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.