Eric J. Sundquist. Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. 224 pp. $20.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-57806-863-0.

Reviewed by Mary Carney
Published on H-Southern-Lit (October, 2009)
Commissioned by Lisa Hinrichsen (University of Arkansas)

Recovery and Renaissance

Eric J. Sundquist has been at the forefront of the transformation of American literary scholarship over the last three decades. He was in the vanguard of those reinterpreting American literature from multicultural and global perspectives. In 2006 he received Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, a tribute to his contributions. It is no surprise, then, that his Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865 (2006) offers an incisive and illuminating perspective on the American Renaissance. This volume provides an encyclopedic overview of writings that address slavery, empire, nationalism, and the frontier. This literary history originally appeared as a contribution to volume 2 of The Cambridge History of American Literature (1995), edited by Sacvan Bercovitch. Sundquist made some corrections and added chapter titles and subtitles. The book is divided into three sections: “The Land of Promise: Exploration and Empire”; “To Muse on Nations Passed Away: The Frontier and American Indians”; and, “No More Auction Block for Me: Slavery and African American Culture.” This book offers scholars, teachers, and students of American literature a valuable introduction to influential writers who contributed to the national dialogue on empire and slavery in the United States from 1820 to 1865.

Sundquist characterizes his purpose as one of recovery, and this text lives up to that claim as he explores some of the earliest works of Chicana/Chicano, Native American, and African American writers, highlighting their vital contributions to the American Renaissance. While multicultural, postcolonial, and more recently globalization studies have become a vibrant force in American letters, Sundquist shows that much remains to be done in the study of U. S. writing. He offers scholars a wealth of little-known texts placed in contexts that illuminate their value to global, postcolonial, multiethnic, and national discourses. The early national period was formative to modern multiculturalism. Sundquist demonstrates how marginalized writers and their methods have contributed to the development of unique American art forms. He offers nuanced readings of canonical texts by such writers as Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. As Sundquist aptly states, “literary history is a turmoil of voices, both major and minor, arranged into explanatory patterns bound to be conflicted, provisional, and reflective of one’s own era” (p. 9). His approach contributes to an understanding of the interrelation of voices across regions, races, cultures, and communities.

Sundquist’s encyclopedic overview of the discourses of race and empire in the American Renaissance reveals the threads of this conversation in a range of texts and genres, including sentimental fiction, captivity and slave narratives, urban gothic, creation myths, trickster tales, and frontier fiction. His work examines diaries, speeches, songs, chants, essays, pamphlets, fiction, poetry, and other forms of literary expression. For scholars and teachers of American literature and culture, Sundquist’s literary history is a rich trove of material and a nuanced exploration of themes central to the formation of American identity.

The first section, “The Land of Promise: Exploration and Empire,” analyzes the significance of historical events and contemporary writings that bear on the westward expansion of the United States and its intersections with Chicana/Chicano literature and thought. Sundquist contextualizes the push for exploration of northern Mexico and the western regions of the states within the larger context of the nineteenth-century pursuit of the Enlightenment ideal of progress through scientific inquiry and geographic exploration. Supported by a belief in the cultural benefit to those people often subjugated by the expansion, the United States can be said to have colonized much of the land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans because they acquired land “occupied by politically and militarily less powerful people” (p. 13). Sundquist shows ways in which the concepts that drove the pioneering push were “a natural continuation of the colonial literature of Christian self-examination and prophecy, ... the postrevolutionary purpose of inspiring further democratic revolutions in Europe” (p. 18). The national conception of the ongoing drive across the continent was supported by the ideal of America’s manifest destiny and “the literature of exploration ... [which] played a significant role in the construction of the frontier ideology by which both Indians and Mexicans were categorized in the white mind” (p. 15). The letters, diaries, essays, and other writings by explorers and settlers held a dual view: sympathy for native peoples, yet fatalism about the demise of the native ways of life or “the corruption and degeneration of Hispanic culture” (p. 15). Such attitudes arose, in part, from cultural arrogance and the headlong rush to claim ownership of valuable resources.

Analyzing the literature of expansion, Sundquist traces the work of such writers as Whitman, Cooper, Washington Irving, and Poe. These writers’ often ironic perspectives illuminated the ways in which mythologies of the West and the rationales for expansion were at odds with democratic and Christian ideals. He finds that the literature of “the American West frequently united Edenic possibility and demonic desire; its mythology, created largely in advance of its history, provided a simultaneously geographical and psychological stage on which Americans’ dreams of liberty, prosperity, and world leadership could be enacted” (p. 19). The characters, some real and others imagined, that people this landscape established enduring archetypes. For instance, this era’s nonfictional and fictional depictions of the explorer promulgated an American myth that still shapes concepts of manhood: the mountain man. These men, as well as their fictional counterparts in Irving, Cooper, and innumerable other writer’s narratives, embody “the popular masculine dream of western empire--virility, independence, and daring” (p. 29).

Literature of these decades also records the expansion into areas where not only Native Americans but also Mexicans had long resided. The accounts of exploration, settlement, warfare, and other experiences usually shaped concepts of Mexico and Mexicans based on racial and religious prejudice. For instance, “the Anglo-American novel [merged] domestic romance with the ideology of manifest destiny” utilizing “historical frameworks and allusions to the violent and pagan past of Mexico” (p. 47). Sundquist demonstrates the importance of recovering other texts that offer alternative viewpoints on this region’s culture in order to develop our knowledge of its literary and cultural life. One barrier to such a project is linguistic. Until the twentieth century most of the oral and written literature of this area was in Spanish and given little attention by scholars of American letters. Sundquist sketches a list of Mexican writers dating back to the sixteenth century to give an overview of this area’s history. His analysis of the writings on exploration and empire reveal those voices that have only recently begun to gain attention among literary scholars. He illustrates how the ideas promulgated in fiction and nonfiction sustain the political ends of those who supported the acquisition of lands and the subjugation of cultures in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In the second section, “To Muse on Nations Passed Away: The Frontier and American Indians,” Sundquist discusses how American literature became a tool in the political and cultural domination that accompanied the westward drive of Euro-Americans. He asserts, “American literature of the frontier was always a literature of political and cultural conflict, one in which language itself was a weapon of subjugation and an agent of transformation” (p. 65-66). Despite the condescension with which much of Native American literary expression was treated, their cultural output was sometimes considered even in the nineteenth century to be a foundation for a uniquely American literature, a national literature that would equal that of Europe.

Post-revolutionary writers would influence generations to come with their portraits of peoples native to America. Francis Parkman’s The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), for instance, “played a large role in fixing the idea of Indian ‘doom’ as part of American’s prevailing mythology for the rest of the century” (p. 69). His portraits correlated Indians with “the natural world” and reduced their status to “quasi-human,” a race destined to be defeated and civilized by Euro-Americans (p. 69). These concepts were widely believed and became a fundamental rationale for military, economic, political, and religious coercion. Sundquist compellingly outlines the interrelation between nonfiction writings, governmental policies, and the fictional works, all of which contributed to the rationalization and celebration of the imperialistic westward expansion.

Fiction and nonfiction writers extended the mythologizing that began with depictions of colonial warfare, including captivity narratives. As a result, the Indian became a central figure in the national mythos. Throughout the American Renaissance and for decades afterward, the Indian “became for white writers a nostalgically or ironically charged symbol, capable of representing a variety of ideas: the loss of innocence that progress entails; a mythic age that would give historical scope to an America eager to assert its nationalism; or a primitivitistic stage of social organization preferable to an increasingly urban, industrial world. Most of all, perhaps, the Indian could be figured as a noble hero, tragic in defeat but in pride and stoicism also a mask--at times a mirror--for white anxiety over the destruction of Native American tribal life” (p. 71). Among the texts that reflect these ideas are “Romantic historical fictions,” including those of Cooper, Williams Gilmore Simms, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ethnographical elements are vital to the building of this mythos. Sundquist outlines the major contributors to this discourse, including George Bancroft, Lewis Henry Morgan, George Catlin, Thomas McKenney, and most importantly Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Sundquist underscores the fundamental paradox that a “spirit of nationalism, prevailing attitudes toward ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ life, and land hunger combined to create the conditions for a literature that largely supported Indian Removal even if it scorned the often violent or dishonest methods by which it was accomplished” (p. 70). He points to writers such as Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who supported the paternalistic bullying while decrying the tragic demise of peoples native to this continent.

During this time, the voices of Native Americans were distorted by language barriers and cultural prejudices. An evaluation of the cultural artifacts of Native American culture is problematized by the fact that much of it is translated or recorded by non-Indians. Those few antebellum documents by Indians “are suspect either because they reflect less their native traditions than the expectations of the white audience to whom they were presented or because of problems in translation” (p. 70). While admitting the dearth of reliable sources for Native American literature, Sundquist nonetheless outlines characteristics of these literary traditions. The extant antebellum literature of Native Americans consists primarily of “myths, tales, and songs transcribed by ethnologists; war or treaty orations recorded by witnesses; and autobiographical works, essays, and some prose fiction by Indians or their amanuenses” (p. 89). Sundquist draws on these sources to identify characteristics of Native American literature. For instance, it “is grounded in the rhythms of nature and the body; it often employs repetition and stylized ceremonial forms to create on [sic] organic compact with the surrounding visual and aural world” (p. 90). Mystical or spiritual elements often permeate everyday life and things, and dreamlife is a key dimension.

Sundquist turns to frontier literature and its relationship with domestic novel and captivity narratives. The merging of Euro-American lives with Native Americans gives rise to intense representations of miscegenation, a dominant theme in American letters. He discusses the rise of Indian-hating literature and its apparent expression of white guilt. The roles of hero and savage were often paradoxically intertwined and changeable within these fictions. By the decade preceding the Civil War, the mythos of conquest and progress had been firmly established in the American psyche. Sundquist’s history of writings about the frontier and the American Indian provides insights into the development of concepts that are still present in contemporary cultural artifacts. This chapter provides a remarkable exploration of how history and narrative join to formulate national policy and shape concepts of national identity.

In the third section, “No More Auction Block for Me: Slavery and African American Culture,” Sundquist opens with the failure of the American Revolution to offer freedom for all and the paradoxes apparent in post-revolutionary American thought that celebrated the liberation of some while fearing the self-liberation through revolution of others. Nat Turner’s rebellion was regarded as a harbinger of violent retaliation. Slavery and regional conflict over its moral, economic, political, and legal implications were central to American letters: “sociological and political writing became intertwined with literature” both for and against slavery (p. 144). Sundquist traces the economic, political, scientific and religious arguments on both sides of the slavery question. This chapter is the longest of the three, and its exploration of the impassioned rhetoric of pro- and antislavery writings offers an excellent introduction to these formative and troubling threads in our literary history. The compelling analysis of the rhetoric surrounding human enslavement illuminates the rationalizations and ironies of this writing.

Sundquist opens the chapter with a look back at the heritage of the Revolutionary spirit and ideals. His explanation of historical and rhetorical contexts provides a concise and useful backdrop to the American Revolutionary writings on slavery and African American culture. He delineates the influence on both sides of the debate on slavery. He also incorporates a discussion of the southern Cavalier tradition, which culminates in the work of Simms. These writers claim their views are in line with the inheritance of the American Revolution and the protection of individual liberties. More precisely, the Cavalier tradition advocates for an American legal, economic, and social structure based on a narrowly defined concept of “white, Anglo-Saxon, southern ideals” (p. 164). Romanticizing the plantation South, they portray slavery as a system that was more benevolent than the “wage slavery” that subjugated workers in the North (p. 164). Sundquist discusses the disturbing rationalizations created to maintain the institution of slavery.

Some of the passionate and incisive writing on race and slavery appears in novels that “attack ... liberal, romantic ideals of race harmony” and “exposed the sobering fears and hatreds that underlay both sides of the argument over racial equality and the correct means to achieve it” (p. 166). These novels might take the form of local-color, frontier sketches, domestic, and other fictions. Sometimes slavery is not explicitly addressed, but the “depiction of southern characters prone to violent outburst and comic extravagance echoes the work of Simms and [William Alexander] Caruthers (and adumbrates that of [Mark] Twain and [William] Faulkner) in showing that the aristocratic veneer of the South covered a wilder, often crude interior that thrived in a frontier environment economically energized and socially structured by slavery” (p. 166). Sundquist discusses the contribution of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to revitalizing the abolitionist movement. He explains why this sentimental narrative had a transformative effect on the antislavery cause: “It added an entirely new dimension to a crusade that had often bogged down in petty quarrels and useless theorizing. By giving flesh-and-blood reality to the inhuman system for which the Fugitive Slave Law now required the North, as well as the South, to be responsible, it became a touchstone for popular sentiment, which was already reaching new heights in the North in response to the Mexican War and the Compromise [of 1850]” (p. 194). He positions this narrative within the politics of race and gender identity.

Sundquist explores the reaction of southern domestic novelists to Stowe’s novel and its implications for women’s place in political debate over slavery. At the heart of many of these responses are the same arguments offered in the southern Cavalier tradition and proslavery essays. He calls attention to the fact that “with the exception[] of [John Greenleaf] Whittier, Stowe, and Douglass, the central literary figures of the antebellum period did not devote the greater part of their energies to antislavery writings as such” (p. 184). Many works, such as those by William Ellery Channing, even promulgated racist views of African Americans in pursuit of abolitionist ends, but other writers scathingly parodied slavery and “northern myopia about it, [most notably] Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’” (p. 187). Sundquist offers a compelling analysis of Melville’s fiction and explores the major intellectual currents in Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Samuel Parker, and other voices in the call for the abolition of slavery. The increasingly divisive political landscape created by the slave question was finally acted upon by Abraham Lincoln, whose writings and person Sundquist shows to embody the liberation of a country from its divisive regionalism and immorality. This section on slavery and African American culture is invaluable reading for all who care about American democratic ideals and culture.

While Sundquist offers some rich analysis of particular writers, such as Cooper, Stowe, and Melville, the nature of a literary history precludes the possibility for more substantive and detailed analysis of the full range of texts discussed. For instance, this reader would have enjoyed more attention to Jeremiah Reynolds’s narratives of Pacific explorations, Native Americans’ dream songs, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s epic poem of emancipation. Nonetheless, for scholars and teachers of American literature of the nineteenth century, this book provides a rich trove of diaries, essays, letters, novels, poems, and other texts to explore and incorporate into their study and teaching. His encyclopedic approach to American literary history reincorporates lesser-known voices into the broader study of American intellectual and creative life. He succeeds in his ambition “to recover, in sufficient detail, an array of material that makes it possible to understand American literature in its formative period in more inclusive ways” (p. 8).

Sundquist’s grasp of American literature is impressive as he weaves together more familiar literary, historical, and cultural events with lesser-known materials, thereby bringing into range voices long muffled in the focus on Anglo-American writings and ideas. Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820–1865 contributes to Sundquist’s ambition for American literary studies. He envisions a fluid American canon based not on race, ethnicity, gender, or other constructs; rather, he reaches for a “dynamic heterogeneity” (p. 10). Such a recasting of American literary studies demands further reading of a range of voices. To this end, Sundquist’s work points scholars to a wealth of materials worthy of attention and directs teachers to a multiplicity of compelling approaches to American letters and cultural life.

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Citation: Mary Carney. Review of Sundquist, Eric J., Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865. H-Southern-Lit, H-Net Reviews. October, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25708

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