The Introduction to this book offers an overview of the literary culture of the 1830s. It explores existing literary-critical approaches to the decade’s culture, and considers why the decade has proved so resistant to absorption in literary genealogies. This is a consequence of the decade’s own uncertainty about and self-conscious analysis of its literary temporality. The Introduction proposes that the 1830s are uniquely placed to direct the future interests of contemporary literary studies.

This afterword considers the contribution made by the collection as a whole. It provides a frame for thinking of the 1830s as an ongoing phenomenon, looking at its influence in historical fiction set in the 1830s from George Eliot to Amitav Ghosh and the ways in which literary critics have attempted to understand the varied activity of the decade.

The 1830s saw a reconsideration of the institution of slavery across the South, in which the sense of slavery as an anomalous institution within a republican society gave way to the articulation of more aggressive claim of slavery as a positive good. As southern intellectuals and polemists shifted from apology for slavery to celebration of it, the sanctity of property rights both in slaves and more generally came to be interpreted as a measure of the Southern States’ success in balancing freedom and order. Alongside that shift, the importance of constitutions within the Southern imaginary grew. This chapter traces the constitutionalization of slavery that these developments gave rise to. In the first instance, slavery as an issue was “constitutionalized” through an overt association of slavery with constitutional rights. At a second level, constitutionalization proceeded in a greater attachment to extant constitutions and a call for their preservation as central objects of political life. This chapter shows how these two developments, placed together, resulted in a conflux of slavery and constitution that made defense of each imperative to the other.

This introductory chapter reflects upon the centrality of the Constitution to American political life and outlines the central themes of this book. It provides a summary of its overarching argument that the navigation of abolitionist pressure on slavery in the District of Columbia in the 1830s prompted a turn toward the concept of spirit, and particularly the spirit of 1787, within American constitutional thought. The chapter contains a plan of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter explores the ways in which the interracial immediatist abolition movement of the early 1830s fashioned a conception of abolition as the fulfillment of commitments made at the time of the Revolution but which subsequent actions had left unmet. Casting themselves as acting in parallel to the founding fathers and expressing concern for the possibility of transmitting an unfulfilled revolutionary settlement to posterity, abolitionists sought to navigate their relationship with the nation’s founding documents. Attempting to systematize this relationship, some came to argue that the Constitution ought to be interpreted in accordance with the Declaration of Independence. Others would go further and argue that the Declaration was more fundamental than the U.S. Constitution itself. Just as earlier arguments had cultivated a sense of American national identity tied to the principle of equality, these variations furthered the association of the claim that “all men are created equal” with the American sense of self and contributed to the formation of a national identity with significant ideological content.

This section provides a discussion of different scholarly understandings of the constitutional Compact as conceived of in the 1830s.

This chapter follows the transformation of the issue of slavery in the nation’s capital into the 1830s across four sections. The first section provides the broad setting of a growing sense amongst abolitionists of the “Americanization” of slavery following the initiation of a gradual emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. Given the importance of the District for the domestic slave trade, examined in the second section, this reconceptualization was not without merit. The third section traces the ways in which immediate abolition and its reconceptualization of slavery within the District, in light of the trends discussed in the first and second sections, saw continuities but also important departures from the antislavery position on the District of Columbia in the 1820s. The final section examines the ways in which the District of Columbia grew in significance for defenders of slavery over roughly the same period.