Free Quakers, Founding Fathers, and Native Americans: Ned Buntline's Nativist Historiography

Will Fenton considers the historical fiction and religious appropriation of rabid nativist and prolific dime novelist Ned Buntline (E. Z. C. Judson), and situates Buntline’s Saul Sabberday (1858) in the context of a surge of... [ view full abstract ]

Will Fenton considers the historical fiction and religious appropriation of rabid nativist and prolific dime novelist Ned Buntline (E. Z. C. Judson), and situates Buntline’s Saul Sabberday (1858) in the context of a surge of mass-market historical romances published during the 1850s-1860s that fetishized the Free Quakers, a breakaway sect who relinquished the peace testimony during the American Revolution. Amongst dime novels by John Richter Jones, Edward Ellis, Augustine Duganne, William Howland, and Edward Hand Williamson, Buntline’s romance earned enduring popularity. Examining the text’s publication history—which included serialization in the New-York Mercury, a theatrical adaptation, and publication in four Beadle dime novel series spanning twenty-five years—Fenton posits that Sabberday’s appeal owed to its circumscription of sectarian disputes within a revolutionary frame, displacement of contemporaneous racial anxieties to British territories (Bermuda), and hagiography of the founding fathers intended to invoke and mobilize nativist sentiment, particularly the politics of the late-antebellum Native American party.