Jacksonian America Research Articles

No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America

No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America

No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America

No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America

The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s

From the Publisher: Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, TheForest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuringboth real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisansliving and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters—such as ThomasCole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner—are wellknown,while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs. The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths orgo their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For AlexanderNemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, thefoliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions ofthe people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs,The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.

No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America by Adam Jortner (review)

No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America by Adam Jortner (review)

No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America. By Adam Jortner

Adam Jortner has written a thoughtful and accessible volume on the early years of Mormonism and its reception by American Gentiles. His book has many merits: it is engagingly written; it contains a strong argument; and it fills a gap in the literature. This readable volume is well suited to undergraduate classes needing a case study of how antebellum freedom of religion was lived and negotiated. Because it artfully combines a sophisticated understanding of theology with an eye to foregrounding problems we face today, the book will prove useful to those concerned with understanding an enduring and problematic fault line in American politics. Jortner’s work is strongest when it describes the religious ferment of the early republic. His second chapter outlines the “sectarian dilemma” caused by the pluralism arriving with disestablishment. The dilemma was that laws requiring licenses to preach were lifted just as American Christians were overtaken by a special interest in the miraculous and the magical. American religion may be perennially focused on the supernatural, but the 1810s and 20s were a time of a great “treasure quest,” whether in the gold coins buried by pirates or the primitive piety of the early church (p. 35).

The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois

The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois

NO PLACE FOR SAINTS: MOBS AND MORMONS IN JACKSONIAN AMERICA. By AdamJortner. Witness to History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. xv + 185. Paperback, $22.95.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 48, Issue 4 p. 590-590 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: New and Alternative Religious Movements NO PLACE FOR SAINTS: MOBS AND MORMONS IN JACKSONIAN AMERICA. By Adam Jortner. Witness to History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. xv + 185. Paperback, $22.95. First published: 30 January 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.16229Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume48, Issue4December 2022Pages 590-590 RelatedInformation

Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts

Reviewed by: Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts Christen Mucher (bio) Keywords Settler colonialism, Primordialism, Indigenous peoples, Print culture Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing. By Edward Watts. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 292. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $37.50). Edward Watts’s Colonizing the Past is one of the first monographs to apply a settler-colonial analytic to the well-worn materials of early American myth-making. Spanning U.S. literary production from 1780 to 1915, the book is a dazzling survey of the literary construct of “primordialism”— that is, “white fantasies” of the pre-Columbian past that seek to provide U.S. citizens with a whitened ancient history by displacing Indigenous pasts (4, 76). Watts divides his work into five case studies of primordialism, each of which “diminish Indians”: the myths of Welsh Indians, Lost Tribes, Mound Builders, ancient Irish colonists, and the Vikings and Normans of the Norse Revival (7). His texts range from novels and newspaper articles to poetic epics, tracing the iconic primordial figures over the long century. In the tradition of classic American studies per Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, Watts places print culture within its specific historical context while also, in the style of Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, John Carlos Rowe, and Amy Kaplan, attending to literary history as a vector of imperial violence.1 Colonizing the Past does not [End Page 491] merely assert that the narratives of “primordial whites” were connected to nation-building: It shows how they were central to it. Watts’s attempt to understand the tangle of racialization, white identity, and settler colonialism in nineteenth-century print culture is a clear, compelling, and original reading of familiar as well as non-canonical texts that “reveals the moral and racial precariousness of the settler nation” (46). While notable recent scholarship has focused on Watts’s broad subject, none has situated the production of ancient pasts in the paradigm of white supremacy and settler triumphalism as clearly and insistently as Watts has here.2 In the connections he draws between marginal texts and canonical writers, Watts also makes clear that the power of primordialism was not confined to the pens of “western” writers or removal apologists. Moreover, Watts’s deep knowledge of the print culture of the early republic and antebellum eras translates into a fascinating and useful guide to U.S. literary history. Watts’s first chapter provides a superb survey of writings on Welsh Indians, by which Watts also displays his unparalleled knowledge of the literary history of early America. Chapter 2 includes a particularly skilled reading of Lydia Sigourney’s 1822 poem Traits of the Aborigines in America and the culture of sentiment, intriguingly casting the New England writer’s anti-removal campaign as motivated not by the abhorrence of violence but rather by millennialism (75, 72). The third chapter is likewise noteworthy for its refreshing reevaluation of the “Mound Builder myth,” [End Page 492] which Watts frames in terms of the rise of industrialism and struggle over western and southern markets. Additionally, his analyses of colonialism and transatlantic folk and nationalist movements provide a thought-provoking reorientation for the immigration debates and anti-Catholic nativism of the mid-nineteenth century. Colonizing the Past is admirable in its forceful assessment of settler triumphalism—Watts boldly indicts, for example, the “genocidal print culture of Jacksonian America”—and for avoiding euphemism or under-statement (94). One of its most compelling, if subtle, arguments is that much of early nineteenth-century literary culture was engaged in developing “fiction[s] of absolution” to excuse white settlers from the theft and murder that enabled U.S. national settlement on Indigenous lands (46, 91, 128). Indeed, the book’s major contribution to the field is its clear-eyed attention to the operations of whiteness, and to the entanglement of racialization and settler colonialism. Moreover, it provides an accessible introduction to settler-colonial theory and delivers a compelling argument for the theory’s applicability to early American literature. The Atlantic orientation of the book, however, is a limitation that frequently led Watts to postcolonial...

Pirates, Bloodhounds, and White Heirs: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Fictions of Haiti

Pirates, Bloodhounds, and White Heirs: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Fictions of Haiti Mark Kelley “It should no longer be possible to write a history of the early American republic without mentioning Haiti, or St. Domingue,” Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler note in their 2016 collection, The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States (1). Haiti’s revolution (1789–1804) fundamentally challenged the white-supremacist legacy of its US revolutionary counterpart (1775–83). What began in Haiti as a large-scale revolt against French colonial rule concluded with the hemisphere’s first free Black republic.1 In turn, US writers confronted the potential disruption of white hegemony in their own nation and across the hemisphere.2 Just as a Haiti-less US history is impossible, the same could be said of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s literary career. At present, Sedgwick is only sparingly considered part of the subsequent “transatlantic print culture of the Haitian revolution” that Marlene L. Daut recounts in her 2015 field-shaping book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (3).3 Melissa Homestead has introduced the crucial idea that Sedgwick “insistently represented cultural and economic ties between the USA and the Caribbean,” but she stops short of further exploration and, I will show, casts those “ties” in overly neutral terms (“Shape” 192).4 The “ties” Sedgwick highlights include US wealth stolen from Haiti, diasporic culture imported from Haiti, antislavery sentiment powered by Haiti, and, most complicatedly, proslavery sympathies justified as a response to Haiti. Like us, Sedgwick knew that it was impossible to write her history without Haiti. In practice, she presents Haiti as too vital to repress yet too revolutionary to praise. Haiti subsidizes and unsettles Sedgwick’s vision of Jacksonian America. The full scope of Haiti’s revolutionary history, diasporic culture, indissoluble sovereignty, independent economy, and rejection of white hegemony is not to be found in Sedgwick’s fiction. From her perspective, this free Black republic [End Page 1] was primarily a source of American wealth, a shaper of its culture, and a threat to its prevailing white hegemony. Thus, she writes in the discourse of “manifest domesticity,” in Amy Kaplan’s term, wherein America is constituted via real and imagined domination over Haiti.5 This dynamic is strongest in a trio of works published in succession: the canonical Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827), the children’s story “Dogs” (1828), and the pirate novel-of-manners Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times (1830). As I show, the underdeveloped pirate plot in Hope Leslie—in which a Tortuga-bound Chaddock and his piratical crew threaten to kidnap Hope—charges the historical novel’s climax with an unspoken fear: colonial violence could have begotten (or may yet beget) novel systems of enslavement or revolution centered in Haiti. Sedgwick’s removal of the pirate, I conclude, allows her to reject this multivalent Haiti in favor of colonial wealth’s transfer to white New Englanders. In “Dogs,” such heirs confess colonial powers’ denial of Haitian rights. Here, a New England family’s discussion of dogs’ moral training suddenly leads to a précis of bloodhounds’ violence against revolutionary Haitians; in the process, Sedgwick warns that dogged plantation violence or racial revolution may soon pierce US bodies. The solution, she implies, is to promote a more benevolent white hegemony. Sedgwick perfects this process in her subsequent novel. Set in 1820s New York, Clarence portrays a dog-wielding pirate’s threat to ostensibly blameless heiresses of fortunes derived from colonial Saint Domingue and Jamaica. Repeating the pattern established in Hope Leslie and “Dogs,” these white heroines’ rejection of immoral piracy coincides with their acceptance of colonial wealth. In total, Sedgwick implies that white Jacksonian heirs must insulate themselves from post-revolutionary violence while retaining pre-revolutionary spoils. As these readings begin to show, two figures embody Sedgwick’s ambivalent yet self-serving approach to Haiti: pirates and bloodhounds. As numerous scholars confirm, pirates are compelling devices for those seeking to portray national power, its limits, or its alternatives.6 The “bucaniers of Tortuga” in Hope Leslie (334), the Haitian bloodhounds in “Dogs,” and...

Stephen W. Campbell. The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America.

S<scp>tephen</scp> W. C<scp>ampbell</scp>. <i>The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America</i>.

Beyond Whigs and Democrats: historians, historiography, and the paths toward a new synthesis for the Jacksonian era

ABSTRACT This article reviews 30 years of synthetic works on Jacksonian America and argues that while most are still political narratives, the elements of a new synthesis are emerging. Recent scholarship suggests three broad areas from which a newer, more relevant synthesis might come: slavery, race, and gender; political culture; and the new history of capitalism. Furthermore, some key building blocks of a new synthesis have been emerging in the scholarly dialogue prompted by recent research trends and publications.

The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America

The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America

Cooley v. Board of Wardens and its Nineteenth‐Century Legacy

<i>Cooley v. Board of Wardens</i> and its Nineteenth‐Century Legacy

Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America

Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America

The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America by Stephen W. Campbell

The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America by Stephen W. Campbell

Revolutions Across Borders: Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion edited by Maxime Dagenais and Julien Mauduit

Revolutions Across Borders:Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion edited by Maxime Dagenais and Julien Mauduit. Un article de la revue Ontario History (Volume 112, numéro 1, spring 2020, p. 1-131) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

"Plain Catholics of the North": Martin Van Buren and the Politics of Religion, 1807–1836

Historians generally agree that by 1850 Catholics were strongly aligned with the Democratic Party, significantly impacting American politics. Martin Van Buren's role in this story is lacking in the historical literature on Jacksonian America. Catholicism had been outlawed in New York during the colonial era but liberated by the American Revolution. Political barriers were erected against Catholics in the 1780s but overturned by Republicans in the early nineteenth century, led by DeWitt Clinton. Martin Van Buren, Clinton's primary rival in New York, built on his legacy, forging an alliance with Catholics from their common support for the U.S. effort in the War of 1812. As Van Buren sought to renew the Republican Party, he and his "Albany Regency" promoted support for Catholic political equality in the United States and in Ireland. In 1836, Van Buren was charged with being pro-Catholic and even Catholic himself; but with support of Catholics in the key state of New York and elsewhere, he was nonetheless elected president.

Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America by William K. Bolt

Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America by William K. Bolt

Early US Prison History Beyond Rothman: RevisitingThe Discovery of the Asylum

David J. Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum, one of the first major works to critically interrogate the beginning of America's extensive reliance on institutionalization, effectively launched the contemporary field of prison history. Rothman traced the first modern prisons’ (1820s–1850s) roots to the post-Revolution social turmoil and reformers’ desire for perfectly ordered spaces. In the nearly 50 years since his pioneering work, several generations of historians, inspired by Rothman, have amassed a wealth of information about the early prisons, much of it correcting inaccuracies and blind spots in his account. This review examines the knowledge about the rise of the prison, focusing on this post-Rothman work. In particular, this review discusses this newer work organized into three categories: the claim that prisons were an invention of Jacksonian America, reformers’ other motivations for creating and supporting prisons, and the frequently gendered and racialized experiences of prisoners. The review closes by reflecting on the importance of prison history in the contemporary context and suggesting areas for future research.

The Canadian Rebellion, the American South, and Slavery

ABSTRACTIn the past few decades, thanks in large part to the work of several historians that appears in my edited collection, Revolutions Across Borders: Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion (2019), there is a growing trend to consider the Canadian Rebellion within an American historical and historiographical context. Despite this exciting new research, most studies on the Rebellion and the United States continue to focus on the northern borderland. However, the Canadian Rebellion was a significant event that gained attention all over the United States, including the American South. Similar to the North, the American South was also invested in the outcome of the Rebellion. This was due to one reason: slavery. By specifically focusing on the American South and, more importantly, its influence on American foreign policy during the period, I want to encourage historians to take a more definitive stance; that slavery—just like the Panic of 1837, the Anglo-American rapprochement of thepost-War-of-1812 period, or the fear of British retaliation—played a major role in the United States Government’s official opposition to the Rebellion.