Reincarnating Samuel Woodworth: Native American Prophets, the Nation, and the War of 1812

On 11 July 1937, the San Francisco Chronicle published a short article describing the empty and decaying tomb of the early nineteenth-century writer Samuel Woodworth. Sentimental and nostalgic, the article deliberately echoes Woodworth’s most famous work, a song called “The Bucket,” more commonly remembered as “The Old Oaken Bucket.” That 1818 song, popular in anthologies and collections for a hundred years, has become a relic, the forgotten origin of the “Old Oaken Bucket” trophy awarded to the victor of the Purdue v. Indiana football game each year. Woodworth died in New York in 1842, and his son moved the remains west to San Francisco in 1864, for what was supposed to be their final resting place. But the family had to remove the body again at the turn of the century in response to a series of ordinances requiring that old pioneer graveyards be relocated beyond the city’s limits. Ironically, those ordinances (the last of which had prompted the Chronicle article) were a final nod to the westward expansion that Woodworth had idealized in his writings.

The image of a neglected and bodiless grave curiously resonates as both a metaphor for Woodworth’s obscurity and an ironic framework for understanding a novel that he wrote in 1816, The Champions of Freedom; or, The Mysterious Chief . . .. That work, like its author and his grave, has largely been forgotten and removed from the history of the early American novel, yet I believe it deserves critical reappraisal. As a text, The Champions of Freedom draws together the many contradictory discursive threads of early U.S. nationalism. Its diverse and experimental structure, which was dismissively criticized, perfectly represents the inchoate U.S. nation as it emerged from the War of 1812. Rather than writing the nation and its people as homogeneous and exclusive, Woodworth’s novel tells a story of democratic inclusiveness, a many-layered and paradoxical narrative of the young nation.

Foremost among the contradictions that Woodworth addressed in the early nation was the problem of Native Americans, a physical presence in the United States that would be removed and forgotten, or at least repressed, as part of the nation-building process. But in Woodworth’s novel Native Americans are never removed. They are physically present in the narrative, and are represented allegorically in the form of the “Mysterious Chief,” a strange character who functions as a guide and mentor to the novel’s hero, George Washington Willoughby. In a bizarre twist, the “mystery” behind the Mysterious Chief is revealed in the novel’s final scene when George discovers that the “spirit of Washington” has been speaking through the chief’s body all along. Woodworth’s rhetorical move, which entirely resituates the foregoing narrative, formally links an incipient U.S. national spirit with a physical body that represents the historical presence of Native Americans. In what follows I want to investigate that final rhetorical move by tracing the complex historical interventions that preceded it in Woodworth’s earlier literary ventures. These earlier works help to explain how Woodworth’s novel complicates both traditional readings of the early nation and the role of Native America in national identity formation.

In effect, resituating Samuel Woodworth in literary history means reconsidering the importance of nonliterary or popular genres and discourses in the construction of national identity. Woodworth, like many other literary figures in New York at the time, was less a professional poet or novelist than a journalist, printer, writer, editor, and publisher of various newspapers and magazines. Such periodical literature, by its very nature, was designed to respond to the present, and that journalistic immediacy affected the structure and organization of literary texts, disrupting their narrative logic and coherence. Woodworth’s strange allegorical ending in The Champions of Freedom exemplifies an intervening moment when present concerns and anxieties about the nation intrude upon a traditional story of patriotic heroism. Thus, I will contend that Woodworth (and arguably many other writers of the early nation) has been dismissed and forgotten because his texts were misread as poorly plotted historical narratives when in fact...