Forgetting Freedom: White Anxiety, Black Presence, and Gradual Abolition in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 1780–1838

Abstract

SHORTLY AFTER ARRIVING in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1801, newly
appointed state supreme court judge Hugh Henry Brackenridge sat
down to finish the sequel to his lengthy and peripatetic satire on the
dangers of popular democracy, Modern Chivalry. As in the work's earlier
installments, it followed the quixotic adventures of the educated and virtuous
Captain John Farrago and his naïve "bog-trotting" servant, Teague
O'Regan—the former symbolic of thoughtful republican citizenship, the
latter of the recently enfranchised, unlettered voter who elected unqualified
men to high station. Yet Brackenridge offered more than a lesson on
republican citizenship. As John Wood Sweet, Matthew Frye Jacobson,
and others have shown, Modern Chivalry had a much broader ambit. Had
they the opportunity to read it, Brackenridge's Cumberland County
neighbors might have found neatly summarized in the text's later pages
their own struggle to define citizenship in the age of emancipation.
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