Introduction

Beginning with a discussion of partisan politics in Catharine Sedgwick’s juvenile letters and her autobiographical fiction, the introduction makes a case for considering five prominent New England women authors (Sedgwick, Judith Sargent Murray, Sally Sayward Wood, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe) as profoundly influenced by and invested in a Federalist understanding of religion in a republic. This investment, which treats Protestant Christianity as a force necessary for public morality in democratic life, shaped their writing careers and forms an unacknowledged contribution to political and religious debates about church and state in the early republic and nineteenth century. Situating this argument as a contribution to scholarship in literary studies, postsecular studies, and political history, the introduction explains contributions to each area.

New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State

Drawing on novels, poetry, correspondence, religious publications, and legal writing, this book offers a new account of women’s political participation in the process of religious disestablishment. Scholars have long known that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women wrote pious, sentimental stories, but this book uses biographical and archival methods to understand their religious concerns as entry points into the era’s debates about democratic conditions of possibility and the role of religion in a republic. Beginning with the early republic’s constitutional and electoral debates about the end of religious establishment and extending through the nineteenth century, Murphy argues that Federalist women and Federalist daughters of the next generation adapted that party’s ideals and fears by promoting privatized Christianity with public purpose. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Sigourney, Judith Sargent Murray, and Sally Sayward Wood authorized themselves as Federalism’s literary curators, and in doing so they imagined new configurations of religion and revolution, faith and rationality, public and private. They did so using literary form, writing in gothic, sentimental, and regionalist genres to update the Federalist concatenation of religion, morality, and government in response to changing conditions of secularity and religious privatization in the new republic. Their project is shown to complicate received historical narratives of separation of church and state and to illuminate problems of democracy and belief in postsecular America.

Stories without Plots

This chapter explains how the eighteenth-century genre of the periodical essay describes the modern economy as a complex system. Specifically distinguishing itself from the novel, the periodical (or Addisonian) essay narrates economic causality as multiplex and contingent: economic relations cannot be plotted around individual protagonists. The chapter offers a history of the importance of the periodical essay in American literature, and specifically focuses on the examples of the genre by Philip Freneau, Judith Sargent Murray, and Charles Brockden Brown. Although these writers represent very different ideological positions, they each use the generic affordances of the periodical essay to depict the intricate dependencies that constitute global capitalism. The periodical essay thus presents a belletristic form that functions similarly to Hamilton’s policy writing: speculative fictions that narrate the possible consequences that descend from individual moments of production, exchange, and consumption.

“Lines Written by a Lady”: Judith Sargent Murray and a Mystery of Feminist Authorship

A regular and prolific contributor to the Massachusetts Magazine, Judith Sargent Murray probably wrote an anonymously published and joyfully feminist poem that ran in the September 1794 issue: “Lines Written by a Lady, who was questioned respecting her inclination to marry.”