Margaret Fuller, Brutus, and George Bancroft: A Journalist’s Beginnings

Abstract

Margaret Fuller’s brief and very modest first publication, “Brutus,” appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot for 27 November 1834, and is here reprinted for the first time. Fuller’s trying-out of a public voice, specifically encouraged by her father, put her into conversation with George Bancroft as author of “Slavery in Rome” in a recent issue of the North American Review. While Fuller seems uninterested in the implications of the Roman context for judgments about American slavery (a matter that Bancroft himself treats only by indirection), she does challenge some basic assumptions about the uses of history and the (masculine) impersonality of professional scholarship. Fuller’s uninvited reply subverts Bancroft’s intended monologue, producing a dialogue as she deploys a scrappy popular newspaper against a cool, British-style quarterly journal. It becomes a multilateral conversation when the argument is joined by a mysterious “H” from Salem.