1 - When travelers swarm forth: antebellum urban aesthetics and the contours of the political

Summary

When Walt Whitman, democratic crowd champion bar none, salutes the people of the polity, he looks to the masses crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the crowds milling about Manhattan's commercial district, the tides flowing through Broadway. In other words, he does not look to explicitly political crowds, such as those in Baltimore rioting against rampant bank faults in the late 1830s, or those in upstate New York rebelling against rents on long term leases in the 1830s and 1840s, or even those widely admired Dorrites demanding suffrage expansion and forming an extra-legal People's Convention to protest the elected state government in Rhode Island in 1842. Similarly, when Hawthorne scrutinizes what it means to be a “naturalized citizen,” he turns to an everyday crowd scene: a train-station peddler selling his goods to the “travellers [who] swarm forth.” Such literary enterprises testify to the trend, begun in the antebellum period, to displace revolutionary crowds with urban crowds in representations of the fledgling democracy's populace. They accord with Tocqueville's observation in 1838 that “[a]t this moment perhaps there is no country in the world harboring fewer germs of revolution than America.” Indeed such crowd representations bear the mark of a polity preoccupied less with self-installation than self-maintenance.

This is not to say that those writing in the antebellum period lost all interest in representing revolutionary crowds, but that their support for such crowd action was at best ambivalent.