romanticism contra enlightenment

Re Olivera's good post, I want agree in that I had also, in the past, seen "romanticism" taken in its British sense as a response to the enlightenment. But as I have saud previously, as I looked at American legal history, I began to suspect that in America, enlightenement principles were somehow transmuted into attitudes that for want of a better word I could only call "romantic." I mean this to apply only to American law and I am not sure, as I have said, what that means fully. Some aspects I trace back to Herder and something like a "romanticism of place" and to some qualities of imagination applied to identity broadly. Some aspects are suggested by Bernard Bailyn's reading of early North American history and some to my own sense of the romance figures of Cooper. Some of it is suggested to me by Mary Shelley's recapitualtion of matters of language, imagination, and identity in _Frankenstein_. I need to read more specifically in all of this and in the romantic characteristics of the idea of property. Much of the "evidence" of what I am trying to tease out is in the actual language of laws of slavery and more speficially in judicial opinions from the antebellum south and the "scientific" canon of racialism that was contemporary to and influenced them. Finally, I am not sure that there is much direct relationship between American Legal Romanticism (my caps) and "American Romanticism" taken as a moment in American literary and cultural history, but I won't dismiss the possibility that such an argument can be made. All of the references given by JoEllen and Olivera seem very much to the point.
Chris