It is a truism that, for nineteenth-century US cultural critics, the meaning of ‘America’ is deeply rooted in the geographical specifics of the New World. Myra Jehlen has shown how this preoccupation with place encouraged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century models of nationhood based on the idea of ‘incarnation’, where cultural production was considered a realization of the continent's intrinsic potential. In cultivating the land, the American pioneer created ‘nature's kind of civilization by cultivating not a telos’ (no ‘predetermined program’ imported from Europe and imposed on the New World) ‘but an infinite entelechy’ embodied in the North American space and to be brought to fruition by its pioneer cultivators. ‘“America”’, then, ‘was not allegory, for its meaning was not detachable, but symbol, its meaning inherent in its matter’ (1986: 72–3, 9). Jehlen concludes that ‘the United States was defined primarily as place’ (1986: 6), and that ‘an idea of incarnation can be seen to organize American self-consciousness as grammar organizes speech’ (1986: 21).

The concept of incarnation in US discourse draws its persuasiveness from the rhetorical interplay and tension between two geographical models of culture that often reinforce and supplement one another. The first model posits a ‘spatial determinism’ that considers cultural expression to be causally dependent on the topographical environment. Although spatial determinism reaches its greatest authority in the eighteenth century (epitomized by Montesquieu's connection of morality and place), it remains influential within the natural sciences until well after the Civil War.