"A Thought Struck Me": John Fitch and the Federal Republic

Although John Fitch (1743-98) would want history to share his conviction that he was "one of the most singular men perhaps that has been born this age" (Autobiography 22), his status as a generally unread and understudied cultural figure works against his own supposition. Indeed, Fitch's saga of steamboat invention—and the accompanying textual corpus he left behind—demonstrates how one cultural figure was buried in the shadow of the emerging nation. Subsequent analyses of his life have tried to unearth his lost and neglected body, refashioning him to fit specific political gestures. For instance, the nineteenth-century Whig-leaning geologist Charles Whittlesey writes of Fitch: "Oblivion in every form seems to have settled upon his memory in a cloud of thick darkness, which we hope is about to be dispersed" (200). Additionally, other writers sought to portray a Fitch who "expressed a wish to be buried on the shores of the Ohio, where the song of the boatman may enliven the stillness of his resting place, and the music of the steam engine soothe his spirit" ("First Steamboat on the Delaware"). Proleptically responding to such burying, and critiquing the disembodying effects of political representation, Fitch in his writings draws attention to his corporeality and evokes his material existence as a strategy against national abstraction. Considering the Constitution's placement of intellectual property under the onus of the state, Fitch's claims about his steamboat inspiration bespeak a Revolutionary-era model of self-representation—a model tied to embodied acts of patronage as opposed to the bureaucratic and republican network he would soon become embroiled in. In this essay, I attempt to disinter the textual body of John Fitch, narrate his life in counterpoint to contemporaneous historical figures, and begin to produce a Fitch-centered literary history that illuminates the ideological investments of US federalism.

Fitch's story begins sometime in 1785 when he, in a moment of bodily pain while walking with rheumatoid arthritis, wondered if he might be able to create a steam-propelled carriage. After giving up this initial idea, he "thought it might answer for a Boat" (Autobiography 113) and proceeded to design such a contraption. Thinking that he was the first to have had such an idea for steam, he tried to get the newly minted federal government to recognize the state patents he had already garnered under the Articles of Confederation. Disillusioned with the US government when his appeal was denied, he considered marketing what he thought was his native genius to other nations. In a world where intellectual property had not yet been codified as a natural right (even though the conjoined terms circulated in late eighteenth-century Anglophone scientific publications), Fitch functions as an interesting figure who exemplifies the fraught relationship between embodiment and invention that would eventually become systemized (and rarefied) into legal precedent. The very nature of US patent law—where a material innovation becomes abstracted and substantiated by language—is worked out in Fitch's claims of embodied inspiration. Calling US government leaders "Plenipotentiarys" and warning "all Nations at War not to have too contemptable [sic] an opinion of any man however contemptable he may appear" (102), Fitch illustrates the lone, self-disenfranchised individual melancholically mourning the passing of one political era and unable to adapt to the contours of a new political representation.¹

Fitch's life and writings articulate concerns about the relationship between the material body and US political representation. The political value of self-representation is central to Fitch, who claims early in his life story to have descended from "a very respectable [British] family if not what is called Noble" (19-20). But as luck would have it for the man who was "inclined to believe that it was the design of heaven" to persecute him, his father was a poor and "mean nigardly wretch" (22) who—even though Fitch "was nearly crazey after learning" (25)—refused to let him attend school except for a month in winter. To appease his desire to learn, Fitch worked a small plot of his father's undesirable land during...