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.

Lydia Sigourney in the Land of Steady Habits

This chapter examines Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s early writing (Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse and Sketch of Connecticut) and her life writing to understand her projects of affiliating with Connecticut Federalism and narrating continuity between Connecticut Federalism its political successors after the War of 1812. It examines her historical portrayal of conflicts over social class, religion, and government, including the Hartford Convention and the state watershed election of 1818, Congregationalism and religious toleration, and Mohegan evangelism and Samson Occum, as well as Sigourney’s autobiographical portrayal of her own shifting position in these conflicts. This analysis complicates two scholarly tendencies: to portray Sigourney as a democratic, working-class poet and to oppose mass market sentimental piety with the old order of New England Puritanism and established religion. It shows instead that Sigourney represented herself as a Federalist daughter harkening back to and adapting the vision of a classically republican organic society. Her treatment of religious tolerance is shown to be central to this project insofar as it was both a means to deflect criticism of the Federalists and to adapt arguments for state religion to a new era of religious privatization.

{ Coda } remembered forms of a literary nation

The final chapter of this book explores Cooper’s transformations of colonial approaches to indigenous languages as repositories of knowledge into fiction. In his Leatherstocking Tales, Lenni Lenape appears as the ancient ur language of America, forecasting grand narratives of national rebirth with prophetic certainty. The Lenni Lenape word, unintelligible to characters other than those of Lenape descent and the singular Natty Bumppo, is the sign that makes the world of nature flesh for future generations of Anglo-Americans. Cast at once as prophetic and primitive, the rhetorical rendering of the Indian in Cooper’s novels also strives to efface a Native American present. Cooper was not unique in his effort to fictionalize the Anglo-American language encounter, or in his attempt to reconcile the expansionist ethos of the new nation-state with an indelible indigenous past. For other antebellum writers, the American Indian presence haunts or lingers more emphatically, refusing to leave a landscape that is itself infused with Indian words. As Lydia Sigourney asks at the beginning of her poem “Indian Names” (1838), “How can the red men be forgotten, while so many of our states and territories, bays, lakes, and rivers, are indelibly stamped by names of their giving?” The question is, of course, rhetorical. As Sigourney goes on to explain:...

Race, Sympathy, and Missionary Sensibility in the New England Colonization Movement

This chapter focuses on the missionary ideas shared by those from New England who supported the African recolonization movement. It features Leonard Bacon and Lydia Sigourney and traces their motives for supporting the movement. It examines the belief that Chrsitians had a responsibility to civilize and evangelize the world, cultivating sympathy for others, and fighting slavery. According to the author, New England colonizationists saw the American Colonization Society’s efforts as an important part of a broader missionary movement.