Understanding Charles Sealsfield, Understanding America

Of course, questions arise whether Sealsfield was familiar with the basic texts of American political culture, for example, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or The Federalist Papers, or how much he had immersed himself in Jefferson’s writings, above all, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) or in John Adams’ A Defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America (1787) or his more well-known Thoughts on Government (1776) or Alexander Hamilton’s writings on government and economic policy.⁸ An additional question might be raised whether Sealsfield read the works of John Taylor (1753–1824), since Taylor enunciated many of the more radical ideas of Jeffersonian democracy—ideas that Sealsfield later seemed to embrace.⁹

One way of exploring these questions is to exhume and examine Sealsfield’s political lexicon. Every writer has his favorite expressions and words, but in Sealsfield’s case, he almost obsessively repeated certain key words and phrases. The words and phrases themselves seem to initially suggest the contours of a coherent Weltanschauung, a schema that is all-inclusive, dividing reality into a set of political, social, and ethical categories. In other words, Sealsfield’s language choices seem to point in the direction of what J. G. A. Pocock has referred to as “conceptual vocabularies,” that is, paradigms of thought—which could function as a template for comprehending political movements and events.¹⁰

On closer scrutiny, however, this ideological consistency proves to be illusory. Obviously, a novelist entertains very different aims from a political thinker, is less attentive to terminology and has little interest in methodology. The political ideas and images the novelist presents are embedded in his fiction and hence subject to the imperatives of the narrative. In Sealsfield’s case, however, the balance between narrative and political discourse is continually shifting. Sealsfield’s fictions are frequently punctuated by long philosophical interludes or a closed discussion in which one party presents an array of arguments and theses to his auditor, which is then either explicitly or tacitly accepted by the auditor and becomes the ideological cornerstone of the narrative.

Nevertheless, reading Sealsfield as a political author is replete with snares. We struggle to find a fixed point, a center of gravity to organize the seeming welter of contradictory ideas, idiosyncratic arguments, and puzzling imagery. What Sealsfield professes to believe and what we find in his work appear to move in different directions. It becomes apparent that Sealsfield is not a systematic or consistent thinker but a recorder of his times, a chronicler that indiscriminately notes and registers the trends and movements and ideologies that shape American culture. Better still, Sealsfield’s work often reads like an uncanny barometer recording and reproducing the oft-conflicting scenarios of antebellum America.