Crimes Against Feeling: Piracy, Sympathy, and Ocean Politics in Antebellum American Legal Culture

Demonstrating how emotion became central to the legal and literary meanings of piracy in nineteenth-century America Pirates have long occupied a central yet unstable place in American law and national identity.In the decades leading up to and including the U.S. Civil War, the charge of piracy was leveled against an unusually wide range of figures: foreign heads of state, imperial filibusters, transoceanic enslavers, enslaved mutineers, radical abolitionists, and others who challenged established forms of authority.Early American literature reflects this instability, portraying pirates who vary dramatically in politics, race, gender, and allegiance.As Mark B. Kelley shows, these characters are united less by ideology than by their challenge to landed social norms and fixed national belonging.The pirate, in both law and literature, emerges as an individual defined by multiplicity rather than political coherence. Crimes Against Feeling examines how Americans made sense of this ambiguous f