Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (review)

In May 1860, British-born, pro-abolitionist actress Fanny Kemble observed in a letter to a friend: "it seems to me Slavery has made the Southerners insane egotists, and the pursuit of gain has made the Northerners incapable egotists. Manliness, patriotism, honour, loyalty, appear to have been stifled out of these people by material success and their utter abdication to mere material prosperity." Kemble, the divorced wife of a prominent slaveholder, predicted, "A grievous civil war, shattering their financial and commercial idols, and compelling them to find the connection between public safety and private virtue, may be the salvation of the country." Stephen John Hartnett's Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America explores the shaping myths and cultural fictions in antebellum rhetoric that led to the Civil War, highlighting—as Kemble intuited—attitudes about modern capitalism inherent in appeals to and fears of modernity. Attending to "a wide variety of genres of public persuasion" (1), such as novels, advertisements, broadsides, and daguerreotypes as well as speeches, debates, articles, and editorials, Hartnett probes the relationships between foundational cultural myths of American democracy and those of race and slavery, capitalism and modernity, history and representation. In addition to its value as an historical study of antebellum rhetoric and the context out of which it grew, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America will be helpful for advanced students of rhetoric, as Hartnett provides explicit, historically grounded examples of such tropes as metonomy, synecdochy, hyperbole, cataplexies (rhetoric of threats), prolepsis (forestalling objections through predictions of the future), and categorical propositions, among others, in an attempt to explain how antebellum discourse was deployed by speakers, writers, and poets and understood by their audiences.

Hartnett focuses on four case studies. In the first two chapters, "Rhetorics of Abolitionism" and "Rhetorics of Serious Evils," Hartnett examines the rhetorical strategies employed in abolitionist discourse (such as Lydia Maria Child's Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans and Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave) and proslavery tracts (such as William Harper's Memoir on Slavery). In a close reading of parts of these and other primary documents, Hartnett reveals how both Northern appeals to progress, enlightenment, and "Yankee ingenuity" and Southern proslavery depictions of the "impending doom" of abolition, "amalgamation," and political "leveling" were framed by a dialectic of modernity versus nostalgia that had bearing on attitudes toward modern capitalism. Hartnett's analysis of depictions in these texts of the political economy of slavery, including Northern complicity with it, provides, as he suggests, "opportunities for rethinking the historical foundations of modern racism" (91).

In the third chapter, "Rhetoric of Manifest Destiny," Hartnett focuses on the ways in which the mass-production and circulation of Robert J. Walker's 1844 tracts on the annexation of Texas and the arguments about race and slavery implicit in those documents produced the cultural fiction of a "national perspective" advocating imperial expansion (102). The burgeoning development of print culture at this time is key to Harnett's observations of the imbrications of modernity, technology, and rhetorical efficacy. Harnett's final case study builds from rhetorical analyses of representation in widely dispersed print culture to an examination of the democratic "poetics of self-making" in Walt Whitman's poetry and in Whitman's use of and interest in photography. Whitman did not sign the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, but instead identified himself on the frontispiece with an engraving based on a daguerreotype. Hartnett explores the paradoxes implicit in Whitman's carefully constructed visual image as a defiant, democratic, "working man" and the ways this image relates to "the dialectics of commodification, self-making, and democracy in antebellum America" (139). Noting how daguerreotypes work synecdochially, Hartnett (following the work of such historians of photography as Alan Trachtenberg, Alan Sekula, and Sulen Lalvani) explores Mathew Brady's construction...