Pirate Narratives and the Revolutionary Atlantic in the Early Republic and the Antebellum Period

AbstractIn this chapter, piracy is explored in the context of the (post-)revolutionary Atlantic. It demonstrates how at the moment of the political declaration of independence, in which the crisis of colonial legitimacy was performatively resolved, the sign of piracy was externalized by the claim that the British monarch was a pirate and that the future U.S. thus had a natural right to independence. The chapter examines how historical romances in early American literature (such as Cooper’s The Red Rover) adapted Byronic images of piracy in tales of the revolution, appropriating the pirate as a foundational figure and an ideal type of patriotic outlaw masculinity. Even in narrating the crisis in gender relations, as revolutionary femininities gave way to Republican motherhood and the “cult of true womanhood” in the nineteenth century, revolutionary pirates were prominent figures in popular literary production geared towards an increasingly female readership, as in Lt. Murray’s Fanny Campbell (1844/1845). Former revolutionary heroines (here in the form of a patriotic female pirate) were domesticated in such historical romance-novelettes to make palpable the ongoing transition to a more conservative feminine ideal.