Providential Visions:

The Aesthetics of History, Slave Revolution, and Imperial Time in Antebellum America

The antebellum era is often identified by its heroic providential sense of destiny—a time when growth of popular sovereignty and expanding borders led American writers to celebrate a seemingly open horizon of liberty and futurity.  But on the most pressing global issue, the abolition of slavery, the U.S. was woefully behind. Between the 1801 completion of the Haitian revolution and West Indian abolition in 1834, slavery had been all but evacuated from the New World—legal in just the United States and the few remaining colonies of Spain and Portugal. Providential Visions explores how U.S. writers responded to a growing sense that time and space of liberty may have moved beyond national borders by imagining how history writing could inspire new emotional commitments to freedom among the reading public.

            This book examines antebellum history writing as a self-consciously aesthetic project meant to produce a profoundly emotional response to the past. While scholars have highlighted romantic nationalist historians like George Bancroft and William H. Prescott as pursuing “history as a work of art,” my project traces far more complicated interrelations between these nominally nationalist historical texts, transcendentalist mediations on reading and temporality, and abolitionist expressions of rage and fear at the growth of slave and imperial power. Focusing on the years between 1834 and the Civil War, I track the strange career providence as an idea and a feeling through West Indian Emancipation, westward expansion, imperial conquest, the fugitive slave law, and John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid. I show just how contested and fragmentary visions of nationalist futures were, both ideologically and emotionally. Far from the complete metanarrative of history projected by the architectonic structure of George Bancroft’s terminally uncompleted History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent, providence in practice appeared to readers only in fragmentary glimpses of a whole—momentary aesthetic intensities that were a matter of feeling far more than an achieved narrative vision. And as a feeling, the providential visions were subject to far more vigorous contestation by writers and activists looking to redirect the imperial trajectory of slavery’s empire than has been hitherto acknowledged.

            A central concern of this project is how race figured in historians’ and others’ attempts to represent what providence looked and felt like in the past. While romantic nationalists often employed a distinctly anti-black descriptive aesthetic—invoking black and native peoples as threats to providence’s emergence and flourishing across the new world—transcendentalists like Emerson struggled with racial difference as an often productive disordering force in their sense of the meaning of the past. And abolitionists moved between portraying black freedom fighters as patriotic martyrs and envisioning fugitive movements into other orders of hemispheric time that could not be contained by providence at all. I identify five major historical aesthetics in this period. 1) The nationalist imperialist visions of providence found in the histories of Bancroft and Prescott; 2) the anti-chronological textual wandering of transcendentalism’s earliest engagements with history; 3) the self-consciously messianic and fragmentary futures of Margaret Fuller and Thoreau’s anti-slavery writing; 4) assimilationist abolitionism’s visions of black and native inclusion in the national epic; and 5) glimpses of temporally fugitive possibility in William C. Nell and Martin Delaney’s disruptive revisionist histories. 

            I ultimately assert that our sense of the meaning of the past is always informed by the demands of the present and desires for the future. But because our narratives of who we are and have been are constrained by our own limited position in time, our sense of history relies on imaginative description and emotion to make us feel the meaning of events whose final significance lies beyond our own temporal horizons. By examining the aesthetics of antebellum history, this book repositions one of the central ideological metanarratives of the United States as an aesthetic response to transatlantic political currents, constrained by the horizons of race and slavery—and it shows how race continues to deform nationalist visions of the future, as an aesthetically disruptive presence announcing possibilities for freedom beyond the horizons of imperial and national time and space.