The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic by Christopher C. Apap (review)

Christopher C. Apap’s The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic explores the “literary landscape” (xiii) of space and place in the United States from 1816 to 1836. His point of departure is John C. Calhoun’s fear of disunion in the face of national growth after the War of 1812; his end point, addressed in a coda, is the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature. After the War of 1812, Apap argues, westward expansion, demographic mobility, and political crises over slavery generated “an imaginative literature deeply invested in consolidating sectional identity” (10). Apap traces the changing geographic imagination through a wide range of sources, including novels, geography textbooks, landscape paintings, travel literature, sermons, essays, and political speeches. Throughout these cultural expressions, Americans confronted an expanding and heterogeneous nation by turning away from the global and national geographies that preoccupied the early decades of national history, toward sectional and local understandings of space and place, especially in the critical decade of the 1820s. At the same time, Apap argues, representatives of the new nation’s racial diversity—most notably, William Apess and David Walker—reshaped those new sectional identities to the needs of Native Americans and African Americans.

The Genius of Place first offers an overview of the shift in geographic orientation from the global and national to the local and sectional. In the 1820s, geography textbooks, which had previously opened with global treatments of space and then proceeded toward the national and the local, began to treat the local and the sectional before moving to larger spatial scales. The rise of the picturesque in visual art, travel writing, and literature encouraged attention to local landscapes and promoted New England and New York as “idealized American space” (16), smaller territories whose picturesque combination of disparate forms with unity of composition connected local areas with the larger nation. The early novels of Catharine Maria Sedgwick treated New England, the Middle States, and the South as the defining elements of nationhood but asserted the primacy of New England within her vision of “the sectional picturesque” (58). During the same period, James Fenimore Cooper treated New York as a crucial site where the conflicts between New England and the South were buffered and the divisive commercialism and heterogeneity of the Middle States were resolved—most notably in the character of Natty Bumppo, whose sectional hybridity Apap emphasizes over his much-discussed racial identity. (The author inadvertently identifies Rhode Island as a Middle State on page 16.) In Cooper’s hands “New York becomes a symbolic middle ground for the early republic … a space in which sectional representatives interact, collaborate, and accommodate one another in an attempt to achieve a mutually satisfactory goal” (81).

Here, Apap shifts to the Nullification Crisis of 1828 and its reverberation through political writings and fiction. Daniel Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne” (1830), which purported to defend the nation against sectional interests, actually drew on literary sectionalism to frame nullification geographically as a contest between North and South, conflating the North with New England while treating New England as the nation and its interests as “the common good” (106). Southern writers such as John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore Simms, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker responded to Webster and a decade of New England fiction with a southern variant on the sectional picturesque, emphasizing the importance of smaller-scale geographic and cultural locality and suggesting that the nation must be understood as “a collection of local identities” (122). At the same time, writers from the region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi worked to formulate a distinctively western literary imagination while situating the West as essential to national union. Daniel Drake, for example, emphasized the mixture of northern and southern elements in the West, suggesting that the nation’s third major section had the power to hold the first...