Deceit only was forbidden: A Brief Literary Biography of Richard Henry Wilde

A lawyer, politician, and poet of nineteenth-century America, Richard Henry Wilde was a “self-made man.” The phrase itself first came into use during the years of his rise to prominence, as the fluid conditions of nineteenth-century American democracy made it possible for a man of humble origins—like Wilde, a poor Irish immigrant—to achieve prosperity and power through his own resources. In the 1830s the national symbol of the phenomenon was Andrew Jackson. Born dirt poor and orphaned at an early age, Jackson became the President of the United States in 1829. He was a man who created his own value.

But therein lay the problem. If society is fluid and every man can determine his own worth, what is the standard for establishing value? How do we know that something actually has the value it claims for itself? The age of the self-made man was also the age of the confidence man—a man who peddled the mere illusion of value. Hoaxes, sideshows, and showmen like P. T. Barnum, who made a fortune passing off the fake as the real, flourished during the early years of the Republic.

Richard Henry Wilde’s life reflects the concerns about authenticity and value—both monetary and literary—that were a constant preoccupation of antebellum America. Throughout his career as a lawyer and politician—also a poet, scholar, and slave owner—Wilde both struggled against and benefited from the paradox of Jacksonian America. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1789, he emigrated to the United States at the age of eight. He worked as a clerk in a dry goods store in Baltimore, and later in Augusta, Georgia, where he began the study of law. He was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1809, served for three years as Georgia attorney general, and in 1813 was elected to the first of several terms in the US House of Representatives. By the time he ran for reelection to the United States House of Representatives in 1834, however, Wilde carried two significant liabilities into his campaign. The first and most damaging was his opposition to the Jackson administration’s policies on banking and monetary reform. The second was an accusation of plagiarism.

Wilde had been elected to Congress in 1827 as a Jacksonian Democrat and in 1830 had supported the administration’s policy on Indian removal—a policy that was particularly popular among the voters in Wilde’s home state of Georgia, who were eager to take possession of lands claimed by the Cherokees. One reason for this eagerness was that, in 1828, gold had been discovered in the southern Appalachians, touching off a Georgia gold rush that lasted through the 1830s. After the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the state of Georgia instituted a lottery for Cherokee lands that handed them over to prospectors. Between 1830 and 1831, according to one published report, the value of gold coined by the US Mint increased by $670,000—over $14 million in current dollars—due primarily to the confiscation of Cherokee lands in Georgia.

“The discovery of gold in the south, and its exportation as an article of produce,” one journalist wrote, “have added new means of wealth and enterprise to the already vast resources of the United States.”

The prospect of increasing supplies of gold from southern mines inevitably led to an effort in Congress to increase the value of gold. The Coinage Act of 1834, known as “the Administration Gold Bill,” came on the heels of President Jackson’s decision in 1833 to remove government deposits from the Bank of the United States, and was part of the administration’s efforts to eliminate bank-issued paper money and make government-issued gold coins the only acceptable legal tender.

In the Senate debates on the Coinage Act, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri earned the nickname “Old Bullion” for his outspoken advocacy of gold. Benton insisted that gold possessed an ultimate, uniform, and indestructible value that made it “superior to all other currency.” President Jackson himself praised gold as...