Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Law of the Market

In the expanding and industrializing economy of the mid-nineteenth century, American writers and jurists confronted a series of questions about the relationship between law, markets, and morality that remain pertinent to this day. Is monetary compensation adequate or even necessary to rectify accidental harm? Does improving commerce, technology, and infrastructure bind a nation together or exacerbate its divisions? Where does property end and personhood begin, whether in the case of a bodiless railroad corporation, an all-too-painfully embodied enslaved person, or a dammed and commodified river?

The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed both the birth of a distinctly American literature and the integration of local economies into a national market under the sway of an increasingly powerful federal government. Collectively described by historians as the “market revolution,” these events—industrial and infrastructural advancement, economic interconnection, and political centralization—prompted a compensating movement toward closure and containment, whether in the form of protective tariffs, limited legal liability, or constitutional federalism.

Situated at literature's intersections with legal, economic, and political history, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Law of the Market offers a new history of American authors' complex engagement with the nineteenth century's “market revolution.” Geoffrey R. Kirsch examines how antebellum American authors and jurists jointly negotiated the proper boundaries of a rapidly growing marketplace, foregrounding a shared concern with the relationship between openness and boundedness, connection and separation.

In keeping with its emphasis on reciprocity, the volume juxtaposes a rich corpus of primary sources—commercial magazines, political speeches, petitions to Congress, and, most extensively, legal treatises and judicial opinions—with canonical writing by authors including Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau.