The US Novel and the War of 1812
Ed White, University of Florida
The relationship of a literary genre to a geopolitical military conflict is most easily and
traditionally examined thematically, by considering the imaginative treatment of the event and
Not only does such an approach relegate the text to a
reactive position, as a kind of vantage-point for the event, but more critically it assumes that of
course the genre has something to say, and can say something, about the event in question.
There is a scandalous counter-possibility, however
namely, that the literary genre does not
different one.
Such is the case with the US novel and the War of 1812. One can outline the parameters
of the problem succinctly. From 1800 to 1820, US novel production holds more or less steady.
There are a few years that see two or three more or less novels than usual, but throughout this
period, about four or five novels appear per year. This holds for the war years as well
1813
may be a slower year, 1816 a heavier one, because of the war, but in general, the war changes
nothing about the steadily meager publication of novels throughout the 1810s. We can
contextualize this briefly by looking at the publication of stand-alone volumes of poetry. The
first decade of the nineteenth century saw the publication of roughly 130 monographs,1 while
the 1810s (1811-20) saw roughly 230. In this case, the war clearly inspired and provoked poetic
production, with a jump from eleven volumes in 1810 to twenty-four in 1812, twenty-seven in
129 according to Wegelin; I have not included 1800, which saw 24 volumes (compared with 8 in 1801 or 12 in 1802,
since the dramatic number appears to have resulted from Washington’s death.
1
1
1813, and nineteen in 1814. This is not surprising, since poetry of the moment was often
occasional
or to put this differently, imaginative occasional writing typically took a poetic
form. But at issue here is also the stylistic complexity of the respective genres, a point we can
illustrate through the most long. I would venture here a quick defamiliarization of the first of the
four stanzas:
O say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
This consideration of the flag is perhaps notable for two literary maneuvers: first, the supple
overlaying of the metonymic and the metaphorical, such that the flag is at once an obvious
and
of an actual flag after an actual battle); and second, the density of narrative time, such that the
stanza can accommodate a micro-
What this brief example
confirms, I think, is a perhaps counter-intuitive point about prose and poetry
2
for the
conventions of poetry were best suited to an engagement with historical events, whereas those of
accommodate such an event.
This point can be neatly illustrated through the one novel of the decade to attempt an
The Champions of Freedom, which
appeared in 1816
the ambitious subtitle or, The Mysterious Chief. A
Romance of the Nineteenth Century, Founded on the War between the United States and Great
Britain, was perhaps the longest novel to have yet appeared in the United States. Published a
mere
The Spy,2 Champions shows few of the conventions of the Scott-
Cooper tradition
Champions a
fascinating read today. The novel follows the career of George Washington Willoughby, son of
a revolutionary veteran, and whose introduction speaks to the narrative challenges faced by
army who relocates to the frontier where he wishes for a son, only to receive a promise from the
Mysterious Indian Chief of the subtitle, who prophesies the birth and glory of the son.
-year
appointee to the US Supreme Court, and deceased six years before Woodworth publishes his
novel. These basic contours
2
a fictional father linked to both Washington and a Native
...and two years after Scott’s Waverly (1814).
3
American spirit, and a mother who is the daughter of an actual prominent public official
may
illustrate the challenges and temptations of the novelist of the war. Where Walter Scott crafted
the neutral, mediocre observers as central figures,
the tradition of
the moralistic novel, patriotic partisanship, and the conservative formulation of historical
verisimilitude exemplified in contemporary state histories3 resulted in this very different
to blend fiction and history, and by the final third, its protagonist is typically receiving letters
that read like newspaper reports,4 or carrying on conversations about the war in which
subjectivity yields to reportage.
first sprig of those laur
ional
historical narrative increasingly places on the novel, which reads more and more like a
magazine, alternating between a romance subplot and large segments of text lifted from
newspapers, including blow-by-blow accounts of battles and biographical sketches of
prominent military figures. The challenges of the text may explain, as well, why the novel
defers consideration of the war for the first third, which is devoted to an interesting subplot
See the overview in “History as Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature, ed. Kevin J. Hayes
(Oxford, 2008), 569-92.
4 A sample: “The following officers are spoken of as having signalized themselves on this brilliant occasion: lieutenants
Brooks, Smith, Edwards, Turner, and Packet; midshipmen Forest, Lamb, Clarke, Claxton, and Swartwout; sailing master
Taylor and Champlin; pursers M’Grath and Hambleton; and captain Brevoort, of the army, who acted as a volunteer, in
the capacity of a marine officer, on board the Niagara, and did great execution with his rifle. Brooks, Lamb, and Clarke,
are fallen, no more to rise. Hambleton, who volunteered his services on deck, was severely wounded, late in the action.
Claxton and Swartwout are also badly wounded.”
3
4
ighbors. This subplot is perhaps the
most fascinating of ideological reorientations undertaken by the novel, as Irish Catholics are
sympathetically portrayed as US counterparts (both victimized by the British), and easily
assimilable immigrants; yet the pressures of historical explication mean this subplot is largely
could not envision the narrative blend just over the horizon.
The Champions of Freedom
with the war than the formal obstacles to such an engagement; in other words, it illustrates, as an
exception, why the novel does not flourish with and through the war. To reformulate some of
the implicit observations above, I would identify X primary challenges:
1. The historiographic imperative of reportage and documentation rendered difficult
the gaps, distance
The
burden of narrative density (the demand for facts even to the point of statistical data)
consequently undermined the ability to combine the different temporalities that one
2. The relatively conservative focus on the bourgeois character of high status rendered
difficult both the ideological problematization of the war and the clear distinction of
fictional and historiographic elements. The character had to be prominently
imbricated in events, with the awkward consequence of an accidental fictionalization
of historical personages.
5
3. The ideological demands of a war narrative (whether pro or con) sharply undercut
the potential stylistic complexity of metaphorical and metonymic elements.5 Where
poetry could take a basic patriotic relationship (citizen loves nation) and complicate
it lyrically with temporal complications and expansive connotation, a partisan
account within years of the war could not risk any potential ambiguities.6
Thus the scandalous proposition that the US novel, given its development, could not really
register the War of 1812.
But here I would like to return to and complicate the literary-historical problem with
which I began. Is it possible that the relationship between the war and the novel is better
considered in the reverse direction? That is, instead of asking how the novel registered or
responded to the war, we might ask how the war registered the novel. More precisely: perhaps
the development of the novel tells us something about the ideological possibilities for the war
and how it was experienced
an important project given our tendency to tell the story as one of
political parties at odds. I would rather suggest here that the War experience illustrates the
consolidation of Democratic-Republican hegemony during the Jefferson and Madison years.
This achievement was hardly simple, and we may remember that the novel, with only a few
exceptions, was the purview of northeastern Federalist writers largely united in their disdain for
the Shays Rebellion, their enthusiasm for Washington and Adams, their endorsement of strict
It is not that the novel simply endorsed the war, for it traced events to offer a critique of US administrative culture:
“To repair the misfortunes and redeem the honor of the American arms, was the grand object on which the congregated
wisdom of the nation was now exercised; the first step to the attainment of this desirable end, was the abandonment of
that system of favoritism to which the recent disasters were thought to be attributable.” But this brief note of critique is
generally masked by the confident hegemony of this formulation of the novel’s title: “Brown, Scott, Ripley, Gaines,
Swift, Miller, and some others of well-tried talents and courage, now stood forth as the bulwark of their country—the
real CHAMPIONS OF FREEDOM. Each of them commanded the confidence of their country; but, as commander in
chief, the eyes of every unprejudiced freeman were directed to Brown, and government confirmed their choice by
elevating that hero to the rank of major-general.”
6 This may account for Cooper’s return, in 1821, to the American Revolution.
5
6
class hierarchies, and their hostility toward democracy and dangerous forms of free-thinking.7
Jeremy Belknap, William Hill Brown, Susanna Rowson, Enos Hitchcock, Samuel Relf, Royall
Tyler, Sally Wood, Judith Sargent Murray, Tabitha Tenney, Martha Read, William Jenks, the
anonymous author of The Fortunate Discovery and Moreland Vale all were self-identified
Federalists or even Tories, and during the 1790s, the stylistic and ideological exception that
Modern Chivalry.8 But by the 1810s one sees a
number of non-Federalist intellectuals entering the field of imaginative fiction, including
Margaret Botsford, Isaac Mitchell, Jesse Holman, George Watterston, Washington Irving, and
Woodworth.9
Democrat
from Federalist to
as much as describing a profound change in the literary field, whereby the
a given from 1788 to 1800
was finally
severed, and Federalist authority no longer taken for granted. The question, again, is whether
or not a Democratic-Republican sensibility began to emerge that made possible the pursuit of a
war not only opposed by most Federalists but contributing strongly to the Hartford secessionist
relationship with the war, for the late 1810s witnessed a brief flourishing of harsh antiDemocratic prose satires unseen before the war, including The Adventures of Uncle Sam, in
Search After His Lost Honor
The stylistic and political-ideological exception that proves the rule during the 1790s is Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s
Modern Chivalry.
8 I bracket here the political leanings of Charles Brockden Brown, considered by many critics to be a radical democrat; I
rather read Brown, socially close to the arch-conservative Connecticut Wits, as a radical free-thinking conservative,
whose 1801 novel Jane Talbot argues for the veiling of one’s free-thought. In any event, his 1803 pamphlets contain
classically Federalist anti-Jeffersonian stereotypes.
9 Woodworth, Botsford, Holman, and Mitchell appear to have been solid Democrats; Irving was among what were once
known as the Tertium Quids (in New York he was a Burrite) and like Watterston is best viewed as a post-Federalist
migrating toward what would eventually become the Whig movement. The anonymous author of Rosa, as well as that of
The Irish Emigrant, appear to have been at least friendly to the Democratic-Republicans.
7
7
The Yankee Traveller (1817, Concord, NH), and Fragments of a History of
Bawlfredonia
10
Did the war, then, suddenly make possible a new form of
politicized comic satire in the years after its conclusion? Or, to return to the Woodworth
problem, d
favored British author of the moment? I want to venture some answers to these questions via
consideration of three rubrics: the Revolution; Europe; and character types.
The Revolution. One paradox of the early US novel very much germane to the present
problem is its relative silence on the American Revolution, through and in which all of the
writers of the 1790s had lived or matured
Charlotte used the Revolution as a
backdrop and perhaps as a latent problematic, but tellingly the novel was written in Britain.
Domestically-written novels struggled to even know how to represent it. Brackenridge, a
propagandizing military chaplain during the war and author of published sermons and poems
about the revolution, could make sexual jokes and contemporary political references more easily
Foresters focused on the
Revolution, and it did so through an elaborate allegory that ignored events of the fight itself. By
Prisoners of Niagara, the Revolution could become a
relatively neutral backdrop devoid of the Anglo-French split that characterized the political
discourse of the 90s. This was not a nostalgic looking back as much as an insistence on the
shared history of the future, illustrated well in a February, 1810 speech by Senator Henry Clay.
The first two are archly Federalist at the moment of the party’s fading. The partisan leanings of “Clopper” are less
clear, though his sharp condemnation of slavery makes clear his hostility to the Democratic Party. One might include in
this list Robert Waln, Jr.’s Hermit in America of 1819, though the satire is much milder.
10
8
marked the appearance of a school which was for fifty years to express the
national ideals of statesmanship, drawing elevation of character from confidence
in itself, and from devotion to ideas of nationality and union, which redeemed
every mistake committed in their names. In Clay's speech almost for the first
time the two rhetorical marks of his generation made their appearance, and
during the next half century the Union and the Fathers were rarely omitted from
any popular harangue. The ideas became in the end fetiches and phrases; but
they were at least more easily understood than the fetiches and phrases of
Jeffersonian republicanism which preceded them. Federalists used the name of
Washington in the same rhetorical manner, but they used it for party purposes to
rebuke Washington's successors. The Union and the Fathers belonged to no
party, and might be used with equal advantage by orators of every section. (13435)
There are numerous literary equivalents, but one of the clearest may be found in a the
anonymous 1810 novel Rosa. One of the characters, traveling in Boston, hears of a patriot who
perish, so the nation is saved. And the Lord give us plenty, and drown all the E
simpleton I sold my claim upon my country for a song. O! the blessed times of
American spirit are gone by. Wherever I go I hear people talking about the
9
French and the English; but America is hardly ever mentioned. Bad times, young
man, bad times, indeed, when we lose sight of ourselves to talk about other folks.
The tacit agreement between the elderly and the young, against the middle-aged partisans of the
90s, firmly links the past times of Monmouth with a potential future possible only if the
English/French distinction is transcended. This does not, interestingly, seem to be an argument
the United States is reunified. A similar formulation seems to underlie the anonymous The
of 1812 itself, a novel that begins (literally in the first sentences) with the
orphaning of a young daughter of a revolutionary soldier; the novel essentially works through
various t
must rediscover and work through the past alone. What is interesting is how this historical selfunderstanding culminates: with the erection, in the final pages, of a monument to the
revolutionary veteran whose death is announced in the first paragraph. Without being central
in any way, the revolution so clearly frames the novel as if to broadcast its announcement of a
nascent historical sensibility. In short, the Revolution was in some sense solipsized, becoming a
matter for Americans alone; French support or English atrocities no longer mattered as much as
the solidarity, union, and active nationalism of the Founders themselves. And in this sense, the
novels of the moment contributed to the war effort not by making particular claims against the
British but by glorifying the war to such an extent that a re-presentation or sequel was virtually
understood in utopian terms.
10
Europe. Very much a corollary to the reformulation of the Revolution as a western
hemispheric affair, the decade preceding the war witnesses a reconfiguration of Europe as a
referent in early fiction. In the 90s, England, France, and a few other European sites (Italian,
German, Irish, and occasionally Russian and Polish) were of course ubiquitous, but almost
without notice. Though Charles Brockden Brown had not left the United States, his characters
traveled the Atlantic with neither awe nor culture shock.11 We know much of the remarkable
radicalizing or at least disruptive experiences of a range of travelers of the time
poets like
Washington Allston or Joel Barlow, painters like Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley,
politicians like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
the list of whom is easy to construct. No
such list can be compiled of literary characters, and it was more common to find a scene like that
Ormond, in which a European expressed his wonderment at encountering New
primary spheres of disruptive
cultural contact, in a slew of novels from the late 90s to 1810,12 were African and Caribbean
probably says more about northern writers finally acknowledging that their own nation was a
slave culture than about an appreciation of or anxiety about geocultural difference. Yet by 1809
Yankey in London; where twelve years earlier Tyler had offered a
sensational account of an American in Africa, who incidentally passed through England with
barely a comment, he now presented a series of fictitious letters focused on the nuanced and
well-known Sketch-Book
Arthur Mervyn, exuberant about a visit to France at the end of that novel, may be the exception in Brown’s oeuvre;
the 1801 Jane Talbot features a major character who relocates to France where he successfully become French nobility—
barely remarkable, as is Henry Colden’s encounter with closed Japan.
12 I’d include here Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), the anonymous Humanity in Algiers (1801), Brockden Brown’s Arthur
Mervyn (1799), Sally Wood’s Dorval (1801), Read’s Monima (1802) and Margaretta (1807), Sansay’s Secret History (1808)
11
11
Yankey used the experience of overseas travel to refine a sense of Americanness; and where the
writers of the 90s tried to play it cool in their encounters with Europe, this associate and
beneficiary of English literary giants like Scott opened the Sketch-Book was a scenario of a giddy
arrival in Europe. We might say, then, that just as England was depoliticized and disassociated
from the Revolution, it shifted from being the parent culture to being a foreign one; the
diasporic rhetoric may have still framed the matter, but Englishness had become more historical
than cultural. (Another marker of this is the shift in depictions of the Irish, mocked in good
English fashion through much of the 90s, but viewed as one sub-community among others by
the 1810s, before the later anti-Catholic backlash.) Again, this long-term cultural recalibration
seems to have contributed to a war culturally encoded as an assertion of some American loyalty
regardless of the enemies, for the expansion of the menu of international referents signaled a
transcendence of the
Moses
Nathan Israel appeared, with its long accounts of Germany and Italy, the French Revolutionary
references could almost seem quaint, and the US subplot was one of familial reunion, a
gathering of various Europeans in a new tribe. Here the deliberate confusion of New England
and Jewish names
mentioned several times in the text, as when Germans assume the
protagonist to be a Jew
seems a fascinating play on the late historical books (Kings or
Chronicles), as the Jews/Americans look back to an earlier heritage in an effort to reconsolidate
Memoir of the
Northern Kingdom, which narrates the collapse of the United States into a southern Frenchspeaking nation of plantations, and an extended Canadian monarchy incorporating the northern
secession movement. If this narrative simply confirmed the old binaries of the 90s, its author,
12
William Jenks, could nonetheless also envision a utopian conclusion to the dystopian tale, as the
two kingdoms, in the early twentieth century, seek to unite against Illinois radicals. We may
appreciate the irony of the scenario: overly Europeanized Americans fuse as a nation in reaction
to a small national core.
Characters. As is well known, many of the novels of the 90s treat thwarted marriage
plots, typically through seduction. Crudely put, such novels consider character in terms of a
culturally-endorsed moral norm and a series of predictable deviations or failings. While rakes
and coquettes are often more entertaining characters than the surrounding prigs, they are as
predictable as types, and hardly represent individuation. In such a context, the Bildungsroman is
not generically available, its closest European counterpart
The Sorrows of Young
Werter (a 1784 translation) standing as such a danger that numerous novels of the 90s work to
exorcise it. With the possible exceptions of Brow
Arthur Mervyn
Sarah
(serialized in 1802, published as a novel in 1813), it is really only around 1810 that the
Bildungsroman coalesces. It finds its
Glencarn, which proceeds through a catalogue of formative episodes in which the romance is
secondary if still the narrative endpoint. By 1818, Samuel Lorenzo Knapp Life and Adventures
of Obadiah Benjamin Franklin Bloomfield, the title of which signals the autobiographical
inspiration and the fictional embellishment and elaboration, has made the romance fully
subordinate to the narrative of development, as the titular character chronicles his early sexual
trysts, two failed marriages, and the trials of a third. A similar reorientation appears in Rebecca
Kelroy, the marriage plot of which is foiled as the text focuses rather on the odd
Romantic hero of the title. Kelroy
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character of Dr. Blake, who is variously describ
As one charact
a very
Where
the novels of the 1790s offered plenty of eccentrics, so noted by surrounding characters
subordinate to a narrative agenda of satirical defamiliarization, not attempts to draw social
While the novel is rightly considered the closest approximation of an Austenite novel of
manners (Zabelle Stodola), we may consider what it means that manners imply the social
oddball. The character appears three times in the novel, the first time as a petty-bourgeois
intruder into the sphere of the Philadelphia bourgeoisie; as he retreats, he remarks on his own
sense of alienation and oddity. In his second appearance, he answers bourgeois hostility with a
counter-
great people
By his third and final appearance, he is more or less integrated into the social circle (where he is
at last serving as a medical professional)
in short, he shifts from being a deviation from
character to becoming a type of character. Revealingly, this final scene also features the doctor
describing a momentary religious fervor,13 thereby calling attention to another and very much
“[A]bout a month ago I felt in such an excellent humour for the business, that not knowing how long it might last, I
thought the best way was to strike while the iron was hot, and so took the grand rounds, and went to half a dozen
[churches] in one day.—The first place that I got to, had but eleven people in it—I counted to be certain—and thinking
there was not much good to be had there, I marched off to another, where the folks were so thick they were standing
upon one another’s heads; so thinks I, there must be something more than common going on here; so I wedges myself
in among ‘em, and heard a grand discourse, setting forth that when mortals pursue riches, and worldly prosperity,
however discreet their plans may be, a thousand unforeseen accidents can frustrate them; but in the pursuits of religion
and virtue no such obstacles arise; for a man’s success there depends upon himself, and if his efforts are sincere, they are
13
14
related index of shifting character, the emergence of the religious denomination. Traceable in
the almost exponentially increasing references to Methodists during this period of evangelical
expansion, religion shifts from being a marker of hegemonic identity (as it is in most of the New
England novels of the 1790s) to being a selfy).
-11).
in the early US readings
Lives
themselves: they discover what they are (because of ancestry or tradition) and act accordingly.
their heads, or they turn their experiences of persecution into circumstances for a life of
of differentiated choice: the person chooses roles and is judged by those choices. A reader
encountering a literary person considers her as a moral, legal actor with responsibilities and
liabilities; intention and self-understanding displace social role and habit as foci for judgment.
The Asylum
wrong, honour and dishonesty, candour an
sure to accomplish the desired end at last.—It fairly electrified me!—I felt every word the parson said down to the end
of my little toe!—” (148)
15
frameworks at this moment, whether in the legally-obsessed volumes of Modern Chivalry (esp.
the 1804-5 and 1815 installme
of Innocence
The Gamesters, or Ruins
The Lawyer; or Man as He Ought Not to Be (1808), which
This changing sense of character of course corresponds to the changing sense of the Revolution
and, more so, the changing sense of Europe that emerged leading up to the War of 1812, such
that character signaled choices and assessments rather than moral types.
very different experience of military-political conflict itself. While the conflict may have had
clearly partisan dimensions, I would suggest that the opposition was not that between a
Democratic and a Federalist experience of the war, but between a hegemonic and oppositional
experience. If there was a Federalist experience that identified itself as a partisan critique of the
war, even inspiring a secession movement, by the later 1810s it was reduced to critique of the
The Yankee Traveller, which
essentially responds to Democratic hegemony by imagining a world full of radical types. We
should appreciate the distance traveled from the 1790s, from the confident hegemony of
Hitchcock s The Farmer s Friend to the sense, in the late 1810s, that the nation is Democratic, as
confirmed by the recent war.
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