HIST 7345 Law, Literature, and Culture in the Dissolution of the First Republic: 1840-1860

Between 1840 and 1860 what had appeared to be a stable political and legal order in the United States came under strain and ultimately dissolved under the pressure of an increasingly incommensurable set of political disagreements. These disagreements were anchored in and orbited around the American institution of chattel slavery. The period of this dissolution was at once one of the most chaotic and most generative periods of American literary, legal, and political expression. This is the moment in time that produced the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Sumner, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville (among many others). Depending on what lens we are looking through, we call this period The Sectional Crisis or The American Renaissance. This class seeks to track the legal, cultural, and political history of this moment by reading across disciplines (law, politics, poetry, polemics, fiction, etc.). We will read cases, speeches, stories, essays, etc. with the goal of tracing the narrative of the unraveling of the first constitutional order outside of disciplinary boundaries. The theory of the class is that this story is as much a legal story as it is a political story as it is a cultural story. And, to state what may be obvious, the story of this first dissolution may have much to tell us about the present moment of tumult and unraveling that we are living through.