In Distress: A Marketplace of Feeling in the Early American Republic

McCoy, Laura

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-4kdg-fd97

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In Distress: A Marketplace of Feeling in the Early American Republic

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This dissertation documents the centrality of emotion to Americans’ understanding of, participation in, and critiques of the expanding economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. By then, many people viscerally understood that white men’s attempts to procure credit and escape debt could produce fear, anger, guilt, and sadness. In response, anxious middling and upper-class white families cultivated an economy of emotion, consciously laboring to produce cheerfulness and hope to counter those debilitating feelings. This marketplace of feeling served as a necessary corollary to the material market with which historians are more familiar. Nervous merchants tried to establish a “commerce of affection” to help each other through an unpredictable and sometimes unforgiving economy. Male breadwinners both North and South “deposited” difficult emotions with their wives, who labored to make happiness but were uneasy about sacrificing their emotional wellbeing to the pursuit of wealth. Many anxious enslavers insisted that enslaved people absorb the emotional costs of sale, demanding they appear happy to be sold away from their loved ones. However, enslaved people’s displays of anger and grief undermined paternalist claims that slavery produced happiness. These embodied emotions were foundational to abolitionist discourse. I contend that the marketplace of feeling was patriarchal, rooted in (and simultaneously reinforcing) both gendered and racial power. While popular fiction and didactic literature celebrated dependents’ labors to produce happiness for white male breadwinners, many Americans ignored the detrimental effects of this intimate, uncompensated, and sometimes violently coerced labor. Like other labor markets in the early U.S., then, the marketplace of feeling was exploitative, with “profits”—namely happiness and tranquility—often kept from those who labored hardest.

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