The Declaration of Independence and Antebellum Philadelphia Gothic

Reveals how antebellum Philadelphia gothic writers used “civic horror” to imagine dark alternative futures for the American republic, illuminating the contradictions inherent in the Declaration of Independence.

From antislavery and women’s rights activism to anticolonialism, movements to resist oppression and champion self-determination—in the United States and around the world—have often found inspiration in the Declaration of Independence. However, the Declaration of Independence also has a darker legacy. Barbara F. Walter, a scholar of civil wars since the end of World War II, notes that civil wars are often triggered when marginalized regional or ethnic groups declare their independence from the centralized regime. Indeed, the 1860 South Carolina Declaration of Secession, a trigger for the U.S. Civil War, was modeled on the Declaration of Independence. This book examines the darker legacy of the Declaration—the paradox that what is now seen as a crucial founding document of the nation also seems to contain the seeds of the nation’s potential unraveling.
Henry’s gothic archive is rooted in a particular place and time: Philadelphia (the site of the Continental Congress’s deliberation and adoption of the Declaration), roughly during the period 1830–1855. In her classic book American Scripture (1997), Pauline Maier establishes that it wasn’t until the 1820s that the Declaration of Independence came to be revered as the founding document and statement of principle that we consider it today. However, to elevate the Declaration to the status of “scripture” is to suppress the elements of its history that conflict with the myth and thus to give rise to a version of the gothic. As Teresa Goddu describes it, “the gothic tells of the historical horrors that make national identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it.”
While Goddu and others have focused primarily on the historical horrors of slavery and racism, the gothic fiction at the center of this book invokes what Henry calls “civic horror”—mob violence, corruption, and the breakdown of the rule of law. Henry uses this framework in her readings of texts by three prominent American gothic authors—Robert Montgomery Bird, George Lippard, and Edgar Allan Poe—all of whom were writing in Philadelphia at precisely the transformational moment in the creation of an American national mythology that Maier identifies, and all of whom, Henry argues, drew literary inspiration from the contradictions inherent in the nation’s founding.