A covenant of struggle: Constitutional discourse and ideological debate in antebellum America

This study focuses on a set of literary voices that struggle to influence political culture in antebellum America. Drawing on Rogers Smith's formulations of three fundamental ideological traditions in American politics, I examine the implicit constitutional visions and foundational ideologies of writers concerned with women's rights and the issue of slavery, key constitutional debates in this period of cultural crisis.;Chapter One examines texts by Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau that function within a republican ideological paradigm in order to critique the nation for failing to live up to transcendental ideals of justice and fairness in the treatment of women and slaves. Chapter Two examines the Lockean tradition of liberalism as it is represented in the writings of Frederick Douglass. The progression of Douglass's works reveals his changing political attitudes toward the ideology of liberalism and its emphasis on individual rights, the importance of community, and the Constitution itself. And in Chapter Three, I look at two ideologically opposed texts by Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Fitzhugh, both of whom work in a Christian exceptionalist tradition. Remarkably, this foundational vision allows one writer to justify abolitionism, the other slavery.;Chapter Four places Melville's fiction of the 1850s in dialogue with these perspectives and argues that his skepticism about the availability of absolute guides to personal and community relations undermines all foundational grounds for political reform. Chapter Five turns to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln to suggest that his constitutional positions offer procedural, process-oriented principles for containing ideological debate.;The final chapter samples post-Civil War literary perspectives on this emergent paradigm, procedural constitutionalism, as Sandel terms it, and focuses on Walt Whitman's troubled 1871 meditation on expansion of suffrage and political corruption by the forces of capital. Ultimately, Whitman's critique is less concerned with the foundational commitments of his predecessors than with advocating faith in historical process and creativity to give direction to the emergent post-war constitutionalism.