A speculative language: Finance and literary imagination in early America

Abstract

Scholars have long understood that the expansion of paper credit systems and public debt carried unsettling linguistic implications: for example, the credit instrument that deferred redemption into the unforeseeable future, or went entirely unredeemed, constituted for many observers an abuse of language—a written promise that had been broken. Such conclusions, however, tell only part of the story in early America. Focusing on a time period that begins with the first colonial public finance systems in 1690 and concludes with the advent of federal banking at the end of the eighteenth century, this dissertation argues that credit instruments dramatized for certain American writers the imaginative possibilities of language and the extent to which texts might be used for civic purposes: such language could be used to speculate about a future that had yet to materialize and to bind individual readers together through ties of indebtedness. The dissertation examines literary works by Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Judith Sargent Murray and Washington Irving. Embedded in these works is a Euro-American ideology of economic opportunity premised on the notion that risk-taking and start-up debt were necessary for expansion. The linguistic consequence of this ideology, I argue, is an understanding that writers could use speculative language to project a prosperous future; moreover, this speculation could also serve as a collective risk-taking that would encourage readers to invest in that future. Paper credit instruments, which relied on the willingness of buyers and sellers to credit them and were especially prone to the vicissitudes of popular opinion, drew an individual into an exchange community that rendered personal assets contingent on communal economic stability. Drawing an analogy between public currency and literature, writers identified the utility of literary speculation in forging communal bonds and constructing a reading public. Linguistic value was, like monetary value, consensually determined, and speculative language relied particularly on the faith of readers for its eventual realization; a reading community was, like an economic market, a nexus of interdependent relationships.