This chapter examines the emergence of Reconstruction literature as a field of study within nineteenth-century American literature. What can we learn from the appearance of Reconstruction literature as an area of research now, given the troubled landscape of our own twenty-first century? I suggest an answer by focusing on the public political function that this body of writing represented: Reconstruction literature constituted the playing field for fierce debates surrounding Black citizenship and enfranchisement, federal government oversight, and Confederate punishment. Case in point is Albion W. Tourgée’s novel A Fool’s Errand (1879), which, when it appeared in 1879, was hailed as the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Reconstruction.” Deploying Tourgée as a representative Reconstruction writer, I ask what his novel’s varied reception by diverse Americans can teach us about the significance that fictional works held for postbellum policy debates, and what this state of affairs illuminates about the place of Reconstruction literature in the twenty-first century, particularly given the disappearance of nineteenth-century American literature as a dedicated hiring field in the academy today. Ultimately, I argue that to realize the promise of Reconstruction literature requires time and resources, and a reinvigoration of the role of the university in democratic society.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, was a tremendous success and the source of intense polemic when it first appeared in 1852. Since then, the novel has never entirely disappeared from the scene and has remained the locus of heated discussion on the representation of race and on race relations in the United States. This chapter will attempt to trace the role Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Stowe’s novel, but also its rewritings, tie-ins, and adaptations – has played in discussions of race in the United States since the 1850s. The first part will investigate the inception of the novel, its strategies, publishing circumstances, and immediate reception. The second part will focus on the afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both in terms of scholarly commentary and popular appropriations.

This essay returns to F. O. Matthiessen’s off-handed mention that the book he never wrote was “The Age of Fourier.” The essay reads Harriet Beecher Stowe and Margaret Fuller through this lens, recasting two authors who tend to be used as representative presences on syllabi (Stowe the Sentimentalist, Fuller the Feminist) into a new narrative of radicalization via the utopian socialism of Fourier and US Fourierism. The essay turns to the arts of editorial assemblage, used by both authors to craft their texts, in order to discern the collectivities they wished to build, as well as how they build their texts to propel the ongoing momentum needed in the long durée of movements for social change.

A dashing portrait of General Giuseppe Garibaldi filled the front page of the June 9, 1860 issue of Harper’s Weekly while an accompanying article fêted “the hero of the new Italian war,” extolling the “wonders” of his fight for freedom on two continents. “Of all the Italian patriots of 1848 he is, without a doubt, the ablest, most sensible, and most respectable,” Harper’s enthused, praising his certain success in this “new” attempt to unify the Italian peninsula as one state.1 Harper’s proved to be wrong – Italy didn’t unify until 1870 – but this minor setback did little to dampen American enthusiasm for the principled military strategist.2 After meeting the hero that same summer, Henry Adams observed to his brother Charles that Garibaldi “looked in his red shirt like the very essence and genius of revolution, as he is.”3 In comments such as these, as in the numerous celebrations of his character that appeared in the 1850s, Garibaldi embodies the ideals of republican revolution; no need to fear either a turn to terror or divided loyalties with such a “sensible” revolutionary leading the charge.

Tensions over American slavery came to a head with the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It drove many African Americans – free and fugitive alike – away from their homes in the North for fear that the law’s strict new policies on fugitive slave recovery would increase the likelihood of being captured or kidnapped into southern slavery. Using the wildly popular anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a guide, this chapter explores how the Fugitive Slave Act affected anti-slavery views regarding fugitive slaves, international free soil, and the Underground Railroad. It introduces readers to differing viewpoints and heated controversies surrounding the novel’s influence on the anti-slavery movement and it shows how the northward migration of tens of thousands of fugitive slaves contributed to a full-blown “Canada Culture” within the anti-slavery movement of the early 1850s.

Twain’s two most important contemporaries were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Howells was a friend and champion of both writers, although Twain and James expressed distaste toward each other. Each in his own way was an important figure in the emerging literary realism. Although Twain claimed that he preferred reading history and biography over novels and literature, he was an avid reader of his contemporaries’ works, even if he often criticized them. Harriet Beecher Stowe was his next-door neighbor, and he entertained fellow writers in his Hartford mansion. Twain was a champion of some younger writers, although he wearied at the constant demands for advice and help from emerging writers.

From its publication, the powerful affective charge of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) crossed national and cultural borders, and had an enormous impact on the abolitionist debate. Australian audiences retained considerable sympathy for UTC’s depiction of slavery, however, such audiences generally failed to recognise the parallels between the plight of African-American slaves, and of Indigenous Australians. Nonetheless, UTC was sometimes evoked to draw attention to the tragedy of Aboriginal child removal under assimilation policies, now known as the Stolen Generations. UTS also reveals how metropolitan domestic ideals were applied to an expanded imperial world, a sentimental investment in the home and family that was the basis for the colonial project of assimilation. UTC’s colonial application raises again the long-standing debate between those who argue that literature helps to cultivate a more compassionate society, and those who believe that empathy masks complicity with oppressive practices. I argue that despite the manipulation, re-working and stereotypical devices that limit the impact of sentimental narratives, we must distinguish between diverse contexts of reading and social action, and their political malleability, focusing on their relationship to contemporary political discourse.