“Withersoever We Turn Our Eyes”: Reimagining Democratic Writing in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture

Abstract

In his famous 1835 Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville described the press in the US as a fundamentally scattered and anodyne affair. The US, he observed, has no central seat of power, “no metropolis” (2:23). Instead of radiating from a common center, the “intelligence and power of the country are dispersed abroad” (2:23), rays “cross[ing] each other in every direction” (2:23). In the US, there is “no central control over the expression of opinion, any more than over the conduct of business” (2:23). Thus unfocused, the media of “democracy” are also radically reduced in their power and effectiveness. Unburdened by the necessity of licenses, copyright, or registration, US newspapers, periodicals, and books proliferate at the local level at a rate that “surpasses all belief” (2:23) without yet stirring any great political feeling. “[I]t is an axiom of political science” in the US “that the only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely” (2:23).

For Tocqueville, the form and power of print in any given nation state were not arbitrary but part of the providential design of history itself. Nineteenth-century Christian civilizations, Tocqueville believed, were inevitably, whether they willed it or not, marching on the road to greater equality. They would soon all be “democracies.”

Whithersoever we turn our eyes we shall witness the same continual revolution throughout the whole of Christendom.

The various occurrences of national existence have everywhere turned to the advantage of democracy; all men have aided it by their exertions: those who have intentionally laboured in its cause, and those who have served it unwittingly; those who have fought for it, and those who have declared themselves its opponents,—… all have been blind instruments in the hands of God. (1: xix).

For Tocqueville, the gradual development of “equality of conditions” is not contingent upon human actors. It is “a providential fact” and “possesses all the characteristics of a Divine decree.” It is “universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress” (1: xx) In this formulation, the peculiar character of US newspapers and books—their numerousness and scattered powers—is determined from the top down. In its most advanced state, democracy inevitably produces an equality of voices, none of them distinctive, none of them louder or more powerful than the others, none of them productive of political change, which only occurs through providential design.

Tocqueville’s assertions of the determinative relationship between political institutions and print culture have long been contested and put to rest by Michael Warner, Sandra Gustafson, and Trish Loughran, among many others.¹ We are more likely today to believe that print culture, far from being a mere formal echo of the spirit of the nation, is itself a revolutionary instrument, capable of transforming social and political life. Yet the residual idea that US print culture somehow takes its form from the features of the nation-state remains a vital touchstone in nineteenth-century Americanist scholarship. Even as we all believe that print exerts a force that exceeds and potentially transforms political life, American studies is also unconsciously anchored to the idea that books and newspapers in the US were imprinted by and made distinctive through an abiding spirit of democracy intimately linked to the country itself. Three new books on democracy and print culture in the US attest to this vitality: Susan J. Stanfield’s, Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (2022), D. Berton Emerson’s American Literary Misfits: The Alternative Democracies of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Print Cultures (2024); and Bryan Sinche’s Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2024). Although very different in their methods and objects of study, all three document unconventional ways of imagining citizenship and democracy through print in the nineteenth century. Working with the assumption that the US at any given moment must be germinating a more equitable future for itself, these scholars are able to locate insipient democracy in surprising texts. They collectively argue that in the nineteenth-century US certain printed texts, even those that might seem obscure or politically regressive to our eyes, potentially helped to actualize new modes of citizenship, creating prophetic structural spaces into which future generations could step.

In Rewriting Citizenship, Susan Stanfield rehabilitates the literature of white true womanhood—a familiar enough concept to specialists—as an important structure for imagining citizenship for Black men and women as well as white women. Overwhelmingly written by white middle-class women for women’s books and magazines, the literature of true womanhood flourished between about 1820 and 1860, purporting to paint for readers the ideal way to manage a home. Some of this literature was simple advice to women who found themselves at the center of newly emergent nuclear households and so it included tips on how to cook cheap cuts of meat, how to get rid of mice, and how to manage servants. Other strands of the literature of true womanhood included religious tracts on female piety and Christian duty, or fiction and poetry that featured fashionable ladies in glamorous domestic environments. The literature of true womanhood represented women in situations both circumscribed and influential: through their ministrations in the home, women presided over American men, the husbands and sons called upon to be citizens of the new nation.

Stanfield is primarily interested in the household management vein of this literature. Setting aside a long history of scholarly disparagement, she looks anew at this literature’s potential political salience, its construction of a kind of counterpublic domain centered in a private domestic sphere that was also in the process of being fashioned and vivified in a highly public print culture. In these circumstances, the home could offer itself as a kind of quasi-civic space. White women and Black men and women, argues Stanfield, challenged the denial of their citizenship status “by using print culture to elevate the everyday practices of home as proof of their fulfillment of the obligations of citizenship” (5). By creating a form of “domestic nationalism,” household manuals allowed disenfranchised white and Black Americans “to engage in cultural citizenship and nation building without ever physically entering the public sphere (26).”

To make this case, Stanfield goes on to unfold a “cultural history of citizenship.” Her first chapter explores the status of Black men and women and white women as citizens and potential citizens by examining their civic status, voting rights, rights to property ownership, freedom of movement, and opportunities to engage in the public sphere. Stanfield’s focus is mainly on urban society, where households were influenced by an expanding market and access to print, and on middle-class Black communities in the North. In this section, Stanfield traces the extent to which the “heralded nineteenth-century expansion of the electorate, ‘Jacksonian Democracy,’” increasingly involved “the replacement of economic qualifications with racial restrictions on voting” (32). White constituencies that had been able to imagine voting rights for Black property holders in the late eighteenth century, became increasingly recalcitrant to such ideas by the 1830s. Even as free Black Americans grew more prosperous and more vocal in their demands for citizenship, they were also more radically riven from the performance of a citizenship that was equated with the right to vote.

White women’s access to voting was similarly curtailed. In some state constitutions in the late eighteenth century, white women who held property were able to vote. By 1807, the possibility of female suffrage had been erased from both state and federal constitutions. While white women never stopped campaigning for the right to vote, their demands tended to be treated “with amusement rather than alarm” (34). In both cases, these disenfranchised groups turned to print to make a case for themselves as citizens despite being left out of the voting franchise.

Whether they directly challenged their status or instead sought to redefine their everyday activities as fulfilling the civic obligation, women and African American men served as their own agents. While the law might limit voting rights, print culture gave women and African American men the means to critique the law. (42)

Stanfield then argues that the ideology of domesticity provided a kind of architecture for the display of citizenship enacted outside of the public sphere. Scholars of domesticity have long understood that it had an activist dimension. Even as domestic ideology argued that women were best suited to the domestic sphere, its emphasis on female power in that sphere licensed women’s interaction with various reform projects that bore on conduct and morality, most famously abolition.

Thus, Stanfield draws a connection between domestic ideology and the prodigious presence of white women in the abolition movement. But she also argues that domesticity was something that free Black women embraced for their own purposes. “Antebellum African American books, newspapers, and pamphlets promoted middle class standards within the black community and demonstrated those standards to an external white audience” (72). “True womanhood served as an entrée into the middle class and a wider respectability. The very whiteness of its assumptions made true womanhood a viable strategy for the African American community to combat racism and claim an American identity” (99-100). “Because African Americans were so often targeted in mob violence, domesticity and respectability were important strategies to deploy. By demonstrating their own respect for order versus the lawlessness of the masses, African Americans enacted their own argument for equality” (100). By performing their devotion to true womanly ideals, Black women not only sought legitimacy for themselves, but they also sought to establish their husbands as worthy patriarchs and upright members of the American middle class and thus due the privileges and respect of citizens.

In the second half of her study, Stanfield examines five women writers who propounded the ideals of domesticity in both its managerial and civic manifestations: Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book; Catharine Beecher, author of domestic manuals; Lydia Maria Child, antislavery activist and writer; and the Black authors and activists Sarah Forten, a young poet, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, an educator, author, artist and student of medicine. Forten is least well known among these. Heavily involved in the antislavery movement in her teens and early twenties and a frequent contributor of poetry to magazines read by African American and antislavery audiences, Forten withdrew from the public eye—and largely from the historical record—upon her marriage at the age of twenty-four. Stanfield details her own efforts to find traces of Forten once she retreated into a literal sphere of married domesticity and seemingly left her female friends and antislavery activists behind. Stanfield speculates, without explaining the paradox, that once Forten entered married life, her claims to true womanhood waned (148).

Rewriting Citizenship is immensely valuable for gathering strands of activism in the nineteenth century that are not typically considered in concert. Some questions in Stanfield’s approach that this study raises for me but does not answer are related to class. Why would democratic citizenship be linked to the performance of the kind of middle classness manifested in the doctrines of true womanhood? Where did this link between class and citizenship originate? Was upward mobility always an unspoken prerequisite of democratic belonging? We might also ask how efficacious domesticity was as a political strategy when it came to winning enfranchisement. It would not be until 1920, almost a century after the rise of domestic ideology, that white and Black women would gain the power to vote. Why would we assume there were causal connections between domesticity and unfolding claims to citizenship? How do we know it wasn’t domesticity that was holding women back? Historians of domesticity have posed such questions many times, of course, and Stanfield chooses not to pursue them. But we might ask whether the tenets of true womanhood, which were regarded with deep skepticism by many women’s rights activists at the time, are being retroactively redeemed according to a kind of Tocquevillian logic: the ongoing expansion of civil rights in the US in the twentieth century lends visionary credence to the idea that this expansion was foreordained, and that it must have been prophesized in certain nineteenth-century rubrics of behavior.

Whereas Stanfield focuses attention on US residents who struggled to become part of the democratic process, D. Berton Emerson’s American Literary Misfits focuses attention on texts traditionally excluded from conversations about democracy and US literature. Both in the nineteenth century and still today, the measure for identifying US cultures of democracy, according to Emerson, is that they must seem to represent the sovereign US nation-state and certain regions, like New England, that have come to stand in for the nation’s totality. Appropriating “democratic rhetoric for national purposes” (13), the discipline of US studies privileges texts that seem to demonstrate the struggles and emergence of the providential democratic nation imagined by Tocqueville and celebrated by various nineteenth-century cultural arbiters. The hypothesis among these arbiters, and among scholars today, is that US literature was shaped and adjudicated from the top down, with the democratic nation-state authorizing the form its culture would take. Left out of such disciplinary conversations, Emerson contends, are cultures of democracy that were generated outside the conceptual scale of the nation-state, cultures that prioritized “the arrangements of power not from the top down but from the bottom up” (17).

Emerson’s goal is to “wade through varieties of thinking that have not always been obvious to those trained in literary and cultural studies” and to spotlight an eclectic and unusual set of pre-Civil War literary texts. Rather than grappling with the grandiose concept of the democratic nation in its providential, global scope, these texts are distinguished by their limited, intensely local preoccupations. Often characterized not just by their myopia but by their formal inconsistencies and narrative incoherence, these texts, says Emerson, are “American misfits”: they cannot be contained by the “orderly values” associated with the liberal tradition of US literary history and “its preferred version of an individualistic, contract-oriented, rights- and property-protecting, managed form of democracy” (4). Highlighted instead in these texts are “reciprocity, pluralism, and dignity” (15), that is, informal, fitful, grassroots democratic values and practices. The best way of thinking about these misfit texts, says Emerson, is as symptoms of hyperregionality, brewed in contested or transitional geographical and political zones where the liberal nation was not visible as a clear, unified, historical entity. Thus, an excessive, even “messy” focus on the local distinguishes the texts in Emerson’s purview. He calls their formal oddities a “vernacular aesthetics” (19).

Emerson’s study then analyzes a large number of texts, placing them all within inchoate regional landscapes that defy subsumption into the national framework. Chapters are organized by locales and roughly defined time periods. He begins by examining Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s, as the city’s fortunes declined and as the vision and optimism of the post-Revolutionary generation faded and fractured into newly heterogenous class and political formations. Emerson’s exemplary misfit texts here include Robert Montgomery Bird’s picaresque novel, Sheppard Lee (1836), a strange, Poe-like tale of metempsychosis in which the ghost of a dead sausage manufacturer travels across the nation inhabiting a succession of bodies with widely divergent existences, a penniless dandy, a miser, a wealthy brewer, and an enslaved Black man in Virginia who finds himself in the middle of a slave rebellion. So disjointed and incoherent is the novel that its first reviewers considered it unreadable. Sheppard Lee exemplifies Emerson’s idea of the misfit aesthetic work insofar as the novel works “to undercut the coherence building of a depoliticized national collectivity so prominent in the literary and historical writings of this era.” Instead of building on narratives of nationhood, it “critiques national unity and consensus building, along with its version of liberal democracy and the likelihood of deliberative models” (39). In the process, the novel discovers a kind of alternative collectivity in the experiences of random sensate bodies whose diversity cannot be made to fit with a national political mythology devoted to notions of unity.

Emerson next pursues the oddity of the Old Southwest through the writings of its largely forgotten humorists, offering readings of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s, Georgia Scenes (1840) and Johnson Jones Hooper’s, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845), among others. Emerson also examines the Old Northwest, where newly migrating liberal genteel settlers from the East confronted their impoverished new neighbors, as they do in Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839). Perhaps the most interesting chapters are the final two, on California and New York in the 1850s. Here Emerson looks at John Rollin Ridge’s fiery pot-boiler, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), in which a young Mexican gentleman transforms himself into a ruthless bandit after being wronged by encroaching Americans; and James McCune Smith’s Heads of the Colored People series (1852-4), which challenged narratives of Black uplift and upward mobility by bringing the quaint caricature style typical of local color literature to portraits of free Black working class people in New York.

In the case of Joaquín Murieta, Emerson traces the history of the Joaquín legend through its various printed forms from 1854 on. The bandit Joaquín Murrieta was first memorialized for readers by Cherokee author Rollin Ridge in 1854. In Ridge’s novel, the bloodthirsty Joaquín is clearly part of a revenge fantasy against Anglo-Americans, the settler colonists recently arrived from other parts of the US. Roving on the California goldfields after he is robbed of his fortune, Joaquín exacts vengeance on white US settlers, in the process killing anyone who tries to stop him and raising an army of outlaws to rain indiscriminate horror on the frontier and its denizens, whether they are American, Mexican, Peruvian, Chinese, or Indigenous. Like other misfit texts Emerson examines, Joaquín Murieta cannot resolve the mayhem it brings into being. A brief narrative of justice closes Ridge’s novel—Joaquín is shot down and beheaded by a government-sponsored company of mounted rangers—but this narrative leaves unanswered the novel’s questions about the justness of a white settler nation-state whose arrival is prefaced by the brutal displacement of the peoples in its path. That the novel Joaquín Murieta does indeed contain these radical energies, Emerson argues, is suggested by the lengths to which subsequent versions of the Joaquín story, published in the 1870s, went to water down Joaquín’s power and to fortify instead the power and organization of the US government and justice system.

American Literary Misfits is a book dense with vitality and sophisticated argument. Emerson has a firm grasp of antebellum history and politics and wrestles with a set of texts that do not necessarily lend themselves to legibility, much less scholarly designs. But precisely because it is so lively and rich with possibilities, American Literary Misfits invites questions: to what extent, for example, can we separate the creation of vernacular literatures from national ones? Isn’t the imagining of a vernacular literature that is separate from the larger culture of the metropole also part of the nation-state project? It is worth noting that vernacular literature, as a distinct genre, came into vogue in the early nineteenth century as an alleged artifact of the nascent national entities of Europe and its settler worlds. Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Greece, Mexico, and Italy, among many others, became visible as emerging national entities, rebelliously independent from their imperial parentage, partly through the cultivation of their regional cultures, cultures often equated with democracy. The leading European lights of these newly popular genres were such writers as Walter Scott and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, authors who mined the recesses of a seemingly vernacular past to discover ways of life that had, it was imagined, slipped through the fingers of imperial control. They offered audiences histories of what were thought to be preordained, seedling nations, obscure folk collectivities that had escaped the clutches of eighteenth-century liberal empire and were now destined to be born as modern nation-states.

The US was not separated from this development of generic transatlantic vernaculars. On the contrary, US author Washington Irving was an important figure in the rise of transatlantic folk literature, a literature that offered to open doors to the future of the new nation by rooting around in its rambunctious vernacular lore. Irving’s 1809 History of New York and 1819 Sketch Book, both purportedly inspired by Dutch New York folklore, were landmarks in the development of vernacular literature as a genre in its own right. But how do we separate the vernacular as a transatlantic genre associated with nineteenth-century nationalisms from the vernacular as the spontaneous expression of alternative local political cultures? Is Emerson inadvertently promoting a nationalistic fantasy of inchoate regionality, here again unconsciously assuming that the US is a sort of ur-democracy whose culture must, as Tocqueville says, be defined by rebelliousness? Also, why misfit? Isn’t this itself a trope of American nationalism, not unlike the American rebel, the American outlaw, the American maverick, the American renegade, figures who stalk through US literature and literary history as populist antiheroes, their purpose to bring rugged equity to situations where the reign of liberalism has failed?

Emerson and Stanfield could not be farther apart on the issue of how democracy and claims to citizenship are generated. For Stanfield, equity in the modern democracy is built slowly, across decades, through painstaking efforts among the disenfranchised to change the public sphere and the nation’s governing institutions. For Emerson, democracy flourishes in spontaneous local environments where institutions and governments have failed. The final text under consideration here, Bryan Sinche’s Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, offers a third option. Rather than studying the making of institutions or the misfit counterpublics that defy institutions, Sinche looks at the possibilities that the marketplace offered to disenfranchised nineteenth-century people.

In Published by the Author, Sinche unearths a strikingly large number of books and pamphlets that nineteenth-century Black Americans published with their own funds. Hiring a job printer for the book’s manufacture, these authors would then sell the books themselves, mostly either on the street and among friends or as part of a convention or speaking tour. One thing that Sinche’s book makes clear is that the publication of virtually all Black-authored books familiar to scholars today was self-financed, their production paid for not by a publisher or an antislavery or church society but by the authors themselves. Included among these self-financed books are some of the best known: William Grimes’s Life of William Grimes (1825), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Sojourner Truth’s Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). In all, Sinche locates about 150 of these self-published productions, spanning the century, from 1798 to 1902. The stories these self-published authors told varied tremendously: the books and pamphlets most famous today told tales about slavery. Surveyed as a group across the century, however, self-published texts addressed a diversity of topics and sought to perform a broad range of cultural, political, and economic labors for their authors.

Focusing on less familiar texts, Sinche organizes them into six categories, each considered in its own chapter. In the first chapter, Sinche looks at “supplicant texts.” Often written by the disabled or destitute who had scraped enough money together to hire a printer, these texts were sold on the street or in railway cars. They announced the need for economic support and were offered “in exchange for that support” (34). The next chapter concerns narratives that dealt with slavery but were penned by people who stood outside the organized abolition movement. The third chapter studies texts that sought to use Black life stories to rewrite or contest US history and its “cherished mythologies.” Chapter four considers narratives that either lamented the nation’s failure “to realize the ideal of equal justice under the law” or used the power of publication to modify or dispute the details of an official record, often when courts were involved (35). A fifth chapter surveys the largest constituency of self-published authors: ministers. These were typically individuals who found themselves in conflict with the larger, white-led religious organizations to which they belonged. In the final chapter, Sinche sets out to explore what he terms the dark side of self-publication, documenting the history of a Black entrepreneur at the end of the century who wrote and self-published materials deliberately exploiting pro-segregation and even pro-lynching arguments to make his own fortune.

As genres of academic writing go, Sinche’s monograph is primarily conventional book history: drawing on work by Meredith McGill, Leon Jackson, Derrick Spires, and Eric Gardner, it documents and describes an archive of nineteenth-century publications by Black authors with attention to format, price, locale, and the authors’ biographies.² Implicit in Sinche’s argument, however, is the idea that a print culture sphere—in this case one lacking in the mediation of publishers or copyright law—offered a structure for Black speech and politics that both escaped and interacted with the liberal institutional architecture that Stanfield discusses as well as the rambunctious antiliberal spirit animating Emerson’s “misfit” texts.

On the one hand, through self-publishing, Black authors could engage with institutions like the church or the antislavery movement without going through their potentially censoring curatorial apparatus. For some Black authors, like abolitionist activist Thomas Smallwood, “the self-published narrative was the hub within a larger circuit of antislavery writing and activity, and their publications helped broaden the idea of what an antislavery book was supposed to look like and do” (34). Smallwood worked within antislavery institutions as he contested the power and claims of some of its members. In other cases, the self-published text took aim at the institution, even in cases where the author sought to speak in the institution’s name. For aspiring preacher Jarena Lee, whose manuscript was rejected by the African Methodist Episcopal church, self-publication was an act of defiance and a means to earn a living as an itinerant Methodist preacher without access to either a formal pulpit or a publisher.

This dual determination to engage with an institution and to defy its standards was also a factor for those authors who aimed to write alternative histories. Especially after the Civil War, as histories of the conflict were put into circulation, Black authors used self-publication to counteract claims of unblemished Northern virtue and to testify to how history was experienced in divergent ways by Black individuals and communities. In the case of one author, Jacob Stroyer, who published numerous versions of his autobiography from 1879 and 1898, the implication is that history itself is unfixed and amorphous, incapable of being recounted in a single text or contained in a single temporal arc. Stoyer, Sinche argues, “wants readers to understand that the term ‘history’ encompasses more than a series of past events; it also encompasses the lingering emotional and physical traces a community must confront in the present” (114). At the same time, as Sinche makes clear, self-publication was no guarantee of spontaneous democratic expression. Instead, the absence of institutional or communal curatorial standards sometimes licensed antidemocratic speech, as in the case of Robert B. Anderson, a formerly enslaved man whose books, in the 1880s and ’90s, sought to make him money by catering to white supremacists’ prejudices.

The literature of democracy, providential historians believed, would be generated outside existing institutional frameworks, among the common folk. It would sound strange and arcane. When he was trying to conceive of an American literature appropriate to democracy in 1816, the Boston lawyer and Harvard professor Edward Tyrell Channing imagined that it could only be found outside of existing institutions, that is, in “nature,” in the “hoarse and wild musick” of the common people (207). In nature, we find those whose “imaginations are filled with bright forms of unattained excellence, kindling enthusiasm and hope, for a man to dream about, when he grows tired of what others have done, and burns to make more perfect what he attempts himself” (204). Indeed, in some ways Tocqueville would echo the designs for an American literature set out by Channing’s generation, a generation convinced that they were the marginalized voice of a global democratic future. The voices of democracy, Tocqueville believed, will be informal, unsophisticated, cacophonous: “Style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose—almost always vehement and bold” (1840, 61). “Literary performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigour of thought” (1840, 62). Though now US literary scholars reject providential narratives, they still embrace the providential promise, the idea that democracy is inevitably evolving and expanding, always being brewed in unseen places among the common people. These three studies of democratic literary cultures express a kind of updated version of Tocquevillian beliefs, each traveling outside of canonical history to discover democratic voices that we have not as yet heard.

Sandra Tomc is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her recent work includes Fashion Nation: Picturing the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century (2021) and essays in ELH, American Literature, and Winterthur Portfolio.

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Works Cited