Anthony Paper PDF

Paper Money Men
Paper Money Men

Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public
Sphere in Antebellum America
David Anthony
The Ohio State University Press

Columbus
Copyright 2009 by The Ohio State University.

All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anthony, David, 1964
Paper money men : commerce, manhood, and the sensational public sphere in antebellum
America / David Anthony.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8142-1110-6 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-8142-9207-5 (cd-rom) 1. American literature19th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Economics in literature. 3. Masculinity in literature. 4. Money in literature. 5. Wealth in literature. 6. MasculinityEconomic
aspectsUnited States. 7. Sensationalism in literature. I. Title.
PS217.E35A58 2009
810.9'003dc22
2009023482
This book is available in the following editions:
Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1110-6)
CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9207-5)
Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik
Text design by Juliet Williams
Type set in Adobe Minion Pro
Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
As we proceed to develop our investigation, we shall find, in general, that the

characters who appear on the economic stage are mere personifications of
economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they
come into contact with each other.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (1867)
I love the paper money, and the paper money men;

My hundred, if they go to pot, I fear would sink to ten...
I hold the paper money men say truly, when they say
They ought to pay their promises, with promises to pay;
And he is an unrighteous judge, who says they shall or may,
Be made to keep their promises in any other way.
Thomas Love Peacock, Paper Money Lyrics (1837)
C o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
ix
xi
Introduction
Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture
Chapter One
Sleepy Hollow, Gothic Masculinity, and the Panic of 1819
41
Chapter Two
Shylock on Wall Street:

The Jessica Complex in Antebellum Sensationalism
70
Chapter Three Banking on Emotion:
Debt and Male Submission in the Urban Gothic
102
Chapter Four
Tabloid Manhood, Speculative Femininity
123
Chapter Five
Success and Race in The House of the Seven Gables
156
Epilogue
Bartlebys Bank
183
Notes
Works Cited
Index
187
204
216
I l l u s t r a t i o n s
The Doctors Puzzled or the Desperate Case of

Mother U.S. Bank (1833).
14
Figure 2
Troubled Treasures (1833).
16
Figure 3
Capitol Fashions for 1837 (1837).
17
Figure 4
Image from Jack and the Bean Stalk (1857).
19
Figure 5
Cover image from The Weekly Rake (10-2-1842).
24
Figure 6
Treasury Note (1837).
31
Figure 7
Cleansing the Augean Stable (1844).
32
Figure 8
Image from The Surprising History of Jack and the

Bean Stalk (184245[?]).
35
Figure 9
The Ghost of a Dollar, or the Bankers [sic] Surprize (1808).
44
Figure 10
The People Putting Responsibility to the Test (1834).
71
Figure 11
Image from The History of Mother Twaddle, and the

marvellous atchievments [sic] of her son Jack (1809).
77
Image from The History of old Mother Goose, and the

golden egg (1840).
78
Figure 13
Shylocks Year, or 1840 with No Bankrupt Law (1840).
80
Figure 14
New Edition of Macbeth. Bank-Ohs! Ghost (1837).
109
Figure 15
Cover of The Thomas Street Tragedy. Murder of Ellen Jewett.

Trial of Robinson! (1836).
126
Figure 1
Figure 12
ix
Illustrations
Figure 16
The Innocent Boy (1836).
146
Figure 17
Ellen Jewett (1836).
147
Figure 18
Fifty Cents. Shin Plaster (1837).
151
Figure 19
Cover of White Slavery!! Or Selling White Men for Debt! (1840).
158
Figure 20
Practical Amalgamation (1839).
163
Figure 21
Zip Coon on the Go-Ahead Principle (1834).
173
Figure 22
Jim Brown (1842).
178
Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s
Much like many of the fictional characters I examine here, I have accrued a
considerable number of debts over the course of my professional life. This is
especially true of the period in which I have written this book. Fortunately,
these are debts of gratitude to the many people and institutions that have
helped me with this project, and I would like to acknowledge them here.
For fellowship support I would like to thank the following: the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation for a dissertation fellowship that allowed me to lay
the foundation for this project; the American Antiquarian Society for three
separate short-term research fellowships that were absolutely essential to the
beginning, middle, and end of this project (a Peterson Dissertation Fellowship and two AAS-NEMLA Fellowships); the Library Company of Philadelphia for a short-term Mellon Fellowship; and Southern Illinois University,
Carbondale, for a Summer ORDA Fellowship.
A version of chapter 1 of this study appeared in Early American Literature 40, no. 1 (March 2005): 11144; a version of chapter 3 appeared in
American Literature 76, no. 4 (December 2004): 71947; a portion of chapter 4 appeared in American Literature 69, no. 3 (September 1997): 487514;
and a portion of chapter 5 appeared in The Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no.
2 (Fall 1999): 24968. I would like to express my appreciation to the editorial boards and publishers of these journals for the right to reproduce this
material here. I would also like to thank the following for reproduction
rights to the various images in this work: the American Antiquarian Society,
the New-York Historical Society, The Library Company of Philadelphia, the
Library of Congress, and the William L. Clements Library at the University
of Michigan.
xi
xii
Acknowledgments
This book began as a dissertation at the University of Michigan. For mentorship at this stage, I would like to thank Julie Ellison, whose fascination
with gender and emotion was infectious; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, whose
enthusiasm for my work was incredibly confidence-building; and most of
all, Jonathan Freedman. His belief in me before, during, and after my graduate work at Michigan was essential to this books creation and completion,
and his own work has set the standard that I have strived to meet. I would
also like to thank James Thompson, with whom I studied at UNCChapel
Hill. His passion for a materialist approach to literature sparked an early
interest for me in the relations between money and gender. For intellectual
and emotional support during graduate school (and afterward), I would like
to thank Susan Rosenbaum, Steve Soper, Eliza Richards, Eric Kligerman,
Michael Strong, Elly Eisenberg, Kathy Pories, and Paul Crumbley. Thanks
also to Adam Henderson for close friendship outside of academia.
This book was completed at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
During this period I have been aided, buoyed, and inspired by numerous
friends and colleagues in Carbondale. Foremost among them are Paula Bennett, Ed Brunner, George Boulukos, David Sutton, Beth Rowe, Sue Felleman, and Peter Chametsky. Many thanks also to various colleagues at other
universities for their insightful and challenging readings of drafts of several
chapters of this book, especially Teresa Goddu, David Leverenz, John Evelev,
David Zimmerman, David Shields, James Shapiro, and Christopher Looby.
I would also like to thank the staff at the American Antiquarian Society for
their consistently generous help, especially Laura Wasowicz, Jon Benoit,
Caroline Sloat, and John Hench. I also want to express appreciation to the
readers commissioned by The Ohio State University Press for their insights
and enthusiasm for the project, to Sandy Crooms for her initial interest in
the book and her guidance throughout the publication process, and to Maggie Diehl for her thorough-going editorial assistance.
Finally, I would like to thank members of my family for their patience
and support. I am particularly grateful to my mother, Judy Anthony Henderson, for her constant encouragement and unwavering love, and to Shirley
and Robert Desmond, for taking me into their family. Most of all, though, I
would like to thank Erin Desmond Anthony, the person whose intellect and
passion I most admire. Her faith in this project has been unflagging, and
her readings and insights have been invaluable. In the ensuing pages I will
discuss stories in which desperate men seek after treasure, but I am the lucky
one who stumbled upon a pot of gold when I met her. This book is dedicated
to her, and to our son Aidan.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Fantasies of Treasure in
Antebellum Culture
He dreamed that he had discovered an immense treasure in the center of his garden. At
every stroke of the spade he laid bare a golden ingot; diamond crosses sparkled out of
the dust; bags of money turned up their bellies, corpulent with pieces of eight, or venerable doubloons; and chests...yawned forth before his ravished eyes, and vomited
forth their glittering contents.
Washington Irving, The Golden Dreams of Wolfert Webber,
Tales of a Traveller (1824)
As the rays of the lanterns fell within the pit, there flashed upwards, from a confused
heap of gold and of jewels, a glow and a glare that absolutely dazzled our eyes....The
chest had been full to the brim....Having assorted all with care, we found ourselves
possessed of even vaster wealth than we had at first supposed. In coin there was rather
more than four hundred and fifty thousand dollarsestimating the value of the pieces,
as accurately as we could, by the tables of the period. There was not a particle of silver. All was gold of antique date and of great varietyFrench, Spanish, and German
money, with a few English guineas, and some counters, of which we had never seen
specimens before. There were several very large and heavy coins, so worn that we could
make nothing of their inscriptions. There was no American money.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Gold-Bug (1843)
Captain Kidd and the Golden Eggs

One of the key images in the development of antebellum sensationalism is
the staging of a relationship between men and treasure. A kind of nervously
repeated primal scene, in which we see men hugging hoarded piles of gold
bullion, fantasizing about chests of coins and jewels, or, most often, lamenting the recent loss of such riches, these moments proliferate in the cultural
production of the period, and provide readers with an embarrassed fantasy
glimpse at the source of their economic origins. For Freud, the primal scene
is rarely accessible by way of direct recollection; instead, only in dreams is

Introduction
this moment available, surfacing throughout ones life as a kind of continual

trauma. Literary sensationalism is the cultural repository of such dream
images for the antebellum period. Repeating in fantasy form the charged
scene in which a capitalist selfhood is created, they remind us that by the
mid-nineteenth century, America had become a kind of fiscal neurotic,
given over to insecurity, anxiety, depression, and irrational fearsall states
of affect stemming from the residual question: what was the originary relationship between men and money, and how did it go so terribly wrong?
Dream moments of found treasure inform the work of canonical writers
such as Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. But they are more frequent
in the periods pulpier material, such as urban sensation fiction, magazine
stories, and melodramatic stage productions. Moreover, these moments are
usually crucial to the very fabric and structure of these narratives, often providing the backdrop against which both character and plot are organized.
[H]e surveyed the prospect disclosed by the opened chest, with a glance of
the deepest satisfaction, we are told at a key moment in George Lippards
best-selling novel, The Quaker City (1845), as the criminal Devil-Bug first
views a cache of gold he has stolen with the help of his accomplice Gabriel
Von Gelt. By his side knelt the Jew, his dark eyes sparkling with delight, as
he gazed upon the treasures of the opened chest...and over the rich stores
of coin (238). Von Gelts comments are equally telling. Bi-Gott! he says.
I smellsh te gooldt already....Doubloosh! Doubloosh! (239). Lippards
unembarrassed anti-Semitism offers the Jew Von Gelt as a negative figure
of greed, but the somewhat obscene covetousness Von Gelt displays is not
enough to displace the more general significance and desirability of the treasure in this passage. Indeed, described as analogous to the missing funds
of the United States Bank (200), the rich stores of coin are at the thematic
and emotional center of the novel; representing a form of financial stability
otherwise absent from the world Lippard depicts, the gold is (far more than
the various imperiled women the reader encounters) the real object of desire
in this novel.
As I will discuss over the course of this book, there are an even greater
number of moments in which antebellum narratives pivot around the
exchange of currencyfor example, the dramatic moment in Harriet
Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) when young George Shelby seeks
somewhat naively to arrest the commodity status of his good friend, the
slave Uncle Tom, by giving him his golden dollar. Ive brought you my dollar, George says to Uncle Tom (171; emphasis in original). Stowe makes it
clear that the gift is a direct response to the crisis of debt that has engulfed
his family and forced his father to sell Uncle Tom to the slave trader Haley
(He had speculated largely and quite loosely, we are told of Mr. Shelby
[51]). But the repeated sale of Uncle Tom proves that the dollar is no match
for the vicissitudes of the modern paper economyjust as George is himself unequal to the task of bettering speculative capitalism, this despite his
eventual assertion of his manhood when he punches the slave trader Simon
Legree (592). And as I will show, it is precisely this inequity between hard
money and the speculatory economy that drives much of antebellum sensationalism, and the form of manhood it so often depicts. By way of starting,
though, I want to emphasize how literary representations of treasure
money hoarded and stored, longed-for and sometimes locatedretain their
own special significance in the works of this period. For what they offer is a
fantasy response to the very problem experienced by George Shelby. Indeed,
as Lippards mention of the U.S. Bank begins to suggest, these moments signal, both directly and indirectly, a broader set of concerns over the periods
economy. Specifically, they take part in a complex meditation on the shift
from a mercantilist form of capitalism, in which value is thought of as stable
and linked to local trade and secure sites of gold bullion, to a sense of the
world informed by the drama and dynamism of capitalist exchange. What
these stories comment on, in other words, is the shift from money as treasure to money as capital. And, I will argue, this shift makes all the difference
for the representation of manhood, especially as manhood was linked more
and more closely to the context of the boom-and-bust economy of midnineteenth-century America.
I love the paper money, and the paper money men, writes Thomas
Love Peacock in Paper Money Lyrics, a satiric work produced in the wake
of the 1837 Panic. I hold the paper money men say truly, when they say
/ They ought to pay their promises, with promises to pay (115). I want to
follow Peacock, and refer here to a paper money manhood, one emerging with particular force and complexity within antebellum sensationalism. On the one hand, this designation refers simply to the speculator
villains who populate so much of the periods fictionthe men whom Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, writing about the early republican period, refers to
as the corrupt new men of paper and placethe new capitalisms stockjobbers...[who] live in a passionate and venal world driven by fantasy
and credit, obsessed with stocks, speculation, and debt (Domesticating
Virtue 172). But paper money manhood also implies the far greater number of aspiring professionals who found themselves the victim of the new
and unstable paper economy in the period from 1819 to 1857. As historians such as Charles Sellers, Scott A. Sandage, and Steven Mihm have
shown, this period was marked by widespread economic insecurity and
failure, as the increasing extension of paper forms of credit connected
local communities and their inhabitants with distant, unseen markets and
Introduction
as the value of paper currencies fluctuated with changes in those markets.1 Wherever the market extended, Sellers writes in a description of
the seemingly inevitable series of economic panics that rocked the nation
during this period, the remorseless process of debt liquidation chastened
not only modest venturers, but also the apparently wealthy who had plunged
and borrowed most recklessly. Specie to satisfy their creditors could not be
had (Market 137). Sandage puts it thus: Nineteenth-century Americans
had to live in a new world where the sky was always falling....From Wall
Street to the muddiest rural lane, failure and the fear of it left a garrulous
people at a loss for words (Losers 22; 24).
The image of the specie-poor, failure-anxious citizen was particularly
poignant and especially frequent in the countless representations of fiscally imperiled professional manhood that I will be examining here. Critics
and historians have made it clear that early-nineteenth-century professional manhood was especially volatile, in particular as a new breed of men
migrated from the country to the city, and took up careers that were increasingly intertwined with and vulnerable to distant market forces beyond their
control.2 Thus Toby Ditz suggests that the imperiled masculinity characteristic of the wholesale merchant classes in early republican Philadelphia
reflects dislocations caused by the long-term transformation of markets
from temporally and spatially delimited places and events into impersonal,
unbounded, and abstract processes (Shipwrecked 51). The result, she
argues, is a precarious form of male selfhood, one centered less and less
on an interior form of self-possession and inner being, and increasingly
contingent on a commodified and frequently elusive form of reputation.
To become economically insolvent in this world, Ditz explains, is to become
unmanned and feminized (72; 66). David Leverenz provides similar
analysis of the professional male of the antebellum period. As he explains
in his seminal study, Manhood and the American Renaissance (1989), The
basic class conflict between 1825 and 1850 comes with the rise of a new
middle class, for whom manhood is based much more exclusively in work
and entrepreneurial competition. Traditional norms of dignity and social
status, implying as they do a relatively stable world of small villages, can mitigate the basic connection between manhood and humiliation. In a world of
much greater mobility and competition, manhood becomes a more intense
anxiety (74). For Leverenz as for Ditz, early forms of professional American
manhood were located at the uneasy dividing line between older forms of
mercantile capitalism and the new, more fluid world of the paper economy.
Indeed, as they make clear, the various versions of a dominant capitalist
manhood emerging during this period were themselves ideological, and
designed to guard against the vicissitudes of risk and competition.
Building on the work of Ditz, Leverenz, and others, Dana Nelson further
complicates the capitalist manhood emerging during this period.3 Arguing
that the radicalizing energy of local democratic practices was rerouted
(National 34) during the early national and antebellum periods into the
psychological and affective energies of market competition (15), she suggests that the white professional manhood came to embody a new and corporate (21) form of national selfhood. The result, she says, is an anxious
manhood constantly at odds with itself. [E]merging models of competitive manhood, quite differently from the communal models they replaced,
required individual men to internalize in terms of personal responsibility
the political and economic vicissitudes of the early nation, she says. These
new responsibilities propelled a substantially intensified need for management and control and a particular pattern of emotional anxiety among white
men (62).
Nelson demonstrates throughout her study the way in which the anxiety of the professional male is often projected onto figures of Otherness
such as women and Native Americans. As I detail throughout this study, the
periods sensationalism performs a similar logic of displacement, whereby
sensational figures of financial anxiety such as the Jew and the speculator (and, more specifically, characters such as Irvings Headless Horseman
and Melvilles Bartleby) embody the putative theft of masculine wholeness and enjoyment, even as they represent the disavowed desires of the
emerging professional male. But by way of starting, I want to emphasize two
main points. First, and as the above critics suggest, we need to continue to
extend our study of the professional male during this period, and in doing
so extend our understanding of the very psychology of capitalism as it was
both shifting and coalescing within the emergent professional classes. How
was desire negotiated by the professional male in postmercantile America,
and how did this negotiation reflect the more fluid world of paper money
and credit? What was the role of fantasy in helping the professional male
negotiate the shift from mercantilism to capitalism proper, and how did
the very notion of fantasy change for these new men in this new world?
Moreover, what do these changes tell us about mid-nineteenth-century capitalism, at least as experienced by an emerging class of professional men?
And, finally, what is the role of anxiety in shaping the professional male
of the mid-nineteenth century? The period was punctuated by economic
panics, cataclysmic upheavals that underscored the precariousness of the
paper economy. Can we read these traumatic events (especially the panics
of 1819, 1837, and 1857) as triggers for a more general masculine psychology of anxiety and loss? I suggest above that we might read the sensational
staging of men and treasure as a kind of embarrassing primal scene, wherein
Introduction
antebellum culture was able to glimpse, if unconsciously, a supposedly original relationship to money, but one tinged already with the discomfiting
reality of erotics and desire. Are such dream images also informed by the
anxious knowledge that, in a world of economic panics, a primary relation
to moneyhard money, money as treasureis no longer possible?4
In seeking to answer these and related questions, I will be emphasizing the second issue I want to stress here at the outset: the fact that paper
money manhood appears across the spectrum of early American cultural
production. Clerks, merchants, financiers, confidence men, lawyers, bachelors, libertines, doctors, politicians, philosophers, investors, speculators,
dandies: these and other figures of male professionalism are the ubiquitous
but often-overlooked supporting cast of antebellum cultural production.
This book argues that this cast of characters is especially important as we
seek to understand the story that this culture was telling itself about itself
in a period of tremendous social and economic upheaval. This book argues
further that it is antebellum sensationalism that specializes in depictions
of this new and quite anxious form of manhood. Over and over we see in
this material the tableau of a struggling professional male negotiating the
frightfulbut also sometimes thrilling and titillatingworld of credit and
paper money. To retrieve my fortunes so that I might marryI speculated in stocks and lost all I possessed, says a plaintive Mark Livingstone
in Dion Boucicaults hit play The Poor of New York (1857), a narrative that
thematizes the panics of 1837 and 1857: The poor!whom do you call the
poor?...[T]hey are more frequently found under a black coat than under
a red shirt. The poor man is the clerk with a family, forced to maintain a
decent set of clothes, paid for out of the hunger of his children....These
needy wretches are poorer than the poor, for they are obliged to conceal their poverty with the false mask of content (145). A kind of whitecollar agonistes, Livingstone here gives voice to the plight of several decades
of professional men who precede him in the periods sensationalism, for
whom the sense of selfhood and self-possession has become contingent
on the uneven tides of the economic marketplace. Indeed, distinct from
the struggles of the red shirt working-class male, the white-collar professional male as embodied in Livingstone is absolutely central to antebellum
sensationalism, and thus to antebellum culture. For it is in the sensational
representation of this figure that we see the anxieties, desires, and fantasies
of antebellum capitalist culture staged for audiences who were themselves
negotiating life in the paper money world of the mid-nineteenth century.
We might therefore turn to the frequent staging of a relationship between
professional men and treasure in the pages of the periods sensationalism.
Two useful examples are offered in the above-quoted stories by Irving and
Poe, both of which revolve around the search for treasure said to have been
buried by the notorious pirate Captain Kidd. The Irving story is titled The
Golden Dreams of Wolfert Webber. Part of a series of stories dubbed The
Money Diggers in Tales of a Traveller, the story centers on the increasing
worry and embarrassment experienced by the title character, Wolfert Webberthe family patriarch[] and rural potentateas his once isolated
and successful family farm is gradually surrounded by the modern urban
world (TT 228).5 The chief cause of anxiety to honest Wolfert...was the
growing prosperity of the city, we are told. [W]hile every one around him
grew richer, Wolfert grew poorer, and he could not, for the life of him, perceive how the evil was to be remedied (229). But in what follows, Webber
is invigorated with hopes of economic recovery when, visiting his local pub,
he hears a series of tales about buried treasure in the area. One story claims
that the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant buried chests of gold specie when
the British invaded, and continues to haunt the region. Another and more
frequent story has it that the treasure was buried by Captain Kidd. The
problem, however, is that regardless of who buried it, such treasure is as elusive as gold specie itself in America in the wake of the 1819 Panic. Though
Webber dreams nightly of immense treasures in his garden, his increasingly
desperate efforts to find the gold buried on his farmland prove futile. Worse,
his search causes him to abandon his crops, with the result that he and
his family are soon faced with dissolution. Wolfert gradually woke from
his dream of wealth, we are told. By degrees a revulsion of thought took
place in Wolferts mind, common to those whose golden dreams have been
disturbed by pinching realities....Haggard care gathered about his brow;
he went about with a money-seeking air, his eyes bent downward into the
dust (238). Late in the following story of The Money Diggers sequence,
the apparitional Captain Kidd appears before Webber, but it is only to taunt
him, and we are left to understand that, at least for Irving post-1819, found
gold is merely a fantasy.
In Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself (1836), Robert Montgomery Bird
reworks Irvings story of a debtor males futile search for Captain Kidds
gold. I found the whole coffin full of gold and silver, some in the form of
ancient coins, but most of it in bars and ingots, he says in describing his
nightly dream vision of the treasure. Ah! how much torment a poor man
has in dreaming of riches! (35).6 But the more famous revision of Irvings
story is offered in Edgar Allan Poes The Gold-Bug (1843). Like Wolfert Webber and Sheppard Lee, the tale revolves around a man marked by
financial failure. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been
wealthy, we are told of William Legrand. [B]ut a series of misfortunes
had reduced him to want. To avoid the mortification consequent upon his
Introduction
disasters, he left New Orleans...and took up his residence at Sullivans

Island, near Charleston, South Carolina (Gold 234). While on Sullivans
Island, Legrand is bittenquite literallyby a gold bug, which is to say that
he finds and is bitten by a large beetle whose scales were exceedingly hard
and glossy, with all the appearance of burnished gold (242). But Legrand
is also bitten by the fetish for gold. As Marc Shell demonstrates, Legrands
increasing obsession with gold echoes the similar obsessions of Democrats
such as Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Thomas Hart Benton in
the 1830s (Money 523). Believing that, along with the beetle, he has found
a map to Captain Kidds long-rumored and much-sought-after store of buried treasure, Legrand, like Irvings Wolfert Webber, becomes obsessed with
locating the hidden hoard of gold bullion. As he explains, the gold will, if
found, reinstate me in my family possessions (Gold 242). By storys end,
of course, we find that Legrand has been correct in his guess about Captain
Kidds hidden gold. With the help of the narrator and his ex-slave Jupiter,
he finds $450,000 in gold specie, as well as a fortune in jewels (254). If not
quite enough to calm the more general climate of financial panic plaguing
the nation in the wake of the 1837 Panic, the treasure is certainly enough
to restore Legrand to his accustomed position of propertied manhood. But
we might consider as well the fact that, as the above quote reveals, [t]here
was no American money (254) among the antique coins found in Kidds
treasure chest. The comment is telling, for it suggests that the chest is quite
literally filled with old moneymoney created, that is to say, during a time
when the new economy had yet to take hold, and when Americas economic
instability was still far off in the future. What Legrand locates is thus money
as treasure rather than money as capital. I will be arguing here that this is a
crucial distinction in seeking to understand not only the form of manhood
emerging during the antebellum period but also the very nature of the stories antebellum culture was telling itself about selfhood and money.7
Literary fantasies of found gold are not new to literature, of course. The
discovery by Beowulf and Wiglaf of the hoard of treasure in the Dragons lair
in Beowulf; Jacks theft of the goose that lays the golden eggs in Jack and the
Beanstalk; the pirate treasure finally located at the conclusion of Stevensons
Treasure Island (1883); Jonathan Harkers discovery of the Counts hoarded
gold in Bram Stokers Dracula (1897): such narratives make it clear that the
dream of finding hidden stores of gold treasure is repeatedly enacted across
a range of historical periods and narrative forms, and always, it would seem,
as a means of addressing a variety of social concerns. Thus in Beowulf, for
example, the dragon and his treasure represent a corrupt king who withholds wealth from his people. Conversely, in Cotton Mathers The Life of
Phips (1697), the description of William Phipss search for treasure is exemplary precisely in that it acts as a lesson for Puritans concerned about the
fates of their souls. As Jennifer Baker puts it, images of payment or sudden
outpourings of wealth had long suited the Puritan notion of a covenant of
grace, through which Christs sacrificial death redeems the debt of human
sin for the elect (Securing 35). In this sense, she argues, Mathers story of
Phipss trial and doubt imparts the crucial lesson that treasure can only
be obtained through a faith that rests somewhere between the dangerous
extremes of assurance and despair (37).
But what about stories such as Wolfert Webber and The Gold-Bug?
How might we understand them as reflecting the emergence of a new sort
of narrative in antebellum America? More specifically, how might we understand the very notion of American literary character as undergoing a shift
in such narratives? And more specifically still, how is American literary
manhood changing in such stories? One place to begin in seeking to answer
such questions is with the representation of moneyand especially treasurein the periods literature. For, and as Fredric Jameson suggests, the
literary depiction of money has shifted across time and literary genre. Thus
he observes that narratives such as the art-novella are quite different both in
content and form than their later incarnations, precisely because of evolving
conceptions of money at different historical junctures. As he explains in a
passage that I want to quote at length:
The art-novella, then, will be governed by the experience of money, but
of money at a specific moment of its historical development: the stage of
commerce rather than the stage of capital proper. This is the stage Marx
describes as exchange on the frontiers between two modes of production,
which have not yet been subsumed under a single standard of value; so great
fortunes can be made and lost overnight, ships sink or against all expectation appear in the harbor, heroic travelers reappear with cheap goods whose
scarcity in the home society lends them extraordinary worth. This is therefore an experience of money which marks the form rather than the content
of narratives; these last may include rudimentary commodities and coins
incidentally, but nascent Value organizes them around a conception of the
Event which is formed by categories of Fortune and Providence, the wheel
that turns, bringing great good luck and then dashing it, the sense of what
is not yet an invisible hand guiding human destinies and endowing them
with what is not yet success or failure, but rather the irreversibility of an
unprecedented fate, which makes its bearer into the protagonist of a unique
and memorable story. (Ideologies of Theory 52)8
10
Introduction
For Jameson, it is only with the entrance into a more advanced stage of capitalism properthe stage Marx describes in terms of the distinction between
money as money and money as capitalthat success and failure become
interiorized psychological conditions (Capital 247). Notions such as luck
and fate, Fortune and Providence, oras with Mathers narrativethe covenant of grace, are part of an earlier literary ethos, one that is simply inconsistent with the more dynamic fiscal world of the nineteenth century, in
which fiscal panics are increasingly common, and in which it is the invisible
hand of mysterious market forces that guides human destiny. Accordingly,
it is only with a more advanced system of capital, one marked by what Marx
refers to as the unceasing movement of profit-making (254), that writers
such as Irving and Poe begin to invent characters for whom success and
failure have their specifically monetary resonance.
Characters such as Wolfert Webber and William Legrand, that is to say,
are the product of a new economic order. Indeed, Jamesons observations
also allow us to see how the narratives produced within the context of capital can reflect a longing for an earlier, precapitalist period, even as they make
it clear that such a period is permanently foreclosed. For if, as Jameson suggests, the concept of treasure signals a period that predates the vicissitudes
of modern capitalism, then certainly the golden dreams of a character
such as Wolfert Webber reflect a kind of desperate desire to escape the very
psychology of success and failure in modern America. Literary treasure is
in this sense a reference to the earlier moment of mercantile capitalism;
even better than the funds of the United States Bank ironically invoked
by Lippard, such stores of currency represent an immutable form of value
and stabilityone that, by extension, is linked to a longed-for form of fiscally secure, self-possessed masculinity. Captain Kidds money is therefore
nostalgic, precisely in that finding (or losing) such treasure is quite different
from making or losing a fortune on a speculative business venture. Both
represent luck and contingency, but it is the later phase of capital proper
that produces the more internalized, anxious form of selfhood that is all but
wholly based on market notions of success and, more often (especially
in American narratives post-1837), failure. This, then, is the payoff for
Legrand in locating Kidds money: finding the treasure means escape from
a felt sense of failure, but it also provides him imagined (and, for the reader,
allegorical) passage back to a very different historical moment, one that
precedes the very notion of an individual who has failed in the context of
the economy proper.9 Sandages analysis of the links between nineteenthcentury ideals of manhood and ideologies of market success is especially useful here. Failure troubled, hurried and excited nineteenth-century Americans not only because more of them were going bust, he explains, but also
because their attitudes toward ambition were changing....An American

with no prospects or plans, with nothing to look forward to, almost ceases
to exist....Failure is the lost horizon of American manhood (Losers 13;
20; 87).
The above nineteenth-century narratives thus tap into an issue that
would saturate American culture from the 1820s through the 1850s, and
that predominates in the narratives I will examine over the course of this
book: what had become of the nations gold bullion? In one respect, of
course, this was a question that occupied political economists and more
general social commentators, especially during periods of economic panic,
when the specie reserves of the nations banks dwindled and the value of the
paper money in circulation plummeted. Writing during the Panic of 1819,
the first fiscal panic to affect the nation as a whole, James Swan put it thus:
Let us reason a little on the present scarcity of silver and gold coin: whatever be the cause of that scarcity[,] whether it be real or fictitious, whether
it has been sent abroad, or been concealed at home from fear or bad intentionswe are without it (Address 12). Nearly twenty years later, concerns
about the nations supplies of gold bullion had only increased in intensity.
Echoing Swans concern that Americas hard currency has been siphoned
away to other countries, William Gouge explained that the problem was
the use of paper money as a circulating medium. As he explained in his
influential treatise, A Short History of Paper Money and Banking (1833): A
hundred years ago, the chief feature in the commercial policy of nations,
was the amassing of gold and silver, as a kind of wealth par excellence. Now,
he is the wisest statesman, who is most successful in driving the precious
metals from a country....Eagles have disappeared for the same reason that
dollars have disappeared. Whenever Bank notes are used, no more specie is
retained in a country than is necessary for transactions of a smaller amount
than the least denominations of paper....It has been found impossible in
England to make sovereigns and one pound notes circulate currently; and
we all know that small notes in the United States have not only driven away
gold coins, but also such silver coins as are of a higher denomination than
half a dollar (67; 107).
For Gouge as for many others, the demand for specie in countries that
did not use paper money necessarily resulted in the inexorable exit of hard
money out of the United States and into the coffers of foreign merchants
and their banks. Worse, the absence of hard money within the United States
resulted in economic instability. As Gouge also argued in the same text: In
foreign countries the paper of [U.S.] Banks will not pass current. The holders of it, therefore, present it for payment. The Banks finding their paper
returned, fear they will be drained of coin, and call upon their debtors to
11
12
Introduction
repay what has been advanced to them....The circle extends through society. Multitudes become bankrupt, and a few successful speculators get possession of the earnings and savings of many of their frugal and industrious
neighbors (25).
Such proclamations were the product of a long-running debate over
the new economy initiated by Alexander Hamilton in the early 1790s over
the vociferous objections of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other
Republicans. Insisting that the country needed a means of creating cash
in order to compete on a world stage, Hamilton created a national bank
with the powers to fund a national debt and to forward credit in the form
of banknotes and paper money without relying on an actual gold standard.
The Jeffersonian opposition to these measures centered on the argument
that real material value inhered only in actual specie (gold and silver), while
paper money and banknotes not backed by specie offered the mere illusion of value. For example, in a pamphlet titled The Bank Torpedo, or Bank
Notes Proved to be a Robbery on the Public, and the Real Cause of Distresses
Among the Poor...(1810), Benjamin Davies claimed, There is nothing
on which men more generally agree, than on what is called the right of
property....But how can he enjoy this right, while the Bankers are suffered
to use paper, lieu of gold and silver [?] Does it require any more labor to
fabricate a note, than to counterfeit money? Do not then the Bankers enjoy
the benefit of labor without laboring themselves? (10). Such arguments
were echoed by a range of critics in the years before and after the Panic
of 1819, each of whom decried a system in which a proliferating number
of state banks were not backed by actual capital but instead specialized in
transactions based on intangible, paper forms of value (such as banknotes
and corporate stocks) and persisted in the policy begun during the War of
1812 of refusing specie payment on demand. Even the Bank of the United
States, rechartered in 1816 to rein in these state banks by enforcing specie
payments, cashed in on the boom by overextending its own loan line, especially in western banks involved in land speculation. Rather than provide
stability, the U.S. Bank added to a precarious and absurdly circular situation:
any bank pressed for specie would be forced to demand repayment from
debtors, most of whom were unable to pay except in notes held on banks
that had no specie reserves.10
The bullionist stance was intensified in the 1830s by Andrew Jackson
and his high-profile war against the U.S. Bank and its president, Nicholas
Biddle. Backing Jacksons 1832 veto of the bill to recharter the Bank, as well
as his 1833 decision to remove the federal deposits from it and redistribute
them to smaller state banks, hard money Democrats depicted a corrupt
economy floating precariously on the airy foundation of uncertain promises.
Concerns about a floating bubble economy are central to numerous satiric

narratives about the tensions between paper money and gold. For example,
in a pamphlet titled Specie Humbug (1837), the narrator relates his plan for
a bank founded on the great principle of making money out of nothing
(Specie 6); in Colloquy Between a Bank Note and a Gold Coin (1835),
the two forms of currency debate theories of inherent worth while jostling
around in the pocket of an unnamed citizen (Colloquy 4549). But these
worries are best represented by writers such as Gouge and Theophilus Fisk,
the latter of whom produced two lengthy pamphlets in 1837, both of which
were aimed at explaining the threat that paper money and the banking system posed to the nations core ideals of labor and value. Writing in Labor,
the Only True Source of Wealth, Fisk claims that the most respected people
in the new economy are the air bubble paper money nobility which considers honest labor fit only for serfs and bondmen (Labor 56). Similarly,
in The Banking Bubble Burstwhere he quotes at length from Gouge and
British writer William Cobbetts Paper Against Gold (1822)Fisk argues
thus: Bank notes are not moneythey are only promises to pay money.
They pass as money so long as the credit of the institution from which they
are issued remains unimpaired; but this is easily deranged, and then they
are comparatively worthless, having no intrinsic value whatever....[P]aper
money produces nothing but an army of consumers (who fabricate it) and
who diminish the real wealth of the country in exact proportion to the number of those who live without labor. The president, cashiers, clerks, &c. &c.,
do nothing but consume the wealth others have earned; consumption is the
end of production (Banking Bubble 3637; 40).
Elaborating on Jacksons warning in his 1837 Farewell Address that [I]f
your currency continues as exclusively paper as it now is, it will foster [the]
eager desire to amass wealth without labor (Farewell 302), Fisk depicts a
dystopian society based on pure consumption. From this perspective, the
notion of self-possession rooted in labor and a correspondingly reliable form
of specie value has given way to a dispossessed, laborless model of selfhood,
one that is not only insubstantial but also, perhaps inevitably, self-consuming.
The debates over gold were made particularly dramatic in many of the
political cartoons produced in response to the periods banking controversies. For example, in an 1833 image entitled The Doctors Puzzled or the
Desperate Case of Mother U.S. Bank (figure 1), Jackson is depicted as a wise
medical practitioner who looks on with bemused satisfaction from a rear
window as a corpulent U.S. Bank is purged of its specie reserves (this is
the missing money Lippard refers to some years later in The Quaker City).
Pro-Jackson in orientation, the image suggests that Jacksons 1833 order for
the withdrawal of federal funds from the Bank and their placement into
13
Figure 1 The Doctors Puzzled or the Desperate Case of Mother U.S. Bank. 1833 published by Anthony Imbert.
Lithograph on wove paper; 28 x 39.2 cm. Reproduced with permission of the American Antiquarian Society.
state banks (actions signaled here by the broken vials on the floor in front
of the vomiting Mother Bank) will save the nations specie from the corrupt
clutches of Bank president Nicholas Biddle and return it into the hands of
honest workingmen. Dn that Doctor Jackson, Biddle says as he straddles
the Bank, seeking to comfort her. This is the effect of his last prescription.
For the Biddle of this image, the loss of gold bullion means a curtailing of
speculative excess; for Jackson, it means a chance to recover the nations
integrity by retrieving its lost gold.
Anti-Jackson images also relied on fantasies of treasure saved or restored.
For example, in an 1833 lithograph titled Troubled Treasures (figure 2), we
see a reversal of the dynamic offered in The Doctors Puzzled. Here it is
Jackson who is bent over and vomitingin this case, he is expelling his veto
of the U.S. Bank, this while a devil figure makes off with the $200 million
in Treasury funds that Jackson had threatened to withdraw from the Bank.
The implication here is that the nations treasure has actually been saved as
a result of Congressional resistance to Jacksons fiscal policies. Similarly, in
Capitol Fashions for 1837 (1837), Jacksons successor, Martin Van Buren, is
caricatured as wearing a cloak trimmed with Shinplaster banknotes, the
mocking term for the small-denomination banknotes that were circulated
during the 1837 Panic in an unsuccessful effort to compensate for the run
on the nations specie reserves (figure 3). I like this cloak amazingly, says
a vain Van Buren, for now I shall be able to put into execution my designs
without being observed by every quising [sic], prying Whig. The joke here
is that Van Buren seems unaware that his hard-money banking policies have
failed, and that, as Americas specie reserves are being drained away, the
nation is increasingly reliant on unstable paper currencies. This is driven
home both by his aside that this kind of Trimming is rather light, not so
good as Gold (emphasis in original), and even more so by the image to his
left, in which we see a large audience streaming into a theater in order to
catch a glimpse of A Real Gold Coin The Last In This Country. Once more,
it is the seeming scarcity of gold that is located at the heart of the nations
problems, both fiscal and social.
This perceived lack of gold bullion is perhaps why the fairy tale Jack
and the Beanstalk was popular in America in the first half of the nineteenth
century (the related Jack the Giant Killer was also a popular stage production).11 The tale almost always begins with a description of young Jack as
profligate and lazy, so much so that his widowed mother is forced to desperate measures to support the two of them. Oh! you wicked child, she says
in one text from the early 1840s.12 [B]y your ungrateful course of life you
have at least brought me to beggary and ruin! Cruel, cruel boy! I have not
money enough to purchase even a bit of bread for another daynothing
15
Figure 2 Troubled Treasures. 1833 by R. Bisbee. Lithograph on wove paper; 23.2 x 32.9 cm.
Reproduced with permission of the American Antiquarian Society.
Figure 3 Capitol Fashions for 1837. 1837 by F.J. Winston. Etching on wove paper;
30.1 x 24.4 cm. Reproduced from the Collections of The Library of Congress.
18
Introduction
now remains to sell but my poor cow! (Surprising History 4). Made thus to
feel guilty, Jack volunteers to take the cow to market, and therefore begins
the difficult transition from childhood (and its link to the mother) to manhood (and its location in the commercial world of the father).13 Hence when
Jack is apparently swindled into accepting magic beans instead of money,
we see an image of masculine economic failure, one that would surely have
resonated in antebellum America. (In the first American version of the tale,
The History of mother Twaddle, and the marvellous atchievments [sic] of her
son Jack [1809],14 the man who sells the beans to Jack is a Jew, which is to
say he is a stereotypical symbol of market corruption. Come buy, he says,
dis rare bean for a faring / It pofsefses such virtues dat sure as a Gun / Tomorrow it vill grow near as heigh as de Sun [H.A.C., Mother Twaddle 4].
I will turn more fully to the sensational figure of the capitalist Jew in chapter 3, but suffice it to say here that the deeper one travels into antebellum
sensationalism, the more dramatic the examples of anti-Semitism, and the
more one realizes the centrality of the Jew in American cultures attempt to
imagine its relationship to money).
Jacks bad luck at market is countered, however, by the magical interposition of good fortune. Overnight a beanstalk grows to an impossible height,
and when Jack climbs it he is amazed to find a castle in which resides an evil
giant, who it turns out has killed Jacks father and siblings, and stolen the
family fortune. Having gained your fathers confidence, he knew where to
find all his treasure, the fairy tells Jack. [Y]ou must persevere in avenging
the death of your father, or you will not prosper in any of your undertakings,
but be always miserable (Surprising History 10; 11). In the ensuing scene,
the giants wife lets Jack into her house, and hides Jack from her flesh-eating
husband in her oven. As a result, Jack manages in successive trips up and
down the beanstalk to rob the giant of his goose that lays golden eggs, his
sacks of gold and silver, and his magical singing harp. The image of Jack
that appears in an 1857 version of the story published by John McLoughlin
in New York, in which we see Jack struggling with two bags stamped with
the words SILVER and GOLD (Jack and the Bean Stalk 8), captures the
masculine fantasy of found treasure (figure 4).15 Indeed, especially as staged
in the context of antebellum America, the giant comes to represent both an
Oedipal father figure who must be defeated, and (as with the market Jew)
the abstract, devouring forces of market capitalism that have ruined his
fathers patriarchal agency. Jacks theft from and subsequent slaying of the
giant, meanwhile, suggests a revitalized form of market manhood. In some
versions Jack cuts off the giants head, while in others he chops down the
beanstalk and the giant breaks his neck. Either way, Jacks slaying of the giant
amounts to a return form of symbolic castration, and successful entry into
Figure 4 Image from Jack and the Bean Stalk. 1857 by William Momberger.
Published by John McLoughlin. Reproduced with permission of the
American Antiquarian Society.
20
Introduction
the world of both manhood and capitalism (no more hiding in the maternal
oven for Jack).
Here the fairys words to Jack at the end of an 1856 version of the story
published in New York by H.W. Hewet are suggestive: Now, my dear Jack,
you may take possession of all your fathers property again, as I see that you
will make a good use of it, and become a useful and good man....If you
had remained as idle and lazy as you once were, I should not have exerted
my power to help you to recover your property, and enable you to take care
of your mother in your old age (Jack and the Bean-Stalk 32).16 On the one
hand, the quote suggests that an Algeresque form of pluck and initiative
has rescued Jacks fortunes. But its important to note that Jacks success is
possible only through the fantastical work of the fairy and her beanstalk. In
fact, in early American versions of the story the fairy is often adamant in
explaining to Jack that it is her agency, rather than Jacks, that has brought
about his reversal of fortune. By my power, the bean-stalk grew to so great
a height, and formed a ladder, she says in the The Surprising History of Jack
and the Bean Stalk. I need not add that I inspired you with a strong desire
to ascend the ladder (11). Thus, although Jack is indolent, careless, and
extravagant (4), his is not a story of success and failure proper. Rather, the
tale is a deeply nostalgic fantasy of a premodern form of young manhood,
one guided still by the sort of Fortune and Providence Jameson suggests.
And what this suggests is that the giants gold is quite different from the
money Jack uses to pay for his beans. Discovered only through a magical
form of good fortune, the giants hoarded goldmuch like Captain Kidds
treasure in Poes storyis located outside of, and in many ways precedes, the
modern stage of speculative capitalism that Jacks money inhabits.
The same form of nostalgia informs a version of the Mother Goose narrative from the early 1840s titled The History of old Mother Goose, and the
golden egg (184042).17 In this version of the story, a boy named Jack discovers that the goose he buys at market had laid him / An egg of pure gold
(Mother Goose 1). Not surprisingly, his mother is delighted by this news, and
tells him that he is a good boy. But when Jack seeks to convert his golden
egg into cash, his luck takes a turn for the worse. Jack sold his egg / To a
rogue of a Jew / Who cheated him out of / The half of his due, we are told.
Worse still, the Jew then steals the goose itself: The Jew got the Goose /
Which he vowd he would kill / Resolving at once / His pockets to fill (3).
Here, though, Jacks motherMother Gooseintercedes, and in a magical
narrative resolution she flies off with the goose up to the moon. In this
fantasy, Jack can again be cheated at market (and physically beaten: we learn
that the Jew began to belabour / The sides of poor Jack [4]), but it doesnt
matter. For the narrative insists on a dream rescue of Jacks treasure from
the clutches of the capitalist male (embodied once again in the figure of the
Jew), a conclusion that echoes the outcomes of both Jack and the Beanstalk
and Poes The Gold-Bug. In each case, we see manhood rescued from the
complex and emasculating world of modern market relations. Indeed, it
is only the discovery of gold that seems to satisfy such fantasy needs. This
is why, in stories ranging from Charles Brockden Browns Arthur Mervyn
(17991800) to very recent novels (and their cinematic reproductions) such
as Scott Smiths A Simple Plan (1993) and Cormac McCarthys No Country
for Old Men (2005), the discovery of large caches of paper money leads only
to disaster and masculine failure. Paper money is in these narratives false
treasure, and its dramatic discovery a false triumph that is part and parcel
of the capitalist ethos that real treasurefound goldis able to counter.
Unfortunately, though, while a character such as Jack is able to find his stolen riches at the top of the beanstalk, most of America in the period 181957
was left to wonder who had made off with its supplies of hard money.
Theft and Compensation:

Men and Money in the Sensational Public Sphere
Canonical authors such as Irving and Poe were not the only writers seeking
to tell the story of gold lost and (occasionally and with the help of tremendous luck) found. Rather, stories such as The Gold Bug were intimately
linked with a diverse media, which included not only pulpy works such as
The Quaker City, but also penny press newspapers such as the New York
Herald, stage melodramas such as Boucicaults The Poor of New York, murder pamphlets, lithographs, minstrel songsters, and more.18 Again and again
these sensational texts stage narratives in which male charactersespecially
professional menseek to negotiate the related crises of economic self-possession and gender. I thus suggest that this work consolidates within the
representational space I will refer to here as the sensational public sphere.
Marked by the emergence of penny press newspapers and cheap urbansensation novels, as well as the increasing popularity of magazine fiction,
melodramatic stage productions, and political cartoons, the sensational
public sphere offered a space in which an emergent professional class of
men was able to see itself reflected in a whole range of narratives, virtually
all of which were located at the fraught moment of transition I am describingthat which marks the shift from an older form of mercantile capitalism to the new and much less stable world of the emergent paper economy.
Moreover, the various texts that compose this public sphere appeared with
a frequency and an intensity that reflects what I will suggest is a profound
21
22
Introduction
sense of lost security. For what these stories outline is a notion of masculine
selfhood that turns quite intimately on ones relationship to money. Moreover, it is a form of manhood specific to the context of the boom-and-bust
economy of mid-nineteenth-century America, and thus to the various forms
of cultural production seeking to respond to the shift from mercantilism to
capitalism proper.
By invoking the notion of a sensational public sphere I am thus seeking
to add to recent critical work that complicates and challenges the notion of
a rational public sphere theorized by Jrgen Habermas in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). For Habermas, the public sphere
acted as a space of discourse in which citizens were able to bracket inequalities of status and private concern, and to engage in unrestricted and rational
political discussion devoted to the common good. But, and as critics such
as Nancy Fraser, Mary Ryan, Lauren Berlant, Michael Schudson, and others have made clear, the idealized space Habermas conceives is exclusively
white, male, and bourgeois in orientation, and is in fact structured by the
exclusion of, and in conflict with, alternate publics.19 As Fraser puts it, [T]he
bourgeois public sphere was never the public. On the contrary, virtually contemporaneous with the bourgeois public sphere arose a host of competing
counterpublics, including nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite
womens publics, and working-class publics (Rethinking 7). I want to
argue here that the sensational public sphere is a competing public sphere
of the sort Fraser outlines (7). It is of course true that the emergent professional classes of the antebellum period were predominately white and male,
as well as upwardly mobile in ways that the working classes generally were
not. Accordingly, it might seem as though a discourse oriented around such
a class is reasonably close to the sort of public sphere Habermas describes.
But the sensationalism I am describing is the virtual antithesis of the rational-critical discourse Habermas attributes to the bourgeois public sphere.
Indeed, revolving in large part around the excessive emotions, passions, and
desires of the professional classes, and marked by sensational extremes of
violence, sexuality, fear, and titillation, the sensational public sphere staged
a professional selfhood in the very act of respondingoften poorly, but usually in interesting waysto the intense pressures and anxieties of life under
an emergent and quite unstable capitalist economy. One might say that this
counterpublic acted as the emotionally charged and often irrational underbelly of the periods more properly bourgeois public sphere. This is not,
then, a subaltern counterpublic of the sort Fraser envisions (14), a space
that gives voice to minoritized populations. Instead, the sensational public
sphere provided a new, alternative space for expressing the concerns and
anxieties of the very figurethe professional malethat Habermas associates with a rational sphere of discourse.
A useful example of the print discourse that characterized the antebellum sensational public sphere is offered in the lead story from an 1842
issue of The Weekly Rake, one of many short-lived, tabloid-style rags aimed
primarily at the young men of New Yorks clerking classes.20 Titled The
Dandy and the Soap-Fat Man, the article recounts an assault perpetrated by
a working-class Irish laborer on a finical, conceited fop who not only has
accrued debts throughout town but also has had the poor judgment to challenge the laborer physically (WR 10-1-1842). The real violence of this narrative, however, is contained in the accompanying cartoon (figure 5). Offering
a freeze-frame of Jacksonian class politicswith the Soap-Fat Man embodying the prolabor, anti-Whig posture voiced by Jacksonian critics of paper
money, and the dandy representing the fiscal recklessness of the upwardly
striving professional male and the economic market more generallythe
cartoon suggests that professional masculine selfhood is frequently staged
in terms of humiliation, disempowerment, and a general sense of class instability. But the cartoon also implies that this sensational masculinity is being
negotiated in a very public manner. For while the assault is viewed by the
many clerk types who have gathered to cheer the dandys embarrassment,
it is also subject to re-presentation within the very pages of The Weekly
Rakesomething made overt by the figure of a newsboy in the foreground
of the cartoon, watching the assault and carrying a bundle of the papers
recent issues. The interest the newsboy takes in the action thus tells us what
we already know: that the citys fast-growing market for sensational media
was organized to a great extent around the vociferous class politics of masculine conduct and sensibility. In Public Sentiments (2001), Glenn Hendler
argues that [a]s early as the 1840s, when the ideology of gendered separate
spheres was being forcefully inscribed in American culture, sentiment and
male embodiment were already being deployed together as part of a public discourse of political reform and masculine self-fashioning (4344).
Whether packaged as sentimental (Hendlers primary focus), gothic, or
sensational, the masculine postures of affect and self-fashioning Hendler
describes are everywhere in evidence within the sensational public sphere.
And again, they counter the ideal of the traditional bourgeois public sphere,
in which a bourgeois male public could supposedly debate political questions in a purely rational and abstract fashion. Instead, by offering a space
for the depiction of masculine affect, class violence, and fiscal crisis, the
sensational public sphere was forwarding vexed questions of class, gender,
and self-possession into public discourse in new ways.21
At present, most of the critical work on antebellum sensationalism
builds on the historical work of Sean Wilentzs Chants Democratic (1984)
and examines its working-class orientation. For example, this perspective is
poignantly argued by Michael Denning in his seminal work on dime-novel
23
Figure 5 Cover image from The Weekly Rake. 10-2-1842. Reproduced with permission of the American Antiquarian Society.
sensationalism, Mechanic Accents (1987). Who read these stories and what
did they think of them? he asks (27), and goes on to suggest that the majority of these readers were working-class laborers. The dime novels were part
of the popular culture of the producing classes, a plebian culture whose
metaphoric centers of gravity were the honest mechanic and the virtuous
working-girl (46). Dennings reading is echoed by critics such as Eric Lott
in Love and Theft (1993) and Shelley Streeby in American Sensations (2002).
Extending the work of Denning as well as that of historians such as David
Roediger and Alexander Saxton,22 both Lott and Streeby argue that working-class whiteness was the central issue in antebellum mass culture. Focusing on blackface minstrelsy, Lott argues that the minstrel show provided
a kind of fantasy space onto which white, working-class male audiences
could project anxieties about desire and embodiment, while at the same
time gaining vicarious access to these same repressed modes of feeling. As
he explains, [W]hite pleasure in minstrelsy was...a willed attempt to rise
above the stultifying effects of capitalist boredom and rationalization....
It was a rediscovery, against the odds, of repressed pleasure in the body
(14849). For Streeby, meanwhile, the many imperial narratives that appear
within antebellum sensationalismespecially those that revolved about the
U.S.Mexican Warrepresent a complex negotiation of class, gender, and
nativism for (primarily male) working-class readers. [I]nterest in the material and the corporeal makes sensationalism an aesthetic mode that supports an emphasis on laboring bodies and the embodied relationships that
workers have to power, she says. [S]ensationalism is the idiom of many
nineteenth-century working-class cultures (15; 27).
These and other studies are invaluable to our understanding of the
cultural work performed by antebellum sensationalism. But, and as I have
been suggesting, a great many of the stories we see in the periods newspapers, magazines, cheap novels, plays, and (now) canonical fictions revolve
around professional men, whether merchants and clerks or speculators and
confidence men. Sometimes these characters are depicted as positive, morally striving members of the community and nation; other times they are
corrupt villains whose proximity to the economic market have left them
materially and ethically vitiated. Either way, they act as the center of gravity of the sensational public sphere, the representational space that revolves
around the career of the professional classesand especially the professional
maleemerging during the antebellum period. I thus echo Paul Gilmores
suggestion in The Genuine Article (2001) that the focus of critics such as
Lott on mass culture as exclusively (or nearly exclusively) working class
works to obscure[] the active presence of professional and middle-class
audiences (4), as well as a mass cultural sphere that responded to and
25
26
Introduction
helped to figure the periods dramatic economic and social upheavals (6).
As he puts it in describing the emergence of entrepreneurial sensationalist venues such as P.T. Barnums American Museum, In their synthesis of
middle-class respectability and Bowery-born sensational entertainments,
such as minstrelsy, these more middle-class-oriented mass cultural arenas
provided a model for combining older artisanal and genteel paradigms
of gender ideals within a highly commercialized realm (6). For Gilmore,
this mass cultural sphere was particularly noteworthy for the way in which
the representation of race and racial difference worked to bolster a white
middle-class formation he terms literary manhood. I will also pursue the
sensational representation of race in several chapters of this study. But I am
arguing more generally that the sensational public sphere was the discursive
representational space in which a professional manhood was being staged in
an extended and quite vexed relationship with the stage of capital proper
described by Jameson. More specifically, it was the sensational public sphere
that made most evident a form of manhood for which success and failure
have become interiorized psychological conditions.
Exact dates of origin are difficult to pin down, but I argue that the sensational public sphere took shape in April 1836, with the dramatic sales of
penny press newspapers in New York City during the coverage of the Helen
Jewett murder trial.23 As I discuss at length in chapter 4, the case, in which
a young male office clerk was accused of murdering a high-priced female
prostitute, became an immediate sensation, fueling intense but also quite
lurid media coverage and rivalry between papers such as the New York Herald and the New York Sun. These papers took up competing postures toward
the case, offering as they did so a long-running debate about an emergent
white-collar masculinity, about male and female sexuality, and about political economy more generally. Sales of the citys penny papers soared, and a
tabloid-style form of sensationalism was born. Very quickly, writers such
as Poe, Lippard, George Thompson, and Ned Buntline, as well as Nathaniel
Hawthorne and other highbrow writers, all began to adopt the titillating
and affecting mix of gothic horror and sentimentality deployed by the Herald, the Sun, and other papers, as well as their obsessive interest in the career
of the professional male.24
In designating a sensational public sphere, I therefore hope to encompass the range of material that consistently tapped into the psychological
undercurrentsthe desires, fantasies, and anxietiesof antebellum capitalist culture, especially as experienced by the emerging professional classes
that were so often the central subjects of this material. In doing so, I am
arguing that much of this psychological work revolves around a fairly particular logic, wherein sensationalism seeks to rewrite masculine insolvency
by providing what I will term compensatory fictions. Indeed, the central

premise of this book is that the sensational public sphere offers narratives
that engage in a kind of psychic trade-off, wherein the absence of American
gold (or American money, as Poe puts it) is countered with other, compensatory forms of currency and value. And what these alternate forms
of currency provide is a kind of fantasy redress for the failed or imperiled
manhood of the new paper economy. Thus while characters such as Wolfert
Webber and George Shelby are forced to discover the compromised and vulnerable nature of manhood in the era of paper money, the fiction itself seeks
to provide readers with alternative solutions to the crisis of male selfhood
everywhere evident in this material. For, in fact, the narrative of treasure
actually found that we see in tales such as The Gold-Bug or Jack and the
Beanstalk is relatively unusual: amidst the climate of financial unrest, antebellum writers were inventing new ways of imagining a stable (and usually
male) selfhood, one that might rewrite the sense of failure faced by so many
of the professional men depicted within the periods sensationalism.
In Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture (1979), Jameson suggests
that works of mass culture must of necessity offer some genuine shred of
fantasy content to consumers as they confront the alienating effects of life
under capitalism (144). For Jameson, this means giving voice to genuine
social and historical content, or, more abstractly, to what he describes as the
deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of a social order longing for collectivity or Utopia (144). Thus he suggests that part of the lure of
a mass culture phenomenon such as Steven Spielbergs Jaws (1975) lies in its
ability to tap into the image of an older, more traditional America (figured
in the salty World War II veteran and small business owner Quint)even as
this image of national cohesion is killed off by the giant shark as leviathan,
and replaced by the new alliance between technological corporate capitalism and bureaucratic law enforcement (embodied in the characters Hooper
and Brody). Similarly, he suggests that films such as The Godfather (1972)
and Godfather II (1974) hinge on the fantasy content of the ethnic family,
even as it displaces the role of corporate capitalism onto the scapegoated
Mafia. This sort of reading might well be available in the works of various antebellum writers (for example, the famous A Squeeze of the Hand
chapter in Moby-Dick certainly offers a counter to the ruthless drive of the
American capitalism Ahab embodies). But I am more concerned with the
way antebellum sensationalism often seeks to compensate readers with narratives in which male characters heal the psychic wounds of fiscal crisis.
For in doing so, what these narratives reflect is a longing for the kind of
stable selfhoodand indeed the social cohesionthat have been stolen by
modern capitalism and the new economy: hence, again, the lure of treasure
27
28
Introduction
in so many sensational narratives. But in the absence of treasure found,

antebellum sensationalism seeks to answer to the felt sense that American
manhood has lost a precious, essential part of itselfits very potencyby
imagining alternate forms of male selfhood. Thus, while I am not engaging
with notions of a collective unconscious according to Jameson, I am interested in the way mass cultureand especially the sensational public sphere
of antebellum Americaengages readers with compromise strategies that
offer fantasy solutions to life in capitalist culture, solutions that often tap
into libidinal psychological currents running beneath the surface level of
conscious modern life.
My thinking here takes off from the following insight David Leverenz
offers in Manhood and the American Renaissance, one we might take as axiomatic for the literary and cultural production of the early national and antebellum periods: [A]ny intensified ideology of manhood is a compensatory
response to fears of humiliation. Thus, for Leverenz, manhood becomes a
way not of dominating, but of minimizing maximum loss (4; 73). I want to
extend Leverenzs insight to show how the sensational public sphere is one
of the key sites within which such compensation is offered, and the dramatic
losses of the paper money period are minimiz[ed]. Other critics of nineteenth-century sensationalism have suggested related readings. For example,
in Mechanic Accents Denning suggests that the mid- and late-nineteenthcentury dime novel revolves around a specific form of fantasy compensation
for working-class readers, in which powerlessness finds imagined redress
in stories of social alchemy. The dime novels that elicit allegorical readings
in order to make sense of them are novels of disguise, he argues. [T]he
stories of tramps who are discovered to be heirs, and of working girls who
become ladies. All depend on magical transformations to compensate the
impossibility of imagining realistic actions by powerful agents (74). Thus,
for Denning, dime-novel sensationalism rewrites the story of working-class
disempowerment by repeatedly staging narratives that are not unlike the
sorts of fairy tales I cite above. Just as Jack magically ascends the beanstalk
in order to retrieve his lost family fortune, the characters Denning examines
perform impossible shifts of class status and agency as a means of answering
to the fantasy needs of working-class readers unable to achieve such change
in their own lives.
This book suggests that the sensational public sphere is engaged in a
similar process of fantasy resolution. Specifically, I show how sensationalism performs a kind of dual task, in which readers see both economic
crisis, and its compromise resolution. One of my main goals is therefore to
demonstrate how this material seeks tirelessly to project fiscal crisisand
more specifically, capitalist desireonto figures of Otherness such as the
Jew and the speculator, suggesting thereby that it is they who have stolen
away the kind of fiscal security that went along with the nations supplies
of gold bullion. This, indeed, is one of the prime forms of cultural work
performed by the sensational public sphere, and it is without doubt one of
the primary reasons this material was so popular. Quite simply, these texts
allowed a reader to see his own complicity in the capitalist system embodied in a figure of recognizable alterity: not only the speculator and the Jew,
but also the libertine and rake; the always sexually charged black male; the
female prostitute and other threatening females; gothic figures of Otherness
such as Irvings Headless Horseman; even Melvilles Bartleby. These are all
sensational characters who absorb, crystallize, and help manage the forms
of pleasure and enjoyment that we see circulating, often madly and excessively, within the world of sensationalism, and the sensational public sphere
more specifically. Indeed, they are a kind of symptom, one expressed widely
and variously throughout the sensational public sphere in what we might
think of as the messy psychological aftermath of the primal scene staging
the embarrassing intimacies of men and treasure.
In The Clerks Tale (2003), Thomas Augst examines a range of diaries
maintained by young professional men in the antebellum period, and argues
that they reflect the painstaking efforts of the periods emergent class of
white-collar men to fashion an interior and disciplined form of selfhood.
Arguing that the clerks life was measured, often obsessively and frequently
quite anxiously, against the presence of his moral Other, he suggests that
[f]or middle class men, free time was not merely a privilege, but a moral
test (58; 62). And certainly the periods advice books for young men stress
the need for self-control. Again and again writers such as Henry Ward
Beecher, William Alcott, Daniel Wise, and Timothy Shay Arthur warned
against excess expenditure of finances, sexual energy, and even emotion.
always let your expenditure be less than your income, writes
Daniel Wise in an altogether typical passage from these tracts. Deny thyself,
in little as in great things, is a necessary condition of prosperity (Young
146; caps and emphasis in original). But the periods sensational public
sphere suggests that many if not most young professional men failed the
test Augst describes. For what this material performs is a panicky and often
guilty unease about the very excesses, lusts, and appetencies said to have
supplanted the putative security of a gold-backed form of selfhood. Indeed,
from the mercurial Ichabod Crane in Irvings 1819 The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow (whose devouring minds eye signals his desire to sell off the Van
Tassel estate for cash [SB 279; 280]), to the racy pages of The Weekly Rake,
to the notorious Mr. Tickels in George Thompsons gritty 1849 urban gothic
novel, Venus in Boston (one of the those wealthy beasts whose lusts run riot
29
30
Introduction
on the innocence of young females [11]), male desire and capitalist desire
are the sine qua non of the periods sensationalism.
And this goes for the many characters (persecutory creditors, misers and
hoarders, and so on) whose obsessive, clutching relationship to money
especially gold bullionis excessive, even disgusting, precisely because of
its negative relationship to circulation. This negative form of avarice is often
embodied in the figure of the Jew, and usually the Jewish usurer. The above
passage depicting Gabriel Von Gelt gazing with delight upon a chest of gold
partakes of this tendency, as does the rogue of a Jew who swindles Jack and
tries to steal his goose in the Mother Goose narrative. But Gentile figures such
as the old miser in Melvilles The Confidence-Man (1857) are represented
as equally negative and problematic. My gold, my gold! Ugh, ugh, ugh! the
miser cries out after being duped into giving over his ten hoarded eagles to
the stranger without receiving a receipt for his supposed investment (104).
Indeed, Jew or otherwise, the miser and similar figures of hoarding place
us in the terrain of filthy lucre, that site which Freud famously outlines in
theorizing the symbolic links between money and excrement. We know
that the gold which the devil gives to his paramours turns into excrement
after his departure, Freud says, and the devil is certainly nothing else than
the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life. We also
know about the superstition which connects the finding of treasure with
defaecation, and everyone is familiar with the figure of the shitter of ducats (Character 9: 174). Gold, he goes on to say in a related discussion of
dreams in folklore, is seen in the most unambiguous way to be a symbol of
faeces (Dreams 12: 187). Christopher Herbert suggests that the contradiction Freud points to, in which an object as socially significant as gold is
linked with that cultures most repulsive form of filth, reflects the fact that
Christianity idealizes poverty and anathematizes money (Filthy 190).
Quoting the biblical moment when Paul in the First Epistle to Timothy says
that a pious man must be not greedy of filthy lucre, Herbert explains that
The Victorian worship of money, rooted though it is in Protestant culture,
is shot through with the dread and aversion that such passages enjoin upon
all faithful believers (190).
Herberts discussion is useful for understanding the seeming contradiction we often see in antebellum American sensationalism. Though, as I have
been suggesting, gold was for many the longed-for embodiment of fiscal
and social stability, its accumulation could also be perceived as unclean or
pathological. This was especially true for Whig-Republicans opposed to the
hard-money postures of Jackson, Van Buren, and other Democrats. Consider, for example, the strain of humor that informs political cartoons such
as Treasury Note (1837) and Cleansing the Augean Stable (1844) (figures 6
and 7). In each, the joke revolves around the imagined relation between
Figure 6 Treasury Note. 1837 by Napolean Sarony. Printed and published by H.R. Robinson. 25 x 44.2 cm; lithograph on wove paper.
Reproduced with permission of the American Antiquarian Society.
Figure 7 Cleansing the Augean Stable. 1844 by H. Bucholzer. Lithograph with water color on wove paper; 30.1 x 44 cm.
Reproduced from the Collections of The Library of Congress.
feces and the mint drop coins issued by Van Buren during the Panic of
1837, in response to a shortage of hard money after the suspension of specie payments by New York banks on May 10, 1837. In the image to the
right of Treasury Note, we see Jackson depicted as an ass excreting mint
drops as Van Buren collects them in a hat. In Cleansing the Augean Stable,
presidential candidate Henry Clay and various other Whigs, such as Daniel
Webster and John C. Calhoun, shovel piles of mint drops from the floor of
the newly vacated White House. Clearly, for some, the Jacksonian fetish for
gold was no better than the excess greed of the speculator. Indeed, as a shitter of ducats, Jackson is here guilty of a relationship to hard money that is
both morally corrupt and pathological. Thus, whether male capitalist desire
was represented in relation to paper money (the speculator) or hoarded
money (the miser and usurer), what we see within the periods sensationalism is an attempt to negotiate the problem of desireand especially male
desireunder capitalism.
The forms of psychological management and negotiation I am describing within sensationalismin which we see projected onto sensational figures of alterity the linked and sometimes contradictory anxieties about (on
the one hand) the felt theft of an older, mercantilist way of life and (on the
other hand) the excess desires of capitalismare usefully captured in the
dynamic of projection Slavoj iek terms the theft of enjoyment. As he
explains in a well-known passage:
What we gain by transposing the perception of inherent social antagonisms
into the fascination with the Other (Jew, Japanese...) is the fantasy-organization of desire. The Lacanian thesis that enjoyment is ultimately always
enjoyment of the Other, i.e. enjoyment supposed, imputed to the Other, and
that, conversely, the hatred of the Others enjoyment is always the hatred of
ones own enjoyment, is perfectly exemplified by [the] logic of the theft of
enjoyment. What are fantasies about the Others special, excessive enjoymentabout the blacks superior sexual potency and appetite, about the
Jews or the Japaneses special relationship towards money and workif not
precisely so many ways for us to organize our own enjoyment? Do we not
find enjoyment precisely in fantasizing about the Others enjoyment, in this
ambivalent attitude toward it? (Tarrying 206; emphasis in original)
ieks insights about this process of theft are especially interesting when
thinking about the fiscal anxieties of the antebellum period. As I have been
suggesting, it is the very notion of theft or loss that informs this cultures
relationship to money, and to the economy more generally. How else to
explain the continuing obsession with treasure and lost gold during the
33
34
Introduction
period? Gold, that illusive and quite magical substance, represents the very
way of life that has been (or is believed to have been) stolen by the new
economy. Hence, one suspects, the power for antebellum readers of Jack and
the Beanstalk, the story of a voracious, flesh-eating giant who has stolen the
family fortune, and whose greatest pleasure is to count the stolen coins each
night before bed. Like the figure of the Jew or the speculator, the giant is the
excessive Other who has stolen our lost enjoyment.
And yet iek makes clear that this ideology of theft also allows for much
that is pleasurable within sensationalism. Indeed, the constant staging of
Otherness that sensationalism specializes in allowed antebellum readers to
fantasize about their own outr forms of desire and enjoyment even as they
denied that this link existed. Thus, although as iek argues, The hatred
of the Other is the hatred of our own excess of enjoyment (Tarrying 206;
emphasis in original), reading about the sensational Other is another matter altogether.25 For what sensational reading provided is a kind of indirect
access to the libidinal world of capitalist desire that is both anxious-making
and, simultaneously, quite titillating. The many depictions of Jack gazing
longingly at the giants gold are in this sense ironically revealing reminders
that the giants obscene covetousness is in fact a mirror image of Jacks own
excessive greedgreed that is of course linked to the youthful capitalist
manhood that Jack, especially in American versions of the story, embodies.
If Jack was pleased at the sight of the silver, how much more delighted he
felt when he saw such a heap of glittering gold! we are told in The Surprising History of Jack and the Bean Stalk (19), a passage highlighted by a telling
image of Jack peering over the giants shoulder at a pile of coins (figure 8).
This, I would suggest, is a somewhat embarrassing moment when the ideology of theft and stolen enjoyment gives way, and we receive a glimpse of
the very excesses it is supposed to mask.
We should therefore understand that while the professional male of
American sensationalism was seeking to deny his own relation to the desires
and appetencies of the paper economy, he was at the same time involved in
an often desperate effort to retrieve this very enjoyment back from the figures of Otherness who have stolen it away from him. This, of course, is one
way to read Jacks return theft of the giants stolen treasure in Jack and the
Beanstalk. In the majority of the periods sensational texts, however, we see a
different process at work, which revolves around the logic of compensation
I am describing. For what antebellum sensationalism much more frequently
provides is the fantasy of enjoyment retrieved, but alsovia a version of the
alchemy Denning describesa fantasy of an enjoyment purged of its more
troubling relations to capitalist desire. Indeed, though antebellum sensationalism is obsessed with figures of Otherness who embody capitalist desire, it
Figure 8 Image from The Surprising History of Jack and the Bean Stalk.
184245[?] published by Turner and Fisher. Reproduced with
permission of the American Antiquarian Society.
36
Introduction
is just as obsessed with inventing narratives through which readers might see
capitalist desire cleansed of its most troubling aspects, and thus returned to
its male characters in saferperhaps launderedform. Put another way,
antebellum sensationalism frequently repackages and defuses male desire in
ways that make its link to capital difficult to see. This compensatory masculinity thus acts as an alternative to the form of manhood we might associate with an earlier, mercantilist periodregardless of whether this form of
manhood ever existed. It is not, in other words, manhood directly linked
to gold and treasure. Rather, knowing that treasure la William Legrands
discovery in The Gold-Bug is unlikely, the sensational public sphere seeks
to forge other, compensatory forms of currency and valuediffering versions of a gold standardfor the professional men of the antebellum period.
This, it seems to me, is the corollary to the fantasy of found treasure, and it
is one of the primary fantasies driving the sensationalism of the antebellum
period.
An example from one of the ensuing chapters might clarify what I am
suggesting here. This is from chapter 2, Shylock on Wall Street: The Jessica Complex in Antebellum Sensationalism. Here I show the compensatory logic at work within the many antebellum sensation narratives that
reimagine the Shylock and Jessica story from Shakespeares The Merchant
of Venice. In particular I argue that the economic tensions that inhere in
American versions of the Shylock characterhis tendency to hoard and
withhold, as though he has himself stolen the nations missing gold bullion;
his excessive and sometimes perverse forms of pleasure and desireare
perhaps most complex when played out in the many texts that reimagine the romantic life of his daughter. Distant cousins of the Jessica narrative, in which Shylocks daughter, having stolen her fathers ducats and
jewels, elopes with the Christian Lorenzo, these sensational stories recur
throughout the period, and are important in two ways. First, they suggest a
fantasy strategy by which the Gentile male might reappropriate the forms
of economic potency and manhood that have been stolen and hoarded by
the sensational Jew. Simultaneously, these updated Jessica stories provide
a means of imagining how the otherwise problematic and alien forms of
passion and desire housed in the Jew might be converted, and smuggled
back into the capitalist world of Gentile culture in less threatening form.
Here, in other words, it is the figure of the Jew that fuels the compensatory
logic I am describing. Streeby shows how sensational narratives about the
U.S.Mexican War and other mid-century imperial encounters, especially
as produced in the urban northeast by writers such as Buntline, tapped into
nativist sensibilities in order to appeal to a working-class audience. I show
here how the language of anti-Semitism offered by Buntline and myriad
other writers performed a similar form of cultural work in imagining

the relationship during this period between professional manhood and the
economic market.
As this example suggests, the sensational logic of masculine compensation cuts across a range of issues, and comes in a variety of packages. But in
each case what we see emerging from the welter of material that comprises
the sensational public sphere is a fairly specific logic whereby professional
manhood is reimagined in terms of an altered relationship to desire. Over
and over again sensationalism stages scenarios in which men are threatened
by a figure of menacing Otherness (the Headless Horseman; creditors, etc.),
even as these texts provide a titillating mix of readerly anxiety and pleasure.
But, and somewhat surprisingly, the result is a narrative convention whereby
we see the conversion of male desire. The goal, of course, is a conversion of
paper money desire into a form of desire somehow associated with a gold
standarda bullionist desire in which value and desire are imagined as
proximate. But in the chaotic world of sensationalism (to say nothing of
the real world of antebellum America), this form of exchange isnt possible.
Instead, the narratives of the sensational public sphere offer a form of fantasy compensation whereby the excess passions of the professional male are
traded for categories of selfhoodGentile; middle-class; whitethat are
themselves the new and improved markers of success and value in corporate America.
But even this is uncertain. For, and as I show in several of the ensuing
chapters, some texts suggest that fantasy compensation is either difficult to
achieve, or unavailable entirely. The result in such cases is a sort of narrative
crisis, where we see the ideological strain that fantasy resolution actually
requires. The most famous such example is Herman Melvilles Bartleby, the
Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853), which I discuss in the epilogue to
this study. Here, the unnamed attorneys narration reflects a kind of desperate effort to retrieve from his enigmatic clerk some portion of his own lost
enjoyment, and to thus rewrite his uneasy sense of Wall Street manhood.
But Bartleby, of course, is a figure of alterity more radical even than the
capitalist Jew, and what we see is that he is in fact resistant to any form of
fantasy closure. And yet this sort of text is, I will argue, just as interesting
and just as important as those that provide what we might think of as successful forms of compensatory fiction. Indeed, the fact that sensationalism of the sort I am describing is uneven and contradictory is simply to
be expected. Less a coherent aesthetic space than an amalgam of materials that addressed the sorts of issuesprofessional manhood, commerce,
desirethat I have been describing, the sensational public sphere was not
ideologically consistent.
37
38
Introduction
The other chapters of this study take up a similar line of analysis. In

chapter 1, I read Washington Irvings The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and
a range of other stories, novels, and plays from the 1819 period in the context of the Panic of 1819. Arguing first that the chronically nervous and
highly gullible Crane is an early embodiment of sensational paper-money
manhood (especially given his desire to sell off the Van Tassel estate for
cash in order to invest in speculative ventures on western lands), I argue
further that the ghostly figure of the Headless Horseman embodies the felt
theft of masculine wholeness and potency experienced by American men
in the 1819 era. Following my discussion of Americanized versions of the
ShylockJessica narrative in chapter 2, I turn in chapter 3 to the role of emotion in the negotiation of a capitalist male selfhood. Looking at a range of
urban sensation produced in the wake of the 1837 Panic (The Quaker City
in particular), I show how this material repeatedly seeks to transform the
crisis of excessive masculine expenditure into problems of masculine emotion and self-management. Affect and humiliation, that is to say, become in
the urban narrative (especially the urban gothic) a new and compensatory
form of male specie, one that brings with it the cultural prestige of a sentimentalized and recognizably middle-class manhood.
I pursue a related narrative about masculine anxiety in chapter 4, with
a discussion of the 1836 penny press news coverage of the Jewett murder,
which I describe above. Focusing in particular on the obsessive coverage of
the murder in James Gordon Bennett Jr.s New York Herald, I suggest that
the prostitute Jewett acted for Bennett as a figure of sensational Otherness
and theft much like the Headless Horseman, the Jew, or the paper money
con man, in particular as she came to embody the periods frightening paper
economy. But I suggest as well that the murderer Robinson acted as a kind
of male proxy for Bennett in his imagined efforts to retrieve the very manhood that she has stolen, a fact that complicates his depictions of the murder
considerably. Nor, I argue, is Bennetts an isolated representational strategy.
As I show in a concluding section of this chapter, Nathaniel Hawthornes
The Blithedale Romance (1852) stages a similar form of market allegory,
in which female characters such as Priscilla (especially as the Veiled Lady)
and Zenobia act as overwhelming and at times monstrous versions of the
speculative economy for many of the novels male characters.
I continue my examination of Hawthorne in chapter 5, as I look at a
sensational subgenre I refer to as the bank romance. Reading Hawthornes
The House of the Seven Gables (1851) alongside urban Wall Street novels
such as by J.B. Joness The City Merchant; or the Mysterious Failure (1851),
I suggest that the sensational black body so frequently deployed within this
material acts as a site onto which to project fears about the capitalist male,
and thus about economic failure. Here, in other words, the black male plays
the role performed by the Jew and other figures of Otherness in antebellum
sensationalism; simultaneously, the category of whiteness comes to act as a
kind of compensatory gold standard for masculine selfhood. But I show as
well how sensational narratives that promise fantasy forms of whiteness also
reveal the blurred edges at the boundaries of such racial categories. For just
as the gold standard is in truth illusoryan agreed-upon fictionso too
is the sensational fantasy of whiteness a cultural myth, one writers such as
Hawthorne seem to both believe in and undermine in their fictions.
As this overview suggests, it is the attempt to render the excesses of capital somehow comprehensible that is really the key mark of sensationalism as
I understand it. Sensationalismespecially the material offered within the
sensational public sphereacted as a key fantasy space for members of the
professional classes in antebellum America. Indeed, I would suggest that, as
a whole, sensationalism does work fairly similar to that of fairy tales such as
Jack and the Beanstalk. Here again I turn to Dennings provocative comparisons of working-class dime-novel narratives to fairy tales such as Cinderella.
Suggesting that the magical transformation often offered within these stories (from working girl to heiress, for example) responds to the powerlessness of working men and women, Denning argues that such forms of
wish-fulfillment offer a utopian vision of reorganized society (Mechanic
19596). The sensationalism I am describing, while targeting a different
demographic than Dennings working-class material, is also committed to
strategies of wish fulfillment and fantasy resolution as a means of redressing
a pervasive sense of social powerlessness. We are not here in the realm of the
liberating magic Walter Benjamin ascribes to the fairy tale (Illuminations
102), but it may be that we are close to the qualities Ernst Bloch suggests
when he says that they provide an immature, but honest substitution for
revolution (Hope 368). The tales within the sensational public sphere are
often similarly immature, but they also offer a similar form of alternative to
social upheaval. What they offer is compensation. Return payment for a felt
sense of loss, sensationalism helps imagine an adaptive selfhood, one reorganized to confront the troubling realities of life in mid-nineteenth-century
America. In this, sensationalism acknowledges that, as Sandage puts it, the
only identity deemed legitimate in America is a capitalist identity (Losers 5).
But, I argue, it also allows its consumers to envision an imaginary resolution
to the problem of masculine failure so pervasive under the sign of capitalist
identity.
This compensatory logic is why the oft-staged fantasy glimpse of Americas fiscal primal scenethe embrace of men and treasureis so important
and so interesting. For it reminds us of Americas very deep-seated and libid-
39
40
Introduction
inal relationship with the economic system of capitalism, and the role that
sensationalism played in representing and negotiating this relationship. Like
a primal scene, antebellum sensationalism often provides us with a discomfiting glimpse of our economic originsa glimpse, that is to say, of the origins of a selfhood based on the market-inflected ideologies of success and
failure. The ensuing chapters will focus on the logic of compensation I am
describing here, but it is worth reiterating that this logic stems directly from
these primary fantasies about treasure and male selfhood. Indeed, while, in
a fantasy of masculine ascension, most nineteenth-century American versions of Jack and the Beanstalk imagine Jack and his mother living happily
ever after following the death of the giant, the sensationalism of this period
reflects the knowledge that the modern, paper money male must resort to
alternative narratives of male success. This book examines some of the more
prevalent versions of these alternatives. Fantasies in their own right, they
militate against the specter of economic failuresomething every bit as terrifying as the giant that Jack is able in his great luck to slay.
Epi l o g u e
Bartlebys Bank
I mean no mischief, seek the gratification of no heartless curiosity, thought I; besides,
the desk is mine, and its contents, too, so I will make bold to look within....The
pigeon holes were deep, and removing the files of documents, I groped into their
recesses. Presently I felt something there, and dragged it out. It was an old bandanna
handkerchief, heavy and knotted. I opened it, and saw it was a savings bank.
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street
One of the most fascinating representations of money in the antebellum

sensational public sphere comes in Herman Melvilles Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853). This is the moment when the storys
attorney-narrator discovers in the recesses of Bartlebys desk a small savings bank that has been hidden way inside of an old bandanna handkerchief, heavy and knotted (110). This is not a cache of treasure. Rather, it
is money stored and maintained as a hedge against the vicissitudes of the
Wall Street world of speculative economic activity that is the storys setting.
And, judging at least from the weight of the bundle, it seems as though the
contents of this bank is primarily hard currency. It is, that is to say, a form
of money quite different from the thirty-two dollars in paper bills that
the exasperated attorney attempts to give to Bartleby as a kind of severance
pay, but which Bartleby refuses (116). Why, the attorney exclaims upon
returning to his office and discovering that Bartleby has not left the premises, you have not even touched the money yet (119). Understood in the
context of the periods discourse of political economy, Bartlebys refusal to
touch[] the money suggests a crisis for the narrator: unwilling to accept
or even make contact with the attorneys proffered bills, Bartleby displays an
unwillingness to partake of the paper system itself. His is, it would seem, a
mercantilist mind-set, one that reflects a desire to resist the ceaseless circulation and exchange of modern capitalism. The attorney, meanwhile, who as
a conveyancer does a snug business among rich mens bonds and mortgages
183
184
Epilogue
and title-deeds (93), is the very embodiment of this new capitalism. Indeed,
while the attorney makes the provocative comment that he likes the name
John Jacob Astor because it rings like unto bullion (93), he is himself no
bullionist when it comes to political economy. The attorneys unexpected
discovery thus stages a question that we have seen in various other texts
throughout this study, both Wall Street narratives such as The City Merchant, and more general forms of sensationalism such as The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow and The Quaker City: how do the tensions between an older
form of mercantilism and a modern form of capitalism influence and shape
professional manhood in antebellum America?
In a brilliant reading of this story, Gillian Brown suggests that Bartleby
who of course perishes at storys end when he refuses to eatis analogous to
the very disturbing figure of the anorectic; seeking to control desire and thus
maintain some sort of insulation and self-possession against the intrusions
of the marketplace, Bartleby, like the anorectic, refuses to consume (Domestic 18995). But while Bartleby might, as Brown argues, provide a disturbing
mockery of sentimental self-possession (192), we need to understand as well
the way in which Bartlebys resistant stance poses a more general threat to
the very form of white-collar professional selfhood the attorney represents.
For although Bartleby might be thought of as a fairly powerful figure of
renunciation, we might also understand him as a figure of theft similar to those we have seen throughout this study. Indeed, much as with the
other sensational versions of Otherness I have examined herethe Headless
Horseman, the capitalist Jew, and the appetitive black male, and so onBartleby seems to have access to modes of enjoyment that the attorney believes
he has either lost, or has had stolen from him. Saving rather than spending,
renunciatory rather than greedy, Bartleby is a figure of alterity both to the
attorney, and to the paper money man of antebellum America.
Hence, it seems to me, the feelings of anxiety and even terror that Bartleby evokes in the attorney. For the attorney is haunted by Bartleby, much
in the way that Ichabod Crane, Irvings representative paper money man of
the 1819 era, is haunted by the horrific and castrating figure of the Headless
Horseman. Described variously as the apparition in my room (122) and
this man, or rather ghost (123) who persists in haunting the building
(125), Bartleby makes gothic the scene of Wall Street precisely because he
represents a return of the repressed for the attorney narrator: [H]e was
always there, the attorney says (107; emphasis in original). And, as Naomi
Reed rightly suggests, Bartleby is apparitional precisely in that he is a figure
for the specterlike nature of the commodity in its alienated form (Specter
24763).
But Bartleby is also ghostly in that he is a figure of the uncanny nature of
Bartlebys Bank
the attorneys own desires, which is to say that the attorney is haunted by his
clerk precisely because Bartleby is a figure for his lost enjoyment, returned to
him now in familiar but unrecognized form. And again, much of this seems
to revolve around the attorneys discovery of Bartlebys savings bank. My
first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity, he tells
us shortly after his search of Bartlebys desk. [B]ut just in proportion as the
forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same
melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our
best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that it does not (111).
Here, the certain special case[] is Bartleby, but Bartleby as linked to the
periods political economy. For what he calls attention to are the attorneys
own excessive capitalist desires. iek describes a similar form of inversion
in accounting for American anxieties about the Japanese in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. Citing the general sense in the United States that the Japanese dont consume enough, he argues that the real psychological problem
stems from the perception that their very relationship between work and
enjoyment is strangely distorted. It is as if they find an enjoyment in their
very renunciation of pleasure (Tarrying 2056; emphasis in original). Bartleby too seems, at least from the attorneys perspective, to take a perverse
pleasure in the very renunciation of pleasure. And he is thus a figure of
intense fascination for the attorney, precisely because it is in the scrivener
that he encounters in inverted form his own relationship to the desires, passions, and appetencies of the paper economy itself. This is what the attorney
finds fearful and repulsive.
Thus, while the main question that seems to pervade this story is what
does Bartleby want?, the real topic here is the attorney and his modes of
desire. But this, of course, is what the attorney cant admit to himself, lest
he give conscious articulation to the fact that what he finds repulsive in
Bartleby is in fact the projected image of his own excesses under the sign
of the periods speculative paper economy. What we see instead is a kind of
affective overloada form of panic that is in many ways coincident with
the Wall Street atmospherics of market panic. Indeed, while the attorney
critiques the affective excesses of the murderous debtor John Colt, who as
I mention in chapter 3 became a penny paper sensation in the mid-1840s
(imprudently permitting himself to get wildly excited, the attorney tells us,
[Colt] was at unawares hurried into his final act [120]), he himself gives
over to extremes of emotionality when dealing with Bartleby. I could not,
for the very soul of me, avoid falling into sudden spasmodic passions with
him, he says at one point (107). Describing himself by turns as fearful
(127), fairly flying into a passion (126), and suffering a state of nervous
185
186
Epilogue
resentment (119), the attorney models what we might think of as a kind of

Wall Street hysteriaa condition highlighted late in the story when, after
Bartleby has refused the attorneys offer to lodge at his own house, the attorney flees his Wall Street office altogether. [E]ffectually dodging everyone
by the suddenness and rapidity of my flight, [I] rushed from the building,
ran up Wallstreet towards Broadway, and, jumping into the first omnibus
was soon removed from pursuit (127). Sounding more like gothic maiden
than self-possessed professional, the attorney here reminds us not only that
he is haunted by Bartleby but also, as he twice puts it in an earlier scene,
that he has been unmanned by his clerks uncanny presence in his Wall
Street office (109). For again, like so many texts within the sensational public sphere, this is a story about professional manhood and its vexed status in
antebellum America.
And, at least in the Wall Street world that Melville creates in this story,
manhood remains unstable. For though the dream of recovering lost enjoyment drives a great deal of the sensational material I have described over
the course of this study, Bartleby suggests that the self-and-Other divide
that informs paper money manhood cannot be overcome. Toward storys
end the attorney seeks to deploy the sentimentalizing balm of domesticity,
one that echoes the sought-after closure of a text such as The House of the
Seven Gables. Will you go home with me nownot to my office, but my
dwelling? he asks (127). But Bartleby refuses to be incorporated into the
attorneys private sphere. Instead, intensely located in the world of mid-century professional life, Bartleby gives the lie to the ideology of compensatory
fictions. I know you, he says to the attorney once he has been removed to
the Tombs, and I want nothing to say to you (128). The comment seems
to include both the baffled attorney, and the equally confused reader of the
original version of the story as it appeared in Putnams Monthly in 1853.
Reader, Bartleby seems to be saying, [T]his is not a story in which youll
find fantasy compensation for your concerns about life under modern
capitalism. Whatever precious part of yourself that youre trying to find or
replace cant be found here. Hence the power of the attorneys well-known
final lines: Ah Bartleby! Ah, humanity! (131). Though easily read as indicating a lack of sincerity, they might also reflect a final moment of pained
realization. Perhaps, that is to say, he understands that Bartleby and his
savings bank in fact offered a brief glimpse of a now vanished form of
completed, premarket selfhood. No wonder compensatory fictions were so
pervasive: they helped manage the realization that figures such as Bartleby
and the Headless Horseman would continue to haunt Wall Street, and the
paper money manhood it produced, far into the future.
N o t e s
Introduction

1. Sellers, The Market Revolution; Sandage, Born Losers; Mihm, Nation of Counterfeiters.

2. See, for example, Rotundo, American Manhood; Smith-Rosenberg, Beauty, the
Beast, and the Militant Woman and Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity; Nelson,
National Manhood; Cohen, Unregulated Youth; Ditz, Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity
Imperiled; Gilfoyle, City of Eros; Newfield, The Emerson Effect; Thomas Augst, The
Clerks Tale; Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood; Kimmel, Manhood in America; Stansell, City of Women; and Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes. For a related and
quite useful examination of later-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century manhood,
see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. For valuable overviews of the rise of the
professional middle classes during this period, all of which have been useful to me here,
see Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Classes; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; and
Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women.

3. Nelsons work is, it seems to me, in closest conversation with Christopher Newfields The Emerson Effect, a study that reads the emergent form of liberal masculinity
in the antebellum period through the lens of corporate relations, or what he terms
submissive individualism.

4. For extended analysis of the panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857, see especially Sellers, The Market Revolution. On the relations between Jacksonian economic and social
policy more generally, see Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War; Watson, Liberty
and Power; Rousseau, Jacksonian Monetary Policy; Fabian, Speculation on Distress;
and Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 299325. For insightful readings of nineteenth-century American and British literature in relation to the climate of economic panic, see
David Zimmerman, Panic!; and Gail Turley Houston, From Dickens to Dracula.

5. For a related though quite different reading of the Money Diggers sequence,
see Jennifer Baker, Securing the Commonwealth, 15767.

6. My thanks to Christopher Looby for suggesting Birds text to me.
187
188
Notes to Introduction

7. In a related discussion, Franco Moretti suggests that the hoard of treasure that
Jonathan Harker discovers in Draculas Transylvanian castle should be understood as
old money that the Count has brought back to life in the form of capital. This and none
other is the story of Dracula the vampire, he says. The money of Draculas enemies
is money that refuses to become capital .... It must have...a moral, anti-economic
end....This idea of money is, for the capitalist, something inadmissible (emphasis in
original). Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, 9394.

8. James Thompson also examines this passage in Models of Value, 89, and I owe
my awareness of it to him.

9. There were occasional counters to this longing for gold. Thus Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1729 as the Busy-Body, critiques the peculiar Charm in the conceit of
finding Money by quoting his friend Agricola, who leaves his son a plot of land with
the following caveat: I have found a considerable Quantity of Gold by Digging there;
thee mayest do the same. But Thee must carefully observe this, Never to dig more than
Plow-deep! (Writings of BF 130; 132). For the Franklin of this narrative, in other words,
labor is more important to success than even found gold.
10. For detailed histories of the fiscal crises and bank wars surrounding the panics
of 1819 and 1837, see Sellers, Market, 103201; 30163; Mihm, Counterfeiters, 10356;
and Schlesinger, Age of Jackson.
11. Jack and the Beanstalk was first sold in America in 1809 as the title The History
of Mother Twaddle, and the marvellous atchievments [sic] of her son Jack. For early
American versions of the story aside from the ones I list in the text, see the collection at
the American Antiquarian Society. Note that there are various spellings for Beanstalk
(open, hyphenated, and closed) in the titles of different versions of the text and that I
use these specific styles when discussing individual texts. But note as well that I use the
closed style here and elsewhere when making generic reference to the story.
12. Anonymous, The Surprising History of Jack and the Bean Stalk. Listed in Works
Cited by title.
13. For a compelling Freudian reading of Jack and the Beanstalk, one that has
been useful to me here, see Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, 18393. Bettelheim
also discusses the related Jack and His Bargains, but I have been unable to determine
whether this narrative was commonly read in antebellum America.
14. Listed in Works Cited under H.A.C.
15. Anonymous, Jack and the Bean Stalk. Listed in Works Cited by title.
16. Anonymous, Jack and the Bean-Stalk. Listed in Works Cited by title.
17. Published by William Raine, and listed in the Works Cited under his name.
18. Here I am building on the capacious archival work conducted by David Reynolds in Beneath the American Renaissance. Reynolds argues that the pulpy sensationalism of the antebellum period was located beneath the more refined aesthetic work of
writers such as Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, who were able to draw on this raw material and provide more complicated and ultimately more compelling narratives out of it.
I disagree with the general nature of this claim, and I will be seeking instead to show
how high-culture works such as Bartleby are inextricable from the thick context of
urban novels, short stories, plays, penny newspapers, and other materials that imagine
the lives of professional men. But the value of Reynoldss work is incontestable, and it
has been of considerable use to me here.
Notes to Introduction
19. Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere; Schudson, Was There Ever a Public
Sphere?; Ryan, Women in Public; Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington
City.
20. Other titles include the Sunday Flash, The Whip, and Satirist, the Libertine, and
the New York Sporting Whip. The complete history of these interesting papers has yet to
be written, but for excellent analyses of their cultural impact, see Horowitz, Rereading
Sex, 15993; Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 92139; and Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 92116.
21. Hendler offers a related analysis in Public Sentiments of antebellum temperance
narratives, suggesting that Habermas virtually precludes consideration of the performative, theatrical, and spectacular forms that political discourse took in the Jacksonian
era, and similarly militates against consideration of womens participation in the public
sphere (47). I am suggesting that we understand the periods sensationalismand in
particular the sensational public spherein the sort of performative and spectacular context that Hendler describes.
22. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic.
23. Reynolds argues that the penny news industry is crucial to the rise of a sensationalist aesthetic in nineteenth-century America, and I have benefited from this
background in formulating my understanding of the penny presses and the sensational
public sphere. See in particular chapter 6 of Beneath the American Renaissance, The
Sensational Press and the Rise of Subversive Literature, 169210. There is a wealth of
historiography on the Jewett case, most of which I cite in chapter 4.
24. Various critics have argued that U.S. sensationalism often offers a counter to the
aesthetics of sentimentality, in particular as the former is usually masculine in orientation, while the latter is usually geared toward a feminine audience. See, for example,
Streeby, American Sensations; Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance; and Elmer,
Reading at the Social Limit. But one of the things I hope to do here is show how the
sensational public sphere designates a representational space in which these two discoursesthe sensational and the sentimentaloverlap, and perform a fairly specific
kind of cultural work. Indeed, rather than trying to isolate the sensational, the urban
gothic, or the gothic from the sentimental or the melodramatic, I will be tracing a range
of texts that seek to produce a form of reading that responds affectivelysensationallyto the many crises of capitalist selfhood faced by the modern male of the midnineteenth century. For in fact, as Ann Cvetkovich puts it in her study of the British
sensation novel of the 1860s, sensationalism is not really a distinct genre at all (Mixed
Feelings 14). Rather, it is a discursive formation that informs a range of subgenres, most
of them mass-produced, but some part of the now-canonical literature that bears an
elitist or highbrow stamp. See also in this regard Christopher Looby, who suggests that
the sentimental and the (urban) gothic are in fact thoroughly intertwined in antebellum sensationalism. As he puts it in a compelling discussion of George Thompsons
sensational fiction, [Thompson] wants both to mount a powerful critique of the status
quo and to endorse some of its fundamental values; he wants to affirm sentimental
domestic norms even as he violates them, expose moral hypocrisy even as his fiction
succumbs to it (Romance 653).
25. Eric Lott has shown that the staged excesses of the minstrel show represent a
similar instance of ambivalence for white male audiences. As he puts it in an analysis
189
190
Notes to Chapter One
that is also informed by ieks notion of theft, white subjectivity was and is...absolutely dependent on the Otherness it seeks to exclude and constantly open to transgression, although, in wonderfully adaptive fashion, even the transgression may be
pleasurable (Love 150).
Chapter One

1. In a related discussion, Plummer and Nelson suggest that Crane is an intrusive
male...representative of a bustling, practical New England who threatens imaginatively fertile rural America with his prosaic acquisitiveness (Girls 175). I will be
seeking here to extend this analysis, and I understand this story more accurately as an
attempt by Irving to narrate the debt-based and frequently humiliated forms of masculinity emerging out of the new economy.

2. In An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present Commercial Embarrassments in
the United States (1819), the aptly self-titled Anti-Bullionist argues that a currency
supported by specie was dangerously unstable because cheaper labor elsewhere in the
world would inevitably result in domestic supplies of specie being drawn off to those
markets where labor, and hence commodities, were cheapest. Arguing instead that a
national paper currency not backed by specie reserves would free the country from the
fluctuating value of precious metals and hence from anxieties that specie would disappear from the countrys bank vaults, the writer insists that [W]e must from necessity
abandon the agency of the precious metals, as a check to our circulating medium;
and...a well-regulated paper-money must be established in its stead (Enquiry 2; 7). A
creative variation of this argument was offered by James Swan, who argued in 1819 for
a new form of national paper issued by a national loan office at three percent interest,
one that would replace both specie and the current paper money in circulation. Who
can doubt the solidity of the bills proposed? he asks. The Banks which are now in a
suspension of payment, have not the power to imprint on their bills the value of specie;
but the United States by lending their bills will give to them the action of circulation,
and spread at once over our county, a money really superior in value to the precious
metals (Address 13).

3. For a useful history of the split between more traditionally Jeffersonian Republicans and the emergent National Republicans, see Sellers, Market, 97102.

4. For a useful history of the ensuing Depression of 181922, see Rezneck, The
Depression of 18191822.

5. In this sense The Sketch Book echoes Burkes lament in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) over the fate of Marie Antoinette and, as Claudia Johnson puts
it, the fall of sentimentalized manhood, the kind of [chivalric] manhood inclined to
venerate her (Equivocal 4).

6. This vulgarity is even more evident in the depiction we receive of the citizens
two sons, who seem to represent a posterity that is if anything further removed from
Federalist masculinity. They were arrayed in the extremity of the mode, Crayon tells
us of the mans offspring, with all that pedantry of dress, which marks the man of
questionable pretensions to style....Art had done everything to accomplish them as
Notes to Chapter Two
men of fashion, but nature had denied the nameless grace [of the] true gentlemen (SB
82).

7. In a compelling study of Irvings use of the bachelor type in his negotiation of
masculinity and an emergent form of American authorship, Bryce Traister contends
conversely that Ichabods appetite is here a metaphor for sublimated sexual desire,
wherein the bachelors motivating sensuality is represented as appetitive and consuming, rather than sexual and procreative (Wandering 118). For another discussion of
Irving in relation to masculinity and bachelorhood (one that does not include Sleepy
Hollow), see Banks, Washington Irving, 25365.

8. For a reading of Arthur Mervyn as an allegory of anxieties over speculation
(especially as related to the overseas slave trade), see Goddu, 3151. For a more general analysis of early republican fiction in relation to concerns over speculation during
the 1790s, one that includes an analysis of Dorval, see Weyler, A Speculating Spirit,
20742.

9. For a useful outline of the history of libertine discourse in early America, see
Tennenhouse, Libertine America, 128.
10. Similar links between fiscal humiliation and male castration mark the early
republican period. See for example Sara Woods 1801 Dorval. Here a gold advocate
named Colonel Morelywhose virtue is reflected in his earlier decision to buy up the
worthless paper scrip of revolutionary war soldiers for gold and silverloses his entire estate when he is seduced by Dorval into speculating on the infamous Yazoo land
scheme in Georgia (13). Unable to pay his creditors, Morely is arrested and sent to
debtors prison, where, unmanned and humiliated, he soon dies (140). Morelys real
humiliation, however, comes when the widowed Mrs. Morely actually marries the speculator Dorval. After attempting repeatedly to seduce and then rape Morelys daughter,
Dorval eventually murders his new wife, stabbing her in Colonel Morelys bed with
his sword. With Dorvals naked sword (244) standing in for the rapacious phallus
of the speculator and the blood-soaked bedding violently mocking Mrs. Morelys lack
of virtue on her wedding night, the republican family romance is transformed rather
decisively into something more closely resembling gothic horrora sensational format
overtly linking the evils of speculation with the humiliation and symbolic castration of
men such as Colonel Morely.
Chapter Two

1. This image is not pictured here. Noah was frequently derided for his pro-Bank
sympathies and close ties to Bank president Nicholas Biddle, but he was also the target
of various anti-Semitic slurs. See, for example, the 1828 lithograph City of New-York.
Mordecai M. Noah. Arranged as a parody of a public notice, the image depicts Noah
as being beaten (cow-skinned) by a rival news editor, Elijah Roberts. A playbill on
the wall behind them advertises The Jew, I Act of the Hypocrite, and End with the
face of The Liar.

2. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; see in particular chapter 1, William Shakespeare
in America, 1182. Haraps The Image of the Jew in American Literature provides an
191
192
especially capacious body of research on representations of the Jew in early American

culture, and has been invaluable to me in laying the groundwork for this chapter.

3. The closest we get is the Wandering Jew of Hawthornes The Marble Faun (1860).
For an extended discussion of The Marble Faun in this context, see Harap, 10718.

4. See also Joness The City Merchant; Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant;
and The Western Merchant.

5. Consider the concerns voiced by popular political economist Edward Kellog in
his 1841 Remarks upon usury and Its Effects. Beginning ominously with an epigraph
quoting Shylocks famous lines about his hatred for AntonioI hate him for he is a
Christian / But more, for that in low simplicity / He lends out money gratis, and brings
down / The rate of usance here with us in Venice (1.3.4245)Kellog complains as
follows:
[T]he money-lenders predict approaching scarcity of money, and begin to
draw their deposits from [the] bank; perhaps even draw a few hundred thousand dollars in specie, which creates some little alarm; the banks begin to
call in their loans on stocks, and stocks fall in the market. They curtail their
discounts, and an unusual demand for money, and a depreciation in the means
of procuring it, ensure, and again the usurer begins to exact his own treble
compensation for the temporary loss of interest he chose to submit to; and
now, again, he becomes a competitor at bank for discounts, and, by the same
means as before, a usurious system of plunder worse than robbery is begun
and maintained, to the utter destruction of hundreds otherwise prosperous
men. The predictions of the usurers have been verified. Money is, indeed,
exceedingly scarce, and is worth (upon the usurers rule of value what it will
bring) what it will destroy any class of business men to pay. (32)
For Kellog, the usurer is a danger not simply because he might ruin Americas many unwise debtors. More importantly, he is a danger at the level of the general economy; this
because he is able, by withholding specie during periods of fiscal scarcity and then
raising rates on it, to control the actual supply of money in circulation, and thus provoke economic crisisthe utter destruction of hundreds otherwise prosperous men.
Edward Palmer offers a similar view in a sermon pamphlet entitled Usury, the
Giant Sin of the Age (1865). As he puts it in words that echo Kellogs, [Usury] is a system which is subversive of all true and equitable commerce, and wholly incompatible
with permanent commercial prosperity....[U]nder its operation there comes a time
every few years when the interest due to capitalists upon obligations then maturing,
amounts to more than all the money in circulation. Then, of course, there is a great
revulsion in commercial affairs. The crisis is sometimes temporarily postponed by
financial maneuvering, but only to be the more disastrous when it comes, as come it
must. Then the money market is tight, and rates of interest are enormously increased.
The Shylocks must have the amount of their bonds (16; emphasis added).
Like Kellog, Palmer views usury as exerting a choke hold on the nations money
supply, and thus precipitating economic panics. For both authors, in other words, it is
usury that is at the heart of the nations economic woes. And what this suggests is that
the image of the Jewish usurer so common to the periods sensationalism is in fact the
virtual embodiment of the much more prevalent and insidious form of high-interest
lending practiced by the nations banks and other capitalists, and thus the screen
against which to project both anxiety and anger about the scarcity of money circulating
within the unsteady economy. This is why both Kellog and Palmer are able, almost in
passing, to offer the figure of the capitalist Jew (the Shylocks) as a stock stand-in for
high interest rates, and for usury more generally. For again, what this figure represents
is a negative form of political economy, one that acts as a direct threat to the nations
economic health.

6. The Emerald, or, Miscellany of Literature, 389.

7. Jonathan Freedman provides a similar argument in his discussion of laternineteenth-century authors such as Anthony Trollope, George du Maurier, and Henry
James. As he explains in outlining what he terms literary versions of economic antiSemitism, The passions ascribed to the Jew in the culture of capitalism...may serve
as a powerful way of distancing the affects unleashed by this system from the normative
life of Christian culture and gentile commerce. Indeed, the affectdrenched, passionate,
lascivious Jew becomes a literal embodiment of all the irrationalities, the perversities,
the greeds and lusts, that are arguably the motor, and undoubtedly the consequences,
of an economic system that presents itself as a self-correcting and rational mechanism
for the maximally efficient delivery of goods and services (Temple 73; 69). Freedmans
workeasily the most nuanced of the many valuable studies of Jews in America and
the American imaginationhas been especially influential to me here as I have sought
to understand the antebellum periods obsession with a population of Jews that historians suggest was no more than fifty thousand. The return form of Gentile theft that
I describe below is thus an attempt to build on Freedmans study.

8. The form of projection iek describes might also help explain the contradiction one encounters in realizing that the penchant for hoarding gold ascribed to the
sensational Jew mirrors the faith in gold so often voiced by Jacksonian Democrats, and
just as frequently mocked by anti-Jackson detractors. From this perspective the sensational Jew is in many ways a dramatic extension of these hard-money Jacksonians: like
the Jew hoarding his cache of gold bullion, Jackson and his followers adhered to a strict
mercantilist gold policy that bordered on the obsessional. But the mirrored reflection
of Jacksonian fiscal policy provided by the sensational Jew clearly went unrecognized.
Instead, the Jew remained an uncanny figure that haunted antebellum culture with the
very image of its own quite repressed relationship to gold bullion, even asor precisely
becausehe acted as the figure who had stolen that money in the first place.

9. For a similar but more extended discussion of Marxs essay, see Freedman, The
Temple of Culture, 6567.
10. See for one of many examples John Todds The Jew in Simple Sketches. Here a
sick Jewish daughter beseeches her father to convert to Christianity as she lies on her
deathbed, the implication being that she herself has converted. One might note, however, the various tales in which the Jewess refuses, even in the face of death, to convert.
See for example Myrrah of Tangiers by Caroline C. In this story, Myrrah, the
daughter and sole heiress of the wealthy and excellent Raguel (125), is accused by a
jealous Muslim man of religious infidelity, and is burned at the stake.
193
194
11. On castration in The Merchant of Venice, see in particular Penuel, Castrating

the Creditor.
12. A similarly overt moment appears in Ned Buntlines Morgan; or The knight of
the black flag. A strange story of by-gone times. (1861). Here a group of brawny ruffians (20) storm the home of Solomon the moneylender after he has refused to loan
their leader a large sum of money (he called me a cursed Jew, Solomon explains, and
swore he would raise a mob to pull the roof down about mine ears! [19]). The goal of
the raid is to seize Solomons gold, but in the ensuing scenes we see that the men are
just as intent on raping Solomons daughter, Miriam. As the libertine leader of the crew
puts it in explaining why he doesnt wish to burn down the Jews home, I do not wish
to melt his gold, and there is a fairy within whose ebon tresses I would not scorch for a
thousand sovereigns (21). The ruffians are driven off by the black knight Morgan,
but the mobs desire for both the Jews gold and his daughter underscores the collective
belief in the Jews hoarded riches as well as the link between the nations missing gold
bullion and the alluring figure of the Jewess.
13. Tellingly, Miriams father goes on to inform her that her love for a Gentile repeats the sin of her own mother, who, he explains, had an affair with a Christian years
before (a Gentile, unclean dog as he was [Agnes 4445]).
14. This anxiety is also evident in Buntlines Miriam narratives. For example, in
Agnes; or, the beautiful milliner, Miriam is locked into a sealed-off attic room where, in
what is perhaps Buntlines sensational zenith, she finds her mothers skeleton. Miriam
thus realizes that she has entered her mothers death chamber, as well as her own. At
first she believes that she will be left to starve, but soon a perfumed gas begins to fill
the room, and she understands that her father intends to poison her. Paired with her
mother in this makeshift tomb, the horrified Miriam highlights the Jews perverse (and
perhaps, given the link with her mother, incestuous) desire. But she also underscores
the more general form of cultural work performed by the Jewess in antebellum culture.
And that is to act as an image of excess, one that, at least in the sensational world
constructed by Buntline, is simply too volatile for entrance into Gentile culture. Thus,
rather than imagining Jessicas conversion, Buntline, like various other antebellum
authors, depicts her as stolen from Gentile culture, but apparently irretrievable from
the clutches of the Shylock figure. Simultaneously fascinating, desirable, and fearful,
she embodies the very qualities that antebellum cultureand antebellum manhood
in particularhas disavowed in itself. In yet another narrative, Rose Seymour; or, the
Ballet Girls Revenge (1865), the Miriam character is violently whipped for attempting
to escape from her fathers home. Naked to her waist, the lovely young Jewess was fastened up against the wall, we are told. A hideous old hag was flogging her with savage
ferocity (46). See also Miriam; or, the Jews daughter (1860s70s[?]).
15. This narrative was substantially expanded from the 1828 version of the text,
entitled Judith Bensaddi, a Tale Founded in Fact, and appearing in The Souvenir in
1828.
16. James Shapiro, The Jews Daughter. Unpublished Paper. My thanks to Professor Shapiro for sharing his work with me.
17. Beginning with an epigraph from The Merchant of VeniceAntonio and Shy-
lock, stand forth!Abednego tells the story of a young man named Basil Annesley
who owes money to Abednego Osalez, a Jewish moneylender who seems to have in his
debt nearly every wealthy person in the city of London. Basils goal in borrowing this
money is to lend financial support to a poor young Jewish woman named Esther, with
whom he has fallen in love. Unbeknownst to Basil, however, Esther is the niece of the
childless Abednegoshe is, that is to say, a kind of daughter substitute in the Jessica
genre.
18. As with the death of the Shylock figure, the looting of the Jews home is fairly
common to this material, so much so that we might read the depiction of mob violence
as reflecting a latentand here displaceddesire within Jacksonian America for collective Gentile action against the nations mercantile Jews.
19. This passage is also cited in Harap, and it is to his scholarship that I am indebted
for this passage.
20. A similar anxiety over the linked categories of Jewishness and blackness is
displayed in Edgar Allan Poes famous short story Ligeia (1838). As Joan Dayan has
discussed, Ligeia is marked throughout the text by signs of black blood. But, and importantly, Ligeia is also described in terms of Jewish characteristics. As Poes narrator
puts it, I looked at the delicate outlines of the noseand nowhere but in the graceful
medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same
luxurious smoothness of surface, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the
free spirit (Ligeia 6364). As with Hawthornes description of the Jewess he sees in
London, or Robert Byngs racist description of the villain Densdeth, blackness and
Jewishness seem to serve as referents for one another, and blackness lurks menacingly
behind Jewishness as a kind of fearful and only indirectly named presence, one that,
especially in Ligeia, threatens to emerge and overwhelm the unsuspecting Gentile
male (Dayan, Amorous Bondage 23973).
21. Garames anxieties about Judiths racial makeup are further suggested on the
day he and Judith depart for what is supposed to be a short separation before their
planned marriage. At this point Garame has already begun to experience misgivings
about the engagement, all of which revolve around his understanding of Judith as
racially distinct. Such feelings emerge as he climbs into his coach, and looks up to see
Judith watching him from her bedroom window. As he explains, On taking my seat I
looked up at Judiths windowit was lightedher sadly declining form was distinctly
shadowed forth upon it.... Shade of my beloved, said I in my full heart, shade of my
beloved, fare thee well, fare thee well. The whip cracked, the wheels rattled over the
pavement, and I no more saw even the shade of my beloved (Benasaddi 119; emphasis
added). Marking Judith with racially suggestive terms such as shadow and shade,
Garamemuch like Hawthorne in his journal entrynegotiates the vexed terrain of
race and desire into which he has entered by transforming Judith into a sort of twodimensional figure of blackness, one that stands in for the racial miscegenation with a
Jew that he both longs for and abhors. Indeed, this is the last time Garame sees Judith
in the novel, leading one to suspect that the subsequent revulsion he experiences at the
thought of marrying her is at least partially informed by this haunting image of her
racially distinct shadow-presence.
195
196
Notes to Chapter Three
Chapter Three

1. There is a wealth of information available on the Webster-Parkman case. The
most comprehensive text is Bemis, Report of the Case of John White Webster (1850). For
an extremely compelling analysis of the case, one that links it to changes in conceptions
of liberal selfhood in the nineteenth century, see Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul,
12632.

2. Its worth noting that although American newspapers were almost uniformly
moved by Websters confession, the London Times was much more cynical. Referring
to Websters insincerity, the paper described the text as written with a vast deal of
unction and sentiment, and went on to state that it is difficult to see how the writer
could have regretted its [the Confessions] publicity, before his fate was finally sealed
(7-8-1850).

3. See also Colt, Life, Letters, and Last Conversation (1842).

4. Joseph Fichtelberg provides a similar perspective in his discussion of Emersons
response to the debt he incurred following the 1837 Panic. For many conservatives,
the lesson of the panic was quite clear: retrench, repent, reform, he explains. But other
writers, both men and women, sense a more powerful change in these circumstances
that no mere assertion of reason could forestall. With insolvency, these writers saw, an
older vision of the autonomous self was also waning, and newer conceptions of a more
plastic, deft, market-molded individual were demanded (Critical 11718).

5. See also Jacksons A Week in Wall Street (1841).

6. The main pamphlet for Robinsons trial is Trial, Confession, and Execution of
Peter Robinson (1842). I would like to thank Peter Molin for calling my attention to
this text, and for sharing with me his unpublished paper on the Robinson murder and
Sedgwicks novel, Genteel Crime Fiction: The Case of Catherine Sedgwicks Wilton
Harvey.

7. For similar advice to young men from moral reformers, see William A. Alcott,
A Young Mans Guide (1833), and Catherine Sedgwick, The Poor Rich Man and the Rich
Poor Man (1836).

8. The well-known phrase structure of feeling comes from Raymond Williams,
Marxism and Literature (1977). I am also drawing on Hendlers use of this notion in
Public Sentiments. See especially his introduction, 126.

9. On the rhetoric and ideology of male submission in antebellum culture, see
Christopher Newfield, The Politics of Male Suffering, and The Emerson Effect.
10. For a more detailed history of events surrounding the issuance of the Specie
Circular, see Sellers, Market, 33263.
11. The Quaker City sold 60,000 copies its first year of publication, and 10,000 per
year for the next decade. The novel went through twenty-seven American printings,
and was pirated in Germany and England, under slightly altered titles. For more on
Lippard and the publication of The Quaker City, see Reynolds, introduction to The
Quaker City, ixvi.
12. See Denning, Mechanic Accents, 85117; and Streeby, Haunted Houses.
13. Nelson argues that this novel reflects the gynecological projection onto womens
bodies of male anxieties about class and gender (National 137). For her full discussion
of this dynamic, see 14360.
Notes to Chapter Four
14. See in particular Shelley Streeby, Haunted Houses; Walter Benn Michaels, The
Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, 87112; and Paul Gilmore, The Genuine
Article, 12550.
15. Lori Merish provides a similar point in suggesting the influence of Scottish
enlightenment philosophers such as Adam Smith on narratives of female submission
within the periods domestic sentimentalism. As she explains, [T]he objectification
of women as male property is internalized as a psychic mechanism through which
men managed their feelings of powerlessness and their developmental dependence on
women (Sentimental 3940).
16. My information on these early American counterfeiters comes from Mihm,
Counterfeiters.
17. See Mihm, Counterfeiters, 11325.
Chapter Four

1. The Helen Jewett case is often mentioned in histories both of prostitution and of
journalism, but the only sustained analysis is Cohens The Murder of Helen Jewett. See
also by Cohen the following: The Helen Jewett Murder, and Unregulated Youth. For
a briefer analysis that places the murder more specifically in the context of antebellum
prostitution, see Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 92102. For a discussion of the case in relation
to the history of journalism, see Stevens, Sensationalism in the New York Press.

2. To the best of my knowledge, virtually all editorial material in the Herald is, unless otherwise indicated, authored by Bennett. I have therefore consolidated all Herald
references under Bennetts name in the Works Cited. Each of these references is cited
parenthetically within the text.

3. For readings of the various female reform movements and auxiliary publications proliferating in reaction to the perceived problems posed by the newly mobile
Jacksonian male and the prostitution industry in general, see Christine Stansell, City
of Women; and Smith-Rosenberg, Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman, and
Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity.

4. For a useful and provocative reading of the cult of the female corpse in America
and Europe in the nineteenth century, one that revolves largely around the work of Poe,
see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body.

5. In addition to the Herald, full proceedings were published in the New York Sun,
the New York Courier and Enquirer, and the New York Tribune. The transcripts were
also published in The Trial of Richard P. Robinson, 1836.

6. The pamphlets are as follows: The Thomas Street Tragedy (1836); An Authentic
Biography of the Late Helen Jewett (1836); The Life of Ellen Jewett (1836); A Sketch of the
Life of Richard P. Robinson (1836); Sketch of the Life of Miss Ellen Jewett (1836); Trial of
Richard P. Robinson (1836). For a detailed reading of these pamphlets, which I do not
go into here, see Cohen, The Helen Jewett Murder.

7. See, for example, NYH 5-14-1836; and the New York Sun 5-6-1836.

8. George Wilkes, publisher of the crime periodical The Police Gazette, mentions
the Robinson caps in his 1849 pamphlet The Lives of Richard P. Robinson and Helen
Jewett; quoted in Alexander Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 2078. Saxton
197
198
also provides a description by David OMeara of David Broderick, a local Irish political leader, wearing a Helen Jewett mourner hat as a symbol of anti-Whig political
sympathies when he led a delegation of New York Democrats to meet President Polk
during a visit to Perth Amboy (Rise 208).

9. My information on Bennett and his career as a journalist comes from three
main sources: Crouthamel, Bennetts New York Herald; Carson, The Man Who Made
News; and Stevens, Sensationalism. The information below on the early history of the
penny presses comes from the above titles, as well as from Schiller, Objectivity and the
News (1981); and Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 95108.
10. Owned and edited by Benjamin Day, the New York Sun began publication September 3, 1833, with the aim of providing a form of news from which mercantile and
trade information, as well as partisan politics, would be absent. By all accounts the Sun
enjoyed immediate success: within four months it equaled the most popular mercantile
papers in circulation, and by 1834, with the aid of increased print technology, its circulation was up to ten thousand. Created in imitation of the Sun in 1834, the Transcript
was the most successful of the penny copycats until the Herald was started. For more
on the early history of the Sun see Crouthamel, James Watson Webb, 6981. Note that
I have listed the Sun under Days name in the Works Cited section.
11. The cash-and-carry policy was crucial to the success of the newly emergent
penny papers such as the Herald and the New York Sun. Instead of having to subscribe
to a newspaper, customers were able for the first time to buy editions by the copy. The
young boys selling the papers so aggressively on the street would purchase a bundle of
one hundred papers for sixty-two and one-half cents, which left them a fairly decent
profit margin, provided they sold all of their copies (Crouthamel, James Watson Webb
6781).
12. As with Bennett and the editorials in the Herald, Webb seems to have been the
author of most if not all of the editorials in the Courier and Enquirer during this period. I have therefore listed the Courier and Enquirer under Webbs name in the Works
Cited section. For a fuller account of the Moral War waged against Bennett, see
Crouthamel, Bennetts New York Herald, 3438; and Crouthamel, James Watson Webb,
8486.
13. The most famous such encounter occurred in 1842, when Webb fought in a
duel with Congressman Thomas F. Marshall of Kentucky. Following a series of barbed
exchanges over the national bankruptcy act (which Webb himself had made use of and
defended vehemently), the two met in the woods outside of Washington to settle their
differences. Both men missed their first shot, Webb firing intentionally into the air; but
on the second shot, though Webb again fired into the air, Marshall hit Webb in the hip.
Webb was not seriously injured, but he was indicted by the New York District Attorney
for violating an ordinance against leaving New York State to fight in a duel. Webb was
sentenced to two years in prison for his crime but pardoned not long afterward by New
York governor William Henry Seward. For more on this duel and various other confrontations between the citys newsmen, see Crouthamel, James Watson Webb, 6794.
14. For Bennetts description of his encounter with Townsend, see NYH, October
8, 9, 17, 1836; for an account of his beating by Leggett, see NYH 1-5-1836. For a very
general contextualization of these fights, see Crouthamel, Bennetts New York Herald,
26.
15. For a useful biographical account of Poes many rivalries in the publishing
world, see Silverman, Edgar A. Poe.
16. As Bennett put it in one of many such entries on Townsend, Mrs. T., I understand, had borrowed money of Ellenand yet it is said she intends to administer on her
property. Ellen had many valuables about hershe had a large amount of jewelryher
wearing apparel was splendid, and worth probably $1,500. What has become of all this
property? (NYH 4-14-1836).
17. This claim was never pursued or proved; the following day Bennett reported that
Chancellor, though in fact an ex-lover of Robinsons who had been enticed by him to
run away from her parents, was sent by her parents to South Carolina when the affair
was discovered. Bennett further reported that Chancellor had later returned to the city,
even visited Robinson while he was in prison, and perhaps left the city with him after
his acquittal in June.
18. Most of the information below on brothel riots comes from Gilfoyle, City of
Eros, 7691; 32129.
19. Chichesters reputation as a ruffian involved in the politics of the citys brothels
is something Bennett takes advantage of in his early coverage of the murder, when he
provides an ironic depiction of a conversation between Robinson and Chichester while
the two were supposedly housed next to one another the first few days of Robinsons
incarceration (NYH 4-18-1836).
20. Cited in Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 240.
21. In one of the most significant moments for labor politics in the antebellum period, Judge Edwards, immediately following the Robinson trial, ruled against twentyfive journeyman tailors for conspiring to strike, a decision that resulted in days of
mass demonstration and violence throughout the city. For a history of the strike and
Edwardss verdict, one that provides interesting commentary on Bennetts role in the
events, see Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 25596.
22. The circulation and financial figures below come from Stevens, Sensationalism,
2953.
23. In an 1843 fictionalization of the Jewett story, Joseph Holt Ingraham echoes
Bennetts narrative, explaining that She was the seducer, not he....Her beauty was her
power, and she triumphed in it. She felt a sort of revenge against the other sex, and used
every art to tempt and seduce and ruin young men. Frank Rivers; cited in Gilfoyle, City
of Eros, 151. For more on the sensational story of the revengeful prostitute as it evolved
in the years following the Jewett case, see especially Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 15057; and
Keetley, Victim and Victimizer.
24. This quote, as well as most of Bennetts coverage of the murder from April 11
and 12, is reprinted in The Thomas Street Tragedy.
25. Bennetts strategy here was not an isolated one during the period. As critics such
as Nancy Cott have discussed, the ideologies of female passionlessness and purity
were frequently invoked within middle-class Victorian culture, specifically as a means
of maintaining a masculine sense of security against the contaminating influences of
the public spheres of economic competition (Cott, Passionlessness). Perhaps the
most famous example of such a representation is Hiram Powerss The Greek Slave, a
statue that toured the United States in the late 1840s to the fascination and possibly
the sexual titillation of an estimated one hundred thousand paying patrons. Depicting
199
200
Notes to Chapter Five
a young Greek woman standing naked as she is about to be sold into slavery to the
Turks, the statue was hailed by critics as a model image of sexual purity and chastity,
in particular because of the way the figures expression suggested an otherworldly
detachment that lifted her beyond the sordid realities of her present situation. For a
particularly insightful reading of the cultural politics surrounding the reception of this
statue, see Kasson, Narratives of the Female Body.
26. Brown, Domestic Individualism, 96132; Goddu, Gothic, 10516; and Merish,
Sentimental, 17290. Further citations to Brown are parenthetical within the text.
Goddus market reading is closest to my own here, and I have benefited greatly from
her insightful analysis.
27. For a compelling reading of Blithedale that places the novel in the context of
female celebrity and antebellum mass culture more generally, see Brodhead, Cultures
of Letters, 6282.
28. See especially Brown, Domestic, 96132; and Bronfen, Dead Body, 24149.
29. Brown refers to Coverdales anxiety about bodily contact as self-protective
consumerism (Domestic 11314).
30. Russ Castronovo, for example, argues that like the consumptive and increasingly spiritual body of Little Eva in Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin, Priscilla offers the airy
insubstantiality of an adolescent girl (Necro-Citizenship 118).
Chapter Five

1. For a related and compelling discussion of this image, see Sandage, Losers,
198.

2. The City Merchant is yet another text that follows the romantic career of the
Jews daughter. Here, though, we see a fascinating variation of the Jessica narrative that
I outline in chapter 3. In this version of the story, we see that Rachel, the daughter of
the Jew Ulmar, is married to Billy Grittz, the son of the broker Grittz. The union links
the families of the two Jewish brokers, but it has the effect of thinning, or dissipating,
Jewishness nevertheless. This is most overt with Rachel, who being born and bred in
the city, had none of the JewGerman thickness of speech, nor any of their avaricious
cunning (City 94); the implication here is that her children will assimilate fairly easily into the world of sensibility ruled over by the racially pure Edgar Saxon. This is
also true of Billy, who is described as a descendant of Japhet, as well as of Canaan, in
whom the blood of both races mingled harmoniously (235). Billys Jewish ancestry
helps explain the almost reverential attitude he displays toward hard money when
working at Saxons counting house. The boy could not help feeling exceedingly proud
when accompanying a dray load of gold and silver, we are told. [A]s if by instinct,
which seemed to be innate, his eyes and ears were open to observe and hear everything
which passed among the revenue officers (214). At the same time, however, the Japhet portion of his blood promises that the avariciousness of his father will also fade
out in future generations. Thus, even this substory of Joness racial romance demonstrates how the crises both of the Jew and the unstable economy of the Jacksonian moment are defused, the result being that Saxons own masculine selfhood and integrity
are retained intact.

3. For an excellent discussion of the rhetoric and politics of miscegenation during
this period, one that includes examination of Clays Racial Amalgamation series, see
Lemire, Miscegenation.

4. Hawthornes reliance on a metaphoric slippage between blackness and whiteness in relation to issues of class and labor also informs several of his comments about
manual labor in his letters and journal entries from the 1840s and 1850s. This is particularly true of his descriptions of his work as a surveyor in the Salem Custom House,
a position that often placed him aboard cargo ships bearing loads of coal. Complaining
that his coal-begrimed visage or the sable stains of his profession give him qualities
in common with chimney sweepers, or with the black-faced demons in the vessels
hold (he also describes the longshoremen as looking like the forgemen in Retschs
Fridolin [American 296]), Hawthorne seems drawn to the ways in which the coal dust
he encounters provides metaphoric connections between manual labor and the racial
markings of blacknessmarkings that he seems quite willing to ascribe to the white
working-class men along Salems waterfront. This is also evident in letters Hawthorne
writes from the Custom House to his wife, in which he expresses how unsuited she
is to visit the working-class world of the waterfront. As he puts it in one such letter
when informing her that the days shipment will be salt rather than coal, Sweetest
Dove, fly hither sometime, and alight in my bosom. I would not ask my white dove
to visit me on board a coal vessel; but salt is white and purethere is something holy
in salt (American 345). Though certainly playful, Hawthornes comment also reflects
his desiresimilar to that in his description of the sordid stain left by Ned Higginss
moneyto keep the pure categories of upper-class whiteness clear of the debasing
marks of labor, marks that Hawthorne seems willing to discuss in ways that suggest a
relation to racial difference.

5. For contemporary commentary on the perceived threat of upper-class degeneracy at mid-century, see Beecher, Letters to the People on Health and Happiness; and
Greeley, An Address Before the Literary Societies of Hamilton College.

6. As Todd and other reformers made clear, the only cure for this disease was
heterosexual intercourse within the bounds of marriage. But as Hawthorne explains,
Clifford, who had never quaffed the cup of passionate love[,]...knew now that it was
too late (Gables 141)a fact that highlights the reproductive crisis facing not only
the Pyncheon family but, at least symbolically, upper-class white men in general. For
readings of antebellum culture in relation to male moral reformers addressing masturbation, see Bertolini, Fireside Chastity; and Smith-Rosenberg, Sex as Symbol.
My thanks to Professor Rosenberg for pointing out to me the connections between
Cliffords enfeeblement and the rhetoric of male sexual purity advocated by moral
reformers.

7. Brown makes a related point in discussing Hepzibahs cent shop, observing
that Miserliness, the preoccupation with hoarding and holding money, highlights the
role of the hands in trade, the fact of burst physicality in the touch and love of money,
and this is also emphasized in Hawthornes depiction of the grasping hand of the organ-grinders monkey, noted as well for its too enormous tail and excessive desire
(Domestic 83).

8. Lott argues something similar about Zip Coon and the periods other black
dandy characters. The black dandy literally embodied the amalgamationist threat of
201
202
abolitionism, he says, and allegorically represented the class threat of those who were
advocating it; amalgamation itself, we might even say, was a partial figuration of class
aspiration (Love 134). Here, in an analysis that certainly reflects usefully on a novel
such as The City Merchant, the locus of anxiety is the upwardly mobile white man,
whose aspirations are projected onto the dandy character. But again, the Pyncheon
family experiences these concerns from the top, down; they are the ones who are
threatened with a form of racial tainting that is itself understood in relation to actual
contact with class struggle and, inter alia, contact with actual money.

9. One version of a less troubling form of racial difference is offered by Hawthorne
in a journal entry from 1838, one suggestively similar to his depictions of Hepzibahs
Jim Crow cookies and the Italian boys monkey. Describing a variety of working-class
members of a crowd outside of a commencement ceremony at Williams College, he
turns to a description of a group of black men who are also part of the crowd. Here
is his description of one of the men: I saw one old negro, a genuine specimen of the
slave-negro, without any of the foppery of the race in our parts; an old fellow with a
bag, I suppose of broken victuals, on his shoulders; and his pockets stuffed out at his
hips with the like provenderfull of grimaces, and ridiculous antics, laughing laughably, yet without affectationthen talking with a strange kind of pathos, about the
whippings he used to get, while he was a slavea queer thing of mere feeling, with
some glimmering of sense (American 112). More direct than his representation of the
Italian boys monkey, Hawthornes depiction of the genuine specimen of a slave negro
reflects a cartoon version of black male subjectivity. Here, this image seems intended
to counter concerns of the sort raised by the figure of the black dandy (whose type is
referred to in Hawthornes mention of black foppery). Laughing laughably, with
pockets clownishly overstuffed, and engaged in a stock routine of ridiculous antics,
the man is depicted in terms of a two-dimensional aesthetic that seems designed to
provide Hawthorne with a kind of security about his own, more interior form of white
self-possessionone perhaps challenged by the sometimes raucous festivities of the
working-class members of the crowd at the Williams commencement. Perversely, this
form of assurance comes most powerfully in the strange kind of pathos the man is
said to display over the whippings he used to get. For though on the one hand the
description seems to suggest a sympathy extended across lines of race to one whose
feelings might signal an internaland perhaps sharedform of suffering and pain,
it should more accurately be read as a sentimentalized and nostalgic return to the
plantation South, perhaps of the sort imagined in Plantation Melodies by Stephen
Foster such as My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night! (1853), or Massas in de Cold
Ground (1852)products of mass culture in which the body of the black male acts
as a reliable space of difference in the efforts of men such as Hawthorne to make their
own relation to class and whiteness cohere.
10. As Gilmore points out, the slaves remind us that the Pyncheon fortune seems to
have been derived at least in part from slave labor (Genuine 133; 225n19).
11. For more on the relation between Jacksonian politics and blackface minstrelsy,
see Lott, Love and Theft; and Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 16582.
12. Of course, this exchange between Maule and Scipio also suggests once again
that white Americas racial imagination is circumscribed by basic tropes of minstrelsy
and racial performance. It may be true that Maules comment to Scipio about a shared
blackness is motivated by the theft of his familys property by the Pyncheons. But his
comment also signals a rather profound act of racial appropriation. Claiming blackness, Maule appropriates the absolute victimage of this category for its affective resonance; there is simply no more powerful metaphor for pain, abjection, and dispossession in antebellum culture. Indeed, Scipios very name, which is repeated throughout
Holgraves magazine story, is rarely offered without the race-fixing prefix black (as
in black Scipio), a fact that has the double function of taking away what it enforces:
Scipio is Other because he is black, but his blackness is appropriable in ways he is
unable to control. Scipio, meanwhile, does not have the option of choosing whether to
wear the sign of his abjection. And as suggested by the description of Scipio showing
the whites of his eyes (Gables 192) when Maule arrives at the Pyncheon front door,
Scipio too is rendered in terms of a performed, minstrelized blackness: for Holgrave
(and probably for Hawthorne), there is no real difference between the real and the
represented of race.
13. Gilmore argues similarly: Race, rather than class, or, perhaps more properly,
race understood in terms of middle-class morality, now defines respectability, so that
the historical class differences separating Phoebe and Holgrave no longer matter
(Genuine 14647).
14. For excellent analysis of the multiple tensions in this novel between surface
and depth models of selfhood, see Davidson, Photographs of the Dead. Focusing on
the new technologies of photography Hawthorne foregrounds, Davidson suggests that
the novel represents Hawthornes meditation on the status of representational art at
mid-century, one that led him to pose often anxious-making questions not only about
the distinctions between high and low art but also about subjectivity in the age of
mechanical reproduction.
15. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, the photographer was a great white hunter who gathered the images of his quarry like the head
and skins of his prey (The Stereoscope and the Stereograph).
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215
I n d e x
bank romance, 38, 164, 179. See also

sensationalism
Banks, Jenifer, 191n7
Barnum, P.T., 26
Beckett, S.B.: The Jewess of Cairo, 79,
81, 8587, 88
Bederman, Gail, 187n2
Beecher, Catherine, 169; Letters to the
People on Health and Happiness,
201n5
Beecher, Henry Ward, 29, 154; Lectures
to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects, 106
Bemis, George: Report of the Case of
John White Webster, 196n1
Benjamin, Walter, 39
Bennett, James Gordon, 38, 12348,
153, 155, 174, 197n2, 198n12,
198n14, 199n16, 199n17, 199n19,
199n21, 199n24, 199n25; The
Thomas Street Tragedy. Murder of
Ellen Jewett. Trial of Robinson!,
126, 197n6, 199n24. See also New
York Herald
Benton, Thomas Hart, 7
Beowulf, 8
Berlant, Lauren, 22, 189n19
Bertolini, Vincent, 201n6
Bettelheim, Bruno, 188n13
Adams, John Quincy, 54

Adams, Samuel, 104
African Americans, 38, 9697, 116,
15682, 202n9. See also sensationalism
Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 150
Alcott, William, 29; A Young Mans
Guide, 196n7
Alger, Horatio: Paul the Peddler, 118
The American, 51
Anti-Bullionist: An Enquiry into the
Causes of the Present Commercial
Embarrassments in the United
States, 204
anti-Semitism, 2, 18, 36, 70101,
191n1, 193n7. See also Jews
Arthur, Timothy Shay, 29, 154; Advice
to young men on their duties and
conduct in life, 106; Debtor and
Creditor: A Tale of the Times, 105
Augst, Thomas, 29, 187n2
An Authentic Biography of the late
Helen Jewett, a Girl of the Town
who was murdered on the 10th of
April, 1836 (anon), 197n6
Baker, Jennifer, 9, 43, 187n5
Baltimore Weekly Register, 51
216
Index
Biddle, Nicholas, 12, 15, 70, 106, 116,

131, 132, 160, 177, 191n1. See also
United States Bank
Bird, Robert Montgomery: Sheppard
Lee: Written by Himself, 7
Bisbee, R.: Troubled Treasures, 16
blackface minstrelsy, 25, 26, 94,
17174, 17778, 202n11, 2023n12
Blessington, Lady: Flowers of Loveliness, 14142
Bloch, Ernst, 39
Blumin, Stuart, 187n2
Boston Evening Transcript, 103
Boucicault, Dion: The Poor of New
York, 6, 116
Brantlinger, Patrick, 59
Breevort, Henry, 41, 60. See also Washington Irving
Brodhead, Richard, 200n26
Bronfen, Elisabeth, 197n4, 200n28
Brook Farm, 148. See also George
Ripley
Brougham, John: Much ado about a
merchant of Venice. From the original texta long way, 72
Brown, Charles Brockden: 43, 45;
Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the
Year 1793: first and second parts,
21, 57, 115, 121
Brown, Gillian, 152, 167, 184, 200n26,
200nn2829, 201n7
Brutus: Hints from the Observer, 50
Bucholzer, H.: Cleansing the Augean
Stable, 30, 32
Buntline, Ned, 26, 36, 72, 83; Agnes; or,
the beautiful milliner, 83, 194n14;
Miriam; or, the Jews daughter. A
tale of city life, 194n14; Morgan;
or the knight of the black flag. A
strange story of by-gone times,
194n12; Rose Seymour; or, the
Ballet Girls Revenge. A Tale of New
York Drama, 194n14
Burke, Edmund: Reflections on the
Revolution in France, 190n5
Burney, Fanny: Camilla, 107
Burroughs, Stephen, 115

Burton, Tim: Edward Scissorhands, 46,
6669
Byron, Lord George Gordon: Don Juan,
141
C[], Caroline: Myrrah of Tangiers,
193n10
capitalism: and desire, 56, 26,
2840, 47, 58, 62, 67, 68, 74, 7679,
81101, 106, 112, 128, 143, 14855,
16061, 164, 17172, 177, 182,
18485; mercantile capitalism, 3,
4, 5, 10, 2022, 26, 36, 42, 75, 164,
184; psychology of, 5, 26, 28, 46,
76, 128; and race, 3839, 70101,
15682; speculative capitalism (debates about), 1115, 3033, 4854.
See also manhood; money; Jews
Captain Kidd, 1, 7, 8, 10, 20, 47, 165
Carnes, Mark, 187n2
Carson, Oliver, 198n9
Castronovo, Russ, 155, 200n30
Chapman, Mary, 110
Charles, W.: The Ghost of a Dollar, or
the Bankers [sic] Surprize, 4345
Chicester, John, 138, 199n19
Citizen of Pennsylvania: An Examination of the Causes and Effects, of
the Present State of the Circulating
Medium, and of the Remedy for its
Depreciation, 49, 55
City of New-York. Mordecai M. Noah
(anon), 191n1
Clay, Edward: The Downfall of Mother
Bank, 72, 191n1; New Edition
of Macbeth. Bank-Ohs! Ghost,
10810; Practical Amalgamation,
16263, 201n3
Cobbett, William, 13
Cockrell, Dale, 189n20
Cohen, Patricia Cline, 125, 187n2,
197n1, 197n6
Colloquy between a Bank Note and a
Gold Coin (anon), 13
217
218
Index
Colt, John, 104, 119, 185; Trial of John

C. Colt for the murder of Samuel
Adams, 104; Life, Letters, and Last
Conversation of John Caldwell Colt,
196n3
The Columbian Centinal, 51
Coppola, Francis Ford: The Godfather,
27; The Godfather II, 27
Cott, Nancy, 199n25
Courier and Enquirer, 12833, 139,
140, 197n5, 198n12. See also James
Watson Webb
Crouthamel, James L., 131, 198nn914
Cumberland, Richard: The Jew: or,
Benevolent Hebrew. A Comedy. As
performed with universal applause,
at the New Theatre, in Philadelphia,
73, 75
Cvetkovich, Ann, 111, 189n24
The Dandy and the Soap Fat Man
(anon), 23, 24
The Daughter of Israel (anon), 89
Davidson, Cathy, 180, 181, 203n14
Davies, Benjamin, 12
Day, Benjamin, 198n10. See also New
York Sun
Dayan, Joan, 195n20
debt. See manhood; money
Defoe, Daniel: Lady Credit, 6061;
Review, 6061
Denning, Michael, 23, 25, 28, 39,
196n12
Dickens, Charles: Martin Chuzzlewit,
153
Ditz, Toby, 4, 62, 65, 187n2
Douglass, Frederick: The Life and Times
of Frederick Douglass, 157, 161
Duganne, A.J.H. (Augustine Joseph
Hickey): The Tenant House, or, Embers from Povertys Hearthstone, 82
The Dying Jewess (anon), 82
Edwards, Ogden, 139, 140, 199n21
Ellison, James: American Captive; or,

the Siege of Tripoli. A Drama in
Five Acts, 73
Ellison, Julie, 110
Elmer, Jonathan, 189n24
The Emerald, or, Miscellany of Literature, 193n6
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 105, 107
Evening Star, 133. See also Peter
Townsend
Fabian, Ann, 187n4
fantasy: of compensation for capitalist
alienation, 3, 5, 6, 7, 27, 28, 34, 36,
37, 39, 40, 46, 60, 65, 82, 85, 86,
100, 121, 153, 164, 165, 177, 186;
of economic origins, 1, 2, 40; and
Jews, 36, 81101; and race, 25, 39,
156, 157, 164, 166, 169, 172, 177;
and mass culture, 27, 28, 39; and
nostalgia for pre-capitalist period,
1, 2, 20, 46, 99, 186; and treasure,
7, 18, 20, 21, 36, 40, 43, 165, 169;
and women, 129, 143, 14855, 153;
and working-class readers, 25, 28,
39. See also sensationalism
Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom!,
176
Fay, Theodore Sedgwick: Sidney Clifton, 90
Fichtelberg, Joseph, 107, 196n4
Fisk, Theophilous, 113; The Banking
Bubble Burst, or the Mammoth Corruptions of the Paper Money System
Relieved by Bleeding, 13; Labor,
the Only True Source of Wealth; or
the Rottenness of the Paper Money
Banking System Exposed, Its Sandy
Foundations Shaken, its Crumbling
Pillars Overthrown, 13
Foster, Hannah Webster: The Coquette,
57, 121, 127
Foster, Stephen, 202n9
Franklin, Benjamin, 43, 188n9
Fraser, Nancy, 22, 189n19
Index
Freedman, Jonathan, 193n7, 193n9

Freud, Sigmund: castration anxiety,
153; filthy lucre, 30, 168; the primal
scene, 12, 56, 29, 3940
Gaspey, Thomas: Calthorpe; or, Fallen
Fortunes, 53
Gilfoyle, Timothy, 138, 187n2, 189n20,
197n1, 199n18, 199n23
Gilmore, Paul, 2526, 180, 197n14,
202n10, 203n13
Girard, Stephen, 4345
Gleason, Ebenezer, 115
Goddu, Teresa, 45, 191n8, 200n26
Godeys Ladys Book, 105
Gore, Catherine: Abednego, the MoneyLender. A Romance, 89
gothic. See sensationalism
Gouge, William, 1112, 13
Greeley, Horace, 169; An Address Before
the Literary Societies of Hamilton
College, 201n5
Habermas, Jurgen, 22, 189n21
Halttunen, Karen, 187n2, 196n1
Hamilton, Alexander, 12
Harap, Louis, 72, 19192nn23,
195n19
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: anti-Semitism,
9394; and sensationalism, 26, 127,
15682; The American Notebooks,
201n4, 202n9; The Blithedale
Romance, 38, 129, 14855; English
Notebooks, 9394, 96; The House
of the Seven Gables, 38, 113, 120,
125; 15682, 186, 201n4, 201n6,
2012nn79, 2023n12; The
Marble Faun, 191n3
Henderson, Andrea, 45
Hendler, Glenn, 23, 110, 189n21, 196n8
Herbert, Christopher, 30
Hoffy, Alfred: The Innocent Boy, 145,
146; Ellen Jewett, 145, 147
Holcroft, Thomas: The Road to Ruin, 52
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 203n15

Hone, Philip, 130, 139
Horlick, Allan Stanley, 187n2
Horowitz, Helen, 189n20
Houston, Gail Turley, 187n4
Hyer, Thomas, 138
The Illuminator, 125
Imbert, Anthony: The Doctors Puzzled,
or the Desperate Case of Mother
U.S. Bank, 1315
The Independent American, 5152, 58,
65
Ingraham, J.H. (Joseph Holt), 199n23;
The Clipper Yacht; or, Moloch the
Money Lender [alternate title:
Moloch the Money Lender; or, the
Beautiful Jewess], 84; Frank Rivers;
or, the Dangers of the Town, 199n23
Irving, Washington, 1, 2, 6, 21, 127,
129; and bankruptcy, 4142; and
Federalist sensibility, 5461; the
Headless Horseman, 5, 29, 37, 38,
43, 4547, 48, 6165, 66, 67, 69,
110, 118, 127, 128, 135, 184, 186;
and Henry Breevort, 41, 60; The
Devil and Tom Walker, 47, 58;
The Golden Dreams of Wolfert
Webber, 7, 910, 47, 165; The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 29, 38,
4165, 81, 110; Salmagundi, 59;
The Sketch Book, 4142, 48, 5461;
Tales of a Traveller, 1, 7, 46
Jack and the Beanstalk (as generic title):
8, 15, 21, 27, 28, 34, 39, 46, 76,
188n11. Variants: The history of
Mother Twaddle, and the marvellous atchievements [sic] of her son
Jack (H.A.C.), 18, 77, 188n11; Jack
and the Bean Stalk (Momberger),
18, 19, 188n15; Jack and the BeanStalk (anon), 20, 188n16; Jack the
Giant Killer (anon), 15; The Sur-
219
220
Index
prising History of Jack and the Bean

Stalk (anon), 15, 18, 34, 188n12
Jackson, Andrew: anti-Bank fiscal
policies, 8, 1215, 30, 31, 33, 38,
7072, 101, 131, 143, 15051, 154,
160, 161; 193n8; Farewell Address,
13
Jackson, Frederick: The Victim of Chancery: or a Debtors Experience, 105;
A Week in Wall Street. By One Who
Knows, 196n5
Jameson, Fredric, 910, 20, 26, 2728,
165
Jefferson, Thomas, 12, 41, 42, 58
The Jewess of Constantina (anon), 83
Jewett, Helen, 26, 38, 12348, 152,
153, 155, 189n23, 197n1, 199n16,
199n23
Jews: and African Americans, 93100,
195n20; in American revisions of
The Merchant of Venice, 70101;
and the conversion romance,
85101; in fairy tales, 18, 2021,
30, 7678; and the Jessica Complex, 81101; in political cartoons,
71, 80, 191n1; as scapegoat for
market capitalism, 2, 5, 18, 2021,
2830, 3334, 36, 37, 53, 70101,
157, 16061, 164, 191n1, 193n5,
193nn78, 194n12, 194n14,
195n18; in sensationalism, 2829,
30, 36; 70101, 106, 111, 115, 144,
156, 157, 16061, 164, 194n12,
194n13, 194n14, 195n20, 200n2;
and the theft of enjoyment, 33,
34, 36, 70101. See also anti-Semitism
Jim Brown (anon), 17778
Johnson, Claudia, 190n5
Jones, J.B.: Border War. A Tale of
Disunion, 74; The City Merchant;
or, the Mysterious Failure, 38, 106,
15964, 166, 168, 176, 182, 191n4,
200n2, 202n8; Life and Adventures
of a Country Merchant, 192n4; The
Western Merchant, 192n4
Journal of Commerce, 131

Kasson, Joy, 200n25
Keetley, Dawn, 199n23
Kellog, Edward: Remarks upon usury
and its Effects, 192n5
Kerber, Linda, 42, 55
Kimmel, Michael, 187n2
The Knickerbocker, 135, 141
Ladies Home Companion, 79, 141
Ladies National Magazine, 89
Law, Thomas: The Financiers [sic] A, B,
C, Respecting Currency, 50
Lee, Mary E.: Aarons Rod; or the
Young Jewess, 8789, 98
Leggett, William, 133, 198n14. See also
New York Evening Post
Lemire, Elise, 201n3
Leverenz, David, 4, 5, 28
Levine, Lawrence, 72, 191n2
The Libertine, 189n20
The Life of Ellen Jewett (anon), 197n6
Lippard, George, 26, 72, 127, 135;
The Quaker City, 2, 13, 38, 7374,
11222, 150, 175, 196n11
London Times, 196n2
Looby, Christopher, 187n6, 189n24
Lott, Eric, 25, 171, 179, 18990n25,
2012n8, 202n11
Madison, James, 12
Maitland, James A.: The Lawyers Story;
or, the Orphans Wrongs, 74
Manchester Messenger, 103
manhood: and anality, 11819; and
anxiety, 46, 25, 38, 42, 47, 6165,
73, 106, 117, 129, 14248, 155, 156,
165, 172, 196n13; black masculinity, 38, 15682, 202n9; and
castration anxiety, 18, 20, 46, 52,
53, 6169, 81, 82, 88, 128, 145, 149,
15354, 191n10, 194n11; compen-
Index
satory forms of manhood, 27, 28,

34, 3638, 48, 56, 107, 108, 121,
128, 144, 148; and debt, 4148,
7273, 79, 82, 90, 91, 99, 10222,
15759, 191n10, 19495n17,
196n4; and degeneration, 169; and
emotion, 38, 10222, 182, 185; and
Federalism, 5558, 190nn56; and
financial failure, 4, 78, 1011, 18,
26, 27, 39, 40, 62, 10221, 15682;
go-ahead manhood, 16582; and
the gothic, 23, 38, 4548, 6169,
10222, 135; and homosocial rivalry, 6265, 121; and humiliation,
4, 23, 28, 38, 4148, 53, 6265,
106, 108, 110, 11222, 12934,
148, 191n10; and masturbation,
169, 201n6; and panic, 64, 65,
10222, 144, 145, 155, 185; literary
manhood, 9, 26, 45; middle-class
manhood, 6, 45, 103, 10622,
135, 162, 179, 182; and misogyny,
53; 11314; 129; 14155; 17677;
professional or white-collar manhood, 5, 6, 2123, 26, 27, 2930,
37, 104, 108, 11222, 124, 13640;
155, 15964, 74, 179, 18486;
and property, 8, 20, 42, 45, 5558,
6265, 140, 197n15; and rape, 63,
11314, 11819, 162, 164, 176,
191n10, 194n12; and sentimentality, 23, 38, 111, 114, 11720; and
submission, 62, 10221, 129, 134;
and success, 10, 20, 26, 40, 16482;
and the theft of enjoyment, 3435,
36, 38, 61, 63, 69, 70101, 128, 164,
184, 193n7; and victimage, 1034,
134; and whiteness, 39, 15682;
working-class manhood, 6, 2325,
28, 36, 39, 64, 113, 125, 161, 165,
167, 174, 179, 180, 201n4; and
whiteness, 39, 15682
Marshall, Thomas F., 198n13
Marx, Karl: Capital: A Critique of
Political Economy, v, 10, 75; On the
Jewish Question, 77, 79
mass culture, 25, 2728, 92, 104, 166,

170, 171, 180, 200n27, 202n9. See
also sensationalism
Mather, Cotton, 43; The Life of Phips,
89
McCarthy, Cormac: No Country for Old
Men, 21
Melville, Herman: Bartleby the Scrivener, 5, 29, 37, 45, 106, 18386;
The Confidence Man, 30, 46, 172;
Moby-Dick, 27
Merish, Lori, 154, 197n15, 200n26
Michaels, Walter Benn, 197n14
Mihm, Steven, 3, 1045, 115, 150,
187n1, 188n10, 197nn1617
Millner, Michael, 111
Mina Lowe. The Pretty Jewess (anon),
84
Molin, Peter, 196n6
money: American money, 1, 8, 27;
bank notes, 1113, 49, 51, 132; as
capital, 3, 810; Christian money,
92; counterfeit money, 12, 11516;
and excrement, 3033; gold, gold
bullion, specie, or hard money, 1
21, 27, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41,
42, 45, 4749, 5154, 56, 57, 58, 59,
61, 65, 68, 7076, 81, 83, 88, 9192,
9495, 98101, 105, 108, 115, 120
22, 132, 143, 149, 150, 152, 15960,
16465, 168, 183, 184, 188n9,
190n2, 191n10, 193n8, 194n12,
200n2; hoarded, 20, 3033, 7476,
91, 11516; 201n7; and Jews, 2,
5, 18, 2021, 2830, 3334, 36,
37, 53, 70101, 157, 16061, 164,
191n1, 193n5, 193nn78, 194n12,
194n14, 195n18; laundered money,
88; mint drop coins, 30, 3233;
money as money, 10; old money,
8; orientalized money, 87; paper
money, 3, 5, 6, 1113, 15, 21, 23,
27, 28, 33, 37, 38, 4145, 47, 4854,
68, 72, 81, 106, 115, 117, 122, 123,
127, 128, 143, 164, 166, 183, 190n2;
and racial difference, 15682; as
221
222
Index
treasure (pre-capital), 225; 27,

28, 29, 33, 3436, 39, 40, 48, 76,
99, 169, 182, 183; shinplaster
bank notes, 15, 17, 150, 151; usury,
7475, 19293n5; working-class
money, 168; worship of, 30
Moon, Michael, 118
Moretti, Franco, 188n7
Morrison, Toni, 166
Mott, Lucretia, 161
Murray, Judith Sargent, 43
Nelson, Dana, 5, 113, 187n2, 187n3,
196n13, 197n14
Nelson, Michael, 190n1
New York Daily Transcript, 130, 136,
137, 198n10
New York Enquirer, 72. See also Mordecai Noah
New York Evening Post, 133. See also
William Leggett
New York Herald, 21, 26, 38, 103,
12348, 174, 175, 197n7, 198n11,
198n14, 199nn1617, 199n19. See
also James Gordon Bennett
New York Mirror, 135, 141
New York National Advocate, 51
New York Sporting Whip, 189n20
New York Sun, 26, 103, 130, 136, 137,
139, 142, 197n7, 198n10, 198n11
New York Tribune, 103
Newfield, Christopher, 187nn23,
196n9
Niles Weekly Register, 41, 43, 50, 51, 52,
54, 57
Noah, Mordecai, 72, 191n1
The Northern Whig, 51
OMalley, Michael, 15657
Paine, Thomas, 43, 45
Palmer, Edward: Usury, the Giant Sin of
the Age, 192n5
panic (economic), 5, 6, 8, 64, 162, 185.

See also Panic of 1819; Panic of
1837; Panic of 1857
Panic of 1819, 5, 7, 11, 12, 38, 42,
4854, 58, 76, 159
Panic of 1837, 5, 15, 76, 104, 105, 106,
107, 115, 116, 127, 148, 156, 159,
196n4
Panic of 1857, 5, 46, 76, 106
Parkes, Lyman, 115
Parkman, George, 102, 107
Peacock, Thomas Love: Paper Money
Lyrics, v, 3, 132
Pennsylvanian, 129
penny press newspapers, 21, 26, 38,
12348. See also sensationalism
Penuel, Suzzane, 194n11
Philadelphia Aurora, 50, 52
Philadelphia Democratic Press, 51
Plummer, Laura, 190n1
Pocock, J.G.A., 42, 57
Poe, Edgar Allan, 124, 125, 127, 135;
The Gold Bug, 1, 78, 910, 20,
21, 27, 36, 165, 197n4; Ligeia,
195n20
Poore, Benjamin Perley: The Mameluke, 89
Powers, Hiram: The Greek Slave,
199200n25
racial amalgamation, 16164
Radcliffe, Ann, 45
Raine, William: The History of old
Mother Goose, and the golden egg,
2021, 76, 78
Reed, Naomi, 184
Remini, Robert, 187n4
Restell, Madame, 130
Rezneck, Samuel, 190n4
Reynolds, David, 188n18, 189nn2324,
196n11
Richmond Enquirer, 51
Ripley, George, 148
Robinson, H.R., Fifty Cents. Shin Plaster, 150, 151
Index
Robinson, Peter: Trial, Confession, and

Execution of Peter Robinson for
the Murder of Abraham Suydam,
196n6
Robinson, Richard P., 38, 12348,
197n6, 197n8, 199n17, 199n19
Roediger, David, 25, 157, 189n22
Rogin, Michael, 94
Rotundo, E. Anthony, 187n2
Rousseau, Peter L., 187n4
Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey, 60
Ruffner, Henry: Judith Bensaddi:
A Tale, 8384, 9599; Judith
Bensaddi, a Tale Founded in Fact,
194n15; Seclusaval, 99100
Ryan, Mary, 22, 187n2, 189n19
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 105
Sandage, Scott, 3, 4, 1011, 39, 157,
169, 172, 187n1, 200n1
Sanderson, Joseph: The History of the
Little Frenchman and his Bank
Notes. Rags, Rags, Rags, 4950
Sarony, Napolean: Treasury Note, 31
Saxton, Alexander, 25, 189n22, 197n8,
198n9, 202n11
Schiller, Dan, 198n9
Schlesinger, Arthur M., 188n10
Schudson, Michael, 22, 189n19
Scientific American, 169
Scott, Sir Walter, 141
Sedgwick, Catherine: Wilton Harvey,
105; The Poor Rich Man and the
Rich Poor Man, 196n7
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 118
Sellers, Charles, 34, 49, 187n1, 187n4,
188n10, 190n3, 196n10
sensational public sphere, 2140, 45,
48, 65, 104, 127, 145, 156, 157, 166,
172, 175, 181, 183, 186, 189n21,
189nn2324
sensationalism: and African Americans, 3839, 9697, 15682; and
the bank romance, 38, 164, 179;
and the conversion romance,
85100; and dime novels, 28, 39;

and logic of compensation, 27, 28,
34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 48, 56, 65,
107, 108, 111, 12122, 128, 144,
148, 155, 156, 164, 172, 177, 182,
186; and the gothic 26, 4348,
6169, 10222, 125, 127, 128, 132,
166, 17482, 184, 186; and Jews,
70101, 157, 16061, 164, 193n5,
193n8, 194n12, 194n14, 195nn17
18; and mass culture, 25, 2728,
104; and penny press newspapers,
26, 1024, 12348; sensation novels, 21; and working-class readers,
2425, 36; and sentimentality, 26,
38, 110, 186; and the urban gothic,
38, 72, 10222; Wall Street novels,
1056, 15964, 184, and whiteness, 39, 15682. See also fantasy;
sensational public sphere
sentimentalism. See sensationalism
Seward, William Henry, 198n13
Shakespeare, William: The Merchant
of Venice, 36, 70, 7273; American
revisions of Merchant of Venice,
70101
Shapiro, James, 84, 93, 194n16
Shell, Marc, 8
Sherman, Sandra, 61
Shylocks Year, or 1840 with no Bankrupt Law (anon), 7981
Silverman, Kenneth, 199n15
Simmel, Georg, 75
A Sketch of the Life of Miss Ellen Jewett
(anon), 197n6
A Sketch of the Life of Richard P. Robinson (anon), 197n6
Smith, Scott: A Simple Plan, 21
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 3, 106, 127,
187n2, 197n3, 201n6
Southern Literary Messenger, 83
The Souvenir, 194n15
Specie Circular, 108
Specie Humbug, or, The Autobiography
of Ferret Snapp Newcraft, Esq.: Being a full exposition and exemplifi-
223
224
Index
cation of the credit system (anon),

13
Spielberg, Steven: Jaws, 27
Spillers, Hortense, 176
Stansell, Christine, 187n2, 197n3
Stevens, John D., 197n1, 198n9, 199n22
Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 8, 67
Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Toms
Cabin, 23, 104, 168, 200n30
Streeby, Shelley, 25, 36, 114, 189n24,
196n12, 197n14
Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure
Island, 8
structure of feeling, 108, 111, 122
Sunday Flash, 189n20
Swan, James: An Address to the President, Senate, and House of Representatives, of the United States, on
the Means of Creating a National
Paper by Loan Offices, 190n2
Swift, Jonathan: Gullivers Travels, 59
Taylor, Vermilye: The Banker; or, Things
as they have been! A Farce, in Three
Acts, 52
Tennenhouse, Leonard, 191n9
theft of enjoyment, 5, 3334, 36, 38,
46, 47, 54, 61, 63, 68, 69, 76, 81, 82,
83, 85, 87, 88, 91, 100, 128, 144,
164, 172, 184, 190n25, 193nn78,
194n14. See also Slavoj iek
Thompson, George, 26, 72, 127,
189n24; Venus in Boston: A Romance of City Life, 2930
Thompson, James, 107, 187n8
Todd, John, 201n6; The Jew, 193n10;
The Students Manual, 169
Townsend, Peter, 133, 198n14. See also
Evening Star
Townsend, Rosina, 136, 137, 139, 140,
199n16
Traister, Bryce, 191n7
treasure. See money
Trial of Richard P. Robinson, 197n5,
197n6
United States Bank, 2, 3, 1215, 45, 50,

106, 115, 116, 127, 13034, 148,
160, 177. See also Nicholas Biddle
urban gothic. See sensationalism
usury. See money
Van Buren, Martin, 8, 15, 30, 33,
10910, 131, 160
Wall Street novels. See sensationalism
Warner, Michael, 5556, 57
Washington, George, 42
Watson, Harry L., 187n4
Webb, James Watson, 128, 13034, 137,
138, 139, 198nn1213. See also
Courier and Enquirer
Webster, John White: The Extraordinary Confession of Dr. John White
Webster, of the Murder of Dr.
George Parkman, 1024, 107, 108,
113, 119, 135, 196n1, 196n2
The Weekly Rake, 2324, 29
Weyler, Karen, 191n8
The Wheel of Life (anon), 91
The Whip, and Satirist, 189n20
White Slavery!! Or Selling White Men
for Debt! (anon), 15759
whiteness. See manhood; sensationalism
Whiting, William: The Age of Paper; or,
the Bank Contest, 116
Whitley, T.W.: The People Putting Responsibility to the Test, 7072
Whitman, Walt: Franklin Evans, 111
Wilentz, Sean, 23, 187n4, 199nn2021
Wilkes, George: The Lives of Richard P.
Robinson and Helen Jewett, 197n8
Williams, Raymond, 196n8
Winston, F.J.: Capital Fashions for
1837, 15, 17
Winthrop, Theodore: Cecil Dreeme,
94, 111
Wise, Daniel: The Young Mans Counsellor, or, Sketches and Illustrations of
Index
the Duties and Dangers of Young

Men, 29
Wood, Sarah: Dorval; or the Speculator,
57, 115, 121, 191n8, 191n10
Working Mans Advocate, 138
Zip Coon on the Go-Ahead Principle

(anon), 172, 173
Zimmerman, David, 187n4
iek, Slavoj, 3334, 46, 47, 7677, 81,
185, 190n25, 193n8
225

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Paper Money Men

Paper Money Men

The Ohio State University Press

Copyright 2009 by The Ohio State University.

As we proceed to develop our investigation, we shall find, in general, that the

I love the paper money, and the paper money men;

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Sleepy Hollow, Gothic Masculinity, and the Panic of 1819

Shylock on Wall Street:

Chapter Three Banking on Emotion:

Debt and Male Submission in the Urban Gothic

Tabloid Manhood, Speculative Femininity

Success and Race in The House of the Seven Gables

The Doctors Puzzled or the Desperate Case of

Troubled Treasures (1833).

Capitol Fashions for 1837 (1837).

Image from Jack and the Bean Stalk (1857).

Cover image from The Weekly Rake (10-2-1842).

Treasury Note (1837).

Cleansing the Augean Stable (1844).

Image from The Surprising History of Jack and the

The Ghost of a Dollar, or the Bankers [sic] Surprize (1808).

The People Putting Responsibility to the Test (1834).

Image from The History of Mother Twaddle, and the

Image from The History of old Mother Goose, and the

Shylocks Year, or 1840 with No Bankrupt Law (1840).

New Edition of Macbeth. Bank-Ohs! Ghost (1837).

Cover of The Thomas Street Tragedy. Murder of Ellen Jewett.

The Innocent Boy (1836).

Ellen Jewett (1836).

Fifty Cents. Shin Plaster (1837).

Cover of White Slavery!! Or Selling White Men for Debt! (1840).

Practical Amalgamation (1839).

Zip Coon on the Go-Ahead Principle (1834).

Jim Brown (1842).

Captain Kidd and the Golden Eggs

this moment available, surfacing throughout ones life as a kind of continual

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

disasters, he left New Orleans...and took up his residence at Sullivans

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

because their attitudes toward ambition were changing....An American

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Concerns about a floating bubble economy are central to numerous satiric

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Theft and Compensation:

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

by providing what I will term compensatory fictions. Indeed, the central

in so many sensational narratives. But in the absence of treasure found,

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

Fantasies of Treasure in Antebellum Culture

other writers performed a similar form of cultural work in imagining

The other chapters of this study take up a similar line of analysis. In