Allegorical and typological motifs leave a dominant trace in American literature from the early days of European colonization to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond. Typology was used by late Tudor writers and New England Puritans to justify colonial expansion in the New World and, via the figure of Jonathan Edwards, exerted a fundamental influence on American Romanticism: especially the Transcendentalist thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Negative responses to Emerson's theories of allegory, in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, were matched by positive politicizations of Emersonian allegory, specifically in Transcendentalist anti-slavery writings. Typological allegory features as a powerful Abolitionist strategy in slave narratives, like those by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs (a strategy that inflects Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech), and works also as a decolonizing rhetorical tool in Indigenous writings such as Samson Occom's autobiography (1768), William Apess' works of the 1830s, and contemporary poems like Louise Erdrich's “Captivity” (1984).