The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

In

American political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historical

and mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler and

Ed White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in the

specifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elements

clustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founders

took shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race,

and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase and

the Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deep

anxieties about the United States as a slave nation.

Drexler

and White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the time

is the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in the

literature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800,

the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, his

machinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treason

trial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionary

America to suggest that the figure of Burr was fundamentally a displaced

fantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how the

historical and literary fictions of the nation’s founding served to repress the

larger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of that

repression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of Charles

Brockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics,

tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculate

that this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap in

U.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820.