Chapter 4 focuses on the importance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Using Albion Tourgée’s 1883 novel Bricks without Straw, Oliver Otis Howard’s account of his time as director of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and archival records of the Bureau itself, the novel is read as a fictional reenactment of the work of Reconstruction. Bricks without Straw features two male protagonists, one Black, one white. The emancipated Nimbus lives in Red Wing, a self-sustaining Black-owned Southern community. Hesden Le Moyne, the scion of the leading family in town, is a Union sympathizer but is pressured to join the Confederate Army and loses his left arm in battle. Hesden returns from the war both a pacifist and an abolitionist. In the novel, amputation forces readers to focus on the present and move beyond the past, in recognition that the past of the intact body is irrecoverable. The past of a South organized around the enslavement and exploitation of Black Americans is buried, like Hesden’s lost arm, discarded in favor of a future that puts Black self-determination at its core. Moreover, Black and white characters work together to create a postwar nation organized around racial equality and justice.

This chapter focuses on the essayistic contribution of women writers before the American Civil War. Antebellum women exploited the essay’s openness to write in formats that conformed approximately to conventions of men’s writings but that took shape in host genres, frequently letters, or in generic hybrids as they negotiated gender prescriptions. Conduct manuals, schooling, and published lecture-essays advised on composing essays yet encouraged cultivation in cognate genres of conversation and the familiar letter, social “accomplishments” ceded as the sole literary “arts” in which women might excel. Conversational culture also spawned associations in which women circulated manuscripts and could offer access to periodical publishers in need of materials for audiences growing as literacy spread. Publishing compositions became almost a rite of passage for middle-class white women. Poverty and racist practices posed obstacles to education, publication, and fame for other women who nonetheless composed essays and published outside mainstream venues. They figure among those who produced an extensive body of essays whose range, merit, and impact remain inadequately acknowledged.

This essay reads Lydia Maria Child and Henry David Thoreau against the grain of the usual literary taxonomies in order to consider the degree to which two key preoccupations animated their respective work: first, What constitutes a good life and how might people of limited or moderate means achieve it within a volatile and unforgiving US economy? And, second, How might individuals conceive of and act on their responsibilities to suffering others, especially enslaved Americans, and what should one’s disposition be toward injustice more generally? With attention to their overlapping inquiries into frugality, self-improvement, economic instability, and social injustice, I argue that Child and Thoreau are crucial authors for understanding both the mid-nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries.

This chapter employs the example of the first American Thanksgiving, its facts and fictions, to explore the origins of a national sense of taste in the USA. It traces this sense of taste, equal parts gustatory and aesthetic, to a philosophy that linked personal taste to the expression of republican values and ideals which was mobilized well into the nineteenth century, as writers including Sarah Josepha Buell Hale and Lydia Maria Child employed characters who exhibited republican taste – especially at the Thanksgiving table – in order to illustrate appropriate political behavior. This chapter places Hale’s political advocacy concerning Thanksgiving, as articulated in Godey’s Lady’s Book and to the government directly, against Child’s more imaginative – and more liberatory – evocation of Thanksgiving in her story “Willie Wharton,” so as to show how Child more fully connected the symbolism of food and eating to the cultivation of personal taste. It argues, moreover, that Child demonstrates a more inclusive conception of the USA, even as it remains limited by her inclination to subsume indigenous cultural influences within an already dominant Anglo-American national identity.