These questions are at the core of Chervinsky’s new monograph Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic, where she details how Adams refined the still fragile template left behind by Washington. She writes that Adams “was tasked with navigating the presidency without that unique prestige” (2). This claim is not only descriptive but interpretive. It suggests that Adams’s choices were effectively arguments about the nature of executive power. Chervinsky argues that the difference between Washington and Adams is what makes the presidency so revealing. The navigation of the republic after Washington is the central focus of her book, and she is persuasive when she shows that Adams faced not only the responsibilities of the office, but also the responsibility of defining what the office was. Chervinsky treats Adams not simply as a statesman, but as a political thinker whose writings show how he reasoned through constitutional uncertainty. It is not a hagiographic portrait but rather examines how Adams’s own ideals shaped his decisions, sometimes constructively and sometimes problematically. This makes her work different from biographies that focus on Adams as a personality, such as David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning John Adams (2001) or Joseph Ellis’s Passionate Sage (1993). Instead, she follows the development of Adams’s political thought during a moment when the office itself was still under construction.

John Adams the man and the president appear as two distinct figures. Some historians, like John Ferling, Page Smith, and Bernard Weisberger, argue that the United States may not have achieved independence without Adams’s fierce defense of civil liberties and his ability to articulate Revolutionary purpose. As president, however, Adams confronted political realities that pressured him to define how his principles applied within the new constitutional framework. This tension interests Chervinsky, who shows Adams wrestling with the same ideas of virtue, order, and republican survival that guided him in earlier decades. Her treatment invites readers to consider whether Adams successfully adapted his Revolutionary ideals to a partisan republic or whether those ideals sometimes misled him in the new environment.

While president, Adams tackled a trade and naval conflict with France. He attempted to keep the United States out of full-scale war, but the resulting Quasi-War did not help his position. At the same time, he grew increasingly fearful of French spies and domestic dissent. This fear shaped his support for the Alien and Sedition Acts which allowed him to “order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The Sedition Act criminalized “false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government. These acts plagued his legacy, and many historians have tried to explain why he signed them. Chervinsky pays special attention not just to the war and the acts themselves, but to Adams’s thought process.

Through letters and diaries, Chervinsky analyzes what Adams believed the presidency demanded of him and how he explained it to himself and others. Chervinsky expertly keeps Adams at the center of her narrative but also uses his words to demonstrate how he understood executive responsibility. In a letter from John Adams to Judge Benjamin Chadbourne, Adams warned that “the fate of our republic is at hand” and that most republics fail when “the virtues are gone a free and equal constitution of government has rarely existed among men and requires constant vigilance to protect” (130). When Chervinsky writes that President Adams had not asked for the Sedition Act and had not lobbied for it, she explains that, per Adams’s own words, he believed that he was preserving the republic. She also leaves space for the reader to question whether his reasoning truly aligned with republican principles or whether his fear of disorder overwhelmed his commitment to liberty. Chervinsky does not suggest that the Acts were defensible. Instead, she shows how Adams explained them to himself. This is a valuable distinction because it reveals the internal logic of a president who believed that the preservation of the republic could at times require actions that strained the meaning of freedom. Yet it also raises significant questions. Does understanding his fear make his decision more acceptable? Does it reveal a consistent theory of the presidency, or does it show how easily an executive can interpret a crisis in ways that lead to an expansion of federal authority?

Chervinsky’s work nonetheless gestures toward a broader argument about the nature of executive power. Making the Presidency shows that Adams believed the office required a steady guardian who would act decisively when republican stability seemed threatened. Yet the book also reveals the profound limitations of Adams’s approach. His attempt to balance fears of French subversion with what he viewed as equitable solutions to the problem of a volatile press led to choices that were undeniably wrong. The evidence for this appears most clearly in Adams’s own letters and justifications, where he repeatedly warned that the republic stood on the brink of collapse and insisted that measures like the Sedition Act would safeguard national stability. These documents reveal a leader who conflated criticism with danger and believed that extraordinary action was necessary to avert disaster.

Chervinsky illuminates the internal logic behind those decisions, but the narrative also underscores the hazards of allowing executive anxiety to shape national policy. Rather than offering a coherent model of presidential authority, the book demonstrates how urgent concerns can distort judgment and invite expansive interpretations of federal power. In this sense, it encourages readers to consider whether the origins of the executive branch contain tensions that resist easy resolution and whether Adams’s example serves as a warning about the fragility of republican liberty when fear becomes a guiding force.

Writing history is a time-consuming process. Formulating cohesive sentences and nuanced paragraphs that are readable is an art. Chervinsky makes this process appear effortless, not because she avoids complexity, but because she interprets her sources with care. Her earlier book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, examined how Washington built a structure for executive advice. In Making the Presidency, she shows how Adams made decisions when no structure or precedent offered guidance. Both books demonstrate how institutions grow through interpretation and misinterpretation, success and error.

Chervinsky’s treatment of the Election of 1800 continues in this same nuanced vein . When Adams lost, he ensured that the fundamental attribute of the nation, a peaceful transfer of power, was respected. Chervinsky argues that Adams did not attend Jefferson’s inauguration, not because of personal spite, but because no precedent existed and no invitation was given (332). This interpretation encourages readers to consider the moment not as a failure of character but as a moment of constitutional uncertainty. Yet it also raises a question that Chervinsky acknowledges but does not fully settle: Was Adams consciously shaping a tradition, or did the tradition emerge from circumstances that neither he nor Jefferson fully controlled? That ambiguity strengthens the book, because it reflects the uncertainty that defined the early presidency.

Further Reading:

Joseph Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993).

John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (The University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

David McCullough, John Adams (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (The University of North Carolina Press, 1976).

David Waldstreicher, In The Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Bernard Weisberger, America Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the First Contested Election (Harper Collins, 2000).

Gordon Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Penguin Press, 2017). 

 

This article originally appeared in January 2025

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Ethan Healey is a historian specializing in Early American History with particular emphasis on 18^th– and 19th-century New England. Ethan’s most recent research was an analysis of second American President John Adams and why he stayed retired. The work primarily focused on Adams’s relationship with the press, as well as friends and rivals of his era. Ethan earned his bachelor’s degree in history from New England College, and he currently attends Gettysburg College, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in history. Ethan has published a few academic papers across various online outlets, appeared on several historical podcasts, and has even published poetry in a small local publication known as The Henniker Review. His debut fiction novella, Petition for Return, was released in 2025. He is a high school History Teacher in New Hampshire.

Matthew Tuininga’s recent publication, The Wars of the Lord, offers a new addition to the historiography of Puritan-Native relations, a perspective that dismisses both the “morality tale” of upstanding people fleeing tyranny “to establish religious liberty and democracy,” and the position that Puritans were racially motivated (4). Using numerous primary sources, including sermons and statements of essential Puritan figures, Tuininga argues that serving God was the driving motive for every Puritan action, including how they handled so-called pagans. Scholars dispute whether to characterize Puritan attacks on Natives as a racial or cultural war. According to Tuininga, it was a religious war (4). There was no difference between their missionary campaigns and wars; all were in the name of the Lord. Tuininga tries to rectify the claims of Puritan hypocrisy without justifying their actions as an unfortunate, but inevitable, outcome. The contemporary critical perspective finds the Puritans a hypocritical people who professed themselves as God’s nation, kind and just, but whose actions revealed violent, perhaps even genocidal tendencies and whose intentions sought blood instead of peace. This position follows historians like Lisa Brooks, who recontextualizes Puritan-Native relations through oft-ignored Indigenous perspectives. The charitable perspective, by contrast, asserts that the Puritans truly exemplified their professed piety and justice, yet, circumstantially, could not avoid the wars that led to severe consequences. Historians of the mid-twentieth century, such as Alden Vuaghn, determined that the Puritans had a “relatively humane, considerate, and just policy” towards Indigenous people. Tuininga takes a seemingly balanced stance between these positions, claiming their attacks were neither defensive nor hypocritical. Yet, although Tuininga writes vividly and thoroughly, there appears to be some lack of nuance in his argument. Tuininga contends that although they had disagreements about how to execute their Wars of the Lord, both missionaries and warriors were in consensus about waging an intentional Godly war.

To explain this, Tuininga meticulously arranges his book not only chronologically, but thematically, placing the progression of militaristic strategies alongside the corresponding development of praying towns. This arrangement could indicate how colonists waged war only once they determined that missionizing was an unsuccessful path to achieve the Lord’s work. Such logic could account for the variability between each Puritan generation. As historian Alden Vaughan has argued, the earlier Puritans may have wished for the “peaceful” assimilation and integration of Natives, yet later Puritans resorted to militaristic confrontation^. The fault here lies in the chronology. Those who supported the war and those who established the praying towns were contemporaries who disagreed, not living in different eras as Vaughan presents. As Tuininga himself notes, the praying towns established in the decades leading up to King Philip’s War were not favored by all Puritans, with most viewing Natives in these towns as pagan (277). The goal of the missionaries did not agree with the goal of most Puritans.

Tuininga clarifies that these different Puritan positions, one leaning towards what many would consider a genocide, and another towards missionizing, only debated the approach of their mission, not on the mission itself. Praying towns had obvious Godly purposes, and Tuininga shows how most militaristic moves and strategies were similarly made with God in mind, quoting captains who justified their genocidal acts as a war on “Amalek,” the biblical arch-rivals to God’s people (280). Yet, if their war was religious, not hypocritical and racial, one could ask why religious Natives rarely were able to culturally strip themselves enough to become wholly Puritan; they were largely alienated prior to the war and were attacked by Puritans during the war (274). Tuininga himself writes how Eliot’s praying towns faced resistance (187) and that “most pious colonists viewed the Indians as the worst of men” (192). Although policies toward such Natives were technically equal to those for Puritans, judges and juries did not always treat them with the same fairness (193). The evangelizing of Eliot and Mayhew’s praying towns sought to treat Natives as religious equals, while the war sought to treat them as a distinct cultural entity. For instance, Mary Rowlandson, a Puritan woman taken captive during King Philip’s War, describes the Praying Indians as people without scruples who displayed vicious acts of terror on the Puritans. This inconsistency negates Tuininga’s claim that Puritans didn’t see Natives in racial terms. If faithful Natives adopted English culture and Puritan religion, the primary difference between them and New Englanders was race; while ministers of praying towns may have ignored race, Puritans in support of war acknowledged race and became prejudiced against it. Daniel Gookin, the New England author of Puritan-Native relations who was sympathetic to praying towns, proclaimed that he could not join the multitudes of Puritans to cast all Natives in the same group (262). Based on Tuininga’s book alone, one can question whether those who waged war and those who professed to missionize upheld the same missions, and how we should assess their whether they were both Godly.

The only reconciliation between these two missions is cultural, not religious. Tuininga uses the term “genocide” to describe the events of King Philip’s War, corroborating the contemporary argument of Puritan hypocrisy. Yet, genocide was not a consistent mission between missionaries and warriors. Tuininga’s perspective only works if, rather than a physical genocide, a cultural genocide, took place. Both the praying towns and wars sought to strip Natives of their culture; the praying towns forced Natives to adopt English culture in various ways, such as cutting Indigenous hair, and Puritans concluded their wars with treaties that explicitly eradicated Native identity (88). Yet, if one acknowledges a physical genocide of the war, no such consistency exists between these two missions. Praying towns wanted the assimilation, and thereby the existence, of the Natives, while physical genocide desired their annihilation. Bearing in mind that the UN definition of genocide requires intention of the act, it is difficult to confidently assert whether or not a physical genocide occurred 350 years ago. Tuininga’s assumption that they waged a religious war appears to purport an intention of genocide, one that could not be consistent with the praying town’s cultural genocide. Such inconsistencies in Tuininga’s argument are rooted in his undefined interpretation of “genocide,” a word he uses explicitly to describe King Philip’s War (3). He never elucidates what he means by the term, creating a vague and ambiguous account that makes it difficult to either accept or critique.

Not only does Tuininga avoid defining “genocide,” he also provides no interpretation for the term “religious,” the most integral word for his argument. The obscurity of “religious” invites complications for those seemingly non-religious Puritan-Native interactions, particularly economic. As devout as the Puritans were, they still cared about financial security and success. Tuininga himself notes how Eliot speculated that the reason Puritans “were in danger of doing the same” destruction and depopulation as the Spanish was because “they desired Indian’s land” (258). One can potentially ignore the Puritan’s economic relationship with Natives and Native land by correctly identifying the Puritan—and more broadly, Protestants—dislike of idleness. Economic activity was a way to do the Lord’s work and keep busy. Yet, although one could argue that such economic pursuits were religiously motivated, some of the Puritans’ transactions contradicted their religious doctrine. Puritans relied on the Natives for the consumption of goods, particularly liquor, which they restricted for themselves. Such business deals do indicate hypocrisy rather than simply strict adherence to their doctrines and beliefs. It is difficult to establish or negate a religious premise in every Puritan-Native interaction, especially in the field of economics, though, because Tuininga’s term is under-theorized.

Finally, as fascinating as it is to follow Tuininga’s narrative style, the lack of explicit engagement with secondary sources limits a reader’s ability to evaluate his historiographical intervention. Tuininga introduces a completely new argument, yet, besides for his preface, he does not explicitly write in what ways he rejects previous historical narratives. Since the 1990s, the question of whether the Puritans committed genocide against the Pequot people has received significant attention and debate. Jeffery Ostler, a historian of Native American studies, has written an entire article dedicated to the conversation among existing scholarship surrounding the process of definition and application of genocide in early America; he concludes with the importance of definition alongside other “points of engagement” that encourage Native agency of their history. Tuininga’s story is compelling, but it is undermined by the lack of clearly defined terminology of words that are quintessential to his argument, while limiting his evidence to biblical or Puritan sources. The additional absence of direct discourse with previous scholarship makes his work less defensible. To his credit, Tuininga attempted what no other scholar has done previously. While most of the scholarship considers the two narratives independently, he attempted to fuse them, offering an entirely new image of Puritan-Native relations.

Further reading:

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2019).

Jeffery Ostler, “Genocide and American Indian History,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, March, 2, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.3.

Mary Rowlandson, Narrative of Mrs. Rowlandson; Narrative of the captivity and removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; Sovereignty & goodness of God. Mass[achusetts] Sabbath School Society, 1856.

Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Alden Vaughan, New England Frontier, Puritans and Indians 1620–1675, 3rd ed. (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).

 

This article originally appeared in December 2025.

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Yita Khanin is an MA student in Prehistoric Archaeology at Hebrew University. She recently graduated from Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women with a BA in History and Sociology. Khanin specializes in Indigenous and Nomadic studies and is in the process of publishing her undergraduate thesis on Russia’s reindeer pastoralists, analyzing Indigenous people’s relationship to the State, in addition to beginning her MA thesis on Bedouin pastoralists. In the coming year she will begin her PhD in Indigenous and Nomadic studies of the Levant.

She has published several articles in and served on the editorial board of her university’s history journal.

With a dearth of sources at my fingertips, the Massie pads and belts proved a valuable find. Originally, I thought the question of menstrual management in the nineteenth–century United States would not be so challenging to explore. Yet I found myself unable to find books or journal articles to cite when I first began digging. This only increased the urgency of my research. Instead of giving up, I found ways to work backwards, using mass produced and manufactured products from the twentieth century to infer what and how women created at home for their periods in earlier decades. I then turned to medical history, focusing on midwives, who would have been women’s first stop for nearly all of American history, and then medical texts written by male physicians as women’s medical care became professionalized. Altogether, working backwards from the early twentieth century allowed me to create a hypothesis of how a mobile or working women in the early nineteenth century would have handled her cycles, especially if she worked away from the home or frequently traveled.

Of course, not all women would have had a monthly cycle, though whether their periods were just inconsistent or nonexistent varied. Some women would have had no menstrual cycle, or amenorrhea, because of their ill health or congenital issues. However, physicians in the early and mid-nineteenth century believed any inconsistency in menstrual cycles would harm the menstruator. A delayed or suppressed period caused by sickness or poor nutrition would concern any woman. Therefore, despite the hardship of having a period, women likely wanted to have a regular cycle and may even have sought to induce menstruation when they missed multiple month’s cycles in a row.

Health literature in the early American republic centered on regular menstruation and gave women many tips on inducing periods if they had irregular cycles. For women with problematic cycles, male physicians recommended bland diets and food with fiber, but also more unusual remedies, including water cures. Rest was the common prescription for a menstruating woman, but even this had specific parameters: for example, Dr. William A. Alcott, in his 1850 work, The Young Woman’s Book of Health, railed against the decadence of feather beds, but did allow that women should use comforters, which are thickly insulated blankets.

Midwives are another valuable resource to suss out information about the general lived experiences of menstruators. Midwives remained the main provider of female healthcare until the late nineteenth century. Women in any sized settlement and town would visit the local midwife for help with painful or suppressed periods. Women could buy herbs or teas for suppressed periods, painful periods, or maybe even an abortifacient, if needed. For example, Martha Ballard, a midwife who worked in the town of Hallowell, Maine for decades, felt concern when a local woman had an “‘obstructed’” period in 1789. In this case, Ballard “‘prescribed the use of particular herbs’” for a woman named Genny Cool. Though Ballard uses the term “obstructed” to describe Cool’s issue, which hinted towards a suppressed menstruation, there is a distinct possibility that these herbs, which are not named, could have “been employed to induce abortion” for Cool. Obstruction, therefore, could have multiple meanings, and Ballard grew and collected herbs such as tansy, “a plant associated in some herbals with abortion,” but in her practice, often “seems to have been employed as an anthelmintic, that is, an agent for expelling worms.” Other herbs also had uses beyond menstrual issues. Rue and savin, for example, could both be used to restore menstruation, but were known to cause abortions, and in the case of savin, had been used for such since Roman antiquity. The blurry lines between restoring menstruation and aborting early pregnancy meant that a particular woman’s use of the herb could be unclear. Yet, most herbs could be used to restore or help menstruation.

Women could also produce emmenagogues, which are herbal medicines that would start a woman’s menstrual cycle, on their own from more commonly found botanicals. In fact, women used emmenagogues so often that “[o]fficial, sectarian, and folk medicine” prescribed emmenagogues to women in the nineteenth century. An 1880 medical index listed seventeen botanicals that promised to start one’s menstrual cycle, such as ergot, chamomile, yarrow, cotton root, parsley, cherries, and others. Though lay and medical texts prescribed herbal remedies to induce menstruation, women had other treatment options. For example, as “the logic of a medical system that attributed many diseases, including amenorrhea, to sluggishness of blood or an obstruction to circulation, cures were to be found by inducing sweating” which included steam, warm baths, and “breathing the vapors of emmenagogic [sic] herbs.” But many women probably started with teas, including “14 different kinds of herbal teas,” with ingredients that could be found on most farms, such as ginger or wintergreen leaves, to induce menstruation or to handle the effects of a painful period. Martha Ballard’s diary included a number of herbs and their descriptions from her long-standing midwifery practice in late eighteenth-century Maine. Among those are “Balm,” hops, rue, and yarrow. “Balm” could have been a reference to “an herb used for inducing perspiration and suppressing menstruation,” or a Balm of Gilead used to create a cough syrup. The other three, however, are directly linked to dealing with menstrual issues. Ballard, as well, collected parsley and chamomile, and while these were not directly linked to menstruation, such herbs were often used to either induce menstruation or help with pain.

Innovations in menstrual technology that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century allow us to infer what techniques women used to manage their periods in earlier decades by analyzing what issues new products aimed to ‘solve.’ Instead of taking for granted that the products were almost the same, I seek to trace earlier methods of menstrual technology by pinpointing the issues of handmade methods. For example, a number of the new products sought to alleviate issues of chafing. Therefore, it can be gleaned that women in the nineteenth century and earlier often dealt with issues of chafing from their homemade menstrual rags, an issue exacerbated when away from home. Likely bulky, with pins in the undergarments that may not have stayed in place, mobile women would have dealt with the discomfort of rags and clothes in their clothes while traveling. Chafing would have been another burden to the body as she traveled, causing discomfort, or even infections and other issues from the raw skin.

How did women, especially those away from home, collect the menstrual blood expelled during her cycle in the nineteenth century? We begin by exploring the undergarments of women in the early American republic. Many women wore crotchless underwear in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Crotchless underwear created two problems for menstruating women: napkins and cloths could not be pinned directly to the crotch of undergarments, and there was also no fabric in the crotch to catch any blood if the menstruater started early or got caught unprepared. Though some scholars have suggested that women freely bled throughout much of history, others find this unconvincing. First, bleeding onto oneself would cause discomfort. Second, free bleeding would increase the labor of laundering one’s clothing, which would already be an arduous task for women traveling and staying in the homes of others. The use of crotchless underwear further complicates an argument for free bleeding, as women would have bled down their legs, not into the gusset of the underwear. Instead, crotchless underwear underscores the need for belts to secure cloths to the body

Extant handmade menstrual technology can elucidate how at least some women in the nineteenth century handled their periods. We return to the Massie set of pads and belts held at the Valentine Museum. This particular set, with two napkins knitted out of cotton yarn and the belts sewn from cotton fabric, shows consistent signs of use and stains. The knitted sanitary napkins, which are around twenty-five inches long and three inches wide, both have a hole at the wider, tapered end. This hole could have been used with a button or other fastener, or the belts included in the set may have been fed through the hole to hold the napkin up as the belt fit around the waist. The other end may have been pinned into the wearer’s undergarments.

For both napkins, the wider end with the hole shows reddish-brown stains, likely menstrual blood from the wearer. Small reddish-brown spots dot other parts of the gusset. Though the wearer would have cleaned the piece, which would have included scrubbing out blood stains, not all would be removed. Those left could have been from blood collecting in the same places from each cycle, re-staining the gusset with use and making it harder to remove. The user may have also been more concerned with removing blood from the middle of the gusset, where blood would have been most likely to collect, as the core of the gusset shows less blood stains.

A product insert dated to circa 1914 documents an early manufactured product documents both advances in menstrual technology in the early twentieth century, but also how similar new products were to existing home remedies. Constructed out of elastic and designed to be washed and reused, the “Form-Fit” elastic belt produced by the Logan Company belt operated similarly to earlier homemade menstrual products that were meant to be reused. Part of the packaging of the Logan Company “Form-Fit” sanitary belt reads “It is constructed without buttons, buckles, or any other contrivance that would cause annoyance when worn, either under or over the corset.” This note tells us three things: first, that women were still using buttons, pins, and other closures to attach cloth and napkins to their undergarments in the early twentieth century; and second, that using these closures was seen as a nuisance and something to be fixed by new menstrual technology produced via manufacturing. Finally, we see that women still sought to have reusable items to handle their period at this time, and that fully disposable products did not dominate the market yet.

In many ways, the shape of this elastic belt is reminiscent of the knitted sanitary napkin held at the Valentine Museum, though the older, knitted sanitary pad is much longer, and has a hole that would have been used in conjunction with some sort of fastener. This makes the assertion that the Form-Fit needs no “buttons, buckles, or any other contrivance” noteworthy. Women did not want to use fasteners, and preferred elastic once available, likely because buttons or pins caused discomfort. Though knitted items have some stretch, the elastic belt could still be stretched much further, meaning the overall length could be shorter. Also, the Form-Fit sanitary belt has both the napkin and the belt as one piece, while the homemade set has separate pads and belts. A marketed, mass-produced product sought to make menstrual management easier: less pieces, less fastens, and less discomfort. Yet, the overall shape of a large napkin held close to the crotch between the legs and a loop around the waist remains consistent.

Overall, a menstruating woman would have done the following during her cycle: she would have avoided free bleeding, and if she started her period unprepared, she would have used any sort of rags or cloth on hand to stop the flow of blood down her skirts, legs, or to the ground. Limiting the number of stains on clothing would help with the labor of laundering clothes as she traveled and boarded in others’ homes. She would use handmade woven or knitted belts, as well as pins or buttons, to join the cloths used as pads to her crotchless undergarments, a standard practice. However, with the amount of traveling she did on foot or on horseback, the level of movement and physical activity meant that she was still more likely to bleed onto her clothes. Therefore, she probably wore a sort of menstrual apron around her backside, further protecting the skirts of her dress from blood stains.

 

Further Reading:

Secondary Literature:

Tess Frydman, “America’s Bloody History: Menstruation Management in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” MA Thesis. University of Delaware, 2018.

Sara Read, “‘Thy Righteousness is but a menstrual clout’: Sanitary Practices and Prejudice in Early Modern England,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3, no. 1 (2008-9), 1-25.

Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013).

Etienne Van de Walle and Elisha Renne, eds. Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001).

 Primary Sources:

William A. Alcott, The Young Woman’s Book of Health (Boston: Tappan, Whittemore and Mason, 1850). Retrieved from the National Library of Medicine.

Lydia Maria Child, The Family Nurse; Or, Companion of the Frugal Housewife (London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington-Street, 1837). Retrieved from Google Books.

 

This article originally appeared in November 2025.

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Caroline Greer is an Assistant Professor of Public History at Radford University. She graduated from George Mason University with a Ph.D. in History in 2025 and wrote a dissertation entitled “Sites of Spectacle and Sites of Sacrifice: The Female Itinerant Preacher’s Body in the Nineteenth Century U.S.” which considers the role of gender in early female preachers’ ministries, and also explores the topic of menstruation and pregnancy.

Some of the tourists in Salem in the autumn are there for the witches, and they are bound for disappointment. From what I observed on a late September day, those with the greatest focus on witches themselves come at it from a vaguely feminist perspective. They understand witches as having been killed for being women who were powerful or at least different, and they come with a militant empathy for their plight in 1692. Arriving in the midst of Salem’s autumn extravaganza, they feel a disappointment similar, no doubt, to that of my students who come to a witchcraft class seeking a purely feminist interpretation. Our attention to larger political and social issues over the course of the term dismays those students, just as it does the (partially overlapping) group who come expecting evidence that in Salem actual witchcraft had been practiced. Watching the excesses of Salem’s “Haunted Happenings”, I share some of their feelings of disorientation and disappointment.

In Salem itself, the city’s association with witchcraft stretches the truth somewhat, since most of what happened in 1692-93 did not occur in the modern metropolis of Salem. Fear of witches first arose in what is now Danvers, then the rural hinterland known as Salem Village, a community beyond the boundaries of today’s city of Salem. The crisis reverberated out from the village to involve individuals in numerous other locations, including Salem town, neighboring Ipswich, more distant Andover, and eventually the colonial capital of Boston. Referred to as the “Salem witchcraft crisis,” this act of naming linked these events with that place. This happened even as the boundaries of Salem shrank, beginning when the village was finally allowed to become the independent town of Danvers. Although today’s Salem was as important for providing judges for the court that tried witches as it was for housing people who either leveled or were targeted by accusations of witchcraft, the popular image of witchcraft in colonial New England is irrevocably tied to the city of Salem. Popular fiction, when referencing early American witchcraft, invariably uses Salem as a shorthand term to encompass that history: Harry Potter’s international gathering of witches for a quidditch match, for instance, includes a delegation of American witches known through their residence in Salem. Many other fictional accounts similarly use Salem to stand in for witches.

Happy to exploit that connection, the Salem Chamber of Commerce has long tried to promote tourism from the platform witchcraft offers. Some components of the tourism extravaganza that overwhelms Salem these days have been around for decades. When a graduate student working in the archives there in the 1980s, I was bemused by advertisements for the Witch Dungeon tourist attraction. I knew that colonial Salem hosted no massive, ancient edifices capable of containing the stereotypical medieval dungeon. The dungeon concept, like much of popular witch lore in the United States, equates colonial prosecutions of witches in the late 17^th century with (mostly earlier) European scares. The dungeon represents just one example of this tendency to understand New England and Protestant Salem in European and Roman Catholic terms.

Salem now offers stores and tourist attractions throughout the year that make the witchcraft link, but it is in the seven weeks surrounding Halloween that the city doubles down on its status as “Witch City.” Beginning in mid-September, Salem businesses present a host of “Haunted Happenings,” announced in the sixty-four-page free magazine touting products, tours, plays, and other opportunities on offer during those weeks. The Chamber of Commerce president proudly notes the more than one million visitors came to the city during the 2024 autumn festivities. Judging from the traffic and the strain on parking, the figure of a million over the seven-week event might this year be exceeded. When welcoming visitors to Salem’s spectacle, the president invokes the city’s past witches as the core component of the fabulously successful event. The statute of actor Elizabeth Montgomery playing the 1960s television comedy witch from Bewitched, permanently on display along Essex Street, playfully invokes the city’s claims to witch history.

Some tourists clearly agree that the event is about what they understand of 1692, judging from the crowds gathered on Salem’s Essex Street pedestrian mall. This blocks-long walking street serves as the epicenter of the lavish phenomenon. Attendees on the September day when I accidentally stumbled into the event tended to be more female than male, with women whose ages ranged from young adult to middle aged dominating the crowd. Many were dressed for the occasion, if not as historic witches, at least with the jewelry associated with New Age or Wiccan sensibilities or else in t-shirts proclaiming a feminist condemnation of witchcraft prosecutions. “They didn’t burn witches—they burned women” captured the sentiment. This militant statement was somewhat ruined for the well-informed historian by the thought that no one was burned at Salem. (That method of execution was used only by Roman Catholics who recognized witchcraft as the religious crime of heresy. The Protestant magistrates at Salem hung witches for civil crimes.) Continuing the colonial theme, some tourists, male and female, wore mushroom-shaped felt hats that were sold along the walking route—with a rounded crown, they were not the classic pointy witch hat of popular culture but instead seemed to be someone’s idea of colonial garb.

Such modest allusions to the colonial past were in the decided minority, however, swamped by the more generic Halloween ambience of the event. Take, for example, the many buskers lining the street. The official magazine showcased those buskers who came out in witch attire, and in doing so they highlighted them out of proportion to their actual presence. Running the gauntlet of Essex Street, I saw a guy in an ape suit, a Plains Indian in full headdress, a werewolf, a Dracula, a Smurf, a Bigfoot, a Jason, a Mario Brother, a Chuckie, a Frankenstein’s monster, a Captain Jack Sparrow, a Hannibal Lector, a Pennywise, and a Predator, as well as multiple characters from Nightmare before Christmas. Although horror was overrepresented in the costumed performers, having a high-end costume to don seemed the only real requirement for joining the ranks of entertainers. A connection to a scary movie was appreciated but clearly not required.

The witches, vastly underrepresented, had been replaced by costume characters from films. The local movie theatre did its part to promote the witchy element, showing the 1993 comedy film Hocus Pocus, starring Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy. Interestingly, more recent popular film franchises featuring witches, such as Harry Potter and Twilight, were not highly visible, although storefronts selling merchandise related to both did find a place on Essex Street. Although a few people dressed to indicate their solidarity with the executed, they strolled through a party centered more on Halloween than on 1692.

Halloween’s predominance follows the recent trend amplifying that holiday in the U.S. Tours on offer to Salem visitors emphasize ghosts as much as witches (or more so), even proclaiming wrongly in one case that customers could experience what the accusers and prosecutors of witches most feared in 1692, witches and ghosts. Despite the feminist witch contingent in the crowd, the focus rested squarely on Hollywood horror and even on Halloween more generally. That holiday in the U.S. has shifted over the decades. Once a night for children in homemade (or cheap store-bought) costumes who “trick or treated” for candy from their neighbors, it has become a massive event for adults who dress up, go to parties, and spend lavishly on decorations. Indeed, predictions have it that Americans this year will spend an estimated $13,000,000 on Halloween. A chunk of that Halloween spending is making its way into Salem’s coffers, as local businesses use a vague gesture toward colonial-era witchcraft executions to entice Halloween tourists to their city.

So, what is the historian to do? I have long since stopped explaining to people about the burning versus hanging difference between continental Europe and New England, which goes over about as well as trying to tell one’s fellow academics that dashing sea raiders were mostly not pirates or that the term “puritan” had little historical resonance in New England. Salem in October is more an expression of our moment, with its wild consumerism and hodgepodge of dimly understood historical references, with consumer culture masquerading as historical critique.

The witch scare, an event of some significance in its own time, is little understood by popular audiences and is arguably become ever less so as a result of Salem’s “world-famous” autumn party. Efforts at repairing the inaccuracies mounted by local museums such as the Essex Peabody or by one-act plays presenting some version of the history hardly make an impression. The Salem business community has what it has long sought—an extravaganza bringing in tourism dollars, and the Halloween revelers are mostly pleased, even if a few (mostly women) could be heard to grumble about the dearth of witch-related programming.

My final take away was to muse over the most popular interpretation of the Salem witchcraft, that promulgated in the 1974 work Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. That work helpfully seated the witch scare in Salem Village and demonstrated how it reverberated out from there. It suggested that the root cause of the villagers’ conflict was the rise of capitalism, with frightened residents fearful of change accusing those who enjoyed some economic success in the new system (or were associated with those who did so). I have always thought that argument weak, as I recently explained in an American Historical Review piece. As a result, it was ironic to see that today, at least, Boyer and Nissenbaum had the right of it: Salem witchcraft, whatever it was about in 1692, today marks the triumph of capitalism. Clearly, in today’s Salem capitalism has won. The witches, for their part, continue to be silenced and misunderstood even as a cascade of money pours into Salem’s coffers.

Further Reading:

Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1974).

Carla Gardina Pestana, “A Modest Proposal,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, accessed October 26, 2025, https://commonplace.online/article/a-modest-proposal/.

Carla Gardina Pestana, “Early English Jamaica Without Pirates,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, number 3 (July 2014), 321-360. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.71.3.0321

Carla Gardina Pestana, “The Origins of Witchcraft Crisis 50 Years Later — Paul S. Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft” American Historical Review 129, number 4 (December 2024), 1751-54. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/129/4/1751/7915353 

 

This article originally appeared in November 2025.

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Carla Gardina Pestana started her scholarly life studying religion in New England. Since then she has studied other places and topics as well, and teaches at UCLA. As a child, her homemade version of Halloween was her favorite holiday. Her most recent book is a history of Plymouth in its first years and in a broader context: The World of Plymouth Plantation (2020).

Necessary, but not sufficient. Secession was how southern leaders responded to what they saw as the northern free states’ growing aggression against them. But why did the North threaten the South, intentionally or otherwise? According to another common line of thought, the North was industrializing and didn’t need slavery, which was an old and inefficient way to produce things. Northern industrialists then dragged the agricultural South kicking and screaming into the modern world in a terrible war that could have been avoided.  

This is where interchangeable parts come in. Making standardized and identical products–rather than customized and variable ones–is a core principle of industrial production. Practically, this means breaking production down into a series of highly specialized steps and mass manufacturing each component with machines instead of having skilled craftsmen make entire products from start to finish by hand. In this process, each instance of each component must be made with enough precision to be effectively identical to each other instance of that component—that is, parts must be interchangeable. Without this, industrialization as we know it isn’t possible.

It seems remarkable, then, that this one guy—Eli Whitney, the paradigmatic clever Yankee—invented both the cotton gin and interchangeable parts. It’s as if Whitney single-handedly set the South and the North on opposite courses of economic development that later collided with consequences at once deadly, tragic, and emancipatory.

It’s an incredible story. It just happens to be mostly untrue.  The real Whitney story is less grand than the legend, but more interesting and, ultimately, more edifying. It dispels several widely held ideas that aren’t very true. First, that the Whitney cotton gin was essential for the rise of the Cotton Kingdom in the Deep South. Second, that the antebellum North was an industrial behemoth that overpowered the agricultural South. And most importantly, that technological innovation occurs in dramatic leaps and bounds made by individual inventors.

The Whitney Legend

There is a commonly repeated legend about Whitney himself, some of which is even true. Let’s start there. According to the legend, Whitney showed signs of remarkable mechanical aptitude from an early age. He was born in 1765 on his parents’ prosperous farm in Westboro, Massachusetts, where he could often be found in his father’s workshop messing about with the tools. By the time he was twelve he had mastered the craft of making nails, which were produced one at a time by hand in that era. He refined his skills by turning his nail-making into a business producing ladies’ hat pins. By this time all the people in the area were beginning to recognize that young Eli was more than an average tinkerer.

Whitney’s ambition led him to study at Yale University, where he excelled at his classes and made connections with influential people. When he graduated, Yale’s president arranged for him to go South to take a job as a tutor for a wealthy planter family. On the way South Whitney met Catherine Green, the widow of Revolutionary War hero and planter, Nathaniel Green. She was traveling with her plantation manger, Phineas Miller, another Yale graduate, whom Whitney quickly befriended. When the tutoring job didn’t work out, Green invited Whitney to stay on her plantation while he figured out his next move.

There, the legend goes, Whitney one day hit on the idea of a new kind of cotton gin. Working feverishly and in secret, he perfected the gin in several months and formed a partnership with Miller to patent and profit from it. Although the gin was a mechanical success, numerous patent infringements and lawsuits followed, denying Whitney and Miller their deserved profits and draining their resources. Whitney returned North and ultimately gave up on his first invention.

Instead, he shifted to his second great invention, interchangeable parts, which he pursued after securing an Army contract to produce small arms. To win the contract, Whitney had astounded government officials by displaying ten guns, disassembling their parts and mixing them thoroughly, then reassembling the guns, thus demonstrating that interchangeability was feasible. To go from mere achievability to bona fide achievement, Whitney built a new factory on the principle of interchangeable parts, replacing skilled craftsmen who built guns lock, stock and barrel with ordinary workmen operating specialized machines to manufacture each part, in quantity, to identical specifications.

So goes the legend. What actually happened?

What Actually Happened, Part 1: The Gin

To begin with, we do not really know much of anything about Whitney’s early life. The story of his youthful mechanical aptitude and the details about his nail and hatpin businesses come from a hagiography written by another Yale alumnus, Denison Olmstead, in 1832, seven years after Whitney’s death. Whitney himself never discussed this aspect of his life, at least not publicly in any surviving record. It seems reasonable to surmise that he did have some technological talent and ability, certainly considerable ambition, and perhaps a touch of vision.

But Whitney by no means invented the cotton gin. Ginning prepares cotton for spinning into yarn by separating the seeds from cotton fibers. Devices for carrying out this process, called gins, have existed since at least the early common era and were widely used in India and China throughout the period we today call the Middle Ages. These cotton gins used two rollers to squeeze the seed out of the cotton fiber.

From India, the roller cotton gin traveled to the Americas, where it was used by early English colonists in Virginia and other parts of mainland British North America as they searched for a profitable export crop. In the 1700s, British inventors and manufacturers successively mechanized every aspect of yarn and textile production, dramatically raising manufacturing capacity. This vastly increased commercial demand for raw cotton.

In response, roller gins were enlarged and improved. For instance, barrel gins included multiple rollers on one machine and could be powered by animals, water wheels, and windmills. These improvements, however, did not have much effect on labor productivity because they could not automate the process of feeding cotton into the gin. It was still necessary to have a different person for each set of rollers. Other improvements did increase productivity but not dramatically. For example, hand cranks for turning the rollers were replaced by treadles equipped with flywheels. These kinds of roller gins required strong men to operate and could cause serious injury if worked too strenuously for too long. In 1788, several years before Whitney came along, a Philadelphia-born inventor named Joseph Eve designed a new kind of roller gin that included an automatic feeder, for the first time promising significant productivity gains. It was complicated and “notoriously finicky,” but it worked.

The existence of these roller gins, and the rise of cotton production first in the Caribbean and then in the South, indicates that one key part of the Whitney legend is certainly untrue: there was no absolute bottleneck of production in the separation of cotton fibers from the seed. The bottleneck in part depends on the distinction between long-staple and short-staple, or green-seed, cotton. Long-staple cotton has a smooth seed that separates easily from the fiber, but it can only be grown in limited environments along the Carolina coastline. By contrast, short-staple cotton has a fuzzy seed that clings tenaciously to the lint fiber, but it can be grown throughout a much larger swath of the US South. According to the common view, only Whitney’s invention could effectively gin short-staple cotton. But this is untrue. By 1802, long before Whitney’s new machine had time to make a significant impact, the United States had become Britain’s largest supplier of cotton. Indeed, Joseph Eve relocated to Charleston, South Carolina, around this time and found success marketing his automated roller gins to farmers in the area, some of whom used it on short-staple cotton. The key point to remember here is that demand from Britain’s mechanized textile manufacturers drove the expansion of the Cotton Kingdom far more than any specific way of ginning.

Nevertheless, if Whitney did not invent the cotton gin, he did invent a cotton gin, one that worked very differently from its predecessors and had a much higher rate of output. That is, Whitney’s device produced more seeded cotton per worker per day, a significant achievement. How did it work? Roller gins squeeze cotton between two rollers, leaving a narrow space between, just wide enough for the soft fiber to pass through but not the seed. The seeds are pinched off and fall on the side where the cotton is fed in while the ginned cotton is pulled through and collected on the other side. Whitney did something else entirely. He hammered parallel rows of wire teeth around a wooden cylinder. The teeth pulled raw cotton out of a hopper toward a metal plate, called a breastwork, in which Whitney cut slits, or narrow openings for the rotating wire-teeth to pass through. As the teeth pulled the cotton through the slits, the seeds were shorn off. On the other side of the plate, the cotton was then detached from the teeth by a rotating brush. The advantage of this method was that it increased the productivity of a single worker by multitudes. In his 1793 petition for a patent, Whitney estimated that his gin raised labor productivity by a factor of fifty. This was an exaggeration, but if the true figure was a half or a quarter or even a tenth as much, it would have been significant. 

Others rushed to copy Whitney’s innovation. However, there was a problem. Cotton merchants and manufacturers began to complain about the quality of the ginned cotton that Whitney’s design turned out. The Whitney gin tended to tear the fibers rather than preserving their length, as the roller gin did. This made the cotton harder to spin into yarn. As a result, roller gins continued to be produced and were widely used well into the 1820s and even later. Roller gin designs were also improved further to close the productivity gap with Whitney’s. This is another indication that the Whitney gin, though a definite technological advancement, was not the world-historical force it is typically presented to be.

Still, the higher productivity of the Whitney gin could not be ignored. Manufacturers learned to deal with the shorter fiber staples it produced and other gin makers improved its design. A key improvement was to substitute circular saws around an axel for Whitney’s wire-teeth hammered into a wooden cylinder. This made the teeth more durable. It also allowed for flexible positioning and easy replacement by using spacers in between the saw blades. The saw principle led to a lengthy patent suit that Whitney and Miller ultimately won on somewhat dubious grounds. By that time, however, Whitney was deeply in debt and despondent about ever profiting from the gin, and he had already returned North and shifted his attention to manufacturing muskets for the US Army.

It was in the patent suit that much of the Whitney legend was born. To negate the saw tooth design patent that another gin maker had received, Miller argued that Whitney had already included that idea in his original patent filing. (The inclusion was said to be implicit, because Whitney did not, in fact, mention it at all.) To generate sympathy for Whitney, Miller argued publicly and in court that had it not been for Whitney’s invention, cotton could never have succeeded in much of the South. In other words, Miller presented Whitney as the savior of a declining southern economy, who was pressing his suit only to recover a measure of the recompense he so plainly deserved. The judge largely bought this reasoning and repeated it in his decision. He thereby established the part of the legend by which Whitney’s gin rescued the South from economic stagnation and breathed new life into slavery.

Yet as we have seen, ginning was not a critical barrier to cotton production and improved roller gin designs continued in use for decades after Whitney came along. Moreover, Whitney himself was ultimately only one of many gin makers who improved the gin’s performance. We—meaning people generally in the modern world, but Americans in particular—tend to focus on lone inventor geniuses. But this is rarely how significant innovation actually happens. The case of interchangeable parts shows this even more clearly, so let’s turn our attention to that facet of the Whitney legend.

What Actually Happened, Part 2: Interchangeable Parts

Facing bankruptcy and desperate for credit, Whitney used his elite connections and the fame he had won from his gin design and patent suit, to secure a government contract to manufacture 10,000 muskets in two years. There is no evidence for the story of the reassembled guns that supposedly astonished government officials. Instead, Whitney’s need for money fortuitously coincided with the federal government’s need to appear to be doing something about the possibility of war with France. What better way to seem to be preparing than to make a deal with America’s most famous inventor? The federal government agreed to fund the construction of Whitney’s factory, which was to include advanced machinery that would supersede the need for craft skill.

Whitney ultimately produced the 10,000 guns, but it took him eight years and reams of excuses to do so. He never achieved anything like interchangeability in his lifetime. He did stick with the gun-making business and gradually improved his factory’s performance, which was further improved and modernized by his son in subsequent years. Evidence from Whitney’s factory shows that his gun pieces remained too variable for true interchangeability. Moreover, most of the work was done by hand filing rather than machine milling. During Whitney’s lifetime, the most important approach to machine-based mass production of interchangeable parts was happening in the federal government’s armory at Harper’s Ferry, in what was then still Virginia, under the direction of John Hall.

But Virginia’s slavery inhibited the full development of Hall’s innovations, and the techniques were increasingly perfected, instead, at the armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. This is not to say that the slave South hewed to a premodern or precapitalist mindset that devalued technological novelty. Not long after Whitney’s time, Cyrus McCormick, a Virginian, developed the mechanical reaper, undoubtedly one of the nineteenth century’s most important technologies. But slavery nevertheless weakened southern innovation in countless ways. It denied enslaved people education, including technical education, and any incentive to invent—circumstances that showed up in the South’s much lower per-capita patenting rates compared to the North. It denied enslaved people income, shrinking the domestic consumer markets that drove northern mass production. It was a factor in the South’s lack of cities, where aspiring technologists found one another and the financing to develop their ideas. It is telling that McCormick located his first major factory in Chicago. Similarly, in Springfield, Massachusetts, a whole ecosystem of skilled workers and specialized firms grew up around army contracting, eventually pushing decisively on the technological frontier. By the 1840s, parts were being made sufficiently uniform for interchangeability, though even then, much of the work was done by hand filing to finish the pieces to gauge.

Unlike with the cotton gin, when it comes to interchangeable parts Whitney has little claim to have contributed much. The idea itself was certainly not new with Whitney and many Americans, particularly in small arms manufacture, were experimenting with it. It would be wrong to associate success with one person. For starters, consider all the people who developed the various devices—the lathes, boring machines, milling machines, and so on—that standardized and shortened the work of turning out rough cuts of each part. And consider all the firms that made those machines. In addition, the continuing importance of very fine hand filing meant that many anonymous skilled artisans gradually developed ever-better handicraft techniques. These skills were passed on from workman to workman and remained crucial all the way through the end of the nineteenth century.

When we recognize that interchangeability was not achieved in any real way until the 1850s, and then only in small arms manufacture, we can better appreciate that the North, on the eve of the Civil War, was no industrial giant. The majority of northerners remained rural people, either farmers and their families or folks closely connected to the agricultural economy, such as agricultural commodity merchants or local blacksmiths, whose stock in trade was building and repairing agricultural implements.

This is the final nail in the Whitney legend, insofar as the legend is meant to explain the causes of the Civil War. When it comes to the outcomes of the Civil War—that is, who won the war and how—the North’s industrial lead relative to the South was indeed very significant. But when it comes to causes, the case is different, because the voters who put Lincoln in office were largely farmers and smalltown businesspeople. They were as much agricultural as the slaveholders.

Even when it comes to the war itself, the Union’s industrial advantage can be easily exaggerated. The Union’s real strength was in logistics. Confederates actually did alright with the procurement of small arms and ordinance. They struggled much more in moving supplies to the right places. Railroads and shipping were one part of the Union advantage. But so was a less celebrated aspect of wartime supply and logistics: hay.

The Civil War was as much a war of horses as of people—perhaps more so. According to the most considered estimate, at least 3,000,000 equines (horses and mules) were required by the combined Civil War armies, and the true number “would probably exceed the estimated 3,213,363 soldiers who served.” These horses ate enormous quantities of food. Whereas standard ration for men was three pounds, for horses it was twenty-six, and for mules twenty-three.

Consider, then, William Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign, which set the stage for his famous March to the Sea. Sherman began with about 100,000 soldiers and 30,000 equines. Unlike in his rampage across Georgia, the terrain, timing, and ravaged state of the route from Chattanooga to Atlanta would not allow for “living off the land.” Consequently, almost everything had to be transported along a perilous route that wound its way 350 miles back through Tennessee and into Kentucky. Simple arithmetic will show that what must have most taxed this route was forage for the equines: 100,000 men x 3 lbs. = 300,000 lbs., and 30,000 horses x 23.5 lbs. (the average of the horse and mule ration) = 705,000 lbs. The ratio of equine to human food gets bigger still when calculated by volume rather than weight, because hay was anywhere from 2.5 to 5 times the bulk of grains.

This indicates that much of the war was actually about procuring, loading, transporting, unloading, reloading and again transporting large bales of hay, an effort that reached deep into the remotest corners of the rural North. At 200-400 pounds per bale, it required considerable scarce labor. As Union armies penetrated deeper into the South, those labor requirements increased in key forward depots. This was one reason why so-called “contrabands”—formerly enslaved people who had liberated themselves by fleeing to Union lines—proved so crucial to the war’s outcome. Without their labor, it would have been exceedingly difficult to keep the horses alive on which Union army mobility depended. All of this is simply to underscore that the North’s greater industrial capacity than the South, while certainly important, was far from the lone determining factor in the Civil War’s outcome.

To return to Eli Whitney, then, it is fair to say that he did invent a useful device—his innovative cotton gin—which became closely associated with the brutal expansion of slavery and cotton cultivation in the antebellum South. It is also fair to say that he understood the importance of interchangeable parts and participated—along with many others and without any notable success—in the attempt to achieve effective interchangeability. But he ultimately played a small role in the technological, economic, and political developments that came to define the sectional conflict. If he can hardly be blamed for starting the Civil War, he most certainly cannot be credited with winning it.

 

Further Reading:

For the Whitney legend, see his National Inventors Hall of Fame entry, or the recent National Constitution Center’s blog post of March 14, 2024, “The cotton gin: A game-changing social and economic invention.” The Whitney legend is so prevalent that ChatGPT replied to the prompt, “Tell me about Eli Whitney,” by stating that he “revolutionized the cotton industry” and “played a major role” in the development of interchangeable parts. The history of the cotton gin and Whitney’s role in its development is thoroughly investigated in Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). For Whitney and interchangeable parts, see especially Robert S. Woodbury, “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts,” Technology and Culture 1 (Summer 1960): 235–53 and Robert B. Gordon, “Who Turned the Mechanical Ideal into Mechanical Reality?” Technology and Culture 29 (October 1988): 744–78. The estimate for horses and mules in the Civil is from Gene C. Armistead, Horses and Mules in the Civil War: A Complete History with a Roster of More Than 700 War Horses (McFarland, 2013). The stuff about hay comes from my own research, some of which has been published as Ariel Ron, “When Hay Was King: Energy History and Economic Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” The American Historical Review 128 (March 2023): 177–213. There is a lot to be said about how slavery affected southern technological innovation—much more than can be cited here—but a key perspective to be kept in mind is comparative: not whether there was any technological innovation in the South, but how much and what kind compared to other places. For a start, see the essays by Daniel Rood and John Majewski in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

 

This article originally appeared in October 2025.

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Ariel Ron is the Glenn M. Linden Associate Professor of the U.S. Civil War Era and Director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He is the author of Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic and various other writings.

The innocents in their midst told another story. Since boarding Thomas Downing’s sloop near Virginia, the crew darted up the North American coast with a few final scores in mind. They plundered three sloops: “one from Virginia, one from North Carolina to New-York and one from Barbados to Philadelphia.” According to the August 11 issue of the Boston News-Letter, the pirates “took a cable and anchor and 4 hogsheads of rum and other things out of the Philadelphia Sloop.”

Rum was an integral part of the world inhabited by pirates. Produced from the wastes left over after boiling and curing sugar on Caribbean plantations, the upstart commodity added even more value to one of the most lucrative colonial systems that the world had ever seen. Treasure pooled in the form of slave-produced sugar and rum in the English Caribbean and in North American port cities alike. The emergence of rum—eminently desirable, fencible, and valuable—supported many different forms of profiteering during Atlantic piracy’s “golden age” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

You won’t find this story of pillaged rum in my forthcoming book though. I am more concerned with how the rum was made and under what circumstances it circulated when not snatched by pirates. Nonetheless, pirates—and privateers skirting the edges of legal plundering—make several appearances. Maritime raiders certainly understood the cultural and economic possibilities of rum. The privateer-turned-lieutenant governor of Jamaica Henry Morgan’s drunken antics in 1680s Port Royal show how colonists in one port city responded to the recent profusion of rum production in Jamaica. Alternatively, a brief report from a century later of how several enslaved men (including an expert distiller named Jeffery) were “taken off the island opposite the works by the crew of a Pickaroon about Midnight” offers a powerful reminder that pirates engaged in the kidnapping and sale of human cargoes.

Nonetheless, people listening to me speak on my research often ask why pirates do not factor more prominently in my work. And they are not alone. In some of the most generous feedback that I received on my book manuscript, one mentor questioned the decision “to avoid talking about pirates” with back-to-back-to-back question marks!

My journey as a scholar and teacher makes pirates’ limited cameos even more surprising. Like many history students of my generation, I was entirely taken with Marcus Rediker’s ability to bring pirates to life in Villains of All Nations. Intent on building on this work, I wondered how historians might connect the experiences of 1,000 or 2,000 freebooters whom Rediker portrayed as outsiders to the broader society that they in some ways rejected. I made my earliest forays into archival research in London a couple of years later as I conducted research for a senior thesis examining the tavern culture of Port Royal, Jamaica. This project tested what could be learned about shadowy pirates by focusing on the spaces where they rubbed shoulders with colonial society writ large. Over time, the history of what was consumed in those taverns became more interesting to me than a rather limited subset of drinkers.

Even as piracy has become less central to my research, though, I have sought to pass on the excitement that I experienced as an undergraduate learning about pirates in a history class for the first time. Each fall, I teach a first-year seminar at Widener University on the history and memory of Atlantic piracy. First-year seminars at Widener are expected to build on the expertise of faculty members, but the expectation is that they will introduce students to a subject in ways that transcend the conventional methods by which individual disciplines approach a topic of general interest.

My class responds to this imperative by pairing learning about the history of piracy with inquiries into how these real-life figures and events have been memorialized in novels, popular film, and even a festival near campus. It offers what I hope is an exciting way to probe the discrepancies between history and how it is invoked in popular culture. This class is also where my clearest argument for why pirates must remain ancillary characters in a history of rum took shape.

One of my favorite parts of teaching this course is that I get to regularly reread and rethink Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Besides forming my most vivid memory from being in seventh grade, the book is simply inseparable from modern stereotypes of pirates. As literary scholar John Sutherland writes in the introduction to the critical edition that I read with my students, Treasure Island “has become folkloric and part of the stuff of popular entertainment.” Almost one hundred and fifty years after the novel’s release, the most indelible twenty-first century invocation of pirates—the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise— “is, of course, pure Treasure Island, as filtered through Peter Pan’s Captain Hook.” More than anybody else who came before him, Stevenson left his readers with enduring images of pirates reading treasure maps, walking on pegged legs, and training parrot companions. As my students wrestle with each fall, he too linked pirates to a seaman’s brogue that Jim Hawkins’ allies spoke without.

Stevenson also lashed together rum and piracy. The pirates’ anthem, which appears to have been this author’s invention, begins, “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.” The mysterious Billy Bones cannot stop drinking rum in the Admiral Benbow Inn. An early premonition that the voyage for treasure is blowing off course comes in Jim Hawkins’ observation that “double grog was going on the least excuse.” And when facing a seemingly insurmountable numerical disadvantage upon reaching the island, Jim and his compatriots’ only hope rests in “two able allies—rum and the climate.” Such references are difficult for a scholar of rum to ignore!

The consumption of different alcohols also differentiates good and bad in Treasure Island. Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey strategize over a quart of ale. Later aboard ship, the captain, doctor, and squire pour Jim a glass of Spanish wine. Long John Silver, the story’s most complicated character who is both a leader of the pirates and occasional friend to Jim, oscillates between “the drunken folly of the pirates” and moments of restraint. But other pirates’ preferences for strong liquor (in this case brandy) over other alcoholic beverages are so absolute that Jim immediately knows that Israel Hands’ request for a bottle of wine is merely a pretext to send him out of sight. For Stevenson, a thirst for rum—or at least the apparent inability of pirates to drink only a little bit of it—is as clear a sign as the Jolly Roger.

Hierarchies of more and less healthful alcohols—often locating rum toward the bottom of the scale—were nothing new when Stevenson wrote in the nineteenth century. In Scotland in the mid-1680s, defenders of a nascent domestic rum industry fought vigorously to prove that their rum was every bit as wholesome as brandy. More famously, Benjamin Rush first published his “Moral and Physical Thermometer” in 1784. Wine and beer consumed in reasonable quantities and at appropriate times promoted “cheerfulness, strength, and nourishment.” Even a weak punch could have positive effects. But the stronger concoctions of rum—and most of all “pepper in rum”—sent consumers on a path toward “suicide,” “death,” or the “gallows.” In this regard, Stevenson picked up on a trend dating back to rum and piracy’s heyday.

But Treasure Island was very much a product of the late nineteenth century. First printed as part of a serial titled Young Folks in 1881 and 1882, it was designed to impart moral lessons to youthful readers. One central lesson to those readers was that “demon” rum posed a unique harm to its drinkers because of its potency, affordability, and its addictiveness. As Doctor Livesey—who shared a surname with one of the most prominent British temperance campaigners of the nineteenth century—told Billy Bones early in the book, “one glass of rum won’t kill you, but if you take one you’ll take another and another,” ultimately hastening death.

The concept of drinkers being unable to control their impulses to consume more rum, and the advice to quit drinking in the first place, were not common medical advice in the era when pirates sailed. Instead, eighteenth-century writers generally held that overconsumption was an individual failing that could be overcome with personal discipline. By the late nineteenth century, however, rum’s looming threat became a common trope in temperance campaigns. Teetotalling was one response to this threat that Stevenson personally experimented with, as evidenced by a short-lived attempt in 1884 to quit “grog forever.”

Fast forward another twenty years, and I began to feel an increasing need to confront my family’s past as white Southerners. In spite of having lived elsewhere for fifty years, my mother decreed that she would be buried in that same ancient cemetery. She helped form an association to care for it long-term, and somehow it became a central location in our lives. Soon enough, I realized that many of the men buried there had been Confederates. One cousin suggested the best way to deal with this fact was not to mention it. Silence is never something I manage very well.

In addition, we learned that James Allen Meek’s father had been a bit of a mystery. According to Aunt Effie’s book, Home in the Wilderness, William Meek vanished about 1834, supposedly murdered along the Natchez Trace on the way home from trading down the Mississippi River. No historical account has been found of this death nor of William’s birth, since he lived in what we now call a “burned county.” (In this case, not burned during the Civil War, but destroyed by a tornado and later by a lynch mob.)

In one of many surprise turns in my life, I became a genealogist. I thought with my PhD research skills it would be easy enough for me to trace this family at least back to their arrival on American shores and to please my aging mother in the process. One thing I had not anticipated as a genealogist is how much time one spends with death in the process. Yes, there are births and weddings and degrees earned and the daily grind, but, especially before the advent of modern medicine, death loomed constantly over young and old. This is an obvious truism, but it’s different when you begin to encounter it every day in your research.

I began to feel the need to write about all the death I was encountering, not only in the form of traditional genealogical proofs and kinship articles, but in terms of the ways in which I felt these long-ago deaths within my own life. At the same time, I was running into the inevitable enslavers in the heritage of almost any white person whose family is all from the South, and the whites who went to fight for the Confederacy even though they were too poor to be enslavers. I found in the family papers an original letter written by one such man, a grandson and namesake of the mysterious William Meek, this one dying as a Confederate soldier.

 

I kept a database of the enslaved and enslavers I found, I posted to groups and websites trying to provide this information to African Americans searching for their pasts, I read several books about people dealing with similar histories, and I began to follow Coming to the Table, an organization which tries to find ways toward healing. These encounters left me confused—on one hand, I would develop sympathy for the tough lives most of my ancestors lived, and on the other I would be revulsed by their support of this system of cruelty. Who deserved my sympathy? The white woman who lost eight of her twelve children before she turned forty? Or the enslaved woman whose children were torn from her and lost to her? Did the white men deserve any sympathy at all? Of course, sympathy is not limited, and you can feel it for all humans who struggle through life and through politics and social systems they do not fully understand. But I have had to go through a frequent process of self-correction, and that involves plumbing these issues in a personal way in writing. Along the way, I have uncovered many stories of birth and death, mental illness, murder, miscegenation, heroism, error, faith, forgiveness, and fire every bit as compelling as the latest headlines.

I believe that genealogy has radically positive potential. Henry Louis Gates and his popular PBS show Finding Your Roots has gone a long way toward that, though he still maintains the tradition of hero-worship of our ancestors, which I find overly rosy, even if understandable. The first round of the genealogy craze—your grandmother’s genealogy—often started with a desire to prove how “white” someone was or to prove that somewhere in the far past—before the perceived mediocrity of your average genealogists’ lives—an ancestor was a king or prince. People today still also hope to find a gallant story, even if our designations of what is heroic have changed. Truly, however, genealogy is about valuing the lives of ordinary, working people and allowing or forcing ourselves to feel our personal connections to history, good and bad. It confronts us with the fact that those mentioned in the history books were a tiny minority of the people whose lives unfolded and impacted others every day. Even beyond the retrieval of singular people like Artemisia Gentileschi and Phillis Wheatley, the stories of the hidden still pulse and breathe around us, even the ones that aren’t positive.

 

As I conduct family history research and learn the ways in which DNA can further illuminate that, I continue to encounter stories and images that inspire me to bring some of these people out of the darkness one more time, even if just for a moment. They lived, they died, and we are the sum of their lives.

 

Committed

to Mary Jane Meek Hopkins, 1817-1893

 

In the hush of empty archives,

microfilm wheezes under my fingers.

Then, there—the scribbled court document

telling of your commitment

to the asylum, the long list of those

testifying to your lunacy—brother-

in-law, neighbors, the man who

will soon foster your children for a price

and later own your father’s mill.

 

I do not know these witnesses’ intentions.

Just you with six children under eleven

and no way to even add and subtract

yourself. Your husband dead in the ground

too soon. I imagine the impending cold,

your hands blistered now from chopping

firewood, your own hunger, the high

wailing of sniffling babies, manure

piling up in the barnlot, flies hovering.

 

Mary Jane, bless you—somehow,

you got out of that cell they put you in.

By next census, you are living

back at home with all your children,

and no man. You raise them.

Nothing else may be yours, but they are.

The force of that rises over all

the millstones grinding, the men

learning long division.

 

Under Leaves and Vines

 

Alone, I drive across West Tennessee

             into afternoon sun, quiet except

for the semis thundering through

             the trees that wink in the wind

on either side of the highway,

 

as if to prove primeval peace waits

              somewhere beyond swarming traffic

and the lingering ghosts of war.

               These forests veil the truth.

I turn north toward Lexington,

 

through Parkers Crossroads, where

                one hundred sixty years ago

men slaughtered each other

                 in the cotton fields

and fell face-first among

 

the forest’s bullet-blasted trees.

                 Hero or coward didn’t matter.

They died right here, where I pass under

                 seemingly innocent cloudless sky.

On this trip, I drive back

 

through time and breathe

                 the smoke of the burning bodies

of horses, mules, and men,

                 witness woodlands

shattered to rubble, fields riven

 

with deep-dug entrenchments bleeding

                  into the creeks, their waters retching.

All along these routes, up and down

                  towns and counties, over and over

in 1862, farms went up in flames

 

while women and children hid

                  in barns and fields, hoping there

would be something left to eat.

                  I have watched the day-by-day

on an animated map of the Civil War

 

—how the borders moved up and down,

                  back and forth across these plains. Now,

the new grass lies—flat and clean—

                  while alfalfa, corn, and soybeans reach

their apotheosis. My people,

 

most of them, come from this ground,

                   loess and fragipan, loam and silt,

site of layers and layers of suffering.

                   Along with a few remaining affections,

my heart holds this enemy, my homeland.

 

Even if I wish honeysuckle and kudzu

                   could erase the wrongs—that forests would win

real peace—I know the vegetation cannot cover,

                    much less heal, this past. There is perhaps

delusion in still hoping anything can.

 

The Wrong Cause

based on the letters of Confederate soldier

William H. Meek (1837-1864),

who fought at Brice’s Crossroads

and died a few weeks later at Grenada, Mississippi,

of gangrene after being shot in the shoulder

by a Union sharpshooter

 

Further Reading

 

Relevant Family History

Maiden, Effie Meek. Ed. Anne Meek and Marilyn Brooks Hammonds. Home in the Wilderness. Norfolk, VA: Anne Meek, 2003.

Roney, Lisa. Freeman Cemetery website. Developed from a family booklet written and created by Anne Meek and Marilyn Brooks Hammonds. 2018. https://www.freemancemetery.org/

 

Nineteenth-Century Women’s Mental Health and Property Rights

I first became aware of the use of mental health diagnoses as a way to disempower nineteenth-century women by reading the classic story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (first published in 1892 in The New England Journal) and in the literary criticism of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979).

More direct accounts and historical focus can be found in:

Bailey, Chad. “Surnames and Women’s Rights in the 19th Century in Tennessee, Part II—The 19th Century Women.” Jonesboro Genealogical Society. 23 Aug 2018. https://jgstn.org/8-may-1991-surnames-and-womens-rights-in-the-19th-century-in-tennessee-part-ii-the-19th-century-women/

Baird, Bob. “Women’s Rights: Women, Wives, and Widows.” Bob’s Genealogy Filing Cabinet: Southern and Colonial Genealogies. n.d. https://genfiles.com/articles/womens-rights/

Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad House. 1887. Many current editions available.

Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin Press, 2005. Orig. 1972.

Geller, Jeffrey L., and Maxine Harris. Women of the Asylum: Voices from Behind the Walls 1840-1945. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Mitchell, Christi A. “Neither Hers Nor Theirs: Dower and Household Relationships

Between Widows, Family, and Friends in York County, Maine.” Maine History 38.3 (1 Jan 1999), 166-185. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mainehistoryjournal/vol38/iss3/2/

 

The Civil War in West Tennessee and Northern Mississippi

One visceral demonstration of the constant conflicts across the area of West Tennessee and Northern Mississippi is a video on YouTube, The American Civil War: Every Day (v. 2). 26 Oct 2018, posted under the pseduonym Emperor TigerStar.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDEK4gJBKW0

Examples of the ways in which Tennesseans, their families, and their farms were torn apart during the war, as well as the often mixed feelings they had about “the cause,” can be found in  many of the letters in the archive of the Family Papers of Charles B. Moore (1822-1901), another distant family member of mine and a Union supporter, who lived in Texas and Illinois during the war but still had family in Middle and West Tennessee. Charles B. Moore Family Papers, 1832-1917, part of The Civil War and Its Aftermath: Diverse Perspectives, UNT Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries Special Collections. https://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/CWADP/

More scholarly works focused on the conflicts that included and affected my ancestors include:

Bearss, Edwin Cole. Forrest at Brice’s Crossroads. Dayton, OH: Morningside Books, 2012.

Bennett, Stewart L., and Doug Bostick The Battle of Brice’s Crossroads. Civil War Sesquicentennial series. Charleston, SC: The History Press of Arcadia Publishing, 2020.

Daniel, Larry J. Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army. Civil War America series. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2003.

Hubbard, John Milton. Ed. Booker Roper. Notes of a Private: Annotated. Orig. Memphis, Tennessee: E. H. Clark, 1909. Reprint 2018 by Booker Roper.

Hurst, Jack. Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Lord, Walter. The Past That Would Not Die. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

Levine, Bruce. The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South. New York: Random House, 2013.

Mitcham, Samuel W., Jr. Bust Hell Wide Open: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Regenery History, 2016.

“Myths, Legends, and the Search for Truth. Website of the Battle of Franklin [TN] Trust. https://boft.org/myths

Rhea, Godon. “Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought.” Address to the Charleston Library Society, 25 January 2011. American Battlefield Trust website. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/why-non-slaveholding-southerners-fought [Please note that some of the language in this article is objectionable.]

Watkins, Sam. Ed. and intro., M. Thomas Inge. Company Aytch or A Side Show of the Big Show. New York: Plume, 1999.

Wills, Brian Steel. A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Woodward, Colin Edward. Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War. A Nation Divided series. Charlottesville: UVAP, 2014.

 

Attempts at Confrontation and Healing

Auslander, Mark. The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race & Finding an American Family. Athens, GA: UGAP, 2011.

Branan, Karen. The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth. New York: Atria, 2016.

DeWolf, Thomas Norman, and Sharon Morgan. Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

Miles, Tiya. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack. New York: Random House, 2021.

Mozingo, Joe. The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrier, His White Descendants, A Search for Family. New York: Free Press, 2012.

Perry, Imani. South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation. New York: Ecco, 2022.

Russell, Lauren. Descent. Saxtons River, VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. New York: St. Martin’s, 2021.

Smith, Clint. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. New York: Little, Brown, 2021.

 

Erasure or Black-Out Poetry

Best, B. J., and C. Kubasta. “A Process of Illumination: Conversations about Erasure Poetry.” Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets website, n.d. https://www.wfop.org/a-process-of-illumination-conversations-about-erasure-poetry

Lewis, Kara. “Hidden Meanings: The Power & Precision of Erasure Poetry.” 6 November 2019. Read Poetry website. https://www.readpoetry.com/hidden-meanings-the-power-precision-of-erasure-poetry/

 

This article originally appeared in July 2025.

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Lisa Roney is the author of Sweet Invisible Body, The Best Possible Bad Luck: Poems, and Serious Daring, as well as short work in numerous journals. She spent 20 years as a professor of creative writing and five as editor of The Florida Review. She lives in Florida with her husband and three cats.

There are always joys while going through manuscripts—an unexpected doodle, a funny quote, beautiful papers—but most of what I was encountering was financial document after financial document–Until one stopped me right in my tracks. It referred to expenses “for the two African Gentlemen at Barbadoes.” Written in 1747, the use of “Gentlemen” to describe African peoples was eye-catching enough, but glancing down at the accounts, the entries for making waistcoats, providing pocket money, buying ruffled shirts, and more signaled something extraordinary.

 

Turns out this was a clutch of some twenty documents relating to the financial transactions of a man named David Crichton in 1747 and 1748 while he was in Barbados—receipts for goods purchased, lodging expenses, bills of sale for enslaved people, and associated legal fees. The lawyers’ bills were made out to Crichton, “on Account of the African Company of England,” indicating he was operating in at least a semi-formal capacity with one of the largest slaving enterprises of the day. So paying a tailor to make a bespoke suit out of scarlet fabrics for African men seemed . . .  out of character. And these documents’ presence nestled in a top bureaucrat’s archive next to paperwork relating to trade with Russia, fishery expenses in Nova Scotia, and goods captured by Algerines was unexpected at best. I shuffled through them several times trying to figure out how they were connected.

And then, a document written from Bridgetown, Barbados, laid it all out:

“Whereas John Corrantee and the Caboceers of Annamabo are at present exceedingly well disposed towards the British Nation, and beg the resettlement of that place by the English, and the fort to be rebuilt And whereas a Son of John Corrantee’s Named Ansah was sold here by Captain Hamilton who he (Corrantee) is very anxious to have redeemed We hereby give it as our Opinion that the Redemption of the said Ansah will be very acceptable to John Corrantee (who is the leading man at Annamabo) . . . and will be a means to conciliate Corrantee to, and rivet him in the Interest of the British Nation in opposition to the French, who have been aiming for some Years past at the aforesaid settlement.”

OH.

OH NO.

This pile of paperwork, then, was all related to a flurry of activity by agents of the Royal African Company to fix a colossal betrayal.  Eno Baise Kurentsi, commonly referred to by the British as John Corrantee, was a prominent trader and political figure at the important Gold Coast port of Anomabo. Adept at playing the French and British against each other to advance his trading interests, Kurentsi had previously sent one of his sons to visit France. In the early 1740s he agreed to allow another of his sons, William Ansah Sessarakoo, to accompany a British merchant who offered to take Sessarakoo to England to be similarly educated and feted when he was done trading on the Gold Coast. The captain of that ship, however, instead sold Sessarakoo into slavery in Barbados. In light of this treachery, Eno Baise Kurentsi’s willingness to trade with the English was understandably diminished. The Royal African Company would have to do some MAJOR damage control in a desperate attempt to fix the situation, appease Kurentsi, and keep a foothold in this critical West African region in the face of active French competition. It’s a dramatic event and it has rightfully garnered scholarly attention, including in Randy Sparks’ notable history Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Glancing at the footnotes, though, the materials I had stumbled across had not been consulted and the clues they provided promised to shift our understanding of the events.

The unexpected bundle of documents in Townshend’s archive tells us that it was David Crichton, an agent for the Royal African Company who had spent significant time in West Africa, who got involved to locate William Ansah Sessarakoo, secure his freedom, and uphold the original promise to bring Kurentsi’s son to London. The financial documents paint a very clear picture of exactly how Crichton tried to fix the problem. By October 1747, Crichton was in Barbados and had begun purchasing finery for William Ansah Sessarakoo, also referred to as “Cupid,” and his companion, a young man named “Frederick” who had been sent from Anomabo with Crichton as a sign of faith in the endeavor and to ensure the success of the mission. By February 1748, Crichton had finalized Sessarakoo’s freedom, and for the next several months he provided lodging, food, fine clothing, and pocket money for the pair. Studying the receipts, you get a clear sense of just how much crow Crichton knew that the Royal African Company had to eat to repair the situation. By the time William Ansah Sessarakoo departed Barbados for London in the summer of 1748, his new wardrobe consisted of at least the following:

• two pairs of pumps
• six pairs of stockings
• two waistcoats
• breeches
• buckles and knee buckles
• a full suit of clothing made from broadcloth, durant, linen, and two types of scarlet cloth, adorned with silk twist and thread, white metal coat buttons, and whitewashed breast buttons
• a hat with silver lace
• ruffled shirts
• more stockings and another hat

Meanwhile, his companion Frederick also received pocket money, though less frequently, and was provided with shoes, knee buckles, tailored clothing, a feathered hat, and a velvet cap.

When William Ansah and Frederick arrived in London in the late summer of 1748, it was under the protection of George Montagu-Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax and the President of the Board of Trade. While there, expenses documented in the clutch of receipts indicate that the purchases of fine fashion continued, with entries for a peruke maker, drapers and tailors, more shoes, a surtout, stockings, another hat. The British were well aware of the power African leaders had over their access to goods and enslaved people, and the luxuries offered in apology were intended to be visually recognizable as such to Sessarakoo’s father.

William Ansah Sessarakoo and his companion Frederick became minor celebrities during their stay in England. They met King George II and attended a party hosted by the Duke of Richmond. Their attendance at a performance of Thomas Southerne’s tragic play Oroonoko was reported in The Gentleman’s Magazine. A short, anonymously written book The Royal African was printed, spinning the story into one that favored the Royal African Company, and William Dodd wrote poetry loosely based on the saga. In 1749, Sessarakoo had his portrait painted by Gabriel Mathias, in which he appears well dressed in a red coat and possibly a finely coiffed peruke. I cannot know if any of these goods were the ones provided by Crichton in Barbados and London to smooth ruffled feathers, but it is telling just how prominently fine fashion continued to matter in the public relations campaign to redeem the British from being seen by African traders as deceitful and untrustworthy partners. They signaled that concessions were being made, respect was being offered, and that it was worth Kurentsi’s time to come back to the table to engage with the British.

This story made it into both printed and handwritten records, and scholars have studied it for a wide range of reasons. A quick search of Google Books for “William Ansah Sessarakoo” brings up titles about African politics and diplomacy, Black portraiture, religion in the age of slavery, British theatre and literature, and more. But these histories don’t reference the rich grouping of documents in the Charles Townshend Papers, and why would they? Who would think to winnow through the British Chancellor of the Exchequer’s archival footprint to find anything about this case?  Many of the researchers who travel to the William L. Clements Library to consult Townshend’s papers are studying high law and politics, financial policies, the evolution of the British state and empire, and the lead up to the American Revolution. That’s all for a good reason. The Library of Congress Subject Headings assigned to the collection are terms like “Customs administration,” “Finance, Public–Great Britain” and “Great Britain. Treasury.” In describing large collections, curators and archivists regularly must use standardized language that best encompasses the whole. The trick is trying to remember what might lay hidden in between those broad strokes.

Because as it turns out, as much as this clutch of papers is about a specific story of Atlantic slavery it still absolutely relates to British finance and national politics. David Crichton paid for his portion of all this out of his own pocket, and at this point the struggling Royal African Company was not great at paying their debts. Crichton was imprisoned for the ones he incurred while serving as their agent, and he is directly named in the 1750 African Company Act that dissolved the insolvent company, reorganized it into the African Company of Merchants, and tried to wrangle all the lingering financial messes. One presumes that in Crichton’s desperate attempt to get repaid in this hubbub, his proof of expenditures made it all the way to the Treasury and Charles Townshend, among whose papers they still reside. The British government would want to keep tabs on how the Royal African Company was addressing a diplomatic crisis that threatened their access to enslaved people that fueled a brutal and highly lucrative plantation economy. The stories of Atlantic slavery, African trade politics, and British finance are all intertwined. Curators must keep their attention sharp for hints of such interconnection in the collections they care for, and historians must remain ever curious about what might be nestled within troves of paperwork that feel too far afield to be worth considering at first glance.

Now that these materials have been spotlighted, they promise to help further flesh out this dramatic historic moment. The identity of the captain who initially sold William Ansah Sessarakoo into slavery in Barbados has been disputed, but the papers here clearly name a Captain Hamilton. The exact date of Sessarakoo’s enslavement is vague, but printed portraits of him state that it occurred in 1744. It was also known from reports that by October 1747 a Royal African Company officer, John Roberts, had spoken with Eno Baise Kurentsi, who tasked Roberts “to redeem his son who had been sold at Barbadoes for a Slave in the case of the death of Mr. Crichton.” This statement has previously been interpreted to mean Crichton was the ship captain and his death instigated the debacle. Now, having David Crichton clearly named as a Royal African Company agent, we know this instead means that Kurentsi was actually making a contingency plan. Should Crichton die, Roberts was to take up the work of freeing Sessarakoo.

These records give us a narrowed window from William Ansah Sessarakoo’s reputed sale into slavery around 1744 to Eno Baise Kurentsi’s awareness that the Royal African Company’s agent David Crichton was trying to secure his son’s freedom in 1747. Searching the Slave Voyages databases within this general timeframe, there is seemingly only one relevant hit—Captain Thomas Hamilton of the Valentine, who departed Liverpool in April 1742 and disembarked 282 enslaved people in the West Indies in March 1743, a little earlier than the portrait captions indicated. Directly naming Hamilton as having actively sold Sessarakoo also indicates this was not a mix-up caused by the death of a captain during an Atlantic voyage, but a deliberate act. Knowing the name of the ship that likely carried Sessarakoo into slavery also raises other intriguing questions. While The Royal African contended that Sessarakoo’s alias “Cupid” stemmed from English traders’ appreciation for his “sweet and amiable Temper,” the romantic name of the vessel that bore him into slavery suggests a possible alternative origin grounded instead in the sardonic cruelties of renaming enslaved peoples upon their arrival in the West Indies.

We now have a better lead on who had sold Sessarakoo, but who had purchased him has also been unclear. The Royal African only stated that the person who held Sessarakoo in slavery was “a Gentleman of Distinguished character.” In Townshend’s Papers, however, we now have a bill of sale that shows Crichton redeemed “Ansah Sassaracoo alias Cupid” from Jonathan Blenman, “Attorney General at Barbadoes.” This pinpoints Sessarakoo’s enslaver as Jonathan Blenman (active 1710-1766), who had joined the English Bar in 1717, moved to Barbados by 1718, and worked as a lawyer before serving variously as the island’s Attorney General and Judge of the Vice Admiralty Court. By 1735 he had purchased a plantation in St. George’s Parish and had a townhouse in Bridgetown. A “Gentleman of Distinguished character,” indeed.

The bill of sale shows that Sessarakoo was formally redeemed on February 11, 1748, by the Royal African Company agent David Crichton for £120. The flurry of financial activity in June 1748 suggests this may have been close to when Sessarakoo and Frederick departed Barbados for England, as Crichton finalized plans and closed accounts. Receipts for lodging and clothing appeared again in England in August 1748, giving us a firmer date of their arrival. It was also previously unclear who Sessarakoo’s companion was, but the repeated presence of Frederick in these financial documents provides us with at least a first name. This clutch of documents in Charles Townshend’s papers, then, gives us a much clearer timeline of events, names of individuals involved, and potential for future research to more fully tell William Ansah Sessarakoo’s story while in Barbados. They also give us another window into just how entwined stories of human enslavement are to the histories of British empire, finances, and politics. Perhaps finding Sessarakoo and Townshend in conversation shouldn’t have felt as surprising as it was.

Indeed, by 1752, the Board of Trade put forth a memorial about rebuilding the fort at Anomabo, with the consent and aid of Eno Baise Kurentsi. They consulted a committee of merchants who asserted that “they considered Annamaboe as the Key to the whole Trade of the Gold Coast.” They conferred with David Crichton, “formerly Chief Agent for the old Company at Cape Coast Castle, and a Person well acquainted with the Situation and Circumstance of the Place.” The Board ultimately agreed to recommend the fort’s construction, because it would “tend to promote Trade—by serving the Friendship and Assistance of John Corrantee and his Family, upon which this Trade so greatly Depends.” On that committee sat Charles Townshend, who likely knew all too well the particular details of what it took to secure the friendship of the Corrantee family. And now, thanks to his papers, so do we.

The finding aid for the Charles Townshend Papers at the William L. Clements Library has been updated to include an explicit statement about the documents relating to William Ansah Sessarakoo, in the hopes they draw more researchers to them. Scans of this material are provided in the Further Reading section to encourage further study.

 

Further Reading: 

“Mr. Crichton’s Papers,” Charles Townshend Papers, Box 15, Folders 21-36, William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan. (View Scans)

“An act for extending and improving the trade to Africa,” in Danby Pickering, The Statutes at Large, from the 23d to the 26th Year of King George II. Vol. 20. Cambridge: Joseph Bentham, 1765.

“Blenman of Barbados,” in Vere Langford Oliver, Caribbeana: Being Miscellaneous Papers Relating to the History, Genealogy, Topography, and Antiquities of the British West Indies, Vol. 5 (London: Mitchell, Hughes & Clark, 1919): 153-155.

Rob S. Cox and Shannon Wait, “Finding Aid for the Charles Townshend Papers,” William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan, Accessed November 8, 2024. https://findingaids.lib.umich.edu/catalog/umich-wcl-M-1773tow

John Faber, eng., after Gabriel Mathias, “William Ansah Sessarakoo,” ([London]: [mid-18th century]), National Portrait Gallery, London, Accessed November 8, 2024. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw13960/William-Ansah-Sessarakoo

Ruth A. Fisher, “Extracts from the Records of the African Companies [Part 3],” The Journal of Negro History 13, no. 3 (July 1928): 343-367.

Ruth A. Fisher, “Extracts from the Records of the African Companies [Part 4],” The Journal of Negro History 13, no. 3 (July 1928): 367-394.

Ryan Hanley, “The Royal Slave: Nobility, Diplomacy and the ‘African Prince’ in Britain, 1748-1752,” Itinerario 39, no. 2 (2015): 329-47.

Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations From January 1749-50 to December 1753 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932): 260.

Gabriel Matthias, Portrait of William Ansah Sessarakoo, son of Eno Baisie Kurentsi (John Currantee) of Anomabu, Oil on canvas, 1749. The Menil Collection.

The Royal African: Or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe (London: W. Reeve, 1749).

SlaveVoyages, Voyage ID 94787. Accessed November 8, 2024. www.slavevoyages.org

1. D. Smith, Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Randy J. Sparks, Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

“A Young African Prince Sold for a Slave,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, 19 (February 1749): 89-90.

 

This article originally appeared in June 2025.

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Jayne Ptolemy received her Ph.D. in African American Studies and History from Yale University in 2013. She has since worked in various roles at the William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan, where she currently serves as the Associate Curator of Manuscripts.

The summit attained in Clay’s cartoon is glorious, symbolized by the strutting turkey. But removal invariably follows, represented by the avatar of a famished stray dog cast to the streets. A “coroner’s inquest” by the curious public examines the untimely cause of political death. In the final stage, the officeholder’s body is driven to a potter’s field. The spoilsman is discarded and forgotten. Party politics is a system, however, rather than the behavior of an individual, like Currier’s drunkard. The churn of public approbation invariably moves on to the next person. Fittingly, they, too, are destined to be a victim of party abuse.

While some antebellum politicians did enjoy lengthy careers, two diplomats from Indiana’s First Congressional District, George H. Proffit and Robert Dale Owen, fit Edward Clay’s satirical arc remarkably well. Southwestern Indiana was an unlikely wellspring of diplomatic talent. The district spanned a region of the state called the Pocket. A narrow strip of counties located snugly between the Wabash and Ohio Rivers, the name took hold after the U.S. Congress carved Illinois out of Indiana Territory.

George H. Proffit served in the U.S. House from this seat from 1839 to 1843. A Whig merchant posted to Brazil by President John Tyler between December 1843 and August 1844, his sojourn was cut short by feuds stemming from presidential succession and party dissensus. Robert Dale Owen, an agrarian Democrat, succeeded Proffit in office for two terms in the U.S. House, after which he was sent to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1855 by Franklin Pierce. By the time Owen returned home in 1858, he found himself an outcast within his own party as a unionist with antislavery inclinations trapped within the party of secession.

Diplomatic Spoils

Diplomatic posts were highly coveted political rewards during the antebellum period. Foreign affairs were one of the few powers exercised robustly by the federal government, along with military functions, the regulation of commerce, and delivering the mail. Unlike a postmastership or a job at the customhouse (the latter is noted at the peak of Clay’s cartoon), diplomatic appointments came with the allure of prestige. Serving your country on foreign soil was still the domain of nobility among the world’s great powers. In the early American republic, the arena remained an honor reserved for the elite,

By the 1840s, however, a mission abroad dangled the prospect of status to even the most mediocre of placemen. Appointments also held out the prospect, if rarely the fact, of traveling in style to seemingly exotic places. Literary figures—writers, artists, and educators—sought foreign postings as way to travel widely while drawing upon a government salary.

The pathways of these two rivals, Proffit and Owen, to diplomatic appointments, and the ordeals they faced, tell us an important story about the old spoils system. Ambitious office seekers during the nineteenth century experienced wild swings of fortune that depended on the public’s mood and party benevolence. Hard work and good connections might carry political loyalists on a wave from obscurity to relative grandeur. But the threat of removal, dispossession, and even ostracism was always lurking around the corner.

For-Proffit Government

During the 1830s and 1840s, George H. Proffit served constituents simultaneously as a Whig official, federal bureaucrat, and as local merchant. The lengthy and contested process of Native dispossession was still underway when both he and Robert Dale Owen made their careers in southwestern Indiana. President Andrew Jackson’s policy of accelerating forced removal was overseen in the field by Proffit, an Indian Agent for the War Department, along with several other leading Indiana politicians.

Native peoples openly despised Proffit. On one occasion he was almost knifed in plain day in the Summer of 1837 at an encampment near Lake Keewaunay. An English-speaking Potawatomi woman, Do-Ga, christened him “Ko-cheese,” or louse, for the lack of respect he showed the families preparing for a long journey westward that would become a trail of death.

“Ko-cheese” was stuck to the beating heart of the Mississippi watershed’s borderland political economy. Born in New Orleans, Proffit began his career in the 1820s as a bargeman transporting goods along the Ohio River. At the time he represented Pike and Dubois Counties in the Indiana House of Representatives, championing a Mammoth System of canals and highways, he was also administering the federal government’s expulsion of the Potawatomi from Crooked Creek, earning a salary of $4 per day. 

Proffit’s role in Native expulsion opened a path for the region’s land sales; and he purchased aggressively, buying roughly 1,500 acres of land around Petersburg and several lots in town. The Whig-backed system of state canals and highways that he promoted in the late 1830s aimed to valorize those new landholdings, including two of his lots in Evansville, the southernmost terminus of the Wabash and Erie Canal. Profitt was foremost a businessman. Treaty annuities paid by the federal government to Native peoples as legal compensation for lost territory were spent buying supplies from his two country stores.

Owenism After Utopia

Unlike his Whig opponent, Robert Dale Owen had no interest or capacity for business. He was known primarily by his connection to New Harmony, the utopian community founded by his father of roughly 800 people who moved onto 20,000 acres. Located off the banks of the Wabash River in Posey County, Indiana, the commune was launched in 1826 when it was a village of “four streets running toward the river, & six crossing these.” Robert the elder, an “enthusiastic talker” who carried himself with the countenance of a Roman senator, made a fortune in the textile mills of New Lanark, Scotland. But he decried the cut-throat competition and child labor produced by early industrial capitalism. 

On the edge of American empire, the industrialist put visionary ideas about cooperative property to the test. He called it the “Social System.” But the experiment struggled almost immediately. The legacy of New Harmony lived on as the material basis for the son Robert Dale’s life as a bohemian radical. The patriarch conveyed the remaining property, an enormous estate worth $140,000 at its peak, to his family who stayed behind in America.

Robert Dale Owen established the Free Enquirer along with Fanny Wright. They expounded upon everything from Black emancipation to universal education to birth control when most Americans considered the topics risible. Living for a time in New York City, he supported the fledgling Working Men’s Party. So, the dedicated but small free-thinking community across the United States was surprised, and more than a bit disappointed, when he returned home to the Pocket and evolved into a committed Democratic partisan.

What first pulled into party politics was precisely that very thing upon which all republics are founded—the demand for more say in how his property was governed. He sprang into action in 1835 when he learned that his enormous New Harmony estate would be bypassed by the construction of the Wabash and Erie Canal, championed by George H. Proffit and the Whigs. After lobbying efforts to bring the canal route to his hometown faltered, Owen won election to the Indiana General Assembly and minor victories for the “modifiers” covering the pacing of construction and the payment of public debts.

In his new path, Robert Dale Owen proved to be an adept legislator with a reputation for compromise. “Practicable reforms” like channeling federal money to Indiana’s fledgling common schools or reforming state law so that widows could inherit property were “not radical as you understand the term,” he confessed to his father. But the measures were of “unquestionable utility as far as they go.” During his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives, Owen was instrumental to building a coalition that finally chartered the Smithsonian Institution after eight years of inaction.

By 1845, the Indiana State Sentinel could proclaim in earnest that Owen “is the last man now living in the State” who would “violate his allegiance to just party discipline in the slightest degree whatever.” Defending President James Polk’s annexation plan in a speech on the House floor, Owen allowed to critics that it was unfortunate Texas was a slave republic. “But shall we count it for nothing, on the other hand,” he reasoned, “that we increase also, by one-sixth, our Union; happy, prosperous, blessed, even with her faults, as we feel her to be”? To this, he added: “We can find no Utopia to annex.”

Stumping

George H. Proffit was a “high toned but humorous whig.” Yet, he proved to be inept as legislator. In early 1842, Proffit and five other pro-slavery members of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs quit in protest after John Quincy Adams’s reading of anti-slavery petitions. The sixth president deftly outmaneuvered them. Chairman Adams accepted their resignations and voted to replace them by a “shout of acclamation” from the remaining committee members. The rest of Proffit’s record in Congress was hardly more distinguished. He was a stump speaker, not a legislator.

As Edward Clay’s cartoon about the spoils system illustrates, campaigning was the kind of party service that mattered. The power to hold an audience’s attention was decisive in this era of mass politics. Entire careers, like those of Daniel Webster or Henry Clay, were built upon delivering orations, rhetorical expressions of moral superiority that were laden with references in Latin and Greek. Nobody could mistake George Proffit for such a gentleman. He was crude, funny, and relatable—a western politician.

When Proffit took the stump, he came “loaded seven fingers,” like a muzzle gun so heavily charged that the ramrod stood out seven inches. His specialty was the rousing “spread eagle” speech, a blend of patriotic sentimentality and partisan invective. He charged that Democrats were all Locofocos who would be content without nothing less than the destruction of banks, “robbing children of the property of their fathers,” overturning the schoolmasters’ authority, and, more generally, for sending humanity back to the Iron Age. Western politics was a form of entertainment, after all, and Proffit knew how to put on a good show. “I have never heard a more persuasive speaker,” one traveler noted in his diary.

During the campaign of 1840, George H. Proffit and Robert Dale Owen faced off against each other to represent the First District in the U.S. House of Representatives. They traveled together across the Pocket’s backroads, as was the custom, for two long, hot months in the summer of 1839, riding together on horseback to speak before crowds at towns, county seats, and at impromptu roadside encounters. They would speak for hours at a time, notwithstanding interruptions from the crowd, followed by lengthy rebuttals.

Proffit’s manner of speaking was honed at the country store. There, intimacy and mutual trust were the coin of the realm. Owen was at a disadvantage on the stump. He relied on a plodding style of argumentation—lecturing, really—developed during his years as a gadfly denouncing the ills of society to thin crowds at the Hall of Science in New York City, an assembly for radicals.

Owen was earnest on the campaign trail, not entertaining. He had the awkward habit “of keeping his hands in his breeches pockets,” a Whig paper observed. “As he warms and rises in the importance of his subject, deeper does he plunge his hands into his breeches.” By most accounts, Owen did himself few favors when delivering a stump speech. He lost to Proffit by a 13 percent margin, a rout that cannot be fully attributed to late entrance into the race.

Rather than fold after this harrowing defeat, Robert Dale Owen returned to the campaign trail time and again. He became a regular party speaker, aided in part by sheer availability. That is, he could afford to spend months away from business affairs focused on the election canvass, doing committee work, and attending conventions.

Owen traveled the electioneering circuit for Martin Van Buren in 1840, James Polk in 1844 and Lewis Cass in 1848, not to mention for his own U.S. House campaigns. Owen eventually learned to give a passable speech through workman-like practice and sheer force of will. He proved indefatigable, an advantage in party service during this era that was second only to skills at speechifying.

In and Out of Office

When George H. Proffit embarked in the Summer of 1843 for Rio de Janeiro on the USS Levant, a sloop-of-war that shuttled diplomats to their posts in Latin America, his appointment was the culmination of a long career in public life. Proffit was a popular congressman, and, before that, a state legislator. Now he was leaving the backwoods of southern Indiana, with its coarse manners and meagre living, to serve as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the court of Brazilian Emperor Pedro II. A group of New York merchants even organized a dinner celebrating the Hoosier’s departure for “standing manfully in defence [sic] of the President.”

The journey was not easy. It took two and a half months amid squelching heat to make the voyage from Hampton Roads on the Virginia coast to Rio, crossing the Caribbean and making port several times on the way. And then, after all these labors, Proffit’s tour of duty was over almost as soon as it began. He arrived in Brazil with an unfortunate status as a diplomat without the confidence of his own government.

Mere weeks after disembarking, the U.S. Senate rejected George Proffitt’s confirmation as minister by a vote of thirty-three to eight. More than a disappointment, it was a humiliation. In 1842, John Tyler—an accidental president after the death of William Henry Harrison—had broken decisively with the Whigs after vetoing party-line measures on banking and the tariff. After waiting more than a decade in the opposition, Whigs lost a chance—their only, it would turn out—to govern as a majority on the party’s own terms. Congressman Proffit followed Tyler into political apostasy and received his just reward, a recess appointment for the Brazilian mission at $9,000 per year (or about $300,000 today).

The personal triumph was brief. Henry Clay, the Whig leader preparing to run for president, bitterly denounced Proffit on the Senate floor, along with other members of Tyler’s “corporal’s guard” of ex-Whigs seeking patronage. Following humiliation came disaster. On February 28, the twelve-inch guns of the USS Princeton exploded during official inspection. The accident brought a sudden and gruesome end to Tyler’s Secretary of State, Abel P. Upshur, who envisioned uniting pro-slavery forces in the Western hemisphere by forming a grand alliance with Brazil. The State Department was rudderless at the very moment that Proffit had been stripped of authority by the U.S. Senate. Essentially, he was stranded in South America.  

A mere eight months after leaving home, then, acting-Minister Proffit slunk quietly back into the country on the USS Cyane. Earlier, during the heady moment of Whig triumph in the Election of 1840, he had been celebrated as a party hero. His frenzied efforts stumping on behalf of the Harrison-Tyler ticket were decisive in carrying Indiana’s Democratic-leaning Pike County by a razor-thin margin of 156 votes. “We have a whole team in the person of little George H. Proffit,” boasted a local party paper, marveling at the energy of a man who was but 5 feet and 4 ½ inches tall.

Upon returning from Brazil, Proffit was abandoned by longtime friends who believed that he dropped the Whig standard for little more than a patronage grab. He was hounded by local papers as “the little traitor.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, a longstanding antagonist, crowed that Proffit’s diplomatic tenure was so irrelevant that he was never formally received at court. In truth, the alleged slight was likely due to poor timing: the newly coronated Emperor’s feud with his brother-in-law, the Count of Aquila, had brought court affairs to a standstill. The palace of São Cristóvão also happened to be under renovation. Still, the charge appeared to confirm Proffit’s sudden irrelevance.

But there was yet lower to fall. The rigors of midcentury long-distance travel and the weight of ostracism taxed Proffit’s physical stamina and mental health to a breaking point. He was dead within two years. The lesson weighed heavily on Robert Dale Owen, the Democratic rival who Proffit handily defeated in 1840, but who later succeeded him in Congress. When the possibility of Owen’s own foreign mission arose, he was initially cautious. He did not wish to “bury himself in South America.” What initially looked like a lucrative emolument and rare honor for his Whig predecessor turned out to be a cautionary tale.

Coroner’s Inquest

In the battle to serve as Franklin Pierce’s chargé d’affaires to Naples, Robert Dale Owen, the social reformer, was chosen over August Belmont, the financier with business in Italy. Like Profitt’s post to Brazil, Owen was appointed as reward for political service. He had supported the 1852 presidential aspirations of Joseph Lane, a former state legislator representing Evansville, a city on the Ohio River within Owen’s U.S. House district. During the Mexican-American War, he helped Lane to secure the rank of brigadier general.

After the war, General Lane’s career took off as territorial governor of Oregon and later its U.S. Senator. Declaring Lane “the Andrew Jackson of Indiana,” Owen promoted him in party correspondence, spoke at meetings on Lane’s behalf, and shepherded resolutions of endorsement as the first choice of Indiana Democrats. Owen also penned an official campaign biography under the pseudonym “Western.” It was then Lane who recommended Owen to President Pierce; it was Lane’s influence that prevailed over August Belmont. Congressman Owen, the erstwhile patron, had himself become supplicant, per Edward Clay’s cartoon, “begging for office.”  

When Owen arrived at his post in late October 1853, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies hung on the precipice of collapse. Ferdinand II, a plump and epileptic despot, governed tenuously. His polity had been restored out of the ashes of foreign invasion. Memories of Napoleonic rule and Austrian occupation were still fresh. The throne was besieged by conspiracies at home and threatened by a regional conflict that erupted into the Crimean War. The scourge of liberals everywhere, Ferdinand had earned the nickname “Bomba” for quashing the barricades of 1848. He reigned through a heavy hand of police and censorship.

And yet, Owen, that oracle of humanity’s progress in his youth, the radical egalitarian, embraced the perquisites of life in this minor Bourbon court. He rented lodgings at Palazzo Valli in Chiaia, on the waterfront, with a breathtaking view of the bay from his window. It was a fashionable neighborhood of palatial homes where carriage traffic was three or four abreast in busy late afternoons. Owen kept servants, as was the custom of rank in which he conducted affairs. He attended balls at the royal academy. And he won the king’s personal favor by refusing to cloak the day’s great power politics in the shroud of humanitarian rhetoric, as did England.

Robert Dale Owen proved to be a high-functioning bureaucrat, remaining at his post even during a cholera outbreak in June of 1854. He was promoted to minister resident after a year in office. When Owen’s four-year tenure was nearing an end, he confided to Secretary of State Lewis Cass that he could not bear to leave “one of the most beautiful regions” of the world “without regret.” Owen lobbied James Buchanan, asking to be kept in his post, even for just another year.

Would the president consider Owen’s record of accomplishment? Despite no prior diplomatic experience, he had negotiated a trade agreement, served American nationals well (both seamen and travelers), and, more generally, cemented amiable ties between the two nations. Buchanan, however, was a consummate Jacksonian committed to rotation in office. The president-elect did not even entertain the possibility. It was simply time for another party man to enjoy the emoluments of office.

On September 20, 1858, Owen was formally recalled. He boarded a steamer headed for Marseille and, eventually, back home. Unlike Proffit’s defrocking, Robert Dale Owen went on to live another thirty years, with many adventures still to come. But as predicted by Edward Clay’s “The Seven Stages of the Office Seeker,” Owen’s political career was buried in a potter’s field just the same. He never held public office again.

 

Further Reading:

Primary Sources

Adams, John Quincy. Diary Entry, January 31 and February 9, 1842, Volume 34. John Quincy Adams Digital Diary. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Owen, Robert Dale to Robert Owen. September 3, 1854, Folder 5, Box 1. Robert Dale Owen Papers. Indiana State Library.

Proffit, George H. Loco-focoism As Displayed in the Boston Magazine, Against Schools and Ministers, and in Favor of Robbing Children of the Property of their Parents! Christians! Patriots! Fathers! Read and Reflect! 1840. HathiTrust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hx26wf&seq=5.

Texas and her Relations with Mexico. Speech by Robert Dale Owen of Indiana, delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, January 8, 1845. Library of Congress Digital Collections, https://lccn.loc.gov/42035488.

Secondary Sources

Acton, Harold. The Last Bourbons of Naples, 1825-1861. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961.

Barman, Roderick J. Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825-1891. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Carmony, Donald F. and Josephine M. Elliot, “New Harmony: Robert Owen’s Seedbed For Utopia” Indiana Magazine of History LXXVI (September 1980): 161-261.

Etcheson, Nicole. The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787-1861. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Leopold, Richard. Robert Dale Owen: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940.

Sears, Louis M. “Robert Dale Owen’s Mission To Naples.” Indiana Historical Bulletin VI Extra No. 2 (May 1929): 43-51.

Wilson, George R. “George H. Proffit: His Day and Generation.” Indiana Magazine of History Vol. 18, No. 1 (1922): 1-46.

 

This article originally appeared in June 2025.

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Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer is associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at The University of Toledo. His first book, Electoral Capitalism: The Party System In New York’s Gilded Age, was published in 2020 by University of Pennsylvania Press. He is currently at work on a second book project that reexamines the spoils system across the nineteenth century in American politics.

Mary Lewis was the widow of Robert Benjamin Lewis (c. 1802-1858), author of the first ethnology written by a Black American. She was also the mother-in-law of William F. Johnson (1822-1903), the superintendent of the Howard Orphan Asylum, a noteworthy institution in Weeksville, Brooklyn. And because Howells wrote about her and her family, we now know that Mary Lewis was a formidable person herself. 

In 1836, R.B. Lewis published Light and Truth, From Ancient and Sacred History. New editions were published in the 1840s and 1850s under the title Light and Truth: Collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History, Containing the Universal History of the Colored and the Indian Race, from the Creation of the World to the Present Time. At a time when most Americans read the Bible as more or less literal history, Lewis wrote that the text of Genesis posited that Eden was in Ethiopia, “and the first people were Ethiopians, or blacks.” Adam and Eve’s descendants were therefore black; so were most of history’s great figures, or at least not white in the sense his contemporaries or ours would understand the label. He also wrote that Native Americans were “Israelites—Indians who came out of Egypt,” a not uncommon belief among white U.S. theologians of the time.

Contrary to the university-endorsed “race science” that Black and Indigenous Americans heard in most white churches, read in white newspapers and magazines, and were taught in white-run schools, Lewis’s version of history gave readers of African and/or Indigenous descent an argument that their destiny was not subject to the wickedness of their current oppression. This oppression was temporary; the destiny of the “Colored and Indian race,” rooted in its people’s ancient and recent history, was freedom and greatness. 

There is evidence that Light and Truth was distributed and read widely. Physical copies survive today in the rare books collections of Harvard, Yale, and other institutions. And it wasn’t purchased and read only by Black or Native American readers: the copy in the Boston Athenaeum is inscribed “Nathaniel O. Chaffee, 1849.” Chaffee was a white Unitarian pastor at a number of Massachusetts and Maine churches.

Yet we still know relatively little beyond skeletal facts about R. B. Lewis. He was born in Maine of African and Indigenous heritage. He married twice and had a large family with his second wife, Mary Freeman Heuston Lewis. He spent much of his life at sea. While on land he earned a living painting houses, cleaning and repairing household furnishings, and selling “Arabian” hair oil. He was also issued three patents for inventions related to his trades. The sole known portrait of Lewis, probably commissioned to promote his book, indicates he was a freemason. He went on regular lecture tours with Light and Truth. He died in Haiti while employed as a ship’s cook. But, other than his obvious intellect and energy, we have little sense of what he was like as a person.

We knew even less about his wife, Mary Lewis. At least, until recently.

Researchers had already found in vital records and newspapers that Mary Lewis’s family, the Heustons, was well-known and respected in its hometown of Brunswick, Maine. Like R.B. Lewis, they were also of African and Indigenous heritage. Her father owned a large farm, and the family sheltered refugees from slavery; in 2013, the Heuston family cemetery was added to the National Park Service Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. Recently, Alexandra Peters, a sampler collector and conservator, linked a large, beautiful sampler headed “GENEALOGY” that lists names in the Swain and Heuston families to Mary Lewis. Either Mary or one of her sisters stitched the sampler, which displays not only their needle skills, but also their education. But what was life like for someone in Mary Lewis’ situation, that is, a well-educated Black woman with close family ties, married to an entrepreneurial intellectual activist, mother of a large family, living in New England? How did she see the world? It seemed she hadn’t left any of her own words behind, except possibly the sampler.

But she had. W.D. Howells and his wife, Elinor Mead Howells (1837-1910), moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1866 as Howells took up his position as assistant editor at The Atlantic. “Mrs. Johnson,” also the first essay in Suburban Sketches, published in 1871, relates the history of the Howells’ hiring of Mary Lewis and their increasing familiarity with each other.

Howells’s disguise of the Lewis family as the Johnsons is rather flimsy. His description of Mrs. Johnson’s late husband— a man who had died in the Caribbean while working on a schooner and “a man of letters, [who] had written a book to show the superiority of the black over the white branches of the human family…[who wrote] that humanity was first created of that color”—lines up with what we know about R.B. Lewis. Turning to volumes of the Howellses’ letters to see whether he was indeed talking about R.B. Lewis and had employed Mary Lewis, multiple references to “Mrs. Lewis” and her daughter Esther, whom Howells calls “Naomi” in the essay, can be found.

For a white man of his time, W.D. Howells was relatively forward-thinking about issues involving race. He and his father had been committed anti-slavery newspapermen in Ohio, and the Howells family defended John Brown and then helped Brown’s family after his execution. In 1909, Howells signed “The Call,” the document that began the organization of the group that would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), for which he was later praised by W.E.B. Du Bois. However, to a reader today—and surely to Black readers of the time—the “Mrs. Johnson” essay is disgustingly disrespectful of Mary Lewis, even as Howells’s affection for her is obvious. But if we peel back the mockery and condescension, Howells provides some texture to the bare-bones facts previously known about the Lewis family as well as a springboard of hints about where more information might be found.

If the timeline in “Mrs. Johnson” is accurate, Mary and Esther Lewis arrived at the Howells household in April 1867. R.B. Lewis clearly knew people in Boston, and Mary Lewis had been in Boston at least long enough to marry him there in 1835. Howells reports that “She and her late partner were the parents of eleven children, some of whom were dead, and some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts. During his life-time she had kept a little shop in her native town; and it was only within a few years that she had gone into service.” The 1850 federal census shows the couple in Bath, Maine, with nine children, and the 1860 census shows the widowed Mary Lewis still in Bath with her eldest son, Benjamin, and her four youngest children. By the time of the 1865 Massachusetts census, she was in Dorchester, today a part of Boston, with Esther, her youngest, in the home of white bookseller Charles Augustus Clapp. We don’t yet know how she met Clapp’s family, although the Clapps were members of an extended family of abolitionists and they may have had acquaintances in common.

Howells writes (in a disturbing passage) that after their difficulties convincing young Yankee and Irish women to stay working for his family, the family decided to hire a Black woman. They therefore went to an “intelligence,” or employment, office in the West End/Beacon Hill section of Boston, then the heart of Black Boston. He writes: “It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson; and it was from a colored boarding-house there that she came out to Charlesbridge to look at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her… her manners were so full of a certain tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all our will to ask for references.” (At about this time, Clapp moved to New York with the publisher E.P. Dutton, so Mary Lewis may have moved to a boarding house in consequence.) Howells makes it clear that Mary Lewis was interviewing them rather than the other way around.

From day one in Cambridge, Mary Lewis reveals herself as a brilliant and creative cook, willing to try new recipes and able to reproduce dishes the Howellses missed from Venice, where Howells had been U.S. vice-consul. She asserts her self-respect in a way Howells finds amusing in a Black woman but nevertheless accepts. She makes clear she is an employee, not a servant—she is “a lady who had for thirty years had a house of her own” and so will hear of no rules because she knows how to behave and how to run a house properly. She also lets the Howellses know she would have no difficulty finding another position if she chose to leave—indeed, she tells Howells she has had many previous positions, easily finding new employers when she’s decided to leave unsatisfactory ones.

Howells also relates that Mary Lewis “had not a flattering opinion of the Caucasian race in all respects,” no doubt in part from personal experience, but mostly because she is deeply familiar with the research and arguments her husband put forth in Light and Truth. And she reveals further beliefs shared with her husband not found in his book: “[S]he often developed its arguments to the lady of the house; and one day, with a great show of reluctance, and many protests that no personal slight was meant, let fall the fact that Mr. Johnson believed the white race descended from Gehazi the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to his original blackness. ‘And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow,’ said Mrs. Johnson, quoting irrefutable Scripture. ‘Leprosy, leprosy,’ she added thoughtfully,—‘nothing but leprosy bleached you out.’”

Elinor Howells’ letters reveal a relatively easy-going relationship with Mary Lewis, lending credence to W.D. Howells’ characterization of Mary Lewis’ willingness to share her opinions. These opinions, like the theological arguments just mentioned, reflect familiarity with debates then current in the Black community. Mary Lewis tells the Howellses that, when she attends church, she attends only white churches, not Black churches. Howells portrays this as reflecting mixed feelings about not being white. But at exactly this time, many local Black activists—who would have known her husband—opposed the establishment of Black churches in the North, sin the North, believing they would reverse progress the Black community had made toward social and civil equality.

Beyond this evidence of the Lewises’ intellectual affinity, Howells signals their emotional closeness. He includes an anecdote about Mary Lewis replacing a steel-framed pair of glasses he had bought her with a gold-framed pair: “…their purchase was in fulfillment of a vow made…in the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever she wore glasses, they should be gold-bowed.” She kept this promise to her husband even ten years after his death, revealing a loving bond between the two as well as a sense of the family’s self-worth.   

Howells also portrays two of the Lewises’ children and a son-in-law. Esther (1856-1871) appears as “Naomi.” Elinor Howells’ letters speak fondly of Esther. According to W.D. Howells, she was, like her mother, a strong character and full of energy. He writes of her resistance to schooling but facility with music and Italian, which she learned from a visitor to the house: “She taught the Garibaldi song [with Italian lyrics], moreover, to all the neighboring children, so that I sometimes wondered if our street were not about to march upon Rome in a body.” It’s not clear from the essay or the letters why Esther wouldn’t go to school—nor do we know whether this was even true—but given Mary Lewis’s own level of education, she certainly could have successfully homeschooled Esther. Howells also states that Esther attended Sunday school and took instruction in the evenings from Elinor Howells.

Near the end of the essay, “Hippolyto Thucydides” arrives on a visit to his mother, having left off sheep herding in New Hampshire. In real life, this is likely Victorinus Lewis, who appears with his family in the 1860 census as eight-year-old Victoren. Howells portrays him as comically wayward and a bit strange. Today, he comes across more as depressed, perhaps disturbed, but definitely displaced from home after his father’s death and now forced to make his way as a young Black man in post-abolitionist New England. His mother arranges for him to stay in various boarding houses, but he frequently goes missing before reappearing at the Howells’ house. According to the essay, “Hippy’s” waywardness leads to the departure of the Lewis family from the Howellses’ home. As Howells makes clear throughout the essay, Mary Lewis was devoted to her children, and at the point when she must choose between staying with the Howellses or caring for her son, she chooses her son. Records for Victorinus after 1860 have not yet been found.

Among the most startling and specific passages in “Mrs. Johnson” is an incident in which Elinor Howells comes home one day to find Mrs. Johnson’s “son-in-law, Professor Jones of Providence,…[in] the dining room…at pudding and tea there,—an impressively respectable figure in black clothes, with a black face rendered yet more effective by a pair of green goggles. It appeared that this dark professor was a light of phrenology in Rhode Island, and that he was believed to have uncommon virtue in his science by reason of being blind as well as black.”

This was in fact William F. Johnson, who had in 1860 married Mary Augusta Lewis, the Lewises’ eldest child. It seems W.D. Howells truly didn’t know who Johnson was and he may not have thought it brazen to use Johnson’s surname as Mary Lewis’s fictional surname. Elinor Howells hadn’t heard of him before. On June 16, 1867, she wrote to W.D.’s sister that Mary Lewis had prepared a wonderful meal for one of their Cambridge friends, the writer Henry James. When Elinor Howells went into the dining room later, a man wearing green glasses was sitting with Mrs. Lewis: “Mrs. Lewis immediately introduced him to me as ‘Proffessor [sic] Johnson’ her son-in-law. He is Prof. of Phrenology, having studied with Fowler. You must send long messages to Mrs L. as she is always very particular to know just what you say.” Although she didn’t know of Johnson, it’s clear she knew who “Fowler” was—Orson S. Fowler (1809-1887), a well-known phrenologist. But it is likely that some number of The Atlantic’s older, white abolitionist readers and contributors—not to mention many Black readers—knew Johnson personally.

Often billed as the “eloquent blind lecturer of Ithaca, N.Y.,” Johnson had been born free in Baltimore, raised in Ithaca, and educated at the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind in New York City. He may have studied with Fowler at the Institute and may also have taught there. He toured the East Coast and upstate New York giving anti-slavery magic lantern lectures and phrenology demonstrations. One source says that abolitionists thought Johnson’s lectures important in part because the spectacle of a blind man talking about images attracted some white attendees who were then exposed to anti-slavery arguments.

But Johnson wasn’t just a spectacle—as a man and as an advocate, he was well regarded. For example, in March 1852, he spoke at an anti-slavery convention at the courthouse in Canandaigua, NY, along with leading abolitionists William Cooper Nell, Sallie Holley, Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, and others. He also displayed the influence of R.B. Lewis, even before he married into his family. As recorded by Nell, Johnson “presented a historical sketch of the genius of the early Africans, stating that Memnon, who invented the first letters of the Alphabet, and Euclid, the mathematician, were both Egyptians; and while a copy of the latter’s famed ‘elements’ remained in the libraries of Canandaigua, the exclusion of her school-children for complexion’s sake was, to say the least, a strange commentary. The effort of Mr. Johnson, blind though he is, clearly evinced his mental optics to be keenly active when the rights of his race are in question.”

Soon after his visit to his mother-in-law in Cambridge—where they no doubt discussed political developments in addition to family news—Johnson was appointed head of the Howard Orphan Asylum in Weeksville, Brooklyn, which he would successfully run for the next thirty years. This was then one of the few institutions for Black people in the country managed and operated entirely by Black people. Mary Augusta Lewis Johnson worked as the Orphan Asylum’s treasurer in addition to serving as William Johnson’s sturdy assistant in all things professional. She had graduated from the high school in Bath, Maine, in 1856. During the 1860s, before William Johnson took his position at the Orphan Asylum, Mary Augusta Johnson taught school at Weeksville’s Colored School No. 2, which was in fact integrated at the time.

We still don’t know whether Howells actually understood who Mary Lewis and her family were, understood their educational background and community connections, or emotionally understood how the death of a Black husband and father could lead to the scattering of a previously stable and settled family and reduce a homeowning housewife to housekeeper in a stranger’s home. He casts doubt on Mary Lewis’s boasts that one of her sons (probably Euclid, b. 1846) who had gone to sea was a “prodigy of intellect”; yet given the Lewis parents’ intellectual engagement and his sister Mary Augusta’s education and later career, not to mention Esther’s quickness, one would expect the Lewis children to be bright and well-schooled. He mocks the names she had given some of her children—“it is impossible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson’s family”—but the Lewises had named Euclid and Esther, as well as Artemisa, Hypatia, Europa, and Victorinus, after historical figures in Light and Truth, probably to give them pride in their African heritage.

Howells also states that “Mrs. Johnson could not show us her husband’s work (a sole copy in the library of an English gentleman at Port au Prince is not to be bought for money)…” His implication is that the book was likely either never written or never published; it may instead be a figment of Mrs. Johnson’s desire for affinity with the Howellses: “…we knew that she did not regard us as quality…. Yet she had a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of the family, Mr. Johnson having been an author. She even professed to have herself written a book, which was still in manuscript, and preserved somewhere among her best clothes.” Of course, the husband’s book was published in multiple editions and can still be found by anyone looking for it; maybe the wife’s manuscript, like the sampler made when she was a girl, will also be found one day.  

“Mrs. Johnson” appeared in The Atlantic in January 1868. On March 29, Mary Freeman Heuston Lewis died at not quite fifty-two of “inflammatory fever” at 80 Phillips Street, back in the heart of Black Boston. Did the Howellses know? Esther died in Charlestown, aged not quite sixteen, in 1871, the same year Suburban Sketches was published. Had the Howellses kept in touch with her?

We don’t know how many people reading “Mrs. Johnson” when it appeared in The Atlantic or Suburban Sketches recognized the Lewises and William Johnson. Howells didn’t make much effort to disguise them. As offensive as the essay is—and, we can assume, was to some of its contemporary readers—Howells has inadvertently given us, more than 150 years later, valuable information about an important but nearly forgotten family and its networks.

 

Further Reading:

For suggestions of where more hidden information concerning the Lewis family might be found, click here.

Bay, Mia. The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Goldman, Susan, and Carl Dawson. William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Merrill, Ginette de B., and George Arms, eds. If Not Literature: Letters of Elinor Mead Howells. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1988.

Nell, William C. William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings 1832-1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002.

Piola, Erika. “Rev. W. F. Johnson: Blind Phrenologist, Abolitionist, and Picture Show Lecturer.” Beyond the Reading Room (blog), Library Company of Philadelphia, September 30, 2015, http://librarycompany.blogspot.com/2015/09/rev-wf-johnson-blind-phrenologist.html.

Pitts, Reginald H. “Robert Benjamin Lewis.” In Maine’s Visible Black History, edited by H.H. Price and Gerald E. Talbot, 235-40. Gardiner, Maine: Tilbury House, 2006.

Rusert, Britt. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2017.

Wellman, Judith. Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville, New York. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Wells, Kentwood D. “The Magic Lantern in American Churches before 1860.” The Magic Lantern Gazette 27, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 3-33, https://www.academia.edu/40298208/Kentwood_D_Wells_2015_The_magic_lantern_in_American_churches_before_1860_The_Magic_Lantern_Gazette_27_4_3_33. 

 

This article originally appeared in May 2025.

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Leslie Brunetta is a member of the Cambridge Black History Project and has published a number of articles on forgotten Black history in that Massachusetts city. She is also co-author, with Catherine L. Craig, of Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Sitting, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating (Yale University Press).