1. Abraham Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln , 9 vols., ed. Roy P. Basler, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 1:112, 1:109, 1:110.

2. Ibid., 1:110.

3. Ibid., 1:112, 1:109-10.

4. Ibid., 112.

5. Ibid., 1:115. Other critics have noted the importance of Lincoln's innovative irreverence toward the founding fathers in this speech. See Eric J. Sundquist, "Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance," in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83 , ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 4; Robert J. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 309.

6. Jefferson Davis, "Farewell Address," The Papers of Jefferson Davis , 7 vols., ed. Lynda Lasswell Crist and Mary Seaton (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 7:22. In this farewell address to the United States Senate, Davis, like Lincoln more than twenty years earlier, emphasizes the genealogical character of the nation, interpreting rebellion as the means to "transmit [rights] unshorn to our children," 7:22.

7. Lewis Clarke and Milton Clarke, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons of a Soldier of the Revolution, During a Captivity of More Than Twenty Years among the Slaveholders of Kentucky, One of the So Called Christian States of North America (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1846), 43.

8. Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," Collected Works , 1:114, 1:108.

9. By "national narrative," I mean to imply a consistent narrative line reflected in all the artifacts deployed by a culture (and the list is diverse, encompassing more than literary texts and including painting, architecture, mapping, oratory, legal decisions, constitutional debates, and anthropological description) that provide a meaningful political grammar that is fluid enough, while still internally structured, to accommodate scattered people to homogeneous imaginings of themselves as a nation. I further elaborate the strategies of national narrative below in chapter 1. It is important to mention at this point, however, that what I am calling national narrative may be dominant but by no means is hegemonic. Not all narratives partake of the terms or techniques of patriarchal genealogy. Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827; reprint, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself , ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (1861; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) suggest instances of political community derived through matriarchal remembering as opposed to patriarchal descent. Yet in terms of the discussion and debates surrounding the past, ownership, authority, and political being, the narrative of founding fathers was preeminent in antebellum culture.

10. Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Nation and Narration ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 319. Discussing American culture in terms of Bhabha's ideas about national narrative, hybridity, and cultural difference might seem unexpected, since the formation of a nation in the United States was markedly different from postcolonial situations. Yet without obscuring the significant distinctions between American history and colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial encounters, we can read the counter-memories within imperialism, federalism, and slavery in the United States as creating ambivalences and disruptions that are comparable to the discursive struggles Bhabha and others observe in non-Western sites. On reading eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century American authors as postcolonial writers, see also Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21.

11. By "America," I want to suggest a narrativized entity that both undergirds and exceeds the geopolitical United States. "America" suggests a mythic and ritualized set of associations and practices through which citizens mark their shared allegiances as well as their profound differences. I draw this understanding of America in part from Lauren Berlant, who defines America as "an assumed relation, an explication of ongoing collective practices, and also an occasion for exploring what it means that national subjects already share not just a history, or a political allegiance, but a set of forms and the affect that makes these forms meaningful." The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4.

12. Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," Collected Works , 1:114

13. Ibid., 1:115; George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: Norton, 1979), 8.

14. Jacobs, Incidents , 78; Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews , trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 146.

15. Daniel Webster, The Orations on Bunker Hill Monument, The Character of Washington, and The Landing at Plymouth (New York: American Book Company, 1894), 21; Frederick Douglass, "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro," in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass , 5 vols., ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 2:186, 2:201; William Wells Brown, St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and its Patriots, A Lecture Delivered Before the Metropolitan Athanaeum, London, May 16, and at St. Thomas' Church, Philadelphia, December 20, 1854 (1855; reprint, Philadelphia: Rhistoric, 1969), 37. Eric J. Sundquist suggests that antebellum ambivalence toward the fathers, and parricide in the extreme, unsettles narrative. Working from Freud's Totem and Taboo , he looks at nineteenth-century texts to demonstrate how "the authority a writer's own performance implements will be sanctioned by violence at the same time it is hedged by his unconscious invocation and veneration of the ancestors whose placed he has usurped." Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), xiii.

16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals , in The Birth Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals , trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 197; Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 143.

17. Dred Scott v. Sandford , 60 U.S. 702. (1856).

18. Ibid., 702-3, 703.

19. Ibid., 703.

20. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xiii. Michel Foucault also assesses the authority of origins in "What is an Author?" in Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice , 113-38, and "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 139-64.

21. Dred Scott v. Sandford , 702. Yancey is quoted in George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 61.

22. For more information concerning the filial character of antebellum political culture, one might turn to Melville's Pierre , which treats at some length the crisis occurring in filial consciousness when a patriot father ceases to speak unambiguously. Also see Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided , and Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983), who examines how family history combines with national concerns in Melville's texts.

23. For implications of the etymology of authority , see Said, Beginnings , 83, and Sundquist, Home as Found , xiii.

24. Dred Scott v. Sandford , 700, 701, 703.

25. Ibid., 706.

26. Of course, Clotel Jefferson is not her legal name, and Brown's narrator never goes so far as to grant her share of a patrimony that is legally denied. I give her the name of her purported grandfather to underscore her disjunctive history.

27. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 , ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 82, 84.

28. Elsewhere, such as in The Archaeology of Knowledge , Foucault sees that humanist discourse in general shares these same tendencies of organization, hierarchy, categorization, and codification with "scientific discourse."

29. Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," Collected Works , 1:108.

30. Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 85.

31. Sacvan Bercovitch, "The Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Ideology of American Consensus," in The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture , ed. Sam Girgus (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 29; The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 356. For rewritings of the Declaration, see Philip S. Foner, We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Women's Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829-1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976). Thoreau, who took up residence in the woods on July 4, suggests Walden functions as a declaration of independence.

32. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent , 364.

33. Jonathan Arac, "Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn," boundary 2 19 (spring 1992): 19.

34. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 191; The Office of The Scarlet Letter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 17,31, 112; Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 142; Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, introduction, to Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism , ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 1.

35. Bhabha, "DissemiNation," 313; "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28 (spring 1984): 130; and "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817," Critical Inquiry 12 (autumn 1985): 157, 150. Bhabha's ''DissemiNation" addresses these issues through the concept of "supplements" that augment and revise national narratives. See especially 312-15. These essays have since been collected in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). Other chapters of this volume further explore notions of the hybrid; see especially "Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative" and "By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century."

36. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders," 155. Bhabha's emphasis on "discontinuous history" of course shares much with Foucault's idea of genealogy. See Bhabha's invocation of the "genealogical gaze" in "Of Mimicry and Man," 129.

37. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 427, 418-19. Janet Reno, for instance, understands Moby-Dick as Ishmael's way to move beyond the catastrophic experiences of the Pequod and enter another community, a community of readers. Janet Reno, Ishmael Alone Survived (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1990); see especially 48, 106-7, 136.

38. Frederick Douglass, "The Heroic Slave," in Life and Writings , 5:474. Despite this comparison, which comes at the level of the narrative frame, within "The Heroic Slave," women are figured as a debilitating force in the struggle for freedom. The slave women aboard the Creole play no part in rebellion, and Madison's own independence is jeopardized by his return to rescue his wife. Several important studies do examine women's role in the nation. Foremost, in my mind, is Lauren Berlant's The Anatomy of National Fantasy , but also see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Mary V. Dearborn, Pocohantas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America , ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and the chapters on Stowe in Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

39. Melville, Moby-Dick , 58.

40. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, in Pierre, or the Ambiguities; Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile; The Piazza Tales; The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade; Uncollected Prose; Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (New York: Library of America, 1984), 27. Future citations of works included in this volume will refer to it as the Library of America edition.

41. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 34-35. See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976).

42. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Lecture on Slavery," in Emerson's Antislavery Writings , ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 106.

1. Of course, the coherence of American national foundations is only storied. The fact that the United States can point to two founding documents—the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—is indicative of this fictive though strained consistency. It is therefore more appropriate to speak of national foundations and origins in the plural, as contestatory and divided. On the lack of univocality and determinate meanings in the language and documents of the founding fathers, see Gustafson, Representative Words , 55-57.

2. Edmund Jackson, "The Effects of Slavery," in The Liberty Bell (Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, 1842), 41; E. M. Hudson, The Second War of Independence in America (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863), 146; Isaac Jefferson, Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840's by Isaac, One of Thomas Jefferson's Slaves (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1951), 31, 22. Isaac Jefferson's recollections were recorded in 1847, but not published until 1951.

3. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 199.

4. Washington is quoted in Paul Leceister Ford, The True George Washington (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1896), 154. On Washington's Farewell Address and the question of slavery see Walter H. Mazyack, George Washington and the Negro (New York: Associated, 1932), 132.

5. C. M. Kirkland, Memoirs of Washington (New York: Appleton, 1857), vi, 204-5.

6. Benson J. Lossing, The Home of Washington and Its Associations, Historical, Biographical, and Pictorial (1859; reprint, New York: W. A. Townsend, 1866), 285; Kirkland, Memoirs , 422.

7. Kirkland, Memoirs , 472; Washington Irving, The Life of George Washington , 5 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1859), 5:298.

8. Sundquist, "Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance," 7.

9. Clay is quoted in William A. Bryan, "George Washington: Symbolic Guardian of the Republic, 1850-1861" William and Mary Quarterly 7 (January 1950): 54; Thomas Jefferson is quoted in Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York: Free Press, 1987), 88.

10. Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 20; Timothy Brennan, "The National Longing for Form," in Nation and Narration , ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 49; Bhabha, "DissemiNation," 297; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origins and Spread of Nationalism , rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). In addition to these critics, see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), xii-xxvi; Donald Pease, ''National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives" boundary 2 19 (spring 1992): 3-4; and Arac, "Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn ," 15-16. This grouping should not be read as an indication that all these critics share a common definition of national narrative. Much of the usefulness of national narrative as a concept, I have found, comes from the various inflections given to it. Subtle differences exist among these writers' use of the term. For instance, Arac seems to understand national narrative as a genre of discourse distinct from literary narrative in which texts purvey a monocultural impression. This view is aligned with that of Anderson, whose study powerfully demonstrates how novels in particular have a formative role in the conception of the modern nation. Bhabha takes a slightly different tack, applying the term "national narrative" not to single texts so much as to the received codes, myths, histories, novels, laws, and "truths" that combine to produce a coherent image of the nation. My purpose here is not to detail the distinctions between these critics; assuredly, I have drawn from all their accounts. My own placement among this grouping is elaborated below.

11. Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities , trans. of Balibar by Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1991), 97; Anderson, Imagined Communities , 174.

12. John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity , in The Norton Anthology of American Literature , 2 vols., 3rd ed., ed. Nina Baym et al. (New York: Norton, 1989), 40, 36, 37; John Beverley, Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), viii.

13. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Pelican, 1968), 217; Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie: and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), see especially 81-86, 298-300; Mason Locke Weems, The Life of Washington , ed. Marcus Cunliffe (1809; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 182.

14. On the political demonology of presidential bodies, see Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie , especially "The King's Two Bodies." Michael Kammen notes that in addition to Washington, other Revolutionary figures such as Patrick Henry experienced rhetorical divisions in the antebellum period. A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1978), 18.

15. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 376; Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The Two Altars; or, Two Pictures in One," in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp together with Anti-Slavery Tales and Papers , 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 2:253. For a different account of how New England revolutionaries recognized the inconsistencies of slavery and freedom, see Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 4-13. Also see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), which discusses the strange kinship between freedom and slavery.

16. Daniel Webster, "The Character of Washington," in The Works of Daniel Webster , 6 vols. (Boston: Little and Brown, 1851) 1:230; John C. Calhoun, "Speech on the Slavery Question, Delivered in the Senate, March 4th, 1850," in The Works of John C. Calhoun , 6 vols., ed. Richard K. Crallé (New York: D. Appleton, 1854-1860) 4:562; E. Cecil [pseud.?], The Life of Washington, Written for Children (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1859), 99; The Confederate verse is quoted in William Alfred Bryan, George Washington in American Literature, 1775-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 165; Herman Melville, "Lee in the Capitol," in Poems, Containing Battle-Pieces, John Marr and Other Sailors, Timoleon, and Miscellaneous Poems , vol. 16 of The Standard Edition of the Works of Herman Melville (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 164. Alan Heimert, " Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," American Quarterly 15 (winter 1963): 498-534, places such contradictory invocations in the context of widespread rhetorical production in the antebellum era. For a rendering of the need for coherence at the level of political parties, see Eric Foner, who discusses attempts to form a national political party with a "universal" ideology capable of defeating sectionalism. Politics, Ideology, and the Origins of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 34-53.

17. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims , 199. In light of Fliegelman's critical evaluation of psychohistory, it should be remembered that the story of Oedipus is not solely a psychological fable. It is foremost a drama of political dimensions, a story of a tyrant enacted within Athenian democracy.

18. Frederick Douglass, "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro," in Life and Writings , 2:187-88.

19. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 63.

20. John N. Norton, Life of General Washington (New York: General Protestant Episcopal Sunday School Union and Church Book Society, 1860), 375, 379.

21. Phillips is quoted in Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided , 130.

22. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 7, 62.

23. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 11.

24. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Norton, 1971), 58.

25. Herman Melville, Billy Budd , in the Library of America edition, 1431.

26. Melville, The Confidence-Man , 217; Billy Budd , 1432, 1433.

27. Carolyn Porter, "Call Me Ishmael, or How to Make Double-Talk Speak," in New Essays on Moby-Dick , ed. Richard Brodhead (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 93. In distinction to "News from the Mediterranean," the narrator's understanding of authority (both the authority of Captain Vere and his own as narrator) remains in suspension, denied any sense of closure.

28. White, The Content of the Form , 25.

29. Bhabha, "DissemiNation," 309; Morrison, Playing in the Dark , 8. On the idea of closure, see Hayden White, who suggests that the telos in narrative discourse is always connected to "integrative structures such as the 'folk,' the 'nation,' or the 'culture."' Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 16.

30. George Washington Parke Custis, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, by His Adopted Son, G. W. Parke Custis (Washington, D.C.: W. H. Moore, 1859), 12.

31. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 139.

32. Uncle Juvinell [Morrison Heady], The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-in-Chief (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1864), 3.

33. Ibid., 36-37, 43, 45.

34. Ibid., 45; Winthrop, Model of Christian Charity , 31. It should be remembered that Winthrop's famous sermon is not a doctrine of equality, but a justification for an inegalitarian class structure. One can witness this proslavery distortion of Winthrop's notion of hierarchy in a 1701 pamphlet by John Saffin, who argued that the idea that "all men have equal right to Liberty" contradicts "the order that God hath set in the World, who hath ordained different degrees and orders of men, some to be High and Honourable, some to be Low and Despicable ... yea some to be born Slaves, and so to remain during their lives." Quoted in William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 5. Young George's willingness to sacrifice his body reaffirms what Frederick Douglass notes as an ideological imperative of the patriarchal institution: "It is better that a dozen slaves should suffer under the lash, than that the overseer should be convicted, in the presence of the slaves, of having been at fault." Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; reprint, New York: Signet, 1968), 38.

35. Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians , ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 3; Doris Summer, "Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America" in Nation and Narration , ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, :1990), 76. Charles Powell Clinch, drawing heavily upon Cooper's language, produced a dramatic version of the novel that first appeared in March 1822. See Clinch, The Spy: A Tale of Neutral Ground (From the Novel of That Name): A Dramatic Romance in Three Acts, in Metamora and Other Plays , ed. Eugene R. Page (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941). By the time of the drama's opening, The Spy was in its third edition. For information concerning the reception of The Spy and its central importance as a prototype for the genre of American historical fiction, see Kammen, A Season of Youth , 148, 154.

36. James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy: A Tale of Neutral Ground (New York: Hafner, 1960), 12. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be included in the text. Of course, Washington also appears disguised as Harper in the novel. Yet he does so without evoking the threats to hierarchy that accompany class, gender, or racial cross-dressing. He remains a gentleman, dignified, religious, respectful, even when disguised.

37. Clinch, The Spy ... in Three Acts , 89. Cooper himself later expressed reservations about uttering the name of Washington in fiction. To some readers, it seemed inappropriate to place Washington in secret interviews with the peddler-spy. Indeed, when The Spy reached the New York stage, Washington's character was omitted from the drama.

38. Ibid., 92.

39. Calhoun "Speech on the Slavery Question," 4:561.

40. Cooper, The American Democrat; or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America (New York: Vintage, 1956),172. Although Harvey Birch says at one point "In heaven there is no distinction of colour," the novel hardly suggests that the same sentiment should hold true for this historical world (391). Cooper does include a spokesman for emancipation without exciting any tensions that could strain the hierarchal harmony of his novel. One evening after battle, Dr. Sitgreaves waxes idealistic and predicts "the manumission of our slaves" (193). Yet Sitgreaves's status as a doctor and not a soldier, as an idle philosopher and not a man of action, tends to undercut his liberal views. After the good doctor expresses his reservations about the institution first imported by the British, Cooper invalidates his position by stating: "It will be remembered that Doctor Sitgreaves spoke forty years ago" (193). History proves Sitgreaves to be a visionary, a social dreamer lost atop ethereal mastheads.

41. Cooper, The American Democrat , 147, 174, 137, 45, 171 Critics have characterized The Spy as an ideological rupture with democratic faith devoted to staving off any further revolutionary action that might threaten class distinctions. On this point, see Robert Clark, "Rewriting Revolution: Cooper's War of Independence," in James Fenimore Cooper: New Critical Essays , ed. Robert Clark (London: Vision, 1985), 191. Kammen similarly notes the manner in which historical romances about the Revolution have tended to de-revolutionize its political character; see A Season of Youth , 64, 211-13, 219.

42. Eric Lott marks a similar irony in his understanding of how use of a cultural form—blackface minstrelsy—to suture national divisions in antebellum America could work to expose and intensify that crisis. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), especially 201-10.

43. Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His AntiSlavery Labours in the United States, Canada, & England (1855; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 114.

44. Uncle Juvinell, The Farmer Boy , 4. For more on the preface, see Jacques Derrida, Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 44-45. Helpful in understanding Derrida's conception of the preface-text relation is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's translator's preface to Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976): "The preface is a necessary gesture of homage and patricide, for the book (the father) makes a claim of authority or origin which is both true and false" (xi). In calling the preface "the critical instance of the text," Derrida implies the subversive nature inherent to the preface. Dissemination , 27 n.

45. Derrida, Dissemination , 44, 45.

46. Abraham Lincoln, "Fragment on the Constitution and the Union," in Collected Works , 4:169.

1. Melville, Moby-Dick , 246. All subsequent citations in this chapter are to the Houghton Mifflin edition cited in the introduction and will appear parenthetically in the text.

2. John Seelye has also compared the kinetic, linear quality of Ahab's story to the static, discursive circularity of Ishmael's musings. Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 6, 63-66.

3. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," in the Library of America edition, 1154. Nina Baym underscores Melville's discomfort with narrative in "Melville's Quarrel with Fiction," PMLA 94 (October 1979): 909-24. She suggests that "Melville abandoned narrative principles and did not use normative fictional genres.... [He experienced] a rapid disenchantment with fiction both as a mode of truth telling and as a mode of truth seeking" (913).

4. Various critics have noted Moby-Dick's allusive treatment of Manifest Destiny and the political crisis it produced. See, for instance, John McWilliams, Jr., Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character: A Looking-Glass Business (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Rogin, Subversive Genealogy ; and Heimert, " Moby-Dick and the American Political Symbolism," 510.

5. Ezra B. Chase, Teachings of Patriots and Statesmen; or the "Fathers of the Republic" on Slavery (Philadelphia: J. W. Bridley, 1860), 6, 12. On Clay's reverential faith in Washington's Farewell Address, see Bryan, "George Washington," 54. Few figures questioned the prevailing political retrospection as Melville did. For a rare exception, see Albert Brisbane, who in 1840 criticized the leading statesmen of the day for putting their faith in "the policy of a Washington or a Jefferson, and not in new principles or organic changes.... It is clear that our politicians are all looking backwards." Social Destiny of Man: or, Association and Reorganization of Industry (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968) viii.

6. My use of "truth" as a category of knowledge is not meant to imply a transcendent or universal intelligence. Rather I follow both Melville and Foucault in subjecting "truth" to the critical perspective of genealogy. As I will argue below, for Melville, "truth" did not denote universals, but instead a historically specific and racially contextual belief in democracy.

7. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1160, 1162; Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," in The Archaeology of Knowledge , trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972),224; Power/Knowledge , 131.

8. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1160.

9. In trying to evade slipping dans le vrai , Ishmael thus resists the "author-function" also described by Foucault in "What Is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader , ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101-20.

10. Three recent studies of Moby-Dick raise similar questions. Wai-chee Dimock's Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), Rogin's Subversive Genealogy , and Carolyn L. Karcher's Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) all understand Herman Melville as a profound critic of a national mission that sanctioned the domination of Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans, and the imperialist aggression of the Mexican-American War.

11. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Signet, 1980) 16, 42,21,44; Derrida, Dissemination , 41; Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , (New York: Penguin, 1986) 44; Jacobs, Incidents , 3.

12. The Letters of Herman Melville , ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 96.

13. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land , 11, and see her discussion of further accounts of Melville's variance from potential colleagues, 9-26.

14. Melville, Letters , 127, 78.

15. Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987),46; Charles H. Foster, "Something in Emblems: A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick ," in New England Quarterly 34 (March 1961): 11; Melville, Letters , 127, 128.

16. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1160; Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 40-41. Edgar Dryden has also paid attention to the thematic content of Melville's form, noting especially its metaphysical dimensions. Dryden argues that in Melville's hands, the novel acts as a metaphysical attempt to formulate an "experience which is both particular and unified" (7). My focus on the political content of narrative form, however, suggests that Moby-Dick often struggles against the implicit coherence and unity and of narrative. See Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).

17. Frederick Douglass, "To The Lynn Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle, August 18, 1846," in Life and Writings , 1:187. The range of Moby-Dick's narratives, according to Baym, confused readers, and early reviews were "unable to determine its genre." "Melville's Quarrel with Fiction," (917-18).

18. Richard Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 20, 4.

19. Carolyn Porter, "Call Me Ishmael," 102, 101, 100; Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel , 151. John Samson underscores Porter's discussion of how Ishmael subverts authorized discourses of antebellum America. Working from insights supplied by Bakhtin and Foucault, Samson stresses how Melville developed an anti-authoritarian stance toward a national culture that was becoming increasingly monolithic. White Lies: Melville's Narratives of Facts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 11-16. Anacharsis Clootz was a radical democrat and German-born leader of the French Revolution who headed a delegation he proclaimed as an "embassy of the human race." He was sent to the guillotine in March 1794.

20. Melville, Letters , 127.

21. Eleanor E. Simpson, "Melville and the Negro: From Typee to Benito Cereno," American Literature 41 (March 1969): 28.

22. This displacement of Queequeg from the "dark continent" to the imaginary Kokovoko serves as an misdirection that corresponds to Melville's theory of truth telling. As Ishmael says of Kokovoko, "It is not down in any map; true places never are" (62).

23. The Richmond Enquirer is quoted in Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie , 53; Hudson, The Second War of Independence in America , 150.

24. Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical (1854, reprint; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 227, 214; J. C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippencott, Grambo, 1855), 403, 404. Karcher's Shadow over the Promised Land provides excellent readings and background of antebellum ethnology and its representation in Melville's texts. For instance, in her chapter "A Jonah's Warning to America in Moby-Dick ," she discusses at length how Queequeg rescues Ishmael from color prejudices instilled by contemporary scientific discourses (62-69). Also helpful is George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind .

25. Therefore Ishmael allows Melville to criticize the discriminating actions of judges like his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, whose decision to uphold racially segregated schooling in the case of Sarah C. Roberts v. City of Boston (1849) later acted as the foundation of the doctrine of "separate but equal." See Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land , 10.

26. William A. Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, As Exhibited in the Institution of Domestic Slavery in the United States: With the Duties of Masters to Slaves (1856, reprint.; Miami Fla.: Mnemosyne, 1969), 223, 223-24. Ishmael here undercuts the declaration he later extrapolates from his observations of Pip: "For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days" (319). In fact, Ishmael's own association with Queequeg, as well as his descriptions of Daggoo, should logically contradict his "findings" here. Also noteworthy is the severe irony of Ishmael's statement when considered alongside of Frederick Douglass's comments on the meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro, or Harriet Jacobs's description of New Year's Day as a time of uncertainty and separation for the slave mother who sits "watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning." Incidents , 16.

27. Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 42. Chase's classic study traces the Prometheus motif throughout Melville's work. See, especially, 45-48.

28. Michael Walzer suggests that "symbolic action" is key to political manipulations. "The union of men," writes Walzer "can only be symbolized; it has no palpable shape or substance." "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought," Political Science Quarterly 82 (June 1967): 194. For accounts of the struggle for narrative authority between Ishmael/Melville and Ahab, see See F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Whitman and Emerson, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 445-47; Nicholas Canaday, Melville and Authority , (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968), 52; Robert L. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens to Poe in the Modern Period (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 137; and, Seelye, Melville , 63-71.

29. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael , (New York: Grove Press, 1947), 53.

30. Rogin similarly notes that Ahab makes ceremonial use of the pagan harpooners to invest his rule with a mystical, religious power. Subversive Genealogy , 129-31.

31. Melville, Letters , 133, 142.

32. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1159, 1158. On the Puritan understanding of the relation of symbolism to allegory, see Charles Feidle-son, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). In Typee (1846), the ship's captain attempts a similar manipulation of dark bodies as part of an effort to curb his crew's desires for "liberty" or shore leave: "if you'll take my advice, every mother's son of you will stay aboard, and keep out of the way of the bloody cannibals altogether.... for if those tattooed scoundrels get you a little ways back into their valleys, they'll nab you—that you may certain of. Plenty of white men have gone ashore here and never been seen any more." Herman Melville, Typee (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 34.

33. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1159.

34. Pease, Visionary Compacts , 245. On Ahab's ability to distort the covenant into a form of possession, notice his appraisal of Starbuck after the ritual of "The Quarter-Deck": "Starbuck is now mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion" (140).

35. James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel," in Notes of a Native Son , (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 25. Foucault continues to say that the political involvement of the body establishes "the 'body politic' as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communications routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge" (28). On female abolitionists'/suffragists' use of the black body, see Karen Sánchez-Eppler's fine article, "Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Abolition and Feminism," Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 28-59.

36. For further commentary on the theatrical dynamics between Ahab and Pip, see Canaday, Melville and Authority , 45, and Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land , 84-88.

37. John Schaar, "The Uses of Literature for the Study of Politics: The Case of Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" in Legitimacy in the Modern State (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1981), 77. These redemptive moments, of course, have strong components of male eroticism and homosexuality, which Melville understood as fulfilling desires that are at once political and sexual. On this point, see Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

38. Homi Bhabha equates this reduction of narratives with nationalism: "For the political unity of the nation consists in a continual displacement of its irredeemably plural modern space, bounded by different, even hostile nations, into a signifying space that is archaic and mythical, paradoxically representing the nation's modern territoriality, in the patriotic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism. Quite simply, the difference of space returns as the Sameness of time, turning Territory into Tradition, turning the People into One." "DissemiNation," 300.

39. The Congressional Globe: New Series, Containing Sketches of the Debates and Proceedings of the First Session of the Thirty-First Congress (City of Washington: John C. Rives, 1850), 246.

40. There are, however, studies that read Moby-Dick's characters as having real-world referents in the antebellum political scene. Foster thus reads Ahab as Daniel Webster in "Something in Emblems," while Alan Heimert positions John C. Calhoun as Ahab in " Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism." I resist this strict type of allegorical reading. I agree more readily with Rogin's strategy for reading Melville in Subversive Genealogy : "The intention here is neither to make Melville's romances real by reducing them to some preexistent reality, nor to recover American history in Melville in order to unmask the truth behind his fiction, but rather to understand Melville's constructions in the light of the material from which they were made" (23). Rogin thus writes: "Melville was a realist in his attention to a political rhetoric which, in the literary definition of that term, was not realist. Unlike that public language, however, Melville's version of American history was no celebratory romance" (41). Likewise, David S. Reynolds argues that "historical source study can be delimiting'' and focuses his critical energies on the rhetoric, not the message, of reform movements of Melville's era. See Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), 156.

1. "Editor's Table," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 5 (November 1852), 839. William Wells Brown, Clotel; or the President's Daughter. A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States . (1853; reprint, New York: Carol, 1969), 72.

2. On the structural imperatives within citizenship that erase local identities with abstract affiliations, see Lauren Berlant, "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life ," in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text , ed. Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), 113-14.

3. "Editor's Table," 839; Melville, Moby-Dick , 153. Important studies of economic and territorial expansion in relation to American literature and culture include Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Display in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); and Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982).

4. Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 5.

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature , in Essays and Lectures , ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 17. All further references to Emerson in this chapter that use this edition will be cited in the text. I follow Hayden White, who discusses the difference between narrating and narrativizing by defining narration as a discourse that "openly adopts a perspective and reports it" and narrative as a discourse that "feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story ." "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in On Narrative ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981), 2-3.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," in Untimely Meditations , trans. R. B. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 68-70, 62, 64.

7. Edward Everett, "The Bunker Hill Monument," in Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions , 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850), 1:362; George Washington Warren, The History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association during the First Century of the United States of America (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1877), 375; Daniel Webster, "The Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," in Works , 1:86; Daniel Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 86; Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History,'' 71.

8. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia , in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson , ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1972), 205, 196. Frank Kermode's study of the translatio discusses biological aspects informing American exceptionalism. See The Classic (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 100.

9. Thomas Cole, The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches , ed. Marshall Tymn (St. Paul, Minn.: John Colet Press, 1980), 16, 10. Cole's nativist tone reverberates with themes of Manifest Destiny. The waters of the Hudson, the American prairie, the "margin of the distant Oregon," are "his [the American's] own land; its beauty, its magnificence, its sublimity—all are his" (3). David C. Hunington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York: George Braziller, 1966), 10.

10. John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 12. The Boston preacher is quoted in Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 107. Sears, Sacred Places , 3-30, and McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 100-16, are indispensable in explaining the national and popular resonance of Niagara Falls in nineteenth-century America. Also important in understanding the national appeal of landscape painting in this period is Angela Miller, "Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape," American Literary History 2 (summer 1992): 207-29. "In the absence of a shared race history," she argues, visual representations from the Hudson River School "proffered a sense of national identity" (213). My understanding of collective imagining draws upon Anderson's discussion of the logo in "Census, Map, Museum," Imagined Communities , 163-85.

11. Lincoln, "Fragment on Niagara Falls," in Collected Works , 2:10-11.

12. Hunington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church , 70; for a discussion of the radical dimensions of Church's Niagara , see 69; McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 206. Hunington states that "Frederic Church and the United States of America were one" (61) in his argument that Church was the artist of Manifest Destiny. Such a view, I think, is essentially correct, though in the absence of further commentary, this interpretation risks reproducing the ideological message of Church's painting insofar as it understands Niagara as an uncomplicated, grand patriotic expression without remarking upon the less glorious aspects that reside in American expansionism and its artistic imaginings. In addition, I want to insist that my grouping of Church and his mentor Cole is not an attempt to collapse the differences between the two. Cole's landscape paintings—often punctuated with tree stumps that suggest an ambivalence about American inroads into the wilderness—cast a more sombre tone than Church's works. Cole's apprehensions culminate in his Course of Empire series, whose ruined classical monuments bespeak reservations about American exceptionalism. For detailed descriptions of the differences between specific works by Cole and Church, see Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press: 1988). Adam Badeau's description of Church's Niagara underscores how the antebellum art patron was disposed to imagine herself or himself at the scene, or better yet, how via the image, he or she outdistanced spatial restrictions to stand at the site of a homogeneous polity: "The idea of motion he [Church] has imparted to his canvass, the actual feeling you have of the tremble of the fall." The Vagabond (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1859), 123.

13. Cole is quoted in Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth-Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969), 63; Badeau, The Vagabond , 123-24. For a reading of Cole's Niagara Falls as an evocation of cosmic unity, see McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 213-14. It is important to remember that the sublime works to elevate humans even as it diminishes them. In many nineteenth-century landscapes, faint views of civilization suggest praise for human endeavors that are able to secure a foothold for settlement within the awesome splendor of the wilderness. Thus, Sears argues that the elevated perspective of American landscapes brings to mind "a faintly sacred point of vision that recalls Moses's view of the Promised Land from Mount Pisgah." Sacred Places , 54. Angela Miller extends the implications of this insight, stating that the allusion to Moses's view of the Promised Land was "repeated by Americans like an incantation throughout the period of settlement as they sought to subdue the wilderness and make it blossom as the rose." "Everywhere and Nowhere," 214.

14. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings , 197.

15. Cole is quoted in Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century , 64. Donald A. Ringe, in The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving, and Cooper (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971), examines how the expanse of American nature influenced the consciousness and productions of nineteenth-century painters and writers. And also see Hunington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church , xi, and McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 247, for instance, who argue that Emersonian principles underlay aspects of Church's and Cole's work.

16. Melville, Pierre , in the Library of America edition, 3. Angela Miller elaborates the political dimensions of nineteenth-century landscape painting. She argues that the tension between part and whole in aesthetic composition replicates the tension between the remoteness of local jurisdiction and the abstractness of federal centralism. See "Everywhere and Nowhere," especially 208-9, 219.

17. John L. O'Sullivan, "The Great Nation of Futurity," in Manifest Destiny , ed. Norman A. Graebner (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 19-20; Melville, Moby-Dick , 103, 105, 106. Anderson, Imagined Communities , 22-36. See also Heimert, who discusses how the distinct geographic origins of the Pequod 's mates exemplify positions in the national debates of the mid-century United States. " Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism," 502.

18. Simms is quoted in Kammen, A Season of Youth , 162; the review of Melville is quoted in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Critical Essays on Melville's 'Pierre; or, The Ambiguities' (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), 38; Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Wits and Words in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 31; Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1165.

19. Badeau, The Vagabond , 154.

20. Daniel Webster, "The Character of Washington," Works , 1:230; J. Lansing Burrows, "Address Before the Mount Vernon Association, July 4th, 1855," Southern Literary Messenger 21 (1855), 515.

21. Kirkland, Memoirs of Washington , 57.

22. McKinsey, Niagara Falls , 104. The diminutive figures at the base of the falls, enveloped and partially obscured by the spray from the falls, further makes incidental—and forgettable—Native Americans, suggesting their incompatibility within the monumental nation. Wai-chee Dimock demonstrates how the extermination of Native Americans was made to conform to larger narratives of American destiny: "The Indian, as he is described by antebellum ethnographers and politicians, is therefore always the subject of a predestined narrative in which he is responsible for, guilty of, and committed to a fated course of action, in which he appears as... a legible sign of his own inexorable end." "Ahab's Manifest Destiny," in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature , ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 190.

23. Ibid. McKinsey discusses the engraving America in terms of "harmony." But is unity the only message that this engraving can narrativize? In chapter 4, I suggest that Williams Wells Brown presents a different strategy of reading sublime national narrative that listens to the story the muted slave of America might tell.

24. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia , in Life and Selected Writings , 197. Given Webster's message, it is not surprising to hear his speech described as illustrative of federalism, as unifying, as "sublime": "The conception of the whole discourse was magnificent; and, being grandly sustained in all its parts, its effect upon the immense auditory, carried away by his lofty sentiments, mingled into one mass, and wrought up as one man to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, was really sublime." Warren, History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association , 150; Webster, "Completion of The Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:59

25. Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 186.

26. "Editor's Table," 702; Weems, Life of Washington , 5.

27. Berlant makes a similar point: nationalism produces a "powerful politically sanctioned ideology of amnesia" that leads to the erasure of local memory. The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 194. While I agree with Berlant, at the same time, I want to suggest that national history leads to a forgetting of not just local memory, but of national history itself.

28. Weems, Life of Washington , 22; Jared Sparks, The Life of George Washington (New York: Miller, Orton, Mulligan, 1855), iv.

29. Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 62, 71.

30. For the sake of clarity and simplification, I will hereafter refer to the Washington Monument in Baltimore as the Baltimore Monument, and the obelisk in Washington, D.C. as the Washington Monument. My suggestion of an equivalence between Emerson's writing and the national narratives of American monuments deserves further comment. The volume of Emerson's corpus, and its contradiction and diversity, must be somewhat overlooked in order to argue for a sympathy between Emerson and monumental architecture, and yet, as Donald Pease suggests, Emerson's thought, particularly his popular notions of self-reliance and transcendence, proved susceptible to this sort of seamless rendering by the antebellum public. "Emerson himself was not careful to distinguish what he meant by self-reliance from what the term was popularly understood to mean," writes Pease. "His essays and orations exploited the confusion between what he meant and what the public understood." Visionary Compacts , 205. In short, then, my invocations of Emerson are designed as explications of those discrete elements of his thinking that can be taken up to ratify the projects and philosophy of monumental culture. Following Foucault's "What is an Author?" I read Emerson not so much as an autonomous writer, but as a discursive subject whose writing is infused with various cultural forces including the transcendent imagining of the nation. Champion of Young America and critic of national policy, devotee of American exceptionalism and antagonist of United States social institutions, Emerson represents a complexity and a contradiction, not all of whose ideas filtered equally throughout the republic. Like imperial America, my interest lies in Emerson's notions especially conducive to the monumental project.

31. Everett is quoted in Warren, History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association , 115; Melville, Moby-Dick , 132. In addition, to fabled New World political advancements, the Bunker Hill Monument gave testimony to a progressing and more efficient American ingenuity. One of the first railroads built on the American continent ran between Quincy and Bunker Hill, transporting the granite blocks used in construction. While expenditures for the Baltimore structure totalled two hundred and twenty thousand dollars, the Bunker Hill monument, containing twice the amount of cubic feet and sixty feet higher, was estimated at one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. See Richard Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston, and the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill , (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1849), 353-54.

32. Pease, Visionary Compacts , 217. John Bodnar reads monuments such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as instances in which "official culture" tries to override "ordinary" culture by using nationalism to predominate the "profane" experiences of "ordinary people and ordinary emotions." He suggests that Webster's speeches at Bunker Hill, by championing the middle classes, worked to foreground this ordinary citizen, but I find it hard not to see Webster's praise as a ratification of a common, undifferentiated culture committed to prosperity and progress. In Webster's era, so much of what was considered to be "common'' or "ordinary" was understood as coincident with America itself. See John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 7, 25.

33. Weems, Life of Washington , 9; Everett is quoted in Warren, History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association , 116; William W. Wheildon, Memoir of Solomon Willard, Architect and Superintendent of the Bunker Hill Monument (Boston: Monument Association, 1865), 223. Just as contributions and certificates permitted the citizen to imagine himself or herself as part of national history, at Niagara Falls the souvenirs, guide books, and certificates from trips to Termination Rock were all directed at "tourists who stepped out of their ordinary routines, their familiar and obscure surroundings, and stepped onto the stage of history." Sears, Sacred Places , 23-24.

34. Wheildon, Memoir of Solomon Willard , 191; Frederick Loviad Harvey, History of the Washington National Monument and the Washington National Monument Society (Washington, D.C.: Elliot Printing, 1902), 72. Traces of division still disfigure the Washington Monument even though it was completed in 1886. The visible discrepancy in the shading of the marble blocks between the lower and upper portions of the monument preserves memory of the cessation of national construction in the Civil War era.

35. Melville, Moby-Dick , 141; see Anderson, Imagined Communities , 24-25.

36. Webster, "Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:86-87, 105. Hannah Arendt outlines this republican notion of the past and religare in "What is Authority?" in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1968). Arendt describes how the Roman republic saw itself moving into a future that extended to the foundations of the past.

37. Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 202-3. The entire chapter on Panopticism (195-228) is key to understanding Foucault's ideas about the intersection of visibility and disciplinary individualism. In light of Foucault's investigations, one is struck by the fact that the granite for the Bunker Hill Monument, an icon of democratic freedom, was prepared by forced labor at the state prison.

38. Pease, Visionary Compacts , 45. By saying that American monumen-talism does not make individuals visible, I do not intend to discount that within the United States, individuals are also highly visible registers of simultaneously, power, knowledge, and resistance. The existence of extensive police forces, public-opinion polls, and the popularity of psychological therapy may be taken as signs of panopticism.

39. Webster, "Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:83.

40. Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 201, 207.

41. Melville, Letters , 210.

42. Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile in the Library of America edition, 425. All further references made to this edition will be included in the text.

43. Melville, Letters , 170; "Editor's Table," 701. Daniel Reagan, in "Melville's Israel Potter and the Nature of Biography," American Transcendental Quarterly 3 (September 1989): 257-76, though he may misrepresent an elitist tendency of Emerson's notions of biography by concentrating upon Representative Men , is helpful in generating a historical context for nineteenth-century American biography. For the monarchical tension within Melville's authorship, see chapter 2 of Dimock, Empire for Liberty .

44. Chase's classic work, Herman Melville , locates many of Melville's figures within the American folk tradition; for further treatment of the folk influences in Israel Potter , see 176-83.

45. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel , 191.

46. Melville, Letters , 78. For an exploration of the parallels between Melville and Bartleby, see Leo Marx, "Melville's Parable of the Walls," in Herman Melville's 'Billy Budd,' "Benito Cereno," "Bartleby the Scrivener," and Other Tales , ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 11-29. John Seelye further elaborates on metaphysical grounds the differences between Melville and Emerson. Melville , 7-8.

47. "Editor's Table," 701. In his account of monumental history, Nietzsche describes a situation relevant to Israel's effacement, emphasizing the pitfalls of neglect, of smoothing out "what is individual,": "If, therefore, the monumental mode of regarding the past rules ... the past itself suffers harm : whole segments of it are forgotten, despised, and flow away in an uninterrupted colourless flood." "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 69, 70-71.

48. Perhaps inadvertently, Warren records the ways in which the monumental forgets and pushes the individual toward oblivion. Warren notes that "it was promised in the beginning that the names of all those who should give a single dollar would be preserved in perpetual remembrance," only to apologize that such a project remained to be realized. History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association , vii. Peter J. Bellis's discussion supports the idea that Israel Potter identifies amnesia and alienation as key elements of the monumental. Melville's "reinscription" of Potter's autobiography as biography works to " discredit the notion of historical narrative as simple 'recollection'; history is, he insists, a fictionalizaton, a reinscription that obscures the reality of alienation and loss." "Israel Potter: Autobiography as History as Fiction," American Literary History 2 (winter 1990): 610.

49. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 179; Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston , 344; Webster, "Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:86. Wu Hung's essay on Tiananmen Square provides a helpful account of how monuments can act to implement a fixed, temporal order. The Goddess of Democracy that sprang up under much different auspices than the official state buildings in the square, he suggests, offers an almost antimonumental posture insofar as "it was prepared to be destroyed." It is this ephemeral nature that connotes the political for Arendt. "Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments," Representations 35 (summer 1991): 113.

50. Webster, "Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:107; Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," Collected Works , 1:112, 1: 115. This understanding of Lincoln's politics emerges from my reading of Arendt, who describes politics as a human realm of interconnection that is necessarily transitory and fragile. See The Human Condition , especially 199-200.

51. Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 72.

52. Carolyn Porter, "Reification and American Literature," in Ideology and Classic American Literature , ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 203. See also Pease, who comments on the "incomprehensible," nonactual aspect of this passage. Visionary Compacts , 227.

53. See Bellis, " Israel Potter ," for a thorough accounting of the differences between Melville's biography and Potter's autobiography. Bellis sums up the significance of these differences by suggesting that Israel Potter is a "critique of narrative representation that is at once a theoretical or self-reflexive gesture and an attack on the mythmaking that supports an ideology of national progress" (622).

54. In his discussion of Pierre , Sundquist suggests a relation between parody and patricide. Home as Found , 177-82. For an illuminating account of contemporary resistance to the official history of the monumental, see Marita Sturken, "The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial" Representations 35 (summer 1991): 118-42.

55. Israel R. Potter, Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824, reprint; New York: Corinth Books, 1962), 50. As Melville remarks in his preface, despite the original's autobiographical form, it was written by another, most probably its publisher, Trumbull.

56. Arendt, The Human Condition , 186; Bellis, " Israel Potter ," 607.

57. Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 82, 81; Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 149, 105.

58. Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 76. See also Bhabha, "DissemiNation," for a discussion of how alterity and difference such as is found in Israel Potter represents the nation as an "ambivalent, ragbag narrative" (318).

59. Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 69, 71. Laughter performs another vital function by guarding against the excessive use of critical history, which can destroy life. Critical history can lead to an outlook that declares "For all that exists is worthy of perishing. So it would be better if nothing existed" (76). For further elaboration of the need to temper critical history with metaphor and tragedy, see White, Metahistory , 332-72.

1. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1161; Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy , 29.

2. O'Sullivan, "The Great Nation of Futurity," 20. McWilliams provides interesting background about O'Sullivan; see Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character , 13-15. Not only was O'Sullivan Una Hawthorne's godfather, but he figured as the godfather of the Young America movement. Perry Miller's The Raven and the Whale still stands as one of the most comprehensive treatments of literary nationalism during the American Renaissance. Other commentators include Kammen, A Season of Youth , 161-69; McWilliams, 1-21, and Joel Porte, In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 16-19.

3. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1165.

4. Theodore Parker, The American Scholar , ed. George Willis Cooke (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1907), 33-34, 44; Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1164.

5. Parker, The American Scholar , 37. Despite Parker's determination that slave narratives were "original," these works often adapted and cunningly manipulated more established literary forms, among them the picaresque, the sentimental novel, and the travel narrative. That slavery and race provided an "original," if not embarrassing, cultural nationalism is evident in the context of minstrelsy in addition to that of the slave narrative. See Eric Lott on the intersections of the popular culture of blackface and national culture. Love and Theft , 89-107.

6. Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (winter 1989): 6, 12-13, 11, 13. The intersection of monumentalism and race could also examine the United States government's attitude toward Native Americans. Beginning with the Hudson River School, art and literature portrayed Native Americans relinquishing the grandeur of Nature to the white settler. In Ann S. Stephens's Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860; reprint, New York: John Day, 1929), for instance, the disappearance of Native Americans is carefully staged against a monumental landscape. This real dispossession from the land saw the symbolic inclusion of Native Americans within an iconic and monumental history. Treaties with tribes were often ratified with peace medals engraved with the president's image. On this point, see the iconic medallion emblazoned with an image of Washington that Chingach-gook wears in The Pioneers . In addition, representatives from tribes formed part of the formal ceremonies consecrating the Washington Monument, and some of its stones, whose inscriptions face inside, were donated from tribes.

7. Ibid., 14; Bercovitch, "The Rites of Assent," and see also the final chapter of The American Jeremiad . Douglass, Narrative of the Life , vii.

8. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad , 176.

9. Burrows, "Address Before the Mount Vernon Association," 515; Marion Harland [Mary Virginia Terhune], Moss-Side (New York: Derby, Jackson, 1857), 55; E.D.H., "The Fugitive Slave's Apostrophe to Niagara," in Joseph T. Buckingham, Personal Memoirs and Recollections of Editorial Life (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, Fields, 1852), 194. This poem's author is identified by only the three initials, and evidence suggests that it is not the production of a fugitive slave, despite the work's title. Impersonal, distancing expressions such as "the bondman's breast" (192) and "the Negro's God" (194) indicate the poem as the creation of a white abolitionist.

10. Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and, Forty Years a Freeman: Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, while President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West (1856; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 303-4; Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro , 158.

11. William Wells Brown, The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings, Compiled by William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1848; reprint, Philadelphia: Rhistoric, 1969), 23; Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," in Essays and Lectures , 69.

12. William Wells Brown, The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847), in Four Fugitive Slave Narratives , ed. Robin W. Winks, et al. (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969),43, 1; St. Domingo , 25, 32.

13. Brown, Narrative , 1.

14. For the different editions and changing details of Brown's autobiography, see Larry Gara's introduction to the Narrative , xi.

15. William Wells Brown, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969), 109-10. Not all critics have agreed on the significance of William Wells Brown. Arthur P. Davis, introducing J. Noel Herrmance's William Wells Brown and 'Clotelle': A Portrait of the Artist in the First Negro Novel (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1969), belies Brown's significance as cultural critic. He considers Brown a "limited and pedestrian" writer and continues to state: "Brown was not a five-talent man like Frederick Douglass; he was a one-talent, at best a two-talent man.... When we think of these circumstances, we tend to forget some of the artistic shortcomings of Mr. Brown. The surprising thing is that he wrote at all" (vii, viii).

16. William Wells Brown, "A Visit of a Fugitive Slave to the Grave of Wilberforce," in Autographs for Freedom , ed. Julia Griffiths, (1853; Rochester, N.Y.: Wagner, Beardley, 1854), 71.

17. Frederick Douglass used "colonize" in this sense of racial segregation when he denounced the prejudice "that colored people should be separated and sent up stairs—colonized." See Doulgass, Life and Writings , 2:123. William A. Craigie cites two examples particularly relevant to connotations of deportation. In 1863, Thomas Prentice Kettel recorded in History of the Great Rebellion : "The President alluded to the efforts he had made in relation to emancipation, and also in relation to colonizing the emancipated blacks." In 1854, Maria Cummins wrote in the sensationally popular The Lamplighter : "The house is pretty considerable full just now, to be sure, but maybe you can get colonized out....'One room, in the next street!' cried the doctor. 'Ah, that's being colonized out, is it?'" A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles , 4 vols., ed. William A. Craigie, et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 1:558-59).

18. Brown, "A Visit of a Fugitive Slave," 71; The Black Man , 34.

19. Brown, Narrative , 46.

20. George Lippard, The Legends of the American Revolution, 1776; or, Washington and His Generals , (1847; reprint, Philadelphia: Leary, Stewart, 1876), 360, 368.

21. Ibid., 361-62. This passage nicely illustrates Lippard's understanding of the ideological contradictions posed by the figure of the black slave, but even more contradictory for him was the figure of white slave of industrial labor. David S. Reynolds writes: "Though painfully conscious of the southern Negro's plight, Lippard was more concerned with the white slavery in northern factories than with black slavery on southern plantations." George Lippard (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 59.

22. Lippard, Legends of the American Revolution , 361; William Lloyd Garrison, "No Compromise with Slavery," in The Liberty Bell (Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, 1844), 216; Abraham Lincoln, "Address to the New Jersey Senate at Trenton, New Jersey," in Collected Works , 4:236. The fuller context of Lincoln's speech makes clear that his concerns about national duration are rooted at the level of narrative. He remembers "that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book ...'Weems' Life of Washington'" (4:235). In the face of secessionist fever in early 1861, his own presidency could hardly be so securely emplotted.

23. From the Greek, meaning "to put in beside," parenthesis implies a hiatus having no grammatical connection to the passage into which it is inserted. Often the lack of connection is contextual as well, in the sense of a digression that steps outside the supposed process of the discourse. Within a sentence, parenthesis destroys unity, producing a dislocation that interrupts the progress, promised to all sentences, from beginning to end. Hugh Blair writes: "I proceed to a third rule for preserving the Unity of Sentences; which is, to keep clear of all Parentheses in the middle of them ... for the most part, their effect is extremely bad; being a sort of wheels within wheels; sentences in the midst of sentences, which a writer wants art to introduce in its proper place." Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres , 2 vols., ed. Harold F. Harding (1783; reprint, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 1:222.

24. Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 137-39, 142. See especially 82-87 for his discussion of parenthesis. I do not mean to say that with the decline of the Puritan community, historical consciousness became wholly secular and that Rome replaced Canaan as the destination of memory. American politics carried, and still do carry, strong religious overtones. Washington's resistance of the dictatorial impulse can fit a religious allegory as well. Lippard, for instance, speaks of Washington as "the redeemer" (77) and imagines a temptation in the American wilderness when British general William Howe tries to seduce Washington from the cause of independence with offers of a dukedom.

25. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided , 49. In addition to this anecdote about Monroe, Forgie's book is stocked with examples of attempts either to preserve or to throw off the founding past.

26. Brown, Clotel , 64. Bercovitch makes this argument about dissent/ consent in several places, but see The American Jeremiad , especially the final chapter.

27. Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter , 70.

28. Herman Melville, "The Bell-Tower," in the Library of America edition, 819. All subsequent references are to this edition.

29. Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," Collected Works , 1:108. Lincoln's Lyceum speech was motivated by outbreaks of mob violence that seemed to indicate the present's distorted understanding of democracy. It is not insignificant that he took as one of his examples the lynching of a black man in St. Louis.

30. Various critics have noted the dimensions of both wage slavery and race slavery in "The Bell-Tower." See especially Karcher, Shadow over a Promised Land ; Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction and the American 1850's (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), as well as "Melville's 'Bell-Towen:' a Double Thrust," in American Quarterly 18 (summer 1966): 200-207.

31. Earlier in his career, Bannadonna participates in founding. He reminds one of the magistrates: "Some years ago, you may remember, I graved a small seal for your republic, bearing, for its chief device, the head of your ancestor, its illustrious founder" (825).

32. Other commentators have noted the correspondence between Bannadonna's bell and the Liberty Bell. See, for instance, Karcher, Shadow over a Promised Land , 156, and Fisher, "Melville's 'Bell-Tower,'" 206.

33. Historical legends present other dates than Washington's birthday 1846 for the cracking of the Liberty Bell. Among them are the arrival of Lafayette in 1824, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1828, the death of John Marshall in 1835, and Washington's birthday in 1835. See Justin Kramer, Cast in America (Los Angeles: Justin Kramer, 1975), 77; Rev. John Baer Stoudt, The Liberty Bells of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: William J. Campbell, 1920),120-21. On February 26, 1846, the Public Ledger assessed the status of the bell after Washington's birthday:

      The old Independence Bell rang its last clear note on Monday last in honor of the birthday of Washington and now hangs in the great city steeple irreparably cracked and dumb. It had been cracked before but was set in order for that day by having the edges of the fractures filed so as not to vibrate against each other, as there was a prospect that the church bells would chime on that occasion. It gave out clear notes and loud ... [but] it [is] completely out of tune and left ... mere wreck of what it was. We were lucky enough to get a small fragment of it and shall keep it sacred in memory of the good and glory achieved by the old herald of Independence in times long past and ever to be remembered.
Quoted from Victor Rosewater,
The Liberty Bell: Its History and Significance
(New York: Appleton, 1926), 102.

34. David S. Reynolds discusses the popular veracity of Lippard's creations in George Lippard , 49. Sensing the inextricable blurring of historical fact and popular fabrication, one historian wrote in 1926: "The Legends of the Bell have secured unquestioning acceptance and enjoyed a popularity not only among the unlearned but also among people priding themselves upon being especially critical; in faith, they have accomplished as much as its true history in widening a pall of sacredness about it and making it venerated far and wide as a precious relic." Rosewater, The Liberty Bell , 110—11).

35. Lippard, Legends of the American Revolution , 392; Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," Collected Works , 1:108.

36. Lippard, Legends of the American Revolution , 392. Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," Collected Works , 1:115.

37. Lippard, Legends of the American Revolution , 393.

38. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1952), 57; Lincoln, "Address before the Young Men's Lyceum," Collected Works , 1:115.

39. Locke, Second Treatise of Government , 58.

40. Abraham Lincoln, "Address at Cooper Institute, New York City," in Collected Works , 3:523, 534-35. Although Lincoln here entertained critiques of the national patriarchy, later in the same speech he displaced the threat of parricide by pointing to Southern sectionalists: "It was not we, but you, who discarded the old policy of fathers" (3:538).

41. David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays of the Civil War Era , 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1972), 16; Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written By Himself (1892; reprint, New York: Collier, 1962),485,484. Also important is Douglass's reminder that Lincoln spoke from a much different place than did most social critics and reformers of the antebellum era. Evaluating Lincoln's statements during his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Douglass recognized the position of the politician: "These were not the words of an abolitionist—branded a fanatic, and carried away by an enthusiastic devotion to the Negro—but the calm, cool, deliberate utterance of a statesman." Life and Times , 295.

42. Abraham Lincoln, "Emancipation Proclamation," in Collected Works , 6:29; Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 146. Lincoln's view of the Emancipation Proclamation is quoted on 151. For the problematics of Lincoln's views and policies toward blacks, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, "Only His Stepchildren: Lincoln and the Negro," Civil War History 20 (December 1974): 293-310, and George M. Fredrickson, "A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality" Journal of Southern History 41 (February 1975): 39-58.

43. Abraham Lincoln, "Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland," in Collected Works , 7:301-2.

44. Abraham Lincoln, "Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg," in Collected Works , 7:23; Douglass, "Comments on Gerrit Smith's Address," in Life and Writings , 1:375.

1. Douglass, Narrative , 114; "The Heroic Slave," in Life and Writings , 5:503. All further references to "The Heroic Slave" in this chapter will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Daniel Webster, "Completion of The Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:59; Emerson, Nature , in Essays and Lectures , 7. Recent studies examining America's national patriarchy include Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided ; Rogin, Subversive Genealogy and Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Vintage, 1976), and Sundquist, "Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance" and To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Also relevant are Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth , and Jay Fleigelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims .

3. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Stern, introduction to a special issue on memory and counter-memory, Representations 26 (spring 1989): 2; for a further description of topoi as related to memory, see 2-3.

4. Mary Henderson Eastman, Aunt Phillis's Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is (1852; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 205; Burrows, "Address Before the Mount Vernon Association," 517; Edmund Jackson, "The Effects of Slavery," 41.

5. Brown, Narrative , xxv, 91.

6. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man," 126,130. Also see Bhabha's account of the hybrid, "Signs Taken for Wonders," 153-57, and his account of "cultural difference"in "DissemiNation," 312-15.

7. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxii-xxiii, 75,42-54.

8. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom , 191; Dred Scott v. Sandford , 703.

9. Douglass, Narrative , 21. Certainly, Douglass's 1845 autobiography is an integral document of American history and not simply a personal narrative. I am commenting, however, on the editor's efforts to limit the discursive scope of the Narrative . Sundquist provides a discussion on the important changes Doulgass made in his history and representation of America in moving from the Narrative to My Bondage and My Freedom. To Wake the Nations , 83-93.

10. Douglass, Narrative , 93; My Bondage and My Freedom , 361.

11. See James Olney, "The Founding Fathers—Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington," in Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987 , ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Olney reads Douglass's Narrative as a "revolutionary document" that signifies upon the Declaration of Independence (6). Also see Sundquist's chapters on Douglass and Nat Turner in To Wake the Nations and Maggie Sale, "Critiques from Within: Antebellum Projects of Resistance," American Literature 64 (December 1992): 695-718.

12. I refer to "amalgamation" instead of "miscegenation" because the latter term was not invented until 1863, and was coined then to express a specific anxiety concerning how black emancipation would affect sexual relations between the races. See Forrest Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 53-55.

13. Brown, Clotel , 226. Sundquist makes use of the duality of the Mayflower—vessel to freedom and slave trade ship—to discuss the "elementary doubleness of America's political origins." "Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance," 7. He also examines the patriotic implications of Nat Turner's rebellion, see "Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance," 14, and To Wake the Nations , 65.

14. William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (New York, Oxford University Press, 1987) and The Signifying Monkey ; Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Robert Stepto, Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

15. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History," in The Foucault Reader , 87, 88; Bhabha, "DissemiNation," 312.

16. Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage; or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (1890; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 158-59.

17. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death , 337. James Olney and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have discussed the problematics of memory for the slave narrator. See Olney, " 'I Was Born': Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature," in The Slave's Narrative , ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 149-152; and Gates, Figures in Black , 100-104; Melville, Pierre , 27. Hortense Spillers' article, "Mamma's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" Diacritics 17 (summer 1987): 65-81, which examines the historical and rhetorical construction and effacement of black womanhood, is instrumental in understanding the disruptions in gender and family identity caused by slavery. It is important to point out, however that my remarks concern the slave narrative and do not necessarily concern the slave community. In addition, it should be noted that my study seeks to understand conceptions of freedom largely within men's slave narratives. Women's slave narratives proffer much different notions of freedom, ones that are less individual and more family-oriented. See Sale, ''Critiques from Within," especially 701-13.

18. See John Thompson, The Life of John Thompson, A Fugitive Slave, Containing His History of Twenty-Five Years in Bondage, and His Providential Escape: Written by Himself (1856; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968). Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave; Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853,from a Cotton Plantation, near the Red River, in Louisiana , in Puttin' On Ole Master: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup , ed. Gilbert Osofsky (1853; New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 406, 229.

19. Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro , 280; Albert Taylor Bledsoe, An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1856), 131; James Roberts, The Narrative of James Roberts, Soldier in the Revolutionary War and at the Battle of New Orleans (1858; reprint, Hattiesburg, Miss.: The Book Farm, 1945), 31. In suggesting that black patriarchy was slighted in national consciousness, I do not mean to indicate that blacks did not exercise fatherhood or that they were merely incidental to American founding history. Indeed, Brown's own studies, such as The Black Man and The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867; reprint, New York: Citadel Press, 1971), oppose the antebellum predisposition to ignore or declare invalid black fathers, within both actual social structures and constructed national history.

20. James W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly a Slave in the State of Maryland , in Great Slave Narratives , ed. Arna Bontemps (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 201.

21. Gates, Figures in Black , 100; Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death , provides a range of cross-cultural examples of "social death."

22. C. W. Larison, Silvia Dubois (Now 116 Years Old), A Biografy of the Slav Who Wipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom (1883; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 76.

23. S. A. Cartwright, Slavery in the Light of Ethnology , in ' Cotton is King,' and Pro-slavery Arguments: Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright on this Important Subject , ed. E. N. Elliot (1860; New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), 722.

24. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Now in England (1855; reprint, Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1972), 98. Brown dictated his narrative to Louis Alex Chamerovzow. On the slave narrator's strategies to gain authority and authenticity, see Stepto, Behind the Veil , and Olney, "'I Was Born.'"

25. Byrd is quoted in Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll , 75.

26. Roberts, Narrative , 10.

27. On the indispensability of history for human subjectivity, see Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 60-61.

28. Douglass, Narrative , 21-22.

29. William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William And Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860; reprint, Salem, Mass.: Ayer, 1991), 2, 57. Samuel Ringgold Ward also uses a textual metaphor to describe the mulatto: "Ah! the slaveholders are publishing, as in so many legibly written volumes, in the faces of their mulatto offspring, the sad, sickening evidences of their abominable immoralities." Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro , 205.

30. Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom , v; the proslavery pamphlet is quoted in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Black Rebellion: A Selection from Travellers and Outlaws (1889; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 272; Dred Scott v. Sandford 702-3.

31. Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom , 2, 60. These and other scenes from the Crafts' history are adapted by Brown in Clotel , 170-76, 204. On the sexual and psychological dangers of the miscegenated body, see Dearborn, Pocohontas's Daughters , 131-58.

32. Moses Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (1838; reprint, Philadelphia: Rhistoric, 1969), 1-2; Brown, Narrative , 59; and Clotel , 158, 159. The mistress's actions in Clotel are a perfect example of what Barbara Jeanne Fields calls "society in the act of inventing race." "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America" New Left Review (May-June 1990): 95-118.

33. William Andrews examines fictive slave narratives, including Clotel and "The Heroic Slave," and points to the ways in which African American texts confuse fictional and factual discourse to acquire narrative authority. "The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative" PMLA 105 (January 1990): 23-34.

34. The newspaper reviews of Brown are quoted in William Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown, Author and Reformer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 259, 288. In Behind the Veil , Stepto treats the complex relationship of the slave narrative to the editor's preface.

35. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom , xxxi; Frederick Douglass, Letter to Charles Sumner, September 2, 1852, in Life and Writings , 2:210; Sundquist, To Wake the Nations , 104.

36. Eric J. Sundquist, introduction to Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays , ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12; Brown, Clotel , 245.

37. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death , 340.

38. Brown, Clotel , 217. Douglass recounts a similar episode of a slave woman's suicide/escape in his "An Appeal to the British People, May 12, 1846," in Life and Writings , 1:159.

39. Brown, Clotel , 224, 226. Yet the conclusion of Clotel suggests reservations about how effective this militant political strategy is in the United States. It is not insignificant that the close of the novel finds George living happily in Europe, passing as a white man, and Clotel dead. The "tragic mulatto," as Werner Sollors has argued, had no place in American society, finding only suicide as the pathetic outcome of a resolve to remain in the United States. Those fictional characters who removed to Europe, in contrast, fared more successfully. See Werner Sollors, "'Never was Born': The Mulatto, An American Tragedy," Massachusetts Review 27 (summer 1986): 300. In later versions of Clotel , entitled Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon (1860) and Clotelle; or, the Colored Heroine (1864), the mulatto, George Green, becomes the black rebel Jerome. For the significance of these changes, see Jean Fagan Yellin, The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863 (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 174-77. Both the chronological setting of Clotel (1831) and George's genealogy—"He too could boast that his father was an American statesman. His name was George"—make it plausible that he is the son of a founding father. The ambiguity of whose name is George ("his'' logically refers to "father") creates suggestive speculations about which Virginia statesman named George gave birth to this rebel.

40. Hughes, Treatise on Sociology , 239-40, 240; Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind , 405; Brown, The Black Man , 92.

41. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery , 10; Thomas Roderick Dew, "The Abolition of Negro Slavery," in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 , ed. Drew Gilpin Faust (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 59.

42. Cartwright, Slavery in the Light of Ethnology , 725; Baynard Hall, Frank Freeman's Barber Shop; A Tale (New York: Charles Scribner, 1852), 210; the South Carolina reverend is quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 127. Sundquist also discusses Dew's use of the words patricides and patriots in the context of Nat Turner and Douglass. To Wake the Nations , 35, 115.

43. New Orleans Daily Picayune , December 3, 1841; Andrews, "The Novelization of Voice," 28.

44. Frederick Douglass, "The Heroic Slave," in Life and Writings , 5:479. All further references to this text are to volume 5 this edition. For the historical circumstances of the Creole affair, see Howard Jones, "The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt," Civil War History 21 (March 1975): 28-50. Andrews offers a similar view of the subversive quality of fictive discourse within Douglass's story. He argues that "The Heroic Slave" sabotages "natural" discourse by authorizing the representation of history within fictive discourse. "The Novelization of Voice," 29-31.

45. Robert B. Stepto has suggested the significance of naming in this first paragraph of "The Heroic Slave." Stepto writes: "Douglass advances his comparison of heroic statesman and heroic chattel, and does so quite ingeniously by both naming and not naming them in such a way that we are led to discover that statesmen and slaves may share the same name and be heroes and Virginians alike." "Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass' 'The Heroic Slave,"' Georgia Review 36 (1982): 362.

46. Abraham Lincoln, "First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois," in Collected Works , 3:19.

47. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 68. Stepto's essay "Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction" also marks Madison Washington's example of violent resistance as a significant opposition to the Christ-like passivity and sufferings of Uncle Tom. Andrews makes a similar point in To Tell a Free Story , 186. Still, it should not be forgotten that Uncle Tom's Washington is dressed up in blackface as well—a fact that, especially after the appearance of Eric Lott's Love and Theft , makes this portrait the site of complex negotiations between ethnic, national, and gender identities. While not radical for Uncle Tom, this blackface Washington offers subversive readings for Northern audiences, acting as a "racialized mediator of northern conflicts in southern guise" (199).

48. Richard Yarborough, "Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass's 'The Heroic Slave,"' in New Essays on Frederick Douglass , 180.

49. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story , 187. Maggie Sale argues against the positions of Yarborough and Andrews as well: "this criticism of Douglass's strategies rests on the notion that one can exist, indeed one can think, in a place outside of culture, outside the language systems" that constitute the material and imaginative worlds of nineteenth-century America (711). And see Sundquist in To Wake the Nations : "the notion that the language of the Revolution was but a new form of totalizing imprisonment, a thorough mockery of freedom, is a view that would have been anathema to Douglass" (121). Indeed, Douglass seems to anticipate the arguments of Yarborough and Andrews and attempts to sort out the complex legacy of Washington and the other founders in his speech on the Dred Scott decision. See Life and Writings , 2:407-24, especially 422-23.

50. Brown, Clotel , 226-27.

51. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave , 370; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia , in Life and Selected Writings , 278.

52. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 433.

53. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 170.

54. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History," 82.