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Current Issue Article Abstracts Spring 2010 Vol. 30.1 • • • • • • • • "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights": The Rhetoric of the War of 1812 Paul A. Gilje At the beginning of the War of 1812 Captain David Porter flew from his mast a banner with the phrase "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights." This slogan reflected ideas that derived from the Age of Revolution combining patrician interest in free trade with more plebeian concerns about rights and the protection of seamen from impressment. As such it aptly summarized the key diplomatic reasons why the United States entered the war. Throughout the conflict Americans used the phrase to explain their support for the war. After 1815 the phrase continued to be used in a wide variety of relevant and irrelevant contexts. By the 1840s for some Americans the phrase had become disembodied from its original meaning; for others, it retained much of its original poignancy as a statement of principle and an assertion of basic rights. "The Right to Purchase Is as Free as the Right to Sell": Defining Consumers as Citizens in the Auction-house Conflicts of the Early Republic Joanna Cohen This article explores the commercial turf war over auction houses in the 1820s, a dispute which inadvertently altered how Americans imagined the civic rights and obligations of consumers. Beginning in 1817, east coast merchants embarked on a self-interested crusade to convince Congress to tax auction houses out of existence. As the auctioneers retaliated, this private conflict over profits escalated into a public debate on the state of the nation's political economy. Seeking public sympathy, both sides quickly focused on the needs of purchasers, arguing that their business alone upheld the rights of the consumer in a chaotic and corrupt marketplace. But this strategy failed as the choices and desires of individual shoppers forced both sides to reformulate their understanding of the consumer. As Americans continued to flock to shops that stocked goods bought at auction, merchants in particular conceded that championing the consumer did not serve their cause. Abandoning hope that a tariff would curb the success of the auction-house, the merchants began to argue that consumers must regulate themselves for the good of the nation. By 1828, this argument hardened into a new understanding, that placed the "right to purchase" alongside a set of new obligations, ones that made consumer choice and taste a requirement of good citizenship. Punishing the Lies on the Rio Grande: Catholic and Immigrant Volunteers in Zachary Taylor's Army and the Fight against Nativism Tyler Johnson In May 1846, in the midst of the largest wave of immigration up to that point in its history, the United States went to war with Mexico. The nation's attention became focused on northern Mexico as General Zachary Taylor's army marched up the Rio Grande and fought Mexican forces in the major battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista. Hundreds of the same immigrants then pouring in to the country volunteered to serve under Taylor. Catholic and Democratic Party newspapers and leaders friendly to the immigrants used their service to fight nativist prejudice on the home front, defending Catholics and immigrants as loyal citizens. This study examines the efforts of Catholic and Democratic leaders by focusing on three phenomena of the war in northern Mexico: the fall 1846 riot on the Rio Grande between the Irish Jasper Greens of Savannah and their fellow Georgia company the Kennesaw Rangers, the exploits of immigrant volunteers in battle and the use of those who died as martyrs, and the service of two Jesuits, Reverends John McElroy and Anthony Rey, as chaplains to Taylor's men. Newspapers and letter writers defended the Greens from charges of riot and drunkenness, praised their valiant soldiers and the heroic dead, exalted the compassion and courage of the two Jesuits, and used all three scenarios to fight nativist prejudice and counteract anti-Catholic propaganda. This understudied corner of the U.S.-Mexican War sheds light on the continuing process of assimilation and acculturation for antebellum immigrants and points out the importance of religious and ethnic identity in deciding who could be an American. Making Hero Strong: Teenage Ambition, Story-Paper Fiction, and the Generational Recasting of American Women's Authorship Daniel A. Cohen During the early 1850s, Mary Gibson, a teenage orphan from Vermont, moved to Massachusetts and became, under the pseudonym Winnie Woodfern, a frequent contributor to several Boston "story papers" (weekly periodicals that mimicked the format of conventional newspapers but were mostly filled with popular fiction). Amid her varied output, she produced a series of tales depicting teenage girls who display masculine traits, violate conventional gender norms, and struggle to fulfill high literary or artistic ambitions. Gibson's early career, and those stories in particular, shed new light on the transformation of women's authorship in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. During the 1860s and 1870s, other scholars have argued, domestic fiction was eclipsed and a new conception of the American woman author as literary artist emerged under the influence of an elite, male-dominated mode of high-cultural production, centered in such exclusive venues as the Atlantic Monthly. The case of Gibson, however, suggests a different account of the transformation of American women's authorship-pushing the new pattern back into the antebellum period and locating its origins in more popular venues. Far from waiting for the elite imprimatur of the Atlantic, young Yankee women such as Gibson rushed to take advantage of the dramatically expanded publishing opportunities provided by Boston story papers of the early 1850s. In doing so, Gibson and her peers not only abandoned many of the inhibitions of "literary domesticity" but also embraced ambitious new models of women's authorship, artistry, and worldly achievement. |
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