Catharine Sedgwick’s White Nation-Making: Historical Fiction and The Linwoods

Set around the American Revolution, written on the heels of the 1832 Nullification Crisis that anticipated the Civil War, and published in 1835 amid anti-abolitionist mob violence, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s The Linwoods; or “Sixty Years Since” lends itself to an examination of the cultural work of the American historical novel in the early national period. Sedgwick’s preface directs readers immediately toward central questions of how history is used and repressed. By grounding her narrative in “the only suffering period” of the country’s past, Sedgwick announces, she aims to “deepen [readers’] gratitude to their patriot-fathers” and thereby “to increase their fidelity to the free institutions” those men established.¹ The novel’s commemoration of revolutionary heroes builds to an apotheosis of Washington as the incarnation of “liberty and popular government . . . gone forth to restore the order of God’s providence; to abase the high, and raise up those that were bowed down; . . . to unbind chains . . . and to sow at broadcast the seeds of knowledge, virtue, and happiness!” (205). Yet the rhetoric of liberty complicates Sedgwick’s stated goal, since it conjures up the “peculiar institution” that the “patriot-fathers” neglected to abolish, even as it obscures the fact that the Revolution had not set about unbinding the chains of those held as chattel. The novel’s use of history to celebrate the patriots’ achievements suppresses the Revolutionary generation’s perpetuation of slavery. That The Linwoods is motivated in part by anxieties over

Catharine Maria Sedgwick, c. 1832, engraved by A. B. Durand after the painting by Chas. Ingham.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-113381.

that institution, however, an institution increasingly involved in violent contention at the time of the novel’s composing, becomes apparent from the first chapter, where the repressed story of slavery returns in a subtext of blacks’ history in tension with the narrator’s stated purpose. Sedgwick’s imaginary solution to the problem of slavery relegates freed African Americans to the status of permanent menials; she thus reenacts her role models’ failure to envisage genuine fulfillment of the Revolution’s egalitarian ideals and contributes to the ongoing construction of whiteness that would effectively replace the peculiar institution in sustaining racial hierarchy.²

Studies of the role that culture played in the Jacksonian era’s formation of white identity largely focus on male subjectivity, blackface minstrelsy, and the laboring class—or, occasionally, on male subjectivity as defined against Native Americans in frontier fiction.³ A narrowly masculinist focus does not permit these cultural studies to address the ways in which women’s writing, such as The Linwoods, participated in the work of white nation-making. On the other hand, new literary studies that begin to address race- or nation-formation in Sedgwick’s writings tend to follow older paradigms of historical fiction by focusing on the matter of Native Americans and the frontier, thus precluding discussion of slavery and, likewise, ignoring The Linwoods.⁴ Yet Sedgwick’s novel intervened in her era’s dialogue on race to demonstrable effect, and, as a pivotal text among historical fictions, it significantly (if arguably) intervened in cultural history as well, reworking the Anglo tradition in ways that earned international acclaim for her literary achievement and, ironically, serving as one inspiration for the first African American novelist.

Critics into the middle of the twentieth century credited Sedgwick’s aesthetic achievement in the historical novel, pointing to, among other things, her fluent, precise style; the “psychological insight,” realism, and originality of her characterizations; her convincing dialogue; and her success at introducing conventions of the novel of manners into the historical novel.⁵ As did her contemporaries, modern critics esteemed her historical fictions as Sedgwick’s choicest writing.⁶ But when academics in the 1950s developed a paradigm of the American historical novel, they expelled women writers from the tradition their criticism created. Although the first full-length study of historical fiction as an American tradition recognized The Linwoods for extraordinary characterization and...