The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr (America and the Long 19th Century, 3)

InAmerican political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historicaland mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler andEd White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in thespecifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elementsclustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founderstook shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race,and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase andthe Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deepanxieties about the United States as a slave nation.Drexlerand White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the timeis the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in theliterature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800,the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, hismachinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treasontrial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionaryAmerica to suggest that the figure of “Burr” was fundamentally a displacedfantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how thehistorical and literary fictions of the nation’s founding served to repress thelarger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of thatrepression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of CharlesBrockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics,tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculatethat this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap inU.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820.