In this essay, I examine the work of the little‐studied 19th‐century American novelist John Neal as a way of investigating how electricity was used to contest romantic ideas of organic wholeness. Neal draws on electrical science and imagery repeatedly in his romantic novels and criticism of the early 1820s. In describing Neal's use of electricity, I place his work in conversation with Hans Christian Ørsted's development of the romantic organicism of naturphilosophie in his experiments and his demonstration of electromagnetism. Like Ørsted's science and the theories of romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, electricity, for Neal, comes to suggest the limits of a mechanistic Newtonian worldview. But unlike the romantic organicism of Coleridge and Ørsted, Neal's romantic use of electricity views it as a disruptive force that instead of revealing the harmonizing potential of oppositional forces governed by some universal law suggests the indeterminacy and limits of scientific experiment and law.