| Although much political discourse of the antebellum period characterized the mariner as a problem for the emerging nation and its body politic to solve, the era's literary culture adopted a position that contrasts the expressed ideas of early U.S. political figures in its more complicated perspective of the sailor. Ultimately fickle and variable, U.S. maritime literature published before the Civil War nevertheless demonstrates an intricate, nuanced understanding of what happens when citizenship finds itself unmoored and adrift in the currents of inter- and intranational aquatic spaces. In other words, antebellum literary culture rejects the postures of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Authors like James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and J. H. Ingraham value the variegated political significance and ideals attached to their fictional sailors. They present their mariners as contributing necessary and positive features to the body politic, either by reinforcing extant civic models or proposing new ones. Of course, the representation of the sailor as citizen also emerges as a complicated, vexed topic in the literature of the era. While the common sailor might find himself an idealized civic model, other maritime figures---the pirate and the riverman---appear ultimately beyond the ken of the body politic. What we find, then, in the antebellum treatment of the mariner-citizen are two uneven strands of development: On the one hand, authors like Cooper, Ingraham, and authors of pirate narratives stake out conservative positions regarding the sailor's civic fitness, recuperating the sailor as a political figure only by fitting him or her to extant models of citizenship and by removing the revolutionary threats embodied by the historical sailors described in work by Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker, and Leon Fink. On the other hand, authors like Melville, Emil Klauprecht, and the often anonymous authors of Mike Fink legends employ their maritime narratives to take more politically progressive positions---using the mariner to redefine civic ideals or underscoring the ways that rivermen, necessarily national, internal maritime figures offer a more problematic challenge to U.S. civic ideals than the socially and politically egalitarian seaman. |
