America and the Long 19th Century
General Editors
David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
Elizabeth Young
Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel
Edlie L. Wong
Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line
Gretchen Murphy
Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America
James B. Salazar
Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines
Meg Wesling
Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature
William A. Gleason
Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights
Robin Bernstein
American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary
Jacob Rama Berman
Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth-Century America
Andrew Lyndon Knighton
The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr
Michael J. Drexler and Ed White
The Traumatic Colonel
The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr
Michael J. Drexler and Ed White
New York University Press
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New York University Press
New York and London
© 2014 by New York University
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ISBN: 978-1-4798-7167-4 (cl.)
ISBN: 978-1-4798-4253-7 (pap.)
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A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
To Amisha
To Kimberley
There is no subject so interesting and important to the real lovers of their country, as that of slavery, because there is none which involves the happiness, prosperity and glory of our country in so great a degree—none attended with so many difficulties in remedying. It is admitted by all parties, slave-holders or not, that slavery is the greatest curse our country is afflicted with—it is a foul stain upon our national escutcheon—A canker which is corroding the moral and political vitals of our country. There is but one voice on this subject, and that is the voice of condemnation, as an enormous, and an alarming evil.
—Daniel Raymond, The Missouri Question
It has been made a question among the learned, whether most good or evil has resulted to mankind, from the discovery of America. That the munificent gift of a new world, should have given rise to such a question, is of itself a melancholy proof of human depravity.
Although there may be no serious difficulty in deciding this question, yet, when we consider what oceans of blood have been shed—how many human beings have been butchered—how many nations of brave, high-minded men have been exterminated; and when we add to this the mass of human suffering which has been already caused by negro slavery, the philanthropist is almost ready to drop the tear of regret, and exclaim, alas, that America was ever discovered!
—Daniel Raymond, Thoughts on Political Economy
Contents
Acknowledgments
Burrology—Extracts
Introduction
1. The Semiotics of the Founders
2. Hors Monde, or the Fantasy Structure of Republicanism
3. Female Quixotism and the Fantasy of Region
4. Burr’s Formation, 1800–1804
5. Burr’s Deployment, 1804–1807
Conclusion
Notes
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Portions of this project were presented at the Bucknell University English Department and Faculty Colloquium, the University of Florida English Department’s Americanists’ Colloquium, the Aaron Burr Association, Indiana University’s Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Research Center for Urban Cultural History at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the University of Texas at Austin, Emory University, the University of Glasgow, Rutgers University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, American University in Beirut, and Tulane University. From colleagues too numerous to attempt to list here—they include faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates—we received generous and thoughtful suggestions and insights, essential to the growth of this project, and all through a time of widespread institutional austerity. We thank student assistants Emily Anderson, Deanna Koretsky, and Stephanie Scherer for their hard work. We owe our thanks, as well, to University of Florida students in ENG 3011 and AML 6017 and Bucknell University students in ENG 306. A version of chapter 2 appeared as “Secret Witness, or the Fantasy Structure of US Republicanism,” in Early American Literature 44.2 (2009): 333–63. We thank the anonymous reviewers, David Shields, departing from the journal’s editorship, and Sandra Gustafson, entering, for their help. A portion of chapter 4 appeared as “The Constitution of Toussaint: Another Origin of African American Literature,” in A Companion to African American Literature, ed. Gene Jarrett, 59–74 (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). We are grateful to Gene for his suggestions and encouragement. We are grateful, too, at NYU Press, to the series editors, Priscilla Wald, David Kazanjian, and Elizabeth McHenry, as well as to Eric Zinner and Alicia Nadkarni.
The Traumatic Colonel began with a conversation in October of 2005. Since then, we have worked in fits and starts, time permitting, with hours on the phone, hundreds of emails,