This dissertation explores the political agency of satire as a literary form in America before, during, and immediately after the Civil War. The fluidity between rulers and the ruled, or politicians and protesters, in colonial and nineteenth-century America led many otherwise powerful figures to adopt poses of satiric modesty that allowed them to address pressing issues from two angles simultaneously: direct, political engagement through arguments and diplomacy and indirect, aesthetic engagement through satire voiced by characters with ties to the people.

“Satirist-statesmen” such as Benjamin Franklin, James Russell Lowell, P.T. Barnum, John W. De Forest, and Abraham Lincoln simultaneously produced satire and held positions of cultural or political prominence. In satires featuring homespun characters, personae, or self-presentations, they encouraged their mass audiences to identify with them and against their defamiliarized targets. In this way, satirists created representatives-in-print who spoke to and for politically and socially marginalized Americans, thus urging political insurgency through cultural emergence. Satire's interrogations of political paradigms helped its readers consider the roles they might play in challenging dominant norms, in turn shaping the political environment that facilitated those interrogations.