Abstract
SHORTLY AFTER ARRIVING in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1801, newly appointed state supreme court judge Hugh Henry Brackenridge sat down to finish the sequel to his lengthy and peripatetic satire on the dangers of popular democracy, Modern Chivalry . As in the work’s earlier installments, it followed the quixotic adventures of the educated and virtuous Captain John Farrago and his naive “bog-trotting” servant, Teague O’Regan—the former symbolic of thoughtful republican citizenship, the latter of the recently enfranchised, unlettered voter who elected unqualified men to high station. Yet Brackenridge offered more than a lesson on republican citizenship. As John Wood Sweet, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and others have shown, Modern Chivalry had a much broader ambit. Had they the opportunity to read it, Brackenridge’s Cumberland County neighbors might have found neatly summarized in the text’s later pages their own struggle to define citizenship in the age of emancipation.
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