Political Pamphlets

Abstract

This chapter traces the critical history of Charles Brockden Brown’s political pamphlets of 1803 and 1809 from the dominant reception of them as evidence of Brown’s so-called spontaneous conversion to political conservatism and bourgeois perspectives. The two 1803 pamphlets, on the question of American invasion of New Orleans to prevent Napoleon from acquiring it, need to be contextualized within the overall environment for politically progressive writers in the circum-Atlantic world in a period of revanchist conservatism. The 1809 Address to the Congress has a different tone and perspective. In the absence of an unexpected discovery of Brown’s lost work, a two-volume treatise on geography, the 1809 Address can stand as the closest, least rhetorically ambiguous account of Brown’s outlook on politics.