A 'game of architectural consequences': The American house and the formation of national identity, 1776--1858

This dissertation argues that from the late eighteenth century through the end of the antebellum period, Americans conceptualized their still unsettled state through metaphors of home building. Apprehensive about the consequences of importing European ideals and traditions, post-colonial Americans struggled to define a national tradition even as they undertook the arduous business of social and political design. Without the stability or fixed authority of established structures of belief as embodied in authoritative architectural sites, Americans found resonance in more modest emblems of civic architecture and order. For politicians, artists, and writers alike, the house became the most frequently invoked vehicle in framing debates about personal and national identity in the new Republic. The dissertation explores the ways in which this pervasive concern with the design and furnishing of houses extends and complicates current understandings of emerging paradigms of transformation and permanence across the first eighty years of United States history. It argues that although initially the nation was imagined against a blank canvas, it was built amid a complex series of architectural structures. Thus, the project of house and nation building in the United States was a process of rebuilding. In undertaking that project, the citizens of the new Republic came to terms with the multivalent settlement histories of North America. Through a careful examination of these efforts, this dissertation attempts to retrieve and refocus the cultural centrality of the domestic during this period of American life. In so doing, it engages a broad range of cultural production. Among the political theorists and social critics discussed are William Cooper, Philip Hone, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Jacobs, and George Washington. Novelists and poets examined include Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Caroline Kirkland, Herman Melville., Edgar Allan Poe, and Phyllis Wheatley. The work of natural historians, landscape artists, and authors of architectural and domestic treatises such as William Bartram, Catherine Beecher, William Clark, Thomas Cole, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Andrew Jackson Downing, Meriwether Lewis, and Frances Trollope is also considered.