Outvoting: Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Logic of Apportionment

This forum explores how the fraught nexus of gender and race became central to questions of citizenship and the franchise in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. How did conceptions of the populace – an unremitting contestation of the “we” in “We the People”–shift with the changing electorate before, during, and after the Civil War? Following an introduction by Christopher Malone, Leila Mansouri investigates how slave narratives staged the paradoxes of black electoral politics during the antebellum period. Laura Free then ponders the loyalty oaths imposed on southerners in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, exploring their relevance to more fundamental questions of citizenship and inclusion. Next, through a close reading of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Jennie Kassanoff uncovers how the “gerrymandered black body” consolidated the myth of white male majority rule in an era of tense partisan reapportionment. Collectively, these essays ask us to consider the ways that the nineteenth century continues to reverberate in contemporary debates over race, gender, citizenship and voting rights in today’s fractious United States.