Rethinking America: Abolitionism and the antebellum transformation of the discourse of national identity (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, Hannah Crafts)

This dissertation examines a key moment in the history of American thought on race, ethnicity, and citizenship. My analysis of the works of key figures in the political and moral debate over the question of slavery highlights a cultural transformation taking place in the decades leading to the Civil War. In the works of three non-fiction writers and one novelist, I examine the emergence of a non-ethnic and cosmopolitan idea of American citizenship and American identity. In the context of their different modalities of involvement in the abolitionist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner each came to reject an ethnocultural construction of American nationality in favor of a national identity defined around a shared commitment to the interpretation and implementation of universalist principles articulated in the nation's founding documents. My reading of Hannah Crafts' The Bondwoman's Narrative, focused on the development of narrative agency in the novel, reveals a similar abrogation and reimagining of the idea of the American nation. The conception of American nationality these writers advance is, in each case, crucially linked to textual practices and is developed in the context of working out an adequate interpretive framework with which to approach the nation's founding charter. Emerson, Sumner, and Douglass each drew on literary sources to argue their positions and each understood literature as exemplary of the cosmopolitan sensibility they brought to their thinking about national unity. Additionally, I argue that it is precisely the literary register that allows Hannah Crafts, in all probability a fugitive slave woman, to frame for herself a place of agency in the American political union. My study locates in this turbulent period in American history the emergence of an idea about the nature of the American nation that has waned and reemerged at various points in American cultural history and which continues to underlie some of the most contentious issues in the contemporary debate about American identity.