The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White

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СКАЧАТЬ political mobilization. Just as importantly, however, we want to insist on an expanded sense of imaginative literature that includes not just novels such as Brown’s and Tenney’s but the rich and significant political literature—the pamphlets, polemics, tracts, and biographies—of the early republican period. To that end, we try to reimagine a literary history that might accommodate works such as John Wood’s The History of the Administration of John Adams (1802) or James Cheetham’s A View of the Political Conduct of Aaron Burr, Esq., of the same year. We even speculate that this flourishing of political writing may help us fill the notorious gap in US literary history, between 1800 and 1820.

      But literary analysis is not an end in itself here. It is rather an exploration of a medium in which the dynamics of political fantasy are more easily grasped. Such dynamics are essential to our readings of the two proper novels, which we read as complementary explications of an emerging fantasy at the heart of US political culture, but this analysis allows us to take up the figure of Aaron Burr, the “traumatic colonel” of our title. The thing called Burr has a particular interest for us as the distinctively anomalous figure hovering at the margins of the Founders proper. So we will be arguing that the significance of Burr is precisely its resistance to incorporation in the semiotic system of the Founders. This is an argument broached in chapter 2 but explored in detail in chapter 4, where we outline the articulation of the Burr in the years between 1799 and 1804. In so doing, we try to make sense of those odd details that have proven so fascinating in contemporary literature of the Founders: Burr’s electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the accusations of seduction, the assault waged by the New York Republicans, the duel with Alexander Hamilton, and the Federalists’ odd courting of their hated antagonist to lead a secession movement. Chapter 5 examines the ramifications of this argument, as the uncertain fascination with Burr suddenly coalesced, between 1805 and 1807, into a major conspiratorial fantasy and a notorious treason trial that uncannily reassembled the former leaders of the Revolution. Burr’s formation; his brief circulation through and around the symbolic field of the Founders; the repeated attempts to assimilate him as a Founder figure; the ultimate, violent repudiation and expulsion of this figure—together these reveal Burr to be the traumatic colonel of the Founders constellation. In this respect, Burr is indeed the cipher it was repeatedly described as being, with an emphasis on both meanings of that term, code and key.

      This brings us to our third objective, namely, a new historical perspective on the early republican period informed by the Burr and the literary and phantasmatic elements it designates. Rush and Adams hint at this argument when they note the conjunctions of late 1805, though they miss the crucial reference: Toussaint L’Ouverture, dead in France in 1803. In short, we will be arguing that the history of Burr in relation to the Founders clarifies the complex processing of the great crime of slavery, its increased political institutionalization with the election of the “Negro President,” its likely extension with the Louisiana Purchase, and through all this the enormous threat posed by the Haitian Revolution to the US South. This is an argument slowly developed throughout The Traumatic Colonel, first in a reading of the racial dimensions of the Founders constellation, then in an insistence on the important racial subtexts of Ormond and Female Quixotism. Chapters 4 and 5 then aim to situate Burr’s rise and fall as a coded response to the consolidation of slavery, such that Burr, the imagined renegade conspirator of a breakaway empire, stands revealed as Toussaint in whiteface. The story of Burr, then, is one important story of the US engagement with Haiti.

      This brings us, finally, to another reorientation central to The Traumatic Colonel—that of periodization. Scholarship of the early republic has remained firmly focused on the 1790s, that most historiographically privileged of decades. The 1790s, particularly among literary scholars, have been understood as the pivotal moment of intense ideological division between left and right, a brief moment of the flourishing of radicalism, and a literary boom period before the lull heralding the Era of Good Feelings. Such a focus has fit well with the field’s recent emphasis on nationalist anxieties, the novel, and circumatlantic exchange, in which literary histories have foregrounded the national allegory and transnational affiliations in a cluster of novels from the decade. While we do not dispute the insights of this scholarship, it is worth considering the name that older anthologies gave to this decade—the Federalist Era—and how it may recontextualize our framing of the broader expanse from 1780 to 1820. For from the vantage point of 1808 and the official cessation of the Atlantic slave trade, the 1790s appear to be anomalous, an unusual hiatus in the long consolidation of power by the plantocracy in its alliance with northern workers. Washington’s iconic preeminence guaranteed eight years of rule during which Federalism forged its uneasy compromise with slavery and partisan organization slowly emerged. The continuation of Federalist rule under Adams—facilitated by the still disorderly electoral system—was then the only presidency of a non-Virginian until the messy election of 1824. Given the solid rule by Virginian slaveholders, we might see the overall period as one of the consolidation of a slavery power, with the Louisiana Purchase a high point signaling the extension of human bondage to points south and west; with the Northwest Ordinance of 1785, ensuring a slave-free territory, a crucial exception, matched in foreign policy by the debates over the Toussaint Clause; or with the 1808 nonimportation legislation as the trigger for a doubling down of the slave powers.

      To be sure, discussions of the 1790s have not been silent about race, whether in biographical accounts (e.g., discussions of Jefferson), local histories (such as the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia), or treatment of the world-historical impact of the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, much circumatlantic scholarship has followed Paul Gilroy and others in stressing a Black Atlantic, and we have been inspired by an impressive number of works exploring the centrality of enslavement to US cultural politics. These include older studies such as Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black and David Brion Davis’s writings, as well as such recent focused studies as Leonard L. Richards’s The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (2000), David Waldstreicher’s Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (2004), Henry Wiencek’s An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003), Gordon S. Brown’s Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (2005), and Ashli White’s Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (2010). As important have been such new syntheses treating slavery as Garry Wills’s Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003), Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen’s Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution (2006), Matthew Mason’s Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (2006), Peter Kastor’s The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (2004), Adam Rothman’s Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005), Eva Sheppard Wolf’s Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (2006), Craig Hammond’s Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (2007), and Mason and Hammond’s Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (2011). Also significant has been a wave of cultural-critical works including Dana Nelson’s The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature (1992), Leonard Cassuto’s The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (1997), Jared Gardner’s Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (1998), Philip Gould’s Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2003), David Kazanjian’s The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (2003), Gesa Mackenthun’s Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (2004), Sharon M. Harris’s Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law (2005), Andy Doolen’s Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (2005), the roundtable “Historicizing Race in Early American Studies” published in Early American Literature (2006, ed. Sandra Gustafson), Sean Goudie’s Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006), Robert S. Levine’s Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism СКАЧАТЬ