Wieland, page 1
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN
Charles Brockden Brown—novelist, essayist, short-story writer, magazine editor, and political pamphleteer—has been called America’s first professional writer. He was born in Philadelphia on January 17, 1771, to Quaker parents, Elijah and Mary Armitt Brown. Although a precocious student, Brown was hampered by physical frailty and bouts of melancholy, which would shadow him throughout his life. He studied at the Friends’ Latin School from age eleven to sixteen, before becoming apprenticed to a local lawyer; Brown’s parents had decided that law was the best career for him, while his brothers became successful merchants.
Brown, however, had more interest in literature, and during his apprenticeship he composed poetry and essays and cofounded the Belles Lettres Club in 1787. Dedicated to philosophical and political discussion, the club encouraged Brown’s literary endeavors. In 1789, he published a series of essays in the Columbian Magazine under the pseudonym “The Rhapsodist,” in which he questioned the politics and moral standing of the new American republic. Having resigned from his fledgling law career in 1792, Brown cofounded the Friendly Club in 1793 with friends Dr. Elihu H. Smith and William Dunlap. During visits to New York, Brown sought advice and support from them as he tried to start a professional writing career.
Brown completed his first novel, Sky-Walk, in 1797. Although the complete manuscript was never published, one chapter appeared in March 1798 in The Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence. Brown also finished Alcuin; A Dialogue, a fiction in the form of a dialogue between a male schoolteacher and a female advocate of women’s rights. Parts of Alcuin were printed in the Weekly Magazine as “The Rights of Women.” Other essays and short stories published during 1798 demonstrate Brown’s didacticism, such as “The Man at Home” and “A Series of Original Letters.” At the end of 1798, Brown had entered a period of increased creative production and had had his first major success.
In September 1798, Brown’s novel Wieland; or, The Transformation was published. Based on the true story of a religious fanatic who killed his family, Wieland is a macabre tale of psychological terror narrated by a young woman. The novel garnered favorable critical attention and has become Brown’s best-known work. His American Gothic style, which combined psychological and supernatural elements, would later influence other American writers such as Poe and Hawthorne. As Wieland went to press, Brown was already at work on his second major novel, Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, which appeared in February 1799. Also narrated by a woman, the well-received Ormond is a melodramatic novel that explores innocence, seduction, and murder in the world of a sixteen-year-old orphan. Themes that recur in Brown’s writing—the rights of women, excessive religion, social problems, moral integrity, and the supernatural—surface in Ormond.
The reception of Wieland and Ormond brought Brown fame, and he provided two more manuscripts to his publisher in quick succession. Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 was published in two parts in 1799 and 1800, and some chapters were serialized in the Weekly Magazine. Arthur Mervyn chronicles the adventures of a young man in Philadelphia during the yellow-fever epidemic as he encounters murder, theft, and dishonesty. Brown’s next novel, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, was excerpted in the first issue of his new magazine, The Monthly Magazine and American Review, in April 1799. Like Wieland, Edgar Huntly was written in Gothic style, although Brown had added the rugged American wilderness as the setting for this psychological murder mystery. The book appeared later that year, with great success; volume three included an historical short story, “Death of Cicero: A Fragment.”
After the publication of these four novels, Brown turned his attention to journalism and the Monthly Magazine, where he served as editor. During 1799 and 1800, he wrote numerous reviews, essays, and stories, including “Thessalonica: A Roman Story,” “Portrait of an Emigrant,” “Friendship,” “The Trials of Arden,” “A Lesson on Concealment: or, Memoirs of Mary Selwyn,” and most notably, “Memoirs of Stephen Calvert.” The Monthly ceased publication in December 1800, and in 1801 Brown started a quarterly, The American Review and Literary Journal.
In the same year, Brown published two novels that differed considerably from his previous fiction. Clara Howard and Jane Talbot are epistolary romances written in a sentimental style on the subject of marriage and morality at the turn of the century. Brown continued working on the American Review until it went out of business in 1802, and his serial essays on “Female Accomplishment” ran in Port Folio that year. In 1803, Brown founded another journal, The Literary Magazine and American Register in which he published several essays and stories, including “Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist,” an unfinished novel written in 1798 as a prelude to Wieland. At this time, Brown began writing and distributing pro-expansionist political pamphlets that criticized the Jefferson administration, and he published a translation of C.F.C. Volney’s A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States.
After a four-year courtship, Brown married Elizabeth Linn in 1804, and they had four children. To support his new family, Brown worked in his brothers’ import business until it closed in 1806 and provided editorial material to the Literary Magazine before and after it was renamed The American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics, and Science in the same year. He spent the remaining years of his life composing political tracts on trade and commerce issues and a series of “Scribbler” essays for Port Folio magazine. A massive two-volume geography manuscript on which he had been working was lost.
On February 22, 1810, Brown died at the age of thirty-nine from tuberculosis. His prolific oeuvre includes nonfiction that reveals much about early American culture and fiction that broke ground and paved the way for a national literature.
CONTENTS
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INTRODUCTION by Caleb Crain
WIELAND; OR, THE TRANSFORMATION: AN AMERICAN TALE
MEMOIRS OF CARWIN THE BILOQUIST
THESSALONICA: A ROMAN STORY
WALSTEIN’S SCHOOL OF HISTORY. FROM THE GERMAN OF KRANTS OF GOTHA
DEATH OF CICERO, A FRAGMENT
APPENDIX: AN ACCOUNT OF A MURDER COMMITTED BY MR. J[AMES]Y[ATES], UPON HIS FAMILY, IN DECEMBER, A.D. 1781
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
Caleb Crain
1.
Until the starchily phrased, quirkily researched, zigzag-plotted fiction in this book, there was little reason to think that Gothic writing would come to America. The genre appeared to be distinctly European. It depended on the conflict of utopian ideals with ancient fears, and Americans were too practical for either—or so the national myth would have it. There might be specters haunting Europe, but the United States was too busy making money to lose sleep over them.
Shortly before the eighteenth century’s end, however, a young lapsed Quaker from Philadelphia named Charles Brockden Brown discovered how to unnerve the bold new nation. To bring the Gothic style across the Atlantic, Brown began by “discarding the hacknied machinery of castles, banditti & ghosts,” as the playwright William Dunlap, his friend and later his biographer, explained. Brown realized that the United States had new fears, which required new expression. For his first published novel, therefore, he turned to something domestic and plain: the human voice, the vessel of a person’s identity and authority.
In a representative democracy, the citizen’s voice is the source of power. But how secure is a voice? How do you know you are listening to the right one? Two decades after the Revolution, the American republic was anxious that it might be harboring one utopian ideal after all: itself. And citizens could not rid themselves of the fear that their nation, like other utopias, might crack up and cease to exist.
2.
The fear was not groundless. In the 1790s, the United States faced threats from within and without, and it was not always clear which was which. Consider the danger posed by Edmond Genet, whom revolutionary France had sent as its minister to the United States in 1793. America still owed France a debt of gratitude for its aid in the Revolutionary War, and Genet was welcomed with a tour of fetes that stretched from Charleston to Philadelphia. The sentiment was imprudent; France had just declared war on Great Britain, and the United States could not afford to take sides. Genet, however, took advantage of the surge of affection by enlisting Americans as sailors on French privateers. He made plans to recruit soldiers in Kentucky for attacks on Louisiana, then the property of Great Britain’s ally Spain, and he also had hopes of taking Florida and Canada. When President Washington reminded Genet that America was and intended to remain neutral, Genet angrily declared that he would appeal to the people directly by petitioning Congress for Washington’s removal.
Genet had misjudged. In America, Congress did not depose presidents as wantonly as the National Convention decapitated executives in France. More or less harmlessly, Genet’s outrageous mission collapsed. But the episode was alarming, not least because it would have been hard to say whether Genet posed an external or an internal threat. Did the danger consist in Genet as foreign agent or in the domestic response to him? The Federalists in Washington’s administration viewed with suspicion the Democratic Societies that had sprung up across the country, like toadstools after rain, to welcome the French minister.
Republican politicians like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, on the other hand, viewed with a symmetrical suspicion those Americans who sympathized with France’s enemy, the commercial juggernaut Great Britain. In 1795, the Federalist diplomat John Jay brought ho
me a treaty with Great Britain that proposed to sacrifice a small portion of American honor for two large boons: better terms for maritime trade and the withdrawal of British forces from the American West. In their role as America’s first opposition party, Republicans encouraged voters to regard the treaty with high-minded paranoia: Had Americans fought the Redcoats so bitterly in order to sell the nation’s dignity later at a good price? Could the merchants of New York and New England be trusted to distinguish their financial interests from their patriotic duty? It took some time for the people’s pride to give way to the people’s greed.
Each party was anxious that the other would compromise the nation’s integrity—that it would confuse inside and outside by mistaking another country’s interest for America’s. The challenge in the 1790s was to steer a course between France and Great Britain, and between the French ideology of radical liberation and the British one of fiscal prudence.
Under the presidencies of George Washington and John Adams, the federal government inclined slightly toward Britain and fiscal prudence. The leading thinker during both administrations was Alexander Hamilton, who as Washington’s secretary of the treasury almost single-handedly built the infrastructure for American capitalism. Hamilton defined his political philosophy, and thus the rationale of Federalism, as “1st the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of this Country and 2 the necessity of an efficient general government to maintain that Union.” The definition sounds so reasonable and matter-of-fact as to be indisputable, and therein lay the problem: the Federalists never learned to differentiate between opposition to their policies and opposition to government per se.
They saw themselves as the party of virtue. And as long as virtue governed, any limits to the government’s power—in the form of, say, explicit guarantees of the freedom of the press or the right to bear arms—seemed to be unnecessary obstructions. Hamilton had even argued in The Federalist that since America had no king to restrain, there would be no point to a bill of rights. (In an early indication of his differences with Hamilton, James Madison had seen to it that one was ratified anyway.) In 1794, the Federalist reign of virtue and prudence met a serious challenge in the western counties of Pennsylvania, where the people rebelled against an excise tax that Hamilton had set on whiskey. The rebels dispersed as soon as Washington summoned troops, but a certain innocence was lost and a certain governmental blindness set in. Hamilton was probably correct in believing that his whiskey tax was efficient and not overly burdensome, but he was incapable of seeing that the protest against it was genuine. In frontier Pennsylvania, whiskey was traded as money and valued as a symbol of social unity. The tax upset people. But Hamilton insisted that resentment of it was a mere pretext that had been exploited by subversive elements.
Once Washington retired from politics in 1796, Federalist virtue became precipitously less popular. In June and July 1798—as Brown’s novel Wieland was being typeset—the Federalists unwisely attempted to write their distrust of political opposition into law. The Naturalization Act of 1798 extended the residency period required for citizenship from five to fourteen years. It backfired; Irish immigrants were panicked into registering to vote in great numbers, and nearly all of them would vote Republican. The Alien Enemies Act enabled the president to apprehend during wartime anyone deemed an enemy of the nation, and the Alien Act allowed the president during peace or war to expel any aliens he considered dangerous. Adams thought these acts excessive, and both would expire unenforced. Finally, and most notoriously, the Sedition Act made it a crime to libel the U.S. government. This, too, backfired. In The Age of Federalism, the historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick note “the almost comic clumsiness, the sheer political ineptitude” with which the Federalists prosecuted their enemies on charges of libel—turning their slanderers into heroes, antagonizing their own supporters, and ensuring the victory of Thomas Jefferson in the presidential election of 1800.
3.
Jefferson’s peaceful triumph, however, was far from certain in early 1798, when Charles Brockden Brown was at work on Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale. It was not then clear how, or whether, the United States would survive its crisis. It was natural for a writer like Brown to worry about the nation’s end, and his education prompted him to turn to the classics as he imagined how it might come about. After all, Athens may have been the birthplace of democracy, but Rome had been the death of it.
In Republican Rome, as in early national America, the relationship in politics between voice, virtue, authority, and violence had been an open question for a time. Americans felt the historical analogy keenly. During the Revolution, John Adams had addressed his wife—and Alexander Hamilton had addressed his fiancée—as Portia. George Washington had ordered a performance of Addison’s tragedy Cato for his troops at Valley Forge. In the 1790s, when the American republic was felt to be precarious, politicians began to see one another as Roman villains. To cast aspersions on the Republican Jefferson, for example, the Federalist Hamilton recalled a well-known twist in Roman history: “It has aptly been observed that Cato was the Tory—Caesar the whig of his day. The former frequently resisted—the latter always flattered the follies of the people. Yet the former perished with the Republic [and] the latter destroyed it.” Hamilton, like Cato, was associated with the interests of the upper class. His counterintuitive insinuation was that Jefferson, by pandering to the people and prattling about their rights, was more likely to attempt a coup like Caesar’s.
Cato was one of the two great Roman heroes Americans looked up to. The other was Cicero, Rome’s master of oratory. Together, Cato and Cicero had foiled the conspiracy of Catiline, a demagogue who had hoped to murder the senators in 63 B.C. After Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. and entered Italy, Cato fought him in the civil war, committing suicide in 46 B.C. when he saw that Caesar would prevail. Cicero, on the other hand, made peace with Caesar and retreated to the study of philosophy during his dictatorship. It would be impossible to say which hero Americans loved more. George Washington, as a man of action, modeled himself on Cato. John Adams, as a man of letters, followed Cicero.
Cicero was the natural choice for a politician with a literary sensibility. According to Plutarch, Cicero was “the one man, above all others who made the Romans feel how great a charm eloquence lends to what is good, and how invincible justice is, if it be well spoken.” To American politicians, he represented the power that words could lend virtue in a republic—the power that rhetoric could oppose to rule by force. He represented, in other words, rule by voice. Cicero was the only kind of aristocrat that Adams believed in: a man who could “command two votes; one besides his own.” It would have been hard to find an ambitious young lawyer in late-eighteenth-century America who did not aspire to emulate him.
4.
At least one law student of the era had doubts, however. As the reader will discover, the great orator of the Roman Republic haunts the fiction by Charles Brockden Brown collected in this volume, and he is not always a welcome ghost.
Born in 1771, Charles Brockden Brown was the fifth son of Elijah and Mary Brown, who were practicing Quakers. According to the historian Peter Kafer, Brown’s father had attempted a career as a merchant and failed. Despite financial assistance from his brother-in-law, Elijah was censured by his fellow Quakers in 1768 for failure to pay his debts. After a brief detour into smuggling, he lapsed into mere copying; he became a scrivener, like Melville’s Bartleby. In 1784, he was imprisoned for debt. As Charles later recalled in a letter to a friend, he kept his father company: “When eleven or twelve years of age I spent twelve hours in each day, that is, … I passed the night, for 8 months together in a Jail. In an apartment in which my slumbers were [continual]ly woken by the clanking of chains and bolts & iron doors. Where my ears were continually assailed by blasphemies or obscenities.”
The Brown family was not alone in its troubles. As a group, Pennsylvania Quakers suffered a tremendous loss of prestige and power in the late eighteenth century. For decades they had controlled the state legislature and sat at the top of Philadelphia high society. The Revolution abruptly demoted them. As pacifists, they were sidelined by military events. And observant Quakers could not in good conscience swear allegiance to the commonwealth of Pennsylvania or the new republic, and so their loyalty was widely suspected and they were subjected to legal and financial penalties. Tom Paine’s famous attack on the Quakers at the end of Common Sense was only one among many. On September 5, 1777, Revolutionary authorities arrested nearly a score of Quakers, including Elijah Brown, and deported them to Virginia for eight months. As Kafer observes, the Enlightenment rhetoric of the American Revolution—the talk of inalienable rights and universal freedoms—no doubt clashed with the Brown family’s personal experience of the Revolutionaries’ actions, which must have looked on the ground very much like harassment of a minority on account of its religious faith.
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