Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic:
Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism

Notes

¹ The Pirate was published in Edinburgh and London November, 1821; authorized editions of The Pilot were published in New York and London in January, 1824.
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² The variety of republican attitudes at work in the 1820s suggest that republicanism was a highly adaptable approach to theorizing the relationship of persons and communities to the state—one signaled by certain recurring themes rather than a system or set of beliefs. I use "republican" to refer to political ideas that both value representative government, elite or democratic, and emphasize a need for communal identity. In early nineteenth-century American culture, republican ideologues tended to understand political power as embodied in representative males who are endowed with authority by a constituency comprised of elite white property-owners, who in turn represent the aggregate body of society. For example, in no. 39 of The Federalist Madison sums up the "republican complexion" of government (242) as that endowed with authority "from the great body of the society" it governs (Rossiter, 241).
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³ In a recent study informed by the history of the book and by the history of ideas, Mark G. Spencer has described how Hume’s ideas about factionalism influenced James Madison’s Federalist No. 10.
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⁴ The careers of individual maritime workers in the ages of sail exemplify the contingent nature of "the Atlantic world," for many served or sought profit in both Pacific and Atlantic spheres, and many more employed their skills in smaller local communities. The narratives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century seafarers suggest that Atlantic rim culture is as constructed as local and national geo-political terms for cultural contiguity. Since maritime workers were a historical locus of transatlantic cultural exchange, then narratives about sailors provide an especially useful archive for excavating embedded concerns with the shifting configurations of citizenship and international relations. For foundational research on seamen of African descent and the spread of political ideas, see Julius Scott, "The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution," diss., Duke U, 1986.
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⁵ By the nineteenth century, the British popular imagination had long associated piracy with democracy; both could be seen as unruly systems without any established moral foundation. Christopher Hill notes that in the seventeenth century pirate "Captains were often elected, and were answerable to their crews; decisions on policy and disciplinary punishments were democratically taken. This contrasted very sharply with the despotism of naval captains, the rule of the lash, the ultimate possibility of a death sentence for mutiny" (Hill, 117).
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⁶ Notably, Cooper’s fantasy of revolutionary adventure imagines a maritime power the republic did not possess in the Revolutionary era or in the 1820s, although the US would achieve considerable sea power by the end of the century.
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⁷ Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era is a useful overview of changing ideas about manhood in the United States. Rotundo shows that in the later eighteenth century, intimate friendship between men was the norm in genteel circles. Recent studies of manhood and US print culture have applied the insights of Rotundo’s work to more specific textual sites for the construction of masculinity. Most notably, in American Sympathy, Caleb Crain examines the relationship of sympathy to manhood in the early republic, and in the process shows how critics might productively view friendship among men as a site of possibility and complex negotiations of affect, rather than a reflection of the competitive relations of the market. My purpose here is to show how, for writers like Cooper, the dialectical emotional exchanges between friends also suggested one way to re-imagine the relationship of Britain to the US.
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⁸ Regarding the early republican fascination with charismatic males, Mark Kann writes that "Ultimately, the founders’ faith in the Heroic Man completed their grammar of manhood by promoting a patriarchal discourse that lifted up a few great men over the democratic masses and played down women’s political potential as citizens and leaders" (Kann, 130-1). In A Republic of Men political scientist Kann analyzes the ways in which cultural concepts of gender, and especially white manhood, were deployed in federalist print of the early national era. Positing a cultural "grammar of manhood"—comprised of "the hegemonic norms, language, and rules they employed to promote public quiescence and justify leadership" (3)—Kann assesses the effect of cultural notions of threatening (non-heterosexual) manly disorder, family stability, civic virtue and heroic individuality on the development of citizenship and doctrines of political authority.
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⁹ In this manner, my argument differs from Margaret Cohen’s examination of "know-how" in The Pilot.
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¹⁰ My analysis of the feelings of the hero draws from the theory of charisma and institutional bureaucracy articulated by Max Weber. According to his sociology of the individual as political fetish, the modern state routinizes gender inequalities through a "workaday" bureaucracy located in the mundane structural demands of economic activity; in the civic arena created by official bureaucracy, patriarchal social patterns formalize commercial relations and enforce the domination of a perceived "natural leader" in the home, the marketplace, and the sphere of civic activity. Weber’s description of patriarchal authority emphasizes the historical connections of patriarchal authority to economic forces and statutory bureaucracy. In the Western political scenarios that Weber describes, a social group recognizes the quality of "charisma" in a man; this act of ascription legitimizes the privileged positions of charismatic individuals within the prescribed hierarchy of the "social strata" (Weber, 39). Weber claims that under the conditions of modern capitalism, most social institutions in the West authorize these forms of individual—almost always a male individual—empowerment by managing the system of social status and access to capital.
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¹¹ Showing how later eighteenth-century poets used the "imaginative domain" of the "Atlantic theater" to represent "the connection between emotion and history," Julie Ellison argues that "the Age of Sensibility can by defined by its focus on the moments when consciousness dilates to historical horizons and when history is compressed into consciousness" (Ellison; 124, 141, 142). In a similar manner, maritime historical novels such as The Pirate and The Pilot relate individual consciousness to grand historical narratives through shared experience. In the romantic worlds imagined by Cooper and Scott, each man’s affective capacities engineer his position within social and political hierarchies, and his intimate attachments to peers, subalterns, and authority figures become the basic components of manly historical enterprise.
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¹² It may also be recognizable to scholars of nineteenth century US sentimental fiction. For literary scholars like Elizabeth Barnes, Julia Stern, and Lori Merish, in the eighteenth century philosophies of sympathy set the precedent for sentimental forms and rhetoric—a nineteenth century middle class phenomena with a unique incarnation in the US. In her examination of the ways that familial love intersects with seduction plots, Elizabeth Barnes illustrates how doctrines of sympathy could collapse a variety of emotional relations into the same forms in nineteenth-century novels. Stern uses her readings to describe the psychological underpinnings of connections between emotion, gender, and national violence in US writing, while Merish emphasizes attitudes toward the political and national subject status of middle-class women that make commodity consumption into a gendered practice. Following Nancy Armstrong, most feminists examining literary form in the early US emphasize the acculturation of British forms associated with the white middle class; for many of these scholars the literary relations of the US with Britain illustrate the relevance of British culture and especially print culture to gendered, political, and material practices in later nineteenth-century America.
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¹³ According to Enlightenment thinkers, this process of empowerment requires properly socialized national subjects, because the public must willingly recognize charisma in the men who exercise power.
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¹⁴ Interrogating the literary-critical tendency to idealize narratives of interracial male pairing, Robyn Wiegman has shown how these popular bonding narratives operate by "transmuting the narrative of racial difference into a scenario of the mutuality of gender" (Wiegman, 172). Despite the prevalence of this narrative convention in popular fiction and film, "critical discussions of the American [canonical] tradition have nonetheless debated, for almost half a century, the meaning, centrality, and utopian possibilities inherent in the image of closely bonded men" (172). Wiegman’s thesis on the obsession of twentieth-century narrative with "symbolic marriage among men" is relevant to my study because her close readings highlight the ongoing relevance of theses about manliness, affinity, and sympathy in Enlightenment-era political thought. My point is that the cultural work assigned to same-sex friendship in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historical fictions eventually produced the discourse of sexual correspondence that allowed twentieth-century critics like Leslie Fiedler to theorize "democracy" in US fiction by pointing to scenarios that displace women and heterosexuality, and that use same-sex bonds to dissolve the historical and political problem of racial difference (149).
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