ABSTRACT
These four titles were listed in immediate succession on the content page of the April 1828 issue of The North American Review: a collocation of titles and topics that was not merely coincidental but refl ective of their complex connections in America’s consciousness. In the late 1820s and 1830s in the United States, all of these issues were key concerns-the “Woman Question”; the “Indian Question”; interest in language, not only American English but also other languages, including those of Native American Indians; the claiming of a distinct American literature; and a concern with national boundaries, geographical and cultural.1 Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that, independently and together, these issues were frequently discussed in the nation’s periodicals, played out in multifaceted ways in novels like Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie; Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827), and surfaced in congressional debates of the period. This chapter explores the constellation of cultural, literary, and political concerns signaled by this page of The North American Review-particularly, it focuses on Hope Leslie and women’s antiremoval petitions to examine the larger debate over women’s access to national, political language in the contexts of Indian removal and slavery.2
