The Art of Democracy. Jim Cullen
expression resulted in severe social censure—and, more importantly, where unplanned pregnancy could have deadly consequences, as the fate of both Charlotte and the mother of Rowson herself powerfully testifies. But if Charlotte Temple does not strike us as a feminist role model (though some of the characters in Rowson’s other novels do), her novel nonetheless suggests the defeat of, and ongoing need for, gender solidarity.
The astounding success of Charlotte Temple is one indication of such solidarity. By the time of Rowson’s death in 1824, it had become the most famous and beloved novel in the United States, and it remained so for another generation—until it was replaced by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The varied editions, prints, and versions of the story (unauthorized sequels surfaced, and Rowson’s own Charlotte’s Daughter was published posthumously) suggest the deep emotional attachment many Americans, especially the women for whom Rowson explictly wrote, and who were largely assumed to be her readers, felt for the story.
There is another striking measure of the novel’s impact. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, a gravestone to the fictional Charlotte Temple was erected in lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church cemetery, which housed the remains of luminaries like Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton. For the next hundred years, Charlotte received more visitors than anyone else in the cemetery, as tens of thousands of people left behind flowers, books, and other mementoes in her honor. “In that churchyard are the graves of heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, whose names are familiar to the youngest scholar, and whose memory is dear to the wisest and best,” a lawyer who had worked in an office overlooking the cemetery for forty-seven years wrote in 1903. “Their graves, tho’ marked by imposing monuments, win but a glance of curiosity, while the turf over Charlotte Temple is kept fresh by falling tears.”
Most of the so-called “best and wisest” had little interest in a seduced and abandoned character from a novel about and for some of the least valued members of U.S. society. But a great number of “little people” obviously felt that Charlotte Temple revealed fundamental truths about life in the early United States.
One novel genre was the picaresque. Of Spanish origin (Don Quixote was the prototype), these books featured faraway locations, unusual characters, and deceptive appearances. In part, such stories—which had titles like Adventures of Alonso (1775), The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1794), and The Algerine Captive (1797)—catered to a taste for the exotic and for escapism. As noted in the introduction, however, escapism is never an adequate explanation for the appeal of any work of popular culture. It always occurs within a particular context, and the different ways people choose to escape, and the places they escape from and to reveal a good deal about them.
In the case of the picaresque, setting a tale on the geographic, social, or political margins offered an opportunity for an oblique critique that might not have been countenanced if stated forthrightly. In The Algerine Captive, for example, a naive doctor who agrees to work on a slave ship is himself enslaved in Africa when the ship is captured. His six years as a hostage impress upon him the evils of slavery (a position of more than casual significance for a country that had a constitutionally sanctioned slave trade until 1808) and a new appreciation for a vigorous (if also vulgar) democracy that he had considered full of avarice and cupidity before he left. The novel was written by Royall Tyler, a well-to-do lawyer and judge of Jeffersonian sympathies. As we shall see in the next chapter, he had many of the class prejudices of the ruling elite in early-nineteenth-century America. Yet the abolitionist and mass-democratic elements that suffused his narrative and helped make it popular had explosive tendencies that hit raw nerves. This was especially true in the new United States of the 1790s, when Shays’ Rebellion (which, ironically, Tyler helped suppress), the Whiskey Rebellion, increasing party polarization, elite anxiety over the French Revolution, and growing demands for political equality triggered the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, one of the most repressive censorship and law-and-order measures ever passed in U.S. history. In the contemporary popular imagination, the early United States was a country of idyllic equality and calm rural landscapes. But close readings of its fiction and history suggest otherwise.
Gothic novels reveal similar conflicts. These stories were often set in decaying aristocratic mansions and focused on the unprivileged men (and occasionally women) who had to overcome dangers. Threats were as much internal as external: as Davidson has suggested, gothic novels posed troubling questions about the corrupting effect of power on those previously denied it. They also expressed, as modern gothic stories do, skepticism about any serene confidence in the efficacy of Progress. The early popularity of native gothics novels like Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Arthur Mervyn (two parts, 1799-1800) is especially interesting in this regard, as is the persistence of a gothic sensibility that runs through the work of Brown’s heir, Edgar Allan Poe, and even through to Stephen King. It is ironically appropriate that horror stories took such firm root in a land supposedly predicated on optimism and opportunity.31
Brown is an interesting example because he was the first U.S. author who was able, albeit with great difficulty, to eke out a living as a writer. Independently wealthy people like Royall Tyler could afford to write novels, but they did so without the expectation of making much money from them. One reason for the relative lack of financial support from publishers and readers was the sense that U.S. authors were culturally inferior to Europeans, an attitude that persisted well into the nineteenth century. This cultural factor was reinforced by an economic one: the lack of international copyright protection. U.S. publishers printed English novels without paying royalties, making them cheaper to produce than domestically written ones. Moreover, a novel written in one state was often pirated by a publisher in another colony or state, who drained the original printer of sales and bilked the writer of royalties. In 1790, Congress passed a copyright law that protected authors’ rights for fourteen years, followed by similar protections for prints, music, and plays. In 1831, the term of protection was extended to twenty-eight years, with an option to renew, but an adequate, well-enforced law was not enacted until 1891. Such laws laid the foundation for more Charles Brockden Browns, and for their female counterparts, who would prove even more important in the coming century.32
Copyright law was only one of many changes in the United States as it entered the nineteenth century, however. A new age was dawning, and popular culture would play a pivotal role in creating, reflecting, and explaining it.
CHAPTER TWO DEMOCRATIC VISTAS: THE EMERGENCE OF POPULAR CULTURE, 1800-1860
Cover of the sheet music for “long Time Ago,” a minstrel song popularized by T.D. Rice, the premier minstrel of the Jacksonian era who prided himself on his “authentic” portrayals of slave life.
“ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.”
Rarely have five words had more revolutionary impact on a society than these did in the United States, and rarely have five words embodied more omission, ambiguity, and outright hypocrisy. This presumably “self-evident” assertion from the Declaration of Independence was intended to be a definitive statement—a “truth”—but it ultimately raised far more questions than it answered. In the secular context in which it was written, what does it mean to say that all men are created equal? Does it mean that everyone is born with equal capacities, intellectual and otherwise? That is patently untrue. Does it mean that all begin equal before the law, whatever material advantages may otherwise be inherited or accrued? It now seems amazing that such a statement could have been made in a world that included black slaves and conquered Indians, people whose “inalienable” rights were constantly violated and whose pursuit of happiness was systematically denied. And even if we exclude nonwhite peoples from the Declaration’s purview, where do women fit in a society where all men are created equal?
None of these questions was of decisive importance to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or Benjamin Franklin in 1776. For them and others, the Declaration of Independence was a revolutionary manifesto designed to lay the philosophical foundations for political