Early American Literature

For the past generation, historians and literary critics have been diligently filling in the "empty place" in American life. Claude Lefort's designation for the locus of democratic power freed by the king's absent body (17) has summoned a range of social adhesives, from the republican ideology of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood to Michael Warner's public sphere, Eric Slauter's aesthetic state, and Michelle Sizemore's American enchantment. Add to this list Keri Holt's "federal literacy," a term indicating the reading practices that imagined national unity. Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776–1830 is an acute, [End Page 836] deeply informed, and wide-ranging account of the visual and verbal strategies that promoted political and cultural consensus in the new nation. Holt traces the outpouring of national tropes advanced by almanacs, dinnerware, captivity narratives, novels, and a wealth of periodicals. Her study also marks the gradual collapse of this appeal, as it buckled under the pressures of sectionalism and territorial expansion. Through her meticulous scholarship, Holt's Reading These United States demonstrates both the power and the limitations of the nation's inaugural search for order.

Echoing Wood's account of the founders' idealism, Holt's federal literacy promoted the "composite character" (5) of early national experience, a celebration of "a plural union of differences" (7). Representations of diversity took numerous forms. Geographies, maps, and almanacs highlighted the interdependencies of distinct parts. Popular texts like Jedediah Morse's Geography Made Easy helped to forge a national sensibility while detailing regional differences. So, too, did almanacs, which presented a mix of local and regional details interspersed with mileage tables and court sessions in distant cities. Expansive signifiers like the Declaration of Independence and astrological images allowed readers to project a common experience. The visual arrangement of almanacs, their pages often divided into compartments or cells displaying diverse information in the manner of newspapers, encouraged what Holt calls "multimodal" reading, an experience of heterogeneous unity. Other visual displays had the same effect. Parades celebrating ratification of the Constitution marshaled the young nation's many constituencies in emphatic review, and images of harps, constellations, and interlocking chains adorned newspapers, currency, and fine china. Such strategies, Holt observes, also allowed powerful appeals by those excluded from the national imaginary. In the hands of Benjamin Banneker, for example, the multimodal structure of almanacs became an argument for racial, as well as spatial, pluralism.

Magazines and satires did the same cultural work. Holt demonstrates the federal design of such early publications as the Columbian Magazine, which presented an array of local and national material, including many works by women. The magazine printed a copy of the Constitution when that document was released to the public, and during the ratification debate ran Jeremy Belknap's satire The Foresters, in which colonial history served as an allegory for the new national structure. Satires like The Anarchiad, which purportedly warned against the dangers of diversity, nevertheless [End Page 837] promoted the value of a sophisticated audience accustomed to multiple perspectives. As with almanacs, the wide range of attitudes encouraged a habit of mind, a crucial ideological adjustment enabling a new national consensus. It was a shift exploited by writers like Judith Sargent Murray, who leveraged federal literacy to urge the inclusion of women in the national imperative.

One of Holt's most arresting arguments involves the use of captivity narratives to promote what she calls "concurrent sentimentality." Like the multiple perspectives in almanacs and satires, the experience of captivity and return invited readers to imagine radically different circumstances. Holt's chief exhibit is Mary Rowlandson's Narrative, a best-seller in the Federalist era, which offers a primer in cultural pragmatism. Forced to adapt to her captors, Rowlandson develops a more comprehensive sense of her own community's values. In effect, her faith has been resituated, leavened and deepened by the demands of captivity. Holt offers a striking...