Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (review)

Abstract

In May 1860, British-born, pro-abolitionist actress Fanny Kemble observed in a letter to a friend: "it seems to me Slavery has made the Southerners insane egotists, and the pursuit of gain has made the Northerners incapable egotists. Manliness, patriotism, honour, loyalty, appear to have been stifled out of these people by material success and their utter abdication to mere material prosperity." Kemble, the divorced wife of a prominent slaveholder, predicted, "A grievous civil war, shattering their financial and commercial idols, and compelling them to find the connection between public safety and private virtue, may be the salvation of the country." Stephen John Hartnett's Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America explores the shaping myths and cultural fictions in antebellum rhetoric that led to the Civil War, highlighting—as Kemble intuited—attitudes about modern capitalism inherent in appeals to and fears of modernity. Attending to "a wide variety of genres of public persuasion" (1), such as novels, advertisements, broadsides, and daguerreotypes as well as speeches, debates, articles, and editorials, Hartnett probes the relationships between foundational cultural myths of American democracy and those of race and slavery, capitalism and modernity, history and representation. In addition to its value as an historical study of antebellum rhetoric and the context out of which it grew, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America will be helpful for advanced students of rhetoric, as Hartnett provides explicit, historically grounded examples of such tropes as metonomy, synecdochy, hyperbole, cataplexies (rhetoric of threats), prolepsis (forestalling objections through predictions of the future), and categorical propositions, among others, in an attempt to explain how antebellum discourse was deployed by speakers, writers, and poets and understood by their audiences.