The Ohians and the Kentucks: Solomon Spaulding’s Manuscript Found (1816) and the Literature of the Early Republic

Solomon Spaulding’s Manuscript Found has long been a source of contention in the Mormon community. Whether or not Joseph Smith read it, it is a fascinating text in its own right and unfairly overlooked in the annals of early American literature. This text’s history demonstrates the presumed marketability of Mound Builder novels, even before Atwater’s publication. An indebted minister trying to publish a profitable book to pay his debts, unable to finish, Spaulding gave it to a friend before he died in 1816. By the early 1830s the manuscript had circulated in the upper Hudson Valley, before it vanished, only be rediscovered in a Hawaiian attic in the 1880s, finally finding a permanent home in the Oberlin College Library. Ever since, anti-Mormon activists have used it to accuse Smith of plagiarizing it in The Book of Mormon. Nonetheless, like Ethan Smith’s A View of the Hebrews, the Mormons have kept it in print, and explained the text’s similarities to Joseph Smith’s as coincidences and, as such, counter-evidence.

Dorcasina's Wig: The Borrowed Finery of the Early American Novel

The shift toward transatlantic frames of reference has thrown up an interesting literary problem: how do we reconcile the period’s repeated calls to produce an original, distinctive “American” style of writing (issued by Webster, Brockden Brown, Miller, Mitchell, Tyler, to name just a few) with the fact that many novelists self-consciously borrowed and reproduced the cultural materials of European and British sources? This is a constitutive paradox of many novelistic productions of the early republic, and recent attempts to address it have argued that the very concept of “originality” was a peculiar one at the end of the eighteenth century.  It meant different things to different writers as they sought to negotiate the received cultural authority of established forms with “native” innovation.  Two recent studies have tackled the related literary problems of “originality” and “dependence” in particularly generative ways.  The first is Ezra Tawil’s forthcoming Literature, American Style, which argues that the now critically unfashionable idea of literary exceptionalism was an historical category of thought, circulating throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, that placed debates over national style in dialogue with cultural emulation.  The second is William Huntting Howell’s Against Self-Reliance (2015), which makes a distinction between “the broad strokes of American cultural dependence – the ways in which the artists, writers, and artisans of the United States borrow from Europeans” and “the intimate mechanics of individual artistic, linguistic, and behavioral dependence” (10-11). “Not all art,” Huntting Howell argues crucially, “seeks origination, individuation, or timelessness; there are other registers of signification and other metrics for success, including instrumentality, historicity, and the assertion of common cause” (12).