"Another Declaration of Independence": John Neal's Rachel Dyer and the Assault on Precedent

Since its publication more than 20 years ago, Robert Ferguson's Law and Letters in American Culture has largely defined the critical understanding of the relationship between law and literature in the early American republic. Ferguson's central thesis, of course, is that a tight "configuration of law and letters," lasting from the Revolution until roughly the 1830s, was made possible by several closely related factors. The professional culture of late eighteenth-century America, first of all, essentially required individuals trained in the legal profession to acquire a broad liberal education and to perform in a variety of literary modes. Consequently, as Ferguson rightly points out, "lawyers wrote many of the country's first important novels, plays, and poems" (5). If the broad "interdisciplinary" demands (as we might now call them) of Revolutionary-era legal education encouraged literary pursuits by men of the bar, however, it was the specific content of that educational system that determined their form. According to Ferguson, the triumvirate of "[classical] language study, the cult of eloquence, and emulation of Ciceronian balances immersed the early American lawyer in literature" (75). The lawyer's focus on the study of classical language and literature furthered a natural affinity between his professional ideology and the spirit of neoclassicism. Neoclassical aesthetics, which emphasized the idea that the thoughtful "imitation" of past models could encourage "scientific" progress and perfection in the arts, seemed to blend perfectly with the precedent-centered jurisprudence of the Anglo-American common law tradition. The inherent conservatism of this tradition, in turn, seemed to be best expressed through the "Ciceronian" model of eloquence championed by men such as John Quincy Adams, a model that aimed to "include and incorporate listeners, not to challenge their understanding" (80). Tying all this together, Ferguson argues that a taste both for balanced, "affective" oratory modeled on Cicero and for the neoclassical aesthetics of earlier English writers and critics dominated the intellectual landscape of American elites during the early decades of the republic. The lawyer-writers of the time thus found themselves in the midst of a harmonious conjunction of ideas, one that placed law and literature in remarkable accord based upon mutual reverence for the past. Ferguson concludes, however, that when neoclassical aesthetics and Ciceronian rhetoric lost their primacy in the early decades of the nineteenth century, this configuration of law and letters came permanently apart. As he puts it (effectively creating a literary "period" for the interaction of law and literature), the "new aesthetic of the American Renaissance excluded the legal mind from literary enterprise."

Ferguson's overall argument about the ways in which Revolutionary-era neoclassicism (combined with the "Ciceronian" rhetoric of the time) encouraged a blending of legal and literary discourse remains a powerful one. Nevertheless, by suggesting that this specific intellectual and professional climate in late eighteenth-century America was somehow essential for the "configuration," Ferguson both created a misleading literary history and advanced an unduly limiting critical framework for understanding how law and literature might intersect. I hope to show here that the work of one early antebellum writer, John Neal, provides powerful evidence to challenge each of these positions.¹Rachel Dyer, Neal's 1828 historical novel about the Salem witch trials is, of course, hardly a balanced, "Ciceronian" work that avoids challenging its readers. Critics today, in fact, are probably most familiar with the book's nationalistic "Unpublished Preface to North American Stories," where Neal stridently demands of his audience "another Declaration of Independence, in the Great Republic of Letters" (xvii).²Rachel Dyer's fusion of law and letters extends well beyond such provocative phrases from its introductory frame, however. Indeed, if we consider both of Rachel Dyer's prefaces (for there are two) as integral parts of the whole fabric of the novel, what we find revealed is a text that simultaneously rejects the "neoclassicism" so vital to Ferguson's "configuration" and maintains that law and literature can work together as tools in shaping the nation.³

I argue here that Neal's historical novel is best read as a tightly...