Passing Current: Electricity, Magnetism, and Historical Transmission in The Linwoods

In 1834, a year before Catharine Maria Sedgwick published The Linwoods, her historical romance of the American Revolution, Albert Gorton Greene ran an item titled "Ethan Allen in England" in his short-lived magazine, the Literary Journal, and Weekly Register of Science and the Arts. Drawing on an intriguing gift of apocrypha apparently passed on to Greene by "a friend of [his] earlier life who was well acquainted with this part of the history of this singular man," the article offers several anecdotes demonstrating Allen's "shrewdness and wit."¹ In one of them, Greene recounts an interview between Allen and King George at Windsor castle involving the means of communication among the colonists. In response to the king's query as to how grievances are transmitted to "the common people," Allen replies, "I can tell your Majesty, that amongst a people who have felt the spirit of liberty, the news of oppression is carried by the birds of the air, and the breeze of heaven." The king finds Allen's reply "too figurative" and reminds him of his reputation as a "matter of fact man." Yet Allen's ensuing "plain" answer turns out to be no less figurative: "Well to be plain," Allen responds, in America, "the tale of wrong is carried from man to man, and from neighborhood to neighborhood, with the speed of electricity" ("EA," 297).

The exchange surprisingly upends conventional revolutionary tropes that align liberty with the factual and monarchy with

Frontispiece from C. F. Durant's Exposition, or A New Theory of Animal Magnetism . . . (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1837).

the artificial. It is, after all, a set of "facts" that the Declaration of Independence "submit[s] to a candid world," even as it is the "decent drapery of life" that Edmund Burke seeks to defend in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.² Indeed, in The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine takes Burke to task precisely for producing an argument that is too figurative, or as Paine puts it, for advancing an argument "calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect."³ But for Ethan Allen (at least in Greene's telling), sympathy is not weakness. Quite the contrary: because his countrymen collectively feel the spirit of liberty, Allen asserts, they "cannot be put down with the sword" ("EA," 297).

Which is to say that, for Allen—and, as we'll see, for Catharine Sedgwick in The Linwoods—sympathy or feeling is power, and power of a very particular sort: the power of electricity. The importance of electrical transmission in this little tale becomes more apparent as it continues. After quoting Allen's declaration that the rebels are more than equal to the sword, "The King ma[kes] a long pause, as if strongly impressed with the truth of his remarks." Then, "changing the subject," he asks what Allen knows of Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity and "expresse[s] a curiosity to experience an electric shock" for himself. Allen, he insists, must "visit . . . with his countryman, Dr. Franklin, at his palace in London" ("EA," 297).

Here, Greene's anecdote takes a curious turn—curious because it is, in fact, no turn at all. After all, the king's sudden interest in electricity, which Greene describes as "changing the subject," is easily explained as a kind of free association, obviously deriving from Allen's use of electricity as a figure for the spread of the spirit of liberty. Nor is it much of a leap to think that the king's interest runs even deeper: his "curiosity to experience an electric shock" suggests, metaphorically, his desire to experience for himself the animating spirit of the American rebels. Accordingly, a demonstration is arranged. Franklin devises an appropriate electrical apparatus, the royal family gathers, and just as the king is about to receive his jolt, Allen whispers in Franklin's ear, "remember . . . he ha[s] shocked us across the waters . . . give him...