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.
Most recently, Adam Jortner, publishing
in The Journal of Mormon History, has
resuscitated the text as “a fictional frontier narrative of Native Americans
from the Age of Jefferson. … [that] complicates historiographical conceptions
of popular white understandings of race, history, and democracy” (229). Jortner
than reads the narrative as a parable of recent events on the frontier, with
Tecumseh standing in as the great and tragic figure who represented a hope of a
prehistory of Indian republicanism, one that might be revived. However, just as
Mathews’s Mound Builders have been misread as white, so have Spaulding’s. While
such efforts within Mormon scholarship have preserved the text, they have also
constricted it to readings in conversation with The Book of Mormon. Curtis Dahl suggests, “the critic can more
profitably study [Manuscript Found]
as an outgrowth of a common tradition of writings about the Mound Builders”
(186) than as a proto-Mormon text.
Manuscript
Found’s pre-Columbian Americans are
not Indians: they instead resemble a non-specific Old World population, one
most likely southern European. As such, Manuscript
Found transposes Roman prehistory on the New World, rather than Shawnee,
along the lines of Edward Gibbon’s The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), a well-circulated book in the early
republic, whose theme of imperial self-destruction was as much about
eighteenth-century Great Britain as it was Rome and its reactionary embrace in
the Augustan Age. Given that many early republicans saw themselves as extending
the Empire’s trajectory, such a reading also informed post-Revolutionary
Americans. In that sense, Manuscript
Found shares more with William Jenks’s Embargo-inspired Memoir of the Northern Kingdom (1807).
Each constructs an alternative American history to reframe the regional threat
to national unity, with Spaulding looking backward and Jenks forward. Jenks’s
is composed of a number of fictitious texts, all written in a distant future in
which the North and the South are separate nations facing a war of extinction.
Similarly, but in the distant past,
Spaulding’s Mound Builders—the Ohians and the Kentucks—actually vanish through
such a war. Both end abruptly, withholding resolution, thrusting the task of
finishing the story, of resolving these fissures, onto the reader.
Spaulding participates in an emergent mode of writing
I call “Primordialism”: textual fantasies about whites in North America in the
centuries and even millennia before Columbus. These texts projects both the fantasies and the fears of the new nation as it struggled with its paradoxical condition as a settler nation. The Ohians and the Kentucks then
become both stand-ins for Northern and Southern sectionalists in the days
before the bitter Compromise of 1820 and the defeat of the Bonus Bill in 1817,
both of which reflect and exacerbate these tensions, and they become white
place-holders for the coming raced American nation, even as a failed model. In
doing so, they reduce any and all pre-Columbian Indian history to
meaninglessness, establishing a far older, and thereby legitimizing, white
claim on North America. Primordialism was already the source of so much
interest in the “Welsh Indians” of the early republic, the depiction of
American Indians as “Lost Jews,” and whitened Mound Builders would soon attract
the imagination of dozens of American poets and romanticists. However,
understanding Spaulding’s work—even in its first-draft condition—should help us
to continue to deepen and reconsider the experimental complexity of American
fiction well before Cooper.
Manuscript Found has two frames. The first has the modern “author” finding the Roman
manuscripts in a cave in southern Ohio. After some editorializing, he addresses
the reader:
Gentle Reader tread lightly on the ashes of the
venerable dead—Thou must know that this country was once inhabited by great a
powerful nation. Considerably civilized & skilled in the arts of war and
& that on [the] ground where thou treadest many … a Battle hath been fought
and heroes by [the] thousand have been made to bite the dust. (2)
As
the “translation” begins, the second frame becomes that of Fabius, a Roman
shipwrecked in North America in the fourth century CE, soon after Constantine
converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. This allows Fabius to observe the
Mound Builders, and thus Spaulding’s implied Americans, from both Classical and
Biblical perspectives. Fabius and his crew initially settle among the “savages”
of the seaboard. Soon bored with their uncivilized neighbors and fearful of
their children growing like them, the Romans head west to cohabit with the more
civilized Mound Builders, whose “complexion, the form & construction of
their bodies, their customs, manners, Laws, government and religion all
demonstrate that they must have originated from some other nation & have
but a very distant affinity with their savage neighbors.” Physiologically, the
Mound Builders are “white” in a southern European way:
As to their persons, they were taller on an average
than I had seen in any nation … As to their complexion, it was bordering on an
olive tho of a lighter shade—Their eyes were generally dark brown or black.
Their hair was of the same coular, tho I have sometimes seen persons whose hair
was of a reddish hue. (27)
More
important, the community and civilization—from its monotheism to complex roads
and canals—is marked as “white.” After this, Fabius vanishes, unseen until,
fleeing from the concluding conflagration, when he hides his scrolls in the
cave where the “author” found them.
The first half of Fabius’s text describes a
near-Utopia, with matching empires on the north and south banks of the Ohio:
the Siotans and the Kentucks. Settled among the Siotans, or Ohians, Fabius
learns that, five hundred years ago, a wise man from the west—Lobaska-- had
brought broad reforms to the previously savage people by thwarting a Kentuckian
attack with a disguised canal—needing a “thousand men with shovels”—that safely
trap the Kentuckians. The invaders are spared. Lobaska’s subsequent
reforms--veiled republican ideals—spread to both sides of the river as his sons
become the first emperors of each. Under Lobaska’s regime, internal
improvements are put in place, education and literacy become universal,
utilitarian architecture comes into vogue, and, while there is hereditary
title, leaders are subject to a legislative process:
Tho learning, civilization, and refinement had not
yet arrived to that state of perfection in which they exist in a great part of
the Roman empire—yet the two empires of Siota and Kentuck during their long
period of peace and prosperity were not less happy. As luxiry and extravagance
were scarcely known, to exist, especially among the common people, hence there
was a great similarity in their manner of living, their dress, their habbits
and manners. –Pride was not bloated & puffed up with enormous wealth—Nor
had envy fewel to influme her hatred and malice. (65)
While
these sections call to mind Thomas More’s Utopia,
they also call to mind Gibbon, and the reader’s foreknowledge of the empires’
ultimate destruction haunts the text. Following Lobaska’s death, nearly five
centuries of peace ensue, just as four centuries of peace followed Christ’s visit
to North America between the Nephilites and the Lamanites in The Book of Mormon. While Lobaska’s
republican reforms modernize, eventually, human impulsiveness, greed, and
irrationality cannot simply be erased. When a trivial incident sets off
interregional war, the whole civilization is engulfed, and five hundred years
of humility and pacifism are erased. However, the seeds of self-destruction had
been planted in Lobaska’s flaws plans, a critique of the republican idealism of
Thomas Jefferson. For example, Lobaska had insisted that every community build
defensive earthworks, maintain an arsenal, and train their young men as
warriors, just in case the surrounding savages attacked. Given this militarized
context, then, when the chance came, local chieftains need very little cause to
slaughter their neighbors.
Soon after Fabius’s arrival, in the
fourteenth generation after Lobaska, a Kentuckian prince carries off his
distant cousin, a Siotan princess who had been placed in an arranged marriage
with Sambal, the Siotan king. Their elopement violates the Constitution of each
empire forbidding trans-Ohio marriages. Irrational and overblown rhetoric and
performances inform the run-up to war, just they had the prelude to the War of
1812 as Spaulding was writing. Sambal, like Homer’s Menelaus, responds with
pure selfishness: “How have I been insulted, abused, dishonoured &
outraged. How have my prospects for glory been instantaneously blasted and my
character become the ridicule of a laughing world” (83). Soon, he hires
sooth-sayers to stir up public anger (89). Lobaska’s rationalist values have
vanished: in the Siotan parliament, literally, the loudest voices win. A lower
noble, Boakim, articulates the rationale for war:
The injury, the insult and outrage has not been
committed against us alone—if this was the case perhaps we might accept of
reparation—but it is committed against the throne of Omnipotence and in
defiance of his authority—No reparation can of consequence be received …
Nothing else can satisfy the righteous demand of the Great and good being. The
mighty achievements of your warriors shall immortalize their names--& their
heads shall be crowned with never fading laurels--& as for those who die,
gloriously fighting in the cause of their country and their God, they shall
immediately receive their ethereal bodies--& and shall arise quickly to the
abodes of increasing delight & glory. (93)
God
and glory thus becomes the weapons of bullies, not thoughtful men. Soon,
leaders of far-flung communities arrive with armies set on destroying
everything on the other side of the river:
Ulipoon King of Michegan received the orders of the
Emperor with great joy—War suited his niggardly and avaricious soul—As he was
in hopes to obtain great riches from the spoils of the enemy—Little did he
regard the miseries & destruction of others if by this means he could
obtain wealth and aggrandize himself. (95)
Sure
enough, Ulipoon betrays the Siotan cause by trying to escape with his plunder,
only to be slain by aggrieved Kentuckians. In brief, everything Lobaska had
built on reason and restraint vanishes. Spaulding, like Jenks, presciently
foresaw the end of the republic and the coming of the Civil War. As much as the
rule of law and the Constitution glossed over both human nature and
interregional rivalry, war still came, and everything good about the republic
was lost to the irrational bloodlust no amount of Enlightenment rationality
could erase.
Writing a decade before Atwater, Spaulding mistakes
the Mounds themselves as just earth piled atop the war’s casualties. His Mound
Builders thus destroy themselves and abandon republicanism for violent
conquest. Soon, savages soon the constructions they abandoned. By hiding it in
the primordial past, Spaulding indirectly comments on the fragility of the
settler nation as sectionalim presages the end of the republic of the Founders.
However, jujst as flaws in Lobaska’s plans led to the end of the Mound
Builders, so we might understnd Spaulding’s implication that the fall of the
republic was rooted in the flaws of the founding. In recognizing the republic’s
precariousness, Spaulding chides his countrymen for mistaking their momentary
achievements for signs of an exceptional and perpetual Destiny.
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