Abstract
This chapter shows how mid-nineteenth-century government policymakers and popular writers relied on a shared sentimental language to validate prospective U.S. (postal) empires. Beginning in 1847, subsidized postal circuits began to secure U.S. martial and economic power in transoceanic space. Competing policymakers, such as Charles Sumner and Matthew Maury, invoked the promise of domestic fiction—namely family reunion and the expansion of sympathetic connections—to justify these circuits’ further expansion to India or the hemispheric south. Maria Cummins’s 1854 domestic fiction The Lamplighter (1854) may be read as a judgment of these respective policies. Her heroine’s reliance on India’s postal service and her triumph over harmful southern mail naturalized an Indo-American imperial circuit. In short, tracking India’s mail reveals empire’s material and social circuits.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsBibliography
“American Ocean Steam Navigation: Or the First American Steamship to Bremen.” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 17, no. 4 (1847): 357–364.
“Appropriations for Transporting the U.S. Mail by Steamers.” Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 29, no. 1 (1853): 121.
“The Baltimore Southern Commercial Convention.” Debow’s Review 14, no. 4 (1853): 373–379.
Bancroft, George. “Postal Convention with Great Britain. December 13, 1848.” The Statutes at Large and Treaties of the United States of America from December 1, 1845 to March 3, 1851, 9.29 (1862): 965–970. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. Library of Congress.
Barnes, Elizabeth. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Bauermeister, Erica. “The Lamplighter, The Wide Wide World, and Hope Leslie. The Recipes from Nineteenth-Century Women’s Novels.” Legacy 8, no. 1 (1991): 17–28.
Baym, Nina. Introduction. Cummins. ix–xxxi.
Blum, Hester. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 670–677.
Burnham, Michelle. “Oceanic Turns and American Literary History in Global Context.” In Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion, 151–171. Edited by Hester Blum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
“Connections of the Atlantic with the Gulf- Interests of Alabama.” Debow’s Review 14, no. 6 (1853): 567–572.
Cummins, Maria. The Lamplighter. 1854. Reprint. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Dierks, Konstantin. In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Fenton, R.E. “The Postal System. Speech of Hon. R.E. Fenton, of New York, In the House of Representatives, June 1854.” Congressional Globe 33, no. 1 (1854): 1017.
Fichtelberg, Joseph. Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market, 1790–1870. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.
Fichter, James. So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
“Florida—Its Positions, Resources, and Destiny.” Debow’s Review 14, no. 4 (1853): 312–336.
Fuller, Howard. Empire, Technology, and Seapower: Royal Navy Crisis in the Age of Palmerston. London: Routledge, 2013.
Fuller, Wayne. Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
———. The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Gniadek, Melissa. “‘Outré-mer adventures’: Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? and the Maritime World.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 32, no. 2 (2015): 196–213.
Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “The Gulf of Mexico System and the ‘Latinness’ of New Orleans.” American Literary History 18, no. 3 (2006): 468–495.
Guterl, Matthew Pratt. American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
———. “An American Mediterranean: Haiti, Cuba, and the Antebellum South.” In Hemispheric American Studies, 96–115. Edited by Robert Levine and Caroline Levander. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Henkin, David. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Horne, Gerald. The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Hubbard, Walter, Richard Winter, and Susan McDonald. North Atlantic Mail Sailings 1840–1875. Canton: U.S. Philatelic Classics Society, 1984.
Hunt, Freeman. “The Editor to His Friends and Patrons.” Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 21, no. 1 (1849): 143.
John, Richard. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Jung, Moon-Ho. Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
———.“Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, 3–21. Edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Karp, Matthew. “Slavery and American Sea Power: The Navalist Impulse in the Antebellum South.” Journal of Southern History 77, no. 2 (2011): 283–324.
Kielbowicz, Richard. News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700–1860. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Lang, Amy. “Class and the Strategies of Sympathy.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, 128–42. Edited by Shirley Samuels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Lazo, Rodrigo. Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Mattox, Jake. Alternative Imperialisms in the Age of Manifest Destiny. Dissertation. San Diego: University of California-San Diego, 2007.
Maury, Matthew. “The Commercial Prospects of the South.” Southern Literary Messenger 17, no. 10 (1851): 686–698.
———.“Direct Foreign Trade of the South.” Debow’s Review 12, no. 2 (1852): 126–148.
———. “On Extending the Commerce of the South and West by Sea.” Debow’s Review 12, no. 4 (1852): 381–399.
———. (as ‘Inca’) “Shall the Valleys of the Amazon and Mississippi Reciprocate Trade?” Debow’s Review 14, no. 2 (1853): 136–145.
———. “Valley of the Amazon.” Debow’s Review 14, no. 5 (1853): 449–460.
———. “Valley of the Amazon, No. II.” Debow’s Review 14, no. 6 (1853): 556–567.
May, Robert. Slavery, Race and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
———. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
“The Moral and Social Benefits of Cheap Postage.” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 21, no. 6 (1849): 601–610.
Moubray, Jane, and Michael Moubray. British Letter Mail to Overseas Destinations 1840–1875. London: Royal Philatelic Society, 1992.
Officer, Lawrence H. and Samuel H. Williamson, “Purchasing Power of Money in the United States from 1774 to Present,” MeasuringWorth, 2013. Web.
Pazicky, Diana L. Cultural Orphans in America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
“The Post-Office As It Has Been, Is, and Should Be: As A Means of Modern Civilization.” Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review. 35, no. 6 (1856): 680–697.
R B F. “Art. II.—Of the Establishment of a Line of Mail Steamers.” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review. 29, no. 5 (1853): 549–559.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Scheele, Carl H. A Short History of the Mail Service. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970.
Shulman, Peter. Coal & Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
Sidebottom, John. The Overland Mail: A Postal Historical Study of the Mail Route to India. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1948.
Sinche, Bryan. “Lydia Sigourney’s Sailors and the Limits of Sentiment.” Legacy 29, no. 1 (2012): 62–85.
Singley, Carol. Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Stoler, Ann Laura. “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, 1–22. Edited by Ann Laura Stoler. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Stone, Robert. A Caribbean Neptune: The Maritime Postal Communications of the Greater and Lesser Antilles in the 19th Century. New York: Philatelic Foundation, 1993.
Streeby, Shelley. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Strouth Gaul, Theresa and Sharon M. Harris eds. Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
Sumner, Charles. “Cheap Ocean Postage: Speech of the Hon. Charles Sumner.” Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, 26, no. 5 (1852): 648.
Taketani, Etsuko. U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825–1861. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.
Weinstein, Cindy. Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Williams, Susan. “‘Promoting an Extensive Sale’: The Production and Reception of The Lamplighter.” The New England Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1996): 179–200.
———. Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850–1900. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Winter, Richard. Understanding Transatlantic Mail. Bellefonte: American Philatelic Society, 2006.
Yun, Lisa. The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Nicole Tonkovich and Sara Johnson for their feedback on an early draft of this chapter. This collection’s editors, Anupama Arora and Rajender Kaur, also provided vital notes.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kelley, M.B. (2017). “Every India Mail”: The Lamplighter and the Prospect of U.S. Transoceanic (Postal) Empire, 1847–1854. In: Arora, A., Kaur, R. (eds) India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62334-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62334-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62333-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62334-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)