The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (review)

Abstract

86 Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18. See, for example, Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993). James W. Ceasar's recent Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) develops along somewhat similar lines. Ceasar's project is, however, ultimately quite different from the kind of analysis Bercovitch and Bush develop in that he operates through a dissociative logic in order to distinguish the "real America" from its symbolic manifestations. 19. Bush is not as explicit as he might be about how his project/his particular readings relate to Bercovitch's perspective (despite the numerous references). In particular, Bush doesn't appear to engage Bercovitch's sense that the "myth" of America functions primarily as a force that contains and constrains American public life. Bush's emphasis on the "dialectic" of in/dependence, and its various cultural manifestations, seems to grant more agency to the forces of freedom/independence than Bercovitch does in his work. But this issue, what I refer to as the "containment thesis," needs explicit attention. 20. Michael Kämmen, "Biformity: A Frame of Reference," in The Contrapuntal Civilization: Essays Toward a New Understanding of the American Experience, ed. Michael Kämmen (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971), 3-39. 21. Northrop Frye, The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). 22. See, for example, Leland Griffin's discussion in "A Dramatistic Theory of the Rhetoric of Movements ," in Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, ed. William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 456-78. 23. The first chapter, a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Endicott and the Red Cross" focuses on the broader tension between concern and freedom and, thematically, fits better with the chapters in the second half of the book. 24. Although Bush is silent about Twain's participation in the imperialism debate and his opposition to the annexation of the Philippines. The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics. By Kimberly K. Smith. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999; viii + 318. $40.00. Kimberly K. Smith's project—to examine different conceptions of democracy available to Americans since the American Revolution—is ambitious and important . In particular, she explores how, during the antebellum period, Americans came to associate democracy with rational public debate and to establish "rational argument as a good (perhaps the best) form of political action" (vii). Smith features a wide variety of antebellum texts such as Frederick Douglass's Fourth of July speech and Narrative, Angelina Grimké's published debate with Catharine Beecher over women's political participation, Frances Wright's lectures, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Focusing on the political practices of mob action, public debate, and storytelling—practices that were deployed and/or defended by antebellum Americans and, at the same time, were subject to profound suspicion, skepticism, and criticism—she both develops a history of and critiques the value Book Reviews 87 placed on rational public debate as a norm of American democracy and political action. In part one, Smith establishes that both eighteenth-century and antebellum Americans were ambivalent about the potential of rational argument by examining their views of mob action, particularly their conflicting perspectives on its status as legitimate political participation. Emphasizing tensions between such notions as the right of resistance and the dangers of passion, she maintains that the categories of "order" and "riotousness" were not so firmly established in eighteenth-century America as Revolutionary historians often assume. Shifting to antebellum America, she argues that although an opposition between violence and legitimate political participation structured discussion about democracy, there was not always a clear line between mob action and political practice. Part two examines the two competing models of public debate dictated by neoclassical rhetoric and Enlightenment rationalism . Using Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere as a starting point, she demonstrates the problematic nature of the category of rational public argument for antebellum Americans concerned with order and rationality. Part three explores the use of narrative testimony by abolitionist rhetors, focusing on the...