Thesis advisor: Cynthia Lyerly / This thesis analyzes the practice of whipping during the antebellum South from the perspective of both masters and slaves in an attempt to better understand the brutal form of punishment that served as the physical manifestation of the oppressive nature of American slavery. It examines the distinctive culture of honor to reveal how a rigid divide came to be established and fortified along racial lines. Masters are men who desired to uphold the superior position they held in relation to their slaves, using the whip to enforce order and control. Meanwhile, slaves experienced a deep sense of powerlessness as a result of the practice but examples of aggressive resistance to their masters are present. This thesis seeks to shed light on one of the darkest chapters of American history. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: History.

archives@tulane.edu / This dissertation argues that the public religious activism of free and enslaved women was essential to the growth of mainstream Protestant denominations in the late antebellum Gulf South. Women were not just a silent majority in the pews on Sundays and religious role models at home for their children. This project focuses specifically on the Gulf South of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana where from 1825 to 1861 women transformed the region from a frontier missionary field into the home of modern Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal denominations. They served as public fundraisers, advisors, instructors, and exhorters—championing the benevolent and evangelizing causes of their churches. Slaveholding women relied on enslaved female labor to fundraise for church projects and teach Sunday school in the mission to the enslaved. At the same time, some free and enslaved black women, even after Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion, found public spaces to speak, lead, and fund separate black churches. Women justified their activism by drawing on a combination of socially acceptable ideals including public motherhood, Christian benevolence, and the evangelizing duty of missionary Protestants. Ultimately, this dissertation maps a broader cultural geography of lived religion in the antebellum Gulf South. It adds new public spaces to the conversation, including classrooms, book depositories, benevolent societies, temperance rallies, and mission stations, and proposes a re-thinking of the southern home as more than solely a domestic space. Women turned their homes into sites of public religious practice. Likewise, planation chapels and slaveholder households were not just family or domestic spaces; they offered powerful and paradoxical identities for white women as benefactors, teachers, and oppressors. This project looks at biracial and segregated spaces, mixed-gender and female spaces, on and off plantations, and determines which spaces allowed Protestant women of color to speak or lead and which permitted white women but remained racially exclusive. This new map uncovers where Gulf South women found purpose, identity, and power through religious duty. / 1 / Emily H. Wright

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During the nineteenth century, Americans began to develop a new relationship with death. Urbanites were less confronted with the constant presence of the dead and dying than they had in the past. A new trend in cemeteries also developed as a result. The Rural Cemetery Movement promoted the idea that the dead should be buried amongst a natural setting that was pleasing and calming to visitors. The first few initial cemeteries were an immediate success, but this was not the case in Richmond, Virginia. Although the developers had grand ideas about their cemetery project, Richmonders opposed the cemetery in the first several years. They feared that the cemetery would stunt the growth of the city or even harm the health of the city’s citizens. Over time, however, Richmonders began to accept the cemetery and with this they formed a new understanding of nature that was pleasing and allowed Americans to value natural settings.

“A Place ‘Rendered Interesting’: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of Middle-Class Tourism” analyzes the frequently overlooked ideological dimensions of antebellum print culture related to tourism. Traveling through the American leisure landscape became a primary means by which writers, poets, artists, and everyday sightseers explored and defined their worlds. Through tourism, authors expressed some of their deepest anxieties about the society they inhabited. Tourism texts are therefore deceptively powerful cultural artifacts; in fact, sometimes their codified and even repetitive nature was a means of emphasizing an author or authors’ deepest fears. In my dissertation, I analyze guidebooks, travelogues, periodicals, gift books, children’s literature, novels, and visual culture to reveal how authors and artists used potentially escapist discourses of leisure travel to engage with the most pressing problems of the antebellum moment. My examination of touristic print culture shows that this archive, long dismissed as superficial, was in fact central to the consolidation of white middle class identity, to the emergence of manifest destiny, and to ongoing debates over of the rise of commercialism and abolition. Chapter one explores how antebellum guidebooks address ideologies of progress and empire. I examine Catskill guidebook authors’ uses of literary sources, particularly short stories by Washington Irving. These authors quoted and cited Irving’s stories to create a white mythology for the Catskills that marginalized non-white people and encouraged their removal. Chapter two situates tourism within the broader context of antebellum class identity. I argue that authors like Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Nathaniel Parker Willis employ tourism discourse to articulate concerns about the threat of upwardly mobile lower classes and their potential impact on supposed middle-class morality. Chapter three frames the tension between Romanticism and capitalism inherent in touristic culture. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sketches and stories of the White Mountains, I argue, can help us understand the emergent antebellum problem of the commodified landscape. In Chapter four, I argue that tourism became a space for heated political debate on slavery. Abolitionists like Lydia Maria Child encouraged readers to consider the possibility of reorganized society – specifically, a society without slaves – through the imaginative possibilities of the cave aesthetic. / 2020-11-27T00:00:00Z

This work is a study of the prostitute in early antebellum America as she exists in the literary world. I argue that the prostitute is a metaphor operating on two levels: she is symbolic both of a failed democratic state and the feminist as imagined by a hysteric patriarchy. Looking especially at Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, and a variety of newspaper and journal articles, I explore the ways in which the prostitute embodied the belief that female independence was unnatural and could only result in the widespread vice of the very component of society whose political duty it was to raise virtuous male citizens and the fear that the fate of the French Revolution could reproduce itself in America.

My dissertation argues that the study of antebellum American religious novels is hindered by the secularization narrative, the widely held conviction that modernity entails the decline of religion. Because this narrative has been refuted by the growing field of secularization theory and because the novel is associated with modernity, the novel form must be reexamined. Specifically, I challenge the common definition of the novel as a secular form. By investigating novels by Lydia Maria Child, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Hannah Bond, I show that religion and the novel form are not opposed. In fact, scholars' unexamined and unacknowledged definitions of religion and secularity cause imprecision. For example, the Marxist definition of religion as ideology causes misrepresentations of novels with evangelical purposes, such as Warner's <i>The Wide, Wide World</i> and Bond's <i>The Bondwoman's Narrative</i>. Both novels feature protagonists who submit--one to patriarchy and the other to slavery--a stance that appears masochistic to feminist scholars and critics of slave narratives, respectively. However, attending to the biblical allusions, divine interventions, and theological arguments that saturate these texts places them in another framework altogether and reveals that they are commenting not on one's relationship with other humans but with God. Likewise, unexamined definitions of the secular are problematic because critics often conflate two definitions: the etymological sense of "earthly" and the modern sense of "anti-religious." This slippage underlies the view that religious literature of the nineteenth century became less religious, when it simply became more grounded in daily life. Therefore, to label as "secular" an author like Stowe, who promoted an earthly, lived Christianity, is only accurate if one means "mundane." Finally, my dissertation demonstrates that literary criticism itself relies on the secularization narrative, perceiving itself as modern and progressive. This reliance obscures the role literature has played in constructing this narrative. For example, colonial novels like <i>Hobomok</i> and <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> rewrite American religious history to exclude Calvinism. Noting how our investment in secularity has delimited interpretive possibilities, this project opens the way for increased clarity in the study of religion in literature.

The political history of antebellum Florida has long been overlooked in southern historiography. Florida was a state for just sixteen years before secession set it apart from the rest of the Union, but Florida’s road to secession was as unique as any of its southern counterparts. From the territorial days in the early nineteenth century, Florida’s political culture centered on the development and protection of slavery throughout the state. The bank wars in the pre-statehood and early statehood periods reflected differing views on how best to support the spread of the plantation economy, and the sectional strife of the 1850s instigated Floridians to find the best way to protect it. By the end of the antebellum period amidst increasing sectional strife and a sense that secession and disunion were acceptable courses of action, Florida’s population pulled together under the banner of protecting slavery – and by extension, their way of life – by whatever means necessary. Northern infringement into slavery affected not just the planters, but every free man who called Florida his home.

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Apparitional Economies is invested in both a historical consideration of economic conditions through the antebellum era and an examination of how spectral representations depict the effects of such conditions on local publics and individual persons. From this perspective, the project demonstrates how extensively the period’s literature is entangled in the economic: in financial devastation, in the boundaries of seemingly limitless progress, and in the standards of value that order the worth of commodities and the persons who can trade for them. I argue that the space of the specter is a force of representation, an invisible site in which the uncertainties of antebellum economic and social change become visible. I read this spectral space in canonical works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman and in emerging texts by Robert Montgomery Bird, Theophilus Fisk, Fitz James O’Brien, and Edward Williams Clay. Methodologically, Apparitional Economies moves through historical events and textual representation in two ways: chronologically with an attention to archival materials through the antebellum era (beginning with the specters that emerge with the Panic of 1837) and interpretively across the readings of a literary specter (as a space of lack and potential, as exchange, as transformation, and as the presence of absence). As a failed body and, therefore, a flawed embodiment of economic existence, the literary specter proves a powerful representation of antebellum social and financial uncertainties.