Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865 (review)

Abstract

Studies in American Fiction119 compelling and nuanced, the technical details of the book ought to match the importance of her argument. The University of GeorgiaKristin Boudreau Sundquist, Eric J. Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 18201865 . Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006. 247 pp. Paper: $20.00. Eric Sundquist's Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 18201865 , is a reprint of his chapter in the Cambridge History ofAmerican Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and originally published in 1995. Its format as a reasonably priced paperback book makes accessible to scholars and students alike this study which is usually housed in the reference sections of university libraries. As Sundquist clearly states in his Introduction , "Some corrections have been made, and chapter titles and section subtitles as well as some paragraphs breaks have been added, but the text ofthis new edition is otherwise unchanged" (8-9). Because this excellent study treats important subjects such as "Slavery and African American Culture," "The Frontier and American Indians," and the seminal opening chapter on "Exploration and Empire," all subjects about which much has been written by other scholars since 1995, the reader wishes that this republication had been much longer and more detailed, including critiques of the vast amount of scholarly attention that has been paid to the slave narrative and to Harriet Beecher Stow during the past twelve years. Neither the bibliography of sources nor the cited materials indicate awareness of these studies and some inclusion of these works would have been helpful to the twenty-first century reader. By reprinting exactly his chapter from the Cambridge History ofAmerican Literature, Sundquist was restrained by the rubric of the earlier work: scholarly footnotes were eschewed, and citations were by page number followed by a list ofsources at the end of the chapter. That said, Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865, is an excellent treatment in briefcompass ofa vast amount of material much of which is also treated in greater detail and with a different thesis in David Reynolds' Beneath the American Renaissance. Both Sundquist and Reynolds are concerned to show the influential relationships that existed in antebellum American culture between the so-called canonical writers (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman in F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, first published in 1940) and those more recently discovered or canonized in the twentieth-century academy's efforts to represent a more pluralistic and multicultural or diverse preCivil war history. Both groups ofwriters, for example, were expressing the 120Reviews forging of the United States into nationhood rather than a collection of disparate former colonies into the "several states" of the new republic. Both groups were articulating a vision ofthe new world often confused by the very pluralism they sought to embrace. For example, in "Passage to India" (1871), a particular favorite in many classroom introductions to Whitman, we find: Passage to India! Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first? The earth to be spann'd, connected by network, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near, The lands to be welded together Whitman's timeless vision ofAmerican's manifest destiny, a concept first coined in 1843, suggests a blending ofeast and west through racial mixing and international communications not unlike some contemporary university campus life, where, for example, Berkeley can boast ofa 48% AsianAmerican undergraduate population while being completely wired for the Internet in all classrooms and dormitory rooms. In so doing, Whitman echoed a vision dreamed by Jonathan Edward and Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, both ofwhom saw in the American Expansion the possibility for human integration and communication if not for social reform. Of course this millennial vision was expressed and acted at a tremendous cost not only to the Native American population of the Territories west of the Mississippi river, but also through the experience of millions ofAfrican slaves brought to the new world to serve the needs ofAmerican's "manifest destiny" to be the "Redeemer Nation," which would, in turn, create "American Exceptionalism" not only as an academic term, but also as a historical reality. The problem, ofcourse, was to determine just which racial or...