England was divisive. This, in a nutshell, is the argument of Christopher Hanlon's book about the ways Americans put English culture to use in the antebellum period. Neither a dominant culture that Americans rejected to confirm their “independence,” nor a culture that they embraced with devotion, England instead provided material that fueled the contentious rhetorical debates leading to Civil War. Northerners and southerners, Hanlon argues, referenced and appropriated “England” to bolster their disparate causes. To describe this, Hanlon coins the striking term “Atlantic sectionalism” (x). In doing so he redresses a blind spot in transatlantic scholarship: “what is missing,” he writes, accurately, “is a mindfulness of how sectionalism both shaped American apprehensions of England and configured itself in relation to these apprehensions” (x). Hanlon traces such apprehensions and configurations through the writing of canonical northern figures such as Hawthorne, Emerson, Child, and Douglass, as well as their less canonical southern peers, including John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod.
A number of discussions stand out as Hanlon examines English medievalism, English aesthetics, transatlantic communication networks, and globalization. He astutely traces the American appropriation of the Saxon-versus-Norman rivalry that defined nineteenth-century ideas about twelfth-century England. New Englanders such as Emerson saw themselves as descending from sturdy, bold, and independent-minded Saxons, while southerners claimed the conquering, aristocratic Normans as their ancestors. Hanlon shows that the plight of the Saxons provided a historical touchstone in debates over slavery, as many figures – from Frederick Douglass to Lydia Maria Child to the (fascinating) novelist Henry Herbert – posited a homology between chattel slavery in the South and the enslavement of Saxons under Norman rule. Another strong discussion is a reading of John Pendleton Kennedy's plantation fiction Swallow Barn as an experiment in the picturesque. Originally published in 1832 and revised in 1851 during heightened sectional tensions, the novel harnesses this English aesthetic category in its romanticized portrayal of slavery, in order to “domesticate the wilderness, exalt the perspective of the viewer, and subordinate that which is under view” (111). Hanlon is also very good on the poetry of Henry Timrod, which he situates in the context of the South's global ambitions. He is perhaps at his best, though, in a chapter connecting Preston Brooks's assault on Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber in 1856 to the construction of the transatlantic telegraph cable, which first proved successful in 1858. The chapter makes a number of surprising connections between these two seemingly unrelated events, starting with the material that made them both possible: gutta percha, the rigid natural substance of Brooks's cane and the material that insulated the transatlantic cable. It is a powerful case study that illustrates the way commerce with England aggravated tensions in the United States.
Hanlon says he is on well-trodden ground in providing “another account of antebellum America's cultural embroilment with Britain” (ix). The most obvious precursor is Elisa Tamarkin's magisterial Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008), to which Hanlon himself is quite deferential even as he forwards an opposite view. For Tamarkin, England provided a cultural reference point around which Americans united despite their march to Civil War; for Hanlon, England was just another topic that Americans folded into hostile sectional debates. The force of Hanlon's argument depends somewhat on reversing Tamarkin's earlier revisionist account of the period. Indeed, before Tamarkin established the importance of Anglophilia, scholars might not have been surprised that Americans shoehorned “England” into domestic controversies – often displaying, as Hanlon points out, ample Anglophobia. In some ways, then, America's England returns to an older model of understanding England as providing a foil for American nationalism and an incendiary point of reference in the years leading to war. One indication of this is Hanlon's reliance on Emerson throughout the book to illustrate American attitudes about England: as a theorist of the English “race,” an adapter of the picturesque, a critic of England during the Civil War, and a commentator on globalization. There are worse figures than Emerson to choose as representative, but Hanlon's habitual recourse to him threatens to turn large portions of America's England into Emerson's England. It is partly because of this fixation that Hanlon's attention to Southern sources feels so refreshing. Indeed, it is Hanlon's welcome focus on the South, and the usefulness of his new term, “Atlantic sectionalism,” that will earn the book its place in the field of nineteenth-century American studies.
