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This dissertation investigates the cultural and ideological significance of a genre of American fiction that flourished during the second quarter of the nineteenth century: the frontier romance. These enormously popular works bore a fundamental connection, as yet unexplored, to the nationwide debate about slavery during this period. It was in part this contemporary crisis, I argue, that gave novels about the colonial past so much appeal for an emergent national readership. During the 1820s, the frontier romances of James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick reformulated the terms of the slavery debate so that contradictions that could not even be discussed in the political sphere, much less resolved, did find expression and often a resolution of sorts in fictional narratives about Anglo-Indian racial conflict in the colonial past. By disseminating and popularizing a particular notion of race …