When the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs received a letter from her owner’s family attempting to trick her into returning to the South, she recognized the snare and commented: “Verily, he relied too much on ’the stupidity of the African race.” Published in 1861, Jacobs’s remark may just as well have been directed at many Americans who—impressed with scientists’ “proof” of Negro inferiority—had been lulled into a false sense of racial superiority. As this anecdote suggests, the first half of the nineteenth century ushered in an era of powerful scientific and quasi-scientific disciplines that assumed permanent and innate difference...

In 1854, Frederick Douglass stood before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College. The first African American to speak at a commencement ceremony for an American institution of higher education, the former slave and current author, editor, and lecturer had been invited by the graduating class. Over three thousand people assembled to hear him speak, a larger crowd than attended the official graduation ceremony.¹ Contrasting the students’ eagerness hear the renowned orator, the school’s administration was primarily conservative, doubted the ability of slaves and free people of color to become viable members of the body politic, and favored their removal...

To those familiar with Lydia Maria Child’s commitment to social progress, her claim in An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans that “the opinion of the world” will not be of interest to her as long as her writing can be “abroad on its mission of humanity” sounds sincere.¹ Child was a woman who sensed early in her professional life, as Carolyn L. Karcher argues, that she was called to “reconsecrate her art to the service of her sisters and brothers in bonds,” to create literature that would perform the cultural work she believed was necessary...

In 1853, when Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was twenty-eight years old, her home state of Maryland passed a law preventing free people of color from entering it, with imprisonment and sale into slavery the punishment for transgression. When one man broke the law, he was forced into slavery and, after a failed attempt to escape, died of exposure. “Upon that grave,” Harper is quoted as saying, “I pledged myself to the Anti-Slavery cause.”¹ Why, one might ask, does Harper select this incident to represent her baptism into abolitionism? As chapter 7 details, slave women such as Harriet Jacobs endured almost...

In the spring of 1832, the twenty-eight-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson took his daily walk to visit the grave of his first wife, Ellen. Known for her beauty and intelligence, she had died more than a year earlier after a prolonged case of tuberculosis. Her death devastated Emerson. That day he went beyond communing “with the spirit of the departed Ellen: he opened the coffin.” The gesture, one of Emerson’s recent biographers believes, “was essential Emerson. He had to see for himself.” Later, in 1857, after he had remarried, fathered a family, and established a considerable professional reputation, Emerson would repeat...

We can wonder if, when commenting disparagingly on Americans’ “wolfish” energy, Fuller intended to challenge Emerson, who prefaced “Self-Reliance” with the above poem. Published just two years prior to “The Great Lawsuit,” Emerson’s essay functions as the quintessential call for revitalized American manhood. The “bantlings” allude to the mythological story of Romulus and Remus, the two brothers who are flung into the Tiber shortly after they are born because their mother broke her vows as a vestal virgin. Washed ashore, they are suckled by a she-wolf, and eventually raised by a herdsman and his wife. When they set out to...

“Who need be afraid of the merge?” Walt Whitman dares readers in the debut edition of “Song of Myself” (1. 136).¹ Indeed, the rest of Leaves of Grass (1855) seems to repeat, “Who?” For Whitman, the “merge” is an all-encompassing force, blending sexuality with politics, philosophy, and spirituality to produce unprecedented generative power. Politically Whitman’s merge promises to fuse the disparate bodies that make up the body politic, to create a “race of races” in a teeming “nation of nations.” Philosophically the merge has the potential to reverse what Whitman perceives as the devastating effects of the Cartesian split between...

On a “lovely spring morning” that mocks her sadness, the young, beautiful slave Linda Brent is accosted by her master, who scathes her ears with “stinging, scorching, words” designed to corrupt her mind and hasten her deliverance into his licentious grip. Like so many nineteenth-century heroines, she is indignant at his suggestions. Yet unlike them, she is denied the privilege of sexual modesty due to her status as a slave. Considered “naturally” immoral and lustful by most Americans, she could have been suspected as the perpetrator, rather than the victim, of the “seduction.” But these weighty possibilities, backed as they...

In chapter 7 I suggest that Harriet Jacobs’s dual strategy for negotiating the precarious body politics that dominated her age was to carve a literary space for her transcendent, disembodied will and to reverse the gaze of spectatorship, to become a “peeper” who unmasks the men of science and law and their oppressive discourses. Frances E. W. Harper similarly reverses the politics of the gaze, but perhaps goes a step further, directing her readers to spectate upon the intemperate, unruly bodies of Caucasian characters. As I argue in chapter 3, this rhetorical strategy enabled her to question the physiological basis...