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History, memory, and the echoes of equivalence in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.

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From: Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Date: 20070101
Author:Emerson, Amanda

In the second volume of James Fenimore Cooper's Notions of the Americans, the narrator, a British traveler to America, gives this account of equality:

 
  Equal rights do not, in any part of America, imply a broad, general, 
  and unequivocal equality.... [The American] does not give political 
  power to the pauper, nor to females, nor to minors, nor to idiots, nor 
  yet even to his priests. All he aims at is justice; and in order to do 
  justice, he gives political rights to all those who, he thinks, can 
  use them without abuse. (265) 

Such is the contrarian quality of a ...