This essay traces the study of the vexed topic of sentimentalism in long nineteenth-century American critical discourse. Over the past decades, scholars have drawn upon different disciplines and critical theories to reframe the expansive and subtle complexities of sentimentalism’s influence as mode and ideology; these investigations, under the capacious term “feeling,” sometimes dovetail with, and other times are disaggregated from, inquiries into sympathy, affect studies, the sensorium, and the history of emotions. Although the turn to affect has been seen as a way out of political overdetermination, concerns about liberatory potential and structural collusions were prefigured and informed by debates about sentimentality’s ethical bind. This essay turns to negative terms, glossing the use of “unfeeling” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then appearances of “unfeeling” and “unsympathetic” in illustrative scholarship over the last three decades for their operations and implications. The chapter then teases out the cultural politics of unfeeling from a queer, feminist of color perspective: What if one reconsiders unfeeling from the vantage point of those marginalized and not simply as hegemonic imposition? The discussion closes with Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, reassessing the Indigenous activist’s wish, in her own words, to become “unfeeling stone.”

The nineteenth century was the first era of “big data” in the modern world, and American literary texts published during this time, such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), offer an aesthetic reframing of how individuals and institutions within a culture of data use information at scale to claim authority over knowledge and, by extension, power over people. Moby-Dick also gestures toward the ways that African and African American bodies were subjected to the most brutal regimes of quantification that the nineteenth century had to offer in the form of the transatlantic and intra-American slave trade. One of the major problems facing American literary studies and digital humanities today is the question of how to excavate and explicate the quantitative turn of earlier centuries as we seek to better understand the cultures of data we live in today. The best initial response to this problem is not to begin with a specific digital tool per se, but to build a set of guiding principles for how to critically approach data, media, and power from within a context that recognizes the distinctive contributions of literary texts as aesthetic objects. This essay models one such approach to do so.

Americanist literary criticism has long emphasized the “new” as moments of rupture with traditional modes of interpretation. From New Historicism to the New Americanists, this introduction takes stock of some of these developments over the last twenty years, providing at once an overview and ideas about new directions that the field of nineteenth-century Americanist literary criticism might take in the future. In particular, it highlights the importance of critical modes that focus on bodies and sexualities, move away from the nation-state, adjust the scales of analysis, and reconsider aesthetics.

This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

One trend in recent nineteenth-century American studies has been the rising critical status of poetry, which has gone from being widely neglected by C19 scholars to being a vibrant and diverse field of scholarship. Yet, while this scholarship has recovered major authors and recuperated long-derided aspects of nineteenth-century poetics, it has also maintained an old narrative about C19 poetry, namely that the status of poetry declined during the postbellum period. The career of William Cullen Bryant is emblematic of these trends: while there has been some fascinating recent work on his poetry, it has been informed exclusively by his early poetry of the 1810s and 1820s. This essay argues that Bryant’s career looks different when viewed from the end, rather than the beginning. In so doing, it revises recent critical accounts of Bryant, and C19 American poetry more broadly, by examining his translation of the Iliad, which he published in 1870. Bryant’s Iliad was one of the most celebrated poems of the postbellum era and was considered his masterpiece by contemporary readers. This essay examines the translation and discuss some of the ways in which it engages the politics and poetics of the Reconstruction period

Chapter 4 is an extensive study of runaway slave advertisements that mention that a slave speaks Dutch. For this chapter, I have compiled a database of 487 enslaved persons, coded by year of flight, name, age, Dutch language ability, name of master, county, and original source. I demonstrate that runaway slave advertisements in New York City and environs plateaued in the period 1760–1800, but peaked later in the Hudson Valley, with exceptional growth in the 1790s and 1800s. The data provide evidence for the persistence of the Dutch language in New York and New Jersey and contribute to a picture of Dutch-speaking slaves presenting a sharp economic challenge to the institution of slavery. By the 1790s, Dutch-speaking slaves were running away at a rate of at least 1 per 500 per year. For Dutch slave owners, this meant a significant loss of capital and, moreover, a risk on their remaining slave capital. Runaway slaves tended to be prime working-age males, and the loss of the best field workers frustrated New York Dutch farmers. The pressure of runaway activity also lowered the value of retained slaves and made New York slavery more costly in general. Runaways put pressure on slaveholders to manumit their slaves, extracting the most labor possible from them before agreeing to let them go.

This chapter provides a rough summary of how the United States came to be a federation of states rather than a unitary nation. To that end, it offers a thumbnail sketch of the timeline from the British colonial period to adoption of the US Constitution. The debates at the constitutional convention and the advocacy in both the Federalist and Antifederalist Papers are highlighted, with particular emphasis on the role of state sovereignty and the menu of choices that were open to the framers.

This is the first of two chapters that relate the myriad ways in which state government has impeded true democracy in the United States. In this chapter, the focus is on those counter-majoritarian distortions that are hardwired into the Constitution. These structural barriers to majority rule include equal representation of small states and large states in the US Senate; the Electoral College; the constitutional provision under which a majority of state delegations to the US House of Representatives choose the president when there is no Electoral College majority; and the processes for appointing federal judges and amending the Constitution.

Chapter 7, which serves as the conclusion, describes the important role of the “mild thesis” in obscuring the history of slavery in Dutch New York. The chapter argues that the mild thesis is largely incorrect, and that slavery in New York was harsh and violent. Yet, more than previous historians, I point to the nuance of why the mild thesis came into being, and what it is not entirely without merit. Memories of slavery in Dutch New York came from those who viewed it positively and remembered its final years, when legal protections for the enslaved had been built in to the system.

Chapter 5 addresses a major demographic puzzle concerning thousands of New York slaves who seem to have gone missing in the transition from slavery to freedom, and the chapter questions how and if slaves were sold South. The keys to solving this puzzle include estimates of common death rates, census undercounting, changing gender ratios in the New York black population, and, most importantly, a proper interpretation of the 1799 emancipation law and its effects on how the children of slaves were counted in the census. Given an extensive analysis of census data, with various demographic techniques for understanding how populations change over time, I conclude that a large number of New York slaves (between 1,000 and 5,000) were sold South, but not likely as many as some previous historians have suggested. A disproportionate number of these sold slaves came from Long Island and Manhattan.

Chapter 1 establishes the context and extent of Dutch culture in New York to demonstrate that Dutch slavery in New York was distinct and extensive. This chapter provides a demographic argument for the importance of Dutch slaves in the history of New York slavery. This chapter combines an argument drawn from census data with anthropological observations about the nature of violence and mobility in Dutch New York slavery.