Charles Brockden Brown, Indigenous Peoples, and the Footnote: A Case Study

While Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was no Edward Gibbons, like his European counterparts he did use footnotes. Yet for all we know about Brown’s authorship and editing, no one has systematically examined the ways he used them in his entire corpus of writing. My essay examines how eighteenth-century American use of footnotes was adapted to specific cultural and literary circumstances and how Brown’s use of the footnote over time changes in terms of form and content. In mapping where Brown’s footnotes appear, I argue that as his understanding of the American Indian evolved he makes an epistemic shift from using footnotes for factual information to using them as an alternative discourse which questions, with increasing irony, colonial conceptions of Indigenous people not just in America but globally in the Asian-Pacific. Brown’s use of footnotes, I suggest, also raises questions about the role of the footnote in American literary history.