Divided We Stand: Emergent Conservatism in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive

Among the significant legacies of Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word is the default characterization of the early U.S. novel as generically and socially radical: the word is part of the revolution. We know the scenario: against denunciatory, fiction-loathing conservatives stands the novelist, defensively justifying the genre while agitating the settled sediments of the time. In this Bakhtinian vision, even the most dubious of novelists stands as a hero against the Friends of Order. What this fantasy obfuscates, of course, is the more basic fact that the U.S. novel of the 1790s was largely an outlet of conservative writing. Before penning The Power of Sympathy, William Hill Brown published the satirical “Shays to Shattuck” in the Massachusetts Sentinel, depicting a fugitive Daniel Shays upholding the seditious, imperious beliefs of the demagogue. Jeremy Belknap took up the anti-Shays cause, arguing for a strong central government in both his fiction and historical writing, while Samuel Relf, author of Infidelity (1797), went on to edit the Federalist Relf’s Philadelphia Gazette. The anonymous “Young Lady of the State of New-York” published her Tory novel, The Fortunate Discovery (1798), in which all the major characters not only escape the notorious civil conflicts of revolutionary New York but also find themselves ennobled and resettled in England. Judith Sargent Murray’s novella-in-a-novel—the Margaretta story incorporated into the encyclopedic The Gleaner—enthusiastically endorsed the Adams administration while condemning critics for their French excesses. Indeed, the larger circle of writers self-affiliated with “Constantia” (Murray) and “Philenia” (Sarah Wentworth Morton)—we should include Hannah Webster Foster and Sally Wood in this group—allied themselves with the Federalists, as did Tabitha Gilman Tenney, who emerged from the Federalist stronghold of Exeter, New Hampshire, from which her husband was appointed a Federalist Congressman. Didactic authors Enos Hitchcock and Henry Sherburne were both members of New England’s Federalist clergy. Royall Tyler, who served in the military suppression of the so-called Shays’ Rebellion, collaborated with arch-Federalist Joseph Dennie as he composed The Algerine Captive (1797). The two most prolific authors of the period, Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown, are harder to situate, but it is notable that Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart (1795) was written under the patronage of the Federalist Binghams of Philadelphia, while Brown’s last novel, Jane Talbot (1801), redeemed its male protagonist from the dangerous influence of Godwinism. Within a few years, Brown produced several harsh polemics against Jeffersonian policy, drawing on the standard Federalist caricatures of the day. It is no surprise, really, that the novels of the period are full of alarmist references to Shays, Rhode Island, or mob actions; of disdain for Jefferson, Paine, and atheist-deists; of alarm at class-leveling and the nouveau riche; of praise for those who know their place and the clear differentiation of status. Nor did this predominance necessarily end with the Democratic-Republican ascendancy of 1800, after which Federalists were increasingly on the defensive. A large portion of fiction over the next two decades was penned by conservatives—Jenks, Pettengill, Read, Watterston, Knapp, Thayer, and Waln, to name just a few—such that Counter-Revolution and the Word would in many ways be a more accurate verdict.

But characterizing early fiction as Federalist or conservative both clarifies and obscures the political and literary landscape. For one thing, the clash over fiction itself now appears less a battle between radicals and social conservatives, and more a spat among Federalist intellectuals, in which some reactionaries like Fisher Ames argued with younger conservatives of a different stripe. Indeed many of the critiques of Federalist policy noted by readers of early U.S. fiction might be better read as clashes under and within the hegemony of the Federalist intelligentsia. Hence the clash between Rowson and Peter Porcupine, or Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s critique of the Connecticut Wits, or Brockden Brown’s critique of clerical extremism, or Murray’s feminism and universalist dissent, or Read’s qualified endorsement of Wollstonecraft. If this reorientation clarifies the landscape a bit, it...