Inspired by recent postcolonial fictional reinventions of the history of the Black Atlantic, and employing the critical tools of colonial discourse analysis, this book examines a nineteenth century 'postcolonial' corpus - texts written between the emergence of the United States as a nation and the Civil War. The texts considered witness a growing unease about the issue of slavery and the slave trade that erupted in the Civil War in 1861. Many of the texts have the ocean as their setting and 'negotiate' the complex and ambivalent relationship of 'postcolonial' America to Atlantic commerce and the transatlantic slave trade.