ABSTRACT
With unabated vigor and determination, Brown launched himself into a writing frenzy, which effectively would make him the foremost chronicler of emerging American empire. This chapter examines that in an essay entitled 'A Sketch of American Literature', 1806-7, Charles Brockden Brown, America's first professional man of letters, gave a sobering account of state of the nation's writing at the start of the nineteenth century. It explores Brown's highly original though as yet largely unacknowledged political and historical writings of the first decade of the nineteenth century within the context of contemporaneous transatlantic geopolitical relations. The chapter discusses that Brown envisaged a new global economic order, which would transcend national and imperial boundaries and thus eradicate the inequities bred by colonization and imperialism. The two 1803 pamphlets on the cessation of Louisiana, An Address to the Government of the United States and Monroe's Embassy, represent Brown's first systematic attempt to redefine America's position vis-vis the imperialist powers of Britain and France.
