Opening New Channels: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Law of Commerce

Abstract

American literature and the American market came of age together. Literary historians ascribe the birth of a distinctly national literature to the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Economic and legal historians have characterized the same period as the “market revolution,” in which infrastructural development replaced local economies with an interconnected national and global market. The market’s unprecedented growth was counterpoised by efforts to limit its reach, a dialectic that shaped each of the era’s major legal and political questions. International free trade engendered economic and cultural homogeneity, and accordingly provoked protectionist backlash. Industrial accidents among strangers prompted courts both to expand the scope of legal responsibility into a universal “duty of care” and to cabin that duty within narrow limits. Interstate commerce—including the trade of cotton and enslaved people—at once extended the reach of federal power and sharpened the opposing rhetoric of states’ rights. Opening New Channels traces the same formal tension between expansion and containment, between the sprawling networks of trade and their legal and political boundaries, in the works of authors such as Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and Edith Wharton. While earlier studies generally situate these writers either within or outside their economic and political context, I envision them as “entrepreneurs” who neither endorse nor disavow the existing market so much as they reimagine and sublimate it, as in Thoreau’s titular exhortation to “open new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”