SOURCE: “Catharine Sedgwick's ‘Recital’ of the Pequot War,” in Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 61-90.

[In the following essay, Gould illustrates how Sedgwick uses a revisionist account of the Pequot War to present a larger cultural debate over the nature of citizenship in the early American republic.]

I hope my dear Mrs. Embry [sic] you will go on to enrich your native country and to elevate the just pride of your country women.

—Catharine Sedgwick to Emma Embury, January 29, 1829¹

It has been the fate of all the tribes to be like the Carthaginians, in having their history written by their enemies. Could they now come up from their graves, and tell the tale of their own wrongs, reveal their motives, and describe their actions, Indian history would put on a different garb from the one it now wears, and the voice of justice would cry much louder in their behalf than it has yet done.

—“Materials for American History,” North American Review (1826)

Shortly before Catharine Sedgwick published her third novel, Hope Leslie, in 1827, she wrote a letter home to her brother, Charles, recounting a recent trip to Boston that she had made by stagecoach. Along the way, as Sedgwick described it, she encountered an aged veteran of the Revolutionary War who somehow charmed her. To Sedgwick the incident was worthy of detail:

One old soldier I shall never forget. He was not like most of our old pensioners, a subject of pity on account of (perhaps) accidental virtue, but everything about him looked like the old age of humble frugal industrious virtue. And then he was so patient under the severest of all physical evils … so cheerful and bright, so confiding in kindness, and so trustful in his fellow-creatures. … [He wore] famous green mittens, knit as he said, with a tear in his eye, “by his youngest darter,” leaning on his cane, the horrid cancer decently dressed and sheltered, talking with a benign expression of his old friends, but his eye kindling, and his form straightening with a momentary vigor as he spoke of the heroic deeds of his youthful companions, and the serenity and meekness, and philosophy with which he spoke of the sufferings and the progress of them.²

On its surface, Sedgwick's encounter seems to be nothing more than a sentimental account of an endearing old man. Yet her narrative of the incident, I would argue, suggests her relation—specifically through writing—to a living, cultural symbol of Revolutionary republicanism. What kind of “man” is this? Or better yet: What kind of manhood does Sedgwick manage to re-create here? By claiming both his unique and ordinary qualities, Sedgwick locates this “old soldier” both within and without the fold of a identifiable type. This immediately raises the issue of his representativeness. As a masculine legacy of the Revolution, he is transformed, albeit subtly, by Sedgwick's pen into an androgynous ideal. The passage's rhetoric welds together his meekness and vigor, his tears and heroic deeds, figuring a new symbol of republican manhood whose classical virtues are subsumed by his capacity for feeling. His daughter's mittens—a domestic production, after all—literally and symbolically cover his hands. So the scene translates power from male subject to female writer, from classical vigor to sentimental pathos, and devilishly suggests that the very icon of Revolutionary manhood is itself diseased, and perhaps on its last leg. This is the theme of Hope Leslie's “recital” of the Pequot War.

The successful revision of this icon depends on the negotiation of the masculine language and ideology we examined in the preceding chapter. As I began to show, republican language of “virtue” was layered densely with gendered meaning during the transitional era of the early republic. “Virtue” signified not only the tenets of classical republicanism and liberal individualism but also the precepts of affect, benevolence, and pious, universal love that descended in large part from eighteenth-century Scottish Common Sense philosophy. As the word began to signify new, modern republican adhesives of sociability and Christian benevolence, these traits became increasingly associated in early national America with women themselves and evolved into an ideology of domesticity during the antebellum era. The crucial point here is that during this era the gendered meanings of republican virtue could lend instability to the nature of “masculine” and “feminine” behavior. And as Sedgwick's letter to her brother shows, such instability afforded the chance to refashion the terms of civic ethics in a republic. By manipulating language, one could redefine along the lines of gender the very meaning of a “republic.”

In the next two chapters I take up the issue of gender politics in women's historical romance by situating two of the era's most popular historical romances, Hope Leslie and Lydia Child's Hobomok (1824), in this cultural and historical context. As I argued at the outset of this study, literary critics of all sorts have placed women's historical romance of the 1820s in context of the American Renaissance. In this schema, these texts are either failures that mark Hawthorne's later success or credible novels that should be considered part of the nation's literary flowering. In each case, the critical trajectory points forward, ignoring the specifically post-Revolutionary nature of the language and thematics of women's writing. Moreover, women's historical romance emerged during the 1820s in the context of an established, masculinized genre of nationalist history. Historians like Hannah Adams and Emma Willard were extraordinary women even to cultivate literary careers for themselves at this time. Yet there was little room for “revisionist” historiography at this time. Why, then, we should ask, did women writers even take up the subject of Puritanism? How do their historical productions about Puritanism compare to those of male “historians”? How did they engage contemporary, nationalist histories—and what were the cultural stakes of writing revisionary history via the medium of historical romance?

Virtually everyone recognizes the “antipatriarchal” nature of women's historical fiction. Yet this theme is made even more significant when recast as part of a larger gendered struggle over the nature of the republic, a struggle, I would argue, taking place in part through the medium of Puritan history. The transitional nature of the early republic, with all of its cultural and rhetorical instability, made such a struggle particularly resonant. Indeed, it made it possible. In this chapter and the next, I unravel the languages of republicanism in women's historical romance as a way of demonstrating that the political nature of Sedgwick's and Child's novels descends from the cultural experience of the American Revolution. This chapter demonstrates the immediate significance of Hope Leslie's revisionary history of the Pequot War, where Sedgwick thematizes the incompatibility of gendered forms of “republican” virtue. It provides a segue to Chapter 3, a more comprehensive reconsideration of the literary “conventions” of women's historical romance in the context of this period's changing political culture. Puritanism provided an arena in which to debate the protean, gendered meanings of republican “virtue,” a debate that directly involved a struggle over language itself.

HOPE LESLIE, THE PEQUOT WAR, AND REPUBLICAN VIRTUE

The Pequot War has produced more than its share of historiographic controversy. This, as we shall see, is much more the case with present-day interpretations of the war than those current in early national America. In the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War, revisionist historians began with renewed fervor to question the reliability of Puritan accounts of the attack on the Pequot in 1637. Francis Jennings led the charge during the mid-1970s by pointing out a regional bias that supposedly had distorted an entire historiographic tradition: “During the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, the whole historical profession was dominated by historians who were not only trained in New England but at the same time were steeped in the accepted traditions of that region. Our histories generally show their imprint.”³ The revisionist refusal, however, to treat Puritan sources “as gospel” (as Jennings puts it) has itself come under attack. For instance, one critic of the revisionists' “radicalizing polemics” has argued that they tend to oversimplify ambiguities in Puritan histories and thereby unfairly assail Puritan military tactics and political motives alike.⁴ These historiographic debates are characterized by deep animosities, but more importantly, they reduce themselves to two crucial questions: Did Captain John Mason's attack on one of the two Pequot forts at Mystic constitute a “massacre”? And did the leaders of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay undertake a defensive operation, or a war of conquest? This debate continues to occupy early Americanists, presenting the vexing problem of how we interpret Puritan sources.⁵

As critics of Hope Leslie have noted, it is just this issue that lies at the heart of Catharine Sedgwick's revisionary history of the Pequot War. In the novel's crucial fourth chapter, which recounts the war from the point of view of Magawisca, a young Native American woman who witnessed the Puritan attack, Sedgwick interrogates seventeenth-century accounts of the conflict found in William Hubbard's A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England (1677) and John Winthrop's The History of New England (1630-49), both of which had been reprinted in the decade before Hope Leslie's publication.⁶ Mary Kelley rightly admires Sedgwick for strategically “[m]ining the early histories”: “Sedgwick simultaneously turned the [Puritan] witnesses against themselves and introduced an alternative interpretation.”⁷ Sandra Zagarell similarly has concluded that Hope Leslie “challenges the official history of original settlement by exposing the repositories of the nation's early history, the Puritan narratives, as justifications of genocide.”⁸ More recently, Dana D. Nelson has extended and complicated antipatriarchal approaches by claiming that, taken together, Puritan and Native American versions of the war in Hope Leslie testify to “the political aspect of [all] historical representation”: “Thus through a sympathetic frame of reference, Sedgwick is able to establish a historical dialogue that had been suppressed from the Puritan accounts.”⁹

Whether Hope Leslie contains, then, a radical attack on Puritan histories or an uncannily prescient exercise in historical dialogics, the line of continuity in these readings locates Sedgwick vis-à-vis seventeenth-century historiography. None considers the novel primarily in an early republican cultural context—that is, by reading its history of the war in the context of post-Revolutionary discourse about the conflict. What were, in other words, the contemporary political and cultural issues imbedded within early national narratives about colonial military history? By comparing Sedgwick's history to those of her own era, rather than simply to the likes of Hubbard, Winthrop, and others, we might reconceive of Hope Leslie as an exercise in contemporary cultural criticism. This significantly lends new meanings to its “antipatriarchal” theme. In the context of contemporary histories, Hope Leslie both critiques the viability of masculine, classical republicanism and participates in a larger cultural debate over the nature of citizenship in the early American republic.

This debate was facilitated by the potently ambiguous meanings of “virtue.” As several historians of Revolutionary America have noted, during the eighteenth century numerous intellectual-historical pressures transformed the traditionally masculine meanings of “virtue.” Its classical context, of course, was exclusively masculine. “Virtue” derived from the Roman concept of virtu (the source of “virility”), signifying the austerity, patriotic vigilance, and martial valor theoretically requisite to republican life. Citizenship, as the ancient Romans conceived of it, was the ideal medium for men to express their collective personalities; the vivere civile—the ideal of active citizenship—generally described a situation whereby rulers served dutifully in politics and the masses in military defense. However, in a landmark essay exerting wide influence on scholars of women's history, Ruth Bloch has traced a number of intellectual developments during the eighteenth century that gradually feminized traditionally masculine meanings of virtue.¹⁰ “Virtue,” Bloch concludes, “if still regarded as essential to the public good in a republican state, became ever more difficult to distinguish from private benevolence, personal manners, and female sexual propriety.”¹¹ Gordon Wood similarly has argued for the modern forms of love and benevolence that gradually emerged as the new adhesives of a republican order: “Virtue became less the harsh self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity. Virtue became identified with decency. Whereas the ancient classical virtue was martial and masculine … the new virtue was soft and feminized and capable of being expressed by women as well as men; some, in fact, thought it was even better expressed by women.”¹²

Changes in eighteenth-century civic culture later coalesced into what one historian has called the “discernible social theory” of domesticity.¹³ The view that women were the “natural” stewards of national morality helped to create what Linda Kerber has, in a now famous (and debated) phrase, called “republican motherhood.”¹⁴ From its Revolutionary-era genesis, as Kerber noted, this role imposed upon American women “the contradictory demands of domesticity and civic activism.”¹⁵ The republic's new guardians of civic ethics were at once politically valued and politically disenfranchised. While historians today have come to view with suspicion the gendered dichotomy of “private” and “public” spheres,¹⁶ the home theoretically became the site of inculcating republican virtue.¹⁷ For example, Benjamin Rush, the Revolutionary generation's most prolific writer on republican education, specifically stated that American women (and by this, of course, he meant white, middle- and upper-class women) “must concur in our plans of education for young men, or no laws will ever render them effectual.”¹⁸ One should recognize as well that Rush's gendered construction of republican morality and pedagogy (a subject I pursue at greater length in the next chapter) was premised on the same understanding of cyclical history as the New Ebenezer of Puritanism: “In the ordinary course of human affairs,” as Rush put it, “we shall probably too soon follow the footsteps of the nations of Europe in manners and vices. The first marks we shall see of our declension, will appear among our women.”¹⁹ Hence republican womanhood derived from those anxieties in Whiggish thinking that cast the republic as a fragile, fated thing.

Born from such anxieties, the cultural role of the republican woman helped to legitimate women's writing during this era. The image of the republican woman writer, however, pen in hand, righteously invested in America's civic and political health, was only tenuously empowering. Writers like Catharine Sedgwick certainly carried the “political” authority of moral propriety into the public sphere. Even as a very young woman, a decade before she wrote her first book, A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick appeared to be aware of the personal, literary, and ideological leverage that republican womanhood afforded. In 1812 she wrote a letter to her father, Theodore Sedgwick, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, which declared with ostensible humility, “You may benefit a nation, my dear papa, and I may improve the condition of a fellow being.”²⁰ Despite her use of the metaphors of “cottage” and “palace,” to distinguish her sphere from her father's, Sedgwick subtly implied a gendered equivalence of their roles: “Wisdom and virtue are never at a loss for occasions and time for their exercise, and the same light that lightens the world is applied to individual use and gratification.”²¹ Throughout her literary career, Sedgwick's moral role, with its enabling and sometimes radical possibilities, was premised on the “light” that symbolically marks the beginnings of the evolution of republican womanhood into domesticity. Years later, an anonymous writer for the North American Review began his evaluation of Hope Leslie by legitimating women's writing in much the same way. “We hold it to be a fortunate thing for any country, that a portion of its literature should fall into the hands of the female sex; because their influence, in any walk of letters, is almost sure to be powerful and good.”²² In “the interests of virtue,” women's writing “nurture[d] the growth … of youthful intellect and feeling.”²³ At the same time, however, he delimited women's writing to the “proper walks”—“the lighter kinds of literature”²⁴—thereby circumscribing its politics within domestic space.

This newfound “political” role for women, however, raised a troubling question buried within the cant of republican motherhood. Which kind of “virtue” were women supposed to teach husbands and sons at home? This issue crucially involves the substance of republican citizenship. Male political theorists, of course, glossed over it, recognizing little problem in ideologically reconciling classical and domestic virtue. Men, after all, ideally incorporated benevolence and love into their social relations, even if times of political crisis demanded an exclusively “masculine” response of patriotic duty and martial courage (a subject taken up in Chapter 5). But the opposite was not true. Women had no access to the classical norms of republican citizenship. One should recognize that a lingering ideology of austere manhood contained misogynistic overtones (the abhorrence of “effeminacy,” for example, or the negatively feminine connotations of “luxury” and “indolence”). Moreover, masculine republicanism undervalued the affective ways in which women could forge truly political identities. How, then, did women writers treat a masculine ideology that in large part underwrote their own legal and political disenfranchisement? Divested of true representation, if not always political expression, women writers waged a cultural and ideological struggle within the republic by exploiting the contradictions in their political role.

Nowhere in early national culture was masculine republicanism more pronounced than in the heroic subject of military history. To put it simply, military history was meant to “inspire virtue” and “instill patriotism” in male citizens.²⁵ Exploits of the American Revolution, the many frontier conflicts with Native Americans, and, to come to the issue at hand, the Pequot War, all helped codify a narrowly masculine understanding of citizenship that effectively heightened the difference between men and women as political beings. This is the cultural politics of Hope Leslie's revisionary history. Soaked in a rhetoric of Roman masculinity, the subject of the war in Sedgwick's own day served to memorialize classical virtu. Her novel, then, addresses decidedly contemporary issues of the republic by debunking an entire tradition of masculine iconography derived immediately (though not exclusively) from Revolutionary-era political culture. Hope Leslie's fourth chapter is just what she calls Magawisca'a narrative—a “recital,” or performance, of history, which competed with other contemporaneous performances over the meaning of virtue in early America.

THE “STORY” OF 1637

Hope Leslie's “recital” of the Pequot War confronts a long-standing historiographic tradition. Puritan versions of the conflict tell the larger story of God's Providence in New England, and they typically begin with the murders during the 1630s of three Englishmen—John Stone, Walter Norton, and John Oldham—as a way of justifying Mason's expedition against the Pequot in what is now Mystic, Connecticut, in the spring of 1637. New England's early historians virtually ignored the fact that these three men were anything but saintly figures (Stone, for example, pirated a Plymouth ship, nearly stabbed Plymouth's governor, and was exiled from Massachusetts Bay for adultery and threats of violence; Oldham, as Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation attests, was quarrelsome enough to be called “Mad Jack” by the likes of Thomas Morton).²⁶ Instead, they turned these three rogues into martyrs in order to confirm Native American “savagery” and thereby justify the war. In one of the most important firsthand accounts of the war, John Mason himself unwittingly confirms this rhetorical strategy by claiming that “the Beginning is the Moiety of the Whole.”²⁷ Even providential history, Mason suggests, is manipulable: “If the Beginning be but obscure, and the Ground uncertain, its Continuance can hardly persuade to purchase belief: or if Truth be wanting in History, it proves but a fruitless Discourse.”²⁸

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, this narrative framing device for the war aimed “to purchase belief” and hold the moral high ground. The four histories by the actual participants in the war—Mason, John Underhill, Lion Gardiner, and Philip Vincent²⁹—deftly contextualize the Puritan massacre in this way. Mason, for example, begins by recounting the fate of the “cruelly murdered” John Stone, who fell into the “bloody Design” of the Pequot,³⁰ while Underhill similarly laments Oldham's death: “The Indians [the Eastern Niantics, a tributary of the Narragansetts] … knocked him in the head, and martyred him most barbarously, to the great grief of his poor distressed servants.”³¹ Gardiner and Vincent focused instead on Pequot “mischief” in Connecticut at Fort Saybrook and Wethersfield, but the narrative effect remains the same.³² Later Puritan historians, such as William Hubbard, easily adopted this narrative strategy because it worked so well in casting the war as a defensive operation against a most “fierce, cruel, and warlike People” who “treacherously and cruelly murthered Captain Stone, and Captain Norton.”³³ Ever since the nineteenth-century antiquarian James Savage disparaged his abilities as a historian, most critics have noted how Hubbard's A General History of New England borrows extensively from John Winthrop's Journal. But what better way to stir up passions than the gruesome account of Oldham's murder that Winthrop provides: “[The Puritans] found John Oldham under the seine stark naked, his head cleft to the brains, and his hands and legs cut as if they had been cutting them off, yet warm.”³⁴ Founded upon the dichotomy between “saint” and “savage,” the sensationalist rhetoric of Puritan narrative would seem to belie John Mason's claim that reliable history need not “stir up the affections of men.”³⁵ Puritan history works affectively, consuming, like the flames of Mystic Fort, whatever sympathy readers might later have for the Pequot themselves.

Early nationals easily appropriated this narrative scheme. The deaths of these three “martyrs” later served the nationalistic bias of early republican historiography quite well. Connecticut's premier history-writer, Benjamin Trumbull, merely reinscribed the Puritan line as it was found in Mason and Hubbard by beginning his chapter on the war with the accusation that the “Indians in general were ever jealous of the English, from the first settlement of New-England, and wished to drive them from the country.”³⁶ The “brutal” murders of Stone and Oldham soon follow, as they do in Abiel Holmes, Jedidiah Morse, and Epaphras Hoyt.³⁷ Moreover, the subject of the war further demonstrates ways in which sectarian rivalries of post-Revolutionary New England collapse under the pressures of nationalist piety. No less than her orthodox adversary, Jedidiah Morse, Hannah Adams argued that the New England Fathers “had still an arduous task to secure themselves from the malevolence and jealousy of the natives … [taking] every precaution to avoid a war.”³⁸

The perpetuation of this rhetorical frame for the war helps to explain the historiographic design of Hope Leslie. One might otherwise overlook Sedgwick's inversion of the chronological sequence of an entire historiographic tradition, as she transplants what she realizes are the embellished “stories” of the deaths of Norton, Stone, and Oldham to a moment after the massacre has occurred.³⁹ In the preface to the novel, she manipulates uncertain generic distinctions and gender stereotypes by assuming with all humility the persona of the inadequate historian. Yet this very act devilishly signals her historiographic maneuver: “The antiquarian reader will perceive that some liberties have been taken with the received accounts of Sir Philip [or Sir Christopher] Gardiner, and a slight variation has been allowed in the chronology of the Pequod war” (5). By dislodging these stories from their traditional placement, Sedgwick is able to emancipate readerly sympathy for the Pequot, and thereby recover that element of pathos—that humanitarian impulse at the core of domestic ideology—which both Puritan historians and their early national descendents successfully suppress.

In lieu of the murders of the Big Three, Sedgwick reframes Magawisca's narrative with a scene between Everell Fletcher, a Puritan boy who is the novel's future hero, and Digby, an actual veteran of the war, which functions to invalidate masculine historiography. Indeed, as Digby dutifully guards the Fletcher freehold against the possibility of Indian conspiracies, he stands as a trope for the virtue of Puritan and republican vigilance. And as he begins to rehash the war for Everell, he becomes a living metaphor for a historiographic tradition with which Hope Leslie now competes:

The subject of the Pequod war once started, Digby and Everell were in no danger of sleeping at their post. Digby loved, as well as another man, and particularly those who have had brief military experience, to fight his battles o'er again; and Everell was at an age to listen with delight to tales of adventure and danger. They thus wore away the time till the imaginations of both relater and listener were at that pitch, when every shadow is embodied, and every passing sound bears a voice to the quickened sense.

(43)

In this instance Sedgwick wryly criticizes the historical reliability of status quo historiography, since even eyewitness accounts (what William Hubbard called “the mouths of some faithful witnesses”)⁴⁰ derive from romantic imaginations. At stake here are the Horatian tenets that history offer both pleasure and instruction, the cultural foundations for historical print that Sedgwick problematizes by transferring supposedly “female” faculty psychology to male sensibilities.⁴¹ Both Digby and Everell are stirred up by the “adventure and danger” of a romantic, masculine history, which places them in an imaginative “pitch” distorting “sense” itself.

The ambiguous meaning of “sense” here exploits thematic possibilities arising from the complex legacies of Lockean epistemology and Common Sense morality. Sensation signifies a number of things: immediate impression, the (failed) capacity for reason, and sensibility as the affective source of moral behavior. After pontificating to Everell on the vulnerability of the senses, Digby is unable to recognize Magawisca as she emerges from the forest shadows—a fact that parallels his inability to recognize the ethical implications—because of his lack of moral feeling—of the Puritan massacre at Mystic. Digby fails, then, on simultaneously moral and epistemological counts: Magawisca he mistakes for a man and the Pequot for “a kind of beast” (42). Confounded by his own misperception at the moment Magawisca emerges from the woods, Digby asks, completely dumbfounded, “‘Could I have been so deceived?’” (44). As a representative male historian, his inadequacy devolves upon a deformed moral sense. Sedgwick thus dramatizes a larger defect in masculine historiography by destabilizing the rigid categorical oppositions (reality and illusion, male and female, history and romance) upon which it is founded. Both Everell and Hope Leslie's contemporary reader clearly need another historian.

REPUBLICANISM AND REVISIONARY HISTORY

But what kind of historian? And what was at stake in rewriting this kind of history?

These issues involve the nature of the war's representation in Sedgwick's own era as well as the historiographic and ideological relations between commonwealth and republic. Certainly early national antiquarians, both textbook writers and more “original” historians, naturally borrowed from Puritan sources. The theory and method surrounding their historiographic practice, however, should be understood in its immediate context, for too often critics mystify how and why nineteenth-century historians borrow from their predecessors. George H. Callcott, for example, has argued for the increasing scholarly rigor and sophistication with which nineteenth-century historians approached primary sources, suggesting that the ideal antebellum historian was a “lawyer” or a “judge” of historical evidence: “To use the sources was a simple dictum, but to criticize them, weigh their authenticity, and use them discretely was an art.”⁴² But Callcott simultaneously admits that the historian “felt no need to argue for originality, and he would not have understood why he should make a fetish of reworking material when what he wanted to say already had been better said by another.”⁴³ Together, these two assessments only muddle the issue of historiography as a cultural and political practice. Why, one might ask, did early national history-writers assume that the narrative of the war “had been better said” by their Puritan ancestors?

Early nationals thematized the war principally in two ways, both of which involved important ideological relations between Puritan commonwealth and early American republic: the validation of American exceptionalism and the recovery of Revolutionary virtu. Didactic historians during Sedgwick's day co-opted the Puritan theological concept of “special Providences,” the rare intervention of divine agency to determine events, which was in this case apparent in Mason's success despite being greatly outnumbered. To dramatize the divinely miraculous nature of this underdog victory, they followed their Puritan forebears in misleadingly casting the Pequot as a rising power.⁴⁴ Hannah Adams, for one, marveled at the “interposition of Divine Providence [that] was visible in restraining the savages from their [the Puritans'] infant settlements.”⁴⁵ Trumbull emphasized the day of thanksgiving that the Puritans held afterward, noting that “in all the churches of New-England devout and animated praises were addressed to him, who giveth his people the victory, and causes them to dwell safely.”⁴⁶ Such rhetoric deliberately blurred the meaning of the “people,” transferring its eschatological promise from commonwealth to republic.

Such a transferral involved translation as well. Much more dramatically than in Puritan histories, early national narrative of the war occasioned the opportunity to instruct readers in the political necessity of republican virtu. Early nationals mediated the Pequot War through a cultural discourse of Revolutionary republicanism. Even as Americans gradually sloughed off the atavistic codes of classical republicanism, they still periodically invoked it as a source of masculine identity. Its cultural use, of course, was contingent on rhetorical context. Even a proponent for a wholly “modern” Constitution, such as James Madison, could resort to it, declaring, for example, in the Federalist #57 that the “vigilant and and manly spirit” of the people must safeguard the republic against the power of the House of Representatives.⁴⁷ This masculine ethos also informed Andrew Jackson's cultivation of the persona of “Old Hickory,” the hero of the War of 1812 who had saved the republic at the Battle of New Orleans. Timothy Dwight's handling of his ancestors' run-in with the Pequot begins to show how the period's historical discourse was shaped by a resilient ideology of masculine republicanism. In Travels in New-England and New-York, Dwight concluded:

Few efforts, made by man have been more strongly marked with wisdom in the projection, or with superior courage and conduct, in the execution. Every step appears to have been directed by that spirit, and prudence, which mankind have, with one voice, regarded with admiration and applause in the statesman and the hero.⁴⁸

In this same vein, Benjamin Trumbull's history reveals an affinity with an older ideal of republicanism, where the selfless virtue of volunteer yeoman-citizens (as opposed to standing armies) ensures political survival: “The importance of the crisis was now come, when the very existence of Connecticut, under providence, was to be determined by the sword, in a single action; and to be decided by the good conduct of less than eighty brave men.”⁴⁹ This is more than the clichéd patriotism it might initially appear to be. Trumbull's rhetoric mediates syntactically between passivity and activity, between the agencies, in other words, of divine providence and republican heroism. The phrase “by the sword” allies this militarism metonymically with a distinctly premodern mode of warfare.

The political logic of this historical metaphor is apparent as well in the association of colonial New England with an ancient myth of republican purity. In a Forefathers Day oration of 1820, for example, an Orthodox minister from Connecticut concluded that the “valour” of Mason's expedition prevented “an extermination of the rising colonies.”⁵⁰ In his History of the Indian Wars (1824) Epaphras Hoyt employs a similar language: “Finding war unavoidable, the Connecticut people acted with vigour.”⁵¹ As we have seen, in the aftermath of the Revolution these words lent an exclusively masculine resonance to the historical trope of Puritanism. Here, specifically within the context of military history, their meanings draw upon an Anglo-Saxon mythology of manhood. In the 1828 American Dictionary, Noah Webster significantly noted that “vigor” derived from the Saxon word wigan, which meant to “carry on war,” and that (to recall Dwight's emphasis above on both wisdom and fortitude) it meant both “[s]trength of mind” and “force of body.”⁵² At least theoretically, then, these masculine qualities ensured one's ability to preserve one's property and hence one's independence. Moreover, the word's lexical origins place Puritan militarism within a larger mythology of the ancient purity of the Anglo-Saxon constitution, which to many American Revolutionaries had provided the historical roots of American “liberties” and hence a justification for independence. Revolutionary theorists as diverse as Thomas Jefferson (in “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” [1774]) and Noah Webster (in his conceptualization of the relation between politics and a national language) looked to the mythic purity of the ancient Germanic tribes as the source of English liberties. The Norman invasion in 1066 disrupted Saxon liberties which the American struggle of 1776 in effect recovered.⁵³ The submerged lexical associations between Puritanism and Saxonism thus further place colonial history within the framework of Whig ideology.

Surprisingly enough, in light of the period's overt racism, what might be called the valor/ization of Puritanism was paralleled by the Pequot themselves. As Neal Salisbury has noted, to Puritan historians “the Pequot's most offensive traits were their ‘pride’ and their ‘insolence.’”⁵⁴ Early nationals easily marshaled these racist epithets to reinforce the saint/sinner dichotomy upon which the narrativity of the war was constructed.⁵⁵ Lion Gardiner was careful to include a scene where, during an interlude in the fighting, the Pequot approached the Puritan patrol outside Fort Saybrook and asked “if we did use to kill women and children?” Gardiner's blunt reply, “We said they should see that hereafter,” supposedly elicited a moment of Pequot bravado: “We are Pequits, and have killed Englishman, and can kill them as mosquetoes, and we will go to Conectecott and kill men, women, and children.”⁵⁶ The subtext of contesting masculinities in these Puritan histories (apparent, for example, in Winthrop's and Hubbard's account of John Gallop's heroism, or Mason's bristling over the Narragansett slights upon Puritan valor) endured into early national discourse. Jedidiah Morse, for one, noted how the Pequot became cocky with their initial successes and mocked the Puritans, calling them “‘all one sqaw.’”⁵⁷

Paradoxically, however, the Pequot stood as a model of republican virtue. Juggling their admiration for the Pequot's “manly resistance,” and the obvious benefit of the war's outcome, historians refashioned the Pequot according to conflicting imperatives of gender and race. After narrating their utter defeat, historians such as David Ramsay uncannily refashioned savage pride into civic valor: “In this first essay of their arms, the colonists of New England displayed both courage and perseverance; but instead of treating a vanquished foe with the respect due to an independent people, who made a gallant effort to defend their property, the rights and the freedom of their nation, the victors urged upon them the desolations of war.”⁵⁸ In this context, the Pequot sachem Sassacus could be transformed from the most ignoble of savages to the paragon of patriotism. “In an enlightened age and country,” Timothy Dwight maintained, Sassacus “might perhaps have been a Charles, or an Alexander.”⁵⁹ Once they were defeated, the Pequot exemplified, according to Hannah Adams, “the spirit of a people contending for their country and existence.”⁶⁰ And Abiel Holmes's claim that the Pequot refused “dependence”⁶¹ suggests more than one might at first expect. This code word derives specifically from Revolutionary political assumptions juxtaposing liberty and enslavement, and signals the need for arms to ensure freedom. Such an odd configuration of Native American republicanism was, of course, not restricted to the Pequot alone. Cadwallader Colden, after all, had done virtually the same thing in his History of the Five Nations (1727), and the praise Washington Irving heaped upon the Wampanoag sachem, Metacom, in “Philip of Pokanoket” was typical (as I discuss in Chapter 4) of post-Revolutionary histories about King Philip's War. Most important here is the double bind into which the Pequot were narratively placed by early republican history-writers. Alternatively cast as satanic savages and vigilant republicans, the Pequot were “othered” in simultaneously countervailing ways, bearing the early national inscriptions of both an ideal of citizenship and a foil for civilization.

This context helps explain the structural and rhetorical design of Hope Leslie. The novel's “recital” of the war consists of twin massacre scenes dramatizing a cyclical pattern of history in which gendered equivalences model a pattern of “savagery” transcending race. The symmetry of the two massacres—one Puritan, one Pequot—crucially works to subvert an ethos of masculine republicanism, specifically in the equivalence history-writers drew between Puritan and Pequot virtu. The novel's parallel massacre scenes invert this equivalence, disfigure it by redefining republican valor as male “savagery.” Hope Leslie shows that it is self-consciously engaged with the masculine cultural formulas surrounding narratives of the war. I should at this point distinguish my reading of this section of Hope Leslie from those who have noted Sedgwick's revision of racial stereotypes.⁶² Others duly have suggested the limitations of such a revision but have overlooked or simply ignored the ways in which Sedgwick substitutes gendered stereotypes for racial ones. Native American men in this instance become no less “savage” than their Puritan counterparts; they show that “masculine savage quality” Sedgwick attributed to Indian nature in her autobiography written later in life.⁶³ Gender, in other words, distills race. And the context of republicanism in early national culture helps to explain why.

The issue is this: Hope Leslie's dual massacre scenes thematize the incompatibility of the gendered forms of republican “virtue.” The Puritan attack on Mystic, and Mononotto's revenge against the Fletcher household at Bethel, constitute analogous violations of the home. Sedgwick takes her cue from the repressed guilt in both Puritan and early national accounts about the killing of innocent women and children (Mason's tortuous insistence, for example, justifying his decision to attack that particular fort; or Jedidiah Morse's paradoxically titillated disgust with “a scene of sublimity and horror indescribably dreadful”).⁶⁴ In this context, Magawisca describes the fort as a “nest, which the eagles of the tribe had built for their mates and their young” (47). She specifies that the torch used to light it on fire “was taken from our hearth-stone” (49), thus lending the massacre a particularly dark irony rooted in an emergent antebellum ideology of the home. More importantly, since the historical record located Sassacus and the rest of the ruling elders at another fort nearby, Sedgwick's placement of them at a council of chiefs implicitly argues that the public sphere of political duty (the vivere civile in classical terms) leaves the home tragically unprotected. Only the maternal figure Monoco can sense its imminent destruction. There is no middle ground here: The twin republican tenets of valor and duty together precipitate an inevitable disaster for domestic life. Later, as Pequot fugitives flee to a Connecticut swamp for protection, the final Puritan attack culminates in an explicit violation of sacred domestic space, as “the wailings of the dying children” resound after the English “penetrated the forest-screen” (53).

Virtually the same domestic idyll becomes the victim of the Pequot attack on Bethel. “All was joy in Mrs. Fletcher's dwelling” (60), the narrator notes as the family prepares for the arrival of Mr. Fletcher and Hope Leslie. Even as Sedgwick in this scene suggests that a wife's vanity may result from an unhealthy desire to please her husband (“in obedience to matrimonial duty, or, it may be, from some lingering of female vanity …” [61]), Sedgwick still idealizes the moment distinctly in terms of familial harmony: “A mother, encircled by her children, is always a beautiful spectacle” (61). Sedgwick here deploys a romantic trope whose sentimental surface almost obscures its political potency: “like diligent little housewives,” the minstrel birds seek “materials for their housekeeping” (61). The affinities between the “natural” and the domestic, however, are complicated by the scene's emphasis on the cultivated order of Anglo domestic space—a trait that significantly distinguishes the Fletcher home from the Pequot one. In light of what we have seen as the period's discourse of Puritan enterprise, Mrs. Fletcher's house tellingly reflects “the neatness of English taste”; “a rich bed of clover that overspread the lawn … rewarded the industry of the cultivators” (61, italics mine). What appears to be a series of replicating images, then, is subject to slippage, as the Pequot fort, Fletcher home, and house of Nature vary in degrees of cultivation, together demonstrating both the sanctity of domestic space and a liberal mythology of property rights.

In Chapter 4, I take up the importance of this ideology in reading James Fenimore Cooper's novel of the Connecticut frontier, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), but for now we might recognize that similar details surrounding these two massacre scenes reinforce this gendered equivalence and suggest its empowering claims to universality. First of all, both patriarchal heads are significantly absent during the respective massacres. Second, Magawisca's desperate plea during the murder of Mrs. Fletcher and her child—“‘the mother—the children—oh they are all good—take vengeance on your enemies—but spare—spare our friends—our benefactors,” (63)—strikes the same cords of domestic pathos ringing out earlier at the attack on Mystic. Moreover, there is a biographical context for all of this. In her autobiography written to her niece, Sedgwick admitted as much: “There was a traditionary story of my mother's childhood which used to affect my imagination, for in my youth, dear Alice, the dark shadows of the Indians had hardly passed off our valleys, and tales about them made the stock terrors of our nurseries.”⁶⁵ The real terror (the vulnerability of the “nurseries”) lies in the imagined violation of domestic space that Hope Leslie dramatizes in symmetrical scenes of massacre.

The difference here between Puritan and Pequot men dissolves almost entirely. Although the Pequot sachem Mononotto experiences a momentary pulse of feeling for his victims, his “obdurate heart” only really awakens at the “courage of the heroic girl.” At this moment, the Native American sachem significantly bears one of the early national era's most common epithets for the Puritan Fathers when he silences his daughter “sternly” (75).⁶⁶ Sedgwick thus inverts the equivalence which her own culture drew between Puritan and Pequot valor, recasting republican manhood as a “savage” code of civic ethics.⁶⁷ This thematic maneuver implicitly mocks those ethical and racial discrepancies in status quo historiography which failed to see the obvious equivalence between “white” and “red” savagery. For if Puritan histories unwittingly dramatize vengeful behavior on both sides, early nationals were unwilling to recognize an equivalence that would have shaken their moral high ground. David Ramsay in this respect merely parroted the Word of the Fathers on Pequot “nature”: “Revenge is the darling passion of savages, to secure the indulgence of which, there is no present advantage that they will not sacrifice, and no future consequence they will not totally disregard.”⁶⁸ “When determined upon revenge,” Charles Goodrich assured his readers in 1829, “no danger would deter them; neither absence nor time could cool them.”⁶⁹ Morse shuddered at the image of five Pequot heads perched on poles at Fort Saybrook, a result of vengeance taken by Lion Gardiner's men: “So contagious are malignant passions.”⁷⁰ The hollowness of this racist dichotomy between saint and savage, which Morse cannot bear to admit but cannot completely hide either, gets a biting rebuttal by Sedgwick in an earlier scene in the novel where Digby and a Mohawk are traveling together to deliver Sassacus's scalp to the Puritan magistrates. In a moment of unforgiving irony, Sedgwick has Digby comment that the dried, bloody scalp “‘is an abomination to the soul and eye of a christian’” (25). Transporting the badge of Puritan triumph, Digby and the “fierce savage” are indubitably equated.

The gendered project of Hope Leslie's revision of military history is coterminous with a critique of America's millennial destiny constructed upon the smoldering ashes of Mystic Fort. Sedgwick's exposure of masculine republicanism subverts a theory of exceptional, progressive history by, oddly enough, invoking the Whiggish concept of cyclical time. If Puritans relied on typology (in Hubbard's reading of New England, for example, via the Israelites' victory over Amalek) to explain the war's meaning, early nationals perpetuated the theory of providential destiny. In this context, the symmetry of Hope Leslie's narrative design suggests a view of cyclical history that disrupts the historical teleology of nationalist narrative. Male vengeance occurs and reoccurs in inexorable cycles of retribution that parade falsely as republican virtue. The macabre image of Mrs. Fletcher's blood “trickling, drop by drop, from the edge of the flooring to the step” (67, italics added) not only gothically refigures the true nature of Revolutionary virtu but resonates as well, especially in light of these quid pro quo retributions, with a sense of inevitability. Historical process is key to gendered revision. As we have seen, the subject of Puritanism during the early republic was emplotted to fulfill both cyclical and progressive history. In this regard Hope Leslie's revisionism at once inscribes and redeploys this ambiguity. The novel bears the markings of its own historical emergence at the very moment it displaces progressive with cyclical history—at the very moment, in other words, when the trope of the home's destruction displaces that of the American Israel.

The novel's treatment of race, however, complicates its gendered intentions. Consider, for example, a moment during Hope Leslie's preface:

The Indians of North America are, perhaps, the only race of men of whom it may be said, that though conquered, they were never enslaved. They could not submit, and live. When made captives, they courted death and exulted in torture. These traits of their character will be viewed by an impartial observer, in a light very different from that in which they were regarded by our ancestors. In our histories, it was perhaps natural that they should be represented as “surly dogs,” who preferred to die rather than to live, from no other motives than a stupid or malignant obstinacy. Their own historians or poets, if they had such, would as naturally, and with more justice, have extolled their high-souled courage and patriotism.

(6)

The first part of the passage could be culled from the period's nationalist historiography. (How similar, for example, is Salma Hale's claim that Pequot “resistance was brave and obstinate” and that “for bravery in battle and fortitude in suffering [the Pequot] were not surpassed by any of the English troops.”).⁷¹ At this moment Hope Leslie participates in the cant of Revolutionary America by arguing in effect that the Pequot chose, in the words of New Hampshire's state motto, to live free or die. The new historian whom her reader presumably needs—the “impartial observer”—thus humanizes the Pequot within the sanctioned terms of masculine republican heroism. Her self-conscious departure from Puritan racism (in the brief but stinging allusion to William Hubbard in quotation marks in the excerpt above) rescues the racial other in a way that partakes in a cultural apotheosis of “republican” Native Americans.

What, then, one might ask, is the ethical status of the two massacre scenes? A close reading of Magawisca's history shows that this trope of Pequot valor actually problematizes the thematic trajectory of these scenes, their subversion of classical republican virtue. First of all, Magawisca refers to the Pequot as a “proud and prosperous” tribe (56). As a wavering heroine in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, her unwillingness to inform Mrs. Fletcher of Mononotto's presence results from kinship ties, specifically because her “pride” is “enlisted on the side of her people” (55). Most importantly, Magawisca's actual account of a massacre of domestic innocents loses its initial intention. What at first looks like a “home” inhabited by women and children uncannily becomes a battleground where the Pequot braves “fought as if each man had a hundred lives” (48). William Bradford, Sedgwick argues to reinforce this point, mistook Pequot “courage” and “fortitude” for savagery. Interestingly enough, these textual inconsistencies actually create a parallel to issues raised by today's historians about the Pequot War. Sedgwick in effect prepares her reader for the kind of massacre that Francis Jennings and other revisionists have argued, but then quickly changes frequency during the conflict to emphasize the “manly spirit” of Samoset, who defends the home “with a prince-like courage” (49).⁷² Why?

The contradictions surrounding Hope Leslie's history of the Pequot War—the simultaneous appropriation and subversion of classical republicanism—derive from Sedgwick's complex relationship both to her immediate audience and to her period's prevailing ideologies of race. Her revisionary history belies the difficulty of carrying on simultaneous revisions of gender and race. A historiographic and ethical problem faced her: How does one both critique republican manhood and fully humanize the Pequot for a potentially dubious audience? In The First Settlers of New England (1829), Lydia Child faced a similar dilemma and marshaled the trope of Pequot manliness to similar ends. In Child's series of domestic dialogues, a mother/historian informs her children/readers that had “the Pequods quietly submitted to have their country ravaged, and fortresses built in their immediate vicinity to awe them into immediate subjection, they must have been less than men.”⁷³ Both Sedgwick and Child in these instances resort to a culturally specific brand of ethnocentrism, which if they did not at least partly embrace, they nonetheless deployed to sway their readers on their readers' own terms. Revolutionary republicanism was apparently too misogynistic an ideology to embrace as a modern standard of civic behavior, and yet too powerful a polemical tool to resist. Hence the Pequot warrior himself emerges from this era as a protean text, a sign of cultural and gendered ambivalence, and the object of psychological and ideological projections of Anglo authors. The Pequot War becomes the fictive site of a thematic fracture between gender and race revealing in this case the cultural legacy of the American Revolution.

ROMANTIC HISTORY AND HISTORICAL ROMANCE

These thematic inconsistencies in Hope Leslie coincide with theoretical issues surrounding the very status of historical narrative. Indeed, this section of the novel raises the issue of the representational status of all history-writing; it does so within the context of the changing relations between “history” and historical “fiction” during this early republic. Sedgwick's narrative strategies obviously fulfill her objections to an exclusively masculine form of republicanism. But these strategies also expose an irrepressible (and yet unacknowledged) sense of the impossibility of composing “objective” history. The ideological disruption Sedgwick creates as a historian, of sorts, actually complicates her claims to authenticity. Her revisionary history, after all, manipulates narrative to defamiliarize readers. To put this in present-day theoretical terms, Sedgwick “reemplots”⁷⁴ the Pequot War, divesting the deaths of Stone, Norton, and Oldham of their narrative power (which Jennings and others have recognized) to rationalize the later massacre at Mystic. By reframing the massacre at Mystic, and constructing parallel massacre scenes, Sedgwick's engagement in gender politics ultimately exposes the metahistorical status of Hope Leslie. Her novel's fourth chapter is exactly what she calls Magawisca's narrative—a “recital,” or performance, of history. So despite her intentions to award Magawisca narrative authority, the text's performative qualities suggest the inevitability of historical relativism.

A close look at the relationship between Magawisca's and Digby's histories bears this out. From the outset of Magawisca's narrative, Sedgwick complicates the subject of historical truth by suggesting that her Indian angel's history is an enumeration of events and an artistic performance. “[Magawisca] paused for a few moments, sighed deeply, and then began the recital of the last acts in the tragedy of her people; the principal circumstances of which are detailed in the chronicles of the times by the witnesses of the bloody scenes” (47). Through her own eyewitness, Sedgwick aims to compete with Puritan ones like John Mason and John Underhill, who, via William Hubbard and others, influenced early national discourse about the war. Yet she creates at this moment uncertainties about the status of “history.” Is it a dramatic performance—or merely an enumeration of facts? Magawisca's performance is implied by her need as an artist to pause and capture the moment, to marshall her resources before she stands and delivers. Magawisca's description recalls the generic ambiguity established in the novel's Preface when Sedgwick states that hypothetically either Pequot “historians or poets” (6) could have defended their people's cause.

Magawisca's performance further suggests the power of historical romance as a medium for revisionary history. The crucial point here is that Digby's and Magawisca's histories metaphorically express an increasing competitiveness (and familiarity) between history and historical romance, a subject that I addressed in the Introduction. In this instance the text of Hope Leslie inscribes its own context—that is, the discursive practices surrounding the production of all history-writing during this particular era. Everell Fletcher thus can be situated as the early republic's implied reader for whom the genres of history and historical fiction are competing. And this implied reader, Hope Leslie suggests, already has been corrupted by masculine nationalist historiography. The reader (perhaps unknowingly) comes to historical romance in need of help.

Like Hope Leslie's reader, Everell becomes easily seduced into the scene's paradoxically liberating and debilitating pathos: “‘Did they so rush on sleeping women and children?’ asked Everell, who was unconsciously lending all his interest to the party of the narrator” (48). As Magawisca's story progresses, Everell unwittingly loses his capacity to object to her “version,” and helplessly asks instead for more details about the fate of Sassacus. So the power of historical narrative would seem to lie along the axis of feeling and imagination. Yet the logical extension of such thinking destabilizes the authenticity of Magawisca's history. Sedgwick's apparent desire to authorize Magawisca is frustrated by language belying an irrepressible sense of the artificiality (as in “art” or “artifice”) of historical romance:

It [the war] was an important event to the infant colonies, and its magnitude probably somewhat heightened to the imaginations of the English … and Everell had heard [the events] detailed with the interest and particularity that belongs to recent adventures; but he had heard them in the language of the enemies and conquerors of the Pequods; and from Magawisca's lips they took a new form and hue; she seemed, to him, to embody nature's best gifts, and her feelings to be the inspiration of heaven. This new version of an old story reminded him of the man and the lion in the fable. But here it was not merely changing sculptors to give the advantage of one or another of the artist's subjects; but it was putting the chisel into the hand of truth, and giving it to whom it belonged.

(53)

The metaphor of the chisel at once legitimates Hope Leslie's artistic achievement and undermines the historicity of such a performance. The language surrounding this achievement suggests its purely representational quality: Magawisca's account is “a new version of an old story,” possessing only a new “hue and form” rather than a new substance. Compare this language to the epigraph at the start of this chapter. The reviewer of an early national history defending the Pequot (which tellingly equates the Puritans to the Ancient Romans) rhetorically raises the same theoretical problem: a “different garb” suggests form rather than substance, the inevitable dressings and redressings of language that we inevitably bestow upon the past. Historical narrative would seem to face the problem that the claim to “the hand of truth” is complicated by the lurking sense that only new “versions” can be told.

Sedgwick's intentions here would appear to be open to debate. Dana D. Nelson recently has argued against the notion that Magawisca's history simply subverts the patriarchal Word. In her view Sedgwick juxtaposes Digby's and Magawisca's histories in order to show the inevitably dialogic character of historical narrative.⁷⁵ My argument coincides with Nelson so far as both of us recognize the representational nature of the two histories. But her understanding of Sedgwick's intentions ignores the cultural and historiographic contexts in which Hope Leslie emerged. First of all, the ideological stakes of writing history in this case—the gendered meanings of republicanism during this era—make it difficult for one to believe that Sedgwick stood so theoretically detached from Magawisca's account.

Moreover, the view that Sedgwick self-consciously upholds historical relativism depends on Everell's unreliability (because of his excessive emotionalism) as a standard for judging the “truth” of Magawisca's history. Yet to read Bakhtin backward, as Nelson does, in order to find an avatar of dialogism in Catharine Sedgwick herself, elides early national assumptions about the nature of historical writing. The romanticization of historiography during the antebellum era is crucial to gauging the relative status in Hope Leslie of Digby's and Magawisca's narratives. Early nationals increasingly understood historiography to be an affective and imaginative process. “You will struggle in vain,” Samuel Knapp declared in the preface to Lectures on American Literature (1829), “to make American history well understood by your pupils, unless biographical sketches, anecdotes and literary selections, are mingled with the mass of general facts. The heart must be affected, and the imagination seized, to make lasting impressions upon the memory.”⁷⁶ Reviews of nationalist histories increasingly called for a work of “genius” that could buttress the nation's artistic reputation at home and abroad.⁷⁷ The year of Hope Leslie's publication, a writer for the American Journal of Education defined a new American history in just these terms: “Our country is the monument of our great men. Our history is our national poetry. … If we are an intellectual people, it is to be hoped we are not merely so. It is hoped that we have [in the composition of history] imagination and feeling. Then let this history have an interesting form … let those parts of it appear which address the moral sentiments.”⁷⁸

In this emergently romantic era Sedgwick herself understood Everell's response to Magawisca's “history” to approximate an affective ideal that she elsewhere endorsed. Indeed, the exchange between Magawisca and Everell actually models a dynamic of all history-writing that Sedgwick espoused in a letter (written the year after Hope Leslie's publication) to the renowned Swiss historian Jean-Charles-Leonard Simonde de Sismondi, author of the multivolumed History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages (1809-18):

But, after all, you cannot estimate the benefit, for you are not aware of the homage your writings have inspired … that you infuse into them a moral life, that you breathe your own soul into them, impart to them … a portion of your own identity. This seems to me to be one of their attractive and attaching peculiarities. It is this that makes us feel them to be the production of a being, whose affections and sympathies are kindred to our own.⁷⁹

The passage marks an ostensibly odd moment where a writer of historical fiction tells a historian that she admires him as a historian because his work appeals to faculties associated with imaginative writing. Sedgwick situates history-writing's didacticism within a psychological, emotive dynamic allying the “affections and sympathies” of both reader and writer. The net result not only blurs the genres of history and romance (as we saw in the earlier scene with Digby and Everell) but also obviates the idea that, in Sedgwick's view, Everell's response somehow problematizes the reliability of Magawisca's historical narrative. Just the opposite: It further validates it.

An affective epistemology helps to explain the equivalence Hope Leslie draws between Digby's and Magawisca's “histories.” Hope Leslie registers both the performative nature of all history-writing and the increasing competition between the genres of history and fiction expressed in the juxtaposition of Digby's and Magawisca's accounts. Both historical narratives have the same audience; they produce essentially the same effects. Moreover, Hope Leslie reveals the instability of generic borders. The reasons for this lie in the convergence of two, important trends during the early republic: the proliferation of historical romance in the 1820s and the gradual romanticization of history. Chapter 5 explores the politics of faculty psychology in histories of the Salem witchcraft trials, and locates the uncertainty with which early nationals viewed the imagination, but here I wish to emphasize that during this transitional era historiography was increasingly subjected to romantic literary standards.

The similar cultural space that these dual genres inhabited in the early republic is metaphorically apparent in the equivalent receptions that Digby's and Magawisca's narratives elicit. If we recall the scene between Digby and Everell, where masculine war stories produce only “heightened imaginations,” revisionary history in the form of female romance produces much the same thing: “Everell's imagination, touched by the wand of feeling, presented a very different picture of those defenseless families of savages …”; he “did not fail to express to Magawisca with all the eloquence of a heated imagination, his sympathy and admiration of her heroic and suffering people” (54). Moreover, the power of imagination (as in the letter to Sismondi) involves both historian and audience. For the “wand of feeling” with which Magawisca touches Everell ambiguously refers to their mutually affected sensibilities. Through Magawisca, then, Sedgwick anticipates a principle of romantic historiography which valued the historian's passionate involvement in historical subject matter.⁸⁰ The interaction leaves Magawisca and Everell in the same kind of “romantic abstraction” (54) that Digby and Everell earlier had experienced. And so if Digby's history manages to invalidate itself as nothing more than a specifically masculine romanticism, its feminized revision in Magawisca's performance similarly relies upon the purely manipulative function of language. As history and romance metaphorically vie for authority in Hope Leslie, they expose only an equivalent performativity.

In this context, then, Hope Leslie stages dual modes of history-writing whose epistemological claims inevitably are compromised by the very qualities of affect and imagination that lend them narrative power. Yet Hope Leslie's “recital” at least suggests the problematic implications of history-as-performance that early national histories generally suppressed. Most history-writers used the term simply to signify an enumeration of historical facts. The title of Jeremy Belknap's American Biography, for example, includes the phrase, “Comprehending a Recital of the Events connected with their Lives and Actions.” Those, like Belknap, who claimed historical accuracy refused to acknowledge how nationalist pieties may have complicated those claims. “Where is the American,” one orator asked in 1826, “who has not felt a glow of enthusiasm in listening to a recital of those events that led to our national emancipation?”⁸¹ David Ramsay similarly claimed a scrupulous fidelity to the facts: “The history of a war on the frontiers can be little else than a recital of the exploits, the sufferings, the escapes and deliverances of individuals, of single families, or small parties.”⁸² Ironically, the North American Review found that Ramsay was too close to the contemporary materials treated in the third volume of his history “to admit of a cool, philosophical recital.”⁸³ Yet even here its signification slips as the reviewer in the next breath calls Ramsay's history a “performance.” Thus, predominantly male writers and reviewers alike deployed the term to denote a scrupulous fidelity to the facts, the kind of research that enhanced one's narrative and political authority.⁸⁴

Hope Leslie's performance calls attention to yet another meaning of “recital.” The first entry for the word in Webster's 1828 American Dictionary defined it as a “Rehearsal; the repetition of the words of another or of a writing; as of the recital of a deed; the recital of testimony.” This suggests an act of ventriloquy. Certainly, as we have seen, this process aptly characterizes the transmission of Puritan narrative into early national historical discourse. Early nationals, in effect, followed the biblical epigraph to William Hubbard's A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians, taken from Exodus 17.14, after God had granted the Israelites a victory over the tribe of Amalek: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a Memorial in a Book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua, for I will utterly put out the Remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.” From John Mason's account of the assault on Mystic Fort, through William Hubbard's paraphrasing of it, to its virtual ventriloquy in Benjamin Trumbull and his contemporaries, the Puritan story of the Pequot War continuously was “rehearsed.” Like Joshua himself, early nationals were reminded of the sacredness of national destiny and the purely secular means by which the republic would survive. In the very act of engaging the subject of the Pequot War, then, Sedgwick confronted—and disrupted—the word of the Fathers as it was “rehearsed” from the commonwealth to the republic.

WOMEN'S WRITING AND REVISIONARY HISTORY

The appearance of the Pequot War in Hope Leslie is thus no accident at all. The subject of the war in early national culture was laden with the masculine ideologies of Revolutionary republicanism, and it carried, like the Y chromosome, the genetic inheritance of a misogynistic understanding of the “republic,” which presumably would be passed on (through narrative) to future generations. Sedgwick's treatment of the war was impelled by a gender-specific republican politics of exclusion rooted in classical ideology, which understood the republic in terms of the capacity of male citizens to express their identities fully through active citizenship. Sedgwick's manufacturing of domestic pathos, and her redefinition of “savagery” along the lines of gender—as opposed strictly to race—should be understood in this context. Classical republican ideology merely highlighted the political and ethical inconsistencies in the Revolutionary settlement of 1787-8, ones that excluded women from citizenship and yet still asked them to contribute to the making of good citizens. Women had a political role with no political rights.

So the thinly veiled contest taking place in Hope Leslie between nationalist history and historical romance actually shows Sedgwick interrogating the ethical viability of her culture's association of Puritanism with “republicanism”—a word she already is begining to redefine in the early part of the novel. This crucial section of Hope Leslie signals her controversy with a political and cultural metaphor, her dismantling of what I have called the New Ebenezer of the early republic. In the next chapter, I explore this process of historical revision as cultural criticism, a process that further brings into focus the contemporary historicity of the “Puritans” in women's historical romance.

The representational status of Puritanism has important consequences for redefining the very terms of the debate about women's history-writing in general. In The Feminization of American Culture (1977), Ann Douglas argues that nineteenth-century female romance represented an “escape” from masculine history.⁸⁵ Douglas noted that ministers like Jared Sparks turned away from the feminized province of the Unitarian pulpit in order to pursue the more masculine avocation of history. As Douglas saw it, this was a way for men to escape feminine “influence” and reassert their masculinity. Recent critics justifiably have argued that Douglas failed to see the seriousness of domestic politics in antebellum women's writing.⁸⁶ Yet the typical corrective that women's history-writing represented anything but an “escape from history” misses the point. A contemporary reviewer of Hope Leslie rightly claimed that Sedgwick “has had the industry to study the early history of New England,”⁸⁷ but today we should not define the novel's historicity so narrowly. Hope Leslie represents its own emergence in post-Revolutionary culture. And this explains why Douglas objected to Sedgwick's anachronistic language, which presumably reflected an “apostasy from history” and a “confused conscience,”⁸⁸—traits characterizing, for Douglas, women's historical writing in general. What she (and many others) fail to see is the secondary importance of Puritanism in Hope Leslie. The novel's anachronistic language and thematics of “virtue” testify to its preeminent concerns with the status of civic ethics in the republic.

The “recital” that Hope Leslie offers begins to suggest the competition between alternative forms of “history” during this era. Published in 1827, the very year in which Massachusetts legislated the study of history into the public school curriculum, Hope Leslie registers a hyper self-consciousness about the discursive field of history-writing into which it enters. Much later in life, in her autobiography addressed to her niece's daughter, Sedgwick would time and again juxtapose the state and the home as contending spheres of education, emphasizing, of course, the superiority of the latter: “I believe, my dear Alice, that the people who surround us in our childhood, whose atmosphere infolds us, as it were, have more to do with the formation of our characters than all our didactic and preceptive education.”⁸⁹ The antagonistic power relations between the state and the home are inscribed in Hope Leslie in the contest between Digby's and Magawisca's tales, or, in effect, masculine nationalist historiography and women's historical romance. Eight years after Hope Leslie, Sedgwick again suggested this tension in The Linwoods (1835), a historical novel set in Revolutionary America. While lightly chastising the “duty” that the meekly obedient Bessie Lee performs by “so virtuously” reading histories, the novel's heroine, Isabella Linwood, asks her, “If history then is mere fiction, why may we not read romances of our own choosing? My instincts have not misguided me, after all.”⁹⁰ Isabella's iconoclasm toward status quo historiography expresses ex post facto Sedgwick's own in Hope Leslie. Isabella here testifies to Sedgwick's underlying assumptions about the competition for an immediate reading audience. The story of the Pequot War introduces narrative strategies that work ideally to emancipate the implied reader of the day who, like Everell, presumably has been corrupted.

Like Hope Leslie, who, we should remember, nearly married William Hubbard, Catharine Sedgwick vented herself “upon the ungainly ways of scholars” (154). But these scholars were not really the dead ghosts of John Mason and William Hubbard, but the very real, living spectres of Benjamin Trumbull, Jedidiah Morse, and others who exerted significant cultural power in early-nineteenth-century New England. In the next chapter I explore the narrative strategies with which both Sedgwick and Child conduct cultural criticism, articulating along the way the ambiguous ideological relations between republicanism and domesticity. Such criticism was made possible by the very instability of “virtue” itself during this transitional era. What did it mean—masculine vigilance or affectional benevolence? Who were the real stewards of republican virtue? Like the old war veteran of her letter to Charles, the “republican” heroes of Hope Leslie and Hobomok are subjected to complex surgical procedures in which the language and ideas of republicanism are forever changed.

Notes

1. This unpublished letter comes from the Emma Embury Collection, which is in the inventory of the 19th-Century Shop in Baltimore, Maryland. I would like to thank Stephen Loewentheil for his cooperation in allowing me to consult and use this material.

2. Letter to Charles Sedgwick, October 27, 1826, in Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, ed. Mary Dewey (New York: Harper & Bros., 1872), 179-80.

3. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1976), 181. Other important revisionist studies include Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 35-45; and Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 203-35. These historians address traditional accounts of the war, which place greater faith in the reliability of Puritan sources, such as found in Alden T. Vaughan's New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965). For an even earlier tradition of revisionist historians, see Vaughan, 134.

4. Stephen T. Katz, “The Pequot War Reconsidered,” New England Quarterly 64 (June 1991), 207.

5. See, for example, Alfred A. Cave's “Who Killed John Stone: A Note on the Origins of the Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 49 (July 1992), 509-21. For an even more recent interpretation of whether or not the expedition qualifies as an act of genocide, see Michael Freeman, “Puritans and Pequots: The Question of Genocide,” New England Quarterly 68 (June 1995), 278-93.

6. See Edwin Halsey Foster, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (New York: Twayne, 1974), 73-80.

7. Mary Kelley, “Introduction” to Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), xxix, xxxi.

8. Sandra Zagarell, “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney's Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 6 (Fall 1987), 235. For commentary that is less specific on Sedgwick's relationship to Puritan historiography but that still notes the novel's “subversion of male myth/history,” see Christopher Castiglia, “In Praise of Extra-vagant Women: Hope Leslie and the Captivity Romance,” Legacy 6 (1989), 12, and Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 105 and n. 14, 191.

9. Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 72.

10. Ruth H. Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (1987), 37-58. Bloch argues that through the affective epistemology of Edwardsian religion, Scottish Common Sense thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson who posited an emotional moral sense, and the rise of literary sentimentalism, virtue became increasingly associated with the workings of the heart and hence with women themselves. See also Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Partiarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

11. Bloch, “Gendered Meanings,” 56.

12. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993), 216. See the entire section on “Benevolence,” 213-25, for this change.

13. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 96.

14. Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980; New York: Norton, 1986). See also Mary Beth Norton's Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women (New York, 1980). Rosemarie Zagarri recently has traced the intellectual roots of republican womanhood to the “civil jurisprudential school” of the Scottish Enlightenment. See “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (June 1992), 192-215. For the importance of liberalism to women's political status, see Kerber's “The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985), 474-95, esp. 485.

15. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 288.

16. The very notion of “separate spheres” has come under increasing scrutiny by historians of American women. In this chapter and the next, I treat this issue as an ideological construct rather than as an accurate description of social and political reality. For recent challenges to the concept of “woman's sphere,” see Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Woman's History,” Journal of American History 75 (1988), 9-39, “Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium,” Feminist Studies 6 (Spring 1980), 26-64; Kathy Peiss, “Going Public: Women in Nineteenth-Century Cultural History,” ALH (December 1991), 817-28; Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

17. As Cott has shown, a number of factors made the home the “natural” place for the formation of virtuous citizens. See Bonds, 19-62, for changes that gradually devalued the home as a site of economic production. In this regard, see also Gerda Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson,” in The Majority Finds its Place: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 15-30, esp. 17-18, 25, 29. For the ideological legacy of Lockean and Rousseauist educational theories emphasizing the importance of nurturance, see Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 9-36.

18. Benjamin Rush, “A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania; to which are added Thoughts upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic. Addressed to the Legislature and Citizens of the State,” 1786. In Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical (Philadelphia: Thomas and Samuel Bradford, 1798).

19. Rush, “Thoughts Upon Female Education Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government in the United States of America,” in Essays, 89.

20. Life and Letters, ed. Dewey, 91.

21. Ibid., 91, italics added.

22. North American Review 26 (April 1828), 403-20, 403 for citation.

23. Ibid., 408.

24. Ibid., 406.

25. George H. Callcott, History in United States, 1800-1860: Its Practice and Purpose (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 104.

26. William Bradford gives some account of the machinations of John Lyford and John Oldham. See Of Plymouth Plantation, rev. ed., ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1991), 147-69, esp. n. 8, 149-50. See also Jennings, 188-90, and Vaughan, 123-4.

27. John Mason's “A Brief History of the Pequot War” was edited by Thomas Prince, who brought it to publication in Boston in 1736. It was reprinted in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd ser. 8 (1826), 120-53, 126 for citation. All future citations refer to this edition. As others have shown, Hope Leslie reveals Sedgwick's familiarity with Winthrop, Hubbard, and Bradford. I suspect that she likely was familiar with the MHSC reprinting of John Mason, but its virtual transmission in William Hubbard effectively skirts this problem. Let me say here, however, that my discussion in this chapter concerns the intertextual relations of these Puritan (and early national) histories. My references to the reprinted narratives of Gardiner, Underhill, and Vincent—all of which postdate the publication of Hope Leslie—are premised on those rhetorical and ideological features common to Puritan historians.

28. Mason, “Brief History,” 129.

29. John Underhill, “Newes from America; or a New and Experimental Discoverie of New England,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser. 6 (1837), 1-28. Lion Gardiner, “Leift Lion Gardiner his Relation of the Pequot Warres” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3rd ser. 3 (1833), 131-60, and in A History of the Pequot War (Cincinnati: William Dodge, 1860), 5-32. All citations in the essay come from the 1860 edition; P[hilip] Vincent, “A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New-England, between the English and the Pequet Salvages: In which were Slaine and Taken Prisoners about 700 of the Salvages, and Those which Escaped Had Their Heads Cut Off by the Mohocks; with the Present State of Things There” (London: Thomas Harper, 1638), reprinted with Underhill's narrative in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser. 6 (1837), 29-43.

30. Mason, “Brief History,” 130.

31. Underhill, “Newes from America,” 4.

32. See Gardiner, “Relation,” 12-14, and Vincent, “True Relation,” 35-7.

33. William Hubbard, The Present State of New England. Being a Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England, from the First Planting Therof in the Year 1607 to this Present Year 1677: But Chiefly of the Late Troubles in the Last Two Years, 1675 and 1676; to which is added a Discourse about the Warre with the Pequods in the Year 1637 (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1677), 116-17.

34. John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed. James Savage (Boston: Phelps & Farnham, 1825), 190; Hubbard's account is virtually the same. See A General History of New England from the Discovery to MDCLXXX (Cambridge, MA: Hilliard & Metcalf, 1815), 249.

35. Mason, “Brief History,” 129.

36. Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, Civil and Ecclesiastical (Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin, 1797), I:59-60.

37. Abiel Holmes, American Annals (Cambridge, MA: Hilliard & Brown, 1829), I:235; Jedidiah Morse and Elijah Parish, A Compendious History of New England (London: William Burton, 1808), 93; Epaphras Hoyt, Antiquarian Researches: Comprising a History of the Indian Wars in the Country Bordering Connecticut River and Parts Adjacent (Greenfield, MA: Ansel Phelps, 1824), 44. Even the famous antiquarian Samuel Drake, who initially argued that the English settlers “were too proud to court the favor of the natives,” went on to recount the deaths of Norton, Stone, and Oldham. See the Appendix to his edition of Thomas Church's The History of King Philip's War (Exeter, NH: J&B Williams, 1829), 302-9.

38. Hannah Adams, A Summary History of New England (Dedham, MA: H. Mann & J. H. Adams, 1799), 68.

39. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts, ed. Mary Kelley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 56. All quotations come from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

40. Hubbard, Narrative of the Trouble with the Indians, 116.

41. See Callcott, History in the United States, 139-47.

42. Ibid., 125.

43. Ibid., 136.

44. For a corrective to this commonly held misconception, see Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 211.

45. Adams, Summary History, 68.

46. Trumbull, Complete History of Connecticut, 87.

47. The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: NAL Penguin, 1961), 353.

48. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-York (New Haven: T. Dwight, 1821-2), III:19, italics added.

49. Trumbull, Complete History of Connecticut, 76.

50. Noah Porter, “A Discourse on the Settlement and Progress of New England” (Hartford: Peter Gleason, 1821), 10.

51. Epaphras Hoyt, Antiquarian Researches, 46.

52. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: S. Converse, 1828), unpaginated.

53. See Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 57-61, and David P. Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 81-90.

54. Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 224.

55. See, for example, Adams, Summary History, 69; Trumbull, Complete History of Connecticut, 62; Dwight, Travels, III:12, and Morse and Parish, Compendious History, 95.

56. Gardiner, “Relation” (1860), 17. See Jennings, Invasion of America, 211-13, for European and Native American codes of warfare and the false stereotypes that have been pinned on the Pequot in this regard.

57. Morse and Parish, Compendious History, 95.

58. Ramsay, History of the United States, I:85.

59. Dwight, Travels in New-England, III:11.

60. Adams, Summary History, 70.

61. American Annals, I:241.

62. See, for example, Kelley, “Introduction,” xxix, and Zagarell, “Expanding ‘America,’” 233, 237.

63. See The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ed. Mary Kelley (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 49.

64. Morse and Parish, Compendious History, 97.

65. See Kelley, ed., Power of Her Sympathy, 49.

66. See, for example, Isaac Goodwin's “An Oration Delivered at Lancaster,” Worcester Magazine and Historical Journal 1 (Worcester: Rogers & Griffin, 1826), 327. Hawthorne's “Endicott and the Red Cross” investigates the ambiguities of Puritan rigor, as Endicott is described in this language. See The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. IX, ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude M. Simpson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 431, 444.

67. Ann Kibbey has argued for the “interchangeable” quality of Puritan and Pequot women as a way of showing the intimacy between Puritan racism and sexism. I would argue that despite the ostensible similarities, Sedgwick does not anticipate Kibbey's argument. Sedgwick issues much less of an indictment against “Puritan” sexism per se and more of one aimed at a political-cultural metaphor between Puritanism and republicanism that was popular during her own time. Sedgwick's feminization of Mystic Fort comments on the destructive capacity of male virtu, in which both Puritan and Native American men are implicated. Much of Kibbey's argument rests on the dubious conclusion that the diagram at the end of John Underhill's narrative symbolizes a vagina that “portrays both the Puritan men's genocidal violence and the sexual symbolism of their act” (110). Readers also might be warned that Kibbey gives an idiosyncratic interpretation of Underhill's narrative to make it evidence of the “association between the violence of the war and [Puritan] men's attitudes toward women” (109). Underhill's reference to his wife mocks his own stubbornness. Kibbey also misreads Underhill's treatment of two captive, Puritan women, whom he mentions certainly not to serve misogynistic ends but only to show that the Lord chastens whom He loves. This fulfills the promotional dimension of the narrative: “You that intend to go to New England, fear not a little trouble” (22). One also wonders how Kibbey so easily associates Hutchinson with all Puritan women, and Puritan women with Pequot women in Underhill's narrative. See The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

68. Ramsay, History of the United States, I:84.

69. Charles A. Goodrich, A History of the United States of America (New York: G. C. Smith, 1829), 15.

70. Morse and Parish, Compendious History, 96.

71. Salma Hale, History of the United States (London: John Miller, 1826), 43, 86.

72. Sedgwick likely read Philip Vincent's “A True Relation of the Late Batell Fought in New England,” first published in 1638 and yet not reprinted in the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections until 1837. The description of Samoset's valor bears an uncanny resemblance to a passage in Vincent which is not present in any other of the firsthand Puritan accounts. Sedgwick reads as follows: “Samoset, the noble boy, defended the entrance with a prince-like courage, till they struck him down; prostrate and bleeding he again bent his bow, and had taken deadly aim at the English leader, when a sabre-blow severed his bowstring” (49).

    And Vincent: “A stout Pequet encounters [an English soldier at the entrance], shoots his arrow, drawn to the head, into his right arm, where it stuck. He slashed the salvage betwixt the arm and the shoulder, who, pressing towards the door, was killed by the English” (37).

    Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New-England (1654), with which, as Mary Kelley has demonstrated, Sedgwick was familiar, does specify that there were bowmen at the entrances to the fort who “wounded the foremost of the English in the shoulder” but gives nothing of the particular details found in both Vincent and Sedgwick. See Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Savior in New England (1653), ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910), 167, and Kelley, n.5, 359, for Sedgwick and Edward Johnson.

73. Lydia Maria Child, The First Settlers of New England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansetts and Pokanokets. As Related by a Mother to her Children. By a Lady of Massachusetts (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1829), 24.

74. The term comes, of course, from Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). White argues that “The same event [the attack upon Mystic Fort in this case] can serve as a different kind of element of many different historical stories, depending upon the role it is assigned in a specific motific characterization of the set to which it belongs” (7). See also “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 41-62. Selected essays have been compiled in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). While White has incurred the wrath of many historians, a more balanced theoretical dissent stressing the continuity between narrative and reality may be found in David Carr, Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

75. See Nelson, The Word in Black and White, n.13, 159.

76. Knapp, Lectures, unpaginated.

77. I have taken up this issue in part in my Introduction. See, for example, the review of David Ramsay's History of the United States in the North American Review 6 (1818), 335-7, and the review of Charles Goodrich's History of the United States in the American Journal of Education 2 (1827), 683-7.

78. American Journal of Education, 686.

79. Dewey, ed., Life and Letters, 192.

80. “History only becomes dramatic on two conditions: it must either have the passion of the politician or the imagination of the poet.” Quoted from the Edinburgh Review 105 (January 1857), 23, in Callcott, History in the United States, 148-9. See 147-50 for the importance of emotion to the efficacy of historical narrative. David Levin also noted the “vital feeling of the past” with which the romantic historian was imbued: “One concentrated on responding emotionally to its [in this case, European ruins'] sound, on putting oneself or one's reader in proper imaginative relation with it.” See History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley and Parkman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 7-8.

81. See Goodwin in The Worcester Magazine and Historical Journal, 327.

82. Ramsay, History of the United States, I:137.

83. North American Review, 340.

84. The entry for “recital” in the 1828 American Dictionary further suggests this lexical instability. Webster first distinguishes between an “enumeration” and a “narrative”; the latter he calls “a telling of the particulars of an adventure or of a series of events.” But this distinction collapses because it fails to distinguish between an “enumeration” and a “telling.” Another instance of this sense of “recital” may be found in one of the period's orations, where the speaker argues that war stories of the veterans of the War of 1812 actually swayed naive farmers and thus promoted a kind of dangerous militarism: “The poor inhabitant of a remote retreat, who listens with enthusiasm to the recital of the exploits of his countrymen, and associates himself in interest with those who never regarded him, discovers a patriotism which we cannot but esteem. … Let them be better informed, and know that the country which they love, demands their zeal only for its rights … and that those who excite it in behalf of their own personal renown, impose on their affections and betray their interest.” See Andrew Ritchie, “An Address Delivered to the Massachusetts Peace Society at their Third Anniversary” (Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1819), 14-15.

85. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977; Anchor, 1988), 165-99.

86. The extent of this rebuttal to Douglas is vast, but it originated principally in Nina Baym's Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978) and Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). For a recent contribution to the politics of sentiment, see Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. 10-15, for a reassessment of the Douglas-Tompkins debate.

87. North American Review 26 (April 1828), 413.

88. Douglas, Feminization, 185.

89. Kelley, ed., Power of Her Sympathy, 69-70.

90. The Linwoods: or “Sixty Years Since” in America (New York: Harper & Bros., 1835), 64.