Risk Culture: Performance and Danger in Early America

6. The Devil Designs a Career

—chapter 6— The Devil Designs a Career Susanna Rowson’s conservative response to risk culture conveys the mixed strategies with which even the most adept performers greeted the displacements of modernity. Her emphasis on honor and vows suggests her attempt to resist the expansive opportunities of the public sphere, even as she uses the public sphere to register her claims. In this ‹nal chapter, I turn to another ‹gure whose spectacular successes and failures reveal his “recursive ” capacity to fuse convention and risk. Although Aaron Burr has long been considered an avatar of opportunism—the one Founder devoted to self rather than to self-sacri‹ce—his actions after leaving of‹ce suggest that, like Rowson, he was playing mixed roles. His advocacy of western settlement in what his enemies called the Burr conspiracy was a shrewd public appeal that mingled restless—even revolutionary—innovation with a subtle guarantee of patriarchal order. Burr himself, aristocratic scion in a burgeoning democracy, would sweep away the con›icts of landownership in contested territory, impose order on a lawless region. Burr, his supporters claimed, would turn a ‹libuster into orderly settlement. But if the claim was soon shattered by the frenzied attacks of his Republican opponents , Burr’s failed western venture discloses a more lasting signi‹cance. Exploiting the dislocations of a rapidly developing nation, he helped to enable that re›exive self-scrutiny central to actors in a liberal order. The career he fashioned for himself became emblematic of the risks and ventures of a new age. 186       Five years before Aaron Burr set off to stake his claim in the largest land deal in U.S. history, novelist Sarah S. B. K. Wood published a work that would illuminate the strange course of his career. Dorval; or, The Speculator (1801) recounts the evil deeds of a bigamist, forger, and land jobber who sacri‹ces all to his lust for money and dies an imprisoned suicide.1 In seeking to secure the young Republic from such predation, however, Wood’s novel also exposes a greater problem that Burr’s conspiracy would magnify. In a rapidly changing society and economy, how was it possible to regulate individual lives? Where the race for property determined status, what higher in›uence could bend reckless pursuit to the calm dictates of reason? Dorval proposes an answer by laying waste to postrevolutionary careers. After Colonel Morely helps to win the war, he is faced with the greater challenge of managing his property. His ‹rst impulse, to invest in the lives of promising young men, turns inward after the unscrupulous Dorval interests him in speculation. All too soon, the colonel has lost his independence , his property, and, ‹nally, his freedom as the investments sour. And so it is with all who fall within Dorval’s orbit. Worthy enterprise becomes risky avarice as the smooth-talking stranger tempts characters to yield to their basest impulses. “I behold myself as nothing more nor less than a speculator,” laments Morely shortly before his death, “who was willing to risk his paternal inheritance and the produce of honest industry for . . . the foolish hope of acquiring immense sums” (151). His recklessness has endangered not only his family but also the claims of Revolutionary fathers themselves. The root cause and chief symptom of these anxieties, the novel suggests , are the Yazoo land claims. The region in present-day Alabama and Mississippi had been carved out and distributed in 1795 by bribed legislators . Public outrage forced them to rescind the deal a year later, provoking a generation of lawsuits and widespread distress. As an early investor whose claims were annulled, Morely is caught in the web of indiscretion. But the Yazoo ‹asco, Wood makes clear, is only a symptom of a larger threat to patriarchy . Just as no Alabama landholder could be sure of his title, so the uncertain titles of that unsettled time seemed to threaten all social order, nowhere more clearly than in Dorval’s scattered career. As the child of a sailor, Dorval begins life literally in transit, and once his father abandons him, he gives that roving disposition free rein. A diagram of his movethe devil designs a career 187 ments, from one malicious opportunity to another, would resemble the zigzagging of a wind-driven ship or the onrushing of unreined horses driven by irrational instincts. And though his virtuous foil, Burlington, by recouping his fortune in India, is...