"'A Thorough and Complete Revolution': Antislavery Lawyers and the Radical Promise of the Novel

Abstract

Between the years 1820 and 1880 the legal and social fabric of the United States oscillated from stability to radical possibility and back to stability again. On either end of this oscillation were stable and oppressive legal orders rooted in racial domination and white supremacy. In the middle was a moment of radical and transformational possibility. This dissertation is a study of this moment of possibility and the ways in which it sprung from and was reflected by the practice of abolitionist and anti-racist lawyers. Specifically, this dissertation tells the stories of three lawyers: Richard Hildreth, John Jolliffe, and Albion Tourgée. Each of these lawyers devoted their careers to the struggle against slavery and its legacy and at different points in their careers, each wrote novels as a part of that struggle. Across these three lives, careers, and novels, I trace the outlines of a broader shift in the social and legal order of the United States. Hildreth’s first novel written in 1836 was written amidst a mostly stable national compromise over slavery and its place as a necessary (if despised) linchpin of the union. By the time he revised his novel in 1852, and by the time that Jolliffe wrote his novels in 1856 and 1858, the stability of that compromise had eroded. As that stability eroded, the nature of these lawyers’ legal practices changed and the purposes of their novels changed as well. As they worked and wrote their way into the “second founding” of Reconstruction, the lawyers in this study merged their legal practices with their imaginative ones becoming, in the words of Robert Ferguson, “configured.” After the opening of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the oscillation continued, and a new, proto-Jim Crow order took hold. The dissertation ends with Tourgée revising his first novel (written at the height of possibility) to reflect the newly settled and oppressive legal order.