Read Emerson, Thor eau, or any number of American writings about India in nineteenth century, and find a depiction with very little deviation, of an exotic seat of mys- tical apathy spiced with hints of hideous barbarism, where men act faithfully in accordance to what Emerson calls the idea of a deaf, im- plorable, immense fate. 1 So in 1857, when sepoys (native soldiers employed by British) take up arms against British officers, inaugurating an almost subcontinent-wide revolt and sparking what for a time looks like beginning of end of British Empire, we would expect a complication of idea. Among Transcenden- talists we find silence. But silence wasn't due to a lack of media exposure about events in India. In fact, newspaper coverage of events in India was thick and varied, and in this article, I examine and survey this wide ranging and critically neglected media coverage of 1857 Indian Rebellion. While coverage of rebellion did little to change American perceptions of India, especially in Transcendental- ist discourse, rhetoric and language of that coverage did influence American responses to pressing domestic concerns. Periodical writers employed sensational and other literary devices in order to translate story to American public, with Democratic, Southern, African American, abolitionist, and Irish American newspapers exhibiting vari- ous rhetorical compromises in responses, in order to further own domestic goals. Newspaper coverage of rebellion, and artistic responses to that coverage, reveal an anxiety toward slave revolts in late 1850s and into Civil War, best exemplified by Mary Boykin Chestnutt, whose response to a dramatization of rebels was horror at realization that their faces were like so many of same sort at home. 2 While Asian Indians were an insignificant population in United States in 1850s, sepoys offered spectre of a large-scale slave revolt by a non-white populace, and British response offered models of a potential American response. But if some saw a resemblance between