How did literature and politics blend in nineteenth-century oratory? This chapter argues that the admixture was always particular. Thus it begins by explicating three moments of ordinary oratorical practice in Philadelphia in 1855: a gubernatorial inaugural by James Pollock, an oration by the student Jacob C. White Jr. at the Institute for Colored Youth, and a speech by delegate Mary Ann Shadd at the Colored National Convention. Themes germane to nineteenth-century oratory emerge from these examples: its ubiquity and variety, the interactions of oratorical and print cultures, the critical role of audiences in producing meanings of oratorical events, and the ephemeral characteristics of embodied performance. Further, the emphasis in these examples on freedom, citizenship, learning, leadership, and democratic life highlights political debates on racial justice, slavery, colonization, and emigration, demonstrating the myriad ways in which oratory in the nineteenth-century United States can supply an avenue into culture, voice, and lived experience that helps explain trajectories to our own time.

This chapter is a brief history of the nineteenth-century efforts to expand voting and other political rights, interspersed with analysis of key literary texts in which the question of voting rights is a palpable concern, even though it is sometimes not overtly addressed. It takes as its starting point an early nineteenth-century shift in ideas about qualifications for suffrage, during which the prerequisite of land ownership was replaced by the qualities of “virtue and intelligence.” While this shift ensured almost universal white male suffrage by the 1840s, it also provided an opening – albeit a problematic one – for white women and some African American men and women to agitate for enfranchisement. This chapter demonstrates that literature from the 1830s until the early twentieth century reflected and often intervened in the conversation about the “nature” of women and black men, and whether or not they were suited for integration into the public sphere and specifically into the political realm through voting. Authors such as Margaret Fuller, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Charles Chesnutt (among many others) represented the women’s suffrage and black suffrage movements in ways designed to change readers’ ideas about the “virtue and intelligence” of the disenfranchised.

Nationalism represents, advances, and protects the interests of a national “people,” but the metaphor of bodily nativity at the core of claims to national unity proved increasingly implausible for a United States that, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Civil War, proved to be more of a politically divided house than a corporeally singular nation. Efforts of mid-century writers like John W. Deforest and Walt Whitman to imagine a US nation-state as a heterosexual conjugal union between a single, feminized, national body and its governing state-as-husband would face challenges from later writers like William Dean Howells, who imagined increasingly intensive ways for racial difference within this single national body to undermine national unity figured as corporeal nativity. Responding at century’s end to such racial fractures in corporeal unity, W. E. B. Du Bois would displace the now-untenable conjugal union of the US nation-state with a double-consciousness located within the US citizen’s individual self. This hyphenated identity, grounded in a color line, installs the failed legacy of nineteenth-century US nationalism at the core of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US citizens understand and describe their own and others’ imperial Americanness.

Although racial segregation was a social and literary reality throughout the nineteenth century, it would not come to define political, social, and literary practice until the fin de siècle. The defeat of Populism and the wave of disfranchisement across the South in the 1890s enabled the rise of the segregationist order of Jim Crow. Within this order, black writers incubated the idea that the political fate of black Americans required establishing an African American literature. From the 1890s forward, a variety of black writers, including Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sutton E. Griggs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and J. McHenry Jones, sought in their fictional representations of segregation to determine whether these strictures reflected the political will of white southern elites or the animus of lower-class whites. With no social or political basis for political participation by the southern working classes, the form of black politics that came to predominate in the South was what the historian Judith Stein has called “appeals to the ruling elements of society” for justice and redress, with correlate appeals to black elites to speak for the race. It was also this politics of appeal that structured the rise of African American literature.

In American culture, there is a mix and mismatch of core discourses: religious, Enlightenment, and market economy. Each claims, contributes, and competes for kinds of belonging and national definition, by abstract principles of equality, particular community of religion and nation, and possessive individualism of each one’s own self-interest. Poetry, far from being private reflection or self-referring aesthetic object, is an arena in which each of these discourses encounter each other. Widely circulated in newspapers, magazines, publicly recited, poetry took part in and also refracted, in especially intense and focal ways, the drama, questions, and terms of belonging crucial to, and conflictual in, the unfolding of America. In this chapter, I explore the intercrossing and contention between American discourses of religion, Enlightenment, and individualism in the Abolitionist poetry of Whittier, the poetry of war in Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and the poetry of participation in Walt Whitman. In the texts of each, vocabularies, terms, allusion, and critique of American cultural, religious, and political life form complex interchanges, at times through alignment, at times in tense and critical relationship. The poem becomes a field of confrontation, appeal, and address within the context of their writing as voices of culture take on poetic force.

This chapter considers literary expressions of sovereignty in the nineteenth-century United States that underscore sovereignty’s oppositional nature and its productive potential, and it demonstrates how these literary expressions were, like public argument about sovereignty, constructed through the interplay between law and religion. Religious discourse provided a set of terms, examples, and motifs that shaped the nineteenth-century debate over political autonomy as it ranged across matters of territorial possession and the individual conscience. I first briefly address ideas of sovereignty that circulated in the long nineteenth century and informed US literature and public argument. Then I turn to competing visions of sovereignty expressed by the Cherokee Nation, the state of Georgia, the US federal government, and the US Supreme Court in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the final section, I briefly turn to the figure of John Brown who, in linking the vision of Indigenous sovereignty expressed by the Cherokee Nation to the sovereign individuality espoused by Henry David Thoreau and the Transcendentals, serves as a harbinger of the contests over political sovereignty that ultimately led to the US Civil War.

This chapter explores how country and city stand in as proxies for political, racial, and cultural positions. The country operates as the custodian of the “real America,” which becomes imagined as white, masculine, traditionalist, and working class. The city, meanwhile, teems with the elite and the cosmopolitan. Such gestures conjure away any trace of Indigenous peoples, migrant farmers and ranchers, urban–rural labor alliances, black agrarian Populists, and the city’s intersectional working class. Even as we must acknowledge the generative role country-and-city scholarship has played in US literary criticism, this chapter ultimately calls for rethinking this binary by turning to texts that provide a different account of the rural – a narrative that the country as a concept so effectively obfuscates. Writing by authors such as Hamlin Garland and Zitkála-Šá, conventionally categorized as local-color or regionalist, demonstrates that scarcity and survivance rather than city and country shaped the cultural politics of rural spaces in the nineteenth century. They both challenged the bureaucratic state, as an entity that protected the interests of finance capital by subjecting settlers to constant precarity and violently seeking to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their own land, liberty, and literature.

This chapter surveys the interrelated histories of literature, religion, and politics in the nineteenth-century United States. In the wake of official church disestablishment, a wave of religious fervor combined with a rising tide of immigrants to form a nation in which literature became a venue for conversion, condemnation, and cultural affirmation. From early national historical romances that sought to confirm the new nation as God’s (Protestant) chosen land to Transcendentalist writings that celebrated the sacredness of the individual American soul, nineteenth-century literature tied American identity to religious pluralism and personal devotion. Sentimental novels penned by women writers and narratives of escape written by the formerly enslaved fitted religious tropes of conversion and resurrection to visions of social reform and political regeneration, while Mormons, Millerites, Shakers, Spiritualists, and other religious innovators developed new models of spiritual identity and literary language suited to an expansive and imperial nation. Over the course of the century, literature served as a venue for theological debate, a vehicle for conversion, a passionate plea for abused humanity, and an imaginative space for envisioning social reform. In each of these modes, authors of literature intervened not only in religious discourses but in the vital political life of the nation.

Before the 1950s, there was no ideologically coherent conservative movement in the United States to speak of, and no single party up to that point had a monopoly on conservatism as either a political expression or an ideological framework. The roots of American conservatism, however, stretch back to Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution, John Adams’s contributions to the Federalist Party, and John C. Calhoun’s defense of southern regionalism, among other sources. During the nineteenth century, conservatism functioned in two registers: as an argument against precipitous social change and as an attitude in favor of the social and institutional hierarchies handed down through history. The tension between conservativism’s attitude in favor of hierarchy and its argument against change animates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857). These three novels test arguments for social change – women’s rights, abolition, and interracial marriage, respectively – against attitudes in support of hierarchy, ultimately bringing conservatism into a reckoning with its own fundamental assumptions about history and authority.

This chapter lingers on the very notion of territory itself as a spatial imaginary, a literary trope, and a political crucible for competing ideas of sovereignty. In particular, it examines how territory, or perhaps more precisely, territoriality, did not simply work at the behest of US empire but also served as an essential spatial register for working alongside and even against US territorial annexation, occupation, and colonization. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States asserted an understanding of sovereignty that foregrounded dominance over a territory and its inhabitants. At the broadest scale, territory denoted the sovereign’s property (the United States), and sovereignty denoted control over territory. Settler-colonial notions of sovereignty and territory conflicted with Indigenous understandings of sovereignty that often foreground responsibility to human and other-than-human relatives within a shared space or territory rather than possession of property. This chapter’s three sections, “Terra Nullius,” “Indian Territory,” and “Black Territories,” each take up a concept of territoriality that profoundly influenced US colonial expansion at the expense of other narratives of placemaking. Each section details how narratives of territoriality forcefully shaped US politics and culture while also describing competing notions of placemaking that disrupt these dominant narratives.

Fiction writers in the nineteenth century engaged an evolving assemblage of understandings and conflicts concerning their stories and their relationship with politics. Early decades were characterized by suspicions about the value of fiction and its potential for disrupting the demands of nation-building. With industrialization and mass culture came a new appreciation for literary fiction as vehicle for both consensus-building and sociopolitical change. Through it all, most writers and readers, while employing a variety of modalities and aiming at different political targets, maintained the conviction that fiction, when in the hands of a truth-teller, could convey the “truth” of “great principles” and thus do political work. To demonstrate these nineteenth-century understandings of the intersections of fiction and politics, this chapter examines fiction across the century in three different periods consistent with the history of the book and print culture: the first running roughly from 1800 to the late 1830s, after the nation’s birth but before the age of mass culture; from 1840 to the late 1870s, the age of the industrial book; and from 1880 to century’s end, the early days of modernism, new conceptions of language, and the autonomous work of art.

Nineteenth-century American authors often sought diplomatic political appointments because these were understood to be comfortable positions that provided financial security, cultural enrichment, and leisure time for writing. One popular strategy for obtaining such an appointment was to write a campaign biography for a successful politician. Though overlooked today, the genre of the campaign biography, which dates from the 1820s, was important for American novelists such as William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lew Wallace, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In fact, Hawthorne’s 1852 Life of Franklin Pierce irritated his contemporaries (including Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville) and later became an important touchstone for literary scholars interested in the intersection of literary arts and national politics. Paying special attention to Hawthorne’s work, this chapter argues that, rather than characterize the campaign biography as an inartistic piece of propaganda written merely to secure a political appointment, we should instead understand it as a node in a wider network of literary and political narrative nonfiction genres – also including histories, travelogues, newspaper journalism, and slave narratives.