Introduction

In the 1804 instalment of Hugh Henry Brackenridge's six-volume satire of western Pennsylvania, Modern Chivalry (1792 –1815), the novel's two central figures are welcomed into the many social clubs which seem to be springing up everywhere on the frontier. Teague O'Regan, an Irish-born servant whose artless charisma allows him to attain political importance in the United States, is invited to join so many voluntary associations that it baffles his master, a fifty-three-year-old veteran named Captain Farrago. O'Regan has been admitted to so many ‘learned societies’, despite his lack of a rudimentary education, that ‘should a new edition of the work come to be published, it will take up, at least, two quarto pages, to contain the names of these member-ships’. Wandering into a Tammany club, O'Regan is invited to join their travesty of Indian ritual, while Farrago is dismayed to find that Tammany has little to do with Indians or learning. Any club that takes a name from an Indian hero, remonstrates Farrago, should ‘think … of their brothers that are yet in blindness’, or ‘lend a hand to bring them to light’. Though we are, he reflects, long past the age of the ‘primitive church’, when enlightenment meant Christian conversion, the learned societies might transmit some knowledge west, rather than merely persuade ‘the citizens to vote for this or that candidate’. Farrago's hope that the learned societies of Pittsburgh might contribute to the westward translation of learning and empire has apparently been disappointed.