Afterlives of the American Revolution: Insurgent Remains 3031515447, 9783031515446

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RENEWING THE AMERICAN NARRATIVE

Afterlives of the American Revolution Insurgent Remains Emma Stapely

Renewing the American Narrative

Series Editor Sam B. Girgus, Nashville, TN, USA

This series calls for new visions, voices, and ideas in telling the American story through a focus on the creative energies and generative powers of the American narrative. As opposed to assuming a fixed, inherited narrative for the total American experience, this series argues that American history has been a story of inclusion and conflict, renewal and regression, revision and reversion. It examines the values, tensions, and structures of the American Idea that motivate and compel rethinking and revising the American narrative. It stresses inclusion of so-called “others” – the marginalized, the unseen, and the unheard. Rather than simply repeating the slogans of the past, the series assumes the American story demands and dramatizes renewal by engaging the questions, crises, and challenges to the American story itself and to the democratic institutions that cultivate and propagate it.

Emma Stapely

Afterlives of the American Revolution Insurgent Remains

Emma Stapely University of California, Riverside Riverside, CA, USA

ISSN 2524-8332 ISSN 2524-8340 (electronic) Renewing the American Narrative ISBN 978-3-031-51543-9 ISBN 978-3-031-51544-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51544-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Culture Club/Contributor This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

for Amy

Acknowledgements

I don’t have much space to thank everyone, but I’ve got some time. Way-back: Thanks to great teachers and mentors, Kevin Bell and Matt Frankel at Northwestern, and Sarah Meer at Cambridge, who offered support for early writing and thinking. Thanks as well to my roommates in Chicago—Ryan, Martha, Jeff, and Tempe—for living proof that hanging out with a wide spectrum of nerds is good for the soul. Class time: To my amazing students in Philly at Penn and UArts, and especially here at UCR: thanks for suffering through my bad jokes and being patient with me while I catch up with you. I feel fortunate to have worked with many students who have also become friends and interlocutors: José Alfaro, José Arellano, Zander Allport, Aaron Brown, Sarah Buckner, Kyra Byers, Kiersten King, Hannah Manshel, Adrita Mukherjee, Emily Mulvihill, Miranda Steege, and Zora Thomas. Office hours: Many thanks to my committee members at Penn, Toni Bowers, and David Kazanjian, and especially to my chair, Amy Kaplan, who embodied a rare and wonderful combination of brilliance, mischief, and moral courage. I think a lot about how Amy asked questions; she was totally unmoved by orthodox lines of reasoning and took nothing for granted (I can see her now, cocking her head to one side with a dangerous twinkle, “But why?”). This book is dedicated to her fierce example. I am so grateful to my wonderful colleagues in the UCR English Department, with whom it is a genuine pleasure to teach, study, and plan. Shout-out to fellow Americanists past and present: Courtney

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Baker, andré carrington, Jalondra Davis, Jennifer Doyle, Erica Edwards, Armando García, Robb Hernández, Katherine Kinney, Mark Minch-deLeon, Fred Moten, Michelle Raheja, Ricky Rodriguez, Steven Sohn, and Traise Yamamoto. Thank you to the staff at UCR English, Perla Fabelo, Leann Gilmer, Christy Gray, C Jacob Marcos, Crystal Petrini, and Liz Beth Sanchez who hold everything together. Writing retreat: Thanks to Dan Richter and the McNeil Center for a much-needed year on the Hamer Fellowship. I would also like to express my gratitude to David Martinez for indexing the manuscript, as well as to the two anonymous manuscript reviewers for their helpful suggestions for revision. Special thanks to Emily Weissbourd for her clutch editorial eye and thoughtful advice—you are a treasure, sister. Study hall: Thank you to the staff and librarians at the British Library, the Huntington Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the National Archives (Kew), the New York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and Special Collections at UIC. Special thanks to Kellee E. Warren for her help with the Sierra Leone Collection at UIC. Late night/after hours: Thanks to Ashon Crawley and Yumi Pak for years of dive bars, snacking, and memes. Despite your terrible taste in movies, I learn so much from being your friend. Thank you to my queer Philly sisterhood: Julia Bloch, Sarah Dowling, Matt Goldmark, Jessica Rosenberg, and Emily Weissbourd. So many of our conversations over the years are infused in this book; thanks for listening to all my grumbling. Overtime: Special thank you’s to amazing chairs and comrades, David Lloyd and Sherryl Vint, for their advocacy, support, and patience—and for carrying me bodily across the finish line. This book would not have been published without them. In the beginning: Love and thanks to my rootless family—and especially to Tiril, Bear, and Bailey—for being weird in all times and places, for making me laugh, and for the sacrifices you’ve made on my behalf. Every minute, every day: To Nonny, Mim, and Boo, and to Brandon, for the little miracle of happiness that makes any and all time together a treasure and a joy.

Contents

1

Introduction: Unfixing Revolution—Notes on Turns and Re-turns

1 33 33 40 53 65

2

Charlotte Temple’s Revolutionary Allegories 1 Novel, Allegory, and Revolutionary Time 2 Allegorizing Revolution 3 Revolutionizing Allegory 4 Reading Allegorically

3

Timelines: Anthologizing the Frontier in the Era of the Western Confederacy 1 Timelines 2 Re-collecting the Series: Brackenridge and the Crawford Campaign (1782) 3 “St. Clair’s Defeat” 4 Genre Trouble: “Jackson Johonnet” and the Queer Time of Recurrence

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The Parties to Which We Belong: John André and the Tragedy of Revolution 1 The Unfortunate André 2 The Rule of Thirds 3 Queer Fatedness; or, the Neutral Ground 4 Partying with the Enemy 5 Grave Parties

113 113 123 129 134 137

4

75 75 87 96

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CONTENTS

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Freedom and Other Everyday Objects: Black Petitionary Practice in Sierra Leone 1 Sensible Freedoms 2 Fit to Be Seen 3 A Number of Us 4 To Care of That Ruin 5 Desire to Now

155 155 168 176 183 195

Coda: Returning, Remaining

201

6

Bibliography

211

Index

245

List of Figures

Chapter 2 Fig. 1

Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

The able doctor, or America swallowing the bitter draught [1 May 1774] (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress) The parricide. A sketch of modern patriotism [1776] (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress) Mrs. General Washington, bestowing thirteen Stripes on Britania [1783] (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress) The Reconciliation between Britania and her daughter America [1782]. America says, “Dear Mama say no more about it.” Britannia says, “Be a good girl and give me a buss [kiss].” Spain and France pull at America’s waist. Holland stands on the left (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress) America [toe] her [miss]taken [moth]er (detail) [London, 11 May 1778]. One of a pair of rebesus satirizing the Franco-American alliance (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress)

42 44

49

58

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Chapter 3 Fig. 1

“The Columbian Tragedy” [1791]. Broadside commemorating “St. Clair’s Defeat.” Photo by author (Source Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Chapter 4 Fig. 1

Daniel Berger (engraver) and Daniel Chodowiecki (artist), Major André, von drey Americanern angehalten zu Tarrytown am 23ten Septembr 1780 [Major André arrested by three Americans at Tarrytown 23rd September 1780], [Germany 1784] (Source The Library of Congress)

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Chapter 5 Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Letter from Susana Smith to John Clarkson, 12 May 1792 (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission) Letter from twenty-eight settlers to John Clarkson, 28 November 1792, signature page (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission) Letter from Richard Crankipore to John Clarkson, 1793 (detail) (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission) Petition from Andrew Moor to John Clarkson, 24 August 1792 (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission) Etc etc. Detail from Moor’s petition to Clarkson, 24 August 1792 (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission)

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184

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Chapter 6 Fig. 1

View of the Liberty Bell (left) and excavated foundations at the President’s House site (right), 2023 (Photos by Author. Liberty Bell Center, Philadelphia, PA)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Unfixing Revolution—Notes on Turns and Re-turns

Revolution is a mending word for war that is difficult to fix. In the first place, the semantics of “revolution” encode multiple movements. The word derives from the Latin, revolvere (re—back + volver—turn, roll), “to turn or roll back.” Its oldest sense in English pertains to the motion of celestial or heavenly bodies: the cycling or return of the stars and planets to positions in the sky. This sense of revolution is cosmically integrated; it marks the passage of time with a passage in space. Uniting the heavens and the earth in a single motion, repeated but different each time, celestial revolutions spin the heavens around in familiar but ever-changing constellations with the earth below. The returns of the firmament announce the mundane continuance of change. Celestial revolution thus counter-intuitively anticipates aging and renewal as temporal cycles that move backward. Time turns, or rolls, back as it advances to begin again. In the long eighteenth century (1688–1815), Britain’s constitutional and imperial crises decoupled revolution’s early pairing of continuity with change. The so-called Glorious, or “Bloodless,” Revolution of 1688 in which Parliament ousted James II from the British throne evokes revolution as a close synonym for restoration: a return to a prior state of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Stapely, Afterlives of the American Revolution, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51544-6_1

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liberty allegedly enshrined in Magna Carta which had been degraded in the present. Freezing celestial revolution’s associations with the constancy of variation, this modified invocation of revolution fixes temporal movement to a point of reference in the past, sealing the strife of William and Mary’s succession under the banner of a peaceable transition. It was in this restorative sense, in any case, that Edmund Burke famously defended the Glorious Revolution in the feverish opening sections of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791): “The Revolution was made to preserve our antient constitution of government which is our only security and law for liberty. [.….] The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.”1 For Burke, what is glorious about the Glorious Revolution is that it preserved the transfer of legal property from fathers to sons. In his heavily whiggish account, revolution might be glossed as a regaining of timelessness, classically conservative in that it re-turns to protect the “ancient” tradition of patriarchal property from destruction. In the case of the American Revolution that is the focus of this book, the direction and tenor of revolutionary movement are quite different again. The American Revolution is the first case in which “revolution” was used in English to indicate a political event which resulted in a drastic alteration in government: “overthrow of an established government or social order by those previously subject to it; forcible substitution of a new form of government. In early use also: rebellion” (OED). In the case of U.S. America, revolution moves dramatically forward; it is an “overthrow” which leaps into the future toward the “new.” Perhaps drawing on an etymological strand of “revolution” that pertains to the movement of chance—“alteration, change; upheaval; reversal of fortune” (OED)— the American Revolution appears as a radical progression that leaves the past behind. However, classical and medieval understandings of chance and fortune cast them as highly capricious energies, as likely to bring windfalls as they are to blow one off one’s feet. The American Revolution evokes revolution, by contrast, as a kind of unilinear advance into adjustment, denotatively guaranteed to end with “a new form of government.” As invoked in the U.S. American case, “revolution” thus mends the violence preserved in its definition as a “forcible substitution” with 1 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1791], ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 31.

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a teleological prescription for an original sovereignty. Here, revolution is a cycle fixed to the future, a war against “established order” amended in Founding: a birth. ∗ ∗ ∗ Insurgent Remains builds on critiques of American exceptionalism in American Studies that have demanded a reckoning with the colonial and imperial contours of narratives of U.S. American “uniqueness” which celebrate the promise of the U.S.’s democratic institutions, the genius of its founding, and the specialness of its destiny as the first among nations.2 An outgrowth of, and contribution to, that critique, this book contends that U.S. exceptionalism relies for its coherence upon a set of temporal as well as territorial exclusions that are held in place by the identification of the so-called American Revolution with the “birth” of the U.S. nation-state. Insurgent Remains responds to major scholarly interventions that have argued for the realignment of Early American Studies away from its conventional emphases on U.S. national frameworks. A traditionally land-locked field whose orthodox scholarly narratives chart a progression of American cultural history from seventeenth-century New England to the Civil War, Early American Studies has seen a number of “turns” over the last few decades aimed at recalibrating its organizing spatial logics.3 Transnational and hemispheric approaches have demanded 2 For groundbreaking critiques of exceptionalism in American Studies, see Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), especially Kaplan, “Left Alone with America,” 3–21. 3 For a helpful overview of the phenomenon of the turn in American Studies, see Hester Blum, ed., Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Studies in Motion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). For foundational works in the “spatial turn,” see Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy & National Identity (Chapel Hill: Omohundro/University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and Early American Cartographies, ed. Martin Brückner (Chapel Hill: Omohundro/University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) and “Planet and America, Set and Subset” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, eds. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–16; Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Hsuan Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010);

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more searching engagements with histories of empire, colonialism, and slavery that move within, across, and beyond the borders of what is now considered U.S. America.4 Transatlantic frameworks once dominated by Anglo-American comparatist studies have given way to circum-Atlantic, oceanic, and transpacific turns whose scholars have persuasively argued that the material and metaphoric contours of fluid motion—circulation, flow, wave, current, and tide—resist the territorial entrenchment of U.S. nationalism as well as the linear historicity that tends to accompany it.5

and Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 4 For influential transnational and hemispheric work in Early/American Studies, see Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and “Early American Literature and American Literary History at the ‘Hemispheric Turn’,” Early American Literature 45.2 (2010): 250–65; Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Raúl Coronado, A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies,” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57; Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Christopher P. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: Omohundro/UNCP, 2012); David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003) and The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds. Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Susan Scott Parrish, “The ‘Hemispheric Turn’ in Colonial American Studies,” Early American Literature 40.3 (2005): 545–53; Carolyn Porter, “What We Know that We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies,” American Literary History 6.3 (1994): 467–526; Claudia SadowskiSmith and Claire F. Fox, “Theorizing the Hemisphere: Inter-America at the Intersection of American, Canadian, and Latin American Studies,” Comparative American Studies 4.1 (2004): 5–38. 5 For transatlantic, circum-atlantic, oceanic, and transpacific interventions, see Ian

Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008) and “The Prospect

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Most recently, in what might loosely be described as a terraqueous turn, scholars have antagonized the continental drift of US slaveholding settler coloniality by taking up geographies that defy the strict compartmentalization of water from land: the swamp, the coast, the shoal, and the archipelago.6 Insurgent Remains begins from the premise that while the spatial turns have transformed the scope of Early American scholarship and the politics of its inquiry, the American Revolution has remained largely intact as the chronological threshold separating colonial from U.S. national

of Oceanic Studies,” PMLA 125.3 (2010): 670–77; Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Jim Egan, Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011); Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and “The Deterritorialization of American Literature” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, eds. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 39–61; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Geoffrey Sanborn, Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, and the Maori (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnson eds. Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019); Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Kariann Akemi Yokota, “Transatlantic and Transpacific Connections in Early American History,” Pacific Historical Review 83.2 (2014): 204–219. For an example of an older paradigm in Anglo-U.S. comparativism, see Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989). 6 See especially Monique Allewaert, “Swamp Sublime: Ecology and Resistance in the American Plantation Zone,” Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 29–50; Goudie, Creole America; Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); and Michele Currie Navakas, Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2018). For the archipelagic turn, see Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, eds. Archipelagic American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

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time. Many of the scholars I cite above have been deeply concerned with temporality; after all, ideological visions of U.S. America’s progressive promise have been elaborated through the twinned claims of contiguity and continuity at least since Alexis de Tocqueville’s exceptionalist touchstone, Democracy in America (1835–40).7 In American Studies, scholars identified with the “temporal turn” such as Wai Chee Dimock and Dana Luciano have pushed for greater attention to modes and forms of temporal experience that disrupt, traverse, or thicken what Benedict Anderson (drawing on Benjamin) famously describes as the “homogeneous, empty time” of the nation-state.8 However, the temporal turn has so far been elaborated chiefly by scholars of nineteenth-century American culture. This book works in an earlier moment, 1770–1820, to trouble the assumption that the Revolution holds the U.S. America together as a historical object during this timeframe. One of the temporal problems to which this book responds, then, is that of the periodization which governs 7 De Tocqueville famously tells a chronological story about America beginning with the Puritans that runs alongside a geographic one which emphasizes U.S. America’s continental self-containment in cultural proximity to Europe. “Thus the position of the Americans is entirely exceptional, and there is reason to believe that no other democratic people will ever enjoy anything like it.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 517. 8 For the temporal turn, see Thomas Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Wai-Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American Literature and World History,” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 755–775; Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (New York: Viking/ Penguin, 1990); Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager, eds. Timelines of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Michelle Sizemore, American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Jordan Alexander Stein, “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities,” American Literary History 25.4 (2013): 855–69; and Cindy Weinstein, Time, Tense, and American Literature: When is Now? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For “homogeneous, empty time,” see Benedict Anderson, Imaginary Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [1983] (London: Verso, 2006), 24–25; Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 261.

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the split between Early American Studies and American Studies. Whereas American Studies typically historicizes itself in the nineteenth century, its “Early” counterpart finds its historical coordinates on a chronology that takes the Revolution as its pivotal instance. As Michelle Burnham and Sandra Gustafson have also noted, the Revolution continues in Early American Studies to demarcate the moment after which it is permissible to invoke U.S. national culture as an environment in which reading and writing can be said to occur. The Revolution produces the United States as context and referent, and it continues to exert enormous torque in a field that is ever less disposed to accept the nation-state as a compulsory unit of analysis. Gustafson writes that the chronological construction of “the early period in American literary history” as it is imagined in “anthologies, professional organizations, and scholarly periodicals [...] makes nation formation the signal event that separates earlier from later literature.”9 Similarly, Burnham observes that the year 1776 alone has “an almost gravitational pull in dominant narratives of American history and literature, often yanking efforts at alternative narratives and perspectives back into more familiar temporal and spatial terms the closer one gets to the revolutionary moment.”10 For an example of the kind of gravitational pull Gustafson and Burnham describe, one can look to the publication of Early American literary anthologies over roughly the last twenty-five years, such as those edited by Michael Warner and Myra Jehlen (1997), Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer (2001), Carla Mulford (2002), and Gustafson (2022).11 These projects all represent important challenges to an older orthodoxy of the field that followed a teleological arc from the Puritans to Whitman. But in every instance the geographic, linguistic, and cultural dispersions 9 Sandra Gustafson, “What’s in a Date? Temporalities of Early American Literature,” Theories and Methodologies: “Early American Literature,” PMLA 128.4 (2013): 963 [961–67]. See also Gustafson, “Histories of Democracy and Empire,” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 107–33. 10 Michelle Burnham, “Early America and the Revolutionary Pacific,” Theories and Methodologies: “Early American Literature,” PMLA 128.4 (2013): 953–4 [953–960]. 11 Michael Warner and Myra Jehlen, eds. The English Literatures of America: 1500–1800

(New York: Routledge, 1996); Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, eds. The Literatures of Early America: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Carla Mulford, ed., Early American Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Sandra Gustafson, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A: American Literature, Beginnings to 1820, 10th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022).

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of the opening sections funnel into concluding units which herald the coming of the Revolution and the United States. U.S. nationalist epistemologies of Revolution do not go unchallenged in any case, but the closing visions of these anthologies are strongly grafted to the Atlantic seaboard of what is now known as the U.S., sometimes at the risk of conscripting Black and Indigenous voices to protest in the orbit of a spectral U.S. nation-state whose borders and prerogatives remain hauntingly present, if unnamed.12 These examples thus evince what Lisa Voigt describes as “a progressive narrowing of the field from the Americas to the United States [which] corroborates the traditional narrative of U.S. exceptionalism.”13 Like Voigt, I do not mean by my comments to condemn the efforts represented by these collections—I offer the temporal re-turns of this book alongside and in addition to the various spatial turns in the field, not as their proposed replacement. But literary anthologies do, I think, highlight the force with which the measurement of “early” American time continues to be drawn in relation to the Revolution as a watershed event despite widespread scholarly frustration with the distortions and occlusions imposed by that pattern on their objects of study.14 Few are willing at this point to subscribe to

12 Castillo and Schweitzer’s The Literatures of Colonial America concludes with a unit called “Contested Visions: Revolution and Nation,” while Mulford’s Early American Writings ends with a unit on “Confederation and the Formation of a British Atlantic” that tracks from Jefferson to Banneker, which is followed by a unit on “Native Peoples from Eastern North America.”. 13 Lisa Voigt, “‘Por Andarmos Todos Casy Mesturados’: The Politics of Intermingling in Caminha’s Carta and Colonial Anthologies,” Early American Literature 40.3 (2005): 412 [407–439]. See also Timothy W. Decelle and Abram Van Engen, “Exploring Early American Literature Anthologies,” Early American Literature 56:3 (2021): 845–62. 14 See for example Marion Rust’s remark that “if there is one thing that current theorists of the early American novel have in common, it is a communal exasperation with the default tendency to read early American literary dynamics as stand-ins for national selfdefinitions with which neither author, character nor reader may have had much familiarity or concern.” In a special joint issue of JER/WMQ on recent revolutionary historiography, Alan Taylor likewise notes that “political historians divide over whether the revolution was a pivotal watershed,” with most contributors “dwelling on continuities rather than transformations” across the period. Marion Rust, “Strange Objects: How to Read an Early American Novel,” The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature, ed. Bryce Traister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 90 [83–96]; Alan Taylor, “Introduction: Expand or Die: The Revolution’s New Empire,” Journal of the Early Republic 37.4 (2017): 601–02 [599–614].

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the nationalism of the Revolution’s mythology, but the following chapters show that Early American Studies’ descriptive tools and chronological assumptions remain structured by a vision of Revolutionary time that sets a nationalist epistemic limit on the field, if only in the latent assertions borne by terms like “early America,” “early republic,” “early national,” or “post-Revolutionary,” which clock the Revolution as a bounded movement in time that delivers the U.S. to a predestined futurity. The under-examination of the Revolution’s periodizing force in exceptionalist critique can thereby impose interpretive protocols on historical experiences and objects of study that winnow their political engagements within terms set by the assumption of U.S. America’s inevitability. In this way, the Revolution sutures the historical frame of reference for Early American Studies on a pattern that colludes with U.S. settler colonial regimes of power. The Revolution’s epochal identification with U.S. national “birth” makes it appear as pure rupture, unavailable for scrutiny as a historical construction because it masquerades as a fact which marks the division between worlds. Such elision reproduces U.S. exceptionalism’s characteristic structure of racial disavowal, obscuring the entwined continuities of settler colonialism and chattel slavery that articulate across the colonial/national split and enabling the governing narratives of the U.S. nation-state to absorb the crimes which form its condition of possibility as the unrepresentable prehistory of its Revolutionary origin.15 As others have shown, and as I discuss further in the chapters that follow, however, the Revolutionary wars were foundationally shaped by settler colonial and slaveholding interests during the 1770s and for long afterward. Forty-one of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, and an early draft of that document contains a tortuous passage accusing the king of inciting the enslaved to rebellion, exonerating the settler colonies of responsibility for the slave trade, and

15 I draw here on a large body of work from Black, Indigenous and Native American, and American Studies scholars that critiques rationalist narratives of Enlightened philosophy and liberal democratic governmentality through attention to their racial, colonial, and imperial contours. Work that has been particularly influential for my thinking includes Susan Buck-Morss, Haiti, Hegel, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pitt Press, 2009); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire; Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick; Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; and Fred Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” CR: The New Centennial Review 4:2 (2004): 269–310.

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indicating that, as a supposedly separate people, “Africans” can never be included in U.S. democracy.16 Meanwhile the final version of Declaration describes Native peoples as “merciless Indian savages” waging indiscriminate war upon “our frontiers,” a chimera that renders the figure of the Indian, in Chickasaw scholar Jodi A. Byrd’s words, as an “abjected horror through whom civilization is articulated oppositionally.”17 Yet from the trans-Appalachian homelands of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the north to those of the Cherokee and Muscogee in the south, Indian country was riven by more or less continuous warfare from the 1760s–1790s as Native people navigated the numerous threats posed to their sovereignties by the imperial shakedown and, especially after 1780, the unchecked ambitions of American settler colonists. As I discuss in Chapter 3, U.S. nationalist deployments of Revolutionary history underwrote settler calls for the omnicidal conquest of Native peoples and lands as early as 1783—that is, the same year the Treaty of Paris legally formalized U.S. independence. In many ways, the American Revolution could be said never to have ended for Native people, least of all with a treaty. Its inscription as a putatively neutral chronological marker perpetrates the violence of what Mark Rifkin calls settler time: “the organization of history around the coordinates of settler occupation” which casts “the space of the United States as a given in which to set the unfolding of events” and sets “non-native temporalities as the baseline for marking Native being-in-time.”18 The Revolution’s controlling temporal conceit as a scene of birth thus obscures the U.S. nation-state’s grounding in racial and colonial terror by permitting it to emerge innocently, as a baby: an “infant” republic or

16 I discuss some of the wartime contexts for this in Chapter 5. Jefferson’s language in this passage may have been an attempt to address the concerns of South Carolina and Georgia, where the British had conditionally mobilized the enslaved as auxiliary forces. Ultimately, though, delegates to the Second Continental Congress from those states refused to sign unless this passage was removed. While it can be read superficially as an indictment of the slave trade in which Jefferson affirms the humanity of the enslaved as “MEN,” the passage narrates American chattel slavery as an irreversible phenomenon and defines whiteness a condition of U.S. citizenship. For a discussion of Jefferson’s views on race and its conjunction with liberal discourses of “emancipation” and the African colonization movement, see Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick, 89–138. 17 Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxi. 18 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-

Determination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 1.

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“fledgling” nation. The teleology which binds Revolution to the event of U.S. national independence likewise funnels Revolutionary time to a single point of conclusion that limits the scope of its contestation and the available language for describing its politics. To the extent that it has been apprehended as a war, the Revolution has often been considered as a transatlantic freedom struggle between only two sides (American/British, Patriot/Loyalist) that is heavily identified with the colonial independence movement. Yet what is popularly known as the American Revolution was not one war, but many, with major theaters in the Caribbean, Canada, Indian country, and the coasts of Europe—as well as shocks and aftershocks that were felt in West Africa, Australia, and South Asia. The American Revolution is not therefore a punctual sequence of events concluding tidily with independence, but a manifold eruption of violence spilling out along many temporalities whose politics cannot necessarily be discerned or resolved on the terms of the state. My effort in this book is to historicize the Revolution in the time with which it is epochally identified, 1770–1820, in order to unfix its identification with U.S. national beginnings. I focus on the decades after its official conclusion, examining literary accounts of the Revolution that challenge its dominant associations with the supposed triumph of U.S. national independence. Lingering in the combustive 1780s–1790s in particular, the following chapters read a range of texts—from Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791–1794) to the petitions of self-liberated Black refugees in 1790s Sierra Leone—for delineations of ongoing revolutionary experience characterized by loss and constraint: grief, struggle, scarcity, or simply a lack of good or legible choices, all circumstances that demanded creative, collective responses without guaranteed outcomes. Michael Drexler and Ed White observe that the 1790s are “historiographically privileged” in studies of the “early nation” or “early republic,” which scholars have often discussed in terms of U.S. national anxiety and partisan division.19 However, my intention in revisiting this decade is precisely to challenge the periodization that binds it to the scene of U.S. national culture, which is only possible by conceding the Revolution as a point of inception definitively in the past. Likewise, I offer alternatives to existing readings of this decade’s “ugly feelings” which construe them 19 Michael J. Drexler and Ed White, The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 10.

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within U.S. national cultural contexts.20 The liminal, unfinished reckonings that interest me might therefore be described in Michel Foucault’s terms as Revolutionary “counter-memories,” which Foucault defines as “transformation[s] of history into a totally different form of time.”21 Similarly, the “remains” of my title are meant to invoke loves and pains that are left over from, or left out by, the emergence of a dominant narrative, turning and re-turning Revolutionary historical experience into modalities of time-keeping, politics, and personhood that are not legible within liberal accounts of binary conflict and progress. My term for counter-memory, “remains,” is meant to presence that which is common, unburied, or unresolved—pending works of grief, need, and yearning which I argue offer fuller possibilities for collective action and ethical commitment than those held out by the promise of inclusion in U.S. national history. By approaching the Revolution backward, from the vantage of its literary aftereffects—or the “afterlives” of my title—I hope to highlight the anachronism of the “American Revolution” itself as a historical construction. Indeed, while the association of Revolution with U.S. national origins is familiar now, the American Revolution is in fact a retrospective projection, or back-formation. The term “revolution” was not usually applied to the Anglo-colonial contest on the North American continent while it was being fought, at which time it was most often described simply as the American War, or (depending on the velocities of the passions involved) the American Rebellion. As discussed in Chapter 2, the American War was widely understood not as an independence movement, but as a parricidal revolt or civil war that pitted colonial children against their imperial parent. In a letter to the Oneida from 1775, for instance, Samson Occom (Mohegan) expresses relief that his “Beloved Brethren” had kept their promise “not [to] meddle with the Family

20 Sianne Ngai theorizes “ugly feelings” at the interface between aesthetics and politics, as minor dysphoric affects characteristic of late capitalist modernity that are “explicitly amoral and noncathartic.” My focus in this study is on the temporality of form rather than of affect per se, but like Ngai I diagnose blocked, suspended, and otherwise nonprogressive formal registers of time in relation to the desolations of (in this case emergent) liberal democratic modernity. Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6. 21 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 93.

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Contentions of the English.”22 One of the earliest appellations of the American War as a “revolution” appears in John Adams’s Letters Upon Subjects Respecting the Revolution in America (1780), published in the last year of official conflict between the British and Continental armies. Major historical treatments followed in the next two decades: David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution (1789) and Mercy Otis Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805). Taken together, these three titles imply the development of a consolidating narrative. Adams’s Letters promises an informal, anecdotal account; Ramsay writes a more official “history”; and Warren advertises a history complete with linear plot points: rise, progress, termination. Indeed, Warren’s title appears to be a riposte to Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Where Gibbon traces a historical trajectory that moves downward through decline and fall to ruin, Warren asserts that Revolution rises and advances until it reaches its “termination,” which reads less as a death than a mission accomplished. The “American Revolution” therefore happened, or began happening, at some point after 1780. When defined as a break with the past that establishes a new legal order, revolution is a necessarily anachronistic construction, as it is impossible to claim that one has fought this kind of war unless one wins. “Revolution” as it has come to mean in this sense is thus a rebellion claimed as a victory after the fact: a peculiar form of historical knowledge that depends for its meaning on its outcome, and which works in the U.S. American case to legitimate the crime of usurpation whose memory is minimally preserved in the OED definition—“forcible substitution [...] in early use also: rebellion.” One of the implications of the American Revolution’s anachronistic invention is that its meanings were adjudicated in the context of the upheavals of the Atlantic world in the 1780s–1790s. Indeed, this study is indebted to the work of many scholars who have sought to counter the exceptionalism of the American Revolution by situating it in the Age of Revolutions, particularly in relation to the French and Haitian Revolutions.23 Events 22 Samson Occom to the Oneida Tribe [1775], The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, ed. Joanna Brooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 111. 23 See for instance Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Elizabeth Dillon and Michael Drexler, eds. The Haitian Revolution and the Early

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in France and Haiti make appearances in the following chapters; they are important for evaluating the politics of the works I examine, and help to clarify how the liberal definition of revolution was consolidated defensively around fears of Black, working class, and feminist revolt. However, transnational contexts are not the primary focus of my intervention here. The challenge this book offers to the exceptionalist account of the American Revolution is based in a critique of its underpinnings in Enlightened liberal thought, which radically constrains political personhood within the bounds of European male proprietorship and links revolution’s political legitimacy to the establishment of state sovereignty. My concern is for how this understanding undergirds U.S. nationalist narratives of revolution characterized in their earliest expressions by colonial and racial violence, historical erasure, and ideological commitments to narratives of progress. My materials thus provide resources for unfixing the belated historicization of the American Revolution, but also for reconsidering the entire liberal framework of Revolutionary modernity with which it articulates. To some extent, of course, the belatedness of historical meaningmaking is endemic to Western history, which Michel de Certeau suggests ironically represses its own historicity, or the conditions of its narration, in its presentation as a series of facts.24 Even so, the American Revolution offers an exaggerated case of this insight, since its necessarily retrospective United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); James Alexander Dun, Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2014); Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: Omohundro/ University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Gretchen Murphy, New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Maria O’Malley and Denys Van Renen, eds. Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: UVA Press, 2018); Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Bryan Waterman, Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 24 De Certeau’s insight arises from the ambiguity of the term “history,” which refers both to historical events and their narration: “[...] ‘history’ connotes both a science and that which it studies—the explication which is stated, and the reality of what has taken place or what takes place.” De Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 21.

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invention as a progressive nationalist development had to be sustained by unusually laborious occlusions of historical counter-evidence, all of which was well within living memory if not actively in process at the time of its first elaboration in the 1780s–1790s. The materials I examine thus help to expose how the “American Revolution” works in what is supposed to be its own sphere of influence as a violent historiographic operation which warps what it frames and suppresses what it cannot account for. And part of what is at stake in that is the chance to denaturalize the chronological assumptions and reflexive universalism which can sometimes inflect even transnational Revolutionary historiography. Far from being a selfevident chronological benchmark, the American Revolution has always been a brazenly artificial construction; it required immense effort in the eighteenth century, as it does today, to avoid the knowledge it excludes as a fantasy of U.S. national beginnings. This book hopes to show that the fixing of Revolution to liberal narratives of U.S. national emergence was in its time a ragged, unfixed business—even for some of the so-called founders. John Adams’s writings provide rich examples, as Adams became obsessed by the Revolution as a historical subject in his later life. In an 1813 letter to Thomas McKean, he frets that the history of the Revolution will be lost due to the neglect of a public both disinterested in, and disgusted by, historical retrospection: “Can you account for the apathy, the antipathy of this nation to their own history? Is there not a repugnance to the thought of looking back?”25 Yet in his earlier Letters Upon Subjects Respecting the Revolution in America (1780), Adams had suggested that the problems of writing Revolutionary history were not ones of popular indifference but rather of empirical indeterminacy. He writes: To give a stranger an adequate idea of the rise and progress of the dispute between Great Britain and America would require much time and many volumes; it comprises the history of England and the United States of America for twenty years; that of France and Spain for five or six; and that of all the maritime powers of Europe for two or three.26

25 To Thomas McKean, 31 August 1813. The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2000), 682. 26 Letters Upon Subjects Respecting the Revolution in America [1780], in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2000), 554.

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Adams imagines the writing of American Revolutionary history as a logistical nightmare. But the difficulties of producing a history of such encyclopedic proportions are not simply practical, as Adams seems unable to decide in this passage where or when the Revolution occurred. In the same letter, he claims that the Revolution was already twenty years old by 1775, but the same cannot also be said of the “United States of America,” which may or may not have come into provisional legal being by fiat in 1776, by peace treaty in 1783, or by constitutional convention in 1787. The general outline of Adams’s chronology has vague margins (“five or six,” “two or three”) and the calculation he makes backward from 1775 to 1755 proceeds not from a recognizable beginning of things to their ostensible conclusion, but from one scene of wounding to another: from an imperial war in medias res to a colonial battle of first blood. While Adams’s grandiose claims ostensibly summon the U.S. into an exceptionalist narrative on a global stage, closer inspection reveals the United States to be at best the tenuous subject of an incoherent Revolutionary past that bleeds from its edges and is not its own. ∗ ∗ ∗ The elusiveness of the Revolution as Adams describes it is not simply liberatory, of course. Adams’s contention that the Revolution occurred “before the war commenced” in “the minds and hearts of the people” has been subsequently deployed as a warrant of U.S. interventionist imperialism in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.27 This highlights the dangers of the Revolutionary war’s mystification as a freedom struggle against imperial tyranny, which has been leveraged to justify the U.S.’s unilateral invasion and occupation of sovereign territories at least since George Washington ordered the Continental Army to annihilate the Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, and Onondaga peoples at their summer villages in the

27 “Hearts and Minds” was used during the Johnson administration to refer to the U.S.’s anticommunist attempts to coerce South Vietnamese support for the U.S.’s defeat of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, particularly between 1965–68. The phrase resurfaced in the U.S.’s undeclared wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For instance, chairman Christopher Shays invoked the phrase “hearts and minds” in the announcement and memoranda for Congressional hearings of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations on 15 June 2004. John Adams to Hezekiah Niles 13 February 1813, The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2000), 701.

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Sullivan Campaign of 1779.28 Yet the constitutive anachronism of the “American Revolution” may also open routes for refusing the collapse of Revolutionary time into U.S. national history—and more specifically, for contesting the liberal scripts subtending that slippage which associate freedom with abstract representation, profit, and progress. Adams’s writings usefully suggest that the ideological narrative of Revolutionary history was not resolved even in the hands of its principal architects, which means that it is possible to ask questions of it that derange its containment within U.S. nationalist forms of symbolic closure. This is an insight I attempt to develop across the book’s chapters. While the American Revolution is conventionally understood to end with the conclusion of hostilities between European powers and the seceding colonies at the 1783 Treaty of Paris, I show that for long after this point the Revolution remained an urgent problem engaged in the present that was limned in exigencies carried on from (and in some cases still being fought in) wars whose outcomes had yet to be decided. Collectively, the following chapters argue that Revolutionary countermemories survive in formal registers where they may resist linear narration as well as abstract representational or self-authorizing language. Each chapter considers an “old-fashioned” form or format—allegory, anthology, tragedy, and petition—which hosts engagements with Revolution on non-progressive and non-triumphalist terms. My characterization of these forms as old-fashioned can be clarified by way of Raymond Williams’s notion of the “residual,” as they are cultural elements “formed in the past” that allow “certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed [.….] in terms of the dominant culture” to be “lived and practiced.”29 I have chosen to focus on reused or recycled forms in part to move away from emphases on literary innovation and newness which, in the eighteenth century, have often led to the enshrinement of the novel, the autobiography, and the manifesto as revolutionary genres par excellence. In addition to being outmoded or untimely, each of the residual forms I examine in my chapters are also non-narrative in their 28 See Colin Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 235–259; Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1972), 192–222. 29 Raymond Williams, “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent,” Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 122 [121–127].

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expression, though in many cases I am interested in partial or “impure” adaptations of these forms as they travel across other modes of literary and visual exposition. For example, in Chapter 2, I track allegories of parricide through political cartoons and pamphlets as well as in Rowson’s seduction tale; and in Chapter 4, I argue that the tragedy of Major John André transpires in fragments of epistolary and reported speech as well as in William Dunlap’s fully elaborated tragic drama about André’s death. The residual, non-narrative forms I examine may also productively confound the terms of what Ed White and Michael Drexler call the “theory gap” between history and literature in Early American Studies.30 Left over from the past, the “affordances” of form I discuss in this book produce environments for reading and writing in which the nature of historicity is precisely what is at stake in reading and writing.31 In other words, all of the forms I examine seem in their own ways to operate as temporalizing mediums, encoding and engendering revolutionary experiences of time as a dimension of their formal repertoires. In this way, my materials recall Lindsay DiCuirci’s discussion of the temporal disruptions of historical reprints, which “are recognizable as both old and new, as both historically significant and presently relevant, both remote and familiar.”32 Reactivations of residual forms similarly challenge models of literary history that are staked on dates of first publication and the emergence of new genres. But they also offer alternatives to the disciplinary historicism that dominates Early American Studies scholarship, in which historical context often appears as a prefabricated backdrop or container for literary texts. White and Drexler observe that history’s “firmly orthopedic position” in Early American Studies has tended to impose that model of context on literary studies scholarship, which vitiates the field’s theorization of textuality and limits the stakes of literary

30 Ed White and Michael Drexler, “The Theory Gap,” Early American Literature 45.2 (2010): 469–484. White and Drexler’s term is a riff on Eric Slauter’s observation of the “trade gap” in the field. See Slauter, “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 65.1 (2008): 135–66; Elizabeth Dillon, “Atlantic Practices: Minding the Gap between Literature and History,” Early American Literature 43.1 (2008): 205–210. 31 I use the term affordance here after Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6–11. 32 Lindsay DiCuirci, Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 15.

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evidence to embellishment.33 This arrangement tends to reinforce the epochal periodization of the American Revolution by placing its facticity largely beyond the reach of literary contention. However, revolution tends not to operate in the materials I investigate in externally given or preconceived terms. Neither closely synonymous with restoration nor heroically advancing into futurity, revolutionary time emerges in each case, instead, as a quality whose contours are openly negotiated as modalities of form itself. In Chapter 2, revolution is refigured allegorically through the slow turns of the wheel of fortune that take all in its mortifying sweep. In Chapter 3, anthology’s characteristic gathering of uprooted examples supports evocations of U.S. military defeat by Native insurgents as a temporal experience of recurrence that moves backward and forward through time. In Chapter 4, tragedy’s mechanisms for scrutinizing the false dilemmas of duality work in the case of John André to stall binary epistemologies of Revolution in contradiction. And in the last chapter on the writings of self-liberated Black refugees who traveled to Sierra Leone in the 1790, the refugees’ use of petition casts revolution as an everyday struggle to redress ordinary needs as well as to demand rights and wages. In all these cases, I argue that the alternative temporalities embedded in form open up new ways of thinking about Revolutionary periodization as well as the politics of revolution itself. Perhaps because they are all pre- or early modern in their lineage, none of the forms around which I have organized this book are particularly hospitable to liberal democratic values organized through possessive individualism. Rather, they tend to elaborate—or at least to allow for— visions of time in which life is subject to forces beyond its control. Allegory’s deep medieval roots recall its readers to their mortality, while tragedy stages encounters with fate in which the wellsprings of history seem to arise beyond the reach of individuals, in socio-political accidents. Anthology—from anthos (flower) and logia (collection)—supports orderly visions of serial development that are threatened and subverted by the principle of repetition that is internal to them. Finally, petition is an ancient tactic of last resort, the recourse of the oppressed for whom the law fails to provide shelter. Unlike the classical precedents of Greco-Roman antiquity on which U.S. state imagery often drew in 33 White and Drexler, “The Theory Gap,” 470. See also Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin, “Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies,” Early American Literature 51.2 (2016): 235–254.

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the 1780s–1790s (one thinks, for instance, of Columbia’s promotion as the goddess of the nation), I suggest that these residual forms are all situated in genealogies of dispossession and temporal reordering that can be difficult to harness predictably in the service of authority, and which certainly tend to resist liberal logics of abstract equivalence and linear progress. Three of them—allegory, tragedy, and petition—could be described as very old technologies for protesting differential arrangements of power, critiquing commoditizing logics, and managing mundane suffering. Where Amy Kaplan has shown that U.S. American comparisons to the Roman Republic negotiate desires for historical transcendence in tandem with fears of inevitable decline, the forms that interest me tend to ruminate on the more ambiguous sorrows of non-transcendent historical being, eschewing visions of rise and fall in order to keep watch with the embarrassing chances and necessities of sublunary existence.34 While they can, of course, be taken up otherwise—and while I do not interpret their political import to be either reducible to pain or guaranteed to provide radical outcomes—I have been drawn to the activations of these forms in each instance because they seem so often to probe the possibility that history might not be a domain of mastery or a source of consolation, but a passage through which the knowledge of oneself as an autonomous being is undone. I find in all of my chapters that such undoings are more than losses; indeed, the dethronement of the proprietary, rights-bearing liberal subject provides opportunities in the texts I explore for affirmations of perishable social life joined in common struggle. Just as my chapters track alternative figurations of revolutionary temporality, they also suggest that revolutionary personhood and politics may be relationally (dis)organized through literary form. I argue in my chapters for the creative activation of formal use and re-use as well as the liminal affects to which use gives rise as sites of insurgent political possibility in their own right. By this I mean that the temporal and affective itineraries along which untimely forms travel provide resources and descriptive

34 Amy Kaplan, “Imperial Melancholy in America,” Raritan 28.3 (2009): 13–31. For another influential discussion of the adoption of classical precedent in the U.S. following the Constitutional debates, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786-1789,” Journal of American History 79.3 (1992): 841–73.

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vocabularies for politics that are not reducible to state or partisan allegiance. I understand “politics” quite simply to mean forms of associated life, though the dead have place in them as well. As I moved through the research for this book, I found that the works I examine might be described not simply as counter-nationalist, but more broadly as counter-modern, in their outlook. These writings often register the hallmarks of liberal modernity for which the American Revolution is often celebrated—progressive time, proprietary subjectivity, and representative politics—as damaging machines that destroy lives and fellowships with their prescriptions of mastery. Conversely, all the forms that interest me also support re-sensitizing counter-praxes for liberal modernity by sustaining complex modes of reading and relating: in excess of reason, conclusion, and bounded individuality; disinterested in the promises of legal or symbolic repair; and quite often near or beyond the limits of language. I insist, however, that these are not transcendent mystifications but concrete possibilities for “minor” revolutionary politics, which in my cases draw on formally and materially situated literacies for their proliferation.35 I have therefore attempted to think throughout my chapters about modes of collective association that might be described as allegorical, anthological, tragic, or petitionary—or, in related temporal and affective registers: mortifying, repetitive, fateful, and exigent. My characterization of the politics encoded in the forms I study as “insurgent” (in—into toward, surgere—rise) is intended to evoke revolutionary transformation as a startling, brief, or incomplete uprising. “Insurgent” is a word often used for enemies of the state, and unlike U.S. nationalist appropriations of “revolution” which work to legitimate the U.S. settler state through the call to order, insurgencies suggest rebellious trajectories that offer acute disturbances to existing orders—as well as unforeseen social assemblages—that are not necessarily aspirationally oriented toward state sanction, institutional codification, or the recognition of official power. By thinking about politics as modes of associated life that can take shape provisionally through formal practices, I hope to

35 I draw here and elsewhere in my thinking from Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization

of the “minor,” which I take to indicate modes of thought and action that do not seek inclusion from majority frameworks. I likewise understand the “minor” to eschew the perpetuation of those frameworks through direct conflict, instead generating myriad alternatives to majoritarian synthesis. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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suggest routes by which it might be possible to wrest notions of revolutionary politics away from ends-based criteria that marks as “failed” any endeavor that does not terminate in the codification of national law or yield itself transparently to abstract representation. Likewise, attention to the politics of form provides opportunities for reexamining the preconceived political categories we sometimes bring to the Revolutionary period as scholars. My investments in tracing minor revolutionary politics arise in part from a frustration with descriptive paradigms for American Revolutionary history that tend to associate the political as such with taxonomies of allegiance to cause or nation. Such paradigms have traditionally been reduced to binaries of “sides”: American/British, or Loyalist/Patriot. These pairings are threaded with the telos that binds Revolution to the emergence of the United States because in both instances, the descriptive terms they offer boil down the struggles of myriad contests to the single issue of U.S. American independence. Were you with “us” or against “us”? One of the most obvious problems here is that any accounting of Revolutionary politics premised teleologically on a U.S. national outcome reproduces the anachronism of the “American Revolution,” leveling the violence and ambiguity of its temporalities before the bilateral clarity imposed by nationalist retrospection. While I do not deny that people in the Revolutionary period felt and acted on abstract forms of allegiance, those allegiances rarely seem to have worked out as neatly as such rubrics imply. The most pressing issue for me, however, is that conscientious alignment to an official cause is an absurdly narrow measure for what constitutes politics: one that is premised both on a volitional subject with clear choices before him, as well as on the exclusion of social life from political consideration. As I discuss at greater length in Chapter 4, the orthodoxy that the Revolutionary wars split the colonial population into thirds—Patriot, Loyalist, and “neutral”—suggests even in its language that not to choose a recognizable “side” is to disclaim discernible politics altogether, to do nothing or become uncommitted (neutralized). This envisions “the political,” in liberal terms, as a specialized domain of activity that imposes as a condition of its realization the exercise of rational agency which is not permitted to be passive, ambiguous, strategic, or intermittent. That construction of the political is widely inapplicable across the archives assembled in the chapters that follow; its requirements go unmet even by some of the colonies’ most committed settler ideologues. But the most serious problems with it are clarified in the cases

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of extreme constraint engendered by the Revolutionary wars for Native people and enslaved people of African descent. The language of partisanship obscures the challenges faced and met by Native people and the enslaved, whose partisan “options” in the Revolutionary wars were not necessarily indicative of their priorities. Just as importantly, the reduction of politics to binary partisanship crops out the creative negotiations of risk undertaken by Black and Native people who pursued their own freedoms across the Revolutionary period. In Chapter 3, I discuss how understandings of the Revolution as a conflict between Britain and America that ended in 1783 erase Native peoples’ ongoing struggles against U.S. settler colonial encroachment on their lives and lands into the 1780s–1790s and beyond, focusing on the spectacular successes of the pan-tribal Western Confederacy against the United States in the early 1790s. I also take up the erasures entailed in partisan taxonomies in Chapter 5, which examines the petitions written by selfliberated Black refugees from slavery in Sierra Leone during the 1790s. The men and women whose writings I discuss in that chapter have been recuperated as “Black Loyalists,” but I argue that the ascription of imperial allegiance to this constituency shoehorns their freedom practices into a patronizing historical narrative in which Black actors appear as the beneficiaries of a freedom bestowed on them as a gift of British imperial magnanimity. I suggest instead that the refugees’ adaptations of petitionary conventions theorize freedom more radically as a materially engrossed, fugitive, and improvised performance that exceeds the divisions of partisanship as well as those that separate political concerns from social and economic matters. By asking how formal practices can reflect and shape revolutionary experiences of time that may productively elude preexisting liberal terms for Revolutionary politics, I hope to parry re-inscriptions of Revolutionary history’s supposed margins and centers. Methodologically, my chapters trace formal itineraries that traverse artificial distinctions between canonical and non-canonical materials, between literary and non-literary texts, and between supposedly major and peripheral areas of concern. Hence while Chapter 3 discusses “frontier” materials that have been almost entirely neglected by literary scholars and Chapter 5 reads petitions that have been interpreted exclusively as historical evidence, Chapters 2 and 4 tackle texts that have long been perceived as paradigmatic examples of early U.S. republican cultural production. Attending to minor literacies of residual form thus allows for the assembly of materials within

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and across my chapters that might otherwise be separated by classifications of genre, medium, or discipline. Collectively, they open up routes for reconsidering the cultural politics of the Revolutionary period. But this book’s constellation of subjects also shows that the liberal political taxonomies and chronological assumptions which anchor the Revolution to U.S. national independence are broadly inadequate for describing how the contours of Revolutionary experience are negotiated in its archives. Indeed, the chapters in this book all furnish accounts of minor revolutionary temporalities in which sorrow, constraint, provisionality, and struggle are pervasive. The reason I believe this is important is that they refuse liberal political logics which routinely fail to construe their own symbolic frameworks as sources of violence that produce alienation, suffering, and death. Within liberal politics, subjectivity is normatively considered to be painless, and agony is therefore considered first, to be an absolute condition; and second, to be a perversely marginal problem for which symbolic recognition is the cure.36 Such assumptions continue to structure Revolutionary historiography, which habitually offers to reform itself by including its traditionally excluded constituencies along demographic or partisan fault lines. Some of the richest scholarship that covers the Revolutionary wars— and certainly some of the work that I have most often turned to— has been produced by scholars of Indigenous, Native American, and Afro-American history such as Herbert Aptheker, Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw), Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), Colin G. Calloway, Sylvia Frey, Gary B. Nash, Marcus Rediker, Daniel K. Richter, and Benjamin Quarles.37 Yet the key insights of this scholarship often appear to be 36 I draw here on Lauren Berlant’s work on liberal cultures of U.S. sentimentality, which connects the arrangement I have just described to white supremacy and classism; and on Jodi A. Byrd’s indictment of U.S. liberal democracy, which connects it to settler colonialism. Writes Byrd: “[.….] inclusion into the multicultural cosmopole, built on top of indigenous lands, does not solve colonialism: that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds U.S. empire.” See Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, eds. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 53 [49–84]; and Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 10. 37 Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763–1783 (New York: International Publishing, 1960) and American Negro Slave Revolts: 1526–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) and The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale

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relegated to the sidelines of Revolutionary historiography precisely as a function of its inclusive revisionism. In The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution (2013), for instance, Native American and AfroAmerican histories are given only one chapter each: “Native Peoples in the Revolutionary War” (Jane T. Merritt) and “The African Americans’ Revolution” (Gary B. Nash). These appear in the same section with other single-chapter treatments of minoritized groups: for example, “Women in the American Revolutionary War” (Sarah M. S. Pearsall) and “Loyalism” (Edward Larkin).38 While I admire the work of these individual scholars, I am troubled that their contributions are bracketed in a manner which suggests that racialized, colonized, female, and “failed” partisan subjects can be circumscribed and sequestered at a distance from an unmarked, majoritarian frame of political reference that is implicitly white, male, and Patriot in its outlook. What is silently asserted here is that the history of the American Revolution continues to find its base of operations in the camp of the supposed victor—a victor who is suggested by virtue of his unmarked status to have been unimplicated in the various grievances of this gaggle of “losers.” As I track the movements of allegory, anthology, tragedy, and petition across this book, a very different picture emerges. My chapters show that the structures of British imperial, U.S. settler colonial, and Atlantic slaveholding power, along with discourses of racial difference, gendered and sexualized aberration, and ambiguous or troubled partisan affiliation, were absolutely integral to the construction and deconstruction of Revolutionary historical meaning, both before and after the “peace,” within

University Press, 2023); Byrd, The Transit of Empire; Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra; Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution [1961] (Chapel Hill: Omohundro/ University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 38 The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, eds. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The name of the section in which these chapters appear is “War,” but in the Conference on the American Revolution hosted by the Scherer Center (Chicago: February 10–12, 2011) at which the manuscript was workshopped, it was called “We, the Other Americans.”

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and beyond the canon, inside and outside the thirteen seceding settler colonies, along the serrated edge of nationalist ideology and in countermodern refigurations of revolutionary time. While I in no way mean to suggest that the experiences of Revolutionary historical contingency I trace in my chapters are flatly comparable to one another, or the politics of their formal repertoires equivalent, my research does affirm that Revolution was widely apprehended as a calamitous onslaught of Enlightened political modernity. In other words, there is no unmarked nucleus of Revolutionary history to withdraw to, as that history shredded the hearts even of white, male, settler colonial subjects who stood to benefit most from its spoils. The clearest example of this is in Chapter 4, where I examine the posthumous legacies of Major John André, hanged as a spy at George Washington’s command in 1780. In that chapter, I ponder the anguished responses to André’s death among Patriot-aligned men, whose partisan affiliation with the independence movement would, according to conventional logics, have disbarred André from compassion as an enemy combatant. However, I argue that André’s execution was experienced even within the Continental camp as an unendurable, and recognizably liberal, demand to sacrifice social entanglements on the altar of abstract political representation. The violence of U.S. liberal democracy’s symbolic law was thus not at its emergence, and is not today, a “minority” problem; it forms the grounds of U.S. America’s aggressive regimes of property and power, the surrounded “outside” of the history of the nation-state—the loophole through which this book travels to a past that is far from over. ∗ ∗ ∗ My interests in liminal, excessive, partial, and non-representational literary forms have led me throughout this book to decline both resistant reading and recovery effort as primary methodological concerns, though I engage in both at different times and make no programmatic proscription against either. I decline resistant reading on this occasion because, as I have tried to show across my chapters, it is not necessary for the texts I examine. One of the core claims of Insurgent Remains is that reactivations of residual forms across the period 1770–1820 seem to provide means of expression for revolutionary experiences that may not be available to symbolic repair or narrative closure. I thus contend that the forms I examine here already passively resist liberal nationalist teleologies of Revolutionary history—my task has simply been to show how U.S. national

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interpretive paradigms may have obscured this from view. I have tended to decline resistant reading as well due to my engagements with queer and feminist methodologies and theories of time, particularly those of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose theory of reparative reading has inflected my approach.39 Indeed, I became interested in how the forms I examine seem not just to furnish alternative visions of revolutionary historical experience, but also to provide manuals for dealing with the emergencies those visions produce. Perhaps another way of saying this is that residual— and in this case pre-modern—literary forms can teach or demand reading practices that withdraw from abstract economies of symbolic value in favor of gradual, materially situated ways of knowing. Anthology, a serial form, makes you repeat yourself. Tragedy, whose pharmakon is duality, counsels patience through contradiction. Petition, which is a performative technology for pleading, should be heard as well seen. Allegory is about the depletion of matter by force; it hails and produces a slow reader for whom words are substantively entangled with things. I have tried, then, not to resist but to give myself over to the sensuousness of reading invited by my objects, and to generate descriptive language out of that encounter which may not always line up precisely with our present political desires and predicaments but which do give notice (in Benjamin’s words) that “‘the state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception, but the rule.”40

39 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay is About You,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51. See also Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Special Issue: “The Way We Read Now,” Representations 108:1 (2009): 1–21. Studies in queer time that have influenced me include Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke UP, 1999); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Carla Freccero, Queer/ Early/Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019); and Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 40 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, Trans. Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257.

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In many cases, the materials I examine in this book seem to encourage less clear-sightedness; I speculate in several instances that the forms I engage get activated in order to cope with or forestall the harm entailed in Enlightened modes of representation that demand visibility at the cost of fleshly life. This is one of the reasons that I have not pursued recovery as a primary methodological objective, though I share in the convictions of recovery-based scholarship that history is an ongoing political project. Recovery work in the Revolutionary period can often be cornered into urging recognition for the disprized in an effort to reform or expand established frameworks according to a logic of inclusion—this is related to the pattern I described above, in which “minoritized” identities gain access to majority representation as a condition of their ongoing subjection to its violence, which is reproduced and perpetuated precisely through such incorporations. Such being the case, I argue for unfixing Revolutionary history through minor ways of knowing and transformations of time. Not a gathering in to a new synthesis, but a following out. That being said, I have at several points in my research had the very great joy of stumbling across friends I didn’t know I was looking for. The Sierra Leonean refugees I discuss in Chapter 5 were perhaps the most surprising, as I had never heard of them. I ran into their petitions while following the footnotes to Sylvia R. Frey’s magisterial study of the war in the South, Water from the Rock (1991). Though they are almost or entirely unknown by literary scholars, historians have been aware of them for a long time, and Black Nova Scotians and Sierra Leoneans for much longer. I have thus strenuously avoided using the language of recovery, discovery, or rescue around them, as they are not a secret and they did not need my help. I argue for them with genuine passion on different terms than they have previously been read, but they are, happily, on the wing, and my argument is no more than a provisional report of the things I heard in their writings. In any case, I would consider myself to have failed badly if I was thought to be calling the refugees back into the historical ken of the American Revolution. They fought long to escape it. All of this is perhaps simply to say that the associations of recovery with restorations to normalcy or wholeness, or the “the action or process of regaining possession or control of something stolen or lost,” sit poorly with me because my efforts have been to do precisely the opposite by reading along the grain of time-traveling, uprising remains: the partial, the liminal, the excessive, the unhallowed. If I call for something to be revived

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in this book, then it is not so much the creative, disruptive energies of objects I engage—which I insist were never hiding—but rather a greater awareness of the scripts and paradigms that have covered and re-covered them. The pairing of insurgency with remains in my title forms a curious image that may thus be considered as a kind of pivot away from recovery to return, or re-turn. Remains are left over, lying about, seemingly inert; insurgents are jumping with energy, on a rampage, rising up in flashes. Together, “insurgent remains” suggest the uprising of what is left over or unburied, which might be taken to evoke the rebellious trajectories of what is already lying within our field of vision but perhaps not always considered as manifesting its own politics. Or perhaps: insurgent remains are the leftovers that disturb conventional knowledge by re-turning from where they always were to unfix things for representation. ∗ ∗ ∗ Chapter 2, “Charlotte Temple’s Revolutionary Allegories,” recontextualizes Charlotte Temple in relation to 1770s–1780s allegorical discourses of parricide in which the conflict between Britain and the American settler colonies figures as a fatal separation of mother and daughter. Reading the novel alongside pamphlets and political cartoons, I show how Rowson’s plot adapts parricidal allegory in the early 1790s in order to decry gendered politics of filial memory which require daughters to remember their parents at all costs. Whereas Charlotte Temple is typically read in relation to early U.S. national cultural formations, I use Walter Benjamin’s theories of allegorical form to argue that the text is better understood as a lingering meditation on the nature of Revolutionary time which neither looks nostalgically back to British empire nor optimistically forward to liberal democracy. Refracting the Revolution through the Fall, Rowson’s story brings the reader to an allegorical impasse, slowing the rapid advance of liberal modernity in cycles of unfinished reflection. The last section of this chapter situates my allegorical reading of the text within an intermedial culture of literacy which is eclipsed by prevailing accounts of the eighteenth-century print public sphere. Chapter 3, “Timelines: Anthologizing the Frontier in the Era of the Western Confederacy,” turns from Atlantic crossings to the trans-Appalachian homelands of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, and the formation of the pan-tribal Western Confederacy in the Ohio River Valley. This chapter shows how 1780s–1790s U.S.

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captivity anthologies edited by Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Matthew Carey configure the frontier as a timeline that marks the edge of U.S. national history in order to justify the conquest of Native lands. This connection is effected through Brackenridge and Carey’s deployments of anthology’s serial format to project the Revolutionary war backward and forward through time as a freedom struggle between Americans and a supposedly perennial “Indian” enemy. Using theories of collection drawn from Jean Baudrillard and Susan Stewart, I show how anthologies both fulfill and betray this function. Taking Arthur St. Clair’s 1791 defeat by the Western Confederacy as a flashpoint, I read popular elegies and broadsides alongside a captivity narrative, The Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnet (1792), in which the supposedly infinite arc of American conquest appears instead as a scene of repetitive arrest and reversal. Ultimately, I argue that Native insurgency works through these texts to stall the colonial telos of U.S. nationalist history in queer revolutionary times of recurrence and redundancy. Chapter 4, “The Parties to Which We Belong: John André and the Tragedy of Revolution,” examines the designation of “neutrality,” a seemingly apolitical term that functions in conventional accountings of Revolutionary conflict to maintain the clarity of the Patriot/Loyalist partisan distinction. This chapter discusses the ghostly afterlives of Major John André, arguing that “neutrality” may be reconsidered through André’s story as an ambiguous zone of multiple affiliation and queer yearning, particularly between men, that is traumatically bisected by liberal nationalist disqualifications of the social world from political consideration. I argue that André’s case activates the formal conventions of tragedy, which provide resources for protesting his sacrifice in anecdotes of his capture on the neutral ground, Alexander Hamilton’s first-person testimony of his execution, and Anna Seward’s Monody on Major André (1781), published after his death. Drawing on theories of tragedy by Judith Butler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Raymond Williams, and others, the chapter concludes with a discussion of William Dunlap’s André (1798), in which the affordances of tragedy work to preserve rather than to exorcise the energies of loving and mourning across enemy lines. I argue that Dunlap’s play thus memorializes the Revolution as a site of uncompensated suffering, and its leaders as champions of inhumane ideals. Finally, Chapter 5, “Freedom and Other Everyday Objects: Black Petitionary Practice in Sierra Leone,” follows self-liberated Black refugees

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from New York and Nova Scotia to Freetown in the 1780s–1790s. While historians typically describe the Sierra Leonean refugees either as dutiful subjects of the king or as agents of U.S. liberal democratic idealism, I suggest that we look to their deployments of a revolutionary print form— the petition—for a fuller sense of their collective politics. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and others, I argue that petitionary form is transformed in the hands of the Sierra Leoneans, who repurpose its conventions of political address to redefine freedom as an everyday object that has as much to do with domestic necessities such as soap, rum, food, and paper as it does with suffrage, property, and labor. I thus read the Sierra Leoneans’ petitionary practices as collective modes of Black political theorization. Refusing crude dichotomies that segregate the implicitly elevated sphere of liberty from its raw materials, the refugees’ petitions enact forms of political subjectivity that are not based on rational self-possession, but rather in shared experiences of need and susceptibility to violence that permeate everyday life.

CHAPTER 2

Charlotte Temple’s Revolutionary Allegories

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Novel, Allegory, and Revolutionary Time

Charlotte Temple can’t get out of America. Deracinated by Atlantic crossing and subsequently abandoned in New York, Charlotte spends most of her colonial sojourn longing to go home and proving unable to do so. For Charlotte, “doomed to linger out a wretched existence in a strange land,” Revolutionary America proves to be a nightmare and a death trap, but her story has consistently been associated with U.S. national beginnings.1 Since its feminist recovery in the 1980s as “America’s first best-selling novel,” Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791) has been identified with the emergence of post-Revolutionary U.S. national culture.2 First published in London, the novel’s phenomenal success after its 1794 republication by Matthew Carey in Philadelphia 1 Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (1794), ed. Cathy Davidson (Oxford: OUP, 1986), 73. All quotations are from this edition. 2 Cathy Davidson, Introduction, Charlotte Temple (Oxford: OUP, 1986), xi. For other key feminist interventions of the 1970s–1980s, see Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978); Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33 (1981): 122–39; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (Oxford: OUP, 1986); Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word (Oxford: OUP, 1986).

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has formed the basis for its inclusion in U.S. literary history. And while this might be said to embrace a model of literary history which privileges readerly identifications over preconceived authorial, generic, or national identities, many of Charlotte Temple’s most sophisticated commentators have tended to elide the implications of that gesture by rendering it back to U.S. cultural and political frameworks even—and sometimes especially—after they acknowledge the pitfalls of doing so. Figuring its popularity as a catachresis for a U.S. national public, now-classic feminist readings of the text see it as an effusion of the tortured legacies of the “Founding.”3 An alternative strand of scholarship tracks Charlotte Temple through a transatlantic liberal matrix of race and gender. Nonetheless, it too tends to posit a split between English and American national contexts which the novel is thought to indicate, traverse, or establish.4 Both angles of approach assume the American Revolution’s standing as an inaugural event and fait accompli, whether as a point of separation between colonial/national history and British/American identities, or as the point of succession from “old”/monarchical to “new”/liberal democratic values. These scholarly trends not only showcase the persistence of U.S. national spatial logics. They also expose the relative under-examination of the progressive temporality that forms their condition of possibility. Charlotte Temple’s canonicity was purchased for the price of its enrollment in the story of the “rise of the novel”: story which projects the 3 Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia UP, 1996); Donna R. Bontatibus, The Seduction Novel of the Early Nation: A Call for Socio-Political Reform (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1999); Eva Cherniavsky, “Charlotte Temple’s Remains,” That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discourses and the Imitation of Motherhood in 19 th -Century America (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), 24–40; Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (Oxford: OUP, 1996); Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996). 4 Nancy Armstrong, “Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7 (1994): 1–24; Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004); Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham: Duke UP, 2008); Tilar J. Mazzeo, “The Impossibility of Being Anglo-American: The Rhetoric of Emigration and Transatlanticism in British Romantic Culture, 1791–1833,” European Romantic Review 16.1 (2005): 59–78; Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Americanization of Clarissa,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (1998): 177–96; and Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007).

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conjoined dominance of the novel and the nation-state through a teleological narrative of modernity. This narrative sutures the thunderous exceptionalism of Leslie Fiedler’s 1960 claim that “we are living not only the Age of America but also in the age of the Novel.”5 Cathy Davidson recuperated the text from Fiedler’s chauvinist assessment of it as a barely literate “myth or archetype of seduction” by leveraging a sociological version of this thesis in which Charlotte Temple’s popularity evinces its ground-floor investment in a U.S. tradition of literary qua national greatness from “fledgling” state to “world power.”6 Subsequent generations of scholars have protested the affective register of this argument, its ideological and geographic contours, and its narrow literary purview—but not the developmental conceit of its narrative arc, whereby the assumption that the nation-state is an unavoidable elaboration of modern time makes the Revolution appear proleptically as the origin of (in Fiedler’s words) “a new society.” In a field with an otherwise “weak canon,” Charlotte Temple’ s reputation was built precisely on the metonymic associations with U.S. American independence that can be inferred from its reception history and its Revolutionary plot.7 Yet in Charlotte Temple, revolution is not a point of origin, but a seduction that concludes with death. While the most recent scholarly work on Rowson rightly objects that Charlotte Temple overshadows her wider oeuvre, my provocation in this chapter is that the terms of its canonicity have distorted the text itself and obscured its network of cultural participations.8

5 “Between the novel and America there are peculiar and intimate connections. A new literary form and a new society, their beginnings coincide with the beginnings of the modern era and, indeed, help to define it. We are living not only in the Age of America but also in the Age of the Novel, at a moment when the literature of a country without a first-rate verse epic or a memorable verse tragedy has become the model of half the world.” Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 23. 6 Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 93–94; and Davidson, Introduction, Charlotte Temple, xi. 7 For the discussion of the field’s “weak canon,” see Ed White and Michael Drexler, “The Theory Gap,” Early American Literature 45.2 (2010): 469–484. 8 For representative work on Rowson’s expanded oevre, see especially Marion Rust, Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women (Williamsburg: Omohundro/UNCP, 2008); Ed White, “Rowson’s Arcs,” Studies in American Fiction 38.1 & 2 (2011): 267–283.

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Charlotte Temple is, I suggest, axiomatically misread as a postRevolutionary novel. I argue that it is not quite either, as Rowson’s readers on either side of the Atlantic would have recognized it as a revisitation of an allegory from the 1770s–1780s in which the rebellious American colonies figure as the seduced child of a benevolent British parent. In this paradigm, children who forget their duty to their parents—willfully or not, excusably or not—commit a “parricide” in breach of natural law and so unleash anarchic forces that eventually consume them. Differently from liberal notions of filial independence through which scholars have narrativized the Revolutionary period, this contemporaneous counter-discourse of imperial civil discord conceives of the separation of children from their parents as a deviant species of misfortune—the inward revolt of a body turned against itself, rather than a ripening toward futurity.9 As Rowson helps to show, too, the embodied life of filial memory (children’s “mindfulness” of their duty) is of central importance in this account of rebellion. Charlotte Temple is therefore not quite a novel to the extent that it is an allegory, and it is not a post-Revolutionary text because in the allegory it recycles, there is no such time in a forward-moving sense. Revolution is a terminal condition that produces retrospective mortification. Rowson’s story thus recalls an enduring but largely forgotten strand in eighteenthcentury Atlantic epistemologies of revolutionary rupture: a recursive seam of dismay whose politics are not necessarily addressed to, or exhausted by, the rise of the liberal democratic nation-state. This does not mean, however, that Charlotte Temple is simply a cautionary tale that looks back nostalgically to empire. Instead, I contend that Rowson’s deployment of allegory opens up a speculative temporality in the text between the infinite deferral of U.S. independence and the impossibility of British imperial

9 For the Lockean thesis of filial independence, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority (Cambridge: CUP, 1982). For coverage of the discourse of “civil war” in the Revolutionary period, see Steven Conway, The British Isles and the American War of Independence (Oxford: OUP, 2002); H.T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the American Revolution (London: Routledge, 1998); Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: UNCP, 2006). Late eighteenth-century fiction that takes up this concern includes the anonymous Amelia: or, the Faithless Briton (Boston: W. Spotswood & C. P. Wayne, 1798) and Samuel Jackson Pratt, Emma Corbett; or, the Miseries of Civil War (1780), ed. Eve Tavor Bannet (Toronto: Broadview, 2011).

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reconciliation. Within that double suspension, Rowson mines the allegorical convention of representing parricidal revolt as a female scene of dishonor in order to critique gendered economies of mind that encourage men to forget their families but require women to remember them at all costs. As a result, I argue, Charlotte Temple links allegorical rumination on the colonies’ secession in the American War to an inculpation of patriarchal injustice that resists assimilation by the politics of empire and nation alike. My emphasis on Charlotte Temple’ s engagement with allegory seems to put me at odds with Rowson’s other feminist readers, who widely acknowledge that it invites allegorical readings but generally decline to pursue them on the unspoken assumption that they are aesthetically naïve and politically retrograde.10 Julia Stern writes, for instance, that what is at stake for her is “a reading [...] that extends beyond a reductive decoding of Rowson’s politics as patriarchal and conservative, as antirevolutionary.”11 Stern’s concerns are well-founded in that the allegorical paradigm to which Charlotte Temple returns is indeed compatible with a range of conservative positions across the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Rowson’s retrojection of French villainy into her 1770s plot by way of Mademoiselle La Rue, in particular, accords with reactionary attitudes toward the French Revolution—and perhaps by association, the Haitian Revolution—at the time of the novel’s publication in the 1790s. However, my concern is for the politics of Charlotte Temple’s engagement with allegorical form. And while this does not neutralize the 1790s resonances of La Rue’s characterization, in the world of allegory, there is no moral principle by which history’s calamities can be adequately explained, or reliably imputed to a single source. Indeed, Stern’s assumption that allegorical reading yields conservative results rests on a widely held view of allegory as “reductive decoding,”

10 One of the effects of the rise of the novel thesis on Charlotte Temple’ s reception is that it has enforced a marked preference for resistant and sociological interpretations of the text. An implied opposition between allegorical and politicized reading has emerged as a result which this chapter hopes to show is unwarranted. 11 Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling, 35. Existing discussions of allegory have addressed it more generally through the trope of woman-as-nation or archetypal scripts of Atlantic crossing and liberty. See Lauren E. Davis, “Entangling Alliances: ‘The Coquette’ and Allegories of Independence in Transatlantic Context,” Early American Literature 50.2 (2015): 385–414; Laura Doyle, “Transatlantic Seductions,” Freedom’s Empire, 145–182.

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which Walter Benjamin argues is a Romantic fallacy.12 Following Benjamin, I understand allegory’s formal distinctiveness instead through its counter-modern temporality.13 Writes Benjamin: “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”14 And again: “Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather, a death’s head.”15 I take Benjamin to be saying that allegories register the harrowing passage of time as a constitutive feature of their expression. Attenuated by the historical pressures with which they are aesthetically concerned, allegories eschew models of clarification which turn on the distinction of latent from manifest meaning, or of text from context. As a result, “allegory” seems to name a specific formal arrangement for Benjamin, a mode of historical knowledge, and a scene of interpretation in which the reader, likewise caught up in the force of historical attrition, negotiates contingencies whose significance cannot be fully known. Allegory’s absorption in time is thus characterized by the sorrow of nontranscendent historical being, as indexed by a kind of indigestible surplus of meaning.

12 In the Trauerspiel (1928), Benjamin writes that the view of allegory as “a conventional relationship between an illustrative image and its abstract meaning” comes out of Romantic idealizations of the symbol as “the indivisible unity of form and content.” The aesthetics of the symbol thus conceived, however, insist on a pairing of “form” with “content” that sets in motion a sequence where one is always vanishing into the other; we can never do justice “to content in formal analysis and to form in aesthetics of content.” Benjamin contends that the Romantics transferred the onus for this state of affairs onto allegory, which they identified as a degraded mode of representation in which semiotic value effaces the particularity of its vehicles. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [The Origin of German Tragic Drama] (1928), trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009), 159–60. 13 Like Benjamin, Paul De Man emphasizes the stakes of allegory for alternative reckonings of time, but he differs from Benjamin—and this is why I use Benjamin instead—by assuming that the turn to allegory is a retreat inward (a “refuge”) rather than an opening out, one that is subtended by the insurmountable difference of “a subject” from things. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 14 Walter Benjamin, Trauerspiel, 178. 15 Ibid., 166.

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Benjamin’s emphasis on allegory’s hermeneutic indeterminacy illuminates how allegorical conventions unsettle, rather than decode, the politics of Revolutionary history in Charlotte Temple. As Benjamin suggests, the under- and over-determinations of parricidal allegory stall the advance of time and embarrass summary judgments, pulling the reader into a meditation on Charlotte’s tale which it may not be the point to resolve. Just as it critiques gendered economies of memory, then, the text may also work as a kind of interactive mnemonic device that instills ethical practices in its readers—in particular, slow reading—for coping with the historical impasse it describes. In this way, Charlotte Temple’s concerns for the readerly experience of allegorical interpretation point to a residual culture of mnemonic literacy in the late eighteenth century that is ignored by prevailing accounts of the Revolutionary print public sphere.16 The following discussion unfolds in three parts that draw out these threads. The first part historicizes the parricidal allegory of rebellion that Rowson takes up by tracing it through 1770s–1780s political cartoons and writings in which the settler colonies’ revolt often framed as a seduction rooted in forgetting. The second part shows how Charlotte Temple’ s return to this allegorical tradition in the 1790s supports a far-reaching critique of patriarchal economies of filial memory through which Rowson recasts Revolutionary history as an echo of the Fall rather than the birth of the nation-state. And finally, the third part contextualizes the text’s investments in mnemonic literacies within the late eighteenth century, showing how allegorical interpretation commutes between word and image in a gyre of reflection which may qualify the time of reading as a revolutionary experience of another kind.17 16 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Boston: MIT Press, 1991). The classic Early American study is Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990). For work that complicates the account of a nationalized U.S. print public, see Lindsay DiCuirci, Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2018); and Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1820 (New York: Columbia UP, 2007). 17 The phrase comes from Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). Benedict Anderson famously identifies the nationalist production of this kind of time with the newspaper. See Imagined Communities, 24, 33.

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Allegorizing Revolution

One of the most enduring liberal narratives of the American Revolution holds that it was foretold by a decades-long shift in the colonies toward Lockean individualist understandings of filial development that presume the eventual independence of children from their parents.18 This narrative obscures the degree to which the supposedly receding paradigm of filial duty in fact governed diplomatic scripts between the settler colonies and Britain deep into the 1770s. Indeed, in whiggish political rhetoric and iconography up to and including the year 1776, the colonies figure as beloved child of a doting parent, and separation from the “mother country” is officially unthinkable. There is no sense of a fork in the road between tyrannical parental authority on the one hand and the prospect of natural independence on the other; separation is officially unthinkable. The challenge is rather to make settler colonial expressions of grievance consistent with proper filial acknowledgments of Britain’s parental care and dignity. Hence the First and Second Continental Congresses assiduously maintained the settler colonies’ filial loyalty to Britain and its monarch deep into the crisis, directing their protests at Parliament and not at George III or their “fellow subjects in Great Britain.”19 That pattern would remain consistent both before and after hostilities broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. In the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress (October 14, 1774), for instance, John Adams writes that the colonists’ “dutiful, humble, loyal, and reasonable petitions to the Crown for redress, have been repeatedly treated with contempt by His Majesty’s ministers of state.”20 Adams carefully deflects blame away from the King, whom he represents as being sympathetic to the colonists’ wishes for “peaceable” (122) reunion with “the mother country” (120). The exculpation of the King can also be seen in the statements issued by the Second Continental Congress in July 1775: the “Olive Branch Petition” (attributed to John Dickinson) and “Declaration of the Causes of Taking Up Arms” (attributed mostly to Jefferson). The “Olive Branch” sues for peaceful resolution, blaming 18 See Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims. 19 Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress [1774], in Samuel

Eliot Morison, Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution 1764–1788 (London: OUP, 1929), 122. 20 Ibid., 119.

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“Your Majesty’s ministers” for the crisis and stressing that the conflict is “peculiarly abhorrent to the affections of your still faithful colonists” because they are bound to Britain by blood and sympathy, “the strongest ties that can unite societies.”21 Jefferson’s “Causes” asserts that the colonies have “taken up arms” only to defend themselves against Gage’s troops and not to “dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we [the colonies] sincerely wish to see restored.”22 The alibi of third-party interference in Britain’s “family” affairs likewise structures a cartoon entitled The able doctor, or America swallowing the bitter draught (Fig. 1), published in London in May 1774 and reengraved a month later by Paul Revere for Boston’s Royal American Magazine. The print depicts America as a half-clothed Indian woman who is forced to drink tea by two British ministers while a third peers up her skirts.23 The cartoon visually equates Parliamentary economic policies with siege tactics (the print forecasts “Boston cannonaded” in the distance), but Britannia herself stands outside the circle of oppression that dominates the foreground. Britannia receives none of the blame for America’s abuse here. On the contrary, she expresses shame at America’s mortification; mother and daughter are bound in sympathy, and we are to construe the ministers’ actions as a double violence that “hurts” them both. It is a convention of eighteenth-century political allegory to represent America and Britain as female figures, but this convention acquires special significance in the context of Revolutionary political debates about 21 “Second Petition from Congress to the King, 8 July 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0114. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760–1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, pp. 219–223]. 22 “Declaration of the Causes of Taking Up Arms” (1775), Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution 1764–1788 (London: OUP, 1929), 145. 23 I use the term Indian after Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe) to indicate that it is a colonial representation, “a simulation of dominance and absence,” rather than a trace of Native and Indigenous presence and survivance. The “Indian Princess” was the single most common allegorical figure for the colonies during the Revolution, though she was largely replaced by the figure of Columbia after 1783. See Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1994), 13. For the shift in allegorical convention, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789,” Journal of American History 79.3 (1992): 841–73.

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Fig. 1 The able doctor, or America swallowing the bitter draught [1 May 1774] (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress)

the nature and limits of filial obligation. Lockean liberalism may presume the eventual autonomy of sons from fathers, but this is emphatically not the case for mothers and daughters.24 Hence The Able Doctor makes affective claims on the viewer precisely by underscoring what it designates as a natural identification between mother and daughter as women. Note, however, that the engraver deemphasizes America’s “Indianness” to secure this arrangement. Dakota scholar Philip Deloria has shown that the figure of the Indian was deployed during this period to accommodate contradictory positions and identities; cartoonists controlled its valences “by arming it, clothing it, shifting its gender, or coloring its face.”25 In this case, the engraver downplays America’s phenotypic and cultural differences from Britannia so that the sanctity of reproductive white female bodies (virgins, mothers) and their relationships to each other 24 For further discussion of the gendered limits of liberal narratives of self-determination in the 1790s U.S., see Marion Rust, Prodigal Daughters, 51–57. 25 Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), 29.

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(mother-daughter) can to stand for civilization as such. White female vulnerability becomes in this way the basis for colonial claims to political affinity with Britain, as America paradoxically achieves parity with her mother through her sexual abuse. The strained rhetoric of colonial loyalty staged by 1770s whiggish colonial petitions and political cartoons defensively wards off contemporaneous arguments which cast America as a deranged or homicidal child. As The Parricide (Fig. 2) shows, it was in these terms that detractors interpreted the colonies’ actions. Published in London in 1776, The Parricide inverts the spatial and symbolic equations of The Able Doctor (Fig. 1). This time Britannia’s half-naked body is the violated object of our gaze. British ministers sympathetic to the American colonies hold Britannia by the arms; Camden guides the lion toward her, and Wilkes seems to direct America to drive her dagger into her mother’s breast.26 America appears once more as an “Indian Princess,” but the cartoon stages this depiction in a more intensely pejorative strain, mapping its claims about America’s filial transgressions onto a visual plane that entwines binary gender with a racist account of morality. To the extent that the hydra-headed figure of Discord on the far left of the frame can be said to have a human gender assignment, his well-muscled legs, torso, and upheld arms mark him in hyper-masculine terms.27 Discord’s “blackness” is restated on the right of the frame in the lion’s “beastliness,” and the radical Whig, Charles James Fox, appears as his namesake in the right background. Caught in the closing circle of anarchy, Britannia’s exposed torso and supine posture underscore her position as a hyper-feminized victim, her emphatic whiteness evincing a moral innocence with luridly racial and sexual contours. The Parricide seems to establish a civilizationist schema that imagines Britannia attacked on every side by supposedly barbaric forces. The crux 26 Don Cresswell, The American Revolution in Drawings and Prints (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1975). Cresswell identifies the figures in this print, which was first published in London. 27 This is a depiction of the same figure Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker identify as “an antithetical symbol of disorder and resistance, a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism.” They note that from the early seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, “rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labor.” The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000), 2–3.

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Fig. 2 The parricide. A sketch of modern patriotism [1776] (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress)

of the drama, however, unfolds between Britannia and America in the center of the frame, with America’s line of movement suggesting that she proceeds with purportedly “savage” aim as she goes in for the kill. But while America perpetrates the violence against her mother, she does not appear to be fully accountable for that violence. For all its polemics, the politics of this allegory are ambiguous. Note, for instance, America’s ambivalent racialization. Positioned between the extremes of Discord and Britannia, America wears a feathered war bonnet but is otherwise attired in neoclassical European fashion. Her skin is as pale as Britain’s, except for the slight shadow across her face (a “darkening” perhaps legible as rage) and—most startling of all—her left arm, poised to strike Britannia’s breast, the hand that clasps the dagger deliberately framed in the empty space between two standing figures. Inside the imperial family but also attempting to destroy it, America cannot be categorized in strictly binary terms. She is neither guilty nor innocent, but strangely both at once—in other words, a victim of seduction. Whose idea was this anyway? America’s, Discord’s, or the beastly ministers’? The figure of Wilkes is especially

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revealing; with his finger outstretched and his head bent toward America’s ear, he appears to be telling her what to do: a powerful suggestion that her behavior is only the most visible portion of an agenda which is not necessarily her own. The Parricide thus makes two apparently contradictory claims that are salient to my discussion of Charlotte Temple. It indicts the colonies’ secession as an unforgivable violation of the natural order and also provides an explanatory mechanism for this infraction through the grammar of seduction, which partially excuses it. As a result, one ends up here (as in Rowson’s tale) with a curious sense that there are at once too many and not enough explanations for what is happening. Where Revere deploys race and gender to stabilize his interpretation of the Anglo-settler conflict in The Able Doctor, The Parricide is wracked by semiotic movement and excess, conscripting discourses of race, gender, animality, and morality into an attempt at exposition that seems perpetually to fall short of the mark. Filial autonomy clearly emerges as a kind of tragedy in The Parricide, but the subject(s) of that tragedy proliferate almost before our eyes: split between Britannia’s impending murder and the conditions that have led America into madness, and split again in the person of America who is not herself, and perhaps not a person, but many and none at the same time. For America, as a victim of seduction, is conscious but not thinking in this moment—it is unthinkable that she should be—and if her unthinkingness stands among the many pathetic subjects of this Revolutionary allegory, then it may be important, once again, that America is (or was once) a woman, because as a woman and a daughter, she is supposed to be open to suggestion, to remember and repeat what she is told. To the extent that it is conceived as a seduction in this print, revolution starts to look like a specifically feminine tragedy of not knowing, or of being constantly at risk of forgetting, who you are. Yet as Peter Oliver’s makes clear in his delightfully choleric account of the war, Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion (1781), filial rebellion—no matter how absent-minded, how mitigated by external factors—was a treason backed by the profanation of the fifth commandment, and believed by many to be inevitably self-destructive. Oliver characterizes the Revolution’s spokesmen as villainous reprobates, and America as a much-beloved child:

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[America was] a Colony, wch. had been nursed, in its Infancy, with the most tender Care & Attention; which had been indulged with every Gratification that the most froward Child could wish for; which had even bestowed upon it such Liberality, which its Infancy & Youth could not think to ask for; [and] which had been repeatedly saved from impending Destruction [. . .].28

Unlike other historic revolts, Oliver argues, the American Revolution did not originate “from severe Oppressions” (3), but was manufactured by a group of “abandoned Demagogues” (145) who foisted their unholy agenda upon the people by unprincipled, propagandistic means. Such being the case, Oliver contends, the American people themselves were guilty of foolishness and not of malice—“they were weak,” he writes, “& unversed in the Arts of Deception” (145). Even the priests were beguiled by the revolutionary “Wheel of Enthusiasm” which, once turning, “whirled away” the people’s reason and left a vacuum “for Adams, & his Posse to crowd in what Rubbish would best serve their Turn” (146). Like Charlotte Temple, whom Rowson’s narrator describes as “the hapless victim of imprudence and evil counsellors,” the colonies as Oliver imagines them have every advantage of loving and benevolent parents; and like her, their weakness is their impressionability.29 They are quite literally talked into dangerous and ultimately damning exploits from which they cannot turn back. Even if they are not entirely to blame, however, Oliver avers that the colonies (like Charlotte) seem nonetheless doomed to suffer the awful consequences of their actions. Charlotte sinks from ruin to penury, madness, and death, just as Oliver imagines the colonies deteriorating into waste: “The issue hath been, that a fine Country, like the Land of Canaan, flowing with Milk and Hony [sic], is turned into a dreary Wilderness, enstamped with vestiges of War, Famine, and Pestilence.”30 Allegorized as seduction, filial rebellion seems to condemn the (mostly) innocent to a life that can only end in tears. ∗ ∗ ∗ 28 Peter Oliver, Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View, eds. Douglass Adair and John A. Shutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), 3. 29 Rowson, Charlotte Temple, 57. 30 Oliver, Origin and Progress, 149.

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The seduction paradigm I have been tracking lays emphasis on the role of corrupt counselors who stand in the way of Anglo-American reconciliation (Whig MPs, colonial rabble-rousers, or Tory fat cats). Even the most furious partisan polemics agree on this point, whether they defend or deplore the colonies’ resistance to imperial policy. In Britain, allegorical renderings of Anglo-American conflict as a machination of slanderous provocateurs would last through the war. Such depictions appear in Britain as late as 1783, the year that the Treaty of Paris formalized the peace between Britain, the Continental Congress, and the colonies’ European allies. A British print of that year entitled Mrs. General Washington bestowing thirteen Stripes on Britania [sic] (Fig. 3) shows George Washington beating Britannia while sporting a frock under a military uniform, complete with tricorne hat. Perhaps punning on the etymological link between “transvestism” and “travesty” (both derived from the Latin travestire, from trans—“across” and vestire—“to clothe”), the cartoonist’s portrayal of Washington appears to couch the war as a fraudulent infraction of the natural order, in this case by marking it transphobically as an expression of sexual perversion.31 “Parents shouldn’t behave like tyrants to their children,” quips Washington, a scourge in one hand and a fistful of Britannia’s hair in the other. But as in the case of The Parricide, closer inspection of Mrs. General Washington suggests that Washington may be acting out the wishes of others. Congress’s international allies (Holland, France, and Spain) stand behind Washington offering verbal encouragement: “Minheer deserves to be striped for a Fool,” “Encore mon Amy Encore,” “Me wish you Stripe her well.” While Washington’s cross-dressing works in an obvious way to stigmatize him, it may also function in exculpatory terms if taken seriously as a transgender signifier. Washington’s persuadability constitutes a crisis in normative eighteenthcentury discourses of seduction, which seem to demand a female subject to the extent that seduction is concerned with diversions of the will considered proper to women within a binary, heteropatriarchal gender system. Thus, to the extent that Washington can be construed as acting 31 Washington’s transvestism carries the onus of sexual pathology in eighteenth-century medical discourse. Foucault writes that sexualities not “economically useful and politically conservative” were annexed to mental illness in eighteenth-century medicine. In these terms, Washington’s cross-dressing flouts the “proper” genealogical relation between mother and son—by dressing as a woman, Washington denies his role as procreative agent and proprietor of his family’s identity. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 37.

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on his own initiative, the print implies that he is a degenerate man whose ensemble is supposed to confirm his identity as a sadistic criminal. But to the extent that he is suggestible, the rules of seduction seem to demand that Washington become a woman. Men can be seduced, of course, but here the printmaker’s attempt to explain how this is possible (i.e., by fashioning Washington as woman) also produces a queer gendered subject who is both/neither a man in women’s clothes and/nor a perfect lady. Similar to America’s ambiguous racialization in The Parricide, Washington’s ambiguous gendering in this print holds guilt and innocence in unresolved tension. It is important to note that the parricidal allegory Rowson revisits in Charlotte Temple was especially untimely in the context of the 1790s American settler colonies. While allegories of colonial seduction like “Mrs. General Washington” continued to circulate in the British press into the 1780s, by that time they had become more partisan-identified with Toryism than previously. That is because a different paradigm took hold in whiggish colonial rhetoric in the mid-1770s, perhaps most famously in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (Jan. 1776). Up to this point, whiggish colonial petitions and political cartoons had adopted rhetorical strategies designed to mitigate the identification of settler complaint with parricidal intention. Common Sense capsized that convention of colonial grievance by abandoning its conciliatory stance. Paine told a completely different story. He claimed that if Britain was America’s mother, she was a bad one to whom America owed no allegiance. Britannia became the enemy: Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families. [. . .] the phrase parent or mother country has been jesuitically adopted by the king and his parasites, with a low papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds. [. . .] This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of a monster [. . .].32

32 Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1986), 84–85.

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Fig. 3 Mrs. General Washington, bestowing thirteen Stripes on Britania [1783] (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress)

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Paine is not one for consistent reasoning; he hedges his bets and spews arguments like a pinwheel, but in this moment his strategy is to sponsor independence through misogyny. Paine asserts that Britain is not a “parent country” at all—this is a fabrication of “the king and his parasites.” But just in case Britannia is a mother, then she is a monstrosity, lower than “brutes” and “savages,” because she preys on her own offspring. Hence it is Britain and not America who bears the onus of unnatural conduct, and it is America’s right, if not duty, to pursue legal autonomy. Colonial fulmination thus emerges as the liberated behavior of good children from abusive and amoral female domestic authority. And after months of strained debates and mounting grassroots pressure, a similar argument against the tyranny of parents carried in Congress. The Declaration of Independence was drafted by June 28th and ratified less than a week later. I do not mean to suggest that Common Sense is somehow directly responsible for the Declaration. I point to the publication of Paine’s pamphlet instead as a moment in which the accusation of Britain’s gross parental neglect may have become widely and powerfully available as one rhetorical strategy among others for settler colonial disputation. In fact, the Declaration avoids the subject of Britain’s maternity altogether, opting instead for a laundry list of the King ’s misdeeds that takes up the majority of the document.33 The continuity between Common Sense and the Declaration that interests me is that they both abandon the seduction story I have been tracing in which depraved advisors appear as the architects of Britain and the colonies’ family quarrel, shifting the onus of unnatural conduct onto a depraved parental figure. Rowson’s emphasis on the interference of ministerial agents in Charlotte Temple thus places her text firmly within an allegorical genealogy that skips over whiggish justifications for U.S. independence. Where Paine tells a story about the flight of children from maternal monstrosity and the Declaration tells a story about the abuses of a tyrannical father, Rowson’s Charlotte is persuaded to leave two adoring parents by bad advisors: Montraville, an officer in the British army, and Mademoiselle La Rue,

33 “He has obstructed the administration of justice [...] He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies [...] He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, & destroyed the lives of our people [...].” In “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled,” Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 20–21.

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her French teacher. While I hope to show that the politics of the text are not reducible to (and in fact quite critical of) reactionary Toryism, the outlines of Rowson’s plot are clearly those of the earlier parricidal paradigm. Rowson’s recycling of that paradigm—and especially the popularity of her story among U.S. American readers—therefore challenges the liberal orthodoxy that the Lockean thesis of filial independence rendered its predecessor culturally obsolete. But this also means that Charlotte Temple operates on a set of assumptions in which Revolutionary time does not self-evidently lead to U.S. national history. Given its publication in the 1790s, the temporality of the text at once leans into the feeling of inevitability around Charlotte’s fate and counter-factually turns away from U.S. national futurity. Charlotte Temple belies liberal narratives of U.S. independence as a progressive event that left the claims of the past definitively behind. Its residual form disrupts the assumed chronological cohesion of “early national” cultural production as a post-Revolutionary phenomenon, while its American reception suggests that feelings of ambivalence about U.S. national independence may have survived in the settler colonies for years after the fact. Indeed, even in the Declaration, liberal screed par excellence, the strain of colonial disaffiliation lingers. Two long passages were edited out of Jefferson’s manuscript copy, each of them attempts to disavow exclusions entailed in the settler colonies’ revolt. The first passage attacks George III for sanctioning slavery and accuses him of inciting the enslaved to rebellion. The second blames the British people for supporting Parliament and for allowing the government to send “soldiers of our common blood” to “invade and destroy” the colonies. Jefferson ruminates gloomily on the matter: these facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection; and manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren. we must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies at war, in peace friends. we might have been a free & a great people together; but a communication of grandeur and of freedom, it seems, is below their dignity. be it so, since they will have it.34

34 “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled,” Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 23.

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Jefferson seems to revert to the rhetoric of love and regret that characterizes earlier Congressional petitions to the “mother country,” but openly forbids his own fond impulses. Hence the passage radiates with internal tensions. Jefferson attempts, for instance, to police the Anglo/ American split pronominally, pitting we/us against a third-person they/ them, but he betrays the emptiness of this gesture when he refers to British soldiers as having “our common blood.” By this he means, of course, that “we” and “they” are comprised by the same body; indeed, he bases his complaint of the British people’s behavior on these grounds. Though Jefferson repeatedly refers to the emotional connection between Britain and the colonies as a thing of the past, he is thoroughly unconvincing. This passage avers that America’s affective separation from Britain has already been accomplished—“these facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection”—while revealing that it is happening in the present and must continue in the future: “manly spirit bids us to renounce,” “we must endeavor to forget,” “be it so.” But how can one forget on purpose when forgetting implies accident, passivity, or the suspension of consciousness? And even if “we” deliberately forgot, would it not amount to a form of memory, paradoxically preserving the lost object in the very effort to abandon it? In his reading of this passage, Peter Coviello argues that it envisions a nation bound through affect: “[...] the grief that the recognized necessity of separation occasions, in Jefferson’s conclusion, proves to be exactly the affect that will bind, make distinct, and hold together the new national public.”35 For Coviello, the anxieties this passage evinces about independence are metabolized, as soon as they are detected, by an incipient national community of feeling whose recognizability as such is assured by the very fragmentation which brings it into being. In other words, Jefferson’s grief is always-already U.S. American. I wonder, though, if we might see a countervailing unbinding through memory in this passage that intercepts the conversion of loss into identity. What if we can’t remember who “we” are? The strain of “remembering to forget” bursts the conceit of Jefferson’s “we,” which slips the noose of proto-national designation to invoke a transatlantic fraternity of Britons in the subjunctive time of desire: “we might have been a free and a great people together.” Is it possible that, forgetting ourselves, we might be 35 Peter Coviello, “Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America,” Early American Literature 37 (2002): 452 [439–68]; also, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: U Minnesota Press, 2005).

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convulsed by an impossible and ruinous yearning, shearing mutinously into the past, which might threaten more dangerously to exceed the consolidations of national history? Remember: this passage never made it to the final cut.

3

Revolutionizing Allegory

The outlines of the familial allegory from the debates of the 1770s traced above are clearly visible even in a simple overview of Charlotte Temple’s plot, with Charlotte as Britain’s colonial “daughter” fatally separated from her benevolent parent through the collusion of military force (Montraville) with a scheming ministerial body (La Rue). But the story’s superficial resemblances to parricidal allegories of rebellion are supported by the text’s consistent characterization of Charlotte’s seduction as a crisis of memory. The Temples describe Charlotte’s “duty to her parents” as a mnemic fidelity to her mother’s example that is broken by her elopement, which her father compares favorably with death and glosses in terms of forgetting: “she has forgot us all” (78). For the Temples, Charlotte’s unsanctioned disappearance disrupts the generational chain of female remembrance that knits the patriarchal family together. And as Charlotte’s phantasmagoric nightmares confirm, the cultural logic of her seduction is therefore that it entails a visceral “parricidal” attack on her parents’ characters, as well as the loss of her vital interdependence with Lucy. Like in Oliver’s account, the law of rebellion seems to demand Charlotte’s destruction; the daughter who forgets her family murders them, and thus kills herself. However, Rowson innovates on her source materials by yoking the allegorical imperative of her plot to questions about the embodiment of female memory in the social world.36 Charlotte Temple might thus usefully be considered as a kind of extreme close-up on Wilkes’s outstretched finger in The Parricide (Fig. 2). Rowson emphasizes the circumstances surrounding Charlotte’s lapse, putting pressure on the scripts that bind “forgetful” daughters to ruin in the process.

36 Rowson is drawing on the (by this time) century-old insight among British writers that political allegories of rebellion and the seduction tale ask overlapping questions about lapsed duty as a crisis of embodied feminine persuadability. See Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (New York: OUP, 2011).

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As in The Parricide, blame in Charlotte Temple is difficult to pin down—spreading and genealogical, under- and overdetermined, at large. Rowson initially frames her investigation in generational terms that seem to establish Lucy Eldridge’s successful conversion of filial piety into wifely virtue as the correct and desirable counter-example to her daughter’s pitiful mischance. However, the admonitory moralism of this comparison breaks down on inspection because the itineraries of both women’s memories lead to their deaths. Lucy’s filial devotion is expressed as a perfect remembrance of her father that terminates in an incestuous nightmare: Lucy hopes they may die simultaneously and mingle their bodies in “one grave” (14). Charlotte’s experience shows that in fact she does not forget her parents; she remembers them too well, even when she is unconscious and increasingly to her detriment. Meanwhile, Rowson vascularizes the connection between the Lucy and Charlotte narratives within a network of examples which ensures that there are no men who disobey “good” parents in the novel, and no women who disobey “bad” ones. Henry Temple and Montraville disobey their fathers, Temple Sr. (Tory) and Montraville Sr. (Whig), who each set financial gain as an absolute condition for their son’s choice of wife.37 Consequently, they both benefit from economies of memory that authorize amnesia at little or no cost to men, and de-authorize it at the expense of women’s lives. Rowson thus makes it impossible to locate a gender-blind (or indeed partisan) politics of disobedience in Charlotte Temple around the question of whether parents are benevolent or tyrannical, as Revolutionary polemicists had done by amplifying Britain’s innocence (Oliver) or Britain’s monstrosity (Paine) in order to excoriate or defend colonial dissent. Instead, she isolates the normative gender variables of seduction so that her readers have to deal with the most perplexing scenario of all: a perfect woman who “forgets her duty” to perfect parents. In this way, Charlotte Temple

37 Rowson buries the lead on this similarity. Temple Sr. is a toady aristocrat who makes advantageous marriage an explicit condition of Temple’s inheritance; his concerns with title and honor mark him clearly as a Tory. But Montraville Sr.’s command to his son is that he should not marry poorly and drag “a deserving woman into scenes of poverty and distress” (40). Montraville Sr.’s rationale is thus superficially humanitarian but subtended by economic imperatives of proprietary individualism (make it on your own) and female commoditization (marry a wealthy wife) which license the very distress he disclaims. This oily separation between the spirit and the letter of the law is what marks Montraville, Sr. as a Whig.

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hardwires questions about rebellion’s (il)legitimacy to potentially unanswerable ones about female resistance and desire in a system that denies women both. What seems to be at issue is the proposition that good girls (Charlotte, America) are born and raised, like Lucy, to be incapable of forgetting their families. The doom of parricide which appears as an inflexible law of nature in the prints and political cartoons I discuss above thus emerges in Rowson’s text as a proliferation of potentially unanswerable questions. Despite their initial reaction, the Temples want to bring Charlotte home, and Rowson’s officious narrator chimes in to aver that Charlotte’s belief in her irredeemable error “exist[s] chiefly in imagination” (36). So why does Charlotte seem doomed to die, why does this feel inevitable, when there is nothing intrinsically preordained about it in her case? Why, as well, is her death inevitable given that her hyper-active filial memory does not appear to have misfired, but is functionally identical with her mother’s? Who, or what, is to blame? The chief complicating factor in Charlotte’s case is of course that her “forgetting” (already a highly suspect term) is the result of ministerial interference. If there is an isolable moment in the text when Charlotte’s seduction can be said to occur, and this is far from certain, it is the scene in which Charlotte first reads a letter from Montraville, who is nowhere nearby at the time. The guilty party in that scene is ostensibly Mademoiselle La Rue. As many other readers of Charlotte Temple have noted, La Rue is plainly cast as the villain of the text. A convent escapee with a checkered past, La Rue cuts a dashing figure in the novel that is irresistibly exciting both from a contemporary feminist perspective and for Charlotte herself. She is the only woman in Charlotte Temple who tells her own story, which she is capable of inventing and re-inventing to suit her needs. She is also the only woman in the novel who openly expresses sexual desire. The narrator tut-tuts that La Rue has “lived with several different men in open defiance of all moral and religious duties” (26), and in the course of Charlotte Temple she takes at least three male lovers (Belcour, Crayton, and Corydon). She wields powerful seductive appeal for women as well. Remarks the narrator: I have said her person was lovely; [. . .] he must know but little of the world who can wonder, (however faulty such a woman’s conduct,) at her being followed by the men, and her company courted by the women: in short [. . .] Mrs. Crayton was the universal favorite: she set the fashions,

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she was toasted by all the gentlemen, and copied by all the ladies. (100, my emphases)

La Rue confounds heteropatriarchal scripts in which men initiate and women receive. Indeed, she subverts any orderly distinction between activity and passivity, for instance by seducing men with stories in which she casts herself as a wronged penitent, which is how she “awakens a passion” in Crayton, who marries her (58). At other times, as in the quotation above, men “follow” her, but they do so as puppies and not as wolves. To follow the road of La Rue is not to pursue (in sense of hunting or chasing), but to obey, attend, or copy. The connotative link between following and copying is most obvious when La Rue is in the company of women. In the passage above, women court La Rue and copy her fashions: activities whose overlap constitutes a category crisis in the text. The word “court” shares an etymological root with cohort, from the Latin, cohors, “yard or retinue.” The court is what surrounds (yard) and follows (retinue). As a noun in the context of royalty, the court is thus a collective body that encircles, ingratiates, and flatters. The association with royalty that La Rue’s courtliness conjures is I think germane, for it suggests that La Rue is a queen. This presents a gender paradox within the novel because La Rue is a woman who rules in a world of women who remember. She is also both a female sovereign and a sex object in a system that otherwise does not allow for the coexistence of those categories. As a trendsetter (“she set the fashions”), she exercises power through influence rather than decree—indeed, she reveals that this distinction itself may be pliable. La Rue’s association with courtly “followings” thus underlines continuities between imitation and obedience which become particularly dangerous when she is surrounded by any and all other women, who, in this novel, have no faculty for resistance to persuasion and reflexively disclose their thoughts to authority. The effects of La Rue’s influence on Charlotte are most visible in the letter scene, which Rowson refracts allegorically through the temptation of Eve. During this scene, La Rue (playing serpent, of course) heads off Charlotte’s plan to confess to meeting with Belcour and Montraville through a series of manipulations, not all of which work. When anger fails to produce results, La Rue tries guilt with more success: “perhaps it will give you pleasure to see me deprived of bread [...], lose my place and character, and be driven again into the world.” The narrator writes that “this was touching Charlotte in the most vulnerable part.” Charlotte

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“rises from her seat” and “take[s] Mademoiselle’s hand”: “I love you too well,” she says, “to do anything that would injure you.” The seduction at the heart of the novel is thus one between women, a moment of lesbian eroticism in which Charlotte rises in her seat at the touch of her “most vulnerable part,” clasps hands with La Rue, utters a declaration of love. Having won the advantage, La Rue moves to seal her claim by drawing Charlotte out on the subject of Montraville, as Charlotte’s complicity is the surest guarantee of her silence. Again, La Rue tests different strategies. She appeals first to Charlotte’s reason—“judge for yourself”—which predictably goes nowhere. After that, curiosity (“he writes a good hand”), reverse psychology (“I think he is marked with the small pox”)—and finally, memory. Montraville might die in America, La Rue says, yet Charlotte will not alleviate his suffering “by permitting him to think [she] would remember him when absent” (32). Eureka. Charlotte sheds a tear, and begins to read. ∗ ∗ ∗ La Rue’s instrumental role in Charlotte’s seduction is the most obvious difference between Lucy and Charlotte’s histories, and the place in the text where Rowson’s engagement with parricidal allegory threatens most to collapse into reactionary extenuation. Even at its first publication in 1791, but especially after 1794, La Rue’s portrayal might be taken anachronistically to deplore the American rebellion as the work of French and Haitian Revolutionary anarchy, defending patriarchal domesticity and imperial arrangements of power on both sides of the Atlantic in the process. On this accounting, Charlotte Temple cannot go home because in the time of the plot and at the time of this story’s publication, the interference of third parties had carried her too far to come back, as a 1782 print entitled The Reconciliation between Britania [sic] and her daughter America (Fig. 4) makes clear. America tries to return to her mother’s embrace, but reunion is just out of reach—foreign powers pull her away. Rowson’s work travels quite clearly in the vein of an embarrassed toryism, and it is not my intention here to palliate her recourse to alarmist Francophobia around La Rue.38 However, in allegorical terms, Satan’s guise as a French woman in Charlotte Temple raises more questions than 38 I use the terms “toryism” and “whiggish” in order to distinguish between party affiliation and ideological position. Though Rowson was the child of a Loyalist who had

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Fig. 4 The Reconciliation between Britania and her daughter America [1782]. America says, “Dear Mama say no more about it.” Britannia says, “Be a good girl and give me a buss [kiss].” Spain and France pull at America’s waist. Holland stands on the left (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress)

it answers, as it tells us nothing about why or how La Rue is able to breach Charlotte’s defenses. Blame ricochets off La Rue in surprising directions. While she clearly plays a key role in Charlotte’s seduction, she is not ultimately responsible for it. Rather, like Milton’s Satan, she reveals the flaws in patriarchal creation. Indeed, the argument that seems to work on Charlotte is the compulsion to remember that is the hallmark of her feminine virtue, as it was for her mother before her. In an important sense, then, Charlotte’s seduction is the culmination of her parents’ values. What kind been dispossessed during the war, her ideological values appear to be moderately conservative in the context of the 1770s–90s. I avoid classifying the text through a biographical lens or preconceived partisan categories, however, because a core claim of this book is that these approaches can limit the multivocal politics of Revolutionary literary forms and practices. Moreover, they can obscure the structural politics of heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and slavery which cut across their distinctions, and to whose entwinement I return at the end of this chapter.

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of ideal can the Temples, and especially Lucy, be said to represent when it makes Charlotte so helpless? She fails exactly as the perfect daughter of perfect people would fail, is doomed to fail—because, as a woman, she is not supposed to have a mind of her own. La Rue thus exposes the cruelty of Charlotte’s Fall as the predestined outcome of the British empire’s patriarchal “innocence.” In this way, La Rue helps to cast into relief a crucial difference between Rowson’s inflection on parricidal allegory in this novel and its hardline Tory versions in Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress and Mrs. General Washington (Fig. 3). In those expressions, parricide carries a punitive sentence whose administration is assumed to be a fair, if lamentable, vindication of the divine justice of patriarchal dominion. By contrast, the linkage between parricidal allegory and social critique in Charlotte Temple castigates the entwinement of British imperial projects with patriarchal domestic ideologies. Edmund Burke’s career offers a useful example of how that connection was negotiated in the specific case of the American colonies. In the 1770s, Burke had attempted to broker “the peace of the empire” in the language of parental forbearance.39 In 1777, the situation seemed to have become hopeless, and Burke reflects in “A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol” that “All communication is cut off between us [Congress and Britain].”40 Burke then turns inward, reasoning that— if nothing else—the deadlock was an opportunity for Britain to put her own house in order: “though we cannot reclaim them, we may reform ourselves” (283). What follows is a craven apologia for British imperial power that concludes, in a typically Burkean manner, with a wistful affirmation that the “unsuspecting confidence” of colonies in the mothercountry “is the true center of gravity amongst mankind.” Writes Burke: “It is this unsuspecting confidence that removes all difficulties and reconciles contradictions which occur in the complexity of all ancient puzzled political establishments” (292). In sum, Burke reasons that the solution to Britain’s failure as an imperial parent lies in being a gentler parent, but not

39 “[...] we conjure you [...] not [to] suffer yourselves to be persuaded, or provoked, into an opinion, that you are at war with this nation. [...] Much delusion has been practiced; much corrupt influence treacherously employed.” Edmund Burke, “Address to the British Colonists in North America” (1777), The Portable Edmund Burke, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1999), 275. 40 Edmund Burke, “A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America” (1777), ibid., 283.

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in dispensing with the normative expectation of infantile colonial—and indeed, female—dependence. In other words, he champions the mindless acceptance of authority as the power that will “reconcile contradiction” between the governors and the governed at the center of a reconsolidated domestic patriarchy and the empire under its thumb. Burke’s notion of “unsuspecting confidence” might be considered as the real-world counterpart to Charlotte’s vacant mind in Rowson’s tale. While the allegorical identification of La Rue with France certainly allows for a reactionary reading in Charlotte Temple (don’t send your kids to boarding school! remember your parents! beware of France!), the text clearly does not advocate a recommitment to “unsuspecting confidence” along the lines that Burke suggests. Indeed, Charlotte’s inability to forget her parents shows that this is precisely the problem; she is automatically unsuspecting, and it kills her. La Rue is clearly vilified, but a pat xenophobic reading of the text is inadequate, for it requires that La Rue be only one thing at a time (France), when she is always more. Rowson suggests that both empire and patriarchy seem to be rigged for calamity because women’s (and colonies’) “unsuspecting confidence” makes them unable to deal with the problem La Rue represents, which cannot be nationalistically contained. Indeed, the mechanism that gains La Rue access to Du Pont’s school is the influence of influence on “unsuspecting confidence.” La Rue is recommended to Du Pont by “a lady whose humanity overstepped the bounds of discretion” (26). Having heard and pitied La Rue’s tale of woe, this lady presents La Rue to Du Pont with her seal of approval. The narrator hastens to add that Du Pont herself is “a woman in every way calculated to take the care of young ladies” (26).41 She just makes a bad call, and perhaps an inevitable one, because what she responds to through La Rue’s intermediary is the queenly power which is La Rue’s exclusive preserve. As both narrator and character, La Rue can part truths from appearances, and she cannot therefore help but ruin and destroy women’s acculturated “unsuspecting confidence” because she reveals in their presence an appetite they never knew they had: the desire for narrative that makes reading a pleasure and storytelling possible. The same faculty that makes La Rue an excellent liar also makes her an accomplished actor and raconteur in the sense that she 41 It may be worth noting that DuPont, the only other French national in the text, and Mrs. Beauchamp, who has one French parent, are both exempted from the condemnation that attaches to La Rue.

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can substitute signs for realities in narrative form—indeed, she troubles the distinction between artifice and truth. La Rue is the reason Rowson’s allegory is a novel. La Rue’s narrativity brings the core problematic of desire in Charlotte’s seduction, and the colonies’ rebellion, into focus. The narrator at one point proclaims: “it is now past the days of romance: no woman can be run away with contrary to her inclination” (29). In one way, this is obviously untrue in the world of the novel, which (much like our own) does not appear to have a concept of consent by which the distinction between enthusiastic participation and coercion could be consistently or adequately adjudicated. But the narrator calls attention to a key word— inclination—that Charlotte uses throughout the novel. Here, at last, we encounter the critical point of divergence between Charlotte and Lucy’s stories—the key to this plaguing question of Charlotte’s apparently inexorable doom—because Charlotte has something that her mother did not: “inclination,” or desire. In many ways, La Rue allegorizes Desire itself; she sheds infrared light on inclination wherever she goes, and everywhere she goes, she finds it. The moment in which La Rue shines her beacon on Charlotte’s inclination is in the letter scene, and more specifically, in the twinned seductions of La Rue’s tears and Montraville’s text. For if Charlotte and La Rue’s exchange in the first instance of their lesbian encounter reveals Charlotte’s desire for Desire, the second makes good on that revelation by calling forth Charlotte’s desire for narrative. La Rue’s successful appeal to Charlotte’s memory is at the same time a captivating act of storytelling: He [Montraville] is most probably going to America; and if ever you should hear any account of him, it may possibly be that he is killed; and though he loved you ever so fervently, though his last breath should be spent in a prayer for your happiness, it can be nothing to you: you can feel nothing for the fate of the man, whose letters you will not open, and whose sufferings you will not alleviate, by permitting him to think you would remember him when absent, and pray for his safety. (32)

Upon review, it seems that La Rue has linked an imperative Charlotte recognizes (remembrance) to something Charlotte’s upbringing has conditioned her to want because it is denied to her. La Rue tells Charlotte a story about herself in which Charlotte is the focus of Montraville’s

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thoughts, but from a distance. In the story that seduces her, Charlotte’s value to Montraville has thus been abstracted from her person; she doesn’t need to be present in order for him to long for her because she is a narrative persona, a character, who can circulate autonomously as such. Montraville is not what Charlotte desires. She wants to be the heroine of her own tale, to elope and not to be abducted, to bear something other than the requirement to remember by acceding to the power that La Rue flourishes so well: to wield authority as influence, to be representative. How could she not? She was born to want it—she just didn’t know until now. And so Charlotte Temple casts the American Revolution as an echo of the Fall which began in a women’s bedroom with the awakening of desire for Desire. Again, it is critical that in this sequence, La Rue exposes the givenness of rupture in the historical order that leads to Charlotte’s seduction—hence it (and the American Revolution) appears as a kind of preordainment rather than as a radical break from the past. La Rue does not produce desire; she brings it forth from its hiding places by calling attention to the fact that it was already there, like mold in a block of cheese. What Charlotte experiences as she fantasizes about being the heroine of her own tale is not precisely a splitting of discretion from inclination, therefore, but the consciousness of inclination as an energy that is separate from discretion. This consciousness cannot be satisfied by the very narrativity that it simultaneously seems to demand. Charlotte will never be the heroine of the story that La Rue tells about her, yet Charlotte’s desire for that story and the version of herself that it represents will move her to pursue them in a manner that can (for Rowson) only end in disappointment because what she seeks does not exist. Its allure lies in its fictitiousness. Desire thus instantiates a different modality of historical—and, indeed, sexual—experience for Charlotte that we might call “narrative,” which La Rue seems able to summon out of thin air. We can seek but never find the causes and origins of this modality because it simultaneously has none, and too many. And it is thrilling, but also sorrowful, because it is moved by the terminal non-coincidence of fantasy with fulfillment. One of its old names is sin. Another is “modernity.” Charlotte Temple usefully theorizes modernity as an experience of history that is activated by Desire: one that is inhabited by a split, aspirational subject who imagines herself in narrative form. La Rue is the closest thing in Charlotte Temple to modernity—the “impossible” breach in the temporal and semiotic order that rebellion represents—because she is the

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Desire that sets it in motion. As a result, she cannot be held or winnowed in form, not even by time, because she is the force that cleaves truths from appearances. Charlotte Temple identifies the emergence of modernity with a Revolutionary chronology, but La Rue reveals that the desire which set it off was there all along, nestled in the unbroken orb of Charlotte’s mind and dispersed along the chain of her inheritances. In other words, La Rue demonstrates that there is no going back to some idyllic British past before “foreign” interference, because it never existed—the Temples’ rose-bowered cottage was always a death trap. As Desire, La Rue thus has an acutely destabilizing temporal effect that is captured in one of the meanings of “following”: to trail behind, to come after. La Rue produces temporal lag, pulling time in her train; everything in her wake feels obsolete and moribund. While she can offer a salutary correction to the nostalgic delusions of empire and ethnonationalism for this reason, the problem is that once history is driven by Desire, it is set on a course that feels linear and unstoppable. La Rue is associated throughout the novel with her own temporality, figured most often as a rapidly spinning wheel: the encircling throng of the women who court her, for instance, or the wheels of the chaise that bear Charlotte away. At another moment, the narrator launches into one of her many exhortations to the reader: “Ye giddy flatterers in the fantastic round of dissipation, who eagerly seek pleasure in the lofty dome, rich treat, and midnight revel [...]” (34). Here La Rue’s influence is associated with a kind of merry-go-round of sensual indulgence, very much like Oliver’s invocation of the “Wheel of Enthusiasm.” The most significant example, however, is the sole use of the word “revolution” in Charlotte Temple, which appears in conjunction with La Rue on the journey to New York: “[...] during the voyage a great revolution took place not only in the fortune of La Rue but in the bosom of Belcour” (59). Here “revolution” seems to describe an advance that actually goes nowhere; La Rue has exchanged one lover (Belcour) for another (Crayton), and Belcour has locked on to Charlotte as his next target. In this instance and in the examples above, the quality connecting La Rue’s revolving temporal signifiers is a sense of hurried interchangeability. La Rue’s chaotic temporality begins to draw out a historical impasse in the text: things cannot go back to the way they were before, but they cannot go forward either. If Charlotte’s transgression was preordained by the corruption of the patriarchy that produced her, the problem with La Rue is that the only way to survive her is to become like her. Yet if

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everyone became La Rues, the price would be the adoption of modern history as a forward crash through time that spins its wheels into air, and the acceptance of commoditized economies of fungibility and obsolescence which license modern social and signifying practices. Others have argued that the doctrine of felix culpa offers a way out of this impasse, whereby Charlotte’s sin would get “redeemed” by the prodigal arrival of the U.S. nation-state, through the gothic reformulation of national publics founded in grief, or as the racial plot of the British empire.42 And indeed, Rowson eventually wrote a sequel about Charlotte’s daughter, Lucy Temple (1828), that recounts Lucy’s unknowing engagement to her half-brother many years later, and which strongly supports the latter reading.43 Set entirely in southern England, Lucy Temple centers Britain as home in the heart of the empire, establishing a parallel between Lucy’s exemplary devotion as an educator (she founds a school in lieu of marriage) and her brother’s military service, first in India and then in the Peninsular War, where he dies. Though its endings are framed melancholically in terms of sacrifice, Lucy Temple proposes the military and the school as twinned “comic” successors to Charlotte’s tragic tale, offering up their gendered institutionalities as neurotic biopolitical substitutes for incestuous romance which promise to reproduce and consolidate the disciplinary regimes of sentimentalized British imperial power.44

42 Fliegelman casts the Revolution as the completion of the fortunate fall: “The rising

glory of America had proven to be the fortune long promised and now provided the earliest European prodigals, the first fallen.” Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 267. For more recent (and less sanguine) invocations of this concept, see Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire; and Marion Rust, Prodigal Daughters. 43 The novel was first published posthumously as Charlotte’s Daughter; or, the Three Orphans (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1828). 44 As Desirée Henderson notes, the sequel disturbs U.S. national readings of Charlotte Temple that I have been troubling here, as it “can be seen neither to contribute to the history of the rise of the novel nor to comment upon the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.” However, existing readings interpret Lucy Temple as a redemptive fable of female independence in a stratified system of British patriarchal inheritance without linking that issue to the articulation of British imperial power. See Henderson, “Illegitimate Children and Bastard Sequels: The Case of Susanna Rowson’s Lucy Temple,” Legacy 24.1 (2007), 5 [1–23]; Donna R. Bontatibus, The Seduction Novel of the Early Nation, 65–66; Steven Epley, “The Redemptive Power of Suffering in Lucy Temple,” Studies in American Fiction 38.1–2 (2011), 249–265; Marion Rust, “Novel Schoolrooms,” Prodigal Daughters, 249–299.

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In Charlotte Temple, however, no such resolution is in view by the close of the narrative. The novel concludes with a double vision of “misery and shame” (the last words of the text), as Montraville mopes about Charlotte’s grave in Trinity Churchyard and La Rue dies penitently of venereal disease under the Temples’ roof. While it is not my purpose here to suggest that Charlotte Temple is unavailable to state-sponsored ideological agendas, felix culpa readings of its reflections on Revolutionary history can only be made by eliding the text’s allegorical mortification of progressive temporality. It is this move, in fact, which led Benjamin to accuse the Baroque German allegoricists of betrayal when, as Susan Buck-Morss explains, they “claim[ed] that the fragments of failed nature are really an allegory of spiritual redemption.”45 As Benjamin put it: “[... their] intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of the Resurrection.”46 Lingering, then, with Charlotte Temple’s temporal impaction—the impossibility it presents of going either forward or backward—I suggest that the text encodes the experience of allegorical literacy with a palliative (though not curative) counter-temporality that recasts “revolution” as a slowly turning spiral of contemplation. In the “supposed infinity of a world without hope” that allegory presents, it is not possible to resolve history’s undoings by virtue of escape into idealized pasts or futures. But one can learn how to remember differently—that is, not as a reflexive response—by re-learning how to read.47

4

Reading Allegorically

Charlotte Temple’s allegorical form reframes its political engagements, but also offers opportunities for more complex considerations and revaluations of literariness in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Rowson’s virtuosic formal experimentation with allegory in this text has been totally overlooked in a novelistic tradition of criticism that has long been qualified by sheepish apologies for Charlotte Temple’s supposed lack of literary sophistication. Attention to the text’s allegorical form highlights

45 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 175. 46 Benjamin, Trauerspiel, 233. 47 Ibid., 232.

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its participation in eighteenth-century cultures of intermedial literacy that routinely moved between visual, literary, artefactual, and other kinds of “reading,” but which have been largely ignored by scholars.48 The allegorical interpretation proposed by this chapter requires an oscillation between image and text, in particular, that can be traced back to the artes memoriae tradition of scriptural study to which allegory belongs.49 As Mary Carruthers shows, in this tradition pictures (picturae) and words (litterae) are interlinked mnemonic modalities which both entail “inventive, rhetorical activity” and stand on much more equitable footing than in the logocentric, and especially print-based, model of literacy that dominates the narrative of Enlightenment.50 Charlotte Temple’s residual or minor investments in allegorical reading may have been obscured by the “rise of the novel’s” progressive imperative as well as its generic tunnel vision, which seems to demand the segregation of the novel from other (and especially older) kinds of cultural production.51 This may help to explain why nuanced scholarship on visual and artefactual cultural modalities that run through and around Charlotte Temple tends to be disconnected from literary studies’ accounts of its textuality.52 My provocation is that, as a narrativized allegory, Charlotte Temple draws on an experience of interpreting image-texts and thing-pictures

48 My use of the term “intermedial” here is influenced by Matthew Pethers’s discussion of the 1809 frontispiece by Cornelius Tiebout. Pethers uses this term to describe “the movement of portraiture between the three mediums [of] novel, painting, [and] engraving.” Matthew Pethers, “Portrait Miniatures: Fictionality, Visual Culture, and the Scene of Recognition in Early National America,” Early American Literature 56.3 (2021): 761 [755–807]. 49 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edition (Cambridge: CUP, 2008); Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966). 50 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 276. 51 For an important discussion of this issue that troubles its Eurocentric bias, see

Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 52 Charlotte Temple’s intermedial textuality invites strong connections with what Susan Stabile calls “the mnemonic arts” of fan language, portrait miniatures, and souvenirs, as well as to Charlotte Temple’s multimedia afterlives in illustration, waxwork, and theater. See Spencer D.C. Keralis, “Pictures of Charlotte: The Illustrated Charlotte Temple and Her Readers,” Book History 13 (2010): 25–57; Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004) and “Still(ed) Lives,” Early American Literature 45.2 (2010): 371–95.

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that would have been familiar to its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers in a range of devotional, pedagogical, and popular settings. For example, rebuses (“picture-puzzles,” or sometimes “thing pictures”) have a centuries-long premodern history as mnemotechnic devices, games, and even prayers, but they also circulated in the 1770s–1780s alongside allegorical cartoons as political commentary on the Revolutionary wars.53 A pair of rebuses published in London in 1778, for instance, satirizes the Franco-American alliance in an exchange of letters from Britannia [toe] Amer[eye]ca and [America toe] her [miss]taken [moth]er (Fig. 5).54 A decade later, Isaiah Thomas published the first American rebus Bible, A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (1788), whose long title announces that it is “designed to familiarize tender Age, in a pleasing and diverting Manner, with early Ideas of the Holy Scriptures.” This text features 500 woodcuts in a variety of visual rhetorics, including rebuses, illustrations, and emblems, each of which demands a different kind of creative interpretation alongside or in combination with words and concepts. In a logocentric model of interpretation, these examples can appear as sub- or illiterate objects, but in fact they demand complex and imaginative relays between words, ideas, and pictures, which are cast in a kind of synaesthetic relation. Using an image of a moth to trigger the first syllabus of “mother” in the rebus epistles, for instance, addresses a viewer who can bridge their phonetic knowledge of language with written characters on the page, much as a viewer of Mrs. General Washington (Fig. 3) would need to know the etymology of the word “travesty” to get its visual pun. Similarly, as I suggest above, an eighteenth-century reader of Charlotte Temple might trace its parricidal allegory back and forth through time across Biblical, novelistic, visual, and legal sources in order to negotiate its political and moral outlook. Such imperfect “translations” between words and pictures point to a kind of multisensory hyperliteracy that rejoices in the impaired intelligibility among its parts. Words and pictures are not primarily representational in this model; their role is to jog the reader’s memory, prompting them to recall, rearrange, and apply material which, as Carruthers puts it, they in some sense “already know.”55 53 For an excellent discussion of the premodern history of the rebus, see Jessica Brantley, “’In Things’: The Rebus in Premodern Devotion,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45.2 (2015): 287–321. 54 Mary Darly published both rebuses in London, on 6 and 11 May 1778, respectively. 55 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 285.

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Fig. 5 America [toe] her [miss]taken [moth]er (detail) [London, 11 May 1778]. One of a pair of rebesus satirizing the Franco-American alliance (Source British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress)

Memory in this context is an active principle and moral faculty, not simply a warehouse of information that is reproduced by rote. Rowson’s investment in this mnemonic model is on the record from her career as an educator. In her preface to A Spelling Dictionary (1807), she rails against the cognitive vacancy of the “mechanical kind of reading” produced by rote memorization and advocates for students to be “early habituated to connect ideas with words.”56 As Marion Rust writes, “Rowson considered learning read a matter of reflection, as opposed to repetition.”57 This way of thinking begins to illuminate how, in Charlotte Temple, intermedial allegorical reading may operate as a mnemonic counter-technology

56 Susanna Rowson, Preface, A Spelling Dictionary (Boston: John West, 1807). 57 Rust, Prodigal Daughters, 273.

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to the forces that conspire to kill its heroine: the patriarchal British imperial demand for automatic female remembrance on the one hand, and the dazzling allure of modernity’s representational fictions on the other. Charlotte Temple self-consciously thematizes intermedial literacy as a problematic across its generational saga that is made acute by the irruption of modernity into the narrative. Indeed, for all La Rue’s majesty, something is lost when she becomes the Queen of History that it may be possible to describe in terms of reading. Her fast-paced temporality is strongly identified with a runaway economy of substitution that erodes the sensual life of interpretation, liquidating what Heidegger might call the “thingliness” of things along with the phonic substance of language and the rhetoric of images in “the frantic abolition of all distances [that] brings no nearness.”58 Modern interpretation seems to operate as a mode of abstraction that is closely aligned with commoditization, most obviously in its fetishization of phantasmatic images. Surprisingly, however, the novel suggests once again that this type of reading does not originate with La Rue, but haunts the perception of women’s bodies within British patriarchal economies of exchange both forward and backward through the time of its story. By way of conclusion, I will briefly unpack how this plays out by looking at two scenes in which men “picture” women’s bodies. The first is when Henry Temple sees his future wife, Lucy Eldridge, “a lovely creature busied in painting a fan mount,” in her father’s prison cell. Refracted through Henry’s point of view, the narrator notes that “she was fair as the lily, but sorrow had nipped the rose in her cheek before it was half blown” (13). In this scene, Lucy is pictured through decorative or impressed surfaces that have a kind of abstract concretion. The rose in Lucy’s cheek, for instance, is not a symbol of sorrow in the substitutive sense; rather, because sorrow is what has “nipped” it, the rose is a place in Lucy’s flesh that the passage of time has touched. It cannot therefore be completely metaphorized, even though it registers mortification in beautiful terms, as a “flowering.” The rose in Lucy’s cheek is an emblem: a highly specific mnemonic form that Benjamin associates with a metaphoric sensuality that “avoids

58 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans. Albert Hoftstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 163. See also What is a Thing? 1935–36. Trans. W.B. Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch (South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, 1967).

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constant emphasis of its basically metaphoric character.”59 As Benjamin points out, part of what is important about emblems is that they hold meaning in reserve, not as a quantity they possess intrinsically (on the “inside”), but rather as a characteristic of their material life. Emblematic reading thus tends to slow down time, as we see in Henry’s subsequent interpretation of Lucy’s tears: Temple cast his eye on Miss Eldridge: a pellucid drop had stolen from her eyes, and fallen upon a rose she was painting. It blotted and discoloured the flower. “‘Tis emblematic,’ said he mentally: “the rose of youth and health soon fades when watered by the tear of affliction.” (13–14)

Henry experiences Lucy in explicitly emblematic terms, as animating a piece of spiritual wisdom which can be expressed portably, as an aphorism. His “reading” here is intermedial and non-linear, shuttling between body and painting, word and image, in the drawn-out moment it takes for a single one of Lucy’s tears to fall from her cheek to a fan mount and melt into its surface. Now compare the first picture of Charlotte from Montraville’s point of view. They have met before, at a ball in Portsmouth, at which time Montraville “only thought her a very lovely child.” He now sees “a tall, elegant girl [who] looked at [him] and blushed”: [. . .] the blush of recollection which suffused her cheeks as she passed, awakened in his bosom new and pleasing ideas. Vanity led him to think that pleasure at again beholding him might have occasioned the emotion he had witnessed, and the same vanity led him to wish to see her again. (10)

There is no rose in Charlotte’s cheek. She flushes with memory which he mis reads as “emotion,” attributing it to an inward space where he imagines her pleasure to dwell. Montraville’s interpretation is not intermedial, but semiotic. More specifically, his interpretation of Charlotte’s blush is organized through the surface/depth typology of paranoid reading which affirms his preconceived fantasy of himself as a sight to behold that produces (secret) delight in feminine interiors. Charlotte’s

59 Benjamin, Trauerspiel, 198.

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blush itself is dismissed almost as quickly as it appears, a flash of color brushed aside in Montraville’s haste to make meaning his own. This does not mean, however, that Henry’s emblematic reading of Lucy stands as a salutary alternative in the past. There are important differences between Montraville’s and Temple’s patriarchal lineages, but they overlap significantly in the ways that they look at women. Indeed, the hook for Temple’s courtship of Lucy appears earlier in the text, when Lucy expressed her desire to die and be buried with Eldridge. In that moment, Henry perceived Lucy to be a hard surface—a mirror—that compulsively reflects the image of her father through the mechanical turn of her “perfect” filial memory. Hence Henry, too, falls in love with a narcissistic picture of his own patriarchal power over Lucy. His speculative desire to stand in the place of her father as her always-remembered husband enchants him with its representation of his masculine freedom to forget. Benjamin identifies emblems with the partial deterioration of commodity forms, and suggests that allegories look back at them with complex grief because they glimmer with salvation which allegory knows to be impossible. As emblem, Lucy holds out the hope of the survival of “things” within a commoditizing system, along with the promise that those things might construct forms of time and relationality which can resist the liquidations of modernity. Yet the Temple courtship underscores that commoditization was not just a preexisting condition of Henry’s emblematic reading, but also the tide that overtook it in order for Lucy to have a future. Henry ostensibly rejects the reduction of women to wealth when he fights with his father about marrying rich, yet Lucy is nevertheless exchanged between men for money when Henry uses his fortune to pay off Eldridge’s debts. In retrospect, the predication of the Temples’ marriage on monetary transaction also suggests that Henry’s aphoristic reading of Lucy-as-emblem was a minimal form of profit-making—a value extraction—rather than its alternative. The Charlotte narrative thus looks back to Lucy with longing, but also from the knowledge that the promise she embodied was hopeless. In Charlotte Temple, emblem gives birth to allegory, which is a kind of radicalized emblem in which time scours through cheeks to the bone. Allegory’s task is to wrangle its vision of a “home in the Fall” from the clutches of an emblematic mise en abyme actuated by the furtive hope of

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redemption.60 In Charlotte Temple, the form this mise en abyme takes is the generational infinity mirror through which women produce perfect mnemonic copies of their parents, perhaps best visualized in Cornelius Tiebout’s stipple engraving for the 1809 frontispiece, which shows “Charlotte” wearing a portrait miniature (most likely) of her mother, who in turn wears a portrait miniature of Charlotte, reflecting each other back and forth forever. Much as allegory blocks the nostalgic return to empire, the Lucy narrative blocks the reversion of allegory to emblem by revealing that its tunnel of lights is a snare in which the relation between women across time is always-already captured within patriarchal systems of exchange.61 Charlotte Temple suggests that allegorical reading has a kind of palliative capacity for dealing with the sparkling multiplication of emblem’s miniature worlds, as well as with modernity’s headlong rush into futurity. This is because of allegory’s distinctive relationship with time, which is expressed in Rowson’s text through the very old revolutionary image of the Wheel of Fortune, or Fortuna. The narrator invokes this image herself in the same chapter that she describes La Rue’s “followings”: But fortune is blind, and so are those too frequently who have power dispensing her favours: else why do we see fools and knaves at the very top of the wheel, while patient merit sinks to the extreme opposite abyss. But we may form a thousand conjectures on this subject, and yet never hit on the right. Let us therefore endeavor to deserve her smiles, [. . .] whether we succeed or not. (100)

This, then, is the allegory of revolution which counteracts Desire’s rapidly spinning wheels and emblem’s iterative reproductions. The Wheel of Fortune absorbs those movements as epiphenomena within the slow grind of time that takes all in its turn. The sense of justice here is not one that rests on the entitled promise of symmetry, as in the image of scales, but in the humiliation of inexplicable mortal suffering. This vision characteristically emphasizes patience as the basis for interrelation—“patient merit sinks”—and makes no guarantees: “whether we succeed or not.”

60 Benjamin, Trauerspiel, 232–34. 61 For a reading of portrait miniatures as anagnoretic devices in the text’s sexual plots,

see Pethers, “Portrait Miniatures.”

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Allegorical reading offers viscerally to obstruct the hoarding of value that haunts both emblematic and modern interpretation. In an earlier moment, for instance, the narrator suggests that allegorical reading may incite compassion through a kind of auto-disembowelment, a dissection of the heart: “when we reflect how many errors we are ourselves subject to, how many secret faults lie hid in the recesses of our hearts, which we should blush to have brought into open day [...] we surely may pity the faults of others” (68). Similarly, the narrator’s allegory of the Wheel of Fortune blocks the fetishization of images with a move away from transparency and clarity—fortune is “blind,” and we are in doubt. Allegorical reading thus seems to consist not in removing the scales from one’s eyes, but in some sense putting them back, perhaps suggesting a mode of interpretation that chastens the sovereignty of the eye. For instance, a word that appears in the context of both emblematic and allegorical reading in Charlotte Temple is “blotting,” which suggests ink spilled on paper, a mark, stain, tarnish, or dirt. It appears when Lucy’s tear “blots and discolours” her painted rose, and when Charlotte expresses her fear that Lucy has “blotted the ungrateful Charlotte from her remembrance” (78). The scopic metaphorics of blotting are of un-Enlightenment, as something white or shining becomes black or stained. While “blotting” helps to feel out allegory and emblem’s very different degrees of intensity— one a smudge, the other a blast mark—in both cases this image summons relational reading as a coefficient of obscurity or uncertainty: a gathering in the dark. However, blotting is also inextricably tied up with racial discourses of Blackness and Indigeneity. This imagery is reminiscent of the shadow that falls across America’s face in The Parricide (Fig. 2), where it is a metaphor for sin fused at multiple points with a racist inscription of moral “blackness” on an Indian body. It would be possible to say of this, as Nancy Armstrong has claimed, that Charlotte’s ethnic identity changes as a function of her seduction, and that this forms the underlying logic of her inevitable death.62 But I would argue that the language of blotting serves as a reminder that the narrator’s refiguration of darkness as a space of compassion cannot be disentangled from, and is indeed founded on, 62 Armstrong contends that in a U.S. context in which “the American family was a racial formulation from the start,” American daughters die in sentimental literature when they become “ethnically impure.” Armstrong, “Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7 (1994): 1–24.

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The Parricide’s prior entitlement to represent Blackness non-identifiably as disorder, and “Indianness” as a trope of imperial belonging. Likewise, the pathos of Charlotte’s sexual plight is built upon a discourse seen in the The Able Doctor (Fig. 1) that links whiteness to femininity on terms which naturalize the sexual assault of Indigenous and Black women.63 By “whitening” America’s complexion in order to make her pitiable, that print is articulated through an apathetic expectation of enslaved and colonized women’s systematic traumatization so deep that it cannot even be called an assumption. It is the frame of the image, the condition of possibility for its saying anything at all. No matter how Charlotte Temple may critique imperial patriarchy, it never breaks this frame. The very terms of Charlotte’s relatability—and especially of what Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw) might call her grievability—are anchored in the racial and colonial violence of possession which suffuses this chapter’s allegorical archive. And so, lest she be redeemed, let us leave Charlotte in ruins and turn to the west.

63 Black and Indigenous feminist work that informs my thinking here includes Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism: Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy,” Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, eds. Carole McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, Emek Ergun (New York: Routledge, 2020); Louise Erdrich, The Round House (New York: Harper, 2012); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: OUP, 1997); Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861] (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021); Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

CHAPTER 3

Timelines: Anthologizing the Frontier in the Era of the Western Confederacy

1

Timelines

In popular memory and much scholarly history, the space and time of the American Revolution and those of Indian country do not seem to overlap. U.S. national mythology constructs the Revolution as a war fought across an ocean, between British and American armies, in which most everything of note is thought to have happened in New England. This view crops out major scenes of conflict within the settler colonies—the campaigns in the south, and British-occupied Philadelphia and New York—and presses the Revolution’s hemispheric and international dimensions to the margins. It is easy to forget, for instance, that there was a gap between Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown (1781) and the Treaty of Paris (1783) because Britain fought a naval war with Congress’s international allies for possessions in the Caribbean during those years. But where U.S. nationalist memory is neglectful of the Revolution’s messier European embroilments, it consigns Indian country almost to oblivion. If W.J.T. Mitchell is right that “spatial form is the perceptual basis of our notion of time,” then the persistence with which the Revolution takes transatlantic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Stapely, Afterlives of the American Revolution, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51544-6_3

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coordinates sediments a version of Revolutionary history with little or no time for Indian worlds within and beyond the settler colonies.1 Nevertheless, settler desires for Native land were a core vector of colonial dissent against British authority in the 1760s–1770s, and Indian country was a major theater of the Revolutionary wars.2 Colin G. Calloway characterizes the American Revolution as “a civil war for Indian people” as well as a “world war in Indian country, with surrounding nations, Indian and non-Indian, at war, on the brink of war, or arranging alliances in expectation of war.”3 Native nations worked to safeguard their interests as they navigated a complex set of internal, intertribal, and international tensions in a shifting field of contention that included many tribes, the Continental and British armies, Spanish and French interests, and settler militia.4 Some tribes were split generationally (Cherokee), or attempted to maintain embattled positions of neutrality (Lenape and Shawnee), while others were riven by factional allegiances to competing powers (Muscogee and Choctaw).5 Regardless of how they shaped their alignments, Native peoples faced recrimination, famine, and disease in the 1770s–1780s, particularly in sovereign territories where the seasonal

1 “[...] spatial form is the perceptual basis of our notion of time, we literally cannot ‘tell time’ without the mediation of space.” Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory,” Critical Inquiry 6.3 (1980): 542 [539–567]. 2 For the formative place of Native peoples and lands in Revolutionary foment, see especially Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 139–175; and Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 189–236. 3 Colin G. Calloway, “The Continuing Revolution in Indian Country,” Native Americans and the Early Republic, eds. Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 13. See also Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 4 In the context of Native history, I use the terms nation and sovereignty to insist upon the political standing and self-determining power of Indigenous peoples. I do not understand Native concepts of nation and sovereignty to be rooted in the same assumptions and teleologies as those of the colonial state, nor do I assume that they travel univocally across Native cultures. On “nation” in Indigenous Studies, see Scott Richard Lyons, “Nationalism” and Chris Anderson, “Indigenous Nationhood,” Native Studies Keywords, eds. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 168–79 and 180–198. 5 Calloway, “Continuing Revolution,” 5–12.

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crops and villages on which they depended were destroyed by American forces.6 Perhaps most infamously, George Washington ordered the genocidal Sullivan-Clinton campaign in 1779: an invasion of Iroquoia that aimed at “the entire destruction of the whole settlements of the Six Nations” through the indiscriminate murder of noncombatant men, women, and children, as well as the systematic destruction of their food supplies.7 Addressing Washington in 1790, Seneca chief Cornplanter said: “When your army entered the Country of the Six Nations, we called you the Town-destroyer and to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.”8 The conclusion of hostilities between Britain and the settler colonies did not resolve the threats to Native life that the Revolutionary wars unleashed. “For Native peoples,” writes Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), the Revolution itself was not a beginning. Nor was it an end, as its aftermath brought no semblance of peace.”9 The 1783 Treaty of Paris represented an acute emergency for trans-Appalachian Native nations, as Britain signed away huge swathes of territory east of the Mississippi with no mention of tribal sovereignties, thus catalyzing “a renewed 6 Scorched earth campaigns were used against the Haudenosaunee as well as the Cherokee and Muscogee in the south. See Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 180; Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 7 Qtd. in Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First Presi-

dent, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 255. For discussion of the genocidal scale of this campaign, see Rhiannon Koehler, “Hostile Nations: Quantifying the Destruction of the Sullivan-Clinton Genocide of 1779,” American Indian Quarterly 42.4 (2018): 427–453; Jeffrey Ostler, “‘To Extirpate the Indians’: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s–1810,” WMQ 72.4 (2015): 587–622. See also Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1972); Barbara Alice Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2005); Max M. Mintz, Seeds of Empire: The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage, 1972). 8 “To George Washington from the Seneca Chiefs, 1 December 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/0507-02-0005. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 7, 1 December 1790 – 21 March 1791, ed. Jack D. Warren, Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998, pp. 7–16.]. 9 Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 179.

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invasion of Indian lands by a flood of backcountry settlers.”10 Far from a moment of peace, then, this treaty was more like an inflection point in the violence that wracked Native nations to the west, south, and north of the seceding colonies more or less continuously from the 1760s to the mid-1790s.11 Writing a year after the treaty was signed, Samson Occom (Mohegan) observed that “This Family Contention of the English, has been & is the most undoing war to the poor Indians that ever happen among them it has Stript them of every thing, both their Temporal and Spiritual Injoyments—It Seems to me at Times that there is nothing but Wo, Wo, Wo, Written in every Turn of the Wheel of God’s providence against us, I am afraid we are Devoted to Destruction and Misery.”12 Just as Indian country tends to disappear from the Revolution’s mythic geography, what happened there roughly between 1775 and 1795 does not conform to Revolutionary timelines that conclude triumphantly with U.S. national independence. This chapter concerns a development that Calloway and other historians identify as a legacy of the Revolutionary period’s official outcome: the sedimentation of the frontier into a binary ideological configuration separating “Indians” from the presumptive advance of U.S. American settlement. While the frontier has been construed in spatial terms since the Turner thesis, however, I argue for it differently as temporal formation, or timeline, that was invented in the 1780s–1790s through nationalist identifications of the American Revolution with the “birth” of the U.S. nation-state.13 Turning W.J.T. Mitchell’s formulation on its head, 10 Calloway, “Continuing Revolution,” 25. 11 Calloway describes the Treaty of Paris as “one phase of a Twenty Years’ War

that continued at least until the Treaty of Greenville in 1795,” though it may also be possible to say that it marks one among many transitions in the shape of European colonizing power that Native peoples have negotiated for centuries. Calloway, “Continuing Revolution,” 3. 12 Samson Occom, Letter to John Bailey (1784), The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Joanna Brooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 121. 13 Turner makes the exceptionalist argument that the development of U.S. American democratic institutions took shape through their “perennial rebirth” along the frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1921), 2– 3. For the influence of the Turner thesis on twentieth-century U.S. imperial politics, see William Appleman Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical Review 24 (November 1955): 379–95. Williams also offers a cogent analysis of the underlying anxiety in Turner’s text that gets recast as triumphalism. For a critique of

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I argue that U.S. national time forms the perceptual and political basis of settler colonial space in the decades immediately following the Treaty of Paris (1783). These decades were not the first time that the frontier had appeared as a binary formation in colonial North America.14 Nor were they the first time that settler colonial discourse identified Indians as enemies of the U.S. American nation-state. Native people appear, in Chickasaw scholar Jodi A. Byrd’s words, as “the original enemy combatant who cannot be grieved” in the Declaration of Independence.15 What is different about the 1780s–1790s is that, in the official aftermath of the wars with European powers (i.e., with the signing of the treaty), it was possible to reduce the scope of the Revolutionary wars within a nationalist teleology of U.S. independence because the retrospective condition of possibility for that view was now in place. As this chapter shows, U.S. commentators began to use nationalist constructions of the Revolution almost immediately in 1783 in order to authorize settler colonial designs on Native lands. While Byrd rejects the pattern of the frontier altogether, in this chapter’s archive it is a useful framework for showing how the “production of a paradigmatic Indianness” was rendered through the spatialization of time as a property of Revolutionary history.16 This chapter focuses on the role that literary production played in constructing this imagining of the frontier, taking two anthologies of captivity narratives as its frame of reference. Between 1783 and 1793, captivity narratives were anthologized in the former colonies for the first time since Cotton Mather’s compilations of the early eighteenth

Turner’s exceptionalism, see Amy Kaplan, “Left Alone with America,” Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3–21. 14 Scholars of eighteenth-century Native American history see the emergence of the frontier as a racialized boundary as a legacy of the 1763 Royal Proclamation that set the western limit of colonial settlement at the Appalachians. Whereas trans-Appalachian tribal lands had previously existed in what Richard White called a “middle ground” encircled by French, Spanish, and British interests, historians contend that the Proclamation line instantiated a newly assertive binary configuration of power at its threshold. See White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650– 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Richter, Facing East from Indian Country; Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006). 15 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xviii. 16 Ibid., xxxv.

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century.17 Hugh Henry Brackenridge published a group of materials about William Crawford’s 1782 campaign against the Wyandot entitled Narratives of a Late Expedition Against the Indians (1783), while Matthew Carey’s History of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederick Mannheim’s Family (1794) of ten years later comprises a more eclectic selection of captivity narratives.18 These two captivity anthologies are noteworthy for several reasons. Both had influential literary custodians with strong party agendas.19 They were both reprinted in whole or part—especially in the case of Mannheim, which appeared in at least six editions between 1793 and 1800. And they were both recycled wholesale by early nineteenth-century anthologists Archibald Loudon and Samuel Metcalf, in which capacity Brackenridge and Carey’s editorial labors supported increasingly antiquarian iterations of U.S. frontier history into the 1820s.20 By 1821, Metcalf was presenting his reprocessed materials as though they were artifacts of long ago that attested to the “difficulties which our fathers underwent in penetrating and settling a vast wilderness” while “harassed by a treacherous and unrelenting foe.”21 In short, these were widely disseminated texts that bore influence into the nineteenth century. Though they have been overlooked by literary scholars, Brackenridge and Carey’s anthologies are particularly important given that very little scholarship exists on frontier literatures in the 1770s–1790s.22 Jill 17 Mather had published two such collections, Humiliations Follow’d with Deliverances (Boston, 1697); and Good Fetched out of Evil: A Collection of Memorables Relating to Our Captives (Boston, 1706). 18 While Brackenridge was the sole editor and publisher of Narratives of a Late Expe-

dition, Carey was only one of several publishers for the Mannheim anthology, which was first published in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1793. I identify Mannheim with Carey on the grounds that he was clearly the most influential of Mannheim’s publishers, and the only one to produce two editions (1794 and 1800). 19 Brackenridge and Carey were strongly identified with Federalism into the early 1790s, and it may be possible to read their investments in frontier imaginaries in connection with Federalism’s emphasis on national centralization. 20 See Archibald Loudon, A Selection, of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives, of Outrages, Committed by the Indians, in Their Wars, with the White People (Carlisle, PA, 1808–1811); and Samuel Metcalf, A Collection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives of Indian Warfare in the West (Lexington, 1821). 21 Metcalf, A Collection, i. 22 Literary scholarship on captivity narratives in the 1780s–1790s is quite thin. Richard

Slotkin analyzes the Boone narrative (1786) and Annette Kolodny and Alex Gergely have done work on the Panther captivity (1787). See Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence:

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Lepore and Greg Sieminski’s work on reprints of Rowlandson’s narrative in the 1770s is a rare exception.23 By contrast with the urban (and specifically Bostonian) scope of Rowlandson’s eighteenth-century republication, however, Brackenridge and Carey’s anthologies span a broad geographical range and seem to have enjoyed cross-market appeal.24 Most significantly for my purposes, their volumes are collections rather than single-author texts. Brackenridge and Carey use the anthology format in order to promote a supposedly timeless vision of the frontier during the 1780s–1790s as a boundary separating U.S. Americans from Indians.25 The anthology format supports them in that project because it is by definition a collection of materials taken out of context. The word anthology is a botanical metaphor (anthos—flower + logia—collection) which, in the early modern period, referred to a gathering of verse, or a posy of poesy. Despite the seemingly lovely organicism of that image, anthologies are premised on the evidential violence of collecting. They are cuttings. In her theorization of the collection, Susan Stewart notes that “the collection maintains its boundary and integrity” by separating its objects from their origins “within a context that is framed by the selectivity of the collector.”26 Stewart goes on to say, however, that the collector’s hand is characteristically effaced: “Whose labor made the ark is not is not the

The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1800 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973); Alex Gergely, “Conscientious Criticism and the Panther Captivity Narrative,” Early American Literature 56.2 (2021): 531–544; Annette Kolodny, “Turning the Lens on ‘The Panther Captivity’: A Feminist Exercise in Practical Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 329–345. 23 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999); Greg Sieminski, “The Puritan Captivity Narrative and the Politics of the American Revolution,” American Quarterly 42.1 (1990): 35–56. 24 Brackenridge and Carey’s compilations seem to have circulated among urban as well as more “backcountry” audiences, as they were (re)printed in several major U.S. cities—Boston, Philadelphia, New York—as well in Lexington, Leominster, Exeter, and Andover. 25 As in Chapter 2, I use the term Indian after Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe) to indicate that it is a colonial representation, “a simulation of dominance and absence,” that is distinct as such from Indigenous and Native American people, land, and cultures. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 13. 26 Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 152.

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question: the question is what is inside” (152). In the case of anthologies, the editorial function is masked by the conceit that the format represents a neutral or natural arrangement of textual evidence. Anthologies can thus be useful tools for the ideological production of history, as they encourage connections between fragmentary proofs within the implicitly authoritative compass of their surveys. As in other types of collection, de-historicization is in many ways the function of anthologization: “the collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. […] all time is made simultaneous or synchronous with the collection’s world” (151).27 In this way, Brackenridge and Carey’s anthologies link the frontier to Revolutionary politics not by drawing colonial history into the present (as in the case of 1770s reprints of Rowlandson), but rather by severing the connection of U.S. national history to its pre- and/or transnational pasts. The materials in both Narratives and Mannheim infer that an antagonism between Americans and Indians at the frontier is absolute and perennial. Yet the narratives comprised by these anthologies are set exclusively after 1779. Narratives of a Late Expedition against the Indians gathers materials pertaining to a single episode in 1782, while Mannheim produces a rough chronicle of Indian “cruelties” spanning the period from 1779 to the early 1790s. In both cases, then, Narratives and Mannheim generate ostensibly transhistorical accounts of a geographical space—“the frontier”—that are silently structured by chronologies of the very recent past. These anthologies thus anchor their presentation of timeless Indian enmity within an artificial context that deliberately mistakes a U.S. nationalist teleology of Revolution beginning in the 1770s for time immemorial. As collections which attempt to “[make] temporality a spatial and material phenomenon,” they bind the whole of “the west” within the prospective time of the nation-state in such a way that only U.S. Americans can have

27 The anthologies I examine in this chapter link up directly with the colonizing collecting of nineteenth-century ethnography, archeology, and natural history—and especially with the American imperial museum. See Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012); Christen Mucher, Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022); Sarita See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

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either a past or a future there.28 The frontier comes to mark the edge of history itself as an endless war of American independence. One of the striking features of Brackenridge and Carey’s captivity anthologies is that their editorial principles of selection simultaneously identify the frontier as a scene of Revolutionary struggle and evacuate it of real historical conflict (i.e., specific reference to actual events that took place in the trans-Appalachian west during the 1770s). As a result, the British are conspicuously absent from these collections, which is remarkable given that captivity narratives first published in the 1770s are almost always about white male POWs captured either by the British or their Native allies. The two most famous captives of the war, Ethan Allen and John André, were both taken (and in the latter instance, executed) by white armies, and Allen’s 1779 account of his widely publicized three-year internment by the British is dominated by memories of the “barbarity, fraud, and deceit which [Tories] exercise towards the whigs.”29 Allen is among the first to champion an “American empire,” and his narrative expresses vitriolic scorn for “cruel and bloodthirsty savages” that overtops even his contempt for the British.30 For the most part, however, settler colonial wartime captivities were so preoccupied with the conflict with Britain that they portray Native peoples as secondary threats in a struggle that does not fundamentally concern them. Between 1770 and 1782, “Indian savagery” is often couched as an extension or amplification of British malevolence. At points male Indian and British bodies even appear to merge, as in Wheeler Case’s wartime propaganda poem on the death of Jane McCrea: Some British troops, combin’d with Indian bands, With swords with knives, and tom’hawks in their hands, They have a shout, and pass’d along the wood, Like beasts of prey, in quest of human blood.31

28 Stewart, On Longing, 153. 29 Ethan Allen, A narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s captivity, from the time of his being

taken by the British, near Montreal, on the 25th day of September, 1775, to the time of his exchange on the sixth day of May, 1778 [...] (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1779), 17. 30 Ibid., 7. 31 When John Vanderlyn painted a sensationalized rendition of this episode, The Murder

of Jane McRea (1803–1804), he likewise left out the British troops and emphasized McRea’s sexual vulnerability to two hyper-masculinized Indian warriors. Wheeler Case,

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Case’s polemic turns precisely on the indistinguishability of “British troops” from “Indian bands” as they whoop through the woods “like beasts of prey.” In stark contrast, the captivity anthologies of the 1780s–1790s seek to maximize the distance between Americans and Indians within a U.S. nationalist chronology of the west, and one of the more stunning effects of this development is that the British swiftly, and almost completely, vanish from the record. It is worth emphasizing this point because it sheds light on the amnesiac imperative entailed in Brackenridge and Carey’s interventions. In order to render their radically simplified vision of frontier history, Brackenridge and Carey had to opt not to collect materials that were widely available to them. But their collections also demand the ruthless expungement of events that transpired within the living memory of their readers—in Brackenridge’s case, only a few years before. Instead of perpetuating the wartime convention of identifying Indians with British tyranny (a method they might have adopted for justifying the murder and displacement of Native peoples), Brackenridge and Carey recast the Revolution as a struggle in defense of civilization that has been fought between only two parties—Americans and Indians—for all of time. As the frontier becomes identified with the leading edge of Revolutionary struggle, it also curdles into a racial boundary at which whiteness and Americanness become co-extensive values, opposed from the other side of history by Indian “savagery.” This development begins to draw out the paradoxically anticipatory dimension of the collections’ atemporality. By arranging their contents in a decontextualized Revolutionary timeframe, Brackenridge and Carey’s captivity anthologies build the telos of U.S. American independence as an infinite arc of conquest in which the Indian stands as the enemy of white American freedom—or what Byrd calls “the transit of empire.” Following Stewart, I suggest that anthologies help to conjure momentum for this future-oriented racial plot through their serial time signature: “the collection is a mode of control and containment insofar as it is a mode of generation and series.”32 As in the collections of Noah’s Ark and the museum, seriality underwrites the anthology’s expectation of predictable

Poems Occasioned by Several Circumstances and Occurrences, in the Present Grand Contest of America for Liberty (New Haven: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1778), 18. 32 Ibid., 159 (my emphasis).

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increase by limiting the number of possible future outcomes to one point (what follows 1 and 2 can only be 3), but also by managing the perversion of repetition which is internal to it (items in a series are repetitions of type, yet no two items can be identical; ergo what follows 1 and 2 cannot be 2 or 1). More simply put, seriality is a developmental temporality of accumulation which advances through phobic denials of non-linear growth. I suggest that Brackenridge and Carey harness the serial time of the collection’s “passionate pursuit of possession” as an exceptionalist mechanism that yokes Revolutionary past to U.S. national future at the frontier.33 They deploy the anthology’s serializing format both in order to represent Indians as timeless enemies of the Revolutionary settler state and to assert that the settler state will defeat them according to the latent logic of inevitability that the series carries as a heteropatriarchal principle of sexual increase, or “generation.” While anthology is an early modern format, its affordances of decontextualization and seriality thus operate differently than in the other cases this book examines because they are taken up by Brackenridge and Carey as weaponized ideological tools rather than as therapeutic counter-modern temporalities. Yet as Jean Baudrillard notes, the collection’s attempt to “master time” is a “neurotic […] bulwark against anxiety” that is “forever being contested, for the world and human beings are in reality continuous.”34 Indeed, these collections’ visions of the frontier were contested by Indigenous insurgency—on a spectacular scale—in the intervening decade between Brackenridge and Carey’s publications. In the mid-1780s, a pantribal alliance formed in Indian country that included memberships from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; the Three Fires of the Ojibwa, Odawa, and Potawatomi; and the Kickapoo, Miami, Shawnee, Wyandot, Lenape, Kaskaskia, and Mississauga nations.35 Known variously as the Western 33 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects [1968], trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 2005), 93. For another account of the connection between seriality and “frontier” epistemologies, see Ed White’s discussion of seriality after Sartre as a “vernacular sociology” of the backcountry. White, The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 28–72. 34 Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 101. 35 My discussion of the Western Confederacy draws on eighteenth-century histories of

Native nations in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions. See Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country and The Indian World of George Washington; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745– 1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Graymont, The Iroquois in the

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(or Northwestern) Confederacy, Wabash Confederacy, or Miami Confederacy, the alliance campaigned against U.S. forces between 1785 and 1795 for control of the Northwest Territory, which comprised unceded sovereign lands in the Great Lakes and Ohio country relinquished to the U.S. by Britain in the Treaty of Paris. The Western Confederacy was extraordinarily successful. Led by battle-tested war chiefs such as Mishikinaakwa or Little Turtle (Miami), Waweyapiersenwaw or Blue Jacket (Shawnee), Thayendanegea or Joseph Brant (Mohawk), and Buckongahelas (Lenape), the Confederacy arose from the millennia-old interethnic foundations of power and prosperity sustained by Native women across the Ohio River Valley.36 Refusing to sell their lands under increasingly threatening pressure to do so, the Confederacy routed large U.S. forces led by Josiah Harmar in 1790 and Arthur St. Clair in 1791. “St. Clair’s Defeat” in 1791 is a hugely significant historical watershed. Proportionally, it is the most catastrophic military defeat that the United States has ever suffered. The Western Confederacy’s victory in this battle catalyzed waves of panic in the settler colonies and left many literary traces. Materials published in its aftermath suggest that it constituted a crisis for U.S. nationalist discourses of white settler masculinity and threw anxieties about the Revolution’s legacies into high gear. Although anthology is taken up in ideological terms by both Brackenridge and Carey, this chapter is thus invested in tracing how their projects fail, American Revolution; Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Native Americans and the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999); Michael McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015); Richter, Facing East from Indian Country; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground; Steven Warren, The World the Shawnee Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014); Richard White, The Middle Ground. For focused attention to the Western Confederacy, see especially Colin G. Calloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Taylor, The Divided Ground. 36 The Ohio basin had especially deep roots in intercultural exchange, adaptation, and inclusivity, as it had always been “a zone of constant motion” with “porous borders, inhabited by diverse people.” This longstanding pattern was intensified by the pressures of war and displacement, which led many nations to migrate into the Ohio in what Ned Blackhawk describes as an “Algonquin diaspora.” See Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, 8–9, 284; Blackhawk, Rediscovering America, 151; Warren, The World the Shawnee Made.

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and especially how U.S. settler colonial visions of serial time along the frontier collapse under the Western Confederacy’s assertion of Indigenous futurity in the 1790s. While Brackenridge’s Narratives develops a dehistoricized vision of the frontier as a vector of Revolutionary history that is advanced through the serial enactment of proprietary white masculinity, the Western Confederacy’s successes in the early 1790s mark a switch point when anthology’s iterative structure starts to circulate as a minor revolutionary experience which stalls the orderly reproduction of white American freedom in queer times of recurrence and redundancy.

2

Re-collecting the Series: Brackenridge and the Crawford Campaign (1782)

In his preface to Narratives of a Late Expedition, Hugh Henry Brackenridge appears to endorse what historians of eighteenth-century Native America refer to as “conquest theory”: the notion that, as allies of a vanquished enemy, Native peoples had forfeited their natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Though he writes that he intends for Narratives to “[show] America what have been the sufferings of some of her citizens by the hands of the Indian allies of Britain,” he quickly abandons this line and spends most of his editorial commentary furnishing an account of ineradicable Indian “barbarity” which undermines conquest theory’s basic presupposition that Native peoples are political persons who have natural rights to lose. That “the nature of an Indian is fierce and cruel” is, Brackenridge suggests, an incontrovertible fact borne out by the evidence of Biblical and classical precedent. In this way, Brackenridge situates his materials as though they were comparatively recent entries in an enormous body of evidence that justifies the “abolition” of the tribes: “an extirpation of them would be useful to the world, and honourable [sic] to those who can effect it.”37 Brackenridge thus abandons conquest theory’s fantasy of contractual symmetry for an explicitly genocidal colonial ideology of Indigenous difference. As a result, he shifts the historical terrain of the frontier from the scene of recent political conflict (in which

37 Hugh Henry Brackenridge, ed., Narratives of a Late Expedition Against the Indians; with an Account of the Barbarous Execution of Col. Crawford, and the Wonderful Escape of Dr. Knight and John Slover from Captivity, in 1782 (Philadelphia: Printed by Francis Bailey, 1783), 2.

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Native alliances with Britain are the focus) to one of boundless natural duration. This sets the stage for Brackenridge’s nationalist resignification of the Revolution as a war between Americans and Indians, which he accomplishes in part by taking advantage of anthology’s decontextualizing properties. Indeed, the universal prescriptions of Brackenridge’s editorial commentary belie the intense particularity of the narratives he actually gathers in Narratives of a Late Expedition. The volume includes only two captivity narratives, one by John Knight and one by John Slover, who were taken in the Continental Army’s Sandusky campaign of 1782.38 These are separated by a short “Memoir” of Colonel William Crawford, commander of that expedition before he was captured, ritually tortured, and burned to death by the Wyandot on June 11th of the same year. The collection concludes with an epistle addressed to the printer in which Brackenridge writes that “they [Indians] may be reduced to more distant bounds, until driven to the cold snows of the north west […] their practices shall be obscured, and the tribes gradually abolished” (38). Framed by epic gestures toward ancient and natural history on the one hand, and a sweeping final call for genocide on the other, Narratives exudes a sense of historical grandiosity utterly out of proportion with the fact that its advertised content recounts only a single incident. Indeed, Brackenridge’s long title—Narratives of a Late Expedition against the Indians, with an Account of the Barbarous Execution of Col. Crawford, and the Wonderful Escape of Dr. Knight and John Slover from Captivity, in 1782— may be said to capitalize on paratactic imprecision to generate the illusion of breadth. The titular headings of Brackenridge’s collection all describe only two texts, but the connective words “with….and” create the impression that the Knight and Slover texts name only two among unnamed other contributions. Anthologization thus seems to be doing something for Brackenridge in function if not precisely in fact. I suggest that he is invested in the capacity of anthology to present decontextualized materials as episodic illuminations of given order of things. As Brackenridge is well aware, Crawford’s execution by the Wyandot was widely understood in its time to be a reprisal for the Moravian Massacre (sometimes Moravian slaughter 38 I will continue to refer to these two texts as Knight’s and Slover’s, suspending questions of authenticity and authorship, though Brackenridge likely had a heavy hand in writing both narratives.

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or Gnadenhütten massacre) of March 1782, when Pennsylvania militia had murdered one hundred Christian Lenape people at a mission in the Ohio country. Men, women, and children were killed indiscriminately, many of them by scalping. The Wyandot were also possibly responding to the Crawford expedition itself as part of a broader colonial initiative systematically to deracinate Native peoples in the Ohio River basin. Brackenridge, however, deploys the anthology format to refract a single episode through multiple perspectives, which in this case gives a singular historical event the appearance of a serial historical offense. Crawford dies three different times in Narratives; the total body count (whatever it may have been) multiplies where Knight’s and Slover’s observations overlap, while the range of tortures witnessed and described in the course of the collection broadens where they do not. Anthologization allows the casualties of the Crawford campaign to be told and re-told in Narratives in a manner that invites Brackenridge’s readers to identify it with a pattern of unaccountable cruelty that he ascribes to “Indian nature.” Brackenridge thus mines the dehistoricizing effects of anthologization to cast the proceedings of one day in 1782 as evidence of a timeless pattern of Indian “savagery.” However, he is not fully able to maintain the suppressions required for this misrepresentation. At several points, he attempts to reinforce his reading of the Crawford campaign in editorial footnotes, but this backfires when he loses an argument with himself in a long, preemptive note on the Moravian Massacre at the end of Slover’s narrative. Brackenridge writes: It has been said that the putting to death of the Moravian Indians has been the cause of the cruelties practiced on the prisoners at Sandusky. But though this has been made an excuse by the refugees amongst the savages, and by the British, yet it must be well known, that it has been the custom of the savages at all times. […] At the same time, though I would strike away this excuse which is urged for the savages, I am far from approving the Moravian slaughter. […] I am also disposed to believe, that the greater part of the men put to death were warriors […] But the putting to death of women and children, who sang hymns at their execution, must be considered as unjustifiable inexcusable homicide. (30)

Many of Brackenridge’s statements in this passage directly contradict his ostensible goal of demonstrating that Indians are without rights. Indeed, he goes on to expostulate at length against Native peoples’ rights to soil; refers to them as “animals,” “spotted cattle,” and “Devils”; and dismisses

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assimilationist arguments out of hand on the grounds of insuperable difference. But his very attempt to cement a reading of Crawford’s execution as a barbarous “custom of the savages at all times” in the note above leads him to acknowledge counter-arguments (made by “refugees” and “the British”) which point to Indian country’s complex interethnic political and social histories and, indeed, provide testimony that the Wyandot’s actions were rule-bound, justified reprisals. Most extraordinary of all is Brackenridge’s concluding remark that “the putting to death of women and children […] must be considered as unjustifiable inexcusable homicide.” Here, against his stated purpose and over his own objections, Brackenridge affirms the humanity of the Moravian Lenape and concedes that the murder of women and children was an unpardonable offense and “a disgrace to the state of Pennsylvania.” Brackenridge seems unable to overcome the particularity of the Moravian slaughter; the victims are not inert examples of “Indian cruelty,” but women and children who sang hymns at their deaths. Crossing over into history, the Lenape demand a reckoning which overturns the genocidal logic on which Brackenridge bases most of his claims. Indeed, by the ethical terms he sets in this footnote, Brackenridge’s call to “extirpate” Native people becomes unrealizable, as genocide of course entails unforgivable murders of women and children. Likewise, Brackenridge’s assertions that the wars in the west consist entirely of white men “defending the frontiers” against Indian “incursions” and “predatory invasions” gives way to his concession that it is white American settlers who are invading Native lands and destroying Native lives (4). Though the voices of Lenape women and children sing in its margins, Narratives of a Late Expedition is primarily absorbed in the contestatory drama between Indian and American men. Brackenridge situates their antagonism across a racialized boundary that draws definitional power from a recognizably U.S. nationalist account of Revolutionary politics. The frontier itself appears a partisan division between those who are “for” the Revolution (American soldiers and citizens) and those who are “against” it (Indians). But in order to define this binary, Brackenridge admits troubling exceptions to the rule. When John Slover describes seeing two white civilians in the Indian camp, for instance, Brackenridge writes in a footnote that: These men, [Matthew] Elliot and [John] Girty were inhabitants of the western country and since the commencement of the war, having for some

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time professed an attachment to America, went off to the Indians. They are of that horrid brood called Refugees, and whom the Devil has long since marked for his own Property. (23)

Elliot and Girty were intercultural figures with longstanding Native kinships.39 They both elected to fight for the British in the 1770s (the term “Refugee” was a common label for Loyalists). In Brackenridge’s accounting, the fact that they were not on the American side necessarily puts them on the wrong side and makes them damned. But since the British have been largely erased from this version of the frontier, political treachery can only be framed as “going off to the Indians.” As a result, Patriot alignment emerges syllogistically in opposition to Indianness: to be Indian is to have been on the “wrong side” of Revolution, therefore to forfeit “attachment to America” is to be or become “Indian.” Americanness is thus encoded as a white ethnonationalism, which in this case is strongly associated with possessive individualism. Hence Brackenridge brands Girty and Elliot’s voluntary association with Native people as an abdication from proprietary subjectivity—Elliot and Girty become the “Devil’s Property”—which justifies their banishment from history. Brackenridge’s racial logic in the passage above does not appear to be consistently grounded in essentialist physiological discourses of blood or skin. Because the link between U.S. national identity (Americanness) and whiteness is held in place by proper Revolutionary allegiance, phenotypically white men like Girty and Elliot can become un-white/American by virtue of being on the wrong “side” of history. In other words, while Brackenridge presents Indianness as an immutable expression of savagery, the ascription of its opposing qualities (Americanness, whiteness) turns on the nationalist purity of Revolutionary time for which the frontier provides a spatialized accounting. Whiteness for Brackenridge is not genetically assured; it has no positive value—it is a kind of toxic fume given off by abstract possessions (of national attachment, of oneself, of historical representability), and heavily contingent on being in the right place in the right way at the right time. It can therefore be lost or forfeited, and rather easily too, simply by passing into tribal lands from any but a genocidal motive. 39 Girty had been adopted by the Seneca after being taken captive as a child. Elliot worked as a British agent of Indian affairs out of Detroit; he was Irish by birth, and his wife was Shawnee. Calloway, The Victory with No Name, 103.

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This becomes extremely important in Narratives’ presentation of captivity, which binds the frontier to the security of U.S. national history primarily through the sensationalized spectacle of white men’s ritual torture at Indian hands. Capture itself seems to constitute a negation of proprietary white masculinity for both Knight and Slover, whose narratives return obsessively to images of bodies “mangled cruelly […] black, bloody, burnt with powder” (22). “Black” is among the most common adjectives Knight and Slover use to describe captives’ bodies in these accounts. For instance, Knight writes that the prisoners’ faces were painted black and that Crawford’s naked body was “burnt black with powder” (10–11). Slover describes how a prisoner was stripped and “blacked […] with coal and water” (21) before being burned at the stake. When Slover sees this man’s corpse later, he remarks that “the blood mingled with the powder was rendered black” (22). The implied horrors of Indian captivity thus constellate around a neurotic obsession with the racial purity of white male bodies. Together, the blackening of skin and blood construct an overdetermined racial imaginary of contamination that is at once biological, environmental, and cosmetic. The suffusion of Knight and Slover’s narratives with racial panic suggests a set of concerns that has to do with the conservation of white masculine (self) possession under torture, which casts American men into sexualized passive or receptive objects of Native aggression. Brackenridge thus evinces a rationale that conflates the human with the possessive individual and freedom with agency, in such a way that to be overcome by another is to be stripped of possessive power: un-free, un-individual, un-self-possessed, un-Manned—and therefore, in the logic of the text, “black.”40 This is not quite the same thing as saying that Indian torture turns men into women in these accounts. The structuring binary that subtends the scene of torture is white/black rather than male/female per se, the difference being that the former dichotomy is underwritten by a distinction between the human and non-human in which humanity is always already understood to be a quality of proprietary male reproductive authority. According to this logic, settler men who succumb to Native power are stripped of what makes them recognizably human— they do not simply die, but cease to be. “Blackness” thus seems to be 40 I draw from Sylvia Wynter’s critique of Man in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257–337.

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deployed in Knight and Slover’s narratives as a name for an aberrant condition that Black feminist thinker Hortense Spillers identifies with the “American grammar” of slavery: heavily sexualized but non-reproductive enfleshment in the presumed absence of gender.41 While I think Brackenridge may be drawing on an ideology of blackness that underwrites chattel slavery in order to suture his account of U.S. American whiteness in his imagining of the frontier, this observation is not intended to subsume the history of U.S. settler colonialism within that of slavery (or vice versa).42 Rather, the evocation of blackness in Narratives helps to pull out the specificity of the connection between possessive logics and reproductive ones in Brackenridge’s overwrought insistence on the absolute nonviability of the encounter between Americans and Indians. This insistence may seem strange at first, given that when Brackenridge describes Girty and Elliott as belonging to “that horrid brood called Refugees” (my emphasis), he uses a word that is very deeply about reproduction. The etymological root of brood (from Old English, br¯ od) means “breed,” and Brackenridge is using it in this instance to indicate a family of young animals, particularly of birds or insects. While that is of course dehumanizing, Brackenridge also suggests by the use of this term that Girty and Elliot have futures with their Native kin. Conversely, the Knight and Slover narratives indicate that the stakes of any kind of contact between U.S. American white men and Indians are existential. The image of gunpowder blackening blood is especially striking, as it suggests that blood becomes a kind of incendiary device in this context that cannot commingle and will instead detonate when put to the torch. At first glance, then, the scene of the Crawford reprisal underscores Brackenridge’s investments in the utter negation of Indian and American interrelation, but does not appear to offer any possibility of resuming the

41 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229. 42 Of a later moment, Amy Kaplan argues that “the representations of U.S. imperialism were mapped not through a West/East axis of frontier symbols and politics, but instead through a North/South axis around the issues of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation.” She makes that move in order to avoid reproducing the geographical narrative of manifest destiny within her own argument, but at the cost of effacing the specificity of U.S. settler coloniality. I understand the histories of settler colonialism and slavery to be deeply interwoven but not reducible to one another. Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),18.

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orderly progression of serial time. The nonviability of white masculine generativity is exactly what’s at issue. However, Knight’s and Slover’s narratives seem to imply that white men’s terminal enactment of (self-) possession might have serializing potential. Only Crawford appears to achieve the requisite forbearance by receiving violence on his body without being rendered fully passive (i.e., unmanned) by it. Knight describes Crawford’s final moments in gruesome detail: Col. Crawford at this period of his sufferings besought the Almighty to have mercy on his soul, spoke very low, and bore his torments with the most manly fortitude. He continued in all the extremities of pain […] when at last being almost spent, he lay down on his belly: they then scalped him and repeatedly threw the scalp in my face, telling me ‘that was my great captain.’—An old squaw (whose appearance every way answered the ideas people entertain of the Devil) got a board, took a parcel of coals and ashes and laid them on his back and head after he had been scalped: he then raised himself upon his feet and began to walk round the post […] he seemed more insensible of pain than before. (12)

This passage is the last of a description that continues for more than two closely-printed pages, during the course of which Crawford is repeatedly shot, beaten, and branded. Crawford’s ability to maintain consciousness and continue standing up borders on the absurd, but it strikes me as significant that Knight claims to have last seen Crawford on his feet, apparently beyond pain. There is no mangled, “blackened” corpse: at least not one that the reader is permitted to remember. Instead, Knight leaves off his account with the image of a white erection. Crawford alone thus seems to retain, if not to acquire, white masculine generative force from his ordeal. This could suggest that Brackenridge is interested in inviting eschatological or exemplary readings of Crawford’s death in which his memory would become a galvanizing reproductive principle of future conquest.43 However, approaching this moment by way of serial form suggests conversely that the point might be to reproduce Crawford by effacing his singularity. Writes Stewart: “the point of 43 Readings of American culture influenced by prophetic eschatology have been inhabited quite strongly by exceptionalist transhistorical or mythic views of American identity. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (New York: Picador, 2006); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence.

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the collection is forgetting—starting again in such a way that a finite number of elements create, by virtue of their combination, an infinite reverie.”44 On this account, Crawford’s demise is seminal because it starts a new series of U.S. American masculinity in which other white men’s bodies will take his place: ones who will neither “go off with the Indians” to share blood, nor return “blackened” by the genocidal crimes that Brackenridge disavows, but remain self-possessed and die as Men.45 The emphasis in this view falls on the reproduction of a classifying structure of white masculinity (series) rather than on the adulation of an exceptional individual white man (symbol). The series is not a memory but a re-collection. Rather than being American in a mythic sense, this re-collection of serialized white masculinity is U.S.-nationalized as a function of its inscription within a teleology of Revolutionary history that bears foundationally colonizing force. Brackenridge inserts a short “Memorial” into Narratives between Knight and Slover’s accounts in which Crawford’s body is hitched to the progress of Revolutionary time: Col. Crawford, was about 50 years of age, had been an old warrior against the savages. He distinguished himself early as a volunteer in the last war, and was taken notice of by colonel (now general) Washington, who procured for him the commission of ensign. As a partisan he showed himself very active, and was greatly successful: He took several Indian towns, and did great service in scouting, patrolling, and defending the frontiers. (16)

44 Stewart, On Longing, 152. 45 One of the possibilities embedded in the racial overdetermination of this scene is

that its discourse of skin travels through a cosmetic genealogy of blackness that was incorporated into phenotypic accounts of race by way of the language of sin (via misreadings of the mark of Cain and the curse of Ham). The emphasis on skin may thus subliminally register these men’s contamination by the crimes of genocide that Brackenridge disavows. I gratefully acknowledge Emily Weissbourd for calling my attention to this and talking with me about many of the ideas in this reading, including the significance of the word “brood.” Weissbourd, Bad Blood: Staging Race Between Early Modern England and Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). For eighteenth-century treatments of this issue, see Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought to Africa from America,” Poems on Various Subjects Divine and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773); and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

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This is a U.S. nationalist account of Revolutionary chronology from which the British are effaced and in which Indians appear as though they have always been Americans’ common enemy. Brackenridge maintains this calumny through carefully chosen language which enables him to designate settler conquest (taking “Indian towns” and “defending the frontiers”) as the action of Revolutionary time (“in the years 1776, 1777, and at other times”). Hence the Crawford campaign itself could be mistaken here for an extension of “the late war.” This is important because it suggests once again that Crawford’s examplarity is not what Brackenridge most wants to emphasize. Rather, he is interested in how Crawford’s serialization generates an outpost in Indian country for the dehistoricized Revolutionary context that Narratives itself labors to produce. Like a flag on the moon, Crawford’s bones pin space to a future in which the American Revolution will have always been the time when the west won.

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“St. Clair’s Defeat”

The propagandistic potential of serialized white male death may have reached its limits in November of 1791, when the confederated Native forces of the Western Confederacy decimated General Arthur St. Clair’s army near the present-day Wabash River in what is still “the greatest single defeat inflicted by Indians on Americans in their long history of conflict.” As Alan Taylor notes, “three times as many Americans died in St. Clair’s defeat as at George Custer’s more famous ‘last stand’ in 1876.”46 The year before, in 1790, General Josiah Harmar had lost over a thousand men in a campaign of only three battles. Yet “Harmar’s Defeat” does not seem to have had the same impact as “St. Clair’s Defeat,” which triggered an instant response in the popular press and prompted a Congressional inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the expedition. Several broadside elegies, ballads, and news reports survive from the battle’s immediate aftermath. The campaign also makes appearances in a captivity narrative, The Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnet (1792), which I discuss in the following section. St. Clair’s defeat is striking not only for the range of responses it elicited, but also because it seems to have provoked an urgent need for explanation that consistently goes unmet. How was it possible

46 Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground, 259.

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that so many American men—several of them, including St. Clair, prominent Revolutionary war veterans—were so spectacularly overwhelmed by supposedly undisciplined Native warriors? For settler colonial observers, the scale of the defeat was worrying. But so, too, was its repetitive quality. How did this happen again? What does not fill the semantic deficit occasioned by the defeat is any acknowledgment of superior Native military organization, or of the Native political grievances driving the war in the first place. Nonetheless, the Western Confederacy’s formation was galvanized by (though not strictly a consequence of) Britain’s illegal cession of the Northwest Territory to the United States in 1783, and they successfully defended their members’ territories in the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes regions against intensified settler incursions after the treaty. Because this history directly contradicts the widely held belief that the war as such ended in 1783, it challenges the ways in which the chronology and geographical reach of the American Revolution are measured. U.S. nationalist accounts of the Revolution’s scope and duration are so entrenched as temporal markers in this period—dividing colonial from “early republican” time— that histories which do not conform to its compartmentalization tend to fall by the wayside or vanish altogether. This problem is acute around Indigenous and Black histories whose repression has been a condition of possibility for the emergence of a U.S. nationalist telos of the Revolutionary wars. In the case of “St. Clair’s Defeat,” such erasures are inscribed in the battle’s very name, which effaces Indigenous victory in its emphasis on American military failure. As Calloway writes, “The winners write history, it seems, even when they lose.”47 Nevertheless, the radical energies of the Western Confederacy have a constructively unsettling effect on the history of the conflict known as the American Revolution. They exceed logics of reaction, resistance, and causality founded in assumptions of Revolutionary time’s inexorable, linear advance to independence. And it may therefore be impossible to determine when “St. Clair’s Defeat” occurred according to settler accountings of history. As it happens, each one of the foregoing statements has some bearing on the kinds of responses St. Clair’s defeat elicited after the fact, which tend to speak in the register of acute historical crisis.

47 Calloway, The Victory with No Name, 9.

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The St. Clair expedition marks a moment in which the developmental conceit of frontier seriality—which assumes the “gradual” progression of settler time’s advance—buckled under the Western Confederacy’s assertion of Indigenous futurity in the Ohio. One broadside, “The Columbian Tragedy” (1791), describes the Confederacy’s victory as an “Ever Memorable and Bloody Indian Battle, Perhaps the most shocking that has happened in America since its first Discovery” (Fig. 1).48 “The Columbian Tragedy” evinces an acute anxiety for re-collecting white settler male bodies within serial orders of legibility. One notes, for instance, the portrait of General Butler in uniform, backgrounded by field cannons, to the left of the title. This forms a stark contrast with the sheet’s other two images of tiny, literally faceless Native figures brandishing hatchets and bows in landscape scenes. The latter frame Native people as non-individuated vectors of disorder, ungrievable and without history, against whom the settler stands not precisely as an absolutely unique individual (the image is reproducible and indeed re-nameable), but rather as a recognizable iteration of a type of mechanized order: an item in a series. The broadside’s attempt to manage the collapse of seriality into repetition fails, however, in the header, which shows two rows of coffins: one for each officer who died in the battle, their bodies abandoned in Miami territory during the retreat. Every coffin is individually labeled, and the printer arranges the coffins left to right, and high to low, in order of rank. Yet the same woodcut appears to have been used for all of the coffins, so that in material terms it is impossible to tell them apart.49 Whereas Crawford’s ritually tortured body seems in Brackenridge to generate a context for marking Wyandot territory as a speculative future property of American history, here the context for St. Clair’s defeat is the iterative image of the coffin itself: an explicitly empty box. St. Clair’s

48 “The Columbian Tragedy: Containing a particular and official account of the brave and unfortunate officers and soldiers, who were slain and wounded in the ever-memorable and bloody Indian battle [...] Nov. 4, 1791 between two thousand Americans, belong to the united army, and near five thousand wild Indian savages, at Miami Village, near Fort Washington, in the Ohio-country” (Hartford: s.n., 1791). 49 Paul Revere famously uses coffin engravings to commemorate the “Boston Massacre”

in the Boston Gazette (March 1770), though Revere chooses to individualize each coffin with unique memento mori and the initials of the men who had died. See Lauryn Baehr, “Comparing coffins, remembering the Boston Massacre,” Smithsonian Museum of American History, March 15 2023, https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/remembering-bostonmassacre.

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men thus appear as the missing contents of identical inert objects: a string of terminal repetitions trailing off in an ellipsis that will wait forever to be filled with bones. ∗ ∗ ∗ The Western Confederacy’s victory over St. Clair’s forces catalyzed historic crisis as well in the sense that it exposed serious doubts about the nature and experience of history—and about Revolutionary historical experience in particular. St. Clair’s losses were difficult to recuperate; they were not available to the kind of re-collecting that Brackenridge elaborated around Crawford nine years earlier. Even the most sympathetic accounts are constrained by the fact that this battle was a total loss from the perspective of the U.S. St. Clair himself admitted that it was “as unfortunate an action as almost any that has been fought, in which every corps was engaged and worsted, except the first regiment, that had been detached upon a service.”50 If Brackenridge’s Narratives is buoyed by a kind of faith in Crawford’s capacity to generate a series of similar white men in his wake, or at the very least to reassert the frontier as an advancing atemporal context for the serialization of white American masculinity, St. Clair’s defeat seems by contrast to confirm the overmatched weakness of the settler colonial male body and its heirs. The St. Clair expedition’s literary traces have a breathless quality, a feeling of being “out of time” that resists recuperation. No one in the American settler force was adequately prepared, and even the elegies can seem overextended. Efforts to memorialize the dead in the heroic mode are stretched to the breaking point. Take, for example, a stanza from a broadside ballad entitled “St. Clair’s Defeat: A New Song” (1791): Says Colonel Gibson to his men, Brave boys, be not dismay’d, For sure brave Pennsylvanians were never yet afraid, Ten thousand deaths I’d rather die than they should win the field; With that there came a fatal shot, which caus’d him for to yield.

Reinforced by the rollicking meter of the ballad form, the sense here is of an almost comic futility. Gibson scarcely finishes his speech before it 50 Letter from St. Clair to Secretary for the Department of War [Henry Knox], November 9, 1791. Reprinted in “Boston, December 19. Melancholly [sic] Account respecting the Western Army” (Boston: B. Edes and Son, [December 19] 1791).

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Fig. 1 “The Columbian Tragedy” [1791]. Broadside commemorating “St. Clair’s Defeat.” Photo by author (Source Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia)

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is answered with a bullet; there will not be “ten thousand deaths”—only a rather anticlimactic one, and there is little time to dwell on it because other officers are dropping like flies all over the battlefield. Brave words and deeds repeatedly come to nothing, and a few soldiers lose faith before the retreat begins in earnest. The dying General Butler exclaims, “what shall we do? We’re murdered every man,” just before giving his troops the half-hearted order to “beat them if you can” (my emphasis)—a phrase whose conditional clause accents it with the prospect of failure. Meanwhile, Ferguson’s men stop to weep over his body in the midst of the chaos, and when Major Clarke finally gives the command to “form in order, and retreat the best we can,” it results in total confusion: “helter skelter through the woods like lost sheep we did fly.” The author of this ballad emphasizes “veterans” specifically (“many a noble veteran lay scatter’d over the field”), and they are quick to mark a discrepancy between the kind of masculine military heroism associated with the Revolutionary war and the scene they imagine unfolding in the Ohio River Valley: At Bunker’s Hill and Quebec many a hero fell, Likewise at Long Island, as I the truth can tell; But such a heavy carnage sure never did I see, As happen’d on the plains near the river St. Mary.

By placing it on a continuum with major Patriot losses of the Revolution, the lyricist suggests that St. Clair’s defeat can be redeemed as a kind of noble sacrifice in the cause of freedom. But the qualification of the third line—“such a heavy carnage sure never did I see”—interrupts this historical trajectory, setting St. Clair’s defeat apart on the order of magnitude. What this says about the relationship of the present to the Revolutionary past is somewhat unclear, however. Does the scale of St. Clair’s losses make them especially well qualified for inclusion in the pantheon of heroic national defeats (is it an item in a series)? Or does it signal, on the contrary, a semantic dearth that is too singular for serialization yet also confounds the explanatory power of Revolutionary sacrifice? The desolation of the word “carnage” (such a heavy carnage…) may offer a clue. Defined as “a heap of dead bodies, especially of men slain in battle” or “the slaughter of a great number; butchery, massacre” (OED), carnage evokes the mass spectacle of unmourned flesh and senseless wounding. Unlike those of Bunker’s Hill and Quebec, the casualties of “St. Clair’s

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Defeat” do not therefore appear to be sheltered by a coherent sense of place, purpose, or the conviction of eventual success. They are certainly not sacrifices, as they do not stand for anything. Following St. Clair’s defeat, the movement of time from Bunker Hill to Miami Village starts to feel like a regression or degeneration: an impression sharpened by the lengthy list of casualties drawn from the ranks of experienced war veterans. Indeed, “St. Clair’s Defeat” couches the issue of historical decline as a generational problem. The ballad betrays a palpable anxiety that younger generations of American military men are either unfit or unable to step into the shoes of their commanding officers—or indeed simply to receive orders. The rank-and-file feature as a sort of absent presence, rarely responding to the exhortations of the officers and appearing more often than not as the recipients of unquestionably superior Native military force. Unlike in the case of the Crawford campaign, then, St. Clair’s troops’ passivity is not imposed as a condition of captivity. They are being routed in huge numbers on a battlefield: “our militia was attacked […] soon was overpowered and forc’d was to retreat”; “they soon made us retreat”; “they took from us our cannon”; “our musquetry and rifle-men their fire did sustain.” The list goes on. Even when Ferguson’s troops weep over his body, they are “caus’d to cry”—the tense is unremittingly passive until the retreat: “we did fly.” This may begin to explain why the lyricist’s assurances that “No sons of Mars e’er fought more true,” or that “They fought like brave Herculeans,” fall flat. Comparisons to “sheep” and “Saints” are more plausible, though these words both seem to have lost their associations with the paradoxical vigor of the martyr: the sheep are “lost,” the Saints “resigned.” To the extent that this ballad locates a certain martial inadequacy in the generational gap between Revolutionary veterans and their successors, it seems to conform to the general view of the Confederacy’s victory in its aftermath. Though the battle tends to be known as “St. Clair’s defeat,” St. Clair himself does not appear to have been held liable even though he resigned his commission at Washington’s request. The special committee of the House of Representatives appointed to investigate the campaign ultimately determined that poor equipment and lack of supplies were responsible for its miscarriage, and when the committee published its findings in 1792 it was careful to exculpate St. Clair: “the failure of the late expedition can, in no respect, be imputed to his conduct […] as his conduct in all the preparatory arrangements was marked with peculiar ability and zeal, [and] his conduct during the action furnished

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strong testimonies of his coolness and intrepidity.”51 But while St. Clair was officially exonerated, the same could not necessarily be said of his soldiers, whose “want of discipline and experience” (7) was a target of public blame. St. Clair acknowledged this himself, though he noted that it was not the fault of his troops that they were under-prepared: “I have nothing […] to lay to the charge of the troops but their want of discipline, which, given the short time they had in the service, it was impossible they should have acquired, and which rendered it very difficult, when they were thrown into confusion, to reduce them again to order.”52 I argued above that the frontier emerges in the 1780s–1790s anthologies as a serializing temporalization of space that asserts a purportedly natural division between the progressive order of Revolutionary time and the ahistoricity of “the Indian” which opposes it. Seriality promises to maintain this arrangement by projecting iterative patterns of type along a historical telos of predictable development. This is how Brackenridge converts Crawford’s death into an “infinite reverie” of possession. But as the Western Confederacy repeated their victories—and in the process, asserted Indigenous futurity against the U.S. settler state—the frontier seems to fail as a mechanism for organizing progressive history, giving way to repetitive experiences of time that move back and forth or around and around, but not forward. The result is a paradoxically dynamic state of arrest, a feeling that time is stalled on a loop, or, as the epigraph to one of the St. Clair elegies puts it, that “Man knoweth not his Time; he is caught in an Evil Hour.”53

51 “In the House of Representatives of the United States, Tuesday the 8th of May, 1792” (Philadelphia: Francis Childs and John Swaine, 1792), 7. 52 Extract from a letter reprinted in “Mellancholy Account respecting the Western Army” (Boston: B. Edes and Son, [December 19] 1791). The author’s name is illegible due to archival damage, and the recipient is identified simply as a “Friend in New-York.” Another observer added that when the retreat began “great numbers [...] threw away their arms and abandoned themselves to despair.” St. Clair to Knox, November 9, 1791. Ibid. 53 Freeman Hearsey, “An Elegiac Poem” (Boston: Ezekiel Russell, 1791).

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4

Genre Trouble: “Jackson Johonnet” and the Queer Time of Recurrence

Seriality is about time and classification, but it also seems to be rooted in heteropatriarchal ideas about sex. Susan Stewart points this out in her observation of Noah’s Ark as the prototypical collection: “What he [Noah] rescues from oblivion is the two that is one plus one, the two that can generate seriality and infinity by the symmetrical joining of asymmetry.”54 Given this chapter’s concerns, it is worth emphasizing that as a colonial fantasy of collection as well, Noah’s Ark projects the assurance of heteropatriarchal reproduction against the omnicidal backdrop of a drowning planet. Like the U.S. settler discourses of the frontier this chapter traces, its account of survival is bound within a vision in which “the earth and its redundancies are destroyed.”55 This insight helps to clarify how the figure of the Indian appears in the captivity anthologies I examine here as a pathologized agent of repetition which counteracts U.S. national progress. Indeed, because the series is underwritten by a heteropatriarchal notion of “generation” that is linear, it marks the copy as a form of regression (ergo the settler series marks the Indian as a copy). Temporal redundancies likewise become queer forms of time in this construct because they resist the series’ developmental emphasis on reproduction.56 Hence the Indian comes to stand as the non-individualized redundancy—both copy and recurrence—which threatens the infinite elaboration of the colonial series of possession with its queer undoing. One of the more interesting reflections on this set of anxieties in the early 1790s is offered by a captivity narrative entitled The Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnet (1792), which recounts the eponymous character’s involvement in the Harmar and St. Clair campaigns. 54 Stewart, On Longing, 152. 55 Ibid. 56 This line of thinking is drawn from studies of queer temporality which challenge homologies between ideas of progress, development, history, and futurity with those of heterosexual coupling, gender normativity, and biological reproduction. See for instance Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); John Keene, Counternarratives (New York: New Directions, 2015); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

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First published in Beers’s Almanack, the text was republished in several standalone editions between 1793 and 1816. It was also collected in Matthew Carey’s captivity anthology, The Dreadful Distresses of Frederick Mannheim’s Family (1794). Indeed, Johonnet is the only narrative in Mannheim that definitely existed in print before its anthologization. This is important because the anthologized version of the text is always redacted, for reasons I speculate on below.57 By comparing the anthologized to the unabridged text, Johonnet offers a glimpse of what the captivity anthology works to exclude from its serialized vision of frontier temporality. But the text also describes the collapse of seriality into repetition explicitly, at the level of its plot and as a function of its literary expression, by linking the problems of temporal recurrence and the serial reproduction of possessive white masculinity to delinquencies of genre. Indeed, Johonnet’s inability to establish a serialized pattern of progressive growth is encoded in the text’s queer failure to resolve into a single genre. Johonnet seems to set out on an autobiographical project with the observation that “There is seldom a more difficult task undertaken by a man, than the act of writing a narrative of a person’s own life; especially where the incidents border on the marvelous.”58 It is a conventional enough beginning as eighteenth-century preambles go, yet one would expect to encounter it in a completely different generic context. Johonnet conspicuously fails to establish captivity and its conditions as the primary subjects of his tale, neither launching directly into the action, nor laying the groundwork for a scene of capture that follows swiftly afterward. Instead, Johonnet initially appears to be a Bildungsroman. After the opening passage, Johonnet gives an account of his family and the circumstances that led him to enlist in the Western Army, explaining that his parents’ poverty drives him to “seek a separate fortune” (3) in Boston, where he is soon duped into joining the infantry by a recruitment officer armed with a bowl of punch. Johonnet describes his enlistment as a seduction: “a young officer came into my room, and soon entered into conversation on the pleasures of a military life […]. His artifice has the desired effect; for after treating me with a bowl or two of punch, I enlisted, with a firm promise on his side to assist me […]” (4). 57 I work from the first, standalone edition (Providence: [s.n.], 1793) because the anthologized version of the text is incomplete. 58 The Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnet, of Massachusetts (Providence: [s.n.], 1793), 3. All page numbers are from this edition.

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Generic irresolution appears in Johonnet as a queer phenomenon of the plot, marked at transitional moments in the text when Johonnet is overcome by other men: in this case, a sweet-talking stranger with a “firm promise.” Nevertheless, after his seduction, Johonnet appears to resume his pursuit of proprietary manhood, applying himself to his training and obtaining a sergeancy through his efforts. He then joins General Harmar’s forces, noting that the “hunger, fatigue, and toil” of the march are made tolerable by his confident expectations of “easy conquest, rich plunder and fine farms in the end” (4). And it is now, just as he begins to believe that he is on the “direct road to honour, fame, and fortune,” that Johonnet is captured by Kickapoo warriors in an ambush which takes place, as he points out, “before a single opportunity presented in which I could have a chance to signalize myself” (5). Once again, Johonnet is overcome by other men, this time through capture by the Western Confederacy. His capture recalls the grammar of passivity which permeates accounts of the Crawford and St. Clair campaigns. As in those cases, too, the Kickapoo hold Johonnet in a state of dynamic arrest strongly associated with the failure or suspension of possessive white masculinity—made clear in this case by Johonnet’s comment that captivity blocks his settler dream of turning primitive accumulation (conquest, plunder) into capital (fine farms in the end). After this point, however, the Bildung does not seem to reboot; Johonnet’s would-be-tale of progress ends up a staccato rhythm of interruption and reversal that does not seem to advance at all. He escapes his family’s poverty only to be entrapped by the military; he transforms himself into an officer only to be taken captive before he sees battle in the Harmar defeat; and he will subsequently escape his Indian captors only to join St. Clair’s campaign, which he narrowly survives. Johonnet’s life thus follows a restless pattern of advance and retreat whose sequence does not ultimately add up to a developmental narrative—it concludes neither felicitously nor tragically. Last seen hobbling back to Fort Jefferson after escaping his captors, Johonnet seems to be no further ahead than he was at the beginning of his ordeals, both in material terms and by virtue of the fact that there is no end in sight to the repetitive patterns which deny him forward momentum. Despite his near-constant activity, when Johonnet breaks off his narrative he leaves the reader with little more than a staggering sense of inertia. Johonnet’s opening remark that “there is seldom a more difficult task undertaken by man, than the act of writing a narrative of a person’s

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life” would thus seem to bear significance for the entire text, which is in many ways about the conditions of (im)possibility that ground liberal concepts of independence in possession. Johonnet never quite succeeds at being the hero of his own story, which in turn never really becomes a story in that it does not reach a conclusion. I do not mean to imply that Johonnet is therefore a kind of “failed” Bildungsroman instead of (or in addition to) a captivity narrative, because this statement presumes that a classificatory principle obtains in the text which would assign such labels to distinct epistemologies and orders of experience. Rather, Johonnet locates continuities between the ambitions of Bildung (independence, progress, happiness, property) and the circumstances of captivity (enthrallment, in more than one sense) that raise unsettling questions about the supposed destiny—as well as the desirability—of Revolutionary U.S. national freedom’s infinite accumulations. Indeed, in liberalism’s contractual model of freedom defined in terms of privation ( freedom from…), the distinction between mobility and capture is difficult to pin down. As Franco Moretti observes, the ethos of Bildung —like that of liberal contract theory—is typically one of ameliorative exchange in which individuals surrender their personal autonomy for the security and happiness afforded by social attachments.59 In this account, the attainment of happiness (wealth, fame, family) is necessarily ascetic: an achievement measured through loss, a sacrifice. Yet what is lost in the exchange is a state of permissive freedoms ( freedom to…) paradoxically characterized by scarcity, isolation, contingency, and violence. In the liberal vision that underwrites U.S. nationalist evocations of Revolutionary history, then, freedom is experienced as constraint both before and after the assumption of social responsibility, but only in the social world is that constraint imbued with what Moretti calls “symbolic legitimacy.”60 Part of what is acquired under the sign of liberal sociality is the right to believe in organized loss; by accepting one’s place in (hypothetically) symmetrical systems of reward and punishment, one attains freedom from cosmologies of accident in which things can and do happen for no reason.

59 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987). 60 Ibid., 16.

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Approached from this vantage, the breakdown of the freedom/ captivity binary in Johonnet is less problematic from a liberal point of view than the fact that the social and symbolic order through which meaning is assigned to privation appears to have been compromised—the story’s context (or: genre) is broken. In a liberal script, Johonnet ought to be able to exchange self-discipline for social mastery, as in the case of his promotion: an instance in which work magically moves him from a lower to a higher state of attainment and just as magically atones for the mistake of having yielded to the recruitment officer’s “artifice” (4). But this is the first and last time that Johonnet’s initiative affords him measurable improvement. Starting with his capture by the Kickapoo, Johonnet begins to endure adversity without compensation. The figure of the Indian thus seems to stand in the text as the queer external impediment to Johonnet’s self-realization, holding out an explanation for his non-fulfillment that does not necessarily implicate the structures and assumptions of liberal modernity on which U.S. national independence is founded. Along those lines, if the seductive circumstances of Johonnet’s recruitment suggest that his own queer desire to be run away with survives as a repressed coefficient of possession’s seriality, then captivity may be said to reverse the trend by externalizing blame onto Indians for introducing non-developmental repetition into Johonnet’s narrative of progress. To the extent that it posits Indians as obstructions to self-determination in this way, Johonnet’s double participation in the conventions of captivity and Bildung takes on the appearance of pathology, with generic mixture signaling an alien disruption to a narrative that would otherwise take its proper course. At its most ideologically effective, Johonnet thereby identifies Indians as responsible for deregulating the contexts within which its story would cohere developmentally, and envisions their destruction as a condition for sorting out Johonnet’s genre trouble. Johonnet himself corroborates that reading in his concluding call for the “defense” of the frontier from “the depredations of savages” (15). The displacements entailed in this view, however, remain incomplete. For one thing, by marking the narrative of independence as conditional on conquest, Johonnet concedes that Johonnet’s serial entitlement to predictable increase is an entailment of his white American manhood in a very specific context (or: genre) that has to be violently produced and maintained through the foreclosure of Indigenous futurity. The narrative reveals that, whether generic or national, the story of American independence stays afloat on a flood of endings. And this in turn highlights

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the frailty of the proprietary white masculine identity to which Johonnet aspires, which is not simply cohered by projecting its own “disavowed fragmentation [and] self-division” onto Indianness, but premised on the negation of the Indigenous strength that opposes its terrors.61 Indeed, in Johonnet as in many of other contemporary responses to “St. Clair’s Defeat,” the figure of the Indian is not fragmentary or divided. Rather, possessive white masculinity appears enervated in comparison with the power, coordination, and efficacy of the Western Confederacy.62 However reluctantly, Johonnet bears witness to the fact that the supposedly self-authorizing subject is himself subject to counter-forces beyond his control (“Indians”) who attest that time can move in many ways and the world is a collective undertaking. The Western Confederacy’s successful challenges to the colonizing conditions upon which Johonnet’s prospective wealth depends lead him to experience history as a principle of misadventure in which time repetitively goes around in circles. Yet there are opportunities in these revolutions for ways of knowing and being that are not routed through the speculative accumulation of property. After his escape from the Kickapoo, for instance, Johonnet writes that his regiment “joined the western army, on an expedition against the Indians of the Miami Village, the place in which I had suffered so much, and so recently, and where I had beheld so many cruelties perpetrated on the unfortunate Americans” (11). In other words, he returns with his regiment to the former scene of his captivity. Threaded between constraint and flight, Johonnet’s itinerary unfolds in a queer time of recurrence that reiterates past experiences non-developmentally in present and future ones. Johonnet’s second escape from Miami (in battle) recalls his first (from captivity), establishing a horizontal connection between escape and retreat as items in a series (“flight”). At the same time, the repetition

61 Dana Nelson argues that “white/national manhood” emerges in the United States as an imagined identity whose internally divided energies (i.e., of class and region) were stabilized via their projection onto Indians. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 88. 62 This is reminiscent of Michael Drexler’s and Ed White’s arguments that white/

national creole identities in Haiti and the American settler colonies are the etiolated negatives of Black and Indigenous insurgent politics. Michael Drexler, “Brigands and Nuns: The Vernacular Sociology of Collectivity After the Haitian Revolution,” Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies, eds. Malini Schueller and Ed Watts (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2003), 175–199. White, The Backcountry and the City, 112.

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of escape as retreat is perverse from the point of view of the series, as it is a movement forward through time that goes backward. In this case the recurrence asks a pointed question about how free Johonnet is in his liberal freedom, and perhaps whether his captivity among the Kickapoo might have brought him close to something freer. Likewise, the recurrence of his seduction in his captivity troubles their distinction in such a way that it may be possible to consider, as Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich does for Mary Rowlandson, whether captivity among the Kickapoo might not have offered Johonnet a chance for erotic liberation that is unavailable in the settler series because its entire construction is a form of entrapment.63 Indians embody a counter-Revolutionary quantity in “Johonnet” in the sense that their insurgency disrupts the liberal nationalist context within which Johonnet would (re)produce himself as Man. They break the nationalist arc of Revolutionary history. But in so doing their presence annotates modes of temporal experience and historical relation that are banished by the U.S. settler state’s imperative to substitute the story of its birth for all of time. In other words, while Indians are made to signify as non-reproductive threats to life that depend on progressive history and self-possession, in “Johonnet” they may in fact mark queer reproductive organizations of collective life in non-linear time. In the passage of his narrative that was redacted from its annotated versions, Johonnet positions the temporal recursions of his own fate in a broader pattern of historical repetition. Reaching Fort Jefferson, he writes: This Fort is […] within a few miles of the spot where Braddock’s defeat took place. I walked over the ground where the action happened, a few days after our arrival at Fort Jefferson, and viewed it very attentively; having a companion with me who was able to describe the different positions of the English army on that very unhappy day. In many places we observed human bones strewed on the ground, which remained unconsumed, and excited melancholy sensations, Many of the trees around, still shew [sic] the scars of balls which grazed them in the action: Alas, how little did I think at the time of viewing these things, that an army of Americans nearly equal in number to Braddock’s, was destined in a few days to experience a similar defeat, and fly across this melancholy spot […]. (11)

63 Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), “Captivity,” Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

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Johonnet is recalling Braddock’s Defeat by allied French and Native forces at the Battle of Monongahela in 1755. He accurately observes that St. Clair’s retreat will pass by this place, and he thus makes it possible to see the Braddock, Harmar, and St. Clair expeditions in a series of Native victories over white settler colonial armies in the Ohio River Valley. I speculate that this is a major reason for the passage’s redaction, given that Mannheim, like Narratives before it, is invested in defining Indians as pathologized repetitions who exist precisely in opposition to serial orders of meaning. This passage poses a problem, too, for the captivity anthology’s effort to present the frontier as a Revolutionary timeline across which Indians and Americans fight eternally. Braddock’s Defeat occurred well before the chronological cut-off for Mannheim’s range of coverage in the late 1770s. Moreover, Johonnet’s reflection on the politics of alliance in the Seven Years’ War subvert imaginings of the frontier as a timeless racial boundary that is coterminous with whiteness. Americans did not exist in a nationalist sense in 1755; they would have fought in the war as British subjects alongside Native allies, against France and its Native allies. The bones Johonnet sees “strewed on the ground” cannot be identified by nation or ethnicity, but could have belonged to both European and Native people. In many ways, then, Johonnet is remembering what the anthology tries to forget—the existence of a history before the U.S. nation-state, the long precedent of Native military power, and the fact that white and Native people have shared space and time on sovereign Native ground. In this passage, then, Johonnet has entered a temporality in which the cycles of revolution exceed the semiotic regime of the U.S. nation-state. Running against the nationalist construction of Revolution as a progressive development, time as it apprehends Johonnet here is revolutionary in the sense that it folds back on itself in queer cycles of recurrence that make openings for connection through common histories of wounding. Johonnet evokes trees and bones as presences that make active claims on his attention. The trees seem to show Johonnet “the scars of the balls which grazed them” in both a passive and an active sense, as though rolling up the sleeves of their branches to compare battle wounds. And in Johonnet’s description of how the bones “remained unconsumed, and excited melancholy sensations,” bones are the subjects of the verbs “remained” and “excited,” despite (or in addition to) the fact that the passive past participle tense of both verbs has an adjectival quality. The grammar of this sentence thus suggests that the “remaining” of bones is

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a kind of active endeavor in the present as well as a condition of past-ness, just as the bones’ “excitation” of Johonnet’s melancholy is an outcome they seem energetically to bring about. Trees and bones show and tell, move and linger. The uncollected stories they tender are situated and relational. They are about what it could mean to have lived and died, not on opposite sides of history, but together, in each other’s arms.

CHAPTER 4

The Parties to Which We Belong: John André and the Tragedy of Revolution

1

The Unfortunate André

In the early hours of September 23, 1780, three Westchester militiamen encountered a man in civilian clothes wandering the neutral ground in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Evidently lost, the man asked the militiamen to which party they belonged. They are said to have replied, “Yours.” He then revealed his identity and was arrested and strip-searched under a nearby tree. His name was Major John André, Adjutant General in the British army, and he had just tripped into a fatal accident with incriminating papers hidden in one of his boots. At the time of his capture, André was returning from a secret meeting with Benedict Arnold about Arnold’s plans to defect and deliver West Point to the British (this incident is sometimes known as “the West Point treason”). André had missed the boat that was to ferry him back down the river from West Point to British headquarters in New York City, and he therefore changed out of his uniform to make the journey on foot. In the weeks that followed, he was convicted of espionage and sentenced to die. To the military tribunal that issued his sentence, the fact that André was in disguise when he was apprehended earned him a traitor’s death (by hanging), as opposed to what was then considered a more dignified military death (by firing squad). André appealed to George Washington on at least two different occasions for the mercy of a firing squad, writing that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Stapely, Afterlives of the American Revolution, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51544-6_4

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he accepted his lot but did not want “to die on a gibbet.”1 Washington appears to have insisted, however, and André was hanged on October 2, 1780, at Continental headquarters in Tappan, New York. André was an object of acute public mourning when he died. At his execution, Continental soldiers reportedly had to hold back crowds of spectators who “wept and moaned and watched as [André’s] body swayed for a full half hour before it was cut down.”2 Alexander Hamilton was present in his capacity as Washington’s aide-de-camp, and wrote of the experience in a widely republished letter: “My feelings were never put to so severe a trial. […] Never perhaps did a man suffer death with more justice, or deserve it less.”3 The Continental officer in charge of André in the days leading up to his execution, Major Benjamin Tallmadge, was likewise overcome: “I became so deeply attached to Major André, that I could remember no instance where my affections were so fully absorbed by any man. When I saw him swing under the gibbet, it seemed for a time utterly insupportable: all were overwhelmed with the affecting spectacle, and the eyes of many were suffused with tears.”4 The Marquis de Lafayette wept openly. Even Washington attested to André’s personal virtues. In his official report on the André affair, he declared the man he had just put to death was “of the highest integrity and honour, and incapable of any base action, or unworthy conduct.”5 Sweet enemy, honorable spy. André confounded the divisions of war and commanded a baffling appeal in his time and for long afterward. Here was a man in league with the Revolution’s most notorious turncoat,

1 John Andre to George Washington, reprinted in Proceedings of a Board of General Officers (Philadelphia: James Rivington, 1780), 13. For a discussion of the disciplinary politics of André’s execution, see Shelby Lunderman, “To Hang or Not to Hang: Staging the Execution of Major John André on the Gallows and in the Theatre,” New England Theatre Journal 31 (2020): 93–119; and Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 2 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Anchor, 2004), 204. 3 Alexander Hamilton to Lt Colonel John Laurens [11 October 1780], Pennsylvania Gazette, 25 October 1780. 4 Winthrop Sargent, The Life and Career of Major John André, Adjutant-General of the British Army in North America (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1861), 89. 5 Headquarters, New York, 8th October 1780, Proceedings (Philadelphia: Rivington, 1780), 16.

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hanged as a criminal, whose loss elicited cries of agony even (and perhaps especially) from his executioners. Why? It was not as though André was the first person to have been executed for espionage during the war. The Continental Army executed several other British officers for this offense, apparently without incident. Nathan Hale was also hanged as a spy by the British in 1776, but André’s death seems to have produced more despairing responses behind Continental lines despite his being on the wrong side. Moreover, while Hale was quickly enshrined as an illustrious native son of New England (he is Connecticut’s state hero), André’s ghost—like all ghosts—is homeless and ambiguous. He haunted America almost from the moment of his passing, stalking the pages of what is now considered U.S. American literature for decades after the Revolution’s official conclusion. Anna Seward composed a monody for him in 1781, the year of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. William Dunlap staged a tragedy about him in 1798. He features prominently in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821). Later, André visits 1840s–1850s U.S. historical romances, in which he appears, as Elisa Tamarkin puts it, “wandering the war-torn fields of New York picking forget-me-nots and playing the flute.”6 Perhaps André’s most famous apparition is in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). As Ichabod Crane wends his solitary way back from Van Tassel’s autumn feast, he passes by “an enormous tulip-tree […] known as Major André’s tree.” Irving’s narrator, Diedrich Knickerbocker, remarks that “the common people regarded it [the tree] with a mixture of respect and superstition, partly out of sympathy for the fate of its ill-starred namesake, and partly from the tales of strange sights, and doleful lamentations told, concerning it.” This is where Crane encounters the Headless Horseman: at the “identical spot that the unfortunate André was captured.”7 Avery Gordon writes that “the ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure.”8 Ghosts are relational. They are left over

6 Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2008), 142. 7 Washington Irving, “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” [1820–1821], The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., ed. Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 312–313. 8 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8.

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from a dominant arrangement and “give notice that something is missing”—but they do this affectively, by haunting, which Gordon describes as another kind of knowledge at the edges of what it is possible to see or to say.9 It may therefore be slightly the wrong question to ask why André came to haunt America, for this question risks the presupposition that he represents something definitive that could be discovered and named in order to lay him to rest. Gordon proposes different questions: what does André’s ghost designate as missing? What does it recall as lost? What kinds of knowledge do André’s hauntings seem to imply or produce? What might we stand to learn—or indeed, unlearn—if we set out to speak with André’s ghost and not to exorcise it? Scholars who have puzzled over André have often argued that his legacy endured because he embodied an ideal of sensibility that fed alternative constructions of U.S. national identity after the Revolution. The consensus is that André supplements the arid dearth at the heart of U.S. American democratic rights discourse with fine feeling.10 Most recently, Tamarkin contends that André is set apart from other slain figures of the Revolutionary war by virtue of his association with polite culture: “while an appreciation for Hale or other revolutionary figures could always drift into—or synecdochically become—patriotic memorializations of independence, the love of André offered the appeal of a simply aesthetic sensation.”11 As this scholarship attests, André was in many ways a paradigmatic man of feeling. He was young, handsome, and educated: an epic party planner and amateur poet who inspired romantic admiration in men and

9 Ibid., 15. 10 See Caleb Crain, “Introduction: The Ghost of André,” American Sympathy: Men,

Friendship, and the New Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 1–15; Robert A. Ferguson, “Becoming American,” Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 120–150; Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: UNCP/Omohundro, 2009); Michael Meranze, “Major André’s Exhumation,” Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, eds. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 123–135. For a discussion of the class limits of the discourse of sensibility, see Robert E. Cray, “John André and the Three Captors: Class Dynamics and Revolutionary Memory Wars in the Early Republic, 1780–1831,” Journal of the Early Republic 17.3 (1997): 371–397. 11 Tamarkin, Anglophilia, 144.

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women alike.12 Only twenty-nine when he was killed, he was perhaps best known before his arrest for orchestrating the Meschianza in Philadelphia in 1778: a lavish fête, complete with a regatta, joust, and fireworks, that saw General Howe off from his post after a disastrous winter campaign. Shortly before he died, André published a clever ballad entitled “The Cow-Chace” (1780) that poked fun at General “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s thwarted attack on some refugees in a block-house (Wayne was repulsed and returned to camp with only some cattle to show for his trouble).13 No less alluring were the whispers of André’s engagement to Honora Sneyd, rumored to have been cut off because her parents disapproved of his financial prospects. Sneyd died of tuberculosis at the age of twentyeight, five months before André’s execution. For many, then, André may have appeared as a kind of storybook character: a star-crossed lover of delicate refinement who dashed off a lovely sketch of himself in his prison cell and wrote well-mannered letters from custody both to Washington and to his own commander, Sir Henry Clinton, on the subject of honor. Though André is clearly associated with cultures of sensibility, I demur from readings that explicate his appeal in this way on the grounds that they simultaneously nationalize and depoliticize André’s ghostly aftereffects. In the current consensus, André represents the possibility for U.S. nationalisms that do not feel like ones—nationalisms expressed apolitically through nostalgia, aesthetics, and sympathy.14 This position is undergirded by the assumption that there exists a domain without politics. It also negates Revolutionary time as anything other than the point of departure for U.S. national history: an origin to which the nation-state

12 For further discussion of André’s queer sexual appeal among men, see Caleb Crain, “The Ghost of André.” 13 Cow-Chace, in Three Cantos, Published on Occasion of the Rebel General Wayne’s Attack of the Refugees Block-House on Hudson’s River, on Friday the 21st of July, 1780

(New York: James Rivington, 1780). For a reading of André’s “Cow-Chace” and its relationship to ballad tradition, see Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84–113. 14 Tamarkin contends that André offered an anchor for Revolutionary history “at a distance from its politics” (171), but she posits that what is ultimately at stake in the “simply aesthetic sensation” for which he acts as a focalizer is a “particular experience of being American” (xxv). Like those of Knott and Crain, for whom André embodies sympathy or sensibility more generally, Tamarkin’s argument rests on a sleight-of-hand that identifies André with a zone putatively outside politics—“simply aesthetic sensation”— which is nationalized as it is drawn into contact with U.S. state and cultural formations.

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may return largely without risk, and at its leisure. What André has not been taken to indicate is the possibility that Revolution entailed forms of rupture for which the nation may not have provided adequate recompense, and hence that André’s visitations might represent more serious threats to political orders of meaning founded in a progressive vision of Revolutionary temporality. This chapter contends that André’s ghostly career in the 1780s–1790s produces forms of historical knowledge at the edges of what U.S. nationalist epistemologies of Revolution allow us to see or to say. Tracing him from his death to William Dunlap’s André (1798), I argue that André appears and reappears where allegiances to state powers or partisan ideologies fail as explanatory mechanisms for Revolutionary struggle (American vs. British, Patriot vs. Loyalist).15 What I see André presenting as lost or missing from conventional understandings of the Revolutionary war(s) is a meaningful account of minor revolutionary politics: the various forms of associated life that traverse or elude the preconceived categories through which the Revolution is typically narrated as a conflict between sides. Strongly associated with the love between men across enemy lines, André gives notice, in particular, of the costs entailed in the reduction of politics to partisan allegiance. I maintain, however, that the sorrow and alienation occasioned by André’s hauntings are not apolitical sensations of Revolutionary history that can be integrated with state ideological projects, but rather, otherwise political commitments and entanglements which protest the partition of politics from social life.16 I want to be clear that the

15 My argument departs in this way from more recent analyses of André’s memorialization in British and Anglo-American transatlantic contexts, as I stress André’s ambiguous resistance to state ideological projects in general, and to the bilateral clarity of the British/ American split in particular. See Jared S. Richman, “Anna Seward and the Many (After) Lives of Major André: Trauma, Mourning and Transatlantic Literary Legacy,” EighteenthCentury Studies 48.2 (2015), 201–219; David Vinson, “The Extraordinary Afterlife of Major John André, the ‘Common Spy,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 52.1 (2018): 93–113. 16 My sense of the term “otherwise” has been formed in conversation with Ashon Crawley, who theorizes it through Black “extra-subjective mode[s] of being together” that performatively critique epistemologies of “categorical differentiation-as-deficiency” which are “fundamentally about the interdiction, the desired theft, of the capacity to breathe.” See Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 4–6. Also, “Otherwise Movements,” New Inquiry (19 January 2015), https://thenewinquiry. com/otherwise-movements/; Antiphony, Otherwise: Friday Night Joy Service, presented by Ashon Crawley with music by Abdul Hamid Robinson Royal, Troy Sanders, and Jason Moore, Human Resources, Los Angeles, 28 April 2017.

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issue here is not simply the drawing of the Revolutionary war as a bilateral contest, which one might argue is a problem of war in general, but more acutely how a partisan conception of Revolutionary conflict came to be articulated through a consolidating liberal definition of “the political” as such which constitutively excludes the social world from its matrix. André’s ghost does not simply represent the claims of the social over and against those of politics. It points to the anguish of producing that split in the first place. From the vantage of liberal nationalist history, André thus conjures an unthinkable Revolutionary politics—the outlawed passion for the enemy—which registers Revolutionary sacrifice not as an “honoured or justified condition of national life,” but rather as an impoverishment from which it may not be possible to move on.17 André’s sacrifice to the rules of war tends to produce an awareness of Revolutionary history that I contend is tragic in its provenance and outlook.18 Indeed, André gives rise to an experience in his mourners that George Steiner identifies as the “axiomatic constant of tragedy”: “ontological homelessness […] alienation or ostracism from the safeguard of licensed being.”19 (Tallmadge’s comment that the spectacle of André’s body “seemed for a time utterly insupportable” might fall under this heading.) While Dunlap’s André is the only piece I examine that was written and performed as a tragedy for the stage, I draw on theorists of tragedy such as Judith Butler, David Scott, and Raymond

17 “The successful revolution, we might say, becomes not tragedy but epic: it is the

origin of a people, and of its valued way of life. When the suffering is remembered, it is at once either honoured or justified. That particular revolution, we say, was a necessary condition of life.” Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Toronto: Broadview, 1966), 89. 18 This chapter’s emphasis on tragic form differentiates it from the very fine scholarship on André and theatrical form, which tends to focus on the imperial drama of the Meschianza. See Jonathan Elmer, “André, Theatricality, and the Time of Revolution,” A Question of Time: From Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction, ed. Cindy Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 111–119; Randall Fuller, “Theaters of the American Revolution: The Valley Forge Cato and the Meschianza in Their Transcultural Contexts,” Early American Literature 34 (1999): 126–146; and especially Daniel O’Quinn, “To Rise in Greater Splendor: John André’s Errant Knights,” Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 145–185. 19 George Steiner, “Tragedy, Reconsidered,” Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 30. This essay offers a slight revision of Steiner’s highly influential thesis in The Death of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).

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Williams who argue that tragedy’s modalities can travel across periods and forms. The debates in which these scholars have engaged around tragedy’s temporality are long and venerable, but they have centered most recently on whether or not tragedy is relevant to modern experience. On one pole of this debate, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Eagleton argue that tragedy is homologous with modernity; and on the other, George Steiner argues that tragedy was superseded by modernity.20 I identify tragedy instead with counter-modern temporal disruptions, centered in grief, which contest the partition of the oikos from the polis and block principles of succession derived through partisan conceptions of historical conflict. Or, more simply: I think tragedy arrests modernity with “tales of strange sights, and doleful lamentations.” Tragedy’s distinctive temporal signature is inflected by the specificity of its formal preoccupations. Like the other residual forms I examine in this book, tragedy’s “flat,” non-narrative properties disturb U.S. nationalist Revolutionary history by subverting proprietary conceptions of subjectivity and linear constructions of time that underpin its narrative protocols. But unlike the other forms that interest me, tragedy is classically concerned with the stand-offs between contending, and usually mutually incompatible, obligations (Antigone/Creon, Clytemnestra/Agamemnon, Medea/Jason). Tragedy’s capacities for critiquing such dualities seem to be what activates it in the André affair, whose central dilemmas revolve around the violent reduction of politics to binary partisan distinctions in a conflict that was thought by many, including André himself, to be a civil war. Duality is the pharmakon of tragedy; it sickens us with binaries to bring us to the knowledge of violence at the root of law. There is thus a productive anachronism internal to tragedy that has to do with its bleak discovery of the irremediable injury at the foundation of every sovereignty demanding progress. David Scott refers to this as

20 Horkheimer and Adorno see Enlightened modernity as the fulfillment of classical myth, and of tragic fate in particular. More recently, Terry Eagleton has retooled Horkheimer and Adorno’s position, arguing that modernity universalizes the conditions for tragedy. But Eagleton distinguishes tragic inevitability from the “more brittle forms of teleology” upon which modern historical narrative often rests, arguing that in tragedy “the injurious remains injurious; it is not magically transmuted into good by its instrumental value.” Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 39. See also Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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the “temporal dissonance” of tragedy, where “time resists being narrated as an unambiguously progressive resolution to the present’s impasses.”21 Whereas classical tragedy processes this insight through a strict dramatic form, however, André generates an “impure” tragic techne that also goes to work in fragments of description and dialogue around his story. Hamilton’s comment—“Never perhaps did a man suffer death with more justice, or deserve it less”—is a good example, as it distills the “temporal dissonance” Scott describes into an epigram. Wrestling with the fact that André’s sentence was legal according to the rules of war, Hamilton draws attention here to the misalignment between justice and deserving precisely by narrating them in a syntactic sequence that is at the same time perfectly grammatical and non-sensical. How can one die a fully just death while also being minimally deserving of that death? André seems to reveal through Hamilton the constitutive perversion of the law, which functions properly as an instrument of violence whose juridical sentences (like Hamilton’s grammatical one) articulate inequity. But André performs this revelation in the merest way: by stalling the syntax of epigrammatic paradox in tragic contradiction. Hamilton’s formulation thus carries the force of inconsolable injury to the present in the shape of a temporal impasse, sustaining kinship with André after death through the frustrated desire for another outcome, belatedly and in defiance of the law. In other words, Hamilton’s sentence turns André’s sentence into a temporal spiral that seethes with a demand for repair which the law cannot answer because it produced the injury in the first place. Around and around we go, seemingly into a void, yet the feeling of deadlock inspired by tragic contradiction may nevertheless have a weird social life that begins in contact with the slain and absorbs author and reader alike into its gravity well. Nietzsche’s emphasis on tragedy’s irreparable pessimism draws out the social possibilities of this centripetal action. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche argues that tragedy originates with Dionysus, the god of ecstasy and madness, because “tragedy arose from the tragic chorus, and was originally chorus and nothing but chorus.”22 Nietzsche alludes 21 David Scott, “Tragedy’s Time: Postemancipation Futures Past and Present,” Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 200. 22 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1872], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 56.

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here to tragedy’s etymological roots in trag¯ oidia (tragos—goat; ¯ oid¯e— song, ode), or “goat song,” which are thought to refer to ancient practices of scapegoating and blood rite. Dionysian to the extent that it is an “impossible,” bestial utterance which emerges beyond the individuated and classificatory limits of reason, tragedy’s goat song is the cry of the one who has been cast out. For Nietzsche, it therefore issues from the place of what is destroyed in the name of community, of what must be forsaken in order for the law to assert its power, and of what must be forgotten in order for history to advance. André was not simply a victim of circumstances; he was a scapegoat in the specifically tragic sense that he marked a moment in the Revolution when the logic of sacrifice failed to atone for the brutality of sacrifice’s enactment. The knowledge of irreparable harm arising from the scapegoat’s cries is not necessarily cynical or apolitical, however. Nietzsche insists that tragedy’s Dionysian function is to yield another history, and another politics, by destroying the spectator’s conception of himself as an individual (“the primal cause of evil”). Tragedy abolishes “the gulfs between man and man” in order to “give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature.” But for Nietzsche, what lies at the heart of nature is cruelty, and the “unity” to which the tragic spectator is returned is one of “terrible destructiveness.”23 While Nietzsche’s emphasis on the “profound pessimism” to which tragedy gives rise has sometimes been construed as nihilistic, I read it differently as a condition of possibility for politics that do not draw their meaning either from doctrinal morality or from transcendent idealism. Such politics, in Joshua Foa Dienstag’s terms, might be taken paradoxically to entail “an affirmation in the dark, an approval given in ignorance.”24 I am drawn to Nietzsche’s account, then, because it opens ways of thinking about the prohibited social life that emerges in resistance to cathartic readings of tragic injury. Nietzsche refers to the concept of catharsis as an Aristotelian “pathological discharge” that betrays tragedy’s

23 Ibid., 59. 24 Dienstag writes that Nietzsche’s pessimism “does chasten politics in that it discour-

ages utopianism; it discounts the belief either in the perfectibility of the species or of our political conditions. But to claim that it deflates our political energies in general is to mistake utopianism for the whole of politics.” Joshua Foa Dienstag, “Tragedy, Pessimism, Nietzsche.” Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 120.

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true vision of primordial chaos in which “excess reveals itself as truth.”25 I take Nietzsche to mean that tragedy’s painful excesses give rise to forms of associated life (or: politics), and are not simply negations that must be endured so that a chastened installment of the political can resume its activity. Nietzsche thus perhaps counsels more restive responses to tragic fatality than readings that go no further than to pronounce “the perverse […] to be essential to the norm.”26 Judith Butler expresses the frustration of such readings in Antigone’s Claim (2000): “The problem as I see it is that the perverse remains entombed precisely there, as the essential and negative feature of the norm, and the relation between the two remains static, giving way to no rearticulation of the norm itself.”27 I am in agreement with Butler except, perhaps, on the very last point about the rearticulation of the norm, as I follow Nietzsche’s line that our options may not be limited in tragedy to negative or norm if we refuse to accept the equation of the negative with nothing. André’s tragedy discloses that the “negative” feature of the norm is never fully enclosed or entombed by the norm because it is a “nothing” with substance—an indwelling of which pain is a part, but not all. Then again, Butler may mean by “rearticulation” the segmentation (from secare, to cut) and resounding of the norm through the cry of the scapegoat, which might lead out into what Butler went on to describe as “precarious life.” If so, Nietzsche and Butler converge in the assessment I hope to advance around André that the conditions of tragedy are ones in which politics can be re-thought in social terms through the “exposure to violence and our complicity in it, […the] vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows.”28

2

The Rule of Thirds

André made the Revolution’s partisan distinctions feel contradictory in the sense that they broke things apart in a way that didn’t add up. He may therefore have diagnosed a problem with the partisan configuration of Revolutionary politics in 1780 that troubles the writing of Revolutionary 25 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 132, 42. 26 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life & Death (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2000), 76. 27 Ibid. 28 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso,

2004), 19.

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history to this day. Indeed, the case of André calls for further examination of one of the great shibboleths of Revolutionary historiography I antagonize in this project: the notion that the war(s) split the colonial population into thirds—Patriot (“American”), Loyalist, and “neutral.” The two foregoing chapters zeroed in on the first set of terms (Patriot/American) by attempting to fray the historical and imaginative suture this pairing proposes between Revolutionary time and U.S. national independence. This chapter and the next maintain that concern, but they zoom out to the more neglected designations—Loyalist and “neutral”—which conventionally designate what lies beyond or outside the Revolutionary winners’ circle. What strikes me initially about the terms of the Patriot/Loyalist/ neutral triad is the presence of that final word, “neutral,” which suggests a position that is not simply ambivalent in its politics, but disinterested in or absent from the political as such. This begs the question: how must politics be accounted in order for them to have an outside? Or perhaps: what definition of the political is guaranteed by the internal exclusion of neutrality? These questions bear some discussion because they draw out a quandary around the issue of choice that harrowed André and his contemporaries, but which has been largely obscured in our own time. The origins of the Patriot–Loyalist–neutral arrangement (what I shall call “the rule of thirds”) can be traced to a serially misquoted letter that John Adams wrote to James Lloyd in January 1815. Lloyd had written to Adams deploring disunity and party faction in Congress, and Adams responded with a rambling response on the same subject in which his memory drifts from 1774 to 1797 in the course of a paragraph. Adams was eighty years old; he crossed a wire along the way. But it is at this point (in 1797) that the famous passage on the rule of thirds appears in his letter: If I were called to calculate the divisions among the people of America, as Mr Burke did those of the people of England, I should say that full one third were averse to the revolution. These, retaining that overweening fondness, in which they had been educated, for the English, could not cordially like the French; indeed, they most heartily detested them. The opposite third conceived a hatred of the English, and gave themselves up to an enthusiastic gratitude to France. The middle third, composed principally of the yeomanry, the soundest part of the nation, and always averse to war, were rather lukewarm both to England and France; and sometimes

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stragglers from them, and sometimes the whole body, united with the first or the last third, according to circumstances.29

A careful reading of this passage reveals that Adams is talking about U.S. American opinion on the French Revolution, not the FrancoAmerican alliance and the colonies’ war with Britain.30 Yet this passage has been cited and re-cited for over a century as evidence of the partisan split in the (white male) colonial population during the American war. Today the historical consensus is that roughly 20–30% of settler colonists opposed independence (“Loyalist”), while 20–40% of them supported it (“Patriot”).31 The remainder is typically described as being “neutral.”32 The rule of thirds hypothesis about the Revolution is based on a misreading, then, although it faithfully reproduces the tripartite architecture of Adams’ 1815 remarks. However, the presumed opposition

29 The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, ed. Charles Francis Adams, Vol. X (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1856), 110–111. 30 This is made clear by the references to the Franco-American alliance (“enthusiastic gratitude to France”) and to Edmund Burke, who spun increasingly paranoid estimates of English partisan support for French republicanism in 1790–1791. See “Thoughts on French Affairs” [1791], The Portable Edmund Burke, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1999), 503. 31 The first instance in which Adams’ 1815 letter to Lloyd was cited as evidence of the “rule of thirds” in Revolutionary historiography was in George Sidney Fisher’s The True History of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1902). Fisher’s estimate was re-cited widely by U.S. historians during the 1970s—a period in which the bicentennial spurred an enormous output of Revolutionary historiography. The misquotation of Adams’ letter and the “thirding” to which it has given rise has been questioned a number of times since the 1950s, particularly by Marxist scholars, and yet it persists. For Marxist myth-busting of the rule of thirds, see for instance Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763–1783 (New York: International Publishing, 1960), 54–55. For recent citations of Adams’ letter as evidence of Revolutionary partisanship, specifically in Loyalist recovery efforts, see Edward Larkin, “The Cosmopolitan Revolution: Loyalism and the Fiction of an American Nation,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 40:1/2 (2006–2007): 57; and Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion. 32 See for instance Michael A. McDonnell: “In some ways, […] the most troubling political fissure to emerge with independence was that between adversaries—whether patriot or loyalist—and those seeking some form of neutrality. […] Estimates of neutrals in the conflict run anywhere from 40 percent to 60 percent of the population.” McDonnell, “The Struggle Within: Colonial Politics on the Eve of Independence,” The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, eds. Edward Gray and Jane Kamensky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 113.

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between Patriots and Loyalists in contemporary Revolutionary historiography is held in place by a third term—“neutral”—that was not present in Adams’ original comments. Adams estimated that colonial opinion on the French Revolution was split between those who were for France (and/or against England), those who were for England (and/or against France), and those who were averse to war in general. The antipathy to war does not appear in his letter to constitute a depoliticized position: only an ambivalent one when measured against the bellicose English/French divide. Something very different has transpired in the dyadic patterning of American Revolutionary politics. The position evoked by “neutrality” in the rule of thirds is both disposable and definitive because it shores up the operation of the Patriot/Loyalist binary, which works to exhaust the entire field of politics with only two partisanships that are held in place by the denomination of a field outside politics. The possibilities for conceivable forms of relation that might not be available to a strict partisan logic but nevertheless constitute politics (for instance, the politics of aversion to war) are thereby annulled. In the standard accounting of the Revolution’s political field, what lies beyond Patriotism and Loyalism is nothing: the apolitical. The evacuation of discernible politics from neutrality in the rule of thirds produces as its remainder a model of the political adduced exclusively through allegiance, which in turn demands an agential, self-identical political subject defined by choice. Recent recuperative work on Loyalism provides an illustration of how this works. Loyalism has long suffered under the regime of Revolutionary historiographic bias toward U.S. nationalist perspectives; it has tended to be dismissed as a caricature of old-fashioned patriarchal fusspottery, a lockstep obedience that requires little or no explanation as compared to the brilliant achievements of Jefferson or Paine. Undoubtedly this is a problem, and the scholars who have set out to correct it have uncovered much richer imaginative picture of what Loyalism might have entailed for people in different times and places. However, what often goes unchallenged in these studies is the assumption that Loyalism exists in a binary with Patriotism that is defined in opposition to an apolitical “neutrality.” Hence Loyalism has been painstakingly defined by scholars through unambiguous decision-making, or conscious alignment.33 Ed Larkin has the most capacious definition 33 Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan characterize Loyalism as a “body of thought, opinion, and self understanding” that is separated by a “subtle but at times decisive line

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of a Loyalist on offer: “a person who favored reconciliation with Great Britain during the conflicts that began with the Stamp Act and concluded with the War of 1812.”34 Yet Larkin goes on to say that Loyalist writings argue it is “wrong to choose the political over the personal.” Loyalism is thus a political choice of the supposedly apolitical over the political; it is defined as a position by the definition of a zone without politics (“the personal”) that also appears to be at least partially inside it. The punch line is not terribly surprising. The design of “the political” as it is imagined by the rule of thirds is a liberal one from top to bottom. Each of its positive terms as well as the relationships between them and “neutrality” take the classically invaginated structure of liberal thought, which defines the polis and the subject alike in opposition to a feminized sphere that it dominates internally. Using the terms of liberalism, the field delimited by the triad Patriot–Loyalist–neutral is the polis of which Patriots and Loyalists are the agential subjects. Neutrality stands in the place of oikos, otherwise known as social life, which does not take choice as a requirement for participation and therefore does not (in a liberal reckoning) rise to the level of political consideration. The liberal construction of this rubric strongly suggests that the rule of thirds—in addition to being based on a misreading—is not necessarily descriptive of how allegiance or party may actually have been felt by settler colonists during the war, but rather that it became so at a belated point in time by dint of U.S. nationalist proscription. Indeed, it is worth emphasizing that Loyalists themselves, like André as a British officer, would likely have understood what it meant to be a political subject of the crown in terms of immutable duty instead of elective affiliation. In part by overtaking this distinction, the rule of thirds serves U.S. nationalist Revolutionary narratives because it usefully splits the Revolution into a bilateral conflict around the single issue of independence: were you for us or against us? André’s resistance to those terms thus encodes a possibility that had to be

[…] from neutrality.” Maya Jasanoff, too, maintains that “there were two sides in the American Revolution” and describes Loyalism as “a shared allegiance to the king and a commitment to empire.” See Bannister and Riordan, “Loyalism and the British Atlantic,” The Loyal Atlantic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 5–6; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011), 5–8. 34 Edward Larkin, “What is a Loyalist? The American Revolution as Civil War,” Common-place 8.1 (2007). http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-01/larkin/.

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excluded in order for the U.S. to emerge preemptively as the ideological subject of Revolutionary history. In the case of André, the total conflation of allegiance with identity through the operation of unambiguous choice appears as a tragic concern because it renders life ineligible for politics if it retains multiple or ambiguous linkages with the social world. On the liberal model, a decision has to be made; something has to be categorically excluded in order for the subject to become a subject. André appears to have confronted the congealment of this arrangement by being stubbornly more than one thing at a time. All the available evidence suggests that he was firm in his loyalties to the British crown and empire, yet he is consistently represented as refusing the segregation of allegiance from sociality—which is to say, the reduction of politics to partisanship. In the final scene of William Dunlap’s André (1798), for instance, André is last heard discussing his belief that the rebellion is a mistake: “I must think your country has mistook / Her interests. Believe me, but for this I should / Not willingly have drawn a sword against her.”35 The end of his speech trails off as he is moved away by the visibly emotional detachment assigned to escort him to the gallows. The stage directions read: “they sorrowful, he cheerfully conversing as he passes over the stage” (106). Notice that André is doubly engaged in a social interaction and a political debate here—he is practicing two things at the same time which the rule of thirds construes as mutually exclusive by definition. And he’s pulling it off. Where Hamilton’s epigram rearticulates the paradox of justice as a tragic contradiction, in this moment, André’s ability to socialize with his executioners softens the juridical contradictions of partisan allegiance into tragic paradox. This may begin to explain why André was beloved and Arnold reviled. Arnold wanted to switch sides; André rejected the volitional exclusion of the social world on which those sides were drawn. The difference is one of ambivalence (ambi—both ways + valentia—strong, strength), the splitting or shuttling of the will along two distinct courses, as opposed to ambiguity: ambiguus, “doubtful”— from ambigere, “to waver, go around” (ambi—both ways + agere—to drive). Ambiguity implies a passive suspension of the will that proceeds indirectly; it is a quality of impartial undifferentiation which allows for the open proliferation of forms of life “in touch” with one another. In 35 William Dunlap, André: A Tragedy in Five Acts [1798] (New York: Penguin, 1997), 107. All citations are page numbers from this edition.

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the wake of André, the independence movement’s grounding in liberal constructions of political autonomy could thus be considered, in Nietzsche’s words, as a manifestation of “the primal cause of evil”: a lacerating imposition of “gulfs between man and man” that cut off ambiguity and parceled the world into pieces.

3

Queer Fatedness; or, the Neutral Ground

Part of the significance of André’s hauntings is that they illuminate how even the normatively white, male beneficiaries of the rule of thirds’ liberal design felt its requirements as a tragic bereavement. And André tells us something else, too—something unanticipated. What was lost with André was not a something, an object or idealization, but the capacity for being ambiguously socio-political. The Revolution became modern in the André myth by denying its protagonists this freedom in what was, historically considered, a highly ambiguous situation. André’s ghost thus calls attention to modernity’s painful exchange of ambiguity for choice as a measure of political being. The tragic scope of this switch point comes into view in the circumstances surrounding André’s capture, when André failed correctly to identify his enemy. This problem of identification across enemy lines was endemic to the settler colonists’ standoff with Britain, but it seems to have been an especially pressing issue in Revolutionary New York. The city was held by the British, but it was surrounded by a thirty-mile area called “the neutral ground” that formed a buffer with the Continental-controlled territories of Westchester County. Due to the close proximity of contending armies, partisan identifications in this area during the 1770s–1780s were famously blurry.36 Judith Van Buskirk has argued that in New York, the Revolution was not experienced as a “total war”: “Loyalists and rebels, typically depicted as hostile opponents, were, in fact, in constant contact […] crossing military lines to socialize, lend a helping hand to relatives and friends, or conduct a little business.”37 Families split by partisan allegiance were in the habit of taking tea together, and the neutral ground itself was a gray zone in which it was more or less impossible to tell who 36 For other scholarship that links André to the nebulousness of wartime loyalties, see Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic, 128; Colley, Captives, 207, 212. 37 Judith Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 2.

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was who, or where was where. In the anecdotes of his capture, André was caught because he could not make these discriminations himself— he accidentally wandered out of the neutral ground on his way back to Clinton’s camp and then misconstrued the militiamen’s response to his question about the party to which they belonged.38 The tragic irony of André’s arrest is that he was apprehended for failing at an impossible task in a manner that was at once arbitrary (he had a fifty-fifty shot) and unavoidable. Hence there is an aporia between contingency and inevitability at the initial scene of André’s capture that blocks the assignation of fault to a single point of reference. Tragedy has a word for this aporia—fate, or sometimes fortune—that appears all over André’s literary traces. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” for instance, the people of the village regard Major André’s tree with “a mixture of respect and superstition, partly out of sympathy for the fate of its ill-starred namesake […].”39 Knickerbocker also describes André as “unfortunate,” which is the word André himself used in one of his appeals to Washington for a firing squad, pleading that “a decency of conduct towards me may mark, that though unfortunate I am branded with nothing dishonorable, as no motive could be mine but the service of my king and I was involuntarily an imposter.”40 Fate is what happens when agency becomes atmospheric, when events appear to be driven forward by circumstances that are of the world yet beyond one’s control: stars, war, a missed boat, the wrong clothes, fog in the Hudson River Valley. Fate might also be described as the traumatization of choice by something like context, with the qualification that context appears under the hand of fate not as background but as an interactive principle in motion, working energetically—but indifferently— to limit human options and obstruct judgment. Pat understandings of 38 The account of André’s capture varies across sources, some of which were published well after the events in question, and the details do not always align. According to one version, André mistook the green coat one of the militiamen was wearing for Loyalist garb, and asked if they were of “the lower party.” What was actually said is of course hearsay, but for my purposes that is not particularly important, as I am interested in how André’s story circulates as a tragic myth. The transcript I use for this exchange comes from Linda Colley, Captives, 204. For the alternate account above, see Cray, “Major John André and the Three Captors,” 376–377. 39 Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” 312 (my emphases). 40 André to Washington 24 September 1780, Proceedings of a Board of General Officers

(Philadelphia: James Rivington, 1780), 7.

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“tragic errors” and “fatal flaws” as deficiencies of individual character or decision-making are for this reason of little use, because they miss tragic fate’s radical disclosure that autonomous individuality is a lie and the concept of choice may itself be a problem. A whole series of mishaps lead to André’s encounter with the militiamen, none of which can be laid exclusively at his feet. And what happened next is that André asked the most dangerous question it was possible to ask near the neutral ground. “Of which party are you?” André asked a fateful question of actants— possessed forms of life, influenced creatures. This question is not a demand for revelation (identify yourself!) but a socio-political accounting, because it asks how we are entangled with or claimed by things that are external to ourselves. And that may be why, in one telling, André’s open question conjured an open answer. Yours. In the André fable, the space of neutrality has powerful political dimensions that are inseparable from what I suggest is a kind of queer sociality in which none of the participants (yet) has a fixed identity. One man says “yours” to another, almost like a promise, and in the midst of war it both is and is not true—they are at once fellows and adversaries. Yet this way of knowing among strangers is not purely liberatory. “Of which party are you?” could be construed as cagey and withholding, while “Yours” serves equally well as a flirtation and a snare. In contemporary terms, this could be a cruising scene, freighted doubly with the potential for anonymous dangers and pleasures: a possibility evoked in a German engraving from 1784 (Fig. 1). Half in shadow, held around the waist, and with fingertips brushing his collarbone, André locks eyes with the man to his left, who looks back with something like yearning as André rests a hand over his heart. Is this an arrest or an embrace? Clothes are about to come off, and as every man in the frame reaches for André’s sword it is difficult to parse the threat it bears as a weapon from its phallic eroticism. The scene of André’s capture may therefore be queer, not in a state of perfect emancipation, but rather in the sense that it allows for the simultaneous availability of dangers and openings elsewhere construed as incompatible alternatives. The spell was broken when André revealed his identity, thus initiating a chain of events through which he would become “British,” “enemy,” and “spy” on his way to becoming a criminalized corpse. The circumstances of André’s arrest thus seem to dramatize a moment at which a glimpsed possibility for collective association allowed by the neutral ground was overtaken and destroyed by the irruption of a liberal conception of the

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Fig. 1 Daniel Berger (engraver) and Daniel Chodowiecki (artist), Major André, von drey Americanern angehalten zu Tarrytown am 23ten Septembr 1780 [Major André arrested by three Americans at Tarrytown 23rd September 1780], [Germany 1784] (Source The Library of Congress)

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political into its midst. What gets André killed is not a choice he makes but the arbitrary-necessity of choice itself. The story of André’s capture may thus be a tiny parable which warns that modernity might be set into motion each time we have to say who we are. ∗ ∗ ∗ Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argue that Enlightened modernity fulfills “the disenchantment of the world” that begins with classical myth, and in particular with the notion of tragic fate, which they see as activating a law of static homogeneity. They write of “the sanction of fate which, through retribution, incessantly reinstates what always was. Whatever might be made different is made the same.”41 Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of modernity as an incessant conversion of difference into sameness helps to draw out an important paradox of André’s capture and death: as André becomes identifiable in political terms as a subject with a chosen side (or one that is chosen for him), his identifications become increasingly inert. André, Briton, enemy, criminal, corpse. This cascade from name to corpse casts the entrance into political modernity as a scarring experience of legibility in which representational individualism amounts to a featureless death trap. However, André’s story also turns Horkheimer and Adorno’s formulation on its head, because what actually seems to happen in the scene of his capture is that sameness (“We are yours”) gets converted into difference (“I am André”). Undifferentiation opened something up on the neutral ground; individuation shut it down at the gallows by isolating a solitary being from the world and forcing it to stand for something. Horkheimer and Adorno decry tragic fate for bringing about this state of affairs, but I take issue with their conflation of fate with modernity because it parses tragedy as a monotonous rule. I think tragic fate is more mysterious than they propose. For instance, Freud sees fate as uncanny because it permits the “primitive” incursion into modernity of surpassed beliefs, rupturing empiricism and leading back to animism, superstition, and enchantment.42 For Freud, fate temporarily re-enchants the world by helping to create an uncanny environment that erodes the subject by 41 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 8. 42 Freud describes the uncanny at one point as “the only the factor of unintended

repetition that […] forces us to entertain the idea of the fateful and the inescapable, when

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baffling it with meaningful accidents. Freudian fate thereby does some of the work Michelle Sizemore identifies with the “historiography of enchantment,” in this case by bringing neutrality’s temporal richness into focus as a zone of recurrence that liberal modernity declares to be unthinkable.43 André’s fate proffers a tragic counter-memory of Revolution as an emotionally devastating scene of alienation, then, but not without offering, because it shows how men might have (and could again) hold one another in common on the neutral ground.

4

Partying with the Enemy

André was a party planner. His job in the British army was to organize social events, and he seems to have put those skills to good use after death. The word “party” means “to divide into parts” (partiri), or literally “that which is divided,” and it typically denotes a gathering that is parted, portioned, or sided against others. “Party” acquired its more familiar contemporary associations with social enjoyment in the early eighteenth century. A bit like the unheimlich, “party” thus seems to contain its antithesis within itself, evoking both an oppositional grouping and a celebratory get-together. Like the unheimlich as well, “party” plays in undifferentiation by muddling boundary distinctions between insides and outsides, and especially between friends and foes. André has a knack for gathering divided parts into queer parties, revealing that they belong, or are party, to each other. He thus reshapes division as a productive limit for social life by showing that division makes us who we are in relation to things we do not know. We are (dis)possessed, we belong to, do and get (un)done by, others. In that sense, “we” are always partying with the enemy. Some of the most powerful expressions of minor revolutionary politics that take shape around André center on the queer party he formed with we should normally speak of chance.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 144–147. 43 Sizemore reads Irving’s Sketch-Book as “express[ing] uncertainties about national development” that “disclos[e] the potentiality of history before one set of outcomes settles into place.” Whereas Sizemore talks about recurrence in the context of an enchanted “cyclical history of empire,” however, I couch it here by way of Freud and tragic form as a kind of counter-modern return of the repressed. Michelle Sizemore, American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 123.

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Benedict Arnold. Commentators universally described André’s execution as a monstrous discharge of inordinate force, but many—including Hamilton—suggested that Washington murdered André as Arnold’s surrogate. Wrote Hamilton: “There was, in truth, no way of saving him [André]. Arnold or he must have been the victim; the former was out of our power.”44 In her Monody on Major André (1781), Anna Seward treats this dynamic by using The Iliad as an intertext, aligning Washington with Achilles and André with Hector. She thus implies that André was the triangulated victim of Washington’s grief for an unnamed Patroclus (Arnold). Seward has little patience for Washington, however, and argues that he is worse than Achilles because even Achilles returned Hector’s body to Priam: “Less cruel far than thou, on Ilium’s plain / Achilles, raging for Patroclus slain! / […] Fierce as he was;-- ‘tis Cowards only know / Persisting vengeance o’er a fallen foe.”45 Seward’s speaker is protesting the fact that André’s body was “dump[ed] in the Earth on Hudson’s shore” without proper funeral rites (his remains were recovered from Tappan in 1821 and taken to Westminster Abbey). She therefore appears to be aligned with Priam, and in that regard she adopts a queer persona, addressing Washington in the voice of André/Hector’s father to urge the claims of the dead in a devastated scene of intergenerational homoeroticism. In Seward’s account, Washington’s treatment of André’s body as a surrogate for Arnold’s enacts a ruthless denial of their fateful entanglement (or: queer partying) that produces André’s mutilation as its remainder. André’s alignment with Hector thus points to what I would call a politics of perishability, after Rachel Bespaloff’s reading of Hector as “the guardian of the perishable joys.”46 For Bespaloff, Hector is a “resistance-hero” who fights on behalf of a minor politics beyond the 44 Alexander Hamilton to Lt Colonel John Laurens [11 October 1780], reprint in The Pennsylvania Gazette 25 October 1780. This view is taken up as well by James Rivington, proprietor of the Rivington Gazette: “Supposing that General Arnold was guilty […] was this a good reason why Major Andre, whom he deems innocent, should suffer, only because the former was out of their power?” James Rivington, The Case of Major John Andre (New York: Rivington, 1780), 23–24. 45 Seward, Monody on Major André (New York: Rivington, 1781), 17. 46 Rachel Bespaloff, On the Iliad [1947], War and the Iliad, ed. Christopher Benfey

(New York: NYRB, 2005), 43. Seward uses this term to describe the Monody itself: “[…] my weak Muse, in fond attempt and vain / But feebly pours a perishable strain.” Seward, Monody, 18.

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rule of force, as realized for instance when Priam entreats Achilles for Hector’s body with a gift of food that opens another relation to violence through precarity.47 Likewise, for Seward, the claims of perishability made by André’s corpse contest the absolute leveling of all difference by the rule of law—or what Seward calls “the Victor’s dire decree”—but Washington refuses to honor his kinship with the dead. In so doing, he enacts a cleavage of the political from the social that Seward connects to a distinctively modern form of representation which turns on substitution. Seward allusively implies that Washington scapegoats André because he wants vengeance for the grief of Arnold’s disloyalty, or because he is jealous that André was able to penetrate Arnold when he was not (in The Iliad, Hector spears Patroclus in the lower belly, “ramming the point home”). By suggesting that André paid the forfeit for a broken heart, Seward thus figures the law as a principle of desire that generates violence in its attempt to overcome loss symbolically. While it is possible to read this as a homophobic argument, my sense is that the frustrated homoerotic attachment ascribed to André’s sacrifice is not the core issue here. On the contrary, Seward may indicate that Washington failed to honor the passion he feels for Arnold well enough because he turned to the law in order to avoid the knowledge that the beloved is always a stranger to us. Washington is enraged because Arnold was not who he thought him to be, but his desire to fix Arnold to an image in order to keep him always the same leads Washington to cleave to the logic of sacrifice. For Horkheimer and Adorno, sacrifice is the banner of the Enlightenment’s grim dialectic, which insists that “each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.”48 Likewise in Seward and Hamilton’s remarks, André’s execution represents the hideous emergence of force as the totalization of all politics, linked in both cases to the betrayal of affects (longing, hatred) that have been peeled away from their objects and unleashed as brutality on a bystander whose body is made to signify in the name of another. André had to be individuated as himself, but

47 For Bespaloff, Achilles is a “revenge hero” by contrast. Naturally gifted and almost invulnerable, he risks nothing in battle and is driven by an almost insatiable desire for destruction. In the scene with Priam, however, Bespaloff notes that both men become time-bound in the knowledge that “all men live in affliction.” On the Iliad, 82. 48 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11. For their discussion of sacrifice, see 39–43.

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only insofar as he could be used up completely in partial signification by standing, as “enemy,” for someone else.

5

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William Dunlap’s André provides the most fully elaborated account of the queer disruptive charge André’s counter-memory levies against U.S. nationalist Revolutionary historiography. Along with Seward’s Monody, it is one of only two full-length literary works to be devoted to André. It was also the first play to represent Washington onstage during his lifetime. This was an audacious move on Dunlap’s part. The André affair was widely considered to have tarnished Washington’s reputation; it was a risky venture even to consider it as a subject for the stage while Washington lived, and Dunlap’s portrayal of Washington in André is a searing condemnation to boot. Incredibly, Washington attended the opening performance in New York on March 30, 1798. Dunlap was backstage, watching from the wings as the drama denounced Washington to his face. A tragedy in five acts, André’s action is simple. A young Continental officer, Captain Bland, returns to his post in Tappan to discover that Arnold has defected and André is slated to die. Revealing that André had nursed him during his own confinement aboard a British prison ship, Bland pleads with the General (an unnamed Washington) for André’s life to no avail. Headquarters soon learns that the British intend to kill Bland’s father, Colonel Bland—a prisoner of war—if André dies. At this point, Bland’s mother arrives in the camp to beg for André’s life, and later, André’s former fiancée, Honora (brought back from the dead), also appears as a supplicant before the General. André sues Clinton for Colonel Bland’s release, but the Colonel is rescued from British captivity in a raid the same day. The General maintains, however, that “we must shew / That by the laws of war we will abide” (86), and refuses to commute André’s sentence. The drama ends with cannon firing to signal André’s death off-stage, as Captain Bland lies prostate with grief on the ground, having declared that the André episode has destroyed the moral mandate for the cause of independence. Another officer in the Continental Army named M’Donald stands over Bland to deliver a steely defense of the rigors of necessity, at the same time acknowledging that succeeding generations may “abhor” them for what they have done. As this overview begins to suggest, the emotional center of the drama is the friendship between André and Captain Bland, who credits André

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with saving his and his fellow soldiers’ lives when they were prisoners of war. From the beginning, Bland’s feeling for André exceeds the abstract commitments of his loyalty to the Continental cause. In the first scene of the drama, he learns that someone is to be hanged as a spy—he does not yet know whom—and says, “‘Tis well. Just heaven! O grant that thus may fall / All those who seek to bring this land to woe!” Yet as soon as he learns the identity of the condemned, Bland recalls how André, […] like an angel, seeking good for man, Restor’d us light, and partial liberty. Me he mark’d out his own. He nurst and cur’d, He lov’d and made his friend. I liv’d by him, And in my heart he liv’d, till, when exchang’d, Duty and honor call’d me from my friend.— Judge how my heart is tortur’d. (72)

André and Bland’s friendship blooms in a scene of erotic nursing and curing in which André takes sensual care of his opponents’ bodies. In so doing, he nurtures perishable forms of life that defy categorical differentiation. For instance, Bland’s statement that he “liv’d by” André suggests a connection that is proximate in space (alongside) as well as causally indebted (thanks to). This double resonance of “by” suggests the entanglement of orders of association that are usually conceived as distinct: the horizontal relation of proximity, and the vertical relation of gratitude. The second part of the line, “And in my heart he liv’d,” connects these orders of space and time to the (meta)physical register of insides and outsides. Bland lived alongside André, Bland lived thanks to André, and André lived inside Bland—a powerfully queer erotic image that evokes André’s angelic and/or feminized penetration of Bland’s heart. Bland and André do not relate to one another, then, as autonomous and self-contained subjects, but through a kind of network of spatio-temporal, physical, and affective border crossings that defy individualistic explanation or strictly linear causality. The politics of wounding and healing—what Butler calls precarity, and Bespaloff perishability—also seem to give rise to another epistemology of freedom in this moment: “partial liberty.” Perhaps because sickness is bound in fleshly care that limits abstraction, the “liberty” Bland feels in André’s presence has a kind of tactile quality. This may explain why Bland’s love seems to resist exchange when “duty and honor” summon him away. The next line—“Judge how my heart is tortured”—could be

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taken to refer to the torture of the moment when Bland was “exchang’d” out of captivity and had to trade André’s friendship for abstract idealisms in the process. From that moment, André and Bland’s friendship became excessive, because it could not be—and was not in fact—bartered away as Bland moved back across enemy lines. But the torture of Bland’s heart speaks likewise to the conflict of the dramatic present, in which Bland is faced with the possibility of watching André suffer a terrible death. Bland’s enduring love for André informs the play’s core conflict between Bland and the General as they move into opposite corners of a debate over the meaning(s) of justice, obligation, and allegiance. For Bland, André’s compassion on the prison ship evinces his unimpeachable virtue and ought to safeguard him from execution. For the unnamed General—clearly a characterization of George Washington, who in this telling is the sole arbiter of André’s fate—the imperatives of national futurity trump any but a rhetorical acknowledgment of André’s merits and demand André’s death. In Act III, for instance, Bland pleads with the General for André’s life, begging the General to “turn the rigour / Of War’s iron law from him, the best of men, / Meant only for the worst” (85). The General replies: I know the virtues of this man [André], and love them. But the destiny of millions, millions Yet unborn, depends upon the rigour Of this moment. The haughty Briton laughs To scorn our armies and our councils. Mercy, Humanity, call loudly, that we make Our now despised power be felt, vindictive. Millions demand the death of this young man. My injur’d country, he his forfeit life Must yield, to shield thy lacerated breast From torture. (86)

Bland champions the passionate bonds of perishability and insists that “War’s iron law” (85) be calibrated to accommodate their claims. The General embodies the vertical scale of patriarchal power—the Law of the Father—and insists that the demands of the aspiring state preempt attachments that cross enemy lines. But note that, in the moment above, the General’s defense of André’s sentence rests on a symbolic set of considerations wildly out of proportion with the issue at hand. According to the General, André’s death will make an abstract point for a future

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national public (“millions yet unborn”), while at the same time making a bloody example for a national caricature—“the haughty Briton”—who has damaged the egos of colonial American patriarchs at the heads of armies and councils. Whereas Seward and Hamilton suggest that Washington’s stymied love for Arnold drives his overweening use of force in the André affair, Dunlap makes a different claim: the bad object of the General’s devotion is the speculative future of the U.S. nation-state. Nothing the General says seems to make sense. He invokes “mercy” and “humanity” in order to justify “vindictive” power. He also says in a slightly earlier moment that André’s execution will prove to the British that the settler colonists “have the power to bring their acts for trial.” This, he argues, will “stem the flood of ills, which else fell war / Would pour, uncheck’d, upon the sickening world, / Sweeping away all trace of civil life” (86). In other words, by killing André, Washington proposes to prevent an escalation of violence. An astonished Bland counters that pardoning André would “not encourage ill,” as André is universally esteemed—and yet the General presses on like a juggernaut. The General’s final, bizarre argument to Bland is that André must die in order that Bland’s “lacerated breast” may be shielded from torture. But as Bland himself makes clear from the first scene of the play, what tortures Bland is the very logic of sacrificial exchange that the General espouses. Bland likewise rejects the elision of sacrifice with honor when the General tells him that he will be receiving a promotion for his service. Boiling with outrage (the stage direction reads, “with increasing heat ”), Bland snaps into open rebellion: Pardon me, sir, I never shall deserve it. The country that forgets to reverence virtue: That makes no difference ‘twixt the sordid wretch, Who, for reward, risks treason’s penalty, And him unfortunate, whose duteous service Is, by mere accident, so chang’d in form, As to assume guilt’s semblance, I serve not: Scorn to serve. […] Thus from my helm I tear, what once I proudly thought, the badge Of virtuous fellowship. (87)

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Bland’s insight here is that the honor accorded to his service takes the sacrifice of undifferentiated socio-political life as its necessary condition of possibility. He cannot deserve his promotion because merit is criminal within an organization that pegs its legitimacy on the manufacture of “the unfortunate” (ambiguous) into the “sordid wretch” (individual). The stage directions for this moment indicate that Bland “tears the cockade from his helmet” and throws it on the ground. On the night of the play’s opening performance (at which Washington was present), this gesture very nearly caused a riot in the theater because veterans in the audience mistook Bland’s black and white cockade of the FrancoAmerican alliance for the black and white insignia of the Federalists, who were engaged in the late 1790s in a bitter factional rivalry with the Democratic-Republicans. Dunlap seems to have talked the disgruntled audience members down during intermission, and he later wrote some additional lines in which Bland repudiates his actions.49 The circumstances around the performance of André in 1798 suggest that the audience perceived the political audacity of Bland’s actions in strictly partisan terms, through the tunnel vision of late–1790s party faction. Dunlap appears to have anticipated this problem. In the Prologue to André, he tries to head it off by making an appeal that “no party-spirit [may] blast his views,” explaining that his attempt is to “sing of wrongs long past, Men as they were, / To instruct, without reproach, the Men that are” (67). By Dunlap’s own account in his editorial introduction to the text, André was a formal experiment in representing “a real transaction, the particulars of which are fresh in the minds of many of the audience” (64). Dunlap intended André as a “proof that recent events may be so managed in tragedy as to command popular attention” (66), a concern the Prologue addresses by underscoring the recentness of André’s memory, and its odd placement in bilateral accountings of the war: Who has forgot when gallant André died? A name by Fate to Sorrow’s self allied. Who has forgot, when o’er the untimely bier, Contending armies paus’d, to drop a tear. (67) 49 In these added lines, Bland recants, extols Washington’s “pious labors” on behalf of his country, and replaces the cockade. While they were never spoken onstage, Dunlap included them in the introduction he wrote for the publication of the play, which was bound in an edition with Seward’s Monody, André’s “Cow-Chace,” and the proceedings of André’s court martial from 1780.

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Judging by the response to André on its opening night, most had indeed forgotten “when gallant André died.” Perhaps this is why Dunlap does not appear to have staged André again, instead recycling portions of its dialogue into The Glory of Columbia, her Yeomanry! (1803), which celebrates the three militiamen who took André captive and which Dunlap wryly described as a “holy-day drama […] occasionally murdered for the amusement of holy-day fools.”50 Dunlap appears to have been up against market pressures, and had to abandon André’ s counter-memorial subversion of U.S. nationalist visions of the war. Indeed, though they were seemingly lost on Dunlap’s audience, the implications of the cockade scene go well beyond national party politics. This moment is a tipping point in Bland’s near-total disenchantment with the project of U.S. independence as a whole, which entails a fierce criticism not only of Washington as a popular “father” of the nation, but also of the horrors of political symbolism that he wields in that capacity. ∗ ∗ ∗ Dunlap’s comment about “party spirit” in the Prologue could be taken to refer to the Democratic-Republican/Federalist debates of the 1790s, or to the contending “parties” of the Revolutionary war in the 1780s. I suggest that it does both. André critiques each iteration of partisanship by protesting their connection through the sacrificial logic of liberal political representation. In the 1790s factional party terms that Dana Nelson describes in National Manhood, the General could be said to embody a Federalist brand of “national manhood” that bases its claims to authority on the premise that political consensus can be achieved through the “ideals of a vigorous, strong, undivided manhood” as realized in the body of the president, which stands as “a guarantee of manly constitution qua national accord.”51 The General might therefore be seen as 50 Dunlap, History of the American Theatre [1832] (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 227. 51 Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 34. Most existing scholarship on André takes up the issue of “national manhood” with respect to the stage. See Sarah Chinn, “Masculinity and National Identity on the Early American Stage,” Literature Compass 9.2 (2012): 106–117; Desirée Henderson, “Mourning, Masculinity, and the Drama of the American Revolution,” American Drama 13 (2004): 31–45; Jeffrey Richards, “Dunlap’s Queer André: Versions of Revolution and Manhood,” Drama,

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a spokesperson for virtual representation, while Bland’s personal bond with André could be viewed through a Democratic-Republican lens of actual representation. However, I have argued above that in fact what Bland defends in André are the politics of perishability, whose claims cannot be satisfied by “actual” representation because it is defined by the depoliticization of the social world. Likewise, because the General will not adjust the dictates of “War’s iron law” to accommodate affective kinships embedded in the politics of perishability, the virtual model of governance he represents seems to fail in this drama. Political consensus is thus not achieved through the Federalist ideal of “a vigorous, undivided manhood” in André—least of all in the figure of General/future president Washington, whose symbolic attempts to guarantee “manly constitution qua national accord” create discord precisely because they are founded in sacrificial violence. The General habitually denies his own power to alter André’s sentence. In his confrontation with Bland, for instance, he claims that he is able to “know and love” André’s virtues, but insists that he is bound to advocate for “millions yet unborn.” He thus professes to be limited by his transcendence as the representative of a hypothetical national future. At other moments, he abdicates responsibility in the name of fate. Moved by Honora’s plea for André’s life, for instance, he says: “O, what keen struggles must I undergo! / […] to have the power to pardon; / The court’s stern sentence to remit;--give life;-- / Feel the strong wish to use such blessed power; / Yet know that circumstances strong as fate / Forbid to obey the impulse” (103). In a grotesque contortion of reason, the General reserves the right to feel conflicted about having power he refuses to use while announcing that he is a victim of “circumstances strong as fate” that forbid him from doing what he acknowledges he is in fact able to do. The General’s woeful excuse for justification seems to me perfectly to illustrate why Horkheimer and Adorno deplore tragic fate as the forerunner to the abstractions of Enlightenment.52 For Horkheimer and

Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 124–140; Lucy Rinehart, “Manly Exercises: Post-Revolutionary Performances of Authority in the Theatrical Career of William Dunlap,” Early American Literature 36.2 (2001): 263–293. 52 “The principle of the fated necessity which caused the downfall of the mythical hero […] hands down a single identical content: wrath against those of insufficient righteousness.” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 8.

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Adorno, the connection between fate and abstraction articulates through a rote law of repetition in which both time and persons are stripped of texture and converted into interchangeable exemplars. “Abstraction,” they write, “stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation.”53 While I maintain that fateful recurrence is distinct from Enlightened repetition, people like the General are the reason they can sometimes look the same, as the logic of Enlightenment parrots the language of fate to get what it wants. In this case the General invokes fate in order to extenuate his own authority. But he does so in the most cynical possible way, in order to secure his freedom to see the outcome he desires—the liquidation of André as exemplar—through an opportunistic masking of power that is locked in with disavowal. However, this corruption appears in the General’s speech as an explicitly jaundiced, or “bad,” deployment of tragic fate. Dunlap in fact seems to go out of his way in André to demonstrate that the General’s conception of fate is flawed in its premises. Act I, scene ii, for instance, features a conversation between the General and two of his chiefs: M’Donald, a stern moral absolutist who distrusts the masses and insists on self-discipline; and Seward, an idealist who at different times delivers paeans on the glories of patriotism and descends into tormented reflections of the barbarity of mankind. M’Donald casts André as an agent of the Fall, a “mercenary European” who has descended “to play / The tempter’s part, and lure men to their ruin!” He refers to how André was captured in disguise (which is to say, out of uniform), as well as to André’s initial attempt to bribe his captors. Seward chides M’Donald: “What you suggest of one, whom fickle Fortune, / In her changeling mood, hath hurl’d, unpitying, / From her topmost height to lowest misery, / Tastes not of charity” (75). M’Donald replies that André’s fault lies in “misdeed, not fortune,” and goes on to describe fortune and chance as “convenient words” that cover for ambition and falsehood—a rather apt observation in light of the fact that the General is going to deploy “fate” in precisely this way four acts later. But in this earlier moment in Act I, the General intervenes in M’Donald and Seward’s debate in order to check M’Donald’s ungracious sentiments. Washington charts a course directly between Seward’s vision of fate as Fortune (which is utterly capricious)

53 Ibid., 9.

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and M’Donald’s negation of fate in favor of “misdeed” (which is utterly individualized): Yet ever keep in mind that man is frail; His tide of passion struggling still with Reason’s Fair and favorable gale, and adverse Driving his unstable bark, upon the Rocks of error. Should he sink thus shipwreck’d, Sure it is not Virtue’s voice that triumphs in his ruin. (76)

The General presupposes a split subject: one who is divided between passion and reason. Virtue, he claims, is not identical with either of the extremes that Seward and M’Donald represent—idealistic passion on the one hand, stern reason on the other—because the Enlightened subject’s attempt to negotiate between them is what produces the conditions for his triumph or failure (these are the only ways in which this subject understands outcomes). This is not the animist magic of tragic fate as I understand it, in which persons are never so individuated as to be split in half. Ultimately, all Washington has done here is to neutralize his officers’ opposing views on fate by putting them into motion as a dialectic. “Man,” says the General, “drive[s] his unstable bark” between two contending forces: an image which evokes Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of Odysseus and the Sirens. Tragic fate is environmental and chancy; it transforms subjects into “ghostly matters.” In the General’s speech, by contrast, an agential subject is pitched in opposition to nature, which he can only see narcissistically as a projection of an “interior” reality. The seas of fate are stormy, windy, and rocky because the Enlightened subject’s contending reason and passions have put him in turmoil. Since he has no relationship to the world outside himself, this subject is only capable of pity as a function of identification. The General thus fails to grant mercy to André because he does not identify with André; after all, he has never crashed his bark. Moreover, he does not identify with André because he already thinks he knows who André is: Briton, enemy, spy. His bad love object in the future of the nation-state, which exists only in his mind, has insulated him from the chancy offering of compassion. The flawed premises of the General’s dialectic conception of fate connect his espousal of the speculative futurity of nationalist time with his curious double insistence that André’s person both is and is not particularly important. The General, much like Washington in Seward’s Monody,

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commits the great sin of modernity against nature in Dunlap’s play: he will force something multiple to become singular. André will serve as a general example, and yet at the same time it must be him. It could be anyone, but it must be him, and just so—by hanging—even though it does not have to be, even though the General has the power to make it otherwise, and even though André asks only for “a trifling change of form” (91) in the manner of his death. Once again André must become himself, through the volitional exclusion of what exceeds himself, by becoming something he is not: a “haughty Briton,” a bar to the wanton cruelties of war, the enemy to whose party we do not belong. ∗ ∗ ∗ Dunlap thus confounds the distinction between 1790s party factionalism and the nationalist political account of Revolution as a war of contending parties by exposing their co-governance by the Enlightened liberal assumptions underpinning the rule of thirds. This blocks the narration of U.S. national history according to a progressive principle of succession by miring Revolutionary temporality in tragic stalemate. It is not necessary to choose between party readings, or to resolve the play’s context in 1798 or 1780, because either way one arrives at the same place, at the same impasse, with the extortion of representation from ambiguity by the Law of the Father. In concrete terms, this looks and feels like the amputation of queer sensual multiplicity by Washington’s unacceptable assertion that the subject is bound to choose. Other readers of André have noted that it draws patriarchal authority into question, but they have argued that Dunlap resolves this tension either within the play itself or by recourse to the theater as a space for democratic debate.54 These analyses read André in the context of the “early republic,” thus conceding the elision of Revolutionary time with national futurity that the drama itself calls into question. Significantly, they also read André through Oedipal tragic lenses. Oedipalism is the most likely of the classical traditions in tragedy to insist on catharsis and symbolic repair: the incorporation of the patriarchal enemy into the self

54 For a Federalist version of this approach, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 197–226. For an Anti-Federalist one, see Rinehart, “‘Manly Exercises.’”

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by identifying with his demand for a sacrifice. It is no accident, therefore, that Oedipalism strongly inflects the U.S. nationalist tradition of Revolutionary historiography; it is amenable to the dictates of Enlightened liberal modernity upon which that tradition has been founded. As I hope is already clear from this chapter, the tragic genealogies I draw upon are not those of Oedipus, however, but rather of Antigone, Medea, and Clytemnestra: all of them women who radically refuse the separation of the oikos from the polis by violent assertions of patriarchal prerogative. My influences are drawn strongly from Butler’s reading of Antigone in this way. Indeed, I suggest that what we see in André is not an Oedipal drama in which every man is a father or a son, but rather one that regards Oedipalism warily from the perspective of what Butler calls “Antigone’s claim” (the claim of precarity). Almost everyone in this drama except for high command regards Washington as Antigone does Creon, while high command unconsciously regards itself as Oedipus does his father. Much as Butler does in Antigone’s Claim, then, Dunlap deploys one strain of tragic vision (Antigone) against another (Oedipus), internally within a single text. Dunlap thus unearths the buried history of Revolution from the place of its interment within the liberal narrative of Revolutionary success that U.S. national politics take as a “necessary condition of life.”55 André uses tragedy to diagnose the abuse of fate as law in Enlightened thought which divides political from social life. The tragedy of André is the tragedy not of the identity between Enlightenment and tragic fate, but rather of Enlightenment’s co-optation of fate for its purposes as it pushes aside the politics of perishability in pursuit of representation. This process manifests in André as a hardening of dualistic oppositions—friend and enemy, passion and reason, home and battlefield—but I suggest that these oppositions appear as traumatic effects of the General’s abstracting, sacrificial logic rather than as absolutes which preexist and are subsequently cauterized by his enforcement of “the victor’s dire decree.” In other words, I suggest that André reflects on how the Enlightened liberal production of Revolutionary history uses the exchangeability of suffering in order to drive the telos of national time forward. But this is not the method of André itself, which lays bare the arbitrary brutality of this development and speaks from the place of “nothing” that is produced as excess by its advancement. The split in André between Antigone’s claim 55 Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy [1966], ed. Pamela McCallum (Toronto: Broadview, 2006), 89.

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and Oedipal drama is how Dunlap generates “temporal dissonance” in the play, which drags on national time with a terrible cry of suffering issued from the margins. Yet the cry is not all. André protests the elaboration of mutually exclusive alternatives by the likes of the General by grieving in and through counter-praxes of ambiguity that the categorical segregation of political from social life fails to exterminate. ∗ ∗ ∗ While the General moves from force to force, leveling everything in his path, Bland’s friendship with André lingers in the palliation of error. In his prison cell André laments that even a lifetime of “benevolence” can be undone by one mistake: “[…] if in one hour, / One hapless hour, thy feet are led astray;-- / Thy happy deeds, all blotted from remembrance” (78). In his despair, André has adopted the logic of the General, who insists that the circumstances of André’s capture should blot out all other consideration in his sentencing. Bland responds: “Not every record cancel’d—O there are hearts, / Where Virtue’s image, when ‘tis once engraved, / Can never know erasure” (78). Where André’s initial comment—“all blotted from remembrance”—equates “nothing” with negation, Bland’s offers a homeopathic rejoinder that softens negation into the ambiguous image of an engraving (something etched or tattooed into the surface of the heart) that remains palpable after erasure: a phantom mark, felt but not seen, absently present. Bland’s abidance with André in the twilight of ambiguity leads to his terminal disillusionment with the General and the cause of independence. In many ways, this is the most extraordinary illustration the play offers of the failure of the General’s national manhood to guarantee accord, and among its most powerful stopgaps against catharsis. The General’s obsession with the symbolic logic of sacrifice obstructs the bonds between André and Bland so forcefully that it destroys Bland’s fealty not just to the General, but to the patria. Even before the cockade scene, in fact, Bland remarks to André: If worth like thine must thus be sacrificed, To policy so cruel and unjust, I will forswear my country and her service: I’ll hie me to the Briton, and with fire, And sword, and every instrument of death Or devastation, join in the work of war! (80)

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Bland is talking about defection from the independence movement altogether. He has been brought to the edge of renouncing the U.S. nation-state before it even exists because its condition of possibility is an immolation that Bland is unwilling and unable to accept. The danger of this moment is that Bland flirts with reproducing the rule of thirds by switching to the other side. And it is true that the British camp seems serene by comparison with the meltdown at Continental headquarters, where Bland picks fights with high command and everyone except high command seems to spend more and more of their time in tears. Conversely, André does not appear to have been betrayed by his own commanding officers, and his allegiance to Britain may therefore seem to offer a less doctrinaire alternative to liberal democratic idealism in the drama. However, André counsels Bland against turning coat, and Bland seems by play’s end to reach a more radical place of alienation that declines both the promise of U.S. national democracy and the nostalgia of British imperial citizenship. In the final scene, Bland delivers his last lines before throwing himself on the ground as cannons signal André’s death in the distance: Farewell, farewell, brave spirit! O, let my countrymen, Henceforward, when the cruelties of war Arise in their remembrance; when their ready Speech would pour forth torrents in their foe’s dispraise, Think on this act accurst, and lock complaint in silence. (107)

The nature of Bland’s disillusionment here does not seem to admit of repair through simple recourse to another partisanship—his attachment was to André, and André is gone. Indeed, a recalibration of allegiance at this point would be hollow, as it would convert allegiance itself into a symbol of Bland’s love for André that would perpetuate the very sacrificial logic against which Bland has mutinied over the course of the drama. Instead, Bland articulates a disenchantment with the very “cruelties of war” that demand a totalistic accounting of friends and foes. That is to say, Bland expresses a loyalty to André beyond the reckoning of state allegiance: one that both exceeds and destroys the compensatory mechanisms of closure because it arises in opposition to the bloodthirsty sacrifice that makes it possible for “foes” to emerge flatly as objects of derogation. Bland commits, without choosing, to mourn without end—to a kinship with the dead—and he prescribes this endless sorrow as well to his

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countrymen in a manner that seems to inhibit the elaboration of nationalist history from Revolutionary time. Bland suggests that the memory of André’s death is a kind of temporal eddy that slows the simplistic “torrents” of condemnation which underwrite national celebration and advance the cause of progressive history. However, the turn and return to André’s memory seems not to end with the production of a counternarrative, but rather with the silencing of narrative history itself: “think on this act accurst and lock complaint in silence.” Locking complaint in silence is the formulation that blocks catharsis in André. But Bland doesn’t get the last word; M’Donald stands over Bland’s prostrate body to give the final lines of the play. He begins with nationalist malarkey about how the moral of the tale is that Europeans should leave America alone (or else!), and concludes with a disquisition on memory: Still may our children’s children deep abhor The motives, doubly deep detest the actors; Ever remembering, that the race who plan’d, Who acquiesced, or did the deeds abhor’d, Has pass’d from off the earth; and, in its stead, Stand men who challenge love or detestation But from their proper, individual deeds. Never let memory of the sire’s offence Descend upon the son. (108)

M’Donald’s remarks advise the “proper” relationship between Revolutionary memory and forgetting in the generations of the future. “Our children’s children” might hate us, reasons M’Donald, but now we’re dead and they should move on. There is the tiniest inkling in his words that something has gone awry (else why would his children hate him?). But M’Donald mostly counsels forgetting. His speech is a proscription against national mourning (forget the past), but it’s also a proscription against haunting: don’t let the past descend on or through you. M’Donald’s limitation of the relation of past to present to the patriarchal chain of transmission from father to son underscores the impoverishment of his historical imagination, but he further limits even this trickle by proposing that his auditors can and should cut it off. Because isn’t that the dream— or rather, nightmare—that structures liberalism and Oedipalism alike? To be one’s own father, to choose one’s inheritance, to accede to the

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sovereignty of one’s own thoughts and powers of identification? Volitional exclusion of the past, and of the world, except insofar as one can make mastery out of it. Possession by the memory of another? Never let it happen. M’Donald delivers his proscription against haunting while standing over the weeping Bland, down in the dirt the whole time. The stage directions read: “Bland throws himself on the earth” (107). So as an aural and visual experience, the final tableau would present the audience with a scene of Antigone on the ground and Oedipus standing over her as she “locks complaint in silence.” Two claims, but unsynthesized, and one of them refusing to say another word. Curiously, then, what Oedipalism produces as excess around André’s death figures ambiguously as an absence of sound, a muting or deafening that does not appear to have narratable content. It would be possible to read this locking into silence as a perversion that reconfigures the norms of U.S. national identity as they are extrapolated from Revolutionary history. Along these lines, Bland might be said to evoke a kind of gothic nationalism that is structured through incorporations—or failed incorporations—of nonnarratable traumas rather than through the untroubled sacrifice of love to ideological ends. While this is I think a possibility, it reminds me of Butler’s comments on the problems with “entombing” tragedy’s perversions at the heart of the norm, which may only reinscribe the symbolic as the horizon of discernible meaning. I wonder if the “silence” of grief to which Bland refers in his final lines is a quality whose significance might not be exhausted even within a gothic reformulation of U.S. national history. Could the collective locking of complaint in silence be a way of talking about kinship? What would that look (or sound) like? The answer may lie with the women in this play: Mrs. Bland and Honora. Mrs. Bland arrives on the scene with her younger children because her husband (and Bland’s father) is due to be released from captivity, but at the last minute he is restrained as blood ransom for André. Mrs. Bland becomes one of Washington’s supplicants as a result, pleading for André’s life as it becomes entangled with her own and those of her children. In Act V, Mrs. Bland relates to Bland that her latest attempt to sway Washington has failed: The tale of misery is told unheard. The widow’s and the orphan’s sighs Fly up, unnoted by the eye of man,

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And mingle, undistinguished, with the winds. […] come let us home and weep. Alas! I can no more, for war hath made men rocks. (101)

Mrs. Bland may be describing what “locking complaint in silence” looks and sounds like in practice, and it’s neither quiet nor still. Mrs. Bland has been “silenced” in the sense that the social world has been banished to a depoliticized neutrality by André’s sacrifice. Moreover, Washington has refused to hear her. This is important because the sighing, telling, flying, mingling, and weeping that Mrs. Bland’s mourning is doing and will continue to do is a means without an end: a kind of political practice that Agamben calls gesture. “What characterizes gesture,” writes Agamben, “is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported.”56 He goes on: “the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language; it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor’s improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak.”57 Mrs. Bland’s gestures of mourning are gags. Something cannot be figured out in language; tales are told but no one is listening, so speech has been rendered as noise or sound. The gestures of mourning thus do not bring anything about as direct consequence or effect, but register the supporting of the insupportable (“I can no more”) in flesh, sound, tears, and breath—sighs that “fly up, unnoted by the eyes of man.” Mrs. Bland’s last curious image of a sigh that no one sees is particularly interesting, as it suggests that sighing is a “ghostly matter” that is potentially visible but which might also be heard, or even felt. Indeed, the word “sigh” is ambiguously socio-political because it is “guttural” or “phonetic” (OED) language descended from the body; etymologically irreducible (from Middle English, sihe, or sighan from the verb sighe), it makes the sound it means. Sighing might therefore offer a clue to how André refigures haunting as a queer principle of descent along the lines Foucault suggests when he parses Nietzsche’s use of the term “descent” (Herkunft ) as “something that attaches itself to the body”: “It inscribes 56 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 57. 57 Ibid., 59.

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itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate bodies of those whose ancestors committed errors.”58 If the gesture of sighing marks the endurance of sorrow in the body, it may also give notice that we are descended from—possessed by—tragic griefs and errors not our own. The politics of sighing in this notion of descent are not gothic but uncanny because they cannot be entombed; the gesture of breathing is a basic condition of participation in the world. While André is a tragedy (and André’s is a tragedy) that centers on queer male love, Mrs. Bland’s susurrations thus indicate a tragic genealogy that endures and supports the common inheritance of grief through queer maternal lines. Mrs. Bland mourns for André, a son who is not her biological son, because her life and his are entangled in multiple ways: through her husband and her children, through her own ethical revulsion at André’s sentence, through the cruelty of an Enlightened liberal subject who neither hears tales nor sees sighs, and through the brutality of war “which hath made men rocks.” Mrs. Bland does not go home to weep— not yet. She comes back for Honora, who has nowhere to go: “Come, lady, home with me” (106). Honora replies: “Go home with thee? / Art thou my André’s mother? We will home / And rest, for thou art weary— very weary. [Leans on Mrs. Bland].” The “touching” kinship established here between women is ambiguous. Honora may lean on Mrs. Bland as mother, friend, or lover, but in any case, she accepts Mrs. Bland’s home as home. Yet their home will not be a cloister, and its rest will not be silent, or still. The nation will not be party to it. This home is unheimlich: a queer place of partying with the enemy where the grief of other peoples’ mothers for other peoples’ children and lovers will be endured and supported, sighed out for the re-haunting of the world.

58 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” [1971], The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 82 (my emphasis).

CHAPTER 5

Freedom and Other Everyday Objects: Black Petitionary Practice in Sierra Leone

1

Sensible Freedoms

In their 1795 annual report, after a lengthy itemization of expenditures and a weary account of trade, the Directors of the Sierra Leone Company reserve some space to express their dissatisfaction with the settlers in the new towns perched at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. The Directors are annoyed by a specific group of people they refer to as “the Nova Scotians” who, according to the report, are “rash and hasty in their judgments,” prone to making “vehement declamations […] in the public streets,” unreasonable, ungrateful, and attached to “false and absurd notions […] concerning their rights as freemen.”1 The Nova Scotians demand an increase in their wages. They nearly riot over the rising prices of dry goods. They insist that the Governor should be dismissed for watering down the whiskey (actually it was rum). In response to a Nova Scotian’s dismissal on the grounds that he was being “disrespectful to his superiors,” his fellow workers petitioned for a law decreeing that no one “working under the Company should ever be turned off in future” without a verdict from a jury of their peers (82). Bleating that this is no 1 An Account of the Colony of Sierra Leone, From Its First Establishment in 1793. Being the Substance of a Report Delivered to the Proprietors. Published by order of the Directors (London: James Philips, 1795), 80–81.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Stapely, Afterlives of the American Revolution, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51544-6_5

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way to make a profit, the Directors go on to say that the Nova Scotians’ “past lives” might offer some explanation for their behavior—for the Nova Scotians “were all of them at one time slaves” (86). The people to whom the Directors refer as “Nova Scotians” had only lived in Nova Scotia since 1783, the year that Anglo-American hostilities officially concluded with the Treaty of Paris. In that year, the British evacuated three thousand men, women, and children of African descent— almost all of them self-liberated from slavery or indenture—from New York to Nova Scotia as free persons. These refugees were among the estimated 80,000–100,000 people of African descent who fled enslavement during the war between Britain and the settler colonies.2 They formed part of the largest slave rebellion in what is now considered U.S. American history: one that has been silenced in U.S. historiography of the Revolutionary wars.3 Most often described today as “Black Loyalists,” those who were evacuated from New York in 1783 were among the tens of thousands of Black people who had responded to two British wartime proclamations—Dunmore’s Proclamation (November 7, 1775) and Clinton’s Philipsburg Proclamation (June 30, 1779)—that made conditional offers of freedom to the enslaved in exchange for services to the crown. Though the British later attempted to reclaim them on

2 Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker was the first to estimate the total number of enslaved people to have self-liberated during the war and to insist that the majority of those who opted for military service did so behind British lines. Aptheker’s conclusions were subsequently embraced and confirmed by the two historical studies to which this chapter is most indebted: Benjamin Quarles’s The Negro in the American Revolution (Williamsburg: Omohundro/UNCP, 1961) and Sylvia Frey’s Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 1526–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943). 3 See Gary Nash’s introduction to the 1996 reissue of Quarles’s Negro in the American Revolution, xiii–xxvi. U.S. historical treatments of the mass escapes of the enslaved during the Revolution were characterized until the 1940s by what Nash describes as a “combination of white indifference and strategic black myopia,” the latter due to early professional Black historians’ desire to leverage Black Patriot history in support of civil rights struggle. See also Karen Cook Bell, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Gary Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

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moral grounds, both proclamations were cynical deployments of emancipation as a weapon of warfare and a prosthesis for settler obedience.4 But if the British were trying to instrumentalize Black desires for freedom, the enslaved may have seen the proclamations as gambles worth taking for their own reasons—though they were by no means easy wagers. The tens of thousands of self-liberated Black people who fled for British lines frequently did so knowing that they might never see their friends and families again. Fugitives were often turned back, indentured, distributed as “prizes,” or sold back into slavery. If they remained with the British, they received no pay for their labor either as combatants or noncombatants and lived in overcrowded encampments separate from the white army and its retinue.5 Poorly provisioned and subject to horrendous labor conditions, Black refugees were highly susceptible to disease and died in the thousands. For those who survived this litany of horrors, “British freedom” would remain at best a tenuous proposition for decades afterward. But Black people who made their way to British lines nevertheless continued to pursue their freedoms in their own ways and to insist on their own terms as they moved around the Atlantic world. In Nova Scotia, they organized and wrote a petition to the British government in 1790 asking for redress on the grounds that the terms of their settlement had not been honored. The Pitt administration pressured Nova Scotia to fulfill the petitioners’ agreed-upon land allotments (a special point of contention for them) and at the same time offered to cover the cost of the journey for any refugees who wished to resettle in Sierra Leone, where another free Black settlement had been in place at Granville Town since 1787. Almost 1,200 of the “Nova Scotians” elected to leave Canada for West Africa. They set sail on January 15, 1792, and founded Freetown, Sierra Leone under the aegis of the newly incorporated Sierra Leone Company in February–March of the same year. This chapter is about the letters and petitions written by the free Black refugees who settled in Freetown, Sierra Leone between 1792 and 1800. These writings show how the refugees and their fellow Black, 4 Frey, Water from the Rock, 114. On British moral revisionism, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: Omohundro/ UNCP, 2006). 5 See Frey, Water from the Rock; Brown, Moral Capital, esp. Chapter 5; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution.

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lascar, and white neighbors at Granville Town resisted Company efforts to defraud and exploit them. Yet they are not merely documentary records of resistance. Rather, I argue that they deregulate prevailing late eighteenthcentury concepts of Revolutionary freedom by theorizing and enacting forms of collective association that find their coordinates in everyday experiences of need and want. The refugees write petitions about wages and quit-rents, but also to obtain food and household supplies. Their writings thus offer insight into the refugees’ revolutionary politics that is occluded by their inscription in preexisting narratives and partisan taxonomies of Revolutionary historiography. To date, historians have taken up this archive as evidence either that the refugees held democratic values picked up in the settler colonies, or (more commonly) that they were indeed “Black Loyalists,” a term which subordinates their manifold expressions of political desire to coercive British imperial authority.6 By contrast, this chapter approaches the refugees’ writings as theorizations of radical Black freedom whose politics cannot be delineated in ideological terms. Instead, their archive redefines what might constitute a revolutionary moment or movement—both in the eighteenth century and our own time—in excess of the Directors’ narrow understanding of “the political” in their 1795 report. In that report, the Directors contend that the experience of slavery has disposed the Nova Scotians to treat every expression of Company 6 For the former reading, see Fyfe, Introduction, Our Children Free and Happy, 1– 19; and Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: Putnam, 1976). For “Black Loyalist” histories of Sierra Leone, see Stephen J. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786– 1791 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995); Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles : American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011); John Pulis, ed., Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World (New York: Garland, 1999); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (London: Ebury/Random House, 2005). The “Black Loyalist” reading strongly emphasizes the refugees’ writings as evidence of that refugees “cherished [a] belief in themselves as dutiful subjects of the king.” Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 193. I follow Quarles’s line that state allegiance is inadequate to the history of Black Revolutionary insurgency: “The Negro’s role in the Revolution can best be understood by realizing that his major loyalty was not to a place or a people, but to a principle. [...] Whoever invoked the image of liberty, be he American or British, could count on a ready response from the Blacks.” Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, xxvii.

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authority as though it represents a serious threat to their freedom. When they were enslaved, write the Directors, They [the Nova Scotians] felt undoubtedly a strong sense of the peculiar hardships under which they labored, but it is probable they were little acquainted with the true nature of civil rights, or accustomed to think accurately about them: on the contrary, they may very naturally be supposed to have often confounded the unavoidable hardships of life, and the punishments needful in society, with all those other ills which a principle of arbitrary power imposes, and which it can signify little to those who are involved in a state of hopeless captivity particularly to discriminate.(87)

The Directors reason that the absence of freedom which slavery represents was so total that it has left the Nova Scotians unable to tell the difference between necessary and excessive limits on what the Directors call “self-interest”: between the forces that protect them and the forces that might not; or between the humdrum adversity that makes up the bulk of existence (the “unavoidable hardships of life”) and truly menacing assaults on personal liberty that merit vigorous resistance (“those other ills which a principle of arbitrary power imposes”). In other words, the Nova Scotians’ “false and absurd notions concerning their rights as freemen” manifest themselves, according to the Directors, as a “confusion […] dullness and inaccuracy of understanding” about the proper times and places for politics. As their comments make clear, the Directors perceive the refugees through the lens of Enlightened liberalism that I have been tracing throughout this book. In essence, the Directors’ complaint about the Nova Scotians is that they do not seem to understand the social contract; they do not appear to have internalized the logic that liberty necessitates “minor” forms of sacrifice and privation. The misunderstanding which the Directors attribute to the “Nova Scotian” refugees manifests in their language as a problem of indiscrimination: “confusion,” “dullness and inaccuracy of understanding,” “false and absurd notions.” These terms all suggest undisciplined failures to meet or observe epistemological boundary distinctions. The Directors’ grousing on this score is similar to when they complain of the Nova Scotians’ making “vehement declamations in the public streets.” In both instances, they imply that the refugees are doing or thinking improperly, out of place, at the wrong scale. Hence when the refugees declaim in the streets, sound exceeds its “appropriate” limits—and it therefore registers to the Directors as noise. The Directors’ perspective aligns with Jacques Rancière’s description of the police: “The essence of the police lies in a partition of the sensible that is characterized by the absence of void and of supplement: society here

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is made up of groups tied to specific modes of doing, to places in which these occupations are exercised, and to modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places” (my emphasis).7 Rancière argues that the function of the police is to regulate the parameters of the political, conceived as a domain of specialized activity that is separate from work, domesticity, and social life (each of which is also seen to be specific to itself). Such a concept is “tantamount to the pure and simple reduction of the political to the state” because it refers political power exclusively to the principle of the arkhê, which conflates the logic of commencement (the power to begin, to initiate) with the logic of commandment (the power to rule), as Derrida also notes.8 Like Derrida, Rancière observes that this reckoning of political power is rooted in tautology: “the partition that in fact forms the object of politics thus comes to be posited as its foundation.”9 In other words, this concept of the political stakes its legitimacy on the maintenance of categorical separations that its Founding is supposed to have established. I will return to this point below, as it pinpoints the teleological identification of revolution with the founding of law that I have antagonized across this book’s chapters. But Rancière’s account is broadly useful for my discussion here because it explains how the tautology that separates the political from other domains of experience depends upon the partition of the sensible: a term that connects questions of reason (what is available to thought), prudence (what is wise or practical), and sensory perception (what can be seen, felt, heard, tasted, and/or touched). Indeed, the Directors’ direct reference to the feelings of slavery—“they felt undoubtedly a strong sense of the peculiar hardships under which they labored”—is what sets off their rumination on the Nova Scotians’ supposedly problematic discernment of “the true nature of civil rights.”

7 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Stephen Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 44. 8 Rancière, “Ten Theses,” 36; 37–38. See also Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Erick Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For Rancière and others whose work has influenced my own in this chapter, Hannah Arendt is one of the most influential proponents of arkhê politics, particularly around the question of revolution. Arendt famously argues that the American Revolution was superior to the French Revolution on the grounds that the French made the mistake of attempting to address social questions politically. Neil Roberts does a terrific reading of Arendt with special emphasis on her thoughts (or lack thereof) on American slavery. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963); and Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 9 Rancière, “Ten Theses,” 36.

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The Directors of the Sierra Leone Company describe the Nova Scotians’ perception and management of freedom as perverse—they think the Nova Scotians overreact to minor concerns because they do not discriminate between what is really political and what is not. I suggest on the contrary that this quality in the refugees’ writings is exactly what marks those writings as revolutionary acts of political invention. Drawing on Rancière’s redefinition of politics as “an intervention in the visible and sayable,” I suggest in the following pages that the Sierra Leoneans’ use of petitionary forms and conventions undermine the Directors’ fundamental assumption that the political is a specialized domain of activity which is categorically distinct from other modes of relation.10 That is, they are indifferent to the rationalist Enlightened concept of the political that is supposed to be concerned exclusively with matters of citizenship, property, and representation; reducible to abstract questions of rights and allegiance; and unrelated to the contours of work and so-called “private” experience. Instead, the refugees’ use of petitionary forms and conventions—what I shall call their petitionary practice—consistently affirms that soap, rum, goats, paper, and salvaged wood have as much to do with freedom as land ownership, suffrage, and judicial process. Indeed, the “indiscriminate” combination of these concerns in the refugees’ writings also transforms concepts of right, property, and labor. By practicing petition in the twinned Black improvisatory spirit of making-up (imagination) and making-do (necessity), the refugees’ writings make ordinary needs and desires differently sensible as political concerns, and freedom differently sensible as an object of everyday life and struggle.11 ∗ ∗ ∗

10 Rancière, “Ten Theses,” 45. 11 This formulation and much of this chapter’s thinking is indebted to Fred Moten’s

extensive work on improvisational Black freedom, though (hopefully in a way he would approve) I can’t trace it all back to a single source. Let’s try: “It’s the ongoing event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin, replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion, the performance of the birth and rebirth of a new science, a phylogenetic fantasy that (dis)establishes genesis, the reproduction of blackness in and as (the) reproduction of black performance(s).” Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: UMinnesota Press, 2003), 14.

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To begin to understand how the refugees theorize freedom as an everyday object, we can look to moments in which the petitioners identify continuities between Company policy and their experiences of enslavement. In a long collective petition to the Chairman and Directors in 1793, the petitioners write that the acting governor, August William Dawes, “seems to wish to rule us just as bad as if we were all Slaves which we cannot bear.”12 They write to Thomas Clarkson in 1794 that “we wance did call it Free Town but since your Absence We have A Reason to call it a Town of Slavery.”13 And in another collective petition in 1795, they write to the Governor and colony council: “we yet do not know upon what footing we are upon wheather to be made Slaves or to only go by the name of Freedom.”14 In all these instances, the refugees are taking up petition as “an intervention in the visible and sayable” by challenging the Directors’ assumption that freedom and slavery are categorically distinct orders of experience—despite the fact (among many others) that Freetown and Granville Town were situated in clear sight of a slave fort on Bance Island in the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. Against the categorical assumptions of Company administration, the petitioners reveal that both freedom and slavery are contingencies that time and geography do not necessarily guarantee, and which words cannot reliably hold in place. The issue in the 1794 petition is precisely that the name of Freetown may no longer describe its reality. In 1795, the alternative between being “made slaves” and “go[ing] by the name of Freedom” breaks down on investigation because “the name of Freedom” is just a name. Freedom is antithetical to codification and escapes linguistic closure; it is what is mis apprehended by the name of Freedom. Hence “going by the name of Freedom” is a form of unfreedom, akin to being “made slaves.” This theorization of freedom contests the partition of the sensible that Rancière and Derrida describe as a function of the

12 [Petition and Representation of the Settlers at the New Colony of Sierra Leone, 26 October 1793], Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41,263, fols. 98–100), British Library. 13 [Luke Jordan, Jno Jordan, Moses Wilkinson, Rubin Simmons, America Tolbert, Isaac Anderson, Stephen Peters, Jas. Hutcherson, and A great Many more the Paper wont afford to John Clarkson], 19 November 1794, Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41263, fols. 114–115), British Library. 14 [Settlers to the Honourable Governor & Counsil of Sierra Leone], 22 April 1795, Christopher Fyfe, ed., Our Children Free and Happy: Letters from Black Settlers in Africa in the 1790s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 48.

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arkhê. Enlightened understandings of liberty split the mind from the body and are typically routed through ocularcentric valorizations of recognition, transparency, representation, and so forth. By contrast, the 1795 petitioners’ sense of freedom emerges as a fugitive quality that is glimpsed or overheard in the syntax of their statement but not captured by it. Freedom here is, in part, the ability to sense the differences between feelings and words: a “sensing” that the petitioners’ statement feels out in the texture of its illocution. Likewise, the sensual metaphorics of “footing” in their wording—“we yet do not know what footing we are upon”— evoke physical practice, signaling that freedom is embodied: an ongoing dance, or a flight on foot, in which they do not necessarily know what the next “step” will be. The refugees express freedom in such moments as what Fred Moten might describe as an improvisational process; or, in David Kazanjian’s terms, as “the continuing possibility of freedom, at once radically ungiven and recursively bound to the ways and fashions of unfreedom.”15 In all the instances I cited above, the petitioners are thus theorizing freedom as an experience that is felt from moment to moment, a doing or making that is in motion, rather than a having or being that is secured as a possession by name or law. This fugitive quality of freedom practice in the Sierra Leonean writings—their tendency to “fly” across the partitions of the sensible—is one of the reasons I have chosen to refer to the inhabitants of Freetown as refugees in this chapter, rather than by using partisan terminology (Black Loyalist), geographic nomenclatures (Sierra Leoneans or Nova Scotians), or the term settlers. This is not to deny that the inhabitants of Freetown and Granville Town were involved in a settler project in Sierra Leone, or that they identified themselves as settlers at different times. However, the participation of the refugees in the settlement of Sierra Leone was itself substantially un-free, negotiated for them by the very people who would systematically oppress them in the guise of protection across the 1790s. Moreover, refugee relations with the Indigenous Koya Temne were quite complex, as the refugees were on Temne land, and some Temne participated in the slave trade. While there is evidence that the refugees fought with the Temne on several occasions, there are other moments when refugees and Temne seem to have forged temporary alliances in order 15 Fred Moten, “come on, get it!,” The New Inquiry, 19 February 2018, https://the newinquiry.com/come_on_get_it/; Kazanjian, The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 111–112.

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to oppose Company authority.16 Without dismissing the significance of their embeddedness within a colonial structure of power in Sierra Leone, therefore, I would like to suggest that one of the supposed partitions the refugees were continuously negotiating was the highly porous interface between colonialism and slavery. ∗ ∗ ∗ Provisionality links the refugees’ sense(s) of freedom to the form of the petition, which itself is a typically provisional response to a problem without a codified solution. Petition eschews strictly formalist accountings; it could be described as a rhetorical scenario rather than a set of formal conventions per se. An ancient rhetoric of appeal with close associations to prayer, the petition is traditionally a tactic of last resort: one that is taken up when access is blocked or the usual channels are unresponsive, somewhere near or beyond the limits of the law. In part for these reasons, petitioning was widespread in the late eighteenthcentury Atlantic world.17 African Americans collectively petitioned the Massachusetts Assembly on four separate occasions in the 1770s, and Belinda Sutton famously (and successfully) petitioned the Massachusetts

16 A prominent instance was in 1794–1795 when a French ship burned the Company warehouse. The Koya Temne appear to have participated in the refugees’ raids, and Nathaniel Snowball and James Hutcherson moved to Pirate’s Bay with a breakaway group of refugees in the aftermath. In 1796, Snowball and Hutcherson write that they moved to their new site with King Jimmy’s permission. This may indicate that there were independent lines of communication between the refugees and the Temne, and perhaps that the refugees recognized Temne sovereignty, as the Company tried Snowball and Hutcherson for unjust occupation of Company land. A jury of their peers refused to convict them. [Nathaniel Snowball and James Hutcherson to John Clarkson], 24 May 1796, Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41263, fol. 129), British Library. 17 In a world of very limited enfranchisement before and after the democratic revolutions, petition was integral to European imperial governance in the Americas. It is protected as a right in the U.S. Constitution (1789) and the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (1789). Miguel Dantas da Cruz, “Introduction: Atlantic Petitionary Traditions and Developments,” Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840: Empires, Revolutions and Social Movements (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 11. See also Daniel Carpenter, Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).

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General Court for reparations in 1783.18 Non-written forms of petition also show up at major Revolutionary flashpoints, for instance in the Women’s March on Versailles (October 1789), which was set off by bread prices, and at the opening of the Haitian Revolution in the Bois Caïman (August 1791), whose Vodou ceremony resonates with the petitionary strand of prayer. Differently than in these examples, the Sierra Leonean refugees practice petition on a minor scale for almost a decade, across the breadth of their 1790s archive, and they do not invoke petition as a means to a “major” revolutionary end or through codified discourses of rights and duties. I use the term practice after Michel de Certeau, by way of Saidiya Hartman and Derrick Spires, in order to highlight the petitioners’ innovative uses and re-uses of the petitionary convention: ones that are surprising, that break with certain kinds of expectation, even as they exploit something encoded in the form in order to reach new insights.19 In this vein, I see the refugees’ petitioning as a collective, iterative process that continually (re)invents Black freedom as an everyday object, a way of doing things, rather than a possession (having) or identity (being). The Sierra Leonean refugees’ petitionary practice may thus operate along lines that Saidiya Hartman suggests in her discussion of “the subterranean politics of the enslaved.”20 Hartman preempts Rancière’s discussion of the politics of 18 For Belinda’s petition, see Roy E. Finkelbine, “Belinda’s Petition: Reparations for Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 64.1 (2007): 95– 104; Belinda Sutton, “Belinda’s Petition” [1782 & 1787], Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions, eds. Lisa L. Moore, Joanna Brooks, and Carole Wigginton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 186–189. For Black petitions in Massachusetts, see Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 169–213; Howard Zinn, ed., Voices of the People’s History of the United States (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 54–57. 19 Michel De Certeau theorizes everyday practices as tactical “ways of operating” (m¯ etis )

in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix. My use of the term “practice” aligns in many ways with those of Saidiya Hartman in her discussion of “subterranean politics,” and of Derrick Spires’s “practice of citizenship.” I depart from Spires’s concern with citizenship, however. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford, 1997); Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 20 Hartman defines subterranean politics as “small-scale and everyday forms of resistance [that] interrupted, re-elaborated, and defied the constraints of everyday life under slavery and exploited openings in the system for the use of the enslaved.” Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 51.

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dissensus by many years, noting that majoritarian concepts of the political as a site of power with a “proper locus” make the freedom practices of the oppressed invisible.21 Hartman’s insight sharpens the stakes of my provocation that we should read the refugees’ petitioning as theoretical work in its own right. I see this as essential for countering the erasure of Black revolutionary struggle in Revolutionary historiography on the American war and in the wider Atlantic world. Indeed, because the refugees’ archive has only been read up to this point as historical evidence of either liberal democratic or “Black Loyalist” influences, their work has been evaluated “in terms of appropriation and reaction, not creation.”22 Both interpretations are liable to the same patronizing dismissal expressed by Christopher Fyfe, the editor of the only published edition of the refugees’ writings, who remarks in his introduction that their use of petitions “demonstrate[s] clearly that they understood the political concepts and vocabulary of contemporary Britain and America and could use them to maintain their own interests. It also illustrates that they were familiar with the formal style of submitting petitions to authority usual at the period.”23 The refugees’ petitions have thus not been seen as innovative works which theorize and reframe the politics of revolution, but rather as remedial objects around which a preexisting Revolutionary narrative must continue to be spun. The very desire to grant representation to the refugees within existing political taxonomies of liberal Revolutionary historiography thus tacitly relegates the creative power of Black political desires, imaginative expressions, and spiritual promptings to the zone of the unthinkable, which I invoke after Michel-Rolph Trouillot to indicate “that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives.”24 This clarifies the connection of U.S. nationalist Revolutionary narrative to the limitations of the liberal Enlightened account of modernity which undergirds it.

21 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 61. 22 Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 39. The handling of the refugees’ writings as

historical evidence has tended to render them textually inert as supposed reflections of Anglo-American political ideologies. They are also subject to the assumption that the refugees’ understanding of petitionary form, as well as their concepts of freedom, are derivations of implicitly superior European precedent. 23 Fyfe, Introduction, Our Children Free and Happy, 7 (my emphases). 24 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 82.

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Indeed, the historiographical vanishing act around Sierra Leone unfolds on a Eurocentric pattern of Enlightened universalism that many scholars have critiqued in the context of the Haitian Revolution for its occlusion of Black revolutionary thought and action.25 In that vein, the scripts of recovery around the Sierra Leonean refugees could be described as tropes of “erasure and banalization” akin to what Trouillot calls “formulas of silence” in Western historiography on Haiti.26 Nine years after Sierra Leone became a crown colony in 1800, the British governor made this connection himself when he referred to Sierra Leoneans as “negro sans-culottes ” who use even the name of Freetown for “purposes of insubordination and rebellion”: a comparison that evokes Haiti’s Black Jacobins in the conspicuous failure to acknowledge them.27 Sibylle Fischer locates such disavowal within “the ascendancy of a modernity that could be claimed only by Europeans”: one which relegates racial oppression “to the realm of the moral or of social policy [where it] appears to be, from the hegemonic point of view, out of reach for revolutionary action.”28 In one way, the refugees’ writings expose how the partisan terms of U.S. nationalist“ Revolutionary history (Patriot/Black Loyalist”) work to exclude and contain Black insurgency within epistemologies of state governance. But as the refugees journey into the Atlantic basin, they also

25 See for instance Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution [1963] (New York: Vintage, 1989); Kazanjian, The Brink of Freedom; Fred Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” CR: The New Centennial Review 4.2 (2004): 269–310; David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Trouillot, Silencing the Past. 26 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 96. 27 [Thomas Perronet Thompson to Castlereagh, February 8, 17 1809], qtd. in Pybus,

Epic Journeys of Freedom, 205. Thompson’s comment is an associative tangle. In one way, it draws a connection between white working-class and Black struggle which, in the context of the Napoleonic wars, identifies both as “French” enemies of the British state. Yet the comparison also seems to substitute (white) class for (Black) race, drawing on the metonymic association between the French and Haitian Revolutions while activating the Reign of Terror (in which the sans-culottes played a prominent role) as a screen memory for Haitian victories over European forces. 28 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 37.

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lay bare the connections between U.S. nationalist Revolutionary historiography and the entire liberal framework within which revolution is examined in the eighteenth century. When Revolution is narrated, in liberal terms, as a progressive movement toward legal authority (arkhê), Revolutionary action belongs to the exceptional time of the state. It cannot be an everyday object; it cannot take any but a proprietary subject as its protagonist; it cannot be rooted in embodied and material histories of need or want; and its sense of political legitimacy must always be sutured by law. Revolution on this reckoning is nothing more than the narrative of governance, and “governance cannot know what might be shared, what might be mutual, what might be in common.”29 The refugees keep faith with what is lost in that account, and there is thus a chance in their work to ponder alternative routes that revolutionary time might still take.

2

Fit to Be Seen

The oldest senses of petition in English (from Latin, petitio—to ask or beg) retain the grain of the voice and a sense of embodied immediacy: “the action of formally asking, begging, supplicating, or humbly requesting”; and “a supplication or prayer […] esp. a solemn and humble prayer to the Deity, or to a sovereign or superior” (OED). Classically, petitions stage dramatic scenes of entreaty in which a supplicant addresses an aloof figure of authority with a heady mixture of deference and urgency. However, the association of petition with “begging” is somewhat misleading, as it obscures the degree to which this form is rhetorical, and therefore concerned with persuasion. Petitions do not simply ask; they make arguments. But because they are, to use de Certeau’s words, “an art of the weak” against the strong, petitionary arguments can be very subtle matters of tone and attitude, unpicking the seams between demand and appeasement—and usually tailored to the hearing of their auditors.30 Late eighteenth-century petitions to the authority of the crown are thus typically preoccupied with the enactment of deference, which can paradoxically persuade through the observation and acclamation of power

29 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 66. 30 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37.

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differentials. In this mode, petition and propitiation are closely aligned, for instance in the petition to Massachusetts Governor Hutchinson signed “FELIX” on behalf of “many slaves” (January 1773), which makes no specific demands and only asks him to take “their [the enslaved’s] unhappy State and Condition under your wise and just Consideration.”31 Conversely, natural rights discourse affords much more assertive arguments, since rights can form preemptive grounds of approval, as in a 1777 petition to the Massachusetts Assembly signed by “A Great Number of Blackes”: “Your petitioners apprehend that they have in Common with all other men a Natural and Unalienable Right to that freedom which the Grat Parent of the Universe that Bestowed equally on all menkind.”32 Each petition is rhetorically calculated to its moment, adjusting to the shift in settler discourses of the subject from a monarchical to a liberal model in order to obtain redress. While they experiment with elements of these approaches at different times, the Freetown refugees’ writings do not conform to either of the patterns above. In part, this has to do with whom they were addressing and under what auspices. In the 1790s, Sierra Leone was not a crown colony. Granville Town up the river began as a philanthropic experiment, but after 1790 both it and Freetown were run by a British corporation, the Sierra Leone Company, as a proprietary venture.33 Thus the refugees address white people in their writings who were culturally British representatives of Company governance under British law, but not agents of the crown. Although the refugees work through petitionary addresses,

31 Zinn, ed., Voices of the People’s History of the United States, 54. 32 Ibid., 57. 33 The settlement at Granville Town, up the river, was spearheaded by the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor (CRBP) in London, and had been founded as a philanthropic abolitionist venture by the St. George’s Bay Company. Its land was purchased from the Koya Temne in 1787 by Company agents. However, the Temne believed that they were making a lease agreement, not a permanent sale of property. When the Koya named a new ruler, King Jimmy, Company-Temne relations deteriorated for several years before King Jimmy burned Granville Town to the ground in 1790. After 1790, the St. George’s Bay Company reincorporated as the Sierra Leone Company—now a proprietary venture—and sent Alexander Falconbridge (a former slave ship’s surgeon) as its representative to renegotiate the terms of the land deal. It was under the terms of that agreement that the refugees arriving from Nova Scotia founded Freetown in 1792. The refugees were not party to any of these transactions.

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they were not obliged to modulate their claims within terms either of monarchy or liberal democracy, and they consistently elect to do neither. In 1792, Susana Smith petitioned John Clarkson, the governor of Sierra Leone, for soap (Fig. 1).34 Smith neither performs loyalty nor calls on natural rights. Ordinary need and the discomfort it creates form the basis of her request and the rationale for its approval: Sierra Leone May 12, 1792 Sir I your hum bel Servent begs the faver of your Excelence to See if you will Please to Let me hav Som Sope for I am in great want of Some I have not had aney Since I hav bin to this plais I hav bin Sick and I want to git Som Sope verry much to wash my family Clos for we are not fit to be Sean for dirt. Your hum bel Servet

Susana Smith

Smith establishes that Clarkson has the power to grant her request by hailing him as “your Excelence” and identifying herself twice as his “hum bel Servent”—so there is some deference here, and hence the implied argument that Clarkson should grant Smith’s request because he can. But Smith rests the bulk of her case on the repeated articulation of necessity. Her petition insistently restates small-scale need, discomfort, and desire, so that the entire composition becomes a sequence of expressive material absences that form their own collective justification for redress, like bubbles gurgling out of the page. Smith achieves this effect because her syntax is calculated to defer external reasoning. Her first use of a subordinate because clause (“for I am in great want of some”) plays on the double resonance of “want” as both lack and desire, so that where Clarkson might perhaps have expected to receive an abstract justification for Smith’s request, what he gets instead is the sound of need’s uncompartmentalized proliferation: the intonation of want as verb and adjective, description and argument, cause and effect. Smith then defers the next because clause (“for we are not fit to be Sean for dirt”) to the very end of her petition, so that temporally and grammatically, she obliges Clarkson to tarry in the possibility that he should redress her and her family’s need for soap for 34 [Letter from Susana Smith to John Clarkson], 12 May 1792, SLEO_0001_0005_ 0001_0001, Sierra Leone Collection (Box 1, folder 5), Special Collections and University Archives, UIC Library.

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Fig. 1 Letter from Susana Smith to John Clarkson, 12 May 1792 (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission)

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no reason other than that it is repetitively unmet. They should get soap because they want soap. Smith’s petition thus confounds the distinction between means and ends; her request is at once pragmatic and theoretical in its demonstration that the need for soap traverses the segmentation of political/economic/ domestic life. As I hear her, Smith does not simply nominate soap as a political concern (i.e., demand that it is or ought to be politically visible). Rather, she asks a speculative question about the conditions of possibility for political visibility as such. What is the nature of life before the entrance into political recognition, before one is “fit to be Sean”? While it is possible to read her formulation in terms of respectability politics, in some ways I wonder if that isn’t part of the point Smith makes here, since she calls attention to the fact that, even in Freetown, the domain of citizenship concerns (recognition, representation, rights) transpire within a political frame of legibility that is premised on the internal exclusion and disappearance of Black women’s labor.35 She might thus be said to deregulate the notion of freedom as an exclusive citizenship concern by exposing its dependency on her work. Indeed, Smith troubles the notion of visibility itself as the basis for political recognition, shifting freedom into the improvisational terrain of necessity by bringing her family into view as a function of their ordinary encumbrance by “Dirt” that needs cleaning, rather than through abstract (and certainly not individual) rights and duties. In so doing, Smith makes it possible to feel freedom differently in the cut across partitions of the sensible, as a movement whose very possibility is encompassed by the diurnal rhythm of Black women’s care for their families’ bodily needs and wants. Again, as I hear her, Smith does not precisely appeal for a re-valuation of her work or its liberation from domesticity per

35 As many Black feminist thinkers have discussed, this insight runs very deep in Black feminist consciousness due to the double capture of Black women’s labor and reproductive power under slavery. The public/private split was never a mystified object in that experience. See for instance Patricia Hill Collins, “Work, Family, and Black Women’s Oppression,” Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 45–67; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861] (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009); Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229.

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se.36 Rather, her petition makes the existing value of her labor sensible in excess of the politics of governance and capitalist economics by showing that it was never domestically enclosed to begin with. Freedom in fact does not happen when and where it is thought to happen in a masculinist European framework—out there, in “public,” alone—because it is an irreducibly social process that could not even make it out of the front door without Black women’s labor. Freedom has everything to do with laundry. Just as she insists on sociality in advance and excess of political recognition, Smith makes it possible to consider revolution as a recursive micro-temporality of the everyday. Neither restoration nor singular “birth,” revolutionary action is palpable in her petition through her family’s daily rushing out and back in again, a cycle of beginning and resting and beginning again: wear, wash, dry, repeat. This suggests that crossing the threshold into the symbolic domains of work and politics, if such a thing can ever truly be said to occur, most certainly does not occur in a unilinear way. From Smith’s standpoint, everyone comes home at night to melt back into maternal bodies that hold, clothe, wash, and feed them. The materiality of soap is therefore also both theoretical and pragmatic, as its routine disappearance offers a reference point for the temporality of struggle that Smith evokes. Soap continually diminishes through use and must therefore continually be sought out, yet the need for it cannot be abolished by a Founding of Soap, a soap for all of time. Smith’s evocation of daily movement backward and forward, around and around, of using up and starting over, thus dissolves the notion of the origin (arkhê) in a Black maternal vision of the mundane depletions and replenishments which sustain ongoingness. In this way, Smith suggests a metonymic link between soap and what Christie Pearson, in her discussion of Janine Antoni’s soap sculptures, calls “the liquid gifts of maternal excess”: milk, fat, blood, and marrow.37 Soap makes Smith’s labor tangible as exhausting work that literally drains her body, and at the 36 Smith was a formerly enslaved Black woman who may at one time have been forbidden to care for her own family; her relationship to uncompensated reproductive labor in Freetown could thus have been its own complex, everyday process of feeling out the differences between freedom and unfreedom at the intersections of classed, raced, gendered, sexual, and anticolonial struggle. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement” [1977], Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). 37 Christie Paulson, The Architecture of Bathing: Body, Landscape, Art (Boston: MIT Press, 2020), 44. See also Francis Ponge, who takes an ecstatic line on soap as gift: “What

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same time identifies that labor as a source of renewal. Smith’s own waxing and waning thus becomes sensible as the throb of a debt that cannot be repaid.38 The manner of Smith’s address to Clarkson implicates him in this awareness. This particular petition is unusual among the refugees’ petitions in that it is individually authored by a woman. It has an air of intimacy which is enhanced by the petite size of the paper Smith used, and what seems to be Smith’s own delicate handwriting, carefully compressed in the top half of the sheet (Fig. 1). In material terms alone, Smith’s request embodies a continuity between the letter and the petition that is present across the refugees’ writings. But in Smith’s case, the overlap of something that looks and feels like a personal epistle with a petitionary request underlines her overt challenge to the compartmentalization of domestic Black feminine labor from the political. This is of course evinced by the fact that she petitioned the governor directly for laundry soap in the first place. But the manner in which she calls to him also makes it impossible for Clarkson fully to parse his duty to Smith in his capacity as governor from his obligation to her as a social being. In other words, by hailing him in this way, she punctures the split within Clarkson’s own identity which secures his entitlement to rule (arkhê): the separation of public persona from private person. In my reading, she accomplishes this to a considerable degree simply by calling attention to his discretionary power over soap. Allow me to explain. Clarkson was obsessed with hygiene. An abolitionist and Royal Navy officer, he had been with the refugees in Nova Scotia since October 1791 and sailed with them to Sierra Leone in 1792. Clarkson meticulously planned that journey, implementing a schedule for scrupulous washing and cleaning in an effort to ensure that the trip did not recall the Middle Passage. As Simon Schama relates: “There were to be three daily sweeps of, and between, decks. […] the lower decks were to utter enthusiasm in the gift of itself! What generosity!” Ponge, Soap [1967], trans. Lane Dunlop (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 38 I am reading Smith as offering a Black feminist expression of what Moten and Harney describe as the “bad debt” of the Black radical tradition. “This debt attached to those who through dumb insolence or nocturnal plans ran away without leaving, left without getting out. This debt got shared with anyone whose soul was sought for labor power, whose spirit was borne with a price marking it. And it is still shared, never credited and never abiding credit, a debt you play, a debt you walk, and debt you love.” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons, 64.

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be swabbed three times a week in the mornings (to give time for drying) with vinegar scalded by a hot iron […] for effective fumigation. Every day that the weather permitted, bedding was to be aired on deck, and two days a week were to be allowed for washing of clothes.”39 Smith had made this journey. She was well aware that Clarkson already thought about cleanliness in politicized terms. That does not of course mean that Smith’s own need for soap in May of 1792 was any less pressing, but it informs the radical critique of her address. With this context in mind, Smith’s request demonstrates that Company governance is internal to her home by virtue of Clarkson’s discretion over soap. She calls Clarkson into her space by pointing out that he was there all along. Smith thus summons Clarkson to account in more than one way. Her exposure of her need to Clarkson exposes his neglect in bringing it about. As governor, the dirt and the soap are his problem—and moreover, they are his problem in a way that makes him responsible for producing a set of conditions in Freetown that Clarkson himself identifies with racial abjection. Smith’s petition might be heard as a refusal to accept privatized shame or judgment for “Dirt” as a coefficient of Black female domesticity. By the same turn, she offers an analysis of the conditions that create what Clarkson perceives as the stigma of racialized “dirtiness,” which she seems to locate in the linkage between Clarkson’s governance and capitalist economics. Clarkson’s partitioned entitlement to rule articulates with his control over the disbursal of soap. Why is soap locked up away from Smith in the first place, when she requires it to meet fundamental needs? By what principle of right is a necessity held captive as a commodity? Inside the appeal, there may be an invitation to acknowledge the laundry cycle as an exhausting but not exhaustive process of life held and cared for in common. Clarkson could help to kick it off again in that spirit, replenishing Smith’s store and piling up a blessing on her gift of gifts. But Smith’s petition also devastates the whole notion of order that Clarkson represents by indicting the concurrence between Enlightened governance, colonial possession, and white heteropatriarchy as principles of accumulation and of hoarding which inhibit people and things from freely circulating. When she calls his attention to her seemingly “minor”

39 Simon Schama, Rough Crossings, 354.

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need for soap, Smith thus makes a virtuoso demonstration of the foundations of Clarkson’s white masculinist entitlement in racial capital, showing how near a little thing like soap might be to slavery, or freedom.

3

A Number of Us

As a rhetoric of entreaty, petition is concerned with the embodied and aural dimensions of pleading—“the action of formally asking.” This is a form that is preoccupied with listening, and one that has longstanding associations with polyvocality. The etymological history of the word “petition” includes at least two frictional strains. From the fourteenth century, it seems to derive from Old French, peticion, “request or prayer.” However, the Latin root peticionem is more complicated; it means “a blow, thrust, attack” or “seeking, searching.” Petition thus seems to be double throated: one begging or beseeching, and the other attacking and seeking. I suggest above that we hear that duality in Susana Smith’s address to Clarkson, in which she ends up escorting him off the premises of his identity. And I would offer here that petition’s fierce proficiency in this kind of coup is a function of its (seeming) meekness as an appeal, rather than of its latent capacity to become a demand. The distinction is important for drawing out the relationship of petition to sovereignty. The demand is “an act of asking by virtue of right or authority; an authoritative or peremptory request or claim” (OED), from Latin, de—formally + mandare—to order. This word is strongly identified with power, and in its first meaning (“by virtue of right”) with legally secured recognition, which situates it in the realm of politics with a proper locus. Fred Moten notes in The Undercommons that demand is tied up with “acced[ing] to the authority of the state to either grant or refuse your request, after the fact of having recognized your standing, your right to request.”40 The demand thus emphasizes legitimacy and singularity in a kind of oedipalized shouting match with the state: “The properly authorized and authoritative speech of a demand takes the form of a univocal, single speech.” By contrast, Moten suggests in this same conversation that there is another understanding of the claim that is “from some kind of multiphonic delirium or fantasy that undermines the univocal authority of sovereignty,” which he associates with the pealing

40 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 135.

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in “ap-peal” and “cacophony.”41 This is the strand in which I locate the refugees’ Black petitionary appeal, a word whose etymology also speaks of the bell’s apotropaic power (from Latin, ad—away + pellare—to drive). Like Moten, I am interested in how the undoing of sovereignty travels in the collectivized ringing of petitionary appeal’s “call for help” (OED). The refugees’ writings are always appeals, even when they’re not; and their appeals are always collectively voiced, even when they aren’t. It is not possible to separate letters from petitions categorically in this archive. Even taking into account that the “privacy” of personal letters did not necessarily obtain in the eighteenth century, the refugees’ letters to Clarkson after he left the colony in late 1792 are openly communal scenes of address through which all sorts of things pass and voices speak in close conjunction. For instance, halfway through his letter to Clarkson from January 16, 1798, Boston King breaks off from talking about the refugees’ deteriorating relationship with the Company to write: Mr Anderson Moses Wilkerson & Stven Peters join me to you And all of your People as many as I was dare to show your letter to and the Cry of all is O! that God would fabour them one more with your present. the Hat I have gave to Mr Domingo & he turn you many thanks for it & Gave his sarvast to you & Mrs Clarkson. Dear Sir I think of sining one small box of fly to Mr Withbread if you think it will be excepable to him & one bottle of sandepey.42

King’s letter is a jostling social occasion that moves between various calls and shouts, from the quartet King forms with Anderson, Wilkerson, and Peters (as though they just walked into the room); to “the cry of all”—O!—in a direct petition for Clarkson’s return to service; to Mr. Domingo’s suddenly intimate thanks for a hat; and, finally, King’s own voice on the matter of some snuff for Mr. Whitbread. The bell of the appeal is perched beautifully in the midst of this cacophony as its collective enunciation (“O!”), the reverberation of unnumbered voices shuddering out across scales, making bedfellows of a governor and a box of snuff. As Moten suggests, the “multiphonic delirium or fantasy” of the appeal breaks down the partitioned singularity of Clarkson’s sovereignty, 41 Ibid. 42 [Letter from Boston King to John Clarkson], 16 January 1798, Clarkson Papers

(Add. MS 41263, fols. 149–50), British Library.

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in part by wishing him otherwise as a gift of time, “your present.” But the refugees also ring him with clamor as an everyday thing among other things. In so doing they shake him out of himself and put him back into circulation, banishing the evil of his individualism. Where the refugees’ letters channel many voices, their petitions are literally collectivized, though they do not always look it. Petitions that are signed by one person in the refugees’ archive always ask for help in a situation that involves at least one other person, and usually more. Daniel Cary writes to Clarkson on June 16, 1792, “to informed you that I should wished to get married this afternoon if it is not unconvenient to you to do it for me.”43 On May 15, 1792, Richard Dickson finds “a yong man that is agreeable to take part of the children To school them” and petitions Clarkson for a salary: “What you will allow him to school them Pr year.”44 However, single authorship is unusual in the refugees’ archive; even letters that are signed by one person can be collaboratively written. Often, the refugees’ writings are signed by one person who is acting in an agreedupon capacity as a spokesperson for a group, or they are signed by a group who speaks collectively in the body of the petition. The “we” of the petitions does not, however, speak univocally—this is not the sovereign “we” of the demand or of the state. From the outset, the refugees who sailed from Nova Scotia in 1792 seem to have used petition iteratively to experiment with the shape of “we” that was moving together but also changing and recomposing, moving around. “We” depends a lot on who is talking, when, and why— toward which everyday object. The earliest of the refugees’ writings date from before they embarked for Freetown in late December 1791. The very earliest appeals for togetherness itself: To the Honble Mr Clarkson Agent to the Sierra Leona Society. Whereas a Number of us Formerly Where Inhabitants of Birch Town near Shelburne Nova Scotia, But now intending under your Inspection to imbarque to Sierra Leona – Would Therefore humbly Solicit that on our arrival You will be pleased to settle us as near as Possible To the inhabitants of Preston, as they and us Are intimately acquaint’d—so in order to Render 43 [Daniel Cary to John Clarkson, 16 June 1792], SLEO_0001_0005_0000_0010, Sierra Leone Collection (Box 1, folder 5), Special Collections and University Archives, UIC Library. 44 [Richard Dickson to John Clarkson], 15 May 1792, Sierra Leone Collection (Box 1, folder 5), Special Collections and University Archives, UIC Library.

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us Unanimous, would be glad to be As Nearly Connected as possible When the Tract or Tracts of Land shall be Laid out […]45

These petitioners’ self-description registers movement as it is happening, at the moment when “now” teeters between “formerly” and “intending.” But looking behind them, “a Number of us” don’t see a fixed point of origin, only time measured in relative distances. The past participle is a place “Where” dwelling was approximate: Birch Town near Shelburne (close enough) and Preston (too far away). It doesn’t seem to be important to settle the question of who “us” is or where they came from. What matters is who they want to get with, and if in the land of intending they can get a little closer, bringing “intimately acquaint’d” within range of “Nearly Connected.” In its roots, distance is a “standing apart” that carries the sense of discord, as in a lack of harmony that pains the heart— or, in musical terms, “a chord requiring resolution by another.” Distance is the dissonance of being out of each other’s hearing. A Number of us seem to say that freedom is a resonance which overruns the broken syntax of space (an apartness where one thing must follow another) with the simultaneous lifting of voices: “in order to Render us Unanimous.” This petitionary theorization of Black freedom undermines the narrative of arkhê sovereignty from multiple directions. The itinerary of freedom that the petitioners imagine is relentlessly social; it has neither a proper locus nor a proper person and is not strung temporally between a point of inception and a conclusion in independence. Freedom is precisely the ongoing and collective struggle against separation that perturbs false unities of origin and outcome. Just as the refugees’ sense of the past is about relative distances, their sense of unanimity is not the rationalist liberal democratic ideal of procedural single-mindedness: “an opinion, decision, or vote of full agreement,” or “of persons: of one mind or opinion, agreed” (OED). This understanding of unanimity is premised on the translation of its Latin root, animus, as “mind,” but that is a partitioned understanding of the term. At its most fundamental, animus is “the life-giving aspect which animates a thing,” and it has a huge range of associations whose oldest etymological roots talk of spirits: wind, breath,

45 [Petition from the Inhabitants of Birch Town, November 1791(?)], Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41262A, fol. 23), British Library.

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and soul. Along these lines, the refugees evoke unanimity across the partitions of the sensible as a congress of souls in which “consensus is the idea […] that what the flesh does and emotive disposition […] entangle with and produce each other.”46 Unanimity, we might say, is an effort to harmonize with one another, and therefore is not simply about striking the same note at the same time. This in turn implies a practice that is open-ended: an asymptotic movement toward convergence, an effort to get how they feel for each other in better touch with feeling together, a continuous rehearsal. In other words, this practice of freedom sounds to me a lot like the way Ashon T. Crawley describes his writing and music as “playing the same thing but constantly reaching for chords and arpeggios that could say that sameness with difference.”47 The Birch Town petitioners seem to be asking a question about the basis for collective organization—what is it that holds “us” together? But that question is posed and, I think, answered by a chorus of voices whose “we” does not invoke itself through the demand as a subject of governance (“the people”). This “we” arrives, rather, through the appeal’s refutation of singularity. A Number of us and the former inhabitants of Preston are irreducibly plural, and not available to abstract political representation as such. In fact, throughout their 1790s writings, the refugees remain disinterested in pinning themselves down in that way. In 1792, for instance, they call themselves “we the humble pittioners we the Black pepol that Came from novascotia to this place under our agent John Clarkson.”48 Later that same year, they refer to themselves as “we the Children of faith,” “[Mr Bebrote’s] Dear and Sinceir Children of Faith,” and “We the Chldren of St John New brumswick.”49 In the very long collective petition they sent to the Company Directors in 1793, they call

46 Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 47. 47 Ashon T. Crawley, The Lonely Letters (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 6. 48 [Letter from Black Petitioners to John Clarkson], 28 November 1792, SLEO_0001_

0005_0015_0001, Sierra Leone Collection (Box 1, folder 5), Special Collections and University Archives, UIC Library. 49 [Beverhout Company to John Clarkson], 11 December 1792, Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41262A, fol. 209–10), British Library.

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themselves “the Black Settlers of this Place.”50 In 1795, a group of petitioners self-describe as “the people of the Mathodist connection that are calld people of a ranglesome nature.”51 Even in this small selection of examples, the refugees invoke faith, Blackness, movement across space and time, place of dwelling, and disposition or values as common ground. While each of these identifications is meaningful and important, they do not seem either separately or in combination to exhaust the petitioners’ identities. Because the refugees also decline to invoke abstract political rights and duties in such moments, they jam the signal of any attempt to frame or recognize, and thus to govern, them within a singular rubric of authority. The appeal of the former inhabitants of Birch Town also undermines “the univocal authority of sovereignty” because its multiphonic movements undo the idea of a beginning on which law is founded (arkhê). Instead, a Number of us and the former inhabitants of Preston are togethered in the revolutionary time of rehearsal, moved by a desire to move closer together—as near as possible—in the rhythm of breath’s intake and expenditure. The formulation they offer for this, “so in order to Render us Unanimous,” also indicates that their movement toward one another, which looks like it advances forward through time, is in fact an attempt to get back to something. To render is “to give back” (from Latin, re—give + dare—back), and bears associations with performance and representation through recitation and translation. In this sense, the ongoing rehearsal might travel “back” to a place before or against the origin in which word and flesh, sign and sound, have not been partitioned.52 Congregating and dispersing, composing and rearranging, a Number of us seem to sense freedom as if it Where a song. ∗ ∗ ∗ 50 [Petition in behalf of all the Settlers in this Place to Chairman and Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, 30 October 1793], Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41263, fols. 98–100), British Library. 51 “Sundry Settlers to Governor and Council of Sierra Leone,” 16 April 1795, Fyfe, ed., Our Children Free and Happy, 45. 52 Moten refers to this as improvisation’s “ongoing event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin.” As I understand it, this is not a sort of prelapsarian fantasy. Rather, a Number of us and Smith both seem to be talking about the social continuousness of life with itself in advance and in spite of its partition by an originating sovereignty, or the idea of a beginning. Moten, In the Break, 14.

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The multiphonic quality of appeal in the refugees’ writings connects the critique of governance to the relationship of commoditized theories of value and the theory of the sign that Moten describes in the opening to In the Break.53 Indeed, a Number of us’s theorization of unanimity addresses the importance of what Moten calls “the essential materiality,” or “phonic substance,” of language directly, in its explicit concern with the movement of sound through breath that is continuously traversing partitions of the sensible. This sense of intrinsic value is palpable across the refugees’ petitionary practice, where the multisensory and collective substance of thinking, speaking, and moving is inscribed in the materiality of writing itself. The Black radicalism of the refugees’ petitionary theorization of freedom is inseparable from a sense of language as a kind of “thing” that is in physical contact with the body: held in and passed through mouths, ears, and hands. But there is also a sense that embodied and material entities themselves speak—and speak with the eloquence of a presence that is always in passing, on the move. For instance, because there were many literacies in Freetown, and not all of them disposed to writing, the testimonium clause “witness our hands” at the end of collectively authored petitions acquires resonance in excess of convention (Fig. 2).54 There are many other such moments. Broken seals that have bitten out parts of pages and sentences; ink spots spattered in haste across a page; the impression of Richard Crankipore’s thumbprint in the first cry of “Joy” (“I gave your Joy honer Joy and god Bless you”) that he sends to Clarkson in 1793 (Fig. 3).55 The mark of the hand testifies across these examples in a literal sense. The hand which speaks, composes, interrupts, spills, and impresses is something other than a synecdoche for the body or a mute instrument of the mind, and its assertion is therefore inextricable from the refugees’ ongoing contestation of the horror of racial capital, which systematically reduces Black life along both of these axes. The expressivity of hands, ink, seals, and paper along with and inseparably from the polyvocal quality of the refugees’ petitionary practice also suggests a trajectory for revolutionary thought and action that does not aspire to the abstract legibility of the universal 53 See Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” In the Break, 1–24. 54 “Letter from 28 Settlers to John Clarkson,” 19 November 1792, SLEO_0001_

0005_0003, Sierra Leone Collection (Box 1, folder 5), Special Collections and University Archives, UIC Library. 55 [Letter from Richard Crankipore to John Clarkson, June (?) 1793], SLEO_0001_ 0005_0016_0001, Sierra Leone Collection (Box 1, folder 5), Special Collections and University Archives, UIC Library.

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sign, but which ap-peals (un-animus-ly) through the sound of things in motion.

4

To Care of That Ruin

The refugees began to clash with the Sierra Leone Company almost as soon as they arrived in Freetown because they had fundamentally incompatible views of economic fairness. The Company was a proprietary colonial corporation. It wanted to make a profit and regarded the refugees as both labor and captive consumers to that end. Indeed, the Company was at the same time the principal landowner, employer, and importer/exporter in Sierra Leone; it controlled wages, quit-rents, and the commodity prices of all goods that were not made or grown in Freetown, which were warehoused and sold from the Company stores. Conversely, the refugees had arrived in Freetown in the good faith belief that this was to be a free Black space in which, as their petitionary practice attests, they could create something for themselves. They do not seem to have been opposed to any form of property, but they had all been enslaved or indentured and then instrumentalized during the war. They knew very well the value of their labor, and they vigorously countered the Company’s efforts to exploit them.56 The refugees’ recursive negotiation of their experience in Freetown was underscored by the close proximity of the Bance Island slavers to Freetown and Granville Town. The slave fort was a source of constant concern, particularly after August Dawes and Zachary Macaulay took over the administration of the settlements from John Clarkson in 1793. Dawes 56 The refugees were supported in this effort by the strength of their social organization. Those who traveled from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792 were self-organized by congregation: Baptist (led by David George) and Methodist (led by Daddy Moses Wilkinson). The churches were independent of Company authority, and as a result they may have provided spaces in which the refugees could collectivize in order to resist Company policy. In addition, Freetown had a structure of micro-democratic representation that handled matters in the colony which did not pertain to trade. Heads of households voted in annual elections for tithingmen (one per ten households) and hundredors (one per ten tithingmen). Under normal circumstances, heads of household were male by default—but in Freetown, this did not necessarily have to be the case. If a household had lost its men to war, disease, or recapture (as many of them had), women became heads of household and were entitled to full voting rights in consequence. Women in Sierra Leone may have been the first to vote for public office anywhere in the Revolutionary Atlantic world, in Sierra Leone’s 1792 election.

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Fig. 2 Letter from twenty-eight settlers to John Clarkson, 28 November 1792, signature page (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission)

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Fig. 3 Letter from Richard Crankipore to John Clarkson, 1793 (detail) (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission)

appears to have been an avaricious disciplinarian who did everything with an eye for the bottom line; Macaulay, his second-in-command, was a zealous former plantation overseer. Under their watch, slavers harassed the refugees at the wharf with impunity. Luke Jordan and Isaac Anderson write of this in a letter to Clarkson: “a captain of a Slave Ship […] came in here on his way home & began to threaten some of the people working at the wharf & saying in what manner he would use them if he had them in the West Indies And some of the people told him if he came there

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to abuse them they would not allow it & on that account the Governor thought proper to turn them from the Company’s service.”57 This last word, “service,” was a core axis of the refugees’ standoff with the Company. Company administrators appear to have thought about service in strictly transactional terms, as a structure of debt and credit, that amounted to a hierarchical imposition of obedience. This goes back to Britain’s approach to Black fugitives during the war. British “protection” in the 1770s turned on the violent instrumentalization of Black desires for freedom. After 1782, as well, British command used the refugees to cast Britain’s wartime record of emancipation in humanitarian terms and to deal a parting financial blow to the settler colonists by absconding with their supposed lost property.58 British discourses of Black freedom in the 1780s–1790s pathologically insist upon identifying Black refugees in terms of racial capital. This is sharply illuminated, for instance, by The Book of Negroes, a ledger kept by the British during the evacuations from New York in 1782–1783 which uses formal and descriptive taxonomies that frame the refugees as potential chattel through their readiness for work, though its ostensible purpose was to collect evidence of each refugee’s claim to freedom.59 The structuring logics of this record imagine Black freedom as a calculus of imperial subjection that is founded in the identification of Blackness with potentially serviceable labor. In contrast, the refugees seem to articulate Blackness through “the networks of affiliation” produced through and by their petitionary practice.60 The refugees in Sierra Leone refer to themselves as “Black Pepol” at several points in the petitions. Yet I would suggest that the meanings of Blackness and whiteness in their writings are elaborated through a theory of power: one that has to do with the identification of whiteness with 57 [Luke Jordan and Isaac Anderson to John Clarkson], 28 June 1794, Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41263, fol. 112), British Library. 58 In a meeting on the subject with George Washington, on May 6, 1783, Sir Guy Carleton refused point-blank to return Black men, women, and children into American custody who had entered the ranks under promises of freedom, as he claimed this would constitute a “dishonourable Violation of the public Faith.” Washington’s self-liberated former bondsman, Harry Washington, sailed to Nova Scotia in July 1783, and from there to Freetown in 1792. Qtd. in Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 168. 59 The Book of Negroes, Public Records Office (PRO 30/55/100), National Archives,

Kew. 60 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 59.

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acquisitive ambition and exploitative structures of labor and justice. In a petition from 1792, for instance, the refugees set conditions on the forms of service they are willing to undertake in relation to the Company: “we are all willing to be govern by the laws of England in full but we donot Consent to gave it in to your honer hands with out haven any of our own Culler in it.” In particular, they press for mixed representation on juries: “when theur war aney trial thear should by a jurey of both white and Black and all should be equel so we Consideren all this think that we have a wright to Chuse men that we think proper for to act for us in a reasnenble manner.”61 When Company-refugee relations completely broke down in 1799–1800, the refugees submitted a list of grievances to the Governor and Council in which they stated, “we cannot get justice from the White people.”62 “A White man,” they write, “will always follow a Blackman Because it is for their own ends they expects gains Because we are ignorant.”63 In the above examples, I suggest that whiteness appears as a vector of unequal access to education, unscrupulous deployments of legal formality, and obsessive concerns with profit that come at the expense of Black life. But neither whiteness nor Blackness on this accounting is reducible to phenotype or descent. Indeed, Sierra Leone was not homogeneously Black even by those standards. Some of the people living in Granville Town were white, working-class British women who had come to Sierra Leone with refugee spouses or partners. Others were lascars from South and Southeast Asia who had come to London in the 1780s as mariners or servants of East India Company officials.64 White and lascar people seem

61 [Beverhout Company to John Clarkson], 26 June 1792, SLEO_0001_0005_0008, Sierra Leone Collection (Box 1, folder 5), Special Collections and University Archives, UIC Library. 62 [Nathaniel Wansey, Hundredors and Tythingmen to Governor and Council of Sierra Leone], 13 February 1800, Fyfe, ed., Our Children, 60–61. 63 Ibid., 62. 64 Granville Town was different than Freetown in that it had been founded as a result

of Granville Sharp’s work with the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor (CRBP) in order to address the plight of London’s urban “Black poor” in London during the 1770s– 1780s. The term “Black poor” comprised a motley group: veteran mariners and fugitives of African descent who arrived in the capital on British ships, East Indian lascars, and white working-class women. The “Black poor” were in a double bind in 1780s London. Often unable to find work due to racial prejudice, lascars and Black people did not qualify for parish support through the Poor Laws because they could not claim a parish

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to have been included without exception as “Propriatives of the Colenny” in the Resolutions published by the hundredors and tythingmen in 1799: “the Nova Scotia who com with Mr Clarkston adjoining the Granville People with them.” In a similar way to the hailing of all Haitians by “la dénomination génériques de noirs [the generic appellation of blacks]” in the 1805 Haitian Constitution, the Sierra Leonean refugees in 1799– 1800 thus seem to have adopted Blackness as a political rather than a biological mode of relation.65 In this way, Blackness presents an alternative to partitioned Enlightened governance, as it expressly politicizes socio-economic experiences of injustice which arkhê governance segregates from rationalist political recognition and debate. For the same reason, Blackness in the refugees’ petitionary practice may describe a way of relating to or thinking about things as distinct from commodity fetishism or transactional economics. Indeed, I would suggest that that Blackness emerges across the petitions in part as the knowledge that things can be used and inhabited differently than they are “supposed” to be at a given place or time, unsettling the concept of the proper in property. Blackness may thus be a way of describing the creative power of re-purposing that moves across partitions (and petitions) in the refugees’ archives. That possibility is illustrated in the aftermath of a serious confrontation between the refugees and the Company in 1794–95, when a French ship attacked Freetown and burned the Company stores. The refugees refused to douse the fire in protest, as the Company was gouging prices and turning people out of employment for non-compliance. While the warehouse burned, the refugees saved what they could from the flames, at which point the Company accused them of theft. The Company likewise accused the refugees of stealing when they gathered French jetsam from the waves for their own use. In a collective petition they wrote to the Governor and Council following this incident, the refugees write: “we do not think the Company is the loosers of what property was taken – for

of origin. Olaudah Equiano was briefly involved with this project. Stephen J. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786–1791 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 32–33; and Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African: Written by Himself [1789] (New York: Penguin, 2003), 226–231. 65 For an excellent discussion of how this pertains to the problem of universalism and particularity, see Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 232–234.

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we raly think that we are the Distressors.”66 In context, the refugees are protesting that the goods they salvaged were jettisoned by the French in the course of the raid, and thus it is they and not the Company who stand to lose; they are distressed. But it is also possible to hear them saying that what the Company insists on viewing as a loss is in fact a “loosing,” or freeing up of things into circulation, which the refugees’ effect in their capacity as Distressors. Indeed, “distress” comes from the Latin, distringere – “to stretch apart.” As a description of a collective, Distressors thus traverse the partition between pulling apart and pulling together because they are bound by stretching. Unexpectedly, perhaps, Distressing seems to emerge in this way as a multivalent figure for care, as it describes what it is to have common cares, what it is to care for one another, and what it is to redress common care methodologically by en-commoning it further— drawing what produces care into care. Distressing may also proffer a way of talking about how the refugees use form (by stretching it), and how they talk about material things (by putting them to ordinary use), as manifestations of care. This is a paradoxical possibility, but I think an important one. What if it was possible to care for stretched things by stretching them differently, or addressing them with care because they are stretched and not in spite of it? What if we cared for things in their distress, which is to say, what if the stretching of things beyond the bounds of propriety was full of “interdicted, outlawed social life”?67 In the aftermath of the French attack on Company stores, a group of petitioners including Luke Jordan, Moses Wilkinson, and “A great many More the Paper wont afford” wrote a letter to John Clarkson about the injustice of the Company’s accusation that the refugees’ pulling of goods from the fire constituted theft.68 A great Many more offer up a countertheory of property as preservation: […] if any man see Aplace is to be Destroyed by fire and Run the Risk of his life to care of that Ruin Afore it is Destroyed do you not think

66 [Settlers to Governor and Council of Sierra Leone Company], 22 April 1795, Fyfe,

ed., Our Children, 47–48. 67 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons, 93. 68 [Luke Jordan, Moses Wilkinson, Jno Jordan, Isaac Anderson, Rubin Simmons,

Stephen Peters, America Tolbert, Jas. Hutcherson, and A great many More the Paper wont afford to John Clarkson], 19 November 1794, Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41263, fols. 114–15), British Library.

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the Protector of these articles have a just right to these property altho the Articles is not of much Consequence which is a few Boards and one little Notion A Nother.

A great Many more are playing with the right to salvage, a maritime law of ancient standing, which does indeed entitle a salvor to compensation for volunteering their aid in a salvage operation according to a principle of fairness. The right to salvage, however, has no recognized application on land, which is exactly how the petitioners are adapting it here—by likening fire to waves. Importantly, the right to salvage is also not covered by contract law even when at sea; the whole claim of salvage rests on the fact that the salvor had no prior right to, investment in, or responsibility for the things they help to save in advance of those things’ rescue. A great Many more thus elaborate a theory of property ownership that has neither a proper origin nor a proper locus, but is instead gleaned through an aleatory act of service in a world of things that call for help. A great Many more are thus bound to their salvage not by abstract right or lordship, but as Distressors. Note their beautiful formulation, “to care of that Ruin.” A great Many more do not rescue what they rescue from the flames because it has a great deal of commodifiable value. They save things that do not have “much Consequence”: “a few Boards and one little Notion A Nother.” Their use of the word “notion” to describe some of their salvaged goods suggests that A great Many more’s act of service is an affirmation that things retain multiple and simultaneous values in their ruination, in excess of their exchange value, as things.69 Part of what they have saved is an inkling of invention—the possibility for things to be otherwise through their stretching than they might be at present.70 A great Many more thus seem to be talking about a form of value that is not covered by the Marxist account—neither exchange value nor precisely use value, but re-use value: a speculative concern in which the value of a thing is at the same time intrinsic and yet-to-be-decided. The nature of their claim to salvage thus 69 My use of the term “thing” is drawn from Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing, trans. W.B. Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch (South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, 1967); “The Thing” [1971], Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperPerennial), 163–184. 70 Drawing from Heidegger, Brown argues that commodities can become things again by ceasing to work “properly” or being put to different use. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–22.

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clearly rejects the terms of alienation and exploitation that underwrite capitalist narratives of ownership, but it also eschews the romance of original craftsmanship. It is difficult to talk about what A great Many more are claiming here in terms of ownership—they call it care, which has a double edge, as it suggests that they empathize with what they save as careworn subjects, while also addressing them as objects that merit care-full attention. The claim rests on the ongoing possibility of renewal, beginning again and again, instead of making from scratch. Indeed, “to care of that Ruin afore it is Destroyed” implies a cosmology in which everything is always in the process of being unmade and remade: one in which there is no such thing as nothing. A great Many more’s emphasis on care calls attention to the current affection that runs through the petitioners’ invocations of service. It seems that service can set commodified exchange off its axis, producing other kinds of relationship to property through the ordinary distresses of living and working. A meditation on this issue appears in a 1798 letter from Isaac Anderson to Clarkson that is written in Boston King’s handwriting (another instance in which alphabetic literacy itself is being shared as a service among the refugees).71 Anderson relates: I have sent Your Hond a small Barrl of Rice Of my own produce, which I hope your Hond will Except of for it is said Thou shall not mushel the ox that Treadet out the Corn & If so how much More is Your Hond ought to be Estened More them an ox hond have sheaw the same affection with ous all in this Place as well as in Amarica then for in all thing it is Rasonable that the Husbanman ought first to Pertak of the Fruth.

Anderson refers in this passage to Deuteronomy 25:4, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox while he treadeth out the corn.” This passage has been interpreted as a defense of the rights of laboring animals, but it has been extrapolated more generally to cover the fair compensation of all labor.72 The scripture is not explicit about the nature of the handler’s obligation to un-muzzle the ox, but Anderson is: he reads the original prohibition of

71 [Isaac Anderson to John Clarkson] 21 January 1798, Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41263, fol. 151), British Library. 72 The scripture is interpreted to be about compensation in a proverb in 1 Corinthians 9:9 and in 1 Timothy 5:18—“For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, the labourer is worthy of his reward” (KJV).

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Deuteronomy as a rule of affection and respect for the ox’s labor, and thus an allowance for her to “Pertak of the Fruth.” In his letter, Anderson tells Clarkson that he is sending Clarkson a barrel of rice “of my own produce” because Anderson wishes to honor Clarkson as the husbandman of the rice, in the specific sense that Clarkson “have sheaw the same affection with ous all in this Place as well as in Amarica.” Due to the original orthography of the letter, it is not entirely clear whether Anderson is drawing a connection between Clarkson and an ox or an ox-handler, but either way, Anderson theorizes the rights of labor as being inextricably bound up with affection in a manner that disrupts the proprietary logics of governance, traveling across the partitions between economic and social life to create a different sense of freedom as a process of sharing. Here, the produce of labor belongs to those who introduce esteem into work so that it can become pleasurable as mutual service.73 This means that produce belongs to everyone (and everything) involved in service; it belongs to the ox and to the ox-handler as well as to the corn and to those who eat the corn, because they are all mutually bound through the affection that makes service possible. Anderson thus honors Clarkson because he shared affection and respect with the refugees, helping to make labor into a bond of love, and rice into edible esteem. In contrast to racial capitalist constructions of Black serviceability, then, the refugees’ petitionary practice re-signifies service as a mutual and reciprocal relation connected by non-transactional forms of exchange. Service also moves in ways that reorganize the sensorium of freedom. In Anderson’s letter, service has a haptic quality, evoking freedom through physical work and the sharing of food. Elsewhere in the refugees’ writings, service is entangled with good listening as a necessary precondition for justice. 73 The original orthography of the letter makes Anderson’s central conceit tricky to parse: “If so how much More is Your Hond ought to be Estened More them an ox

hond have sheaw the same affection with us [...].” This line can be read in two ways. The similar spelling of Hond and “hond” suggests that may both be abbreviated forms of “honoured,” in which case the line might read, “how much more does your Honour deserve to be Esteemed than an ox [for your] Honor has shown the same affection with us.” Another possibility is that “hond” reads as “hand,” in which case the line might read, “how much more does your Honour deserve to be Esteemed, more than an ox-hand, [for] having shown the same affection with us.” Anderson is loosely aligning Clarkson either with the ox or the ox handler, and the refugees either with the corn or the ox, though it is important that he introduces a qualification of scale—“how much more”— which clarifies that no one is being directly compared to an animal. The commonality is the affection that is shown in each instance.

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In 1793, Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson attempted without success to lodge a long collective petition with the Company directors in London. Having been turned away at the door, they write to Clarkson: […] they [the Company] will not give us any answer but send us back like Fools and we are certain Sir that if they serve us so that the Company will lose their Colony as nothing kept the People quiet but the thoughts that when the Company heard their grievances they would see Justice done them—and we should be sorry any thing bad should happen but we are afraid if the Company does not see Justice done to us they will not have Justice done to them so we want to see you very much as we think you wish us so well that you could keep us from being wronged if you can We are Hond . Sir Your Obedt Serts Isaac Anderson Cato Perkins74

The bad service Anderson and Perkins receive from the Company manifests here as a refusal to listen that forecloses collectively negotiated realizations of justice across partitions of the sensible. Indeed, Anderson and Perkins note that the only reason the refugees have held their peace is because they assumed the relay between the service of listening and the justice of seeing was intact: “when the Company heard their grievances they would see Justice done to them.” But now that they have not been heard, justice will be seen one way or another—and we begin to hear the sovereignty-undoing multiplicity of the appeal at this point, where the stab of petition articulates with entreaty: “we are afraid if the Company does not see Justice done to us they will not have justice done to them.” By the end of this petition, the conventional valediction, “your obedient servants,” has acquired a decidedly subversive tonality, chiming as both threat and solicitation. The petitionary sense of service shifts it from a univocal, top-down requirement to a polyvocal, multidirectional movement, with implications for the way in which the refugees’ writings theorize what it means to be a servant. Indeed, the term “servant” in the eighteenth century has a troubled relationship with the word “slave,” for which it is sometimes 74 [Isaac Anderson and Cato Perkins to John Clarkson] 9 November 1793, Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41263, fol. 105), British Library. My emphases.

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substituted. This happens, for instance, in Scipio Moorhead’s frontispiece engraving of Phillis Wheatley in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), where Phillis is described as the “Negro Servant to John Wheatley, of Boston.” The choice of this term calls attention to the substitutive violence of the synonym, which links the horror of the displacements encoded in Phillis Wheatley’s names (nomen) to John Wheatley’s claim to the proper locus “of Boston” (nomos ). But there is also a suggestion in the frontispiece that power may not have a fixed abode in service. Constrained on all sides by John Wheatley, who coils around her like a ligature, Phillis nevertheless may serve God and the Muses and be served by them in turn, as she can hear things in what the enslaver mistakes for his language that deterritorialize the frame of his domination. The ap-peal is present in Wheatley’s frontispiece in her petitionary attitude of devotional service through prayer (she was also published by A. Bell). Likewise, the refugees in Sierra Leone often sign off their writings with a variation of the formula, “bound to pray.” This appears, for instance, in the valediction of Andrew Moor’s petition of 1792, “your Memorialist as in Dutey bound Shall Ever Pray” (Fig. 4).75 It also appears toward the close of the long petition that Anderson and Perkins carried to London in 1793, which the Company refused to hear: “And if your Honours will take compassion on us and look into our Case and see us done Justice by we will always pray to God to bless you and everything belonging to you and we will let or Children know the good you do us that they may Pray for you after it please God to call our Souls.”76 In one very important way, the petitioners are modeling service here as a reciprocal exchange of good hearings: if they are listened to, they will see justice and make some noise with the Lord. One could say that the conditional is transactional as a quid pro quo, a linear movement that binds the petitioners and their children to a future time of continual obligation. However, the close relationship of “prayer” with petition suggests that in fact “as in duty bound to pray” is circular in the context of a petitionary 75 [Andrew Moor to John Clarkson, 24 August 1792], SLEO 0001_0005_0002, Sierra Leone Collection (Box 1, folder 5), Special Collections and University Archives, UIC Library. 76 [Petition in behalf of all the Settlers in this Place to the Chairman and Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, 30 October 1793], Clarkson Papers (Add. MS 41263, fols. 98–100), British Library.

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request. If the petitioners’ appeal is answered, then they will be bound to make more appeals, and thus regenerate their own petitionary freedom practice by asking and receiving without beginning or end.

5

Desire to Now

In 1799–1800, the refugees broke from Company authority, and their elected officials issued a set of Resolutions overseeing some of the affairs in the colony. In 1800, they affixed a Paper of Laws to the door of Abram Smith’s house. Both documents seem to start from the middle of things. The Resolutions of 1799 launch directly into a discussion of lot maintenance, setting a timeline for cutting grass.77 The 1800 Paper of Laws opens with a prohibition against the artificial scarcity produced by hoarding—no one is to “deny the Settlers of any thing that is to be exposed of in the Colony”—and sets price points on comestibles such as palm oil, salt, beef, and rum.78 In other words, the refugees’ abiding concern with everyday objects runs through what we have perhaps been conditioned to recognize as the “major” revolutionary moment of Freetown in 1800. But at this point the Company violently suppressed what they pleased to call a rebellion with the help of five hundred Jamaican maroon warriors who arrived in the colony in the fall of that year.79 Many of the refugees were jailed. Two men were hanged: Frank Patrick and Isaac Anderson, co-author of the treatise on the esteem of oxen. The last petition attributed to Anderson is an unsigned request for compassionate release from Company custody: September Sunday Mr Ludlow Sir we we de sire to now wether you will let our Mends out if not turn out the womans and Chill dren80

77 [Resolutions of the Hundredors and Tythingmen], 31 August-7 September 1799, Fyfe, ed., Our Children Free and Happy, 59–60. 78 “Paper of Laws stuck up at Abram Smith’s house by the Hundredors and Tythingmen,” 3 September 1800, ibid., 63–64. 79 The maroons had been deported by the British from Jamaica, where they fought in the Second Maroon War. They were held in isolation from the refugees and were not told why they were protesting. Later, the maroons, too, came to resist Company policies— particularly the quit-rents that had been a source of contention almost from the moment that the refugees from Nova Scotia had arrived in 1792. 80 “Isaac Anderson, unsigned, undated,” Fyfe, Our Children Free and Happy, 65.

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Fig. 4 Petition from Andrew Moor to John Clarkson, 24 August 1792 (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission)

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The Company used this appeal as evidence against Anderson’s life. They did not have the power to prosecute him for treason because the Company was not a crown colony. As a result, they tried him on a technicality: “he [Anderson] was charged with one of the numerous statutory offences which under English law at that date carried the death penalty—sending an anonymous and threatening letter to the governor.”81 Derrida writes that “the archive should call into question the coming of the future.”82 According to the majoritarian liberal teleology of Revolution which concludes with independence, the refugees’ insurgency in Freetown in 1800 appears as a “failed” uprising because in the liberal narrative, revolution is an exceptional eventfulness whose legitimacy is state-sanctioned. But in the refugees’ petitionary practice, freedom does not have a beginning or an end; it is continually rebooting on a microtemporal scale. The insurgency in 1800 was an outflow of that process, which did indeed go on. It may even be heard in the appeal above, in the (re)petition of the collective pronoun “we we,” a doubling up of the numberless who want to know but also to start again (“de sire to now”) in the middle of things. The refugees’ archive may thus call the future into question, as Derrida suggests, by questioning the future politics of Revolution as a narrative of governance. Indeed, that sense of beginning and beginning again in the refugees’ desire to now evokes what Irvin Hunt calls “sustained incipience”: a “continuous recommencement” in which “the ends toward which political actors worked were always already met as soon as the work began, but because the beginning did not cease, the very notion of […] a politics of ends, was thrown into question.”83 Hunt’s theory of sustained incipience helps to wrestle the shape and ambitions of revolutionary time from the narrative of governance (arkhê) because it could be described as the form that time takes in a political practice which is not oriented toward closure. When freedom is not a being or having but an improvisational doing and re-doing, or when petitioning generates even more petitioning whether or not one receives an answer, it may become possible to think, do, and read revolutionary 81 Fyfe, Our Children Free and Happy, 78. 82 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 33–34. 83 Irvin Hunt, Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (Chapel Hill: UNCP, 2022), 38, 21.

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history on terms that are not bound to the judgments or fantasies of state power. As I understand it in the refugees’ archive, this mode of time is emphatically not organized around a developmental narrative of “birth” as a point of origin. However, Hunt makes a curious remark that the rebeginnings of sustained incipience are “about birth as a state of being.”84 And this, I think, is something that the refugees bear out. There is a counter-intuitive sense across the refugees’ petitions that want is a principle of abundance. The appeal’s affirmation of multiplicity seems in fact to call it forth, or perhaps to set it loose, as on August 24, 1792, when Andrew Moor petitioned because his wife had given birth, and she and their daughter were hungry (Fig. 4). Moor’s petition is a little supernova that seems to make ordinary want sensible as an excess of dearth which drives the creativity of its appeal. Moor uses a whole sheet of paper, investing Clarkson with the styles of royal governors in a flourish of munificence that summons kingly generosity to his service: To the Right Honourable John Clarkeson Esq Captan Generall and Commander in Chief In and Over the Free Colony of Searra Leone and Its Dependancys and Vice-Admaral of the Same etc etc Whareas your Honours Memorilist Andrew Moors Wife being brought to bed this morning and Delivered of a Daughter and now Stands in need of Some Nourishment for her and the Child your Excellancys Memorialist begeth that out your Humanity Geantle Goodness you Will take it Int your honours Considaration to Give Orders that She and the Child have some Nourishmen Such as Oat meal Molassis or Shugger a Little Wine and Spirits and Some Nut mig and your Memorialist as in Dutey bound Shall Ever Pray NB and one lb Candles for Light

His wife and daughter’s hunger seems to unleash a proliferation of energies in Moor’s petition, an ecstasy of wanting that celebrates and enacts the re-birth of everyday desire—from the ink spots trailing the top margin, to the lavish header and its elaborate etceteras, to the nota bene for a pound of candles (“and another thing!”). Pouring out top and bottom, Moor’s appeal quakes with the surfeit of love. Nourishment is invoked twice, the second time setting off a shower of wishes over “She and the Child” which tumble near the bottom of the page. Asking seems to energize Moor to ask again, for more and for better. This movement happens almost in real time, tracking through the connectors between items in his wish list. The first modest request (for oatmeal) quickly gives way to rarer things: sweetness splits and doubles (molasses or sugar), then a riot of ands tears off at a pace: wine and spirits and nutmeg and more 84 Ibid., 21.

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appeals…and candles for light. Moor’s header seems to suggest that in this cascade we might hear the ringing of things in a world without origin beginning and beginning again. Etcetera etcetera! (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5 Etc etc. Detail from Moor’s petition to Clarkson, 24 August 1792 (Source Sierra Leone Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois Chicago. Published by permission)

CHAPTER 6

Coda: Returning, Remaining

The design of the Liberty Bell Center (LBC) in Philadelphia in many ways encapsulates the problems with the narrativization of the Revolution that this book addresses—and, though unintentionally, helps to outline some of the alternative directions for revolutionary thought and movement it attempts to describe. Opened in 2003 as part of the National Park Service’s (NPS) redesign of Independence Mall, the new LBC is a long pavilion set along 6th Street between Market and Chestnut. The structure is processional. Conceived as a three-dimensional timeline, it leads its visitors through U.S. national history as a linear march of progress that culminates with the bell as a triumphant symbol of U.S. liberal democratic values. Every aspect of Bernard Cywinski’s architecture enforces this trajectory. Visitors enter from a single door at the north end of the pavilion and process toward the bell past a series of exhibits which illustrate its history and the correction of U.S. liberty’s “flaws” by way of suffrage, civil rights, and gay liberation. They then reach the bell—and the only exit—at the corner of 6th and Chestnut. The floor plane is not graded flat; rather, it follows the natural incline of the site from north to south, which posits the experience of progress as an organic relationship between forward motion and uplift, or “rise.” This produces a sense of anticipation that is enhanced by the careful control of sightlines to the bell, which is obscured until the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Stapely, Afterlives of the American Revolution, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51544-6_6

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last moment by the sinuous free-standing wall to visitors’ right and the exhibits on their left, as well as by the fact that the double-height volume containing the bell itself twists off the center axis of the pavilion to the southeast. The bell is thus disclosed at last as a revelation in more than one sense. Visitors encounter it bathed in natural light and framed before a glass curtain wall that looks out across Chestnut Street to the former Pennsylvania State House, now known as “Independence Hall.” Like the liberal narrative of the American Revolution as the birth of the U.S. nation-state, the LBC is a laborious contrivance which struggles to stage-manage the evidence it summons in support of its thesis. For one thing, the bell’s induction into the reliquary of Revolutionary U.S. national freedom—like the invention of the American Revolution itself—was a retrospective development, in this case dating to the middle of the nineteenth century.1 For another, the most salient feature of the bell is that it is damaged beyond repair. It is therefore held in place as a symbol of Revolutionary U.S. democratic idealism by gymnastic feats of magical thinking. Just as the pavilion’s climactic presentation of the bell conjures a metonymy with a Revolutionary point of origin that is historically unfounded, so too does the bell’s relentless presentation as a metaphor for U.S. democracy’s “perfectibility” wrench irremediable dysfunction into the sign and promise of its opposite. The contortions required for these operations are literalized in the pavilion’s design, which breaks its neck to turn visitors’ heads toward the desired reading. The LBC thus encourages its visitors not to encounter the bell as it is or has been, but to fantasize it symbolically as it never was so that it may continue to signify for what it never can be. The LBC’s inculcation of this enchanted leap from fallacy to redemption may be its core civic function. After all, displacement lies at the heart of U.S. liberal democracy’s project of incorporation via inclusion—and, by the same token, of its first and dearest dream of world domination.2 1 There is no evidence that the bell was rung at the signing or reading of the Declaration of Independence (July 4 and 8, 1776), or that it was a symbol of whiggish colonial opposition in the American War. Its inscription is taken from Leviticus 25:10, a scripture about jubilee that was widely interpreted as a reference to Pennsylvania’s religious (read: non-denominational Christian) freedom until the 1830s, when it was taken up by white abolitionists as a talisman of anti-slavery struggle. Associations with the Revolution date roughly from the 1840s. 2 I draw here on Jodi A. Byrd’s insight about the twinship of enchantment and colonial possession: “The state of enchantment was ultimately the rational plan to empty lands of

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If I may be allowed the architectural conceit, the LBC pavilion helps to illustrate the dehistoricizing violence of the liberal teleology binding Revolutionary time to U.S. national history which this book seeks to challenge. As I argue in the foregoing pages, that teleology warps what it purports to include. The ideological premise that the bell is (or “ought to be…”) an exultant symbol of U.S. national democracy is asserted with such force at the LBC that it becomes very difficult to see it—to insist on seeing it—as a broken object that may raise more interesting questions in its resistance to narratives of progress and symbolic repair than otherwise. Indeed, I have suggested that such questions are raised by the broken bells of Charlotte Temple’ s allegories (Chapter 2) and John André’s tragedies (Chapter 4), both of which dissect and deplore the losses entailed in the “rise” of liberal modernity even for those who stood to reap many of its privileges. While those chapters share the book’s overarching concern with the minor revolutionary politics of non-narrative form and counter-modern temporalities, part of what is at stake for me in their arguments is the chance to defamiliarize some of the terrain on which cultural studies of the “early U.S. republic” have been built. I would underline two points on that score. First, it seems to me essential to demonstrate that the nationalist account of the American Revolution is internally incoherent—that it is not in fact especially descriptive of “its own” archive—both to gain a clearer picture of the cultural politics of Revolutionary history, and in order to ward off a new historical synthesis, whether in the shape of a defensive withdrawal to the phantasmatic purity of tradition or of a diversified and reconsolidated master narrative. As Susan Howe writes, “when we move through the positivism of literary canons and master narratives, we consign ourselves to the legitimation of power, chains of inertia, an apparatus of capture.”3 In that spirit, this book argues for the uprisings of revolutionary remains, not the reform of the processes that produced them. Second, Early American Studies has been shaped by Revolutionary historiography so pervaded by presence via the discourse of terra nullius in order to refill them with British imperial law.” Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 22. Inside the LBC, three engraved milestones along the right freestanding wall mark the bell’s history in exceptionalist terms from colonial artifact (The Pennsylvania State House’s Bell), to national property (America’s Liberty Bell), to world power (The World’s Symbol for Liberty). 3 Howe, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 46.

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the teleological expectation of the U.S. nation-state that it has become almost an unconscious symptom of the field, to the extent that it can interfere with our ability as scholars to approach our archives on different terms, or indeed to perceive constituencies and politics that do not fall within its purview. As in the LBC pavilion, we may not always notice that this narrative is a carceral structure which demands that we move in only one direction, that we mistake contiguity for causality, and that we abandon histories that cannot be accommodated within its walls. In fact, some of those histories lie right outside and beneath the LBC’s walls. The master plan for Independence Mall (begun in 1999) that resulted in the new LBC was famously controversial. This is because the site on which the pavilion currently stands was once occupied by the President’s House (1790–1800), which served as the official residence for George Washington and John Adams during their presidencies. The entrance to the LBC is therefore situated within feet of the kitchen and quarters in which African Americans enslaved by George Washington once lived and worked. The NPS and Independence National Historic Park (INHP) had no plans to acknowledge this fact as part of the site redesign and were ultimately obliged to do so through the yearslong advocacy of Black coalitions in Philadelphia in association with professional historians, journalists, and state and local governing bodies.4 Due to their efforts, the foundations of the house’s back buildings were partially excavated in March–July 2007 and sealed under a glass lantern. In 2010, the permanent open-air memorial to the President’s House opened just north of the excavation at the southeast corner of 6th and Market. Here it is important to note that, due to the unidirectional flow of traffic through the LBC pavilion from north to south, the aggregate design of the site casts the history of slavery at the excavation as the “prehistorical” baggage of U.S. democracy. Visitors to the LBC must turn their backs on it, leaving it behind them as they move through the pavilion’s progressive timeline toward the bell.

4 Black advocates in Philadelphia formed two coalitions to press the NPS and INHP

to acknowledge slavery on the site: the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) and Generations Unlimited. Support also came from the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Gary Nash and Ad Hoc Historians, the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia City Council, and the Pennsylvania General Assembly. And this was just in the initial awareness campaign of 2002.

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Nevertheless, the excavation undermines this narrative of advancement. It is accessible twenty-four hours a day from any direction, although when perceived from a distance, the lantern covering the opening appears to be empty, enclosing nothing but air. As you approach, you peer down a ten-foot drop to the foundation walls, which have been left as they were found, poking up out of the ochre soil, now rimed in mineral deposits (Fig. 1). Description of the excavation is limited to a single placard posted on each of the lantern’s four sides that explains what you are looking at but not how to think about it. And while the adjacent President’s House Memorial threatens dangerously to reproduce slaveholding domesticity through its design as a kind of new ruin, no reconstruction of any kind has been attempted at the excavation, which is to say, there is acknowledgment here without representation.5 On my last visit in 2023, a brown tarp was spread over the northwest corner of the exhibit, presumably to catch leaks from the bow window display of the President’s House which protrudes into the space from above. It is discomfiting, maddening, unutterably sad—and rightly so. Where the LBC trumpets the everlasting hope of abstract idealism as it squeezes you up a securitized, air-conditioned incline, the excavation provides evidence of a crime scene out of doors in all weather and requires only that you bow your head to look at it. The excavation thus stands amidst Independence Mall’s noisy simulacrum of history as a resounding well of silence, rebuking the LBC’s assurances that slavery was an error of the past with a fierce attestation of its ongoing, unresolved trauma. It thereby refuses to be compensated on the terms of liberal democratic inclusion, since it testifies that the burial of the history it holds has always been a condition of possibility for the heroized fabulation of Revolutionary American freedom. As a narrative device, the LBC might distort what it frames, but it is murderous in its foundations, which expose it as a colonial technology predicated on Black and Indigenous death. Indeed, by posing a question about the grounds of Revolutionary U.S. nationalism, the excavation points to an even deeper silence at the LBC: the failure to acknowledge

5 The President’s House Memorial recreates the footprint of the main house through

partial reconstructions of its exterior walls, empty door and window frames, and fireplaces. Video exhibits on the walls feature Black historical reenactors in period dress. Displays in this part of the site emphasize the house’s embeddedness in the national legacy of slavery, though that message is mixed in with a contervailing antiquarian impulse to resurrect and celebrate the house as a historic landmark graced by famous visitors.

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Fig. 1 View of the Liberty Bell (left) and excavated foundations at the President’s House site (right), 2023 (Photos by Author. Liberty Bell Center, Philadelphia, PA)

that it stands on Lenni Lenape land. As of 2023, there is no mention of the Lenape anywhere on the site. It says nothing about the infamous 1737 Walker Purchase, or the Lenape’s abandonment and retaliatory murder by their U.S. American allies in the Revolutionary wars, or the massacre of Lenape and Mohegan Moravians by American militia at Gnadenhutten in 1782. Certainly, there is no mention that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania does not recognize any Native nations as of 2023, and is thus (with the state of New York) one of the only parts of Lenapehoking in which its Indigenous people are without standing.6 The eighteenthcentury Native history that is acknowledged at the site appears on a placard at the President’s House which explains how Mohawk, Seneca, and Chickasaw delegations met with Washington there in the 1790s, but 6 As of 2023, the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania (LNPA) was seeking state recognition, though the legitimacy of their campaign was questioned by the federally recognized Delaware Tribe of Indians based in Oklahoma. See Samantha Spengler, “For Years, People Said There Were No Lenape Left in Pennsylvania. This Group Begs to Differ,” Philadelphia Magazine, 11 November 2021, https://www.phillymag.com/news/2021/ 11/06/lenape-nation-pennsylvania/. On Lenape erasure in Pennsylvania, see Daniel Shurley, “Forbears: How Pennsylvania Erased the Lenape from Local History,” Hidden City, 23 August 2019, https://hiddencityphila.org/2019/08/philadelphias-forgotten-for ebears-how-pennsylvania-erased-the-lenape-from-local-history/.

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that U.S. “efforts to befriend the native tribes and secure treaties of peace during this period failed over time” (my emphasis). This is, to put it kindly, a baleful lie. As I discuss in Chapter 3, Washington ordered the Sullivan-Clinton genocide in Iroquoia twelve years before Seneca Chief Cornplanter recalled its horrors to his face at a 1790 Philadelphia summit. The United States went to war with the Western Confederacy in the same year, having failed to coerce its members into selling their lands. The wider context of Independence Mall demonstrates that “the American Revolution” does not exist where or when U.S. national history locates it. Contrary to the insistence of the LBC, Revolutionary history is not a linear movement in time toward the conclusion of U.S. national freedom, but a ruptured force field of multiple, simultaneous, and nonlinear temporalities that bubble up and unspool in different directions, neither resolved nor necessarily reconcilable. On this point, I would reiterate that the arguments of the foregoing chapters are emphatically not connected according to a unified theory of loss. The genocidal obliterations of U.S. settler colonialism against which the Western Confederacy fought (Chapter 3), and those of chattel slavery from which the Sierra Leonean refugees flew (Chapter 5), are remaindered by the liberal U.S. nationalist account of the Revolution as a structural principle of its accession—pushed, as it were, to the LBC’s underneath and outside. The world-ending violence of those exclusions cannot be compared to the experiences of grief and pain that I discuss in the other two chapters. Similarly, the politics of Black and Indigenous erasure are not analogous to each other, nor are the wounds of their disavowal inflicted in precisely the same way by the Revolution’s nationalist framing as a progressive “freedom struggle,” which (as shown at the LBC) projects slavery into a best-forgotten past while completely occluding the ontological basis of the U.S. nation-state in settler colonialism. On my reading, however, the liberal infrastructures of U.S. nationalist Revolutionary narrative—by which I mean liberal modes of accounting time, politics, and personhood—are a source of injury in every case, and not its remedy. My effort in this book has been to expose the dereliction of the Revolutionary thesis of U.S. national birth and to advocate for the proliferation of openings made available by my materials in excess of its explanatory power. Whereas liberal history tends to designate what it cannot render symbolically as a species of unrepresentable a- or pre-political nothingness, I have argued that what lies beyond its ken are “minor”

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revolutionary ways of time-keeping, storying, and collectivizing which find their expression in non-narrative form. Indeed, because there is no preconceived political framework capable of amalgamating all that remains left out or over from the U.S. nationalist narrative of Revolution, I have argued for the affordances of form as competencies for arranging minor revolutionary experience along multiple lines of flight. This approach arose in part from my suspicion of the privilege enjoyed by a handful of prose genres in accounts of the rise of the liberal democratic state that render everything before it obsolete. But it seems I was not alone in that sentiment, as many of my subjects of the foregoing chapters turned to residual pre- and early modern forms as malleable tools for analyzing, protesting, mitigating, and transmuting the multifaceted destructiveness of Enlightened political modernity. On that last note, and by way of closing, I want to reaffirm that the minor revolutionary politics encoded in these forms are politics beyond the reckoning of success or failure, just as the revolutionary experiences that they relate are historical in excess of linear accounting. As I have discussed throughout this book, the liberal sense of “revolution” takes a narrow measure of the political that disqualifies the social world from consideration and delegitimizes any movement that fails either to aspire to or to achieve state sovereignty as its ultimate goal. That set of requirements bears a mutually reinforcing relationship with the imperative to narrate the time of Revolution as a progressive development which leads inexorably to the founding of national law. One of the aims of this book has been to show how deeply these assumptions continue to shape not only how Revolutionary history is narrated, but also who and what gets counted in the first place for revolutionary thought. To return once more to the LBC, the liberal underpinnings of U.S. nationalist narratives of Revolution not only take away the meandering and material qualities of historical experience, but also rob reading of its sensuous dimension, and sensuousness of its political consequence, in a lockstep advance that can only ever lead back to the legitimation of state power. At its simplest, this book affirms that the minor literacies of residual form theorize revolutionary time and politics in ways that are more historically robust and politically workable than nationalist narratives of Revolution which render it “as something separated from ordinary life, something

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extra-superterrestrial.”7 From the vantage of disciplinary historicism, the remains with which I have abided appear as merely conceptual or aesthetic embellishments around the edges of an enshrined empirical truth. On the contrary (to borrow from Marx), their outlying insurgencies attest to “the reality and power, the this-worldliness of [...] thinking in practice,” their quotidian, tactical, and unfinished revolutionary movements offering concrete as well as theoretically robust alternatives to the narration of the past as a property of the state, and tangible lessons in how to steal back present and future times from its grasp.8

7 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst: Prometheus, 1998),

63. 8 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” [1845], in ibid., 572.

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Index

A Able Doctor, The (political cartoon), 41–43, 45, 74 Adams, John, 124 Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress , 40 on history of Revolution, 16, 17 Letters Upon Subjects Respecting the Revolution in America, 13 Adorno, Theodor, 120, 133, 136, 143, 145 Agamben, Giorgio, 152 agency, 130 allegory, 17, 19, 20, 25 allegorical reading, 66–73 artes memoriae tradition, 66 Benjamin on, 37–39 counter-modern temporality of, 38 parricidal, 39 of revolution, 19. See also Charlotte Temple (Rowson) Allen, Ethan, 83 Americanness

whiteness and, 84, 91 American Revolution as "the American War", 12 as anachronism, 12, 13, 17 as birth of U.S. nation, 7–9, 202 exceptionalism of, 13 historiography of, 14–16, 17, 24–26, 124, 147, 156, 158, 166, 168, 203 Indian country, erasure of, 75–77 nationalism and, 79, 82, 97, 110, 111, 167, 203, 208 periodization of, 11, 19 semantics of, 2–3 space and, 75 temporality of, 10–11, 51, 75, 78, 94, 111, 117, 146, 203, 207, 208 as war between Americans and Indians, 88 American Studies, 3, 9 temporal turn in, 6. See also Early American Studies

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Stapely, Afterlives of the American Revolution, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51544-6

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INDEX

Anderson, Benedict, 6 Anderson, Isaac, 185, 191, 192, 195 André (Dunlap), 30, 118, 119, 137–153 ambivalence in, 128 counter-memory of, 137, 142 fate in, 144–146, 147 haunting in, 150, 152 partisan politics and, 141 plot, 137 prologue to, 141, 142 queerness of, 138, 153 André, John, 18, 19, 30, 83, 203 ambivalence and ambiguity, 129 arrest of, 113, 130–133 association with Arnold, 135 ghostly aftereffects of, 116, 117–119, 129 hanging of, 113–115 legacy of, 114–116 in Monody on Major André, 135–137 as scapegoat, 122 sensibility and, 116–117. See also André (Dunlap) anthology, 17, 19, 25, 27, 81 decontextualizing properties of, 85, 88 dehistoricizing effects of, 89, 96 erasure and, 111 etymology of, 19 redaction in, 105 seriality and, 84 seriality of, 30 temporality of, 84 anticommunism, 16 Aptheker, Herbert, 24, 156 Armstrong, Nancy, 73 Arnold, Benedict, 113, 114, 128, 135 B Baudrillard, Jean, 30, 85

Benjamin, Walter, 6, 27, 65 allegorical form, 29, 37–39 on emblems, 69 Bespaloff, Rachel, 135, 138 Blackhawk, Ned, 24, 77 Black Loyalists. See Black refugees Blackness, 43, 74 Black Sierra Leonean refugees and, 186, 188 Indigeneity and, 73 as mode of thought, 188 in Narratives of a Late Expedition, 92–95 petitionary practice and, 186 power and, 186 Black refugees, 207 articulations of Blackness, 186, 188 as “Black Loyalists”, 156, 158 conflict with Sierra Leone Company, 183–187, 188, 194–197 petitionary practices of, 19, 23, 31, 157, 161, 162, 165–166, 170–176, 177–183, 186, 197–199 revolutionary politics of, 158 service, re-signification of, 195 in Sierra Leone, 11, 19, 28, 155–157, 167, 174 Sierra Leone Company Directors’ report, 155–156, 158–161 social organization of, 183 theorization of freedom, 161–163, 182 theory of property, 161, 183, 188–190. See also petition Black Studies, 9 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 30, 80 preface to Narratives of a Late Expedition, 87–88. See also Narratives of a Late Expedition

INDEX

Against the Indians (Brackenridge) Braddock, Edward, 110, 111 Buck-Morss, Susan, 65 Burke, Edmund, 2, 59, 124, 125 Burnham, Michelle, 7 Butler, Judith, 30, 119, 123, 138 reading of Antigone, 147 on tragedy, 151 Byrd, Jodi A., 10, 24, 74, 79, 84

C Calloway, Colin G., 24, 76, 78, 97 captivity in Johonnet , 105 in Narratives of Late Expedition, 92 passivity and, 92, 94, 102 captivity narratives, 30 anthologizing of, 79–81 Native peoples in, 82–87. See also individual titles Carey, Matthew, 30, 80. See also History of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederick Mannheim’s Family (Carey) Carruthers, Mary, 66 Cary, Daniel, 178 Case, Wheeler, 83 Castillo, Susan, 7 catharsis, 122 Charlotte Temple (Rowson), 11, 18 allegoric reading and, 66–73 allegory and, 29 as allegory, 36–39, 53–55, 56, 65–69, 71, 203 canonicity of, 33–35 feminist readings of, 34, 55 modernity in, 62, 69 parricide, allegory of, 48, 53–55, 59–61, 59, 67 as post-revolutionary novel, 33–36

247

seduction in, 54, 55–57, 58, 61–62, 73 temporality in, 36, 62, 63–65, 69 Toryism of, 57 citizenship, 161 visibility and, 172 whiteness and, 10 Clarkson, John, 170, 174, 183 hygiene, obsession with, 174 letters to, 177, 185, 189, 191, 193 Clarkson, Thomas, 162 Clinton, Henry, 117 colonialism in Early American Studies, 4 Common Sense (Paine), 48–51 Cooper, James Fenimore, 115 Cornplanter, 77 Cornwallis, Charles, 75, 115 counter-memory, 12 Revolutionary, 17 Coviello, Peter, 52 Crankipore, Richard, 182 Crawford, William, 80 execution of, 88, 94, 95, 99, 103 in Narratives of a Late Expedition, 87–96 Crawley, Ashon, 118, 180 Cywinski, Bernard, 201

D Davidson, Cathy, 35 Dawes, August, 185 de Certeau, Michel, 14, 165, 168 Declaration of Independence, 50 ambivalence of, 51–53 Native peoples in, 10 slavery and, 9 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, 21 Deloria, Philip, 42 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville), 6

248

INDEX

American exceptionalism, 6 Derrida, Jacques, 160, 162 on the archive, 197 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 6 Dickinson, John, 40 Dickson, Richard, 178 DiCuirci, Lindsay, 18 Dienstag, Joshua Foa, 122 Dimock, Wai Chee, 6 displacement democracy and, 202 dispossession, 20 domesticity Black female, 175 Drexler, Michael, 11, 18 Dunlap, William, 18, 115

E Eagleton, Terry, 120 Early American Studies, 203 historicism of, 18 periodization of, 3–7, 7–9 spatial turns in, 3–6 temporality of, 7 Elliot, Matthew, 90, 93 empire in Early American Studies, 4 empire, American, 83 Enlightenment liberty, understandings of, 163 logic of, 143 the political, conception of, 161 enslaved peoples erasure of, 22–23 Erdrich, Louise, 110 exceptionalism, American, 6, 8 of American Revolution, 13 critiques of, 3 race, disavowal of, 9

F fate, 130 in André, 144–146, 147 modernity and, 133 tragic, 143, 145 Fiedler, Leslie, 34, 35 filial loyalty colonialism and, 40–46 in political cartoons, 47 First Continental Congress, 40 Fischer, Sibylle, 167 Fisher, George Sidney, 125 Foucault, Michel, 12, 152 Fox, Charles James, 43 freedom authority and, 158 in Bildungsroman, 107 Black radical, 158 “British freedom”, 157, 186 citizenship and, 172 as everyday object, 161, 162, 165, 175 imperialism and, 23 partial liberty, 138 petitionary practice and, 179 slavery and, 162 temporality of, 197 French Revolution, 13, 125 reactionary attitudes toward, 37 Freud, Sigmund, 133 Frey, Sylvia R., 24, 28 frontier erasure of British, 91 Revolutionary politics and, 90 seriality, 98, 103 as temporal formation, 79, 82, 103, 105 whiteness and, 111 futurity Indigenous, 87, 103, 109 Fyfe, Christopher, 166

INDEX

G gender discourse of, 25 nation, representations of, 41 in political cartoons, 42, 48 genocide in Narratives of a Late Expedition, 88, 90 Sullivan-Clinton campaign, 77, 207 George, David, 183 Gergely, Alex, 80 ghosts, 115 Girty, John, 90, 91, 93 Glorious Revolution, 1–2 Gordon, Avery, 115 Gustafson, Sandra, 7

H Haitian Revolution, 13, 37 occlusion of Black revolutionary thought, 167 Hale, Nathan, 115, 116 Hamilton, Alexander, 30 on André, 114, 121, 135, 136, 140 Harmar, Josiah, 86, 96, 104, 106, 111 Hartman, Saidiya, 31 subterranean politics of the enslaved, 165 haunting, 116, 150, 152 Heidegger, Martin, 69 heteropatriarchy, 58 seriality and, 104 History of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederick Mannheim’s Family (Carey), 80, 82, 105 history, evacuation of, 83 Horkheimer, Max, 120, 133, 136, 143, 145 Howe, Susan, 203 Hunt, Irvin, 197

249

I imperialism "freedom" and, 23 imperialism, British, 25 imperialism, U.S. interventionism, 16 independence ambivalence about, 51–53 filial, 36 independence, U.S., 10, 142. See also Declaration of Independence Indianness, 42, 74, 79, 91 Revolutionary politics and, 91 Indigenous and Native American Studies, 9 individualism, 19 insurgency, Native, 30, 85 Irving, Washington "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", 115, 130

J James II ousting of, 1 Jefferson, Thomas Declaration of Independence, 51–53 "Declaration of the Causes of Taking Up Arms", 40 on race, 10 Jehlen, Myra, 7 Johnson, Lyndon, 16 Jordan, Luke, 185, 189

K Kaplan, Amy, 20 Kazanjian, David, 163 King, Boston, 177 Knight, John, 88–89, 92–93 Kolodny, Annette, 80

250

INDEX

L Lafayette, Marquis de, 114 Larkin, Edward, 25, 126 Lepore, Jill, 81 liberalism, 150 social contract, 159 subjectivity and, 128 Liberty Bell Center (LBC), 201–203 Black and Indigenous erasure of, 204–207 Liberty Bell as metaphor for U.S. democracy, 202 master plan, 204 literature, Early American anthologies, 7–8 Lloyd, James, 124 Locke, John filial independence, thesis of, 40, 42, 51 Loudon, Archibald, 80 Loyalism historiography of, 126 Luciano, Dana, 6 Lucy Temple (Rowson), 64

M Macaulay, Zachary, 183 Magna Carta, 2 maroons, 195 Marx, Karl, 209 Mary II, 2 masculinity, white, 86 in Narratives of a Late Expedition, 92–95 seriality of, 95, 99, 105 Mather, Cotton, 79 McCrea, Jane, 83 McKean, Thomas, 15 Merritt, Jane T., 25 Metcalf, Samuel, 80 Mitchell, W.J.T., 75, 78

modernity, 133, 208 in Charlotte Temple, 62, 69 as European, 167 fate and, 133 liberal, 21 the novel and, 35 Monody on Major André (Seward), 135–137, 145 Moor, Andrew, 194, 198 Moorhead, Scipio, 194 Moravian Massacre, 88, 89, 206 Moretti, Franco, 107 Moten, Fred, 31, 161, 163, 176, 177, 182 Mrs. General Washington bestowing thirteen Stripes on Britania (political cartoon), 47–48, 59 Mulford, Carla, 7

N Narratives of a Late Expedition Against the Indians (Brackenridge), 80, 99, 111 Blackness in, 92–95 Crawford campaign in, 87–96 history, evacuation of, 83, 87 preface to, 87–88 white masculinity in, 92–95 Nash, Gary B., 24, 156 nation Native concepts of, 76 nation, U.S. Revolution as birth of, 7–9, 15 nationalism American Revolution and, 9, 14, 22, 79, 82, 97, 110, 111, 167 Revolutionary politics and, 90 rule of thirds and, 127 temporality of, 145 white masculinity and, 86 Native peoples

INDEX

in captivity narratives, 82–87 erasure of, 22–23 pathologization of, 104, 111 Nelson, Dana, 142 neutrality queer yearning and, 30 Ngai, Sianne, 12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 30, 129, 152 on tragedy, 122–123

O Occom, Samson, 12, 78 Oedipalism, 146, 150, 151 Oliver, Peter, 45–46, 59 Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, The (Gray and Kamensky), 25

P Paine, Thomas Common Sense, 48–51 parricide, 29 allegorical convention of, 36, 37, 48–51, 53–55 allegories of, 18 in political cartoons, 55 Parricide, The (political cartoon), 43–45, 47, 53, 73 partisanship, language of erasure of Native and enslaved peoples, 22–23 Patrick, Frank, 195 Patriot/Loyalist/neutral triad. See rule of thirds Pearsall, Sarah M.S., 25 Pearson, Christie, 173 Perkins, Cato, 193 personhood, 14 revolutionary, 20 petition, 17, 19, 20, 25

251

of Black refugees in Sierra Leone, 23, 31 collective, 162, 165, 177–179, 180, 188, 193 deference in, 168, 170 etymology of, 176 formal conventions of, 164, 165 as rhetoric, 168 as rhetoric of entreaty, 176, 177 sovereignty and, 176, 181, 193 of Susana Smith, 170–176 as theoretical work, 166. See also Black refugees political cartoons, 39, 67 gender in, 42, 48 racialization of, 44, 48 seduction paradigm in, 45, 47–48. See also individual titles politics insurgent, 21–22 liberal, 127 partisan, 142 partisanship, 120 Revolutionary, 118, 123, 158, 203, 208 politics, liberal, 22, 24, 119 subjectivity and, 24 President’s House, 204 property, 161 Q Quarles, Benjamin, 24 R racial difference discourse of, 25 racialization of political cartoons, 44, 48 Ramsay, David, 13 Rancière, Jacques, 31, 159, 162 on political power, 160, 161

252

INDEX

politics of dissensus, 165 reading allegorical, 66–73 emblematic, 71, 73 rebuses, 67 Reconciliation between Britania and her daughter America, The (political cartoon), 57 recovery, 26, 28–29 Rediker, Marcus, 24 Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnet, The, 30, 105–112 as Bildungsroman, 105–107 queerness of, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111 St. Clair’s Defeat in, 96 representation, 161 residual forms, 17–20, 23 reading practices, 26–28 resistant reading, 26 Revere, Paul, 41, 45 revolution celestial, 1–2 law and, 160 liberal sense of, 208 seduction paradigm, 35, 39, 45 semantics of, 1–3 temporality of, 173 Richter, Daniel K., 24 Rifkin, Mark, 10 Rowlandson, Mary, 81, 82, 110 Rowson, Susanna on reading, 68. See also Charlotte Temple (Rowson) rule of thirds, 124–127 in André, 149 nationalism and, 127 neutrality in, 126 tragedy and, 129 Rust, Marion, 8, 68

S salvage, right to, 190 Schweitzer, Ivy, 7 Scott, David, 119, 120 Second Continental Congress, 40 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky reparative reading, 27 seduction in Charlotte Temple, 54, 55–57, 58, 61–62, 73 discourse of, 47 in Johonnet , 105, 110 seriality, 84, 94 heteropatriarchy and, 104 of white masculinity, 95, 99, 105 settler colonialism structural politics of, 58 settler colonialism, U.S., 5 genocide and, 207 nationhood and, 79 Native responses to, 23 slavery and, 9 temporality of, 87 Seward, Anna, 30, 115, 135, 140 Shays, Christopher, 16 Sieminski, Greg, 81 Sierra Leone demographics of, 187 Sierra Leone Company, 157, 169 conflict with refugees, 183, 188 Directors’ report, 155–156 Six Nations, 29 Sizemore, Michelle, 134 slavery in Declaration of Independence, 9 in Early American Studies, 4 freedom and, 162 settler colonialism and, 9 in Sierra Leone, 183 structural politics of, 58 Slotkin, Richard, 80 Slover, John, 88–89, 90, 92–93

INDEX

Smith, Abram, 195 Smith, Susana petition of, 170–176 Sneyd, Honora, 117 sociality, 173 queer, 131 sovereignty, 76 petition and, 176 sovereignty, Native, 10 space American Revolution and, 75 spatial form time and, 75 Spillers, Hortense, 93 Spires, Derrick, 165 St. Clair, Arthur, 30, 86, 99 exculpation of, 102 St. Clair’s Defeat, 86, 96–103, 104, 111 broadsides, 98, 101–102 Steiner, George, 119, 120 Stern, Julia, 37 Stewart, Susan, 30, 81, 84, 94 on seriality of Noah’s Ark, 104 Sullivan-Clinton campaign, 77

T Tallmadge, Benjamin, 114, 119 Tamarkin, Elisa, 115, 116 Taylor, Alan, 8, 96 temporality of allegory, 38 of American exceptionalism, 3 of American Revolution, 10–11, 20, 51, 75, 78, 94, 111, 117, 146, 203, 207, 208 of Charlotte Temple, 36, 62, 63–65, 69 of form, 12 of freedom, 197 nationalist, 145

253

queer, 104 settler time, 10 of tragedy, 120–121 Thomas, Isaiah, 67 Thompson, Thomas Perronet, 167 Tiebout, Cornelius, 72 tragedy, 17, 19, 20, 25 as counter-modern, 120 etymology of, 122 pessimism of, 122–123 temporality of, 120–121 theories of, 30 Treaty of Paris, 10, 75 tribal sovereignty and, 77 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 166 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 78

U unheimlich, 134, 153

V Van Buskirk, Judith, 129 Voigt, Lisa, 8

W Warner, Michael, 7 Warren, Mercy Otis, 13 Washington, George on André, 114 genocide and, 16 killing of André, 113, 130, 135, 136, 140 portrayal in André, 137, 139–141, 143 Sullivan-Clinton campaign, 77 Western Confederacy, 23, 29, 85–87, 103, 207 defeat of St. Clair, 96, 97, 99 formation of, 97 Wheatley, John, 194

254

INDEX

Wheatley, Phillis, 194 White, Ed, 11, 18 whiteness Americanness and, 84, 91 citizenship and, 10 femininity and, 74

frontier and, 111 power and, 186 Wilkes, John, 43, 44, 53 Wilkinson, Daddy Moses, 183, 189 William III, 2 Williams, Raymond, 17, 30, 120