The bronze bell was created from copper and other metal, heated and cast in a process that has changed little over centuries. An artisan created it around 1750, fulfilling a request from Franciscan missionaries working in the far northern reaches of Spanish claims in the Americas. Bells played a vital role in the sparsely settled mission-presidio communities in the frontier territory claimed by Spain. Their casting and transportation from Spain or Mexico City were significant endeavors. Omnipresent and insistent reminders of the newcomers, they rang daily, compelling residents to attend mass and labor, reminding them to pray the Ave María, announcing baptisms, marriages, and deaths, warning of imminent Apache attacks, and celebrating Catholic feast days.

San Antonio, a small frontier settlement, was populated by Spanish and mestizo soldiers and settlers, isleños from the Canaries, and native Pajalats, Tacames, Siquipils, Tilpacopals, Patumacas, and Coahuiltecos gathered around the missions. A 1772 inventory from Mission Concepción lists two bells, one of which could be the colonial bell in possession of the Rosenberg Library. The same year’s inventory from Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) lists three large bells of unspecified weights, and Mission San Francisco de Espada’s friar inventoried bells in both 1746 and 1772. Additional research might uncover receipts, transportation records, or additional information about the bells that rang in eighteenth-century San Antonio, while spectrographic analysis could help determine the bell’s metal composition, possibly connecting it to other extant bells or to a particular place or region. The studded cross provides one clue to its birthplace; this design is similar to other mission bells cast in Seville and Mexico City. 

In 1794, with the secularization of the missions and the transfer of control to diocesan priests, some bells were relocated to newer missions, while others were repurposed or remained in place. During the waning years of the Spanish empire, they continued to mark daily and special occasions for San Antonio’s residents, as well as the Anglo-American newcomers. By 1835, Tejano militias joined with Anglo newcomers to declare independence against a Mexican state they considered oppressive. 

Late nineteenth-century sources tie the bell to the Texas independence struggle. Texians removed the bells from Mission Concepción and transported them to camp, where they unsuccessfully attempted to melt and mold them into ammunition. One bell was left hanging in a tree. Sam Damon, connected by marriage to descendants of Daniel Boone, brought it by wagon to his land grant in Brazoria County. Some accounts state the bell was torched when Santa Anna’s Mexican Army burned Damon’s barn months later. 

The bell’s original Texas home isn’t clear, but the possibility that it “tocsined the alarum that called to their last battle the spirits of Travis, of Crockett, of Bowie and their followers,” and “sounded the last knell of the murdered patriots, the sacrifice of whom gave to this great empire State its watchword liberty” was too tantalizing not to report in the 1874 press. They were written by men who pined for the past, elite white former Confederates who saw themselves as victims of occupation by an oppressive United States government during Reconstruction. Nostalgic rhetoric oozes from their recollections of the bell, which emphasize the bell’s connection to Anglo-American Texas, not its Spanish colonial past. 

One of these accounts, written in October 1874, states that after the Texas Revolution, Samuel Damon rang the bell to start and end the workday at his sawmill in the 1840s. He later gave it to David Randon for use at his nearby plantation. The account also offers a prosaic celebration of its role in antebellum plantation life. Our bell leads the way out of the wild tangle of darkness to the culture and civilization of Randon’s home:

How oft, in the olden time, when treading the narrow and winding paths through the dense canebrakes, oppressed with the profound solitude of the jungle, and anxious to reach the hospitable roof of my friend Randon before the darkness came upon me, have I listened for the soft peal of that bell, calling the then happy laborer from his work to refreshment and repose, and . . . directing lost ones to safety and deliverance. 

The author continues his journey to his friend’s porch by walking through the cotton field, where a “stentorian voice” sings upon hearing the bell, and the voices of humans enslaved on Randon’s plantation respond. In this telling, the bell was a protagonist in the happy, productive life on Randon’s cotton plantation, bringing about the melodies of content humans and birds as the sun set on a tranquil workday. It actively shaped a strict hierarchy of race-based class and power, not so dissimilar from the way in which it functioned in San Antonio under Spanish religious and colonial authorities.

Sometime in 1854 or 1855, Randon gave the bell to Richmond Academy, where “it called the school-boy with his satchel and shining morning face” to his studies. While there, it “rung out the declaration of Southern independence” when Texas seceded. The school closed in 1862 and the property was sold to Judge William E. Kendall, who converted it into a family home. In its final public act, the bell “burst with grief in tolling the knell of Southern freedom” at the Civil War’s conclusion.

After being approached by a prospective buyer who wanted the bell for its ties to the Texas Revolution, Judge Kendall gifted the bell to the Texas Historical Society, which had been formed by elite families involved in finance, trade, and cotton. By 1893, it was stored safely in Galveston’s Masonic Temple, just as elite interest in preservation of the Alamo and the other four San Antonio missions had begun. In 1895, the group’s secretary took the bell to a chemist to see if it could be restored with an acid wash. It was the subject of an inquiry by the state in 1897, when a commissioner sought to relocate it to the new state museum in Austin. Although a large part of the Historical Society’s collection was damaged or destroyed in the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the bell survived. In 1931 the Historical Society donated its artifacts and papers to the Rosenberg Library.

In the first half of the twentieth century, women like Adina de Zavala and Clara Driscoll worked to preserve San Antonio’s Spanish colonial past. De Zavala, granddaughter of a Tejano participant in the Texas Revolution, introduced Bessie Lee Fitzhugh, a fellow educator and author, to the bell in the 1940s. Fitzhugh included it in her 1955 book Bells Over Texas. The Star of the Republic of Texas Museum requested the bell on loan in the last decades of the twentieth century, during which Texas celebrated the sesquicentennial of its independence; after which the bell was returned to the library, where it is currently on display.

What can we learn from considering the way in which this bell was valued by the range of individuals and groups who owned it? Before it was cast, its value was as metal, which had the potential to be converted into a variety of items for quotidian, ritual, military, or commercial use. Friars valued the finished object for its power to sanctify space and organize time. In Texas’s independence struggle, the bell’s value was in its metal, but when melting other bells failed to produce the desired result, it was useful enough to save and transport out of the melee. As Texas’s economy shifted to capitalism, the bell’s value was in its regulation of laborers. For those in later years, the bell’s value lay not in its powerful sound, but in its visual representation. The now-silent object was tied to its role in a glorified past: hardworking friars of the imagined collaborative mission community, heroes of the Texas Revolution, antebellum plantation owners, Texas’s version of the liberty bell.

Although its origin and path to the display case in the second-floor hallway of the Rosenberg Library remain murky, this resilient object is intimately tied to the exercise of power. In Texas’s Spanish colonial period, it rang out to restructure daily and ritual time, reminding all within its sound of the Spanish economic and cultural presence and the balance of power between the friars and indigenous residents. Perhaps the native inhabitants of the region resented its aural intrusion. Surely its funereal tolls were a grim reminder of the powerful smallpox and measles epidemics. It changed hands and locations along with power shifts in Texas that marginalized Hispanos and Mexicans and privileged Anglo-American settler colonists. In the antebellum period, it signaled the start and end of mill work and cotton harvesting, sounding control over laborers, including those enslaved by David Randon. Changing hands again, its sound structured the daily lives of students. After the Civil War, the bell passed into the control of the white male political and economic elite who formed the Texas Historical Society. They argued for the bell’s centrality in Texas’s foundational myth—the larger-than-life Battle of the Alamo with its Anglo-American protagonists—instead of viewing its importance as a record of the Spanish colonial past. Then, as cities like Houston, Austin, and Dallas began to replace Galveston as the center of economic activity in twentieth-century Texas, the Rosenberg bell was briefly contested by politicians in Austin, who argued “it serves a higher purpose now; resting after years of service it is eloquent of what has been, teaching lessons of patriotism and pride to each succeeding generation.” In the twentieth century, the colonial artifact was resurrected to represent a benign and pastoral vision of Texas’s past, by preservationists, then as part of sesquicentennial celebrations, which emphasized the state’s multicultural past, in the 1980s.

We may never know the precise history of this bell’s journey through Texas history. In the silent spaces and gaps, we should try to understand the ways in which this bell was understood, and perhaps sometimes ignored or even challenged, by the people it summoned on a daily basis. These actions are more difficult to piece together from the documentary record. Although my search for evidence about the bell’s journey continues, I recognize that its importance as an object lies not only in that history, but also in its transition from an aural to a visual object, remembered and interpreted by those who have used it to tell their versions of Texas history.

 

Further Reading

Bessie Lee Fitzhugh, Bells Over Texas (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1955).

Bessie Lee Fitzhugh Papers, The Texas Collection and University Archives, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

Galveston Daily News articles in Portal to Texas History.

Kristin Dutcher Mann, The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590-1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press and the Academy of American Franciscan History, 2010).

Rosenberg Library Museum and Archives, Galveston, Texas.

Mark Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas. See entries on Mission Nuestra Señora de Purisima Concepción, Samuel Damon, David Randon, William Kendall, Texas Historical Society, Texas Revolution, and Adina de Zavala.

 

This article originally appeared in October 2023.

 

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Kristin Dutcher Mann, Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is the author of The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, as well as articles and chapters on the cultural history of the colonial Spanish Borderlands. She is a former high school history and geography teacher and she coordinates the Department’s social studies education program.

The most remarkable aspect of these volumes is their very existence. The assemblage does not grow out of the efforts of librarians, bibliographers, or book collectors retrospectively documenting the printed record of an important episode in the American past. Rather, it is a contemporary collection put together by local witnesses to the populist outrage sweeping through Concord and so many other towns. In 1835 the three-man executive committee of the Concord Social Library, an association of shareholders who maintained a substantial collection of books and periodicals for their own and their neighbors’ use, took note of the “anti-masonic excitement which entered so deeply into the peoples’ interests and [had] biased their social and political judgment for six or eight years.” One member was the son of a Freemason; his colleagues had no connection to the fraternity. None aligned themselves with the populist crusade. Yet, in the heat of the controversy, Dr. Edward Jarvis, Rev. Hersey Goodwin, and businessman Nehemiah Ball took a long view of the conflict and decided that its printed record should be preserved for posterity. If they did not act now, the true significance of the episode might be lost forever, to be remembered by later historians merely “as one of the passing clouds that overshadowed a few people and its story told in a paragraph of tradition or history.” With a sense of urgency they called on the townspeople to scour their houses for pamphlets not just about Anti-Masonry but about “all the great questions that have agitated our country for the last 50 years” and to donate what they found to the “town library.” The call drew an astonishing response; out of the barrels and attics of Concord poured some two thousand pamphlets, which the committee had bound into one hundred and fifty volumes. “They are now an invaluable collection of the fleeting literature & history of the days of their appearance,” Jarvis observed with pardonable pride, “& will transmit to succeeding time a better memorial of their day than will be found in more digested & formal history.”

A good many of these titles have been lost or discarded over the years. But the pamphlets on Masonry and Anti-Masonry, which instigated the collecting project, have passed from the social library into the public library and thence into the William Munroe Special Collections, and they have survived pretty much in their original form. Within the three volumes, Jarvis recollected, “is the history of the agitation.” A partial history is more precise. It is tempting to view these pamphlets, all handily gathered together, as constituting the field of discourse on which the combatants disputed the issues of secrecy and exclusiveness, openness and democracy, during those heated years of the Anti-Masonic crusade. But like any collection, it is selective, representing not only what items were held by townspeople in 1835 but also which titles they were willing to contribute. A few leading participants in the fight were donors themselves, including the most powerful politician and pre-eminent Freemason in town, the richest property-holder, and the “turncoat” printer who deserted his Masonic brethren and his principal patrons to enlist his newspaper in the Anti-Masonic campaign; their names are inscribed on the items they once owned. A couple pamphlets reproduce speeches to the local lodge; another contains the testimony of the Anti-Masonic editor before a committee of the Massachusetts House. 

Seldom do these voices directly engage one another. Nor do they present a debate between dueling parties intent on defeating opponents with well-chosen words. Far from it. The discussion is asymmetrical. The disputants make their cases to different audiences through forms of print as distinctive as the positions they took. Preaching to their respective choirs, the partisans who penned these polemics were well-aware of their adversaries, yet they made little effort to address or win them over. Unlike the pamphlet debates in the era of the American Revolution or the famous exchange between Burke and Paine, these rhetorical forays over Masonry were one-way conversations, calculated to shore up partisan loyalties and turn out supporters at the polls. To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

Consider the opposite approaches to print taken by the two sides. Of the eleven pamphlets in the volume on Masonry, ten were addresses to local lodges by visiting dignitaries in the upper ranks of the fraternity or climbing the ladder to the top; two had been delivered in Concord itself. The publications were keepsakes of those occasions, brought into print at the request and the expense of the listeners. Instead of a copyright notice, each pamphlet records its origin in fraternal exchange. The host lodge appoints a committee to wait on the speaker, express thanks for the discourse, and request a copy for the press; the lecturer acknowledges the courtesy and complies. Often printers in the brotherhood were hired to produce the works, and copies were then distributed within the lodge. These titles were not on offer to the public at large. Rather, they served to enhance personal bonds among members of the order, as was the case with an 1826 address to the grand lodge of Massachusetts by John Abbot, outgoing grand master. The copy was owned by Concord’s power broker, Hon. John Keyes, who had served on the committee to arrange for the publication. The two men were well-acquainted. Keyes had grown up in the town of Westford, ten miles to Concord’s northwest, where Abbot was a prominent lawyer; following his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1809, Keyes had studied for the bar under Abbot’s supervision. The Squire was also familiar with the men responsible for the imprint, fellow Masons William Hilliard and Eliab W. Metcalf, whose Cambridge firm was the official printer of Harvard College for three decades. Embedded in personal relationships, these printed addresses were as distinctive of the fraternity as its public celebrations of St. John’s Day and its secret rituals behind the closed doors of Freemasons’ Hall. 

By contrast, the publications of the Anti-Masons were sent forth to the citizenry in general under the auspices of legislative bodies and political organizations. Setting themselves apart from the secretive fraternity, Anti-Masons put a premium on transparency. All their proceedings were purportedly open to view in the printed records of county, state, and national conventions: the names of delegates and officials, the nomination and selection of candidates, the resolutions and debates. Should one not have time to pore over the numerous columns of small print, “abstracts” and “brief reports” were also available. The Boston Advocate, the principal organ of Anti-Masonry in the state, took pains to produce and circulate these materials; it also disseminated speeches and public letters by prominent supporters of the movement, such as former Congressman Timothy Fuller (father of the better-known Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller) and Suffolk County Sheriff Charles Pinckney Sumner (father of the famous senator). These materials, cheaply made and quickly produced, were probably available at the printing offices that doubled as party headquarters. No advertisements for their sale appear in the local press. Likewise, the reports of legislative investigations must have been distributed to voters by Anti-Masonic representatives to the General Court. Like the printed petitions the Anti-Masons presented for signatures in the towns and like the Bibles and tracts distributed by benevolent societies to “destitute” Christians everywhere, these publications united citizens in a common cause, whose message was unmediated by local elites. Though produced and sold outside a commercial nexus, they gathered up a mass audience for print. Indeed, the polemics of Masonry and Anti-Masonry were, with few exceptions, conducted in the public domain. Only a few works took advantage of copyright law to seek profit. Appropriately for a popular movement, Anti-Masonic publications were the result of collaborative effort and collective authorship. 

Yet the contrast between these bitter rivals can be overdrawn. In the face of a determined campaign to drive Freemasons from public office, deny them fellowship in churches, and criminalize their secret oaths, the fraternity did not unilaterally disarm. It counted on the press to defend its cause. In 1825 twenty-four-year-old printer Charles W. Moore launched the Boston Masonic Mirror, the first newspaper devoted to the fraternity anywhere in the world. Founded a year and a half before the Morgan affair, the Mirror found itself “in the battle of masonry against free-masonry” in the public arena. It had few imitators. For a long time, Massachusetts Masons entrusted their fate to independent newspapers, few of which took much notice of the gathering storm. In Concord brother Herman Atwill safeguarded his lodge’s interests from the editorial helm of the Yeoman’s Gazette. In the 1820s the newspaper filled its columns with friendly accounts of Masonic parades, speeches, and installations of officers, at the same time as it ignored reports of the “outrages” in New York State or dismissed their significance. If any crimes were committed, the Gazette insisted, they were the fault of a few bad apples and not of the Institution itself. When an Anti-Masonic Free Press was started in Boston in 1828, Atwill denounced the bid “to introduce the contemptible Morgan fever into New-England.” As late as spring 1832 he ran a derisive notice of an “Anti-Secret Society Meeting” (A.S.S!) in town, attended by a “baker’s dozen” of Anti-Masons. “Not being one of the initiated,” he explained, “we are unable to make public their proceedings.” 

Silence and ridicule went only so far. As instruments of self-defense, they could not counteract “the high state of excitement” aroused in “the public mind” by the “partial and inflammatory” accusations made “by a few misguided members.” Eventually the fraternity felt compelled to respond. In December 1832, twelve hundred Masons from all over Massachusetts signed a public statement, composed by Charles Moore, portraying the association as law-abiding, virtuous, moral, and patriotic. Widely reprinted in the press, it brought forth a detailed rebuttal, three times as long, from the forces of Anti-Masonry. Sometimes words were not enough. When Herman Atwill, a signer of the 1831 declaration along with twenty-five of his Concord brothers, finally decided to jump ship in the winter of 1832-33 and enlist the Yeoman’s Gazette in the Anti-Masonic crusade, the local establishment retaliated swiftly. Masons and their friends set out to destroy Atwill economically. Angry readers canceled subscriptions. Indignant creditors demanded immediate payment of his debts. John Keyes called in his mortgage on Atwill’s land. County magistrates pulled official advertising from the Gazette. Atwill withstood the fury, shrewdly exposing every act of intimidation in his columns. 

Unable to close him down, the friends of Masonry tried another gambit. They recruited the editor of the Bunker-Hill Aurora in Charlestown to move his shop to Concord. Though not a Freemason himself, William W. Wheildon was the half-brother of Moore and the son-in-law of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge’s official lecturer. For six months he manfully opposed the attempts by “ambitious and unworthy, and designing men”—by the hypocrite Atwill, in particular—to deprive “a very respectable portion of the community” from “the enjoyment of their unalienable and original rights.” He also denied the existence of any “combined determination” on the part of Masons and others, “to persecute or oppress” his rival at the Gazette, while simultaneously revealing that Atwill had sold his newspaper to a consortium of Anti-Masonic politicians. This was a crucial acquisition, establishing Concord as the headquarters of the populist movement in Middlesex County. Unable to prevail running a general newspaper with pro-Mason sentiments, Wheildon soon returned to Charlestown, where he would eventually partner with his half-brother Moore and re-establish his newspaper as the Bunker Hill Aurora and Mirror. The refashioned newspaper regularly ran a “Masonic department” overseen by Moore, but the fraternity no longer had an authoritative organ on its behalf.

In these embattled circumstances the fraternity eschewed direct engagement with critics and focused on shoring up support in its own ranks. A few speakers to local lodges explicitly addressed “the Claims of Anti-Masonry, and Duty of Masons” with the goal of arming the brethren to resist “the war of extermination” being waged against them. Two pamphlets in this vein ended up in the Concord collection—rare instances of polemical writing by Masonic authors in the decade of dispute. One speaker, the Yale-educated clergyman Simeon Colton, saw no need to answer at length the unreasonable charges against the institution. He dispatched them quickly; then, like a modern literary critic, he set out to expose the extravagant language and the manipulative methods of the foe. One disgraceful tactic was to “ridicule” the fraternity and render it “odious” and “contemptible”; another was to exaggerate its power and liken it “in all the array and terror of the Inquisition.” Such violent rhetoric exceeded all bounds; driven by a “persecuting spirit,” it “savor[ed] too much of passion, prejudice, and party zeal.” By such hyperbolic means Anti-Masonry sowed division and distrust. It invited “political demagogues” to “widen the breach” in society; it shattered the peace of the church. These were “the devastating effects of the wide-spreading pestilence,” whose “poisonous effluvia . . . from the caverns of corruption” were “producing a sickly state of public feeling . . . .” How to combat it? Colton ingeniously extended the alarm. The assault on Freemasons did not affect the fraternity alone; it was “an attack . . . upon rights and privileges that lie at the foundation of all good society.” To “proscribe” individuals from serving on juries or holding public office because of a private affiliation was to infringe liberty and to deny freedom of association. Anti-Masonry was thus a threat not just to members of the fraternity; it posed a danger to all. “The dearest interests of individuals and society are at stake.” 

Freemasons were at a disadvantage in this debate. The aim of their exclusive association was to foster virtue and promote peace. Members were forbidden to agitate sectarian or partisan questions within the group. Lodges affirmed these consensual ideals in their names: Harmony, Unity, and, in the case of Concord, Corinthian, in imitation of St. Paul’s campaign to end conflict and impose order among early Christians. No one could be admitted to a lodge without a unanimous vote. Ideologically and psychologically, Freemasons were ill-equipped to press disagreements and expose contradictions. Not so the Anti-Masons, many of whom were veterans of a long sectarian struggle within Massachusetts Congregationalism; opposed to the liberal Protestantism inculcated at Harvard College, these evangelicals demanded a return to the purity of New England’s founding fathers. From their perspective compromise was intolerable. Anti-Masons worked to mobilize all the true believers they could, unite them on a militant platform, and march them to the polls under the banner of “the people” versus the “aristocracy.”  

A key weapon in this campaign was the personal testimony of renegade Masons, among whom Concord’s Herman Atwill loomed large. The Report of the Joint Committee of the Legislature of Massachusetts on Freemasonry, issued in March 1834 and included in the Concord pamphlets, features the testimony of the turncoat editor, exposing the fearful rituals of initiation and challenging the association’s claim to be a “a religious and a moral Institution.” His breaking point came when he proposed to publish John Quincy Adams’s Letters on the Entered Apprentice’s Oath . . . Demonstrating That the First Step in Masonry is Wrong, another pamphlet in the Concord set. His financial backers immediately raised objections, and after Atwill went through with the plan, they dropped their patronage. Atwill opted for Anti-Masonry to sustain his freedom to publish what he wished. 

Anti-Masonry thus relied on the power of personal example nearly as much as did the fraternity. But where Freemasonry invoked the public honors, civic service, and social standing of its members, opponents stressed the personal sacrifices of men like Atwill in the name of liberty and democracy. The two sides were, in the end, ships passing in the night, unseen by one another. Each relied on a different strategy of persuasion through divergent means of communication. Neither could appreciate the polemics of the other. In these choices they may have anticipated our current media world. Opting for different newspapers and imprints, the competing sides in the fight over Freemasonry were no more disposed to take in the same information and messages than are Americans today in their separate enclaves constituted by Fox News and MSNBC, not to mention their separate Twitter feeds. Ironically, the bound pamphlets at the Concord Public Library bring them closer together in the archives than they ever were in life.

 

Further Reading

Bound pamphlets on Masonry and Antimasonry, 1797-1834: Topical Pamphlet Collection, 1741-1996, Box I.7 Vault B20, Unit 1, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library.

John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Ronald P. Formisano and Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest, 1826–1827,” American Quarterly 29 (Summer 1977): 139–65.

Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England 1826-1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Robert A. Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).

Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds., An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the

New Nation, 1790–1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

David G. Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014).

Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

 

This article originally appeared in September 2023.

 

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Robert A. Gross is James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His first book, The Minutemen and Their World (1976), recipient of the Bancroft Prize, was released in a revised and expanded edition by Picador Press in 2022. His latest work, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), was awarded the Peter J. Gomes Book Award by the Massachusetts Historical Society and named among the top ten books of 2021 by the Wall Street Journal.

I first encountered this Indigenous Belonging as an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College in 2014, when the college was in the process of becoming compliant with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), nearly twenty-five years after the law came into being. In the process of reviewing the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum’s Native American collections, the associate curator of the museum, Aaron Miller, highlighted a significant collection of Native-made items held within the College’s earliest collection, entitled the Missionary Collection. Mount Holyoke was initially founded in 1837 by Mary Lyon as a female seminary, which aimed to train women primarily as teachers or Protestant missionaries. Lyon was a significant supporter of missionary work throughout her lifetime, and maintained connections to family friends and Mount Holyoke graduates who worked as missionaries in multiple locales, including Anishinaabe homelands. These missionaries often sent items back to the seminary, which became the Missionary Collection.

Before the Art Museum was established in 1876, the Missionary Collection was initially displayed in Mount Holyoke’s original seminary building after 1837 as “curiosities,” a term that reveals Eurocentric and colonial ideas about Indigenous material culture. European and American collectors acquired Indigenous material culture to display in cabinets of curiosity, which reflected colonial categorizations of Native people as savage and connected to nature. This process removed these Native-made items from existing networks of community knowledge and instead displayed them as exotic specimens. I challenge these frameworks, instead honoring material culture as present-day receptacles of Indigenous knowledge that educate and transmit information to current people. Rather than terms like “curiosity” or “object,” I refer to these items as Belongings, following the work of Lorén Spears, the Narragansett and Niantic executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, who writes that this term “recognizes that they are interconnected to the cultural contexts of their creation and maintain connections to people, both historical and contemporary.”

The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum knew very little about the miniature mokuk when I began researching it in 2014, but the mokuk is not a “curiosity.” While at the museum conducting research within this collection, I took Christine DeLucia’s material culture seminar, which—alongside her mentorship over the years—has deeply shaped my understanding of these histories of collecting and the “transits of Indigenous material culture” within institutions like Mount Holyoke. In a recent Commonplace essay, DeLucia identified critical interdisciplinary methodologies for researching Indigenous Belongings that are missing provenance information and appear “lost,” providing clear ways to retrace their pathways and reconnect them with descendant communities. This piece takes up these methods via the miniature mokuk to argue for the importance of restoring Indigenous histories and knowledge to collections in order to facilitate relationships between Native people and their cultural Belongings, as well as to ensure these Belongings are seen as vital sources for understanding and reckoning with institutional histories of colonialism.

The Missionary Collection includes one other birchbark miniature: a canoe decorated with green, orange, and red flat quillwork. During his 2023 visit, Hemenway stated that he believed both the mokuk and the canoe were from Michilimackinac, noting that early Odawa quillworkers used orange quillwork. While only the canoe is listed in a “Catalogue of Cabinet of articles Sent by Missionaries to Mt. Hol. Fem. Sem. all before 1892,” both miniatures likely entered the collection from the same source, although perhaps not from the same artist or community. Several miniature mokuks collected by Austrian trader and businessman Johann Georg Schwarz, which are currently held in the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien, display remarkable similarities to the mokuk in the Missionary Collection, evincing a potential connection between these Belongings. Schwarz traveled to Michilimackinac in 1820 and 1821, during the same decade that missionaries with connections to Mary Lyon established themselves on the island. The mokuks held at the Weltmuseum Wien have been preliminarily identified as Myaamia or Menominee. While the mokuk at Mount Holyoke is likely of Anishinaabe origin, its maker is unknown. If it were made by a Myaamia or Menominee artist, its origin at Michilimackinac evinces the intertribal trade networks that continued to structure the Odawa island throughout the nineteenth century.

Though it has no paperwork associated with it, the mokuk includes the following description, written in scrawling pen on the bottom of the basket: “Basket of maple sugar made by the Indians.” This description was likely written on the mokuk when it came into the Missionary Collection at Mount Holyoke, probably between 1837 and 1892. In Anishinaabemowin, specifically the Odawa language, the moon that corresponds to around April is the Ziisabaakdake Gizis, or the Sugarbush Moon, when sap begins flowing from maple trees. Native peoples across the Northeast have crafted mokuks for millennia, which they used to store maple sugar, made during the Ziisabaakdake Gizis by reducing maple sap over a fire in trays until it became crystallized and the water evaporated. As Leah Hopkins, a Narragansett museum educator currently working at the Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University, has described, mokuks are an important Indigenous technology that kept bacteria out of maple sugar and that effectively stored it for long periods of time—like a “traditional Tupperware.” The one at Mount Holyoke is a miniaturized version of a mokuk, made to sell to Victorian Americans in the nineteenth century as a means of making money after the imposition of capitalism and policies of land loss that deliberately prevented Indigenous access to homelands that held the ecological means for their survival. 

To trace the origins of these two Belongings, I turned to Mount Holyoke’s archives and special collections, which holds a repository of documents related to missionary work at the Seminary. There, I found letters between Mary Lyon and her close friend Amanda White-Ferry, who served as a missionary at Michilimackinac, Michigan, in the early nineteenth century. Amanda White was born in the same year (1797) and place (Ashfield, Massachusetts) as Mary Lyon, and knew her well. In 1823, White married William Montague Ferry, moving with him to Michilimackinac. Their daughter, Amanda Harwood Ferry, later graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847. At Michilimackinac, William Ferry became the first Superintendent of the Protestant Mission to the Indians established by the United Foreign Mission Society in 1823, which also opened a mission school that November, where Amanda taught. In 1821, two years before the establishment of the Protestant Mission, Henry Schoolcraft had called for the establishment of missionary schools. He wrote, “There is neither school or preaching upon the island . . . there appears therefore in the present society of the ’Mackinac the want of a preacher, a school-master, an attorney, and a physician,—of merchants there are always too many.” The White-Ferry family responded directly to his call, filling the positions of both preacher and schoolmaster on the island. One of the known students at their Presbyterian school was William Blackbird, the son of Odawa leader Mackadepenessy and the brother of author Andrew Blackbird and quillworker Margaret Blackbird Boyd. Each held significant leadership roles in the Odawa community at Waganakising, the home of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. 

Michilimackinac is an Odawa place where two Great Lakes, Michigan and Huron, meet. This island was a traditional gathering place where Native peoples engaged in exchange, diplomacy, and occasional conflict for millennia before European conquest. Despite colonial impositions, including the establishment of a colonial fort that was at various points controlled by French, British, and American forces, Michilimackinac remained a collective and contested Indigenous place. According to Andrew Blackbird, William Blackbird’s brother and the Odawa historian and leader who published a History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in 1887, in their agreement with the United States’ government when they were forced to cede the island, Ojibwe people reserved “a strip of land all around the island as far as a stone’s throw from its water’s edge as their encampment grounds when they might come to the island to trade or for other business.” This agreement demonstrates how Indigenous mobility practices persisted throughout early American history, as well as the strategic ways Native nations protected their rights to return to places like Michilimackinac on a seasonal basis. 

The need to reserve this land responded to destructive settler colonial policies. Mokuks played a critical role in securing Indigenous survival despite land loss. Even before the miniaturization of mokuks as souvenir items, these folded birchbark baskets served as trade items that also facilitated diplomacy between Native and colonial nations. A journal from between 1795 and 1801 kept by Thomas Duggan, the storekeeper of the British Army’s post at Fort Michilimackinac, lists more than two hundred mokuks full of maple sugar brought by Native people from multiple nations, including the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi as well as Cherokee and Sioux. They traded these mokuks in late spring and early summer alongside beaver skins and other items not only to receive provisions, but also to conduct diplomacy with the British and, in the words of Lisa Brooks, to “bind words to deeds” using strings of wampum. This exchange of material culture not only secured food, arms, and other supplies, but represented reciprocity through gift-giving and trade, as affirmed by Duggan’s terminology of “presents” to describe these provisions. Yet this terminology also represented British paternalism. Duggan mistook these reciprocal exchanges as “charity,” describing the Native peoples as “children” and the English as their “father.”

The miniaturization process reflected the growth of tourism in the Great Lakes region in the early 1800s, when wealthy Victorian Americans travelled to and summered at sites within Anishinaabe homelands. As Henry Schoolcraft listed in 1821, rush mats, mokuks, quilled moccasins, shot pouches, and “other fancy goods of Indian fabric” were “generally in demand as articles of curiosity” by visitors to Michilimackinac. Native people adapted their material culture to this growing market, and it was within this context that the White-Ferry family likely acquired the miniature mokuk. Amidst their missionary conviction to civilize and convert the “savages,” a goal clearly articulated in the letters exchanged between Lyon and White-Ferry, a Native artist folded, sewed, and quilled this miniature birchbark basket. The mokuk is a key to understanding material networks of Indigenous resistance to these settler colonial processes across the Great Lakes.

While the miniaturization of mokuks reflected Indigenous adaptation to Victorian American desires, the Native woman who crafted it drew from longstanding networks of environmental knowledge, as described by contemporary artists like Odawa quillworker Yvonne Walker Keshick. During a 2013 conservation consultation session at the National Museum of the American Indian, Keshick shared how her mentors have taught her that “the bark is ready to pick from the trees when the strawberries are ripe in June.” The process of harvesting bark was also spiritual. As Keshick explained, she “puts tobacco down at the first tree, general prayer for all the trees that I’m going to cut. We don’t cut every tree we come to. If the tree is stripping, we cut.” The respect and mutuality that Keshick describes operated in contravention of European policies of private property ownership and environmental exploitation. When they gathered birchbark, spruce roots, cedar, and porcupine quills to make mokuks and other Belongings, Native artists defied civilizing missions and government-sponsored land loss, such as those spearheaded people like Schoolcraft, White-Ferry, and Ferry. Forced to enter the capitalist economy, Native people exploited the existing market of visitors, missionaries, and traders to make a living through their material culture. The goods and money they received in exchange for these items were not adequate payments for their labor or craft, but souvenirs helped Native communities persist. Keshick also described how quilled birchbark baskets have been used by the Anishinaabeg throughout history as boxes to store dried food, seeds, herbs, and medicines. Reflecting on the arrival of Europeans, she remarked, “I don’t think Odawa people could have survived without the use of the birchbark tree.” Her gratitude to birchbark for its role in Indigenous survivance speaks to the importance of mokuks and other Belongings in the study of Indigenous history.

Where, then, does that leave us with regards to the miniature mokuk, which almost certainly traveled to Mount Holyoke from Michilimackinac via the White-Ferry family? While it sits in storage at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, disconnected from its Native creator and the environment of the Great Lakes, this Belonging retains connections to this place and the peoples who continue to live there. Moreover, during Eric Hemenway’s visit, he noted the mokuk’s ongoing relationship not only to Native people and places, but also other Belongings, including the group of miniature mokuks at the Weltmuseum Wien in Vienna, Austria. In 2016, Hemenway and other members of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians traveled there to study the museum’s Indigenous collections from the Great Lakes and advise in the conception of a permanent exhibition. At Mount Holyoke, nearly a decade after I first encountered the mokuk and seven years after Hemenway visited the Weltmuseum Wien, we found ourselves wondering if any of the mokuks in Vienna had been crafted by the same artist. What would it mean to return these mokuks to their homelands to visit each other and their descendant communities? What new connections would form?

 

Further Reading/Watching/Listening

Andrew J. Blackbird, History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan; a Grammar of their Language, and Personal and Family History of the Author (Ypsilanti: The Ypsilantian Job Printing House, 1887).

Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Gerard van Bussel and Eric Hemenway, eds., Around Lake Michigan: American Indians, 1820-1850 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021).

Christine DeLucia, “Antiquarian Collecting and the Transits of Indigenous Material Culture,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, accessed May 17, 2023.

Thomas Duggan Journal, 1949.M-731, William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan.

C. Edwards, “Catalogue of Cabinet of Articles sent by Missionaries to Mt. Hol. Fem. Sem. all before 1892,” Mount Holyoke College Art Museum: A-1, section on “American Indians.”

Leah Hopkins, “Gather. Make. Sustain. Maple Madness,” Haffenreffer Museum, Brown University, March 8, 2021.

Theodore J. Karamanski, Blackbird’s Song: Andrew J. Blackbird and the Odawa People (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012).

Sylvia S. Kasprycki, “A Devout Collector: Johann Georg Schwarz and Early Nineteenth-Century Menominee Art,” in Three Centuries of Woodlands Indian Art, eds. J. C. H. King and Christian F. Feest (Altenstadt: ZKF Publishers, 2007).

Scott Manning Stevens, “Collectors, and Museums: From Cabinets of Curiosities to Indigenous Cultural Centers,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

James McClurken, Gah-Baeh-Jhagwah-Buk, the Way It Happened: A Visual Culture History of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1991). 

Henry Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal of Travels Through the Northwestern Regions of the United States: Extending from Detroit Through the Great Chain of American Lakes, to the Sources of the Mississippi River (Albany: E. & E. Hosford, 1821).

Lorén Spears and Amanda Thompson, “‘As We Have Always Done’: Decolonizing the Tomaquag Museum’s Collections Management Policy,” Collections 18, no. 1 (March 2022): 31-41.

Mina Toulouse, Theodore Toulouse and Yvonne Walker Keshick, “Conservation Consultation for Beyond the Horizon Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes,” National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, November 25, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRn07eHpvAE. 

 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Eric Hemenway (Director of Repatriation, Archives and Records, Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians), Aaron Miller (Associate Curator of Visual and Material Culture and NAGPRA Coordinator, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum), Christine DeLucia (Associate Professor of History, Williams College), Steven Lubar (Professor of American Studies, History, and History of Art and Architecture, Brown University), and Adriana Greci Green (Curator of Indigenous Art of the Americas, Fralin Art Museum, University of Virginia) for your collaborative work to help trace histories of this miniature mokuk and critically interrogate museum collecting practices.

 

This article originally appeared in September 2023

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Allyson LaForge is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Brown University whose research engages Native American and Indigenous Studies, settler colonial studies, and histories of the Native Northeast. Her dissertation project, “Materializing Futurity: Networks of Native Organizing in the Northeast,” examines the role Indigenous material culture played during transnational Native Northeast movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led by coalitions of Native leaders, activists, artists, craftspeople, and writers who worked to resist settler colonialism and ensure Indigenous futurity.

Most immediately, Jones and Allen’s account of the yellow fever epidemic can be understood as a corrective to publisher Mathew Carey’s slanderous account of the actions of Black Philadelphians in his A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793). In that account, Carey reproduced the incorrect theory that people of African descent were immune to yellow fever and accused Black residents who served as nurses and gravediggers of exploiting the crisis for financial gain. Jones and Allen’s response to Carey can serve as historical precedent for understanding the sharp rise in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jones and Allen positioned the experiences of Black Philadelphians during the yellow fever epidemic within a larger history of racial violence. Likewise, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) scholars and activists have positioned these hate crimes within centuries of scapegoating rhetoric weaponized against the AAPI community in response to economic, political, and public health crises. They have also argued that this most recent threat of violence might be partially responsible for higher COVID-19 mortality rates among Asian Americans. 

In addition to this direct connection between past and present, I find Jones and Allen’s narrative strategies useful for thinking about our narratives of crisis more generally. As Derrick Spires has recently argued, it’s important to understand Jones and Allen as not only responding to Carey, but as also proposing their own radical and expansive theories of citizenship. Building off this work, I’d also like to enlarge our understanding of Jones and Allen as critics of a certain kind of reaction to crisis that, as Kyle Whyte has shown, in its misunderstanding of crisis as unprecedented, justifies the expendability of certain populations. Jones and Allen’s Narrative forces readers to confront what Lauren Berlant has described as the environmental conditions of slow death, recontextualizing the yellow fever epidemic within a broader and ongoing history of violence and neglect.

Jones and Allen append to their account of the epidemic “An Address to those who keep slaves, and approve the practice” (23). This address offers a theory for why the white citizens of Philadelphia have been so “willfully blind” in their characterizations of Black health and civic duty (24). Capturing the slippage between “those who keep slaves” and those who “approve the practice,” the opening sentence of this address seamlessly shifts from description to direct address: “The judicious part of mankind will think it unreasonable, that a superior conduct is looked for, from our race, by those who stigmatize us as men, whose baseness is incurable, and may therefore be held in a state of servitude, that a merciful man would not doom a beast to; yet you try what you can to prevent our rising from the state of barbarism, you represent us to be in.” The shift in pronouns links “those who keep slaves” to the “you” of Jones and Allen’s readers: both “prevent our rising from” a “state of barbarism” that is itself a fictional construction that justifies white supremacy. The city’s post-slavery racial hierarchy depends on diagnosing Black residents as suffering from “incurable” “baseness.” Only this widened historical lens provides sufficient context for understanding why the Black residents of Philadelphia were impressed into service during the epidemic and how their public service continues to be portrayed in its aftermath.

The incorrect theory that people of African descent were immune to yellow fever led large numbers of the city’s Black residents to be impressed into service caring for the sick and disposing of bodies. The idea that Black residents were inherently immune was convenient because it justified both the impressment of Black residents as front-line health care workers and their enslavement and disenfranchisement through polygenist definitions of race. Jones and Allen open their Narrative noting that this theory of immunity was always in doubt, characterizing it as only “a kind of assurance,” while attributing their own service to “our sense of duty to do all the good we could” rather than to any confidence in their safety (3). Although the Narrative highlights that Black Philadelphians’ “distress hath been very great, but much unknown to the white people,” it also argues that this position of unknowing is one of deliberate cultivation rather than innocence (15). Although the theory of Black immunity was quickly disproven in the early weeks of the epidemic, “it is even to this day a generally received opinion in this city.” Jones and Allen note that when “it became too notorious to be denied” that Black residents were in fact dying of yellow fever, “then we were told some few died but not many.” This new claim could have been disputed by “any reasonable man” who examined the burial records of 1792 and 1793. Carefully documenting the shifting nature of the justifications for the impressment and neglect of Black residents, Jones and Allen attribute the incoherence of the medical discourse to a purposeful strategy of having “our services extorted” rather than a lack of information. 

Mathew Carey did eventually revise subsequent editions of his Short Account to correct the theory of Black immunity and to temper the charges of extortion he leveled against Black nurses. Jones and Allen did not anticipate that these future editions would sufficiently counter the proliferating versions of misinformation that have already stigmatized the Black residents of Philadelphia: “Mr. Carey’s first, second, and third editions, are gone forth into the world, and in all probability, have been read by thousands that will never read his fourth—consequently, any alteration he may hereafter make, in the paragraph alluded to, cannot have the desired effect, or atone for the past; therefore we apprehend it necessary to publish our thoughts on the occasion” (13). Confirming Jones and Allen’s skepticism about the efficacy of future corrections, in the fourth edition of his Short Account (1794) Carey acknowledges that the theory of Black immunity turned out to be wrong, but he also argues that this mistake was ultimately beneficial to the city’s white residents, because it meant Black nurses were not afraid to serve. This correction only emphasizes the expendability of Black residents in the face of crisis and continues to ignore that the Black nurses described by Jones and Allen served despite understanding the risk of infection.

For Jones and Allen, the problem was not a lack of information, but stubbornly partial accounts of that information. Critiques of partiality appear throughout the Narrative: Jones and Allen refer to “partial” accounts, relations, representations, paragraphs, and men eight times. As Carey’s corrections in his fourth and fifth editions demonstrate, partial’s dual meanings of biased and incomplete operate together, as Carey’s racial bias kept him from seeing a complete picture of the epidemic, including the ways that Black residents suffered and the civic duty they performed. Although Carey accuses “the vilest of the blacks” of extortion, from his very first edition he also specifically praises “Absalom Jones and Richard Allen” for their service, declaring “it is wrong to cast a censure on the whole for this sort of conduct” (77). Refusing to serve as exceptions that prove Carey’s rule, Jones and Allen respond by claiming that being praised individually for their exceptional service, “leaves these others, in the hazardous state of being classed with those who are called the ‘vilest’” (12-13). Speculating about the “bad consequences” of this “partial relation of our conduct,” Jones and Allen again expand our incomplete historical frame, but this time towards the future, as they imagine a Black resident who served as a nurse during the epidemic being “abhorred, despised, and perhaps dismissed from employment” (10). In this vision of “some future day,” the problem is not only that Carey’s “partial relation” has served to “prejudice the minds of the people in general against us,” but that “it is impossible that one individual, can have knowledge of all” other individuals. Because no one individual can have knowledge of the whole, how the part is represented becomes lethally important. Jones and Allen’s single, definitive, copyrighted account of the yellow fever epidemic does not suggest that there’s no way of knowing the truth or that one partial account is as good as the next. Instead, Jones and Allen claim a kind of “power” from their own particularized “situation” to chronicle the material consequences and foreclosed possibilities of a historical record that is congealing before their very eyes (3).

There is also an even more radical implication to Jones and Allen’s refusal to accept Carey’s partial praise: if virtue can be so easily misread as criminal, then insurgency can also be misread as contentment. Although Jones and Allen argue that any “alteration” made in the “hereafter” cannot “atone for the past,” they do suggest that imagining the future can impact the present (13). Rather than a sentimental futurism that defers action in the present to an ever-receding horizon, Jones and Allen claim that imagining future possibilities—possibilities of both equality and vengeance—should have an immediate effect on the present. While Jones and Allen firmly contrast the moral excellence of Black residents to the moral failure of white residents, they find Biblical precedent for considering “the contrary effects of liberty and slavery upon the mind of man,” and tell their readers “it is in our posterity enjoying the same privileges with your own, that you ought to look for better things” (24). But they also caution readers about their partial knowledge of what lies in the “hearts” of enslaved Black Americans: “We have shewn the cause of our incapacity, we will also shew why we appear contented; were we to attempt to plead with our masters, it would be deemed insolence, for which cause they appear as contented as they can in your fight, but the dreadful insurrections they have made, when opportunity has offered, is enough to convince a reasonable man, that great uneasiness and not contentment, is the inhabitant of their hearts” (25). Here surely “the dreadful insurrections” Jones and Allen refer to are in Haiti, a vision of a certain future for the United States should slavery not be ended in the immediate present, and a hyperlinked invocation of xenophobic associations between the contagion of fever and the contagion of insurrection. Collapsing geographic and temporal distance, this passage imagines Haiti’s past as America’s future.

This was not only the warning of a jeremiad, but also a reminder of the insurrectionary action that has already been taken by the enslaved and self-emancipated in the Atlantic world, and yet another recontextualization of that history as a just response, as a future to be anticipated rather than feared. The present perfect tense—“the dreadful insurrections they have made, when opportunity has offered”—and another seamless shift in pronouns from “our” to “they”—renders this history not so much a warning sign of a distant future to be averted as a proximate past that is catching up to the present. Just as readers can’t be sure where Haiti’s past-present ends and America’s future-present begins, they also can’t be sure of what lies beneath the “contented” appearances of Black Americans. Although the community Jones and Allen speak for privileges deliberation in the face of fear—the Narrative opens recounting that “we and a few others met and consulted how to act on so truly alarming and melancholy an occasion”—the Narrative also cautions against an expectation of a “superior good conduct,” of resiliency and mercy, that dissociates deliberation from “insurrections” (3, 23, 25).

Even as Jones and Allen contextualize the treatment of Black residents during the epidemic within a larger history of enslavement, oppression, and revolution, they also anchor the reader in the scene of immediate crisis by punctuating their narrative with the sights, sounds, and smells of the epidemic: “lunacy,” “ordure and other evacuations of the sick,” “vomiting blood, and screaming” (8, 9, 14). Their narrative forces the reader to experience the crisis as ongoing rather than complete. Jones and Allen do not use narrative to contain the disruptive effects of crisis, but to position those effects as part of an incomplete past and undetermined future. This theorizing of how to narrate crisis is what I have found so useful for thinking alongside Jones and Allen at a regional public university with students who are already well-equipped to recognize how unevenly the effects of crises accumulate across lives and institutions. By documenting the partial nature of the judgment that distinguishes between past and present, Jones and Allen empower students to see that perspective does not require detachment.

 

Further Reading

“The Blame Game: How Political Rhetoric Inflames Anti-Asian Scapegoating,” Stop AAPI Hate, October 2022.

Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (no. 3, Summer 2007): 754-80.

Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Mathew Carey, A short account of the malignant fever, lately prevalent in Philadelphia: with a statement of the proceedings that took place on the subject in different parts of the United States (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1793).

Mathew Carey, A short account of the malignant fever, lately prevalent in Philadelphia: with a statement of the proceedings that took place on the subject in different parts of the United States, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1794).

Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown Upon Them in Some Late Publications. By A.J. and R.A. (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1794).

Stephen Knadler, “Narrating Slow Violence: Post-Reconstruction’s Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 5 (no. 1, Spring 2017): 21-50.

Thomas Koenigs, “The ‘Mysterious Depths’ of Slave Interiority: Fiction and Intersubjective Knowledge in The Heroic Slave,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 8 (no. 2, Fall 2020): 193-217.

Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Kyle Whyte, “Against Crisis Epistemology,” in Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, ed. Brendan Hokowhitu et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).

Brandon W. Yan et al. “Death Toll of COVID-19 on Asian Americans: Disparities Revealed,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 36 (no. 11, 2021): 3545-49. doi:10.1007/s11606-021-07003-0.

 

This article originally appeared in August 2023.

 

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Laurel V. Hankins is Associate Professor of English & Communication at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she teaches and publishes work in early American literature. Her work can be found in African American Review, Legacy: A Journal of Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Martin’s confession detailed his experiences growing up in Ireland and his struggles in America during the previous two years, dating from his arrival in Salem, Massachusetts, in May of 1819 through to his Medford highway robbery and apprehension. The facts he offered about his life in America can all be independently verified. However, the bulk of the stories he told to Waldo concerned the various adventures of Captains Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in Ireland and Scotland, where they gained infamy as daring, clever outlaws, outwitting authorities and robbing wealthy English landowners. Martin related these picaresque episodes in lively, good-natured, but barely credible detail. Several of the exploits strain belief: the duo trick wealthy sisters and all their estate servants into entering a room, lock the door, and then plunder the house; Captain Lightfoot (Martin) attends a wedding in drag so that they can rob party attendees; Martin confronts the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in his garden and robs him; Martin woos the widow MacBriar while posing as a rich member of the gentry; Captain Thunderbolt impersonates a physician for weeks, etc.

Francis W. Waldo published Martin’s confession in long pamphlet form a few weeks after Martin’s execution in December 1821. The publication was widely circulated and proved to be immensely popular. Ungrounded speculation arose among its many readers that Martin’s mentor and partner John Doherty still lived and was secretly residing in New England—though Martin’s confession never placed Doherty in America. Indeed, Martin stated that he had last heard of “Thunderbolt” through a letter sent by him from the West Indies.

In 1823, a Portland, Maine, barber named Richard Relhan went on criminal spree under the alias “John Johnson” and created a flurry of excitement that he was “Captain Thunderbolt.” Relhan was chased by a posse across the Canadian border, causing a minor international incident, and was returned to Portland to stand trial for stealing a horse. At that point, Relhan’s real name was revealed, as was his history as a former resident of Philadelphia since 1809—predating the adventures of Lightfoot and Thunderbolt in Ireland. He reformed and later lived many years as an upstanding Portland businessman.

Many years later, in 1847, when long-time local physician Dr. John Wilson died in Brattleboro, Vermont, a publisher there put out a pamphlet claiming that Wilson was Captain Thunderbolt. The claim was based on Wilson’s Scottish heritage, his physical similarities to Martin’s description, and on Wilson’s allegedly suspicious behavior—all of which was highly circumstantial. These allegations can easily be explained or refuted, as Wilson’s friends and family unsuccessfully attempted. Many in Southern Vermont still believe Dr. Wilson was Captain Thunderbolt. 

Over the decades, the legend of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot took on a life of its own in popular culture through stage dramas and embellished, romanticized fictions by such writers as Emerson Bennett and W. R. Burnett. Burnett’s novel Captain Lightfoot presented the pair as heroic Irish rebel outlaws. It was immediately made into a 1955 movie of the same name directed by Douglas Sirk, starring Rock Hudson and Barbara Rush. Martin’s confession also inspired a 1974 movie Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, written and directed by the quirky Michael Cimino, that re-imagined a tale of a veteran criminal abetted by a young partner set in the contemporary American West, starring Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges. In many respects, Cimino’s retelling was more faithful to the source material than the efforts of Burnett and Sirk.

Although the tales of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot reached folklore status in the United States, there was no commentary to be found in Irish, Scottish, or English sources to confirm that their exploits were known there. Indeed, when Douglas Sirk was filming Captain Lightfoot on location in Ireland (the landscape is one of the stars of the movie), no mentions were made in the Irish or British press that the movie was based on an allegedly true account. It appears that it was taken for granted that Hollywood’s Irish outlaws were a scriptwriter’s fiction, though many elements of the story would have been recognized.

A long tradition exists in Irish history, literature, and oral storytelling of the deeds of Irish outlaws active during the many decades of oppressive English rule. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, these outlaws were associated both with Catholic rebel groups and an allied Presbyterian organization, the United Irishmen. These outlaws were constituted as localized cells, with the leaders of each cell taking on menacing-sounding titles of rank: Captain Stout, Captain Whack, Captain Hawk, Captain Dasher, Captain Fearnot, etc. In fact, there was a real “Captain Thunderbolt,” John Duggan, who was captured after a 1799 house raid led by his uncle resulted in a murder. Duggan was brutally executed that same year, about fifteen or sixteen years prior to the supposed fame of Michael Martin’s “Captain Thunderbolt.”

It seems likely that Michael Martin was familiar with some of the classic literature of Irish outlaws: The Life and Adventures of James Freney (1754); Cosgrave’s A genuine history of the lives and actions of the most notorious Irish highwaymen, Tories and Rapparees (1747); and The Life and Adventures of Jeremiah Grant (1816). The Grant title was in print just before Michael Martin departed for America. Though these sources might have inspired Michael Martin, he did not re-use any specific episodes found in these. Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 

The names of Michael Martin, John Doherty, Captain Lightfoot and Captain Thunderbolt do not appear in any Irish or British newspaper accounts from 1814 through 1819. Nor do any accounts of outlaws in that period match their description. Martin portrays John Doherty (Thunderbolt) as a remarkable figure: tall and muscular, a master of disguise, able to romance any woman (and married five times under different names), a career thief who had never been captured, and well-versed in many disciplines, including medicine. Yet no other publications or commentators describe anyone matching Martin’s description of Doherty. At one point Martin asserts that in 1816 there was a reward of £500 on Doherty’s head. Only a few criminals accused of murder—or attacking uniformed officers, or arson, or heavy forgeries—had such a price put on their capture, and they were well-advertised. Yet no reward offers printed in newspapers of the time match Doherty.

Several of the names that Martin drops cannot be verified: the Martin family’s landlord, Sir William Morris; the widow MacBriar; Colonel Brierton; and the Wilbrook sisters. It is not obvious why he would want to hide the identity of his robbery victims, unless they were fictions. Similarly, Martin offers several clues about his family origins, but an Irish genealogist could not verify any of the information, even given that genealogical records of that period are now scarce.

People today who have heard the stories of Captain Lightfoot and Captain Thunderbolt may be disappointed to learn that not only was “Captain Thunderbolt” never a resident of New England, but that he likely never existed at all, except in the fertile mind of Michael Martin. More amazing than the adventures of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is the story of what Michael Martin, condemned to death, did in prison in October and November of 1821. Within these two months, Martin created a heroic narrative for himself, and placed it firmly in the tradition of Irish outlaw lore.

Moreover, during these same two months, Martin and his outside accomplices devised a prison escape attempt that was highly technical—and which nearly worked. Martin was secured within his cell by leg shackles chained to a ring in the center of the room. Somehow, he was supplied with a crude saw, which he used to file a gap through one the links of the chain of his shackles. His shackles were inspected weekly, but he disguised the gaps by mixing ashes and wax to match the color of the chain. One day, when his jailor brought him his meal, he feigned weakness and asked the jailor to pick up something he had dropped. Martin then knocked the jailor over the head, slipped his shackles off the chain to the ring, and rushed out the open door. He pounded the locked outside gate until it burst open, and then ran across a field. However, there were still irons on his legs, and he was quickly chased down and subdued.

The sophistication of Michael Martin’s escape attempt suggests that he was very familiar with prison routines, yet there was no mention of any prior jailings in the account he gave to Francis Waldo. It can be conjectured that he had once been imprisoned in Ireland, where he had the time and access to collect or create tales of adventurous robberies, which he then offered to Waldo as the story of Captain Lightfoot and Captain Thunderbolt. As entertaining as those stories are, they hardly compare to the inventiveness and daring that Martin displayed in the space of two months, while waiting to be hanged. Michael Martin’s escape attempt failed, but his efforts to mythologize himself were a wild success. 

Martin was known as “the last of the New England highwaymen.” Highway robbery is a high-risk crime of opportunity, and in settled regions of the country, professional criminals found more reliable methods to target wealth. Prior to Martin, during the Revolutionary War, groups of roving loyalist Tories were described as highwaymen. After Martin’s time, banditti flourished in the American frontier as it expanded westward—in Western Pennsylvania, in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, and finally in the western territories. The highwayman as a folklore figure resurfaced in the tales of stagecoach holdups and outlaw gangs of the American West.

 

Further Reading

For further reading on the investigation of Michael Martin’s narrative and a closer look at several of the works of popular culture they inspired, check the author’s web site on this project. 

See also Ray Cashman, “The Heroic Outlaw in Irish Folklore and Popular Literature,” Folklore 111, no. 2 (Oct. 2000): 191-215.

A full version of Michael Martin’s confession is available via the Internet Archive, printed in 1926 by the Wayside Press.

 

This article originally appeared in August 2023.

 

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Jerry Kuntz is a retired electronic resources librarian living in the Hudson Valley region of New York. He has authored and edited a number of books on little-known stories of nineteenth-century America, including the award-winning story of early underwater exploration The Heroic Age of Diving (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). He can be reached through this email.

Early Spanish entradas took note of these and other salt resources. In 1540, when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition attacked and occupied the Zuni village of Hawikku, the colonizers “found what [they] had more need of that gold silver,” as one account put it, “that is, a great quantity of corn, beans, [. . .] and the best and whitest salt I have seen in my whole life.” The invaders soon found the salt’s source, the Zuni Salt Lake. Coronado himself felt the lake—and its superior salt—worthy enough to bring to New Spain’s first viceroy Antonio de Mendoza’s attention. After seizing control of the pueblo, Coronado wrote to the viceroy of the Zuni’s “finest order and cleanliness” in their preparation of food and the “excellent granular salt that they bring from a lake one day’s journey” from the village. Still in search of gold, Coronado pushed northeastward, past Tiguex and onto the high plains. In the summer of 1542, led by Teyas guides, expeditioners reported that “neither gold nor silver was seen among those people, nor [was there] news of it,” but there “were many salt lakes which had [salt] in great quantity.” Exposed to the summer sun and heat, evaporated salt lakes and flats yielded slabs of salt “four and five fingers thick and larger and table-tops.”

By the start of the seventeenth century, Spanish colonizers accumulated and appropriated much knowledge about the location and abundance of salt resources north of Mexico. After becoming governor of New Mexico in 1598, Juan de Oñate leveraged this information to legitimize his effort to colonize and control local peoples and resources. “The wealth of the abundant salines,” Oñate reported in 1599, was among a few “very great treasures”—including some silver mines, Native laborers, and their material tribute payments—that might fill royal coffers. To verify salt’s abundance and its commercial viability, Oñate explained to imperial officials that “salt is the universal article of traffic of all these barbarians.” “Indian herdsmen” from the Salinas district often travelled northwest to Taos and Picuris, “where they sell meat, hides, tallow, suit, and salt in exchange for cotton blankets, pottery, maize, and some small green stones.” The sellers most certainly provisioned their salt from the lakes in the Estancia Valley, which according to Oñate “consist of white salt [and] . . . are seven or eight leagues in circumference.” Salt harvesting could be strenuous, but labor would be no issue; Oñate assured the viceroy that “the said pueblos of the salines and Xumanas [Jumanos] all rendered obedience to his majesty.”

Through the seventeenth century, Spanish officials mobilized the Spanish crown’s absolute sovereignty to incorporate salt resources into the imperial economy. To work these resources, officials used the encomienda, a system of land and labor redistribution that extracted tribute from Native peoples. Between 1659 and 1660, New Mexico governor Bernardo Lόpez de Mendizábal ordered Tewas and Tompiros living in the Salinas district to haul salt from the Estancia Valley’s lakes to the Rio Grande and eventually to northern Mexico—shipments and labor that went uncompensated by the Spanish state, presumably by virtue of the legalities surrounding mineral resources within Spanish territorial claims. Harvesting and hauling salt—especially commercial quantities—demanded long hours of physical labor, often conducted during warmer, dryer months when salt lakes and flats reached peak evaporation. Even after Lόpez’s especially exploitative tenure ended, salt trafficking between the Estancia Valley and northern Mexico seemed to have continued through at least 1668. In Parral and at other silver manufactories across northern Mexico, New Mexican salt was used as one of several chemical additives to refine silver ores. 

The introduction of livestock to the northern Mexican borderlands further expanded colonial exploitation of salt resources. This was because animals, too, need salt to survive. Sheep flocks in Cerralvo, Neuvo Leόn (near the present-day Texas-Mexico border) strayed from haciendas and “in the midst of the indigenous nations of those frontiers,” where “fine water holes, springs, pastures, and salt licks” were apparently more abundant. That Spanish flocks drifted toward Native-controlled resources concerned some colonial administrators. To manage and secure settler property, Don Antonio Ladrόn de Guevara recommended that provincial officials “distribute the land and water rights to the settlers, and [. . .] gather each Indian nation under the direct of the settlers;” Ladrόn further advised that “the salt produced on the lands of the heathen tribes [. . .] be used to support” settler commerce, the construction of presidios, and the provisioning of Spanish livestock. To administrators like Ladrόn, the management of salt resources and the animals that depended on them hinged upon “[luring] these Indian nations [. . .] to reduction and quietude.”

But Native peoples proved resistant to reduction. Consequently, salt resources became sites where Indigenous nations and agents of the Spanish state asserted increasingly competitive sovereignties. This was especially true in New Mexico’s Salinas district, where the salt flats of the Estancia Valley attracted contention among local salt collectors, expanding Apaches, and exploitative missionaries. By the early 1670s, mounting tensions between Apaches and Spaniards jeopardized saline commerce in and beyond the valley. Tewa salt collectors allegedly complained to missionaries that Apache combatants attacked people travelling to and from the valley’s salt marshes. Apaches also held up southbound Spanish salt shipments as early as 1670. Rather than offering increased protection to Salinas residents, the missions increased tribute demands to ensure their own survival. Overburdened and under protected by Spanish rulers, Piro, Tompiro, and Tewa salt collectors abandoned the valley. Missionaries soon followed, and the salt flats fell out of regular use for the first time in seven centuries.

The abandonment of the Salinas district signaled a potential end to Spanish rule over the Puebloan world. The 1680 rebellion rocked the upper Rio Grande and the southwestern borderlands at large. At stake was Puebloan religious, political, economic, and territorial autonomy. The participating pueblos made clear that cooperation—not conquest—would dictate Spain’s place in New Mexico. In the years following the Pueblo Revolt, Spanish officials attempted to re-establish some authority by overhauling the tribute system, transferring greater administrative power to alcalde mayors, and issuing new land grants. Yet Spain remained reluctant to relinquish royal control over New Mexico’s few mineral resources. A 1689 grant attributed to Governor Domingo Jironza Pétriz de Cruzate established minimal boundaries formally enclosing the Pueblo of Zuni. The grant did not include the Zuni Salt Lake, the home of the Salt Woman and several shrines and sites central to Zuni subsistence. This omission precipitated several legal struggles by Zunis to protect the lake from repeat colonial encroachments, the most recent of which concluded in 2003 when the Pueblo successfully shut down a strip-mining project that would have disrupted the lake’s aquifer and killed the Salt Woman. 

Spain could—and did—dispossess Puebloan peoples of salt resources by claiming those resources as crown property. But claiming salt did not easily equate to controlling it. Through the early eighteenth century, Spanish officials struggled to establish security along the Camino Real del Tierra Adentro; this primary commercial corridor linked remote resources, colonial commerce, and Spanish settlements to Mexican industries and enclaves. But the rise of Comanche and Apache power suffocated Spanish expectations on all sides. Following the abandonment of the Salinas pueblos, Apaches controlled the valley, its resources, and its roadways, definitively foreclosing future colonial efforts to revive the export of salt to Parral. Apache control over salt resources also stymied Spanish survival at El Paso del Norte, where salt flats at the base of the Guadalupe Mountains supplied the small settler enclave. In April 1692, New Mexico Governor Diego de Vargas reported to Viceroy Gaspar de la Cerda that Apaches had taken possession of a local saline, a freshwater well, and the roads that connected both resources to the settlement at El Paso. “The saline,” Vargas explained, was “much needed in this neighborhood”; nearby settlers seemingly depended upon it to store food through the winter, sustain livestock, and more. The flats north of El Paso del Norte were indeed well suited to settler sustenance. After an Apache prisoner-of-war led Vargas and a party of scouts to the flats earlier in 1692 for inspection and assessment, Vargas reported that the salt crusts reproduced themselves only a few days after mining. But settlers were reluctant to make the journey into Apache territory. In the spring of 1709, Spanish administrators at El Paso del Norte reported that 35 “friendly Indians”—escorted by local presidio soldiers—were the sole volunteers for a salt gathering expedition bound for the Hueco Mountains.

Civilian populations and soldiers shared a reliance on salt as a primary preservative. And like civilians, presidios in the Indigenous borderlands found themselves beholden to local Native power and distant Spanish authority alike. Martín de Alarcόn, Governor of Coahuila and Texas, established the presidio at San Antonio de Béxar in the spring of 1718, but the presidio struggled for several years to secure access to salt for provisions. In the fall of 1720, Native informants told Texas officials that the closest exploitable salt flats lay over 300 kilometers south of San Antonio. But to trek that distance was not worth the danger. According to one report, “many tribes of very warlike Indians” controlled the salt flats, “Indians who have repeatedly prevented fifty, and even sixty, armed men from the Nuevo Reino de Leon from taking the salt.” Further east, in the heart of Caddoan lands, Native informants proved equally significant in providing Spanish soldiers with access to salt. “The Indians” near the Spanish settlement of Los Adaes on the lower Sabine River in far eastern Texas “affirmed [. . .] that there were some salt beds nearby.” The governor promptly “dispatched a lieutenant with a party of twenty soldiers and twenty-five mules.” Fifteen leagues from the presidio, the party “brought back loads of a salt earth so fine that when worked it yields 50 percent salt.” Military officers did not always treat so directly with Native peoples who knew where to find salt. In June 1731, Captain Gabriel Costales, commanding officer at Bahía del Espíritu Santo, requested a license from Viceroy Juan de Acuña to mine salt from Indian lands for the presidio’s use. Brigadier General Pedro de Rivera advised against it, explaining to the viceroy that doing so would only incite rebellion among local indios.

In the heart of New Mexico, too, Spanish officials struggled to secure control over and access to salt well into the eighteenth century. In 1716, New Mexico governor Felix Martinez requested guards and guides to escort an expedition from Santa Cruz to “las salinas atraenzal” near Tiguas villages beyond the southern Estancia Valley. Guarded salt collecting expeditions to the Estancia Valley and nearby saline enclaves persisted through the 1730s and 1740s. For five consecutive summers starting in 1744, Governor Joachín Codallos y Rabal instructed alcalde mayors at Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Santo Domingo, Santa Ana, Laguna, Pecos, and elsewhere to solicit volunteers for salt gathering expeditions into the previously abandoned Estancia Valley. According to Rabal’s orders, the volunteers would be guarded by Spanish soldiers. Over half a century following Spain’s so-called reconquest of New Mexico, salt resources remained situated squarely within Indigenous borderlands, in spaces where Spanish authority still paled in comparison to powerful Native polities. 

Once highly valuable, salt affords a new look at life, environment, and sovereignty in the southwest borderlands. Though Spanish entradas claimed to “discover” potentially productive salt flats and lakes, Indigenous—especially Puebloan—peoples possessed deep knowledge about and attachments to life-giving salt resources. Spanish colonialism did, however, alter many Indigenous peoples’ existing relationships to salt resources in their homelands. Exploiting law, labor, and land, Spanish colonizers tried to control salt resources and harness the profits of their products to stabilize Spanish sovereignty. But rarely did dependence ensure domination. Through much of the Spanish colonial period in the region, Indigenous pasts, peoples, and power dictated Spanish access to salt resources and, therefore, the future and failures of Spanish colonization. And while veritably ancient, the history of salt in the southwest is kept alive by Zuni, Hopi, and other Native peoples today. Thanks to them, Ma’lokyattsik’i lives on.

 

Further Reading

This essay is partly based on the following archival materials:

Baughman Folklore Collection, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Manuel Lujan Congressional Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Ward Alan Minge Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Sophie Aberle Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Edith Cherry Historic Preservation Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

John L. Kessell Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Documents from the Archivo General de las Indias, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Documents from the Archivo General de la Naciόn, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Lorin W. Brown, “The Salt Traffic from the Estancia Salt Lakes to Mexico,” July 17, 1939, New Mexico Works Progress Administration, Fray Angelico Chávez History Library, Santa Fe, NM.

Documentary Relations of the Southwest, Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.

Spanish Archives of New Mexico, Series Two, via Ancestry.com.

 

For published primary sources and relevant secondary sources, see:

Teresa Pijoan, Myths of Magical Native American Women: Including Salt Woman Stories (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2019).

Herbert Eugene Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1916).

Ashley A. Dumas and Paul N. Eubanks, eds., Salt in Eastern North America and the Caribbean: History and Archaeology (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021).

Maxine Oland, Siobhan Hart, and Liam Frink, eds., Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020).

Kent G. Lightfoot, “Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology,” American Antiquity 60, no. 2 (1995): 199-217.

Juliana Barr, “There’s No Such Thing as “Prehistory”: What the Longue Durée of Caddo and Pueblo History Tells Us About Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2017): 202-42.

Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn,” William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2018): 207-36.

Jean M. O’Brien, “Historical Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies: Touching the Past, Looking to the Future,” in Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien, eds., Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (New York: Routledge, 2017), 12-20.

Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, eds., Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539-1542: “They Were Not Familiar with His Majesty, Nor Did They Wish to Be His Subjects (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).

Andrew I. Duff, T. J. Ferguson, Susan Bruning, and Peter Whiteley, “Collaborative Research in a Living Landscape: Pueblo Land, Culture, and History in Central New Mexico,” Archaeology Southwest 22, no. 1 (2008): 1-24.

Gary Huckleberry and Andrew I. Duff, “Alluvial Cycles, Climate, and Puebloan Settlement Shifts near Zuni Salt Lake, New Mexico, USA,” Geoarchaeology: An International Journal 23, no. 1 (2008): 107-30.

Stuart James Baldwin, “Tompiro Culture, Subsistence and Trade,” PhD thesis, University of Calgary, 1988.

Paul M. Kraemer, “New Mexico’s Ancient Salt Trade,” El Palacio 82, no. 1 (Spring 1976).

Ursula Ewald, The Mexican Salt Industry, 1560-1980: A Study in Change (New York: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1985).

Manuel P. Servin, “The Legal Basis for Spanish Colonial Sovereignty: The Act of Possession,” New Mexico Historical Review 53, no. 4 (1978): 295-303.

H. Allen Anderson, “The Encomienda in New Mexico, 1598-1680,” New Mexico Historical Review 60, no. 4 (1985): 353-77.

Ramon A. Gutierrez, “Dona Teresa de Aguilera y Roche before the Inquisition: The Travails of a Seventeenth-Century Aristocratic Woman in New Mexico,” in Jennifer L. Morgan, Carol Berkin, and Thomas A. Foster, eds., Women in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 7-42.

John L. Kessell, Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).

Joe E. Sando and Herman Agoyo, eds., Po’Pay: Leader of the First American Revolution (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2005).

Frances V. Scholes, Marc Simmons, and Jose Antonio Esquibel, eds., and Eleanor B. Adams, trans., Juan Dominguez de Mendoza: Soldier and Frontiersman of the Spanish Southwest, 1627-1693 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012).

Diana Hadley, Thomas H. Naylor, and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, eds., The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History – Volume Two, Part Two: The Central Corridor and the Texas Corridor, 1770-1765 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021).

Tatiana Seijas, “The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain: Indigenous Commerce and Political Action,” in Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 294-313.

“Testimony of Malcom B. Bowekaty, Governor of the Zuni Tribe, to the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs,” July 17, 2002, Washington, D.C. (via Sacred Land Film Project).

 

This article originally appeared in July 2023.

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Annabel LaBrecque is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines the significance of inland salt resources to Indigenous prosperity and settler colonization. She has previously published her research on salt and power in the sixteenth-century Lower Mississippi River Valley for the Scottish Centre for Global History and on salt’s deep history in the Ohio Country for Common-place.

This research was made possible through the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Fund for Native American Research Grant. The author would like to thank Julia Frankenbach, Noah Ramage, and the participants of the 2023 New and Emerging Studies of the Spanish Colonial Borderlands Workshop for editorial feedback.

In 1888, George S. Parker & Co. created a new version, Ye Peculiar Game of Ye Yankee Peddler. Parker had invented his first game, Banking, in 1883 as a rejection of games as moral education. He preferred to emphasize a different value: competition. In Parker’s 1888 rendition, the Yankee Peddler served as gamemaster. The rules warned that the peddler should not be a player as he was favored to win. Instead, farmers competed against each other to get the best deals. The game below extrapolates from Parker to enliven lessons on the Market Revolution. 

The game sets key historical dynamics in motion. How did distribution channels, including new transportation options, shape manufacturing and consumption? What did money look like and how did people spend it? When scholars discuss market anxieties of this age, what do they mean? This game offers a flexible format that allows students from middle school to college to jump in and actively contribute to the lesson.

 

Contextualizing the Game

In introducing the game, a variety of lessons can provide context: early industrialization, infrastructure, bankruptcy, banking and the Bank War, global trade, and American expansion and imperialism. But the game must start with the Yankee peddler. To David Jaffee, Yankee peddlers were more than distributors of goods, they were agents of capitalist enthusiasm. Largely young men in their early twenties, itinerant peddlers loaded up packs or wagons after the fall harvest and carried commodities to far-flung consumers. Local shopkeepers and regional factors advocated licensing laws to tax and stymie the competition. Nevertheless, these migrating merchants abounded through the 1850s. The US census counted 16,594 peddlers in 1860, most from New England, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. They thus contributed to an increasingly integrated market economy. But peddlers were especially notable as cultural icons.

Yankee peddlers appeared in folklore as well as paintings, songs, and, of course, games. In Washington Irving’s classic tale Rip Van Winkle (1819), Mrs. Van Winkle died from a burst blood vessel. How? Arguing with a Yankee peddler. In one yarn shared in Constance O’Rourke’s American Humor, a Southern innkeeper clamors to see a “Yankee trick,” only to have the man sell his wife the coverlet off his bed. T. Jackson Lears writes that after the 1830s, with growing German Jewish immigration, the folkloric Yankee peddler intersected with antisemitic iconography. These tales fed into trickster lore of confidence men, from Herman Melville’s Confidence Man to Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Sam Slick or even Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, to the fantastic spectacles of P. T. Barnum.

Images of Yankee peddlers proliferated because they epitomized both the exuberance and the anxiety of the age. Board game covers and pieces can be found in collections held by the American Antiquarian Society, the New York Historical Society, the Strong Museum of National Play in Rochester, New York, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Paintings include Asher Brown Durand’s The Peddler Displaying His Wares of 1836, The Yankee Peddler by William Tolman Carleton, circa 1851, John Whetten Ehninger’s 1853 Yankee Peddler, and Thomas Waterman Wood’s 1872 Yankee Pedlar. 

Artistic representations of market transactions are themselves useful for discussions of social meanings of commerce. Gender, race, class, and regional identities are often visually striking in paintings and lithographs. Women gather round The Image Pedlar to examine shiny baubles in Francis William Edmonds’ circa 1844 painting. Lilly Martin Spencer modeled the adorably awkward 1854 Young Husband, First Marketing on her own husband. Comparing the two can spark a rich conversation about how society genders market agency. African Americans appear as subjects and objects, as bargainers, commodities, and status symbols. Art itself was a frequent medium of protest against slave dealing, as with Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1868 The Price of Blood. 

“Yankee” itself is not always self-evident. For my California students, Yankees are either Union soldiers or New York baseball players. Norman Rockwell’s 1937 mural, Yankee Doodle, offers a familiar visual of the Revolutionary Yankee re-inscribing the lampooned “doodle” and proclaiming his feathered hat “macaroni.” Here, American Jonathan rebelled against older brother John (Britain). Globally, Yankee and Jonathan were interchangeable. Within the United States, however, the regionalism of the Yankee was important. This is perhaps best encapsulated in a poem attributed to E.B. White:

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.

To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.

To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.

To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.

To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.

And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

The Yankee Doodle notwithstanding, Yankees were usually depicted as unassuming but clever, shading into unscrupulous. Yankee peddlers brought the message and the means for a farm family’s rise in status through conspicuous consumption. But peddlers tested a consumer’s mettle. The quality or value of goods was a question that might not have an answer until after the peddler was long gone. The family could rise in status, but they could also fall. 

What did the new goods look like? In 1802, Eli Terry transformed the manufacturing of clocks. A stately grandfather clock signified craftsmanship and status for a family, but Terry used cutting saws, waterpower, and wooden parts to make the process faster and cheaper. By 1816, he produced a smaller version. Shelf clocks using the Terry method took the rural market by storm, sold via itinerant peddler distribution networks as signs of status. Innovations in publishing and lithographs enabled a wider variety of books and prints. Novels, biographies, and classics were popular, but perennial best sellers included bibles and almanacs. Peddlers themselves enabled publishers to diversify and even to distribute clandestine books like John Cleland’s Fanny Hill; or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

Portraits proved especially popular. Inventor Rufus Porter traveled New England selling silhouettes (black profiles) and quick portraits enabled by use of a camera obscura. A camera obscura used a dark box, lens, and mirror to cast a shadow that transformed portraits, like clocks, from luxury items to mass produced goods. This practice kicked up in the 1820s and by the 1830s, standardized “correct likenesses” found widespread buyers in hinterland communities. Peddlers brought the potential for renewal through news, fashion, and technology, with the goods to back it up—for a price.

 

Paper Money (is weird)

In practice, customers paid for goods with cash, bartered goods, or, for a higher price, credit. In the game, teams/families of students barter and buy using commodity cards and cash.  Money merits explanation. In early America, money was complex. Colonial American efforts to rely solely on book credit (local vendors maintaining a running tab) combined with specie (silver) had never been terribly successful, as repeat efforts by British Parliament to crack down on colonial currencies testify. To have a commercial society, currency created liquidity that helped employers pay wages and consumers purchase goods and services. Cash facilitated market transactions and thus greased the economy.

In the early US, the dollar was the legal unit of currency, but it was not a standard paper currency or legal tender designation until the Civil War. The First and Second Bank of the United States (BUS) printed bank notes and oversaw money markets, but they only provided a fraction of the nation’s currency supply. As Joshua Greenberg writes in Bank Notes and Shinplasters, at the height of its issue in the mid-1830s, the BUS only had $17 million in circulation at a time when the American economy was using approximately $100 million in paper currency. Where did the rest come from? It came from state-chartered banks and, also, non-bank institutions like private companies and hotels.

Market transactions in antebellum America required monetary literacy. New financial textbooks discussed paper currency, but described what goods should cost. They taught the federal monetary structure of dollars and cents. But the Bank of the United States provided the only currency accepted at face value, or par, throughout the country. Paper currency could be discounted based on perceived value, geographic circulation, or information gathered from bank note tables in newspapers. Peddlers themselves could benefit from arbitrage—carrying notes to markets where they might be exchanged more profitably. Using currency required savvy and experience. Newspapers carried stories of trial and error, from changing regulations and business upheaval to confidence men and counterfeiting. In one anecdote, a French tourist couldn’t pay a turnpike toll for his carriage because the 25 cent note he obtained from a steamship captain wasn’t good past the brook about 100 yards back.

The value of paper currency also depended on who wielded it. Being vulnerable left individuals open to exploitation. US Indian agents owed the Cherokee Nation $10,000, but the form of payment was left to the agents. Charles Hicks, Cherokee treasurer, recognized that accepting notes offered by Return J. Meigs meant a compromise in payment value, but had little recourse. This was not an isolated problem. Workers needed to pay attention to more than their stated wage, but also the form of wage. Some employers paid workers in out-of-town, devalued currency obtained from literal money markets because it cost them less and they had the power to get away with it.

Monetary literacy showed that you belonged in the marketplace on several levels. For escaped slaves to pass as free, familiarity with market transactions could prove vital. Women, despite savviness as consumers and retailers, were often depicted as spendthrift and easily bamboozled by flirty clerks. In Horatio Alger stories, being a keen consumer marked characters as worthy of rising from rags to riches. Ragged Dick, Or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks showcases Dick’s savvy recognition of the swindler shops of lower Manhattan. In The Peculiar Game of the Yankee Peddler, students face this very gamble. Are they worthy consumers?

 

Playing the Game

• Object: To get the best deals for your produce in market exchanges with the Yankee Peddler.
• Players:
  • Yankee Peddler (the teacher) to oversee the auction.
  • For large classes, a “clerk” or two might accept & tally the bids.
  • Cluster students in “farm families” of 4-5 to decide upon their family’s bid for each item.
• Equipment:
  • Playing Cards: Print all cards single-sided.
    • Commodity Cards. These cards list an item of produce and a market value. Produce includes local crops or commodities: a bale of cotton, a bushel of potatoes or corn, a peck of turnips, a bag of feathers, a keg of whisky, dinner for the peddler and his horse. 
    • Bank Notes. Include a discussion of antebellum paper money with currency cards as well. Use images of antebellum currency with a discounted value underneath for each card. Make sure students understand the difference between par and discounted values before the bidding starts, but these visuals are great fun. If a group asks if you can provide change, rip a bill and return half.
    • Bid Cards. Include as many bid cards as you have items so that families can submit a bid card for each item. The card should have a place to list family name and their bid. 
  • White or Chalk Board space to list items and purchasing family.
  • Images of 6-8 commodities for purchase. Commodities might include Eli Terry clocks (~$6.75 cash, $8-9/credit), paintings ($.20 for a Rufus Porter likeness), books, a patented mouse trap, a scale, porcelain or ceramics, textiles like blankets, calicos, linens, and more. Create your own price list. The University of Missouri Library has a 19th century price guide by decade.

• Game Play:
  • Distribute cards to families, face down. All families should have the same number of commodity and cash cards (but not the same cards).
  • The Yankee Peddler introduces himself, the number of items he has for sale, and the bidding process. He then introduces the first object. Sell it! As the Yankee Peddler, you want the highest price possible. Go ahead and give details about production, distribution, and social value of commodities. Do NOT reveal prices. Anxiety over how much the item is “worth” is a feature, not a bug, of the game.
  • Families submit bids, face down.
  • After collecting all bids, the family who has submitted the highest bid buys the item. The peddler can refuse to sell an item. Students often bid very low at the beginning and then very high toward the end of the game.
• To Win: when all commodities have been sold, tally up a final profit and loss for the peddler. Which family got the best deals for their produce relative to the cost? That family wins the game.

 

Conclusion

In drawing the game to a close, circle back to the discussions of market-based anxieties.

How do you know if you got a good deal? How do you know how much an item was “worth”?

What shapes prices? Is it just supply and demand? Is it the costs to bring an item to market? Discussing the social value of the goods and what went into their own evaluation of their bidding process can be worthwhile. How did competition shape the game? How might it have played out differently with open bidding? Do these capitalist market transactions feel like gambling?

Many other subjects can be incorporated into the game or its surrounding lesson plan. I started this game for my History of US Capitalism course, with a day on the reorganization of labor, industrialization, and child labor and another on banking controversies. I include yarns that reveal the “Yankee peddler” to be a global figure and connect him to foreign trade. Part of the utility of the game is how many intersections can be addressed, a Choose Your Own Adventure of lesson planning. Find any favorites in your own classroom? Please share!

 

Further Reading

On the history of game production, see Philip Orbanes, The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers, from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003). On a provocative essay on those earlier games and morality, see introduction of Jill Lepore, Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (New York: Knopf, 2012).

While textbooks still frequently refer to the Market Revolution, rooted in books like Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), this game is not contingent upon that concept. More recent work, like Jonathan Levy’s Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021) and Eli Cook, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) favor a focus on infrastructure per George Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1951).

On Yankee peddlers, see David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-1860,” Journal of American History 78 (Sept. 1991): 511-35; Joseph T. Rainer, “The ‘Sharper’ Image: Yankee Peddlers, Southern Consumers, and the Market Revolution,” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 27-44; T. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance:  A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); J. R. Dolan, The Yankee Peddlers of Early America: An Affectionate History of Life and Commerce in the Developing Colonies and the Early Republic (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1964). For more on folklore, see Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931) and Chaim M. Rosenberg, Yankee Colonies Across America: Cities upon the Hills (New York: Lexington Books, 2015). For art history, see Terrence H. Witkowski, “Farmers Bargaining: Buying and Selling as a Subject in American Genre Painting, 1835-1868,” Journal of Macromarketing 16 (no. 2, 1996): 84-101.

A few classic works on capitalism as a game, see Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops:  Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Routledge, 1999); Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008); Karen Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Ladies: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

On the history of money, see Joshua Greenberg, Bank Notes & Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); John McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1680-1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

On the global Yankee trader, see, for example, Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India and the Making of Britain and America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Kariann Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); James Fichter, So Great a Profitt: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Susan Bean, Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 1784-1860 (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001).

 

This article originally appeared in July 2023.

 

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Rachel Tamar Van teaches early American history, the history of US capitalism, and family and genealogical history at Cal Poly Pomona in southern California. She has articles you might use to expand on the US China trade in Diplomatic History, the Pacific Historical Review, and the Routledge History of US Foreign Relations.

Mainly written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (with a few by John Jay), the Federalist essays are the most famous arguments supporting the ratification of the proposed Constitution drafted by the constitutional convention in 1787. Although often praised for their contribution to political theory, the essays were first and foremost designed to blunt opposition to the proposed Constitution and to secure the Constitution’s ratification by the states.

The main objection to the Constitution was that its distribution of powers undermined the authority of states and would inevitably lead to their extinction by a too powerful federal government. Sensitive to that charge, Hamilton and Madison sought to allay such fears by stressing how states could preserve their authority and check potential overreaching by the national government with a variety of political options, including the use of interposition. 

Hamilton and Madison believed that instead of giving the national government too much power, the proposed Constitution had not given it enough power. Madison was bitterly disappointed that the constitutional convention had not included a provision in the proposed Constitution giving Congress a veto over any proposed state legislation. During the ratification debates, Hamilton and Madison argued that the principal danger of governmental overreaching came from the states, who were likely to undermine the authority of a weak national government.

Nonetheless, Hamilton and Madison responded to Anti-Federalists who opposed the proposed Constitution by stressing the power retained by the states. In a series of Federalist essays, they described the powerful role that state legislatures would play as “sentinels” or “guardians” of the balance of authority between the two levels of government. If the national government unduly expanded its constitutional authority, state legislatures would, in their words, “sound the alarm.” Although never using the word “interposition,” what Hamilton and Madison described in their essays precisely foreshadowed the steps that became a common practice among state legislatures soon after the Constitution’s ratification.­

Sounding the alarm (hereafter, interposition) was not simply a mechanism for individual states to take immediate political action, but a means of stimulating a nationwide conversation through interstate cooperation. When states joined together to focus their attention on the national government’s constitutional overreaching, the resulting political pressure had the potential of producing a correction or reversal of such overreaching. That pressure might induce the federal branches involved to reverse course and in the case of Supreme Court rulings deemed wrongheaded, to create support for constitutional amendments to reverse such rulings.

In describing interposition as a tool that state legislatures could use to maintain federalism, Hamilton and Madison made a rhetorical argument in the heat of the debate. At that time, neither Hamilton nor Madison wanted to see state legislatures act with greater vigor under the Constitution particularly since they lamented how much authority those legislatures had wielded under the Articles of Confederation.

Hamilton and Madison wrote what they did to persuade states to ratify the proposed Constitution and their words—as they soon discovered—took on a life of their own. With the success of ratification, Hamilton may well have wished to put the interposition arguments he had made in The Federalist behind him. But his description of interposition came back to haunt him—and far sooner than he imagined.

As President Washington’s first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton was the architect of an ambitious scheme for the nation’s economic development. The national sweep of Hamilton’s plans immediately aroused suspicions. One point of contention was his desire to assume the Revolutionary War debt of the states, in effect nationalizing that debt. The governor of North Carolina considered the congressional act assuming state debts an “extraordinary measure” that would diminish “the independence and internal sovereignty of the state.” David Stuart, Washington’s close friend, warned the President that Virginians viewed assumption as a seizure of power by “unwarrantable constructions of the Constitution.”

When Virginia’s legislature joined North Carolina’s governor in protest in 1790 about the assumption plan and questioned its constitutionality, Hamilton was furious. He vented to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Jay: “This is the first symptom of a spirit which must either be killed or will kill the constitution of the United States.” Hamilton ignored the fact that state legislators were behaving precisely as he and Madison had outlined in The Federalist whenever legislators perceived constitutional overreaching by the federal government. Indeed, just a few years later in 1793, the Supreme Court decided Chisholm v. Georgia, holding that individuals could sue states in federal court. That decision generated widespread interposition by state legislatures throughout the country and ultimately resulted in Chisholm’s effective reversal with the passage of the Eleventh Amendment.

In contrast to Hamilton’s hostile reaction to interposition, his co-author of the concept, James Madison warmed up to the idea. While both had been worried about the lack of national power during the ratification debates, Madison relatively quickly developed concerns about what he perceived as excessive claims for national powers. In particular, he identified a dangerous shift undercutting a balance between state and national powers in the financial schemes Hamilton advanced for Washington’s administration. If national powers needed to be enhanced, Madison wanted those changes to occur through formal constitutional amendment. By 1792, Madison thought that if Hamilton’s broad construction of implied powers for the national government prevailed, the Constitution “had better be thrown into the fire at once.”

In 1798 Madison, along with Jefferson, produced the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, protests by those two state legislatures about the unconstitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Act empowered the President to deport any aliens he deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety” of the nation or suspected of “treasonable or secret machinations” without due process. The Sedition Act criminalized any conspiracy “to oppose any measure” of the national government and prohibited the “writing, printing, uttering or publishing” of any “false, slanderous, and malicious writing” tending to bring the national government into “contempt or disrepute.” Even Hamilton, after reading the bill that became the Sedition Act, thought that some of its provisions were “highly exceptionable.” Both acts sought to stifle political opposition, constrain free speech, and especially targeted newspapers not friendly to the Federalists or President Adams.

Although those Resolutions introduced confusion about interposition and would be relied on to advance the dangerous doctrine of nullification, they were, in fact, classic statements of states using interposition. Misconceptions surrounding the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions stem from thinking that they were independent creations of Madison and Jefferson and not part of an earlier pattern of interposition that traced its roots to The Federalist. The Resolutions are incorrectly viewed as originating the idea that John C. Calhoun would develop into his theory of nullification or an individual state veto.

In Virginia’s Resolutions, Madison neither described what became the theory of nullification nor did he allude to the natural law right of revolution. Instead, he described two distinct types of interposition, each resting on a different basis and calling for vastly different political action. Failing to appreciate that distinction misled Madison’s contemporaries as well as later generations who continued to invoke what they called the “Principles of ’98.”

When Madison described a right to “interpose” in Virginia’s Third resolution, he referred to the theoretical right of the collective people who were the sovereign foundation of the Constitution to serve as the ultimate arbiter of the existence of egregious constitutional overreaching by the national government in the final resort. When Madison wrote that the people as the parties to the constitutional compact retained a theoretical right to “interpose,” he was not talking about the preexisting practice of sounding the alarm interposition. This theoretical right contained in the third resolution was different from what he described in Virginia’s seventh resolution as the right of state legislatures to interpose by sounding the alarm when faced with they believed were ordinary, unconstitutional acts of the national government.

In his Report of 1800 explaining his resolutions, Madison defended sounding the alarm interposition in explicit terms by citing his and Hamilton’s language in The Federalist describing such a role for state legislatures and the practice of interposition after ratification. Nonetheless, Madison bore the responsibility for not clearly distinguishing the theoretical right of the people from the right of legislatures to sound the alarm in his original resolutions.

Identifying the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions as part of a preexisting practice of interposition is complicated because both Madison and Jefferson were sometimes ambiguous and because Madison repeatedly restated his complex views. The wording of Jefferson’s draft of the Kentucky Resolutions also prompted ominous speculation. While neither “nullification” nor “null” appeared in Kentucky’s 1798 Resolutions, the fact that Jefferson included those words in his draft has led many scholars to assume that he, and by association Madison, anticipated and provided support for the nullification doctrine later advanced by Calhoun. Indeed, Jefferson’s formulations eventually resonated with a sovereign states’ rights tradition that merged the two sets of resolutions under the slogan, the “Principles of ’98.”

As finally adopted, both sets of resolutions served to sound the alarm about the Alien and Sedition Acts. Virginia’s legislature declared the acts “unconstitutional” while Kentucky’s described them as “not law” but “altogether void” and “of no force” and “effect.” Despite the different wording, both sets of resolutions offered the same judgment: that the acts exceeded the constitutional authority of the federal government. Virginia’s and Kentucky’s legislatures, like previous legislatures invoking interposition, asked the state’s governor to share the resolutions with other state governors and with the state’s congressional delegation.

The interposition directed at the Alien and Sedition Acts galvanized political support that helped elect Thomas Jefferson President. His election ushered in the so called “Revolution of 1800” that displaced Federalist control of the presidency with the first of several Republican administrations. Given Jefferson’s and Madison’s role in drafting the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, it might seem ironic that their administrations confronted interposition during their presidencies as well. However, given the inherent fluidity of federalism, interposition inevitably came to be used by all parties to resist policies of the national government whenever it might be said that the party in power had thrown the federal system out of constitutional balance.

In Jefferson’s second term, his embargo policy, beginning with the Embargo Act of 1807, prompted an interposition movement by Federalist state legislatures in New England. Although the embargo was repealed by the time of James Madison’s inauguration in March 1809, other decisions of Madison’s administration—many related to the War of 1812—stimulated additional instances of interposition as state legislatures challenged the constitutionality of various acts of his administration.

The culmination of resistance to Madison’s policies related to the war was the assembly of delegates from five Federalist-dominated New England states on December 15, 1814 in Hartford, Connecticut. After meeting behind closed doors, the convention adopted a report accusing Madison’s administration of misconstruing the Constitution and exceeding its constitutional authority. Given “a total disregard for the Constitution,” the report stated that it was appropriate for individual states to offer their “decided opposition.”

In justification, the report paraphrased Madison’s third Virginia resolution, but in a manner that allowed state legislatures to act in ways that Madison had limited to “the states,” by which he meant only the people of the states in their highest sovereign capacity. The report asserted that “in cases of deliberate, dangerous, and palpable infractions of the Constitution, affecting the sovereignty of a State, and liberties of the people; it is not only the right but the duty of such a State to interpose its authority for their protection.”

Despite the Hartford Report’s claims, nullifying national laws deemed unconstitutional far exceeded the role of state legislatures to use interposition to challenge the unconstitutionality of laws that Madison had endorsed in Virginia’s seventh resolution. Moreover, nullifying acts of the federal government and assuming the authority to decide in the last resort was not up to individual state legislatures. Nonetheless, Federalist newspapers supporting the Hartford Convention’s report also mistakenly claimed that Madison had endorsed resistance by individual states.

But it would be in the hands of Calhoun and other nullifiers in the 1830s, however, that the so-called “Principles of ‘98” were twisted into a doctrine of individual state veto and would forever cloud the original function of interposition. In Calhoun’s draft of what became the “South Carolina Exposition” of 1828 he explicitly drew selectively and incorrectly upon Madison’s authority in the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and his Report of 1800 to assert that every state had a right to veto (what Calhoun called an interposition) when the national government acted unconstitutionally. Eventually, South Carolina would invoke Calhoun’s doctrine in 1832, passing an ordinance that supposedly nullified national tariffs the state deemed unconstitutional.

Madison adamantly denied that he had provided any authority for nullification. From Calhoun’s advancement of a theory of nullification in 1828 until Madison’s death in 1836, Madison sought to distinguish interposition from nullification. Before he died, Madison called secession a “twin” to the “heresy” of nullification with both doctrines springing “from the same poisonous root.” He rightly predicted that growth from this evil source would bring “disastrous consequences” such as when Southern states seceded from the Union. Despite Madison’s prediction, interposition developed as a political practice regularly used by state legislatures from the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 until the 1870s. The Civil War marked the high point of state interposition resistance. During the war, sounding the alarm interposition occurred whenever states believed their national government—Union or Confederate—had exceeded its powers, particularly with the use of martial law, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and mandatory wartime conscription.

After the Civil War, Northern and Southern state legislatures opposed Reconstruction laws and policies, racial equality, and enhanced national power using the tool of sounding the alarm interposition. However, those who denied the outcome of the Civil War and who were advocates of white supremacy adopted the slogan of states’ rights and did not embrace the brand of interposition explained in The Federalist Papers. Thus, use of interposition essentially died out, tainted with the Civil War and the discredited notions of nullification and secession, and lay dormant before its re-emergence in the twentieth century.

When the explicit re-invocation of the term “interposition” surfaced in the 1950s, it did so in the hands of those who sought a constitutional basis for white supremacy and racial inequality in opposing the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Although segregationists used the term interposition, their actions were clearly intended to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling and invoked the discredited doctrine of nullification.

*  *  *  *

As originally conceived, interposition rested on the idea that state legislatures were essential monitors of the equilibrium of federalism—and a state legislature’s declaration that acts of the federal government were misguided and even unconstitutional was a legitimate form of political resistance. Nullification, however, whether of a Supreme Court’s decision or an act of Congress was never contemplated by the framers as a power enjoyed by any single state.

At various times in our history state legislative interposition has been misused and mangled into the unconstitutional doctrine of nullification. Even so, interposition has functioned as a powerful tool to express popular discontent and to help us reframe and affirm our constitutional values.

Interposition’s use by states offers the important insight that the national government cannot do whatever it wants and ride roughshod over the states. And, at the same time, interposition reinforces the obligation that states and elected officials owe to the Constitution—and that states lack any legitimate power to nullify national laws. What remains a question is whether state legislative interposition continues to serve a useful purpose today.

Crucially, the history of interposition demonstrates that the preservation of constitutional democracy is a shared obligation among many parties and not merely the task of the Supreme Court. The nation’s history and practice of interposition illuminates how many constitutional settlements were achieved not by a Supreme Court decision, but by a broader discussion among non-judicial participants.

Every elected official—whether at the state or federal level—is obligated to uphold the Constitution. That obligation cannot be abdicated and demands an allegiance to maintain constitutional faith above loyalty to a political party or person.

Interposition offers the important reminder of the necessity of the people’s involvement in America’s constitutional democracy. Just as elected officials cannot abdicate their responsibility to uphold the Constitution, voters cannot abdicate their responsibility to scrutinize the operation of government acting under their authority. Widespread civic engagement of citizens in political issues is the only hope for the survival of the constitutional system that Americans took a chance on in 1787. After all, our republic was based on the idea of the sovereignty of the American people.

 

Further Reading

This article is drawn from Christian G. Fritz, Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

 

This article originally appeared in June 2023.

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Christian G. Fritz is Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law. He is also the author of American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Why is this a source of pride for the small town? The sign echoes in some ways the mythologized view of rural New England’s role in abolishing slavery, especially the idea that many of the farmhouses owned by the region’s elite white citizens were “stations” on the Underground Railroad. While there were a few of these, including in Uxbridge, historians of the Underground Railroad understand that the interconnected webs of safehouses were centered in majority-Black communities in cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, New Bedford, Rochester, and Syracuse. When we dig deeper, however, there is an important part that rural New England played in the abolitionist movement—mainly that the number of people in the region willing to engage with the movement helped to tip the social and national political scales against slavery. This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, its leadup and aftermath, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region. 

The weather and scenery matched the Practical Christian reporter’s optimism, and abolitionists could certainly have used a dose of optimism by the summer of 1845. National developments had only made the slave’s cause more dire, despite the rapid spread of abolitionist sentiment around the country’s northern half since the late 1820s. In particular, the dormant issue of Texas annexation had roared back into the abolitionists’ consciousness during the 1844 election season. Enslavers’ designs on expanding their territory into the former Mexican province brought out a host of abolitionist fears—among them, the prospect of reintroducing protection for slavery where it had been legally abolished (by Mexico), and the possibility that the sheer size of the state meant that as many as five new slave states could be carved out of it, flooding Congress with proslavery representatives and Senators to do enslavers’ bidding. Perhaps we can attribute the writer’s optimism to two factors. First, Uxbridge had already become a leader in rural abolitionism in New England, as we will see. Second, Frederick Douglass, famous now in New England, but soon to be the world’s most famous abolitionist, had arrived in town.

The abolitionist movement that radiated out from Black leadership in urban hubs in the 1830s had roots in rural New England, too. Black New Englanders from the countryside had signed up in large numbers to serve the American cause in the Revolutionary War. Enslaved people in rural Massachusetts, most notably Quock Walker and Elizabeth Freeman, held the state to its Revolutionary professions of liberty by suing for their freedom, winning it for themselves and all others enslaved in the state. The ideological makeup of rural Massachusetts towns in the early republic also created conditions favorable for the flowering of abolitionism. Small farming towns promoted personal independence, commitment to the prosperity of all in the community, and the notion that success should derive from the work of one’s own hands or enterprise. The way the system of slavery created dependent classes, funneled prosperity into the hands of few, and generated wealth from the forced labor of others were all antithetical to traditional rural New England values. While these professed values and the region’s Puritan disposition also paradoxically buttressed white supremacy, they nevertheless created a sizeable population amenable to abolitionist organizers who combed the state in the early 1830s, laying the groundwork for a robust movement.

Uxbridge was one such rural town that offered a sympathetic ear to the plight of the enslaved. There is no doubt that this was in large part because of its small Black population (30 people in 1830), which included refugees from slavery like Nancy Adams and entrepreneurs like Cato Willard. But Uxbridge’s churches also played a part. In rural New England, churches (especially Congregational churches) were often the only spaces in town that could hold large audiences, were located on town squares, and provided excellent venues for meetings at which to discuss the intersecting moral, spiritual, and secular matters of the day. The town in the early 1830s was dominated by two Congregational denominations located on opposite sides of the town square—the liberal and humanistic Unitarians, who were by nature inclined toward abolition, and the Evangelical group who, before 1842, had an anti-slavery pastor. Further, the southern part of the town was home to a Quaker meeting whose house was the only one in the region until the late 1830s. The Society of Friends had been the first predominantly white organization to embrace abolition, warming to the cause through its pacifist tenets and abhorrence of the violence that propped up slavery—and the Quakers counted among their adherents the town’s leading civic couple, Lydia and Effingham Capron, who would play an important role throughout the movement’s life.

On July 30, 1832, Arnold Buffum, a hatter by trade, a Quaker in belief, and a fiery speaker and organizer against slavery, gave an anti-slavery and anti-colonizationist speech to the “respectable . . . country village.” He was astonished when nearly all in the audience “cast their mite” and donated money to the New England Anti-Slavery Society. A year later, he found the town still interested in the plight of the “oppressed descendants of Africa,” and then on February 18, 1834, “THREE HUNDRED AND TEN” people signed on to the founding of the Uxbridge Anti-Slavery Society in the Evangelical Congregational church. Five months later, that core had grown to 450. Almost twenty percent of the town had joined!

The second reason for the optimism of the person reporting on the 1845 meeting was that a refugee from slavery, Frederick Douglass, would be in attendance. Douglass was a studied and experienced orator, and had spent the past half-decade on the lecture circuit, employing the type of retail politics abolitionists were famous for—rousing small towns to action not only in the cause of the slave but also the cause of Black Northerners. Douglass had made many friends and endured many mobs (notably in the fight for Black suffrage in nearby Rhode Island). He had some experience with the Worcester County Anti-Slavery Society’s Southern Division, having attended at least a few of its meetings in the past. In early 1844, Douglass made a name for himself as a featured speaker on the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Massachusetts Hundred Conventions tour. However famous that made him, it was nothing compared to what he was on the verge of becoming: Douglass was now a man on the cusp of international stardom. In May of 1845, the autobiography he had been writing since the previous November went to press, and his astonishing story, the fierce denunciations of enslavers, the insightful critique of American hypocrisy, and the dazzling wit that had earned him renown in abolitionist circles could now be consumed in every library and parlor in the North. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was “the most thrilling work which the American press ever issued—and the most important,” proclaimed the Lynn Pioneer, a “lifting of the veil,” according to the Liberator, “better evidence [of ‘the unspeakable wretchedness of the American slave’] than that of a walk around the plantation after dinner with its proprietor,” according to the Boston Courier. It “should be sold as fast as it can be printed,” proclaimed the National Anti-Slavery Standard.  And it was.

With his Narrative flying off bookshelves in anti-slavery headquarters and elsewhere, Douglass appeared at the Unitarian meeting house in Uxbridge knowing that, despite being a now-famous fugitive, he would find a welcoming audience. Douglass addressed Reverend Austin Robbins’s Baptist congregation in Rogerson village, on the north side of town, on Tuesday evening, June 24, 1845, the night before the Worcester County’s subdivision’s meeting. The next day, that beautiful early summer sun bathed the Unitarian church about a mile south as Effingham Capron gaveled the meeting to order in front of a “large crowd.” Some of the most famous white and Black abolitionists were there: William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel J. May, Stephen S. Foster, and Charles Lenox Remond, to name a few. 

Douglass rose that evening to “represent the slave,” speaking “as no one can, who has not felt the cold steel of oppression piercing the soul.” Alluding to his status as a fugitive, he referred to himself as “an outcast, without protection, living in the midst of monuments reared to liberty.”  American steeples, he said, towered to heaven, and yet the country held him and millions of others as slaves—an image “touching beyond description.”

He reserved especial ire for Uxbridge’s Evangelical Congregationalist minister, John Orcutt. Unlike the previous minister who had lent his church to the founding meeting of the Uxbridge Anti-Slavery Society, Reverend Orcutt was a colonizationist—someone despised by abolitionists and one who argued for the “speedy removal” of Black Americans to Africa. The week before the meeting, Orcutt had warned his parishioners against attending the meeting across the town square in the Unitarian church. “If I go bleeding and panting,” Douglass said, “fugitive as I am, to yonder Orthodox church, I am bolted out by your Rev. Mr. Orcutt.” “Shame,” said one of the other ministers, a shout that was echoed through the church “with becoming indignation.” This was a pressing reminder that in Uxbridge, as elsewhere in rural New England, abolitionist sentiment, though predominant in many places, was certainly not universal.

Later that evening, the meeting was addressed by Charles Lenox Remond, a staunch activist who embodied the “hard core” of abolitionism’s twin goals: the immediate end of slavery and civil and political rights for Black Americans. Not yet given the scholarly attention he deserves, Remond came from a family steeped in anti-slavery activism and had been, according to historian Manisha Sinha, the first Black lecturer in favor of immediate abolition. He also spoke against racism and segregation, which were prevalent in the North despite the end of slavery, and in favor of equal rights for women. He, along with Garrison, protested the fact that women were not seated as delegates at the World’s Anti-Slavery Fair in London in 1840 by sitting with the women in the galleries to which they were relegated. In Uxbridge, the commentator covering the meeting wrote that Remond spoke with “eloquence and power,” recounting the “historical facts of the political aggressions of the tyrant South upon our rights as men, regardless of complexion.” Remond spoke twice more the next evening, closing the meeting with “a feeling testimony to the kind treatment which he, as a colored man, had received in Uxbridge.”

Summing it up, the Practical Christian writer called it “one of the happiest and most profitable Anti-Slavery gatherings I ever attended.” The writer also took the time to excoriate John Orcutt, the Congregationalist minister, labeling him a cajoling, “designing priest” who, “by the aid of garbled extracts from the doings and writings of Abolitionists . . . endeavoured to sustain his charge” that abolitionists were infidels. “Such craven conduct will not always close the ear against us,” and that appeared to be the truth: “ . . . among the numerous multitude in constant attendance at our meeting, the testimony was, it is good to be here.”

The writer then ended with a few telling lines. “Uxbridge,” the Practical Christian trumpeted, “is destined to be a green spot in the Anti-Slavery enterprize. Again will the Liberty Ball be rolled through this village; and as auxiliary to this, I predict this successful Convention will realise our highest anticipation.” The “Liberty Ball” is a clear allusion to the abolitionist Liberty Party, a political party which, though still small even by third-party standards, had made quite a name for itself in the most recent national election—possibly even denying Henry Clay the presidency. Just weeks after the meeting discussed here, another abolitionist meeting came to Uxbridge, this one organized by the Liberty Party, and again, Uxbridge residents showed up “en masse.” It was the “best meeting of the kind—some say the very best—they ever attended.” The meeting passed resolutions declaring it “obligatory” that abolitionists exercise their rights at the ballot box, and withdraw their support from political parties and churches who in any way supported the system of slavery. Tellingly, these passed over the opposition of John Orcutt, who attended the meeting presumably to disrupt it. 

In subsequent years, Uxbridge saw other refugees from slavery speak out publicly against the institution. In 1848, John S. Jacobs and another unnamed man originally enslaved in Virginia discussed their escapes from the “prison-house” of the US South. In October 1849, Henry “Box” Brown described to an Uxbridge audience his harrowing, if creative, escape just over six months earlier—he had concealed himself in a box and had himself shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to an anti-slavery office in Philadelphia. Famous orator Sojourner Truth came to the Unitarian church the following year, “a lot of thanks” being “cordially given” to the church and town by Truth.

What does Frederick Douglass’s speech to Uxbridge’s “faithful little band of Abolitionists” teach us? The first thing is that Uxbridge, like other rural New England towns, was perhaps naturally inclined toward growing the abolitionist movement once it came because of the region’s cornerstone ideals of independence, morality, and communal nature. Douglass found fertile ground there, as evidenced by both his willingness to visit despite his legal status as a fugitive, and the tangible effect he had on the town. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, despite rural New England being overwhelmingly white, the influence of Black New Englanders—by circumstance like Frederick Douglass and other refugees from slavery, and by birth like Charles Lenox Remond—is clear and should be centered if we are to tell the full story of the contribution of rural New England, and small towns like Uxbridge, to the movement to abolish slavery. A large red sign facing the town square and the preservation of such an important space are good first steps. But the way we remember the stories like these needs further fleshing out if we are to recognize the true meaning and impact of abolition in rural New England.

 

Further Reading

Secondary Sources

David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism:  Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

Mary Babson Fuhrer, A Crisis of Community:  The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815-1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

James and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time:  Abby Kelley and the Politics of Anti-Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991).

Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

Unitarian Congregation of Uxbridge and Mendon, “Church History from 1668-1994” (https://ucmu.org/history).

 

Primary Sources

Henry Chapin, Address Delivered at the Unitarian Church, in Uxbridge, Mass., in 1864 (Worcester, MA: Press of Charles Hamilton, 1881).

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (Boston: Published at the Anti-Slavery Office, 1845).

Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855).

Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Boston, MA:  De Wolfe & Fiske Co., 1892).

The Emancipator (newspaper).

The Liberator (newspaper).

The Practical Christian (newspaper).

 

This article originally appeared in June 2023.

 

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C. J. Martin is a research historian at Old Sturbridge Village and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Emerson College, and the Rhode Island School of Design. His forthcoming book is entitled Our Earnest Remonstrance: Race, Citizenship and Voting Rights in New England, 1770-1843. His research more broadly examines the voices of Black New Englanders in the Early Republic, and the role they and abolitionists played in shaping the politics of the era.

Many people have guessed that Wheatley wrote this ode for the woman who had raised her from childhood as a slave, Susannah Wheatley. Yet Susannah Wheatley never crossed the Atlantic. The poet addressed her mistress in another poem titled “A Farewel to America. To Mrs. S. W,” but that was in May 1773 when Phillis was about to sail to London while Susannah stayed behind in Boston.

Other identifications of “Mrs. W—” are based on early notes in a copy of Wheatley’s 1773 book at the American Antiquarian Society. Beside “A Farewel to America” someone penned, “Mrs. Susannah Wright,” and then a different someone penciled, “eminent for her Wax Works etc.” Since the “Farewel” poem is addressed to Susannah Wheatley, some scholars guessed that those notes were actually intended for “Ode to Neptune.” However, no one has found a “Susannah Wright” who traveled to England in late 1772, and the eminent waxworks artist was named Patience Wright.

The key to identifying “Mrs. W—” lies in its connection to three other texts linked to Wheatley and also dated October 10, 1772. Those are her poem “To the Earl of Dartmouth,” the secretary of state overseeing the North American colonies; her letter to that peer; and a short biography of her, all transmitted to Lord Dartmouth by a British merchant and officeholder named Thomas Wooldridge. In a November 24 letter Wooldridge described his interaction with the young poet:

While in Boston, I heard of a very extraordinary female slave, who had made some verses on our mutually dear deceased Friend [Rev. George Whitefield]; I visited her mistress, and found by conversing with the African, that she was no Impostor: I asked if she could write on any Subject; she said Yes; we had just heard of your Lordship’s appointment; I gave her your name, which she was acquainted with. She immediately wrote a rough Copy of the inclosed Address & Letter, which I promised to convey or deliver.

I was astonish’d, and could hardly believe my own Eyes. I was present while she wrote and can attest that it is her own production; she shew’d me her Letter to Lady Huntingdon, which I daresay, Your Lordship has seen; I send you an account signed by her master of her Importation, Education &c. they are all wrote in her own hand.

Another description of Wooldridge’s meeting with Wheatley appeared in the June 3, 1773, New-York Journal, clearly either based on a conversation with the merchant or written by him:

A Gentleman who had seen several of the Pieces ascribed to her, thought them so much superior to her Situation, and Opportunities of Knowledge, that he doubted their being genuine—And in order to be satisfied, went to her Master’s House, told his Doubts, and to remove them, desired that she would write something before him. She told him she was then busy and engaged for the Day, but if he would propose a Subject, and call in the Morning, she would endeavour to satisfy him. Accordingly, he gave for a Subject, The Earl of Dartmouth, and calling the next Morning, she wrote in his Presence, as follows . . .

The newspaper then printed Wheatley’s October 10, 1772, letter to Lord Dartmouth, followed by her poem for him. 

Thomas Wooldridge’s wife was named Susanna. On July 12, 1773, the New-York Gazette reported that “Thomas Woolridge, Esq; and his Lady” had embarked for England, just as the poem’s “Mrs. W—” had been preparing to do. We can therefore conclude that Susanna Wooldridge was the inspiration for “Ode to Neptune.” It is not clear whether Mrs. Wooldridge was present in Boston. Wheatley may well have written this poem for a lady she had never met as a unique souvenir for her husband to bring home from his Massachusetts trip.

In October 1772, the Wooldridges had been married a little over a year. Susanna, Thomas’s second wife, was a daughter of the merchant William Kelly, then living in the newly fashionable London neighborhood of Crutched Friars. Kelly did a lot of business back in New York as a landowner and mercantile partner of Abraham Lott, treasurer of the colony. In his will, Kelly promised his new son-in-law “£3,000 in lands in the Provinces of New York and New Jersey” while setting aside £2,000 for his daughter “free from the debts and control of her husband.”

Thomas Wooldridge was rising through British government ranks by attaching himself to men of influence, particularly the Earl of Dartmouth. At the time of his marriage he held multiple posts in the colonial administration—“Provost Marshal General, and Receiver General of his Majesty’s province of East-Florida, also Fort Adjutant and Barrack-master of Fort St. Marks”—and was involved in multiple disputes with his colleagues. Those appointments gave him the prestige to win a London heiress’s hand and fortune. After that wedding Wooldridge returned to America, currying further favor with Lord Dartmouth by sending back letters on what he saw in various ports. 

Wooldridge’s efforts paid off in August 1772 when Dartmouth became secretary of state for North America. The merchant continued to send reports to the earl, adding such fawning phrases as “your precious time may be very ill bestowed in reading my scrawls.” As part of that campaign for favor, Wooldridge sought out the celebrated Phillis Wheatley at the house of “her mistress” in Boston and challenged her to compose a poem about his patron, which he “promised to convey or deliver.” The merchant probably also arranged for the letter and poem Wheatley then wrote to be printed in the New-York Journal, calculating that publication would both promote and please the secretary of state.

“Ode to Neptune” was thus not Phillis Wheatley’s private plea for smooth sailing for her beloved mistress or for an artistic colleague. She wrote it while contributing to Thomas Wooldridge’s effort to impress the Earl of Dartmouth, who she knew had become one of the highest-ranking officials in the British Empire. Providing this visitor with an extra poem for his wife was a way to win Wooldridge’s favor, just as he was angling for Dartmouth’s favor. “Ode to Neptune” also demonstrated Wheatley’s range, as it was a Horatian ode with four metrical feet in most lines rather than her usual rhymed pentameter.

When Wooldridge visited Wheatley, the young poet was starting to seek patronage in Britain instead of relying on local support. In February 1772 she and the Boston printer Ezekiel Russell had tried to collect enough subscriptions to publish a collection of her poetry, but by May the orders had proved disappointing. Wheatley had already sent her tribute to Whitefield to that minister’s patron, the Countess of Huntingdon. In 1772 the wealthy countess sponsored the publication of A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, one of the first memoirs from someone enslaved within the British Empire. The countess also wrote to the New England merchant Richard Cary for information about Boston’s enslaved young poet, and word of that inquiry almost certainly reached the Wheatley household. Thus, Lady Huntingdon came to seem like a promising source of funds for Wheatley’s collection.

Wooldridge wrote that Wheatley “shew’d me her Letter to Lady Huntingdon,” suggesting she thought that would impress him. And he was impressed. As the merchant’s letter noted, Lord Dartmouth and the countess were close, part of the same aristocratic evangelical circle. Thus, in meeting with Wooldridge, demonstrating her writing ability, and giving him poems addressed to his patron and his wife, Wheatley made the most of an unexpected chance to win over potential supporters in the top ranks of British society.

In November 1772, the month after she met Wooldridge, Wheatley sent her manuscript, the selection of verses retailored for a British audience, to London. The printer Archibald Bell “waited upon the Countess of Huntingdon with the Poems” and gained her conditional support for publishing the book. Money and praise from a wealthy British aristocrat thus secured for Wheatley what crowdfunding in her hometown of Boston could not.

Both Wheatley and Wooldridge sailed from America to Britain in mid-1773. In fact, Wheatley embarked two months before the Wooldridges left New York, even though they had been thinking of that voyage back in October. It is possible their paths crossed again in London, but there is no record of a second meeting. Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects was printed in London that fall, dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon. It included both her lines to the Earl of Dartmouth and “Ode to Neptune.” 

After that, Wheatley and Wooldridge’s lives followed surprisingly parallel courses. Both experienced a rise in status, boosted by aristocratic patrons within British imperial society, only to suffer from the disruption of the American Revolution. Wheatley became a published author, gained her freedom, married John Peters, and had children, but could not finance a second collection of poetry in the straitened economy of wartime America. Phillis Peters died young in 1784.

As for Thomas Wooldridge, after his father-in-law William Kelly died in 1774, he became the business partner of Susanna’s brother Henry and assumed her father’s role as a leader among the London merchants doing business in America. Wooldridge met with such prominent advocates for the colonies as Edmund Burke and Josiah Quincy Jr. and testified to Parliament about shipping losses. In November 1775 the Earl of Dartmouth was replaced as Secretary of State, but Wooldridge no longer needed his patronage. London property-owners elected him as an alderman in 1776, and then he was chosen sheriff of London and Middlesex.

By that time, however, the war with America and the death of Henry Kelly in 1776 had forced the firm of Wooldridge and Kelly into bankruptcy. Wooldridge kept his seat as an alderman and the sympathy of the London press through the war—evidently people accepted that the business failure was not his fault. But peace brought an end to that stasis. Citizens now complained that the alderman was corruptly squeezing money from his office. Wooldridge was locked in debtors’ prison in 1783 and had to declare bankruptcy again, this time to a much less understanding response. The other aldermen took the unprecedented step of stripping Wooldridge of his seat. A 1799 publication looked back on him and declared: “Impudence made him, and caused him to be unmade, an Alderman.” Nonetheless, the city continued to provide Susanna Wooldridge with substantial sums, “independent of her husband, for the support of herself and her children.” This pension helped support her through the lawsuits over the Wooldridge and Kelly debts, which lasted for years on both sides of the Atlantic.

Financially broken, Thomas Wooldridge made his way back to America alone. In January 1794, at the age of fifty-four, he died in Boston, ten years after Phillis Wheatley had died in the same town.

 

Further Reading

Vincent Carretta wrote the first thorough biography of Phillis Wheatley, published in 2011 under the title Phillis Wheatley and republished with new material as Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2023). David Waldstreicher’s The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023) analyzes her poetry in the context of specific moments in her life, including a detailed discussion of her response to Wooldridge’s challenge in 1772.

Carretta also edited Wheatley’s Complete Writings for Penguin Classics (2001), building on John Shields’s The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (1988). However, possible new poems continue to be identified, most recently by Waldstreicher (“Anonymous Wheatley and the Archive in Plain Sight: A Tentative Attribution of Nine Published Poems, 1773-1775,” Early American Literature 57, no. 3 (2022): 873-910) and Wendy Raphael Roberts (“‘On the Death of Love Rotch,’ a New Poem Attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters): And a Speculative Attribution,” Early American Literature 58, no. 1 (2023): 155-84.

There are many interesting literary studies of Wheatley’s poetry and explorations of her significance in African American culture. Some discussions of Wheatley are based on myths or misunderstandings, however, and analyses of “Ode to Neptune” based on identifying its “Mrs. W—” as Susannah Wheatley or Patience Wright are among them. James Rawley explored the importance of Wheatley’s entry into the evangelical circle of the Countess of Huntingdon and the Earl of Dartmouth in James A. Rawley, “The World of Phillis Wheatley,” New England Quarterly 50, no. 4 (Dec. 1977): 666-67.

Thomas Wooldridge’s upward career can be tracked through his correspondence in The Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, vol. 2: American Papers (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1895); Charles Loch Mowat, East Florida as a British Province, 1763-1784 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943); and “Debates of a Political Society” in the London Magazine and Monthly Intelligencer, vol. 44 (1775), 333-41. His downward career is evident in The Swindler Detected: or Cautions to the Public (London: G. Kearsly, M. Follingsby, J. Stockdale, 1781); City Biography, Containing Anecdotes and Memoirs of the Rise, Progress, Situation, & Character, of the Aldermen and Other Conspicuous Personages of the Corporation and City of London (London: W. West and C. Chapple, 1799); and a death notice in the Boston Columbian Centinel, January 4, 1794. Ben Saunders has collected material for “The Thomas Wooldridge Biography Project.”

 

This article originally appeared in May 2023.

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J. L. Bell is the proprietor of the Boston1775.net website, offering daily helpings of unabashed gossip about the people of Revolutionary New England. He is the author of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary Warand the study Gen. George Washington’s Home and Headquarters—Cambridge, Massachusetts for the National Park Service.