The American Hermit and the British Castaway: Voluntary Retreat and Deliberative Democracy in Early American Culture

From Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay's (1681-1759) decision to live self-sufficiently in a cave as a protest against slave labor, to African American recluses such as Robert Voorhis, the Hermit of Massachusetts (b. 1769/70), and Henry "Box" Brown (1815-c.1879), to iconic figures like Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), John Muir (1838-1914), Thomas Merton (1915-1968), and Edward Abbey (1927-1989), many Americans have expressed their critical voices through voluntary reclusion from society. The last decade and a half of the eighteenth century, however, appears to have been an especially busy time for the American hermit. During this period, American printers published an unprecedented number of tales and anecdotes about the lives of hermits such as James Buckland's A Wonderful Discovery of a Hermit. . . . (1786); Samuel Brake's An Account of the Wonderful Old Hermit's Death, and Burial (1787); "The Hermit's Soliloquy" (1788); Abraham Panther's "A Surprising Account of the Discovery of a Lady. . . ." (1788); the narrative of Amos Wilson's hermitic withdrawal as a result of his sister's trial and execution for infanticide (A Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson. . . . [1786] and The Victim of Seduction! . . . . . . [1822]); Lavinia's "The Hermitess; or, Fair Secluder" (1790); Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert's The Fair Solitary; or, Female Hermit (1790); and Peter Longueville's The English Hermit (1795).¹ These seemingly ephemeral texts were reprinted numerous times in the 1790s, attesting to a sustained cultural interest in both male and female hermitic figures during the post-Revolutionary period.²

This article examines the ways in which both the figure and practices of the American hermit are taken up as culturally resonant analogies for early American political subjectivity. The first part of the article considers the popularity of the hermit in poems, almanacs, waxwork exhibits, and choral music of the 1790s to reveal a persistent fascination with the political relevance of hermitic life. The article then attempts to delineate the generic parameters of what I am calling the hermit's tale, a previously unrecognized American literary genre characterized, most interestingly, by its rejection of the Robinsonade as a viable model of American political existence.³ Comparing American hermit tales alongside British antecedents such as Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. . . . (1719) reveals how certain writers deployed the hermit to figure, on the one hand, American political and cultural independence from Britain and, on the other hand, a democratic practice grounded in studied deferral and nonpartisan deliberation.

The final sections of the article discuss the theological and philosophical implications of this critical stance by examining the Pennsylvania Hermit in Amos Wilson's The Sweets of Solitude! . . . (1822) and the hermitic Democrat in John O'Sullivan's essay "Democracy" (1840). A study of the American hermit provides a unique lens through which post-Revolutionary American authors conceived of republican democratic practice as existing in the pause or retired moment between cultural binaries. The hermit's political significance derives from his or her capacity to confront the aporetic conditions of a post-Revolutionary American national identity situated precariously at the boundary between solitude and society, public and private, Federalist and anti-Federalist, and Britishness and Americanness.

George Washington and the Politics of the American Hermit

Perhaps the most significant indication of the young republic's interest in hermits is the persistent republication of British poems on hermitic life. From the 1750s well into the nineteenth century, Thomas Parnell's "The Hermit," James Beattie's "The Hermit," and Oliver Goldsmith's "Edwin and Angelina" (excerpted from The Vicar of Wakefield) continued to be prominently published by American printers in numerous poetic anthologies of British verse, as individual texts, and as epigraphs to various nineteenth-century American novels dealing with reclusive life.⁴ What was so appealing about the figure of the hermit to the post-Revolutionary American political consciousness? Why is it that Thomas Parnell's poem "The Hermit" and Lambert's novella The Fair Solitary are published...