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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in November 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

The Whitney Legend

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

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

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

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

So goes the legend. What actually happened?

What Actually Happened, Part 1: The Gin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Actually Happened, Part 2: Interchangeable Parts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

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

 

This article originally appeared in October 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Committed

to Mary Jane Meek Hopkins, 1817-1893

 

In the hush of empty archives,

microfilm wheezes under my fingers.

Then, there—the scribbled court document

telling of your commitment

to the asylum, the long list of those

testifying to your lunacy—brother-

in-law, neighbors, the man who

will soon foster your children for a price

and later own your father’s mill.

 

I do not know these witnesses’ intentions.

Just you with six children under eleven

and no way to even add and subtract

yourself. Your husband dead in the ground

too soon. I imagine the impending cold,

your hands blistered now from chopping

firewood, your own hunger, the high

wailing of sniffling babies, manure

piling up in the barnlot, flies hovering.

 

Mary Jane, bless you—somehow,

you got out of that cell they put you in.

By next census, you are living

back at home with all your children,

and no man. You raise them.

Nothing else may be yours, but they are.

The force of that rises over all

the millstones grinding, the men

learning long division.

 

Under Leaves and Vines

 

Alone, I drive across West Tennessee

             into afternoon sun, quiet except

for the semis thundering through

             the trees that wink in the wind

on either side of the highway,

 

as if to prove primeval peace waits

              somewhere beyond swarming traffic

and the lingering ghosts of war.

               These forests veil the truth.

I turn north toward Lexington,

 

through Parkers Crossroads, where

                one hundred sixty years ago

men slaughtered each other

                 in the cotton fields

and fell face-first among

 

the forest’s bullet-blasted trees.

                 Hero or coward didn’t matter.

They died right here, where I pass under

                 seemingly innocent cloudless sky.

On this trip, I drive back

 

through time and breathe

                 the smoke of the burning bodies

of horses, mules, and men,

                 witness woodlands

shattered to rubble, fields riven

 

with deep-dug entrenchments bleeding

                  into the creeks, their waters retching.

All along these routes, up and down

                  towns and counties, over and over

in 1862, farms went up in flames

 

while women and children hid

                  in barns and fields, hoping there

would be something left to eat.

                  I have watched the day-by-day

on an animated map of the Civil War

 

—how the borders moved up and down,

                  back and forth across these plains. Now,

the new grass lies—flat and clean—

                  while alfalfa, corn, and soybeans reach

their apotheosis. My people,

 

most of them, come from this ground,

                   loess and fragipan, loam and silt,

site of layers and layers of suffering.

                   Along with a few remaining affections,

my heart holds this enemy, my homeland.

 

Even if I wish honeysuckle and kudzu

                   could erase the wrongs—that forests would win

real peace—I know the vegetation cannot cover,

                    much less heal, this past. There is perhaps

delusion in still hoping anything can.

 

The Wrong Cause

based on the letters of Confederate soldier

William H. Meek (1837-1864),

who fought at Brice’s Crossroads

and died a few weeks later at Grenada, Mississippi,

of gangrene after being shot in the shoulder

by a Union sharpshooter

 

Further Reading

 

Relevant Family History

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

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

 

Nineteenth-Century Women’s Mental Health and Property Rights

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

More direct accounts and historical focus can be found in:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Civil War in West Tennessee and Northern Mississippi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Attempts at Confrontation and Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Erasure or Black-Out Poetry

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in July 2025.

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

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

 

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

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

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

OH.

OH NO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in June 2025.

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

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

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

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

Diplomatic Spoils

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

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

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

For-Proffit Government

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

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

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

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

Owenism After Utopia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stumping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In and Out of Office

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coroner’s Inquest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

Primary Sources

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

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

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

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

Secondary Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in June 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in May 2025.

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

Within BaKongo thought, spiritual power and authority come from one’s ability to negotiate the powerful, often dangerous, fluid forces of the dead. The world of the living and the world of the dead mirror and influence each other and while the power of the dead could be experienced anywhere, the dead were especially concentrated in forested wetlands like the Dismal Swamp. Accessing the power of the dead was important for enslaved Kongolese people in the Americas because the dead could transform the fates of the living, and in doing so, provided a source of power that the Chesapeake rebels sought to harness to challenge that of enslavers.

The rebellion started with rumors, though no one knows for sure who started them. Virginia Governor William Gooch admitted that he could never determine “the first author.” But by fall of 1730, they were pervasive on plantations in southeast Virginia where Gooch reported hearing of “many meetings and Consultations of the Negros in several Parts of the Country in order to obtain their Freedom.”

The rumors, which had been circulating among enslaved communities in tidewater Virginia since 1729, suggested that the King of England had sent an order in the care of former Governor Alexander Spotswood to “sett all those slaves free that were Christians.” It was also rumored “that the order was suppressed,” by planters in Virginia so as not to lose control of the people they enslaved. This “notion,” Gooch wrote to the Bishop of London, “in their circumstances, [was] sufficient to incite them to Rebellion.”

The association between becoming Christian and emancipation from slavery was well rooted in Virginia where Anglo-Protestants had long assumed that being a Christian and being enslaved were incompatible and where, prior to the mid 1660s, enslaved African and Indigenous people who could demonstrate that they had undergone Christian baptism occasionally sued for their freedom and won. Before the solidification of ostensibly secular racial categories centered around white claims to supremacy, Christianity, or the lack thereof, was the primary determinant in who was and was not legally able to be enslaved. By the time of the Chesapeake Rebellion, however, it had been decades since Virginia had clarified that Christianity and slavery were compatible and conversion and baptism did nothing to change the new converts status as enslaved.

Nevertheless, in 1729, an Anglican minister named James Blair in Virginia expressed skepticism about the motives of enslaved Africans who converted to Christianity in a letter he wrote to the Bishop of London. Enslaved people were, on Blair’s account, “very desirous to become Christians; and in order to it come and give an account of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed and the Ten Commandments, and so are baptized and frequent this church; and the Negro children are now commonly baptized.” However, he was suspicious. “I doubt not some of the Negroes are Sincere Converts; but the far greater part of them little mind the serious part, only and in hopes that they shall meet with so much the more respect, and that some time or other Christianity will help them to their freedom.”

The minister’s solution was, unsurprisingly, more theological education. “I hope their very coming to church,” he added, “will in time infuse into them some better principles than they have had.” Two years later, in the rebellion’s aftermath, Blair lamented, “it is certain that notwithstanding all the precaution we ministers took to assure them that Baptism altered nothing as to their servitude, or other temporal circumstances; yet they were willing to feed themselves with a secret fancy that it did, and that the King designed that all Christian should be made free.”

Despite his attempts to dismiss the association between Christian baptism and emancipation from slavery as foolish, the minister’s letters acknowledged that the Anglican Church was not the only source of spiritual authority, neither in the Dismal Swamp region of southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina, nor anywhere else in the British Empire. Many of the Chesapeake rebels had their own notions about Christianity which were shaped by their broader understanding of the sources of spiritual and political power.

As early as the fifteenth century, Catholic Portuguese missionaries had brought Christianity into the Kongo/Angola region of West Africa, and the Kongo Kingdom had adapted Christianity as its official state religion in the early sixteenth century. After the Kongo Kingdom collapsed in 1710, in part due to civil wars fueled by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, BaKongo people made up most of the Africans enslaved by the English between 1710 and 1740. Historians have argued that among these enslaved Christians were the leaders of the Chesapeake Rebellion, and that they understood the rumors about emancipation through the lens of their Christian heritage. Sensitivity to the influence of BaKongo cosmology on Kongo Christianity provides useful context to that argument and can help us better understand the choices made by leaders of the rebellion.

When Christianity became the state religion in the Kingdom of the Kongo, Kongolese people did not abandon their cosmology; instead, they drew on its spiritual and intellectual resources to interpret Christianity. For example, in the KiKongo language the word “church” is translated as nzo a nkisi, which Portuguese missionaries understood to mean “house of the holy.” However, in its common usage, nzo a nkisi referred to a house of the dead, or a grave; and the Kongolese sometimes referred to Christian missionaries as a ngaga nzo a nkisi, or a “priest of the grave.” Within a broad BaKongo cosmology, Christianity became one resource for negotiating the ever-present forces of the dead.

According to the anthropologists John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, “the world, in Kongo thought, is like two mountains opposed at their basis and separated by the ocean. At the rising and setting of the sun the living and the dead exchange day and night.” (34) The realm of the dead, called mpemba in KiKongo, is a kind of mirror opposite of that of the living that nonetheless pervades it. Bodies of water, whether they be the Congo River, the Atlantic Ocean, or the large freshwater Lake Drummond in the heart of the Dismal Swamp, were thought to separate the two realms, and their reflecting surfaces were understood as a place where one could peer into and encounter mpemba.

In addition to dwelling beneath the waters, the dead congregated in forests and heavily wooded areas, referred to as mfinda in KiKongo. Central to BaKongo cosmology was an awareness that the material world of earth and water and plants and animals was inseparable from and replete with the unseen realm of spiritual forces, especially the powerful dead. Trees, with their roots reaching down and out into the realm of the dead and their above-ground branches mirroring this pattern in the realm of the living, played an important role in connecting the spaces of the living and the dead.

Beyond the Dismal Swamp, these Kongolese understandings of the dead influenced black folklore in the South Carolina Lowcountry where, for example, forested swamps were associated with the land of the dead. Perhaps this is why, especially in swampy regions of the Americas, enslaved people from the Kongo region had a reputation for being quick to run away or rebel.

Nine years after the Chesapeake Rebellion in Virginia, an enslaved Kongolese man called Jemmy and about twenty other Kongo-affiliated enslaved people, gathered on a fall Sunday along the banks of the Stono River, near Charleston, South Carolina. There, they robbed a local store for guns and ammunition. Then, inspired by rumors that Spanish Catholics in Florida were promising freedom to fugitives from slavery in British colonies, the group began marching south towards St. Augustine and the Florida wetlands, killing white people and burning down houses along the way until their rebellion was suppressed by colonial forces.

 

The choices the Stono rebels made likely reflected the influence of BaKongo cosmology. As they marched, they beat drums and danced a war dance in accordance with Kongolese military cosmologies. Their choices also reflected their Kongo Christianity which was shaped by that cosmology. The rebellion broke out on a Catholic feast day devoted to the Virgin Mary and they fashioned banners that may have been affiliated with Kongolese celebrations of Mary. Marian devotion played an important role in Kongo Christianity. Her statues, for example, were often treated as minkisi which, in BaKongo thought, are materializations of the power of the dead, “agents” capable of protecting, healing, and harming.

This dynamic and evolving minkisi tradition inspired the use of ritual objects in the Americas like prendas in Cuba, pacquets-congo in Haiti, and conjure bags (sometimes known as “tricks” or “hands”) in the U.S. South. In a vast forested wetland like the Dismal Swamp, a skilled conjuror would find an ample supply of the roots, herbs, and animal parts required to construct conjure bags and therefore harness the power of the dead concentrated in the swamp and deploy it to transform the fates of the living. From this perspective, the decision of the Chesapeake rebels to flee into the Dismal Swamp might be understood to reflect the influence of their African cosmology just as the rumors that motivated their rebellion likely reflect their Kongo Christianity.

From the swamp, as John Brickell wrote in his 1737 The Natural History of North Carolina, the Chesapeake rebels “committed many outrages against the [white] Christians” of the region. Unfortunately, Brickell does not elaborate on these “outrages”, and Governor Gooch’s early dispatches to London regarding the rebellion were lost at sea. Perhaps the rebels raided nearby storehouses, stealing food and supplies, as Robin and Mingo had done in nearby Middlesex County in 1713. Or maybe they sought to kill planters and overseers in the region as Angola Peter and others had conspired to do along the lower James River before their wide-reaching plot was uncovered in 1710.

Whatever “outrages” occurred, alarmed enslavers and colonial officials responded quickly, sending out militias and recruiting local tributary Indians familiar with the swampy region, especially from the Pasquotank community, to suppress the rebellion. At least twenty-nine rebels were captured and executed. Those who evaded capture likely stayed hidden in the Dismal Swamp. Evidence of post-in-ground structures deep in the swamp interior, dated by archeologists to around 1730, may be a trace of the Chesapeake rebels. If so, it suggests that they intended to establish themselves relatively permanently in the swamp.

In the rebellion’s aftermath, Governor Gooch ordered that all overseers and militiamen “repairing to their respective Churches or Chappels on Sundays or Holy Days to carry with them their Arms to prevent any Surprise thereof in their absence when slaves are most at Liberty and have greatest opportunity for that purpose.” He also ordered regular patrols of the swampy region. The Dismal Swamp had long been considered a backwater “refuge for our renegades” by powerful Virginians, but in the aftermath of the 1730 Chesapeake Rebellion they increasingly associated it with the existential threat of enslaved rebellion. Many began talking of draining the swamp, though serious efforts to do so would not begin until the 1760s and would never be fully realized.

The Chesapeake Rebellion had exposed the limits of planter sovereignty in the region. Not only could they not hope to control the people they claimed as their property in the Dismal Swamp, they also could not control notions of spiritual authority, or even the meaning of Christianity, for the people they enslaved. By foregrounding the role of BaKongo inspiration, we can appreciate the Chesapeake Rebellion as one site of the broader enslaved and maroon struggles for not only political, but also social and spiritual, autonomy in the Greater Caribbean and throughout the Americas.

 

Further Reading:

Primary sources on the Chesapeake Rebellion include John Brickell’s The Natural History of North Carolina (1737) and correspondences between colonial officials and authorities in London which are archived in the Fulham Palace Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library in London. Secondary sources include Anthony Parent Jr.’s Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (2003) and Charles F. Irons’ The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (2008). On the use of Kongo (with a “K’) and associated terms see John M. Janzen’s essay, “Kongo Atlantic Diaspora” in obo in African Studies. On Kongo cosmology see John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire (1974). A classic study on BaKongo influence in Africa and the Americas is Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1984). My use of “inspiration” as a concept is inspired by Todd Ramón Ochoa’s Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba (2010). On the minksi (nkisi, sing.) tradition and its relationship to conjure bags in the U.S. South see Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African and Afro-Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (2007), especially the chapter titled “Minksi, Conjure Bags, and the African Atlantic Religious Complex.” My discussion here is also informed by John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4 (1993). On the dead and forests, in particular, see Ras Michael Brown’s essay “‘Walk in the Feenda’: West-Central Africans and the Forests in the South Carolina-Georgia Lowcountry” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (2009), edited by Linda M. Heywood. On the Stono rebellion see Mark M. Smith’s  edited volume Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (2005); especially the interpretive essays by John K. Thornton and Mark M. Smith. Daniel Sayers’ A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp (2014) is the standard source on the archeological traces of maroon communities in the Dismal Swamp.

 

This article originally appeared in May 2025.

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Ryne Beddard received his PhD in Religious Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, with a concentration in Religion in the Americas. His research and writing focus on the intersection of religion, race, and place in the history of the U.S. South and Greater Caribbean.

Beyond just meaningful, work is required of all who can. Much of the intellectual and emotional labor necessary to produce that conceptual common sense—like the physical labor necessary to build America’s literal infrastructure—came from those on the economic margins. Not only did poor people and people of color literally build America, but they also built the assumption that labor makes people worthy, a punishing, disciplinary cultural norm.

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media. Carmody’s first chapter studies the claims made by Civil War veterans seeking government pensions. At nearly 40% of the federal budget, Civil War pensions anticipated social welfare programs like Social Security, including corresponding debates over government so-called handouts and deservingness (33). 

Black veterans in the late nineteenth century faced particular difficulties receiving benefits, often because formerly enslaved soldiers lacked prior records. Contemporaneous Black uplift narratives—success stories from postbellum Black figures, like Booker T. Washington—also offered a cudgel with which opponents of pensions could lambast veterans as lazy. If poor, formerly enslaved Black workers could make it in America, antagonists argued, why did veterans need government assistance. While Black veterans struggled to get their benefits, stories of Black bootstrapping success were used to dismantle the program itself.

Even though Carmody rarely discusses literature in the traditional sense, his training as a scholar of print culture helps guide the reader through the changing paper forms he discusses. In the case of Civil War pensions, we see how written narratives of wartime disability transform into fill-in-the-blank affidavit templates. And in the second chapter, on charity giving, Carmody demonstrates how as social workers standardized their paperwork, so too did those who asked for money. At the Piney Woods school in Mississippi, for example, Black students “worked” for their tuition by sending form letters soliciting donations. Alongside social work, which disciplined itself through procedures like fill-in-the-blank templates, fundraising was similarly professionalized through form letters and solicitation programs by student workers. 

The project of making work central to American culture occurred not only on the page but in other media as well. Film scholars have discussed how experiments in moving photography began with studies of animal and human bodies. As Carmody writes, it is now a “truism of film history that popular cinema was made possible” by Etienne-Jules Marey and Edward Muybridge’s “study of movement” (125). Early forays included films of “pathological location” which captured the motion of people with disabilities (130).

But Carmody tells a new story about the mutually beneficial relationship between early filmmakers and business consultants (often one in the same). Rather than merely producing academic experiments in movement, these early cinematographers worked closely with (or were themselves hired) to employ film to make labor more efficient. In fact, filmmaker-consultants like Lillian and Frank Gilbreth followed not only from “the ‘efficiency craze’ of the early twentieth century or the entrenchment of the Fordist economy,” but also from “the labor ideology of social welfare provision”: all people, including disabled people, should work (138). So, though the project to use film to standardize the movements of disabled workers often failed, such as the Gilbreths’ work with epileptic patients, it did bolster that ongoing assumption that everyone—even disabled bodies—ought to work, and to work as efficiently as possible.

For some of the industries Carmody studies, the imperative to put people to work seems obvious. That strategy consultants like the Gilbreths aimed to maximize the labor of their clients’ employees makes sense—that was their job after all. But some of these institutional histories tell less predictable stories about emerging sectors, such as Carmody’s chapter on the academy’s interest in African American work songs. Early twentieth-century sociologists of music captured the sounds and rhythms of songs not only to preserve and study culture, but because the songs “compelled workers to labor more efficiently”; songs could help academics explain and reproduce efficient labor. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that disciplines which emerged alongside colonial projects were also complicit in exploitative capitalism.

 

 

 

Even across this broad sweep of institutions and genres bent on making work a cultural mandate, some people turned to more liberatory projects. An early postbellum movement for slave reparations copied the Civil War pensions, down to the very blank-form templates; activists like William R. Vaughn in his “Freedman’s Pension Bill,” argued that formerly enslaved people had earned benefits just like veterans. And despite their quest for efficiency, the strategy-consultant Gilbreths ultimately used “motion study to find the best fit between a specific working body and a specific working environment” (145).

That question of “fit” also guided the PhD sociologist Annie Marion MacLean, who studied work songs not with an ear for maximizing labor but for catching unity, collaboration, and contentment. MacLean serves as an example of someone who resisted the exploitative mission of the academy both to maximize others’ labor and as a workplace itself. A disabled teacher, MacLean resisted the rhythms of university life, turning to correspondence courses, which better allowed her and her students to “encounter one another in mutual recognition” (195).

Carmody’s rich discussion offers a convincing, if quite dense, book-length argument. Though he draws on theory as wide-ranging as New Historicism, print culture, Marxian analysis, and feminist labor history, Carmody’s points are usually more formal and historical than theoretical. Carmody shies away from conceptual battles despite a series of long, informative, discursive footnotes on subjects like Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Afro-pessimism, and Charles Richmond Henderson. As he himself writes in an early footnote, “my goal, however, is not to develop a cohesive social theory” (226n10). Given the preponderance of archival richness and formal analysis, one wishes Carmody had thrown elbows a bit more and marked out with more confidence how his own story changes our understanding not just of the history, but of the theory, of work.

Because if we can understand that the assumption we all must work—and that we must work as efficiently as possible—is itself a historical construction only about 150 years old, how should we change our approach to this activity where we spend so much of our lives? Should we work slower and less efficiently? Is finding value in our labor always exploitative? 

Carmody’s turn in the book’s coda to government-funded basic income is instructive. Whether we find work meaningful or not matters less than the fact that it is required—a requirement built up by decades of cultural representation that Carmody explicates with great skill—and a requirement that programs like basic income might ease. When we let go of work as a requirement we might be led away from racist tropes, ableist efficiency standards, and punishing societal expectations. We might also move towards a safety net built less around employment than around common humanity. We might labor less because we find it necessary and instead find motivation in collaboration and in craft.

 

Further Reading:

For a bit of the long history of scholarship on labor under capitalism, consider Karl Marx’s Capital, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism including the new edition’s introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley (2020), and Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back (2021), among many others. Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers (2002) and Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003) serve as useful guides for print culture in this and an earlier period of American history. For some of the touchstone primary source texts explored in this book, see Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life (1903), and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

 

This article originally appeared in April 2025.

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Max Chapnick is a research fellow at the New York Historical, having recently served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate at Northeastern after earning his PhD at Boston University in English and American literature in 2023. His scholarly work appears in American Periodicals, J19, New England Quarterly, and elsewhere. 

 

 

Without text, these prints nonetheless issue a pointed admonition: avoid the tobacco habit! The absence of written commentary allows the imagery to speak for itself, targeting especially the young and impressionable, and their parents. The young girl’s presence in the print is important, too, though she is not partaking. Women were at the forefront of many anti-vice campaigns of the century, notably those championing temperance from alcohol but also abstinence from tobacco. By the latter half of the century, opposition to tobacco was rising rapidly, led not by governmental health directives but by moral conviction and domestic ideals. Figures like Margaret Woods Lawrence believed that tobacco use was not simply a moral failing but a reflection of deeper cultural and economic forces—ones that reformers sought to change but that, like vice itself, proved persistent. Even as these early movements laid the groundwork for future systematized public health initiatives, their impact was uneven, shaped by the same classed and racial biases that would define later governmental efforts at vice control. The imagery in these prints, stark and persuasive, marks an early attempt to instill restraint. Yet, as history shows, the boundaries of “clean living” would continue to be contested, whether in the age of cigarette prohibition, temperance, or, later, the rise of vaping.

In the broader temperance era, dominated by women reformers, tobacco was often seen as yet another corrosive vice, akin to alcohol or gambling in its corrupting influence on character. Reformers linked tobacco use to a deterioration of social and familial values, a habit that disrupted the sanctity of the home. It was a moral battle; tobacco was a barrier to men’s responsibility toward family and a threat to the moral fabric of society. These women—mothers, wives, and sisters—witnessed how men’s indulgence in tobacco and alcohol often led them away from family duties and down a path to moral and spiritual decline.

One such woman, mostly forgotten today though prolific of pen in her time, Margaret Woods Lawrence, championed the anti-tobacco cause. Recognizing the vital role women could play in the cause, she dedicated her book The Tobacco Problem (1885) in this way: “To you, my young countrywomen, I dedicate this book, because the solution of the tobacco problem lies very much in your hands.” By the time she wrote Tobacco Problem, Lawrence was already well known, though typically by her pseudonym Meta Lander, as author of sentimental, moral novels such as Marion Graham (1861; revision, 1890) and Esperance (1865) as well as hagiography such as Light on the Dark River (1853), a memoir of Henrietta Hamlin, a missionary in Turkey. Lawrence’s reputation and wide circle of correspondents and contacts ensured that her writings on tobacco and smoking reached a wide audience.

A friend and correspondent of Frances Willard and other reformers, Lawrence possessed an excellent genealogy, one of considerable moral authority, and was of a sisterhood of prominent writers. Born into American Calvinist nobility at Andover, her father was eminent clergyman and professor Leonard Woods, one of the first generation of faculty at Andover Theological Seminary. Though the seminary’s faculty and student body consisted entirely of men, the women who were connected to the place made even longer-lasting contributions to American letters and reform. Another writer of the day, Sarah Loring Bailey, wrote in her history of Andover: “There have been forty professors [in the history of the seminary], but their wives and daughters, six women, have published books which have had a circulation of at least a million copies.” No doubt, Bailey vastly under-represented the circulation of those women’s works (because one of them was Harriet Beecher Stowe), but she rightly emphasizes the wide readership of the reform works penned by the women of Andover.

Margaret Woods Lawrence, one of the more successful of those women, was thus born into an atmosphere and bloodline of moral propagationists, and even her sentimental novels were examples of religious instruction. Her husband was a well-known clergyman as well as a peace advocate, and together they imbued the next generation of their family with the spirit and action of moral reform. Lawrence’s most touching and personal works are of her family, The Broken Bud (1861), written in memory of her daughter Carrie, who died in childhood, and Reminiscences of the Life and Work of Edward A. Lawrence, Jr (1900), a tribute to her son, a missionary, pastor, and social-settlement reformer who died in his early 40s, preceding her in death.

Lawrence’s love and admiration for both her husband and son (their family letters to each other are spirited, funny, and warm) inspired in her a concern for the sons and husbands of others, for American manhood generally, its moral constitution and the example it set. Lawrence did not challenge the privileged position of men in her world, but she did wish to assert her wifely/motherly influence to reform and cleanse the dirtier habits of men. Her influence with her husband and son succeeded; both abstained from tobacco and (eventually) alcohol as well. Lawrence writes with pride of her son who, even in his travels in Europe: “on the tobacco question he was decided, and notwithstanding the constant temptations, he never yielded, even although a surrender would have enabled him to enjoy many discussions from which the nicotine atmosphere drove him away.” That son, Edward Jr., for his part, became fully devoted to the anti-tobacco cause, though he enjoyed occasionally teasing his mother for her tireless work. On finding out she was reading from her Tobacco Problem to patients in a sanitarium, he wrote to her (in a letter she reproduced in Reminiscences): “I feel very much like scolding you. Away at a Health-Cure, yet so full of tobacco. You think you can’t help it, but that is just the trouble. If you dropped one thing, you would take up two more. I shall add that one of the evils of tobacco is that it is wearing my mother out.”

Lawrence’s anti-tobacco reform work, fueled by her personal connections and a profound sense of maternal responsibility, did not challenge the privileged place of men in her society. Instead, she sought to exert her maternal influence to purify men’s habits and guide them toward healthier, morally sound lives. The tobacco cause became her own reformist crusade, aimed particularly at saving impressionable boys from the seductive lure of “the weed.”

Tobacco companies targeted boys, a practice that infuriated reformers. Trading cards and badges packed with cigarettes enticed young boys—that sort of advertising ploy especially angered Lawrence, worried as she was about the deepening smoking habit among the young. (The famous Honus Wagner baseball card, often cited as the most valuable such trading card, for example, was originally packaged with cigarettes by the American Tobacco Company.)

Amusingly, in her widely circulated The Tobacco Problem, Lawrence praised the advertising cards and tokens proposed and distributed by the Anti-Tobacco League, which itself began a counter-solution by offering “Pledge Cards, Badges and Certificates” to boys who agreed not to smoke. It would be unlikely to find any of those particular enticements competing in price with a Honus Wagner baseball card today, so one suspects that their appeal even then may have paled in comparison to the tobacco cards. Still, many such certificates and badges were issued around the country, achieving some small level of success at least.

Lawrence also decided to directly address the advertising targeting boys. While her lengthy compendium The Tobacco Problem was intended for adult readers (she was encouraged to write it by her friend Frances Willard, whose WCTU had just that year, 1885, instituted a Department for the Overthrow of the Tobacco Habit), she distilled that collection of research on tobacco use into a much shorter pamphlet, “An Open Letter to Boys.”  The “Open Letter” was distributed not in book form but as a “penny paper,” a series produced by the WCTU (Lawrence’s “Open Letter” was no. 27) and sold by them for 100 copies for $1. Reformers could thus order a large stack and distribute them widely among boys. In the “Open Letter,” she tells “Tom, or Harry, or whatever your name may be,” many horrifying accounts of tobacco use, including this: “Some people may say that [tobacco] will do you good. A boy of fourteen who had a severe toothache was told this; so he bought fifteen cents’ worth of tobacco, and, smoking it all, he fell down senseless and died.”

Her longer work addressed men, not boys, and often focused on the man’s role as provider for his family. Lawrence regularly referred to the costs associated with tobacco use, emphasizing that the money men spent on its consumption could instead be used for beneficial societal investments. She liked to draw dramatic, attention-grabbing examples, such as tobacco funding being redirected to finance “two railroads round the earth” or building “a hundred thousand churches.” But even more than the lost opportunity of social investment, Lawrence repeatedly remarked on tobacco’s financial toll on the household, where wives often sacrificed because of their husbands’ smoking habits, arguments alcoholic opponents also frequently presented. “How many a family is cramped for the necessaries of life,” she writes, “because the husband and father will not give up his cigar!” On the other hand, once a man gave up his habit, family fortunes saw a much better chance of rising. Lawrence reported on one husband and father, who, after realizing how much money he was spending on tobacco, decided to quit. He began depositing his saved tobacco money, and, eventually, he used this fund to build a house, which he humorously named his “smoke-house.”

Lawrence’s work was a compendium, presenting research from medical men in readable digest form. Tobacco’s physiological effects were an important part of those scientific observations—the outward expressions of inner “soiling,” both physical and spiritual. She not only cited cases of nicotine poisoning, emphasizing its dangers for youth, but also emphasized the moral lesson she inferred from the scientific literature and lectures. For example, she discussed how the experiments of professor C.H. Bumpus showed that tobacco negatively affected the central nervous system of small animals, extrapolating the potential harm to human users—his claim—with her own reading of the situation as one of spiritually lost youth. These early “scientific” observations of Bumpus and the other physicians cited in her work, while anecdotal by modern standards, bolstered her claims about the physical and spiritual risks posed by smoking.

Lawrence’s own educated, upper middle-class family often enjoyed and discussed books, visited art museums, and attended lectures. Those sorts of cultural experiences, she believed, were important for family development. She reminded selfish, smoking fathers and husbands: “Books, music, pictures, excursions with the children to the seaside or the mountains, a thousand and one little refinements and brighteners of the dull routine of life—all are swallowed up by his rapacious maw!” His smoke-filled maw, at that.

Even worse, sometimes far more, was lost than cultural outings. She cited Methodist Episcopal Bishop Harris, for example, who claimed that “the Methodist Church spends more for chewing and smoking than it gives toward converting the world.” No doubt the pastor was sincere in his words; no doubt, too, the anecdote rested even more heavily than the accumulated smoke from his pipe on the Christian man who valued Christian mission work. The scientific observation, paired with the moral and religious anecdote, served as Lawrence’s two-pronged approach to persuading the reader who was both rational and religious.

Margaret Woods Lawrence’s work was also intertwined with contemporaneous societal attitudes about class, race, and immigration. Lawrence’s work spoke directly to men of her own class, characteristic of the reform era’s white, Protestant, middle-class sensibilities. In The Tobacco Problem, she shared with that audience concerns regarding urbanization and the association of tobacco with immigrant laborers, particularly in San Francisco’s tobacco factories, where she notes the involvement of “Chinese lepers.” Similarly, Lawrence’s association of tobacco use with “barbaric” practices by indigenous peoples and African laborers reflects broader colonialist and racial perspectives embedded in reformist discourses. Her work never focused on those dynamics, but always, lingering at the window of the first-class rail car was the specter of the smoke of the street and the port, infiltrating “respectable” spaces where it was not wanted by respectable people. If the Black or Chinese laborer or new immigrant was not entirely Other in her Christian economy of a brotherhood of believers, he was, at least, “less than,” it seems, on his way to becoming a clean, sober, smoke-free, respectable citizen, just not there yet.

Probably the most startling comparison Lawrence drew in The Tobacco Problem is equating tobacco addiction with slavery. She wrote bluntly that tobacco users were “as truly slaves as were our Southern negroes” and that their “fetters are as tightly riveted.” Lawrence, friend of many abolitionists including Harriet Beecher Stowe, was no doubt inspired by the success of abolitionists’ writing a couple of decades before. By likening tobacco use to recently abolished enslavement, Lawrence condemned the habit not simply as a personal vice but as a system of control that compels submission from its users. The comparison, rather shocking to our eyes, was nonetheless an often-repeated one at the time.

Lawrence’s alignment with other anti-vice crusaders, such as Frances Willard, reflected her gendered and religious views of the world and her work. While she saw herself as working with faith-based, reform women, she saw herself as under the guidance and instruction of men, particularly pastors and doctors, and she did not directly align herself with secular reformers such as Anthony Comstock. Lawrence’s ethics were always self-consciously Christian ones. By linking tobacco use to a larger framework of societal decay, Lawrence positioned her work within the broader anti-vice movement of the late nineteenth century, though her work remained always a moral authority inspired by her faith.

Though none of Margaret Woods Lawrence’s works remained in print after her death, the anti-tobacco movement she helped pioneer laid the groundwork for later public health campaigns. While her contemporaries may have viewed smoking as a moral failing or vice, her broader critiques—including financial irresponsibility, cultural degradation, and health implications—foreshadowed the systemic approaches to vice control, along with their continued and ever-present classed and racial biases, we see still today. Revisiting her work offers a lens to understand how nineteenth-century reformers grappled with deeply ingrained social behaviors and systemic problems, and how their work—so triumphant on many fronts, including, eventually, alcoholic temperance and suffrage—sometimes failed to convince, initially. While no-smoking zones are common now, and have been for some time—and the smoke-free public transportation we enjoy would have brought joy to Lawrence’s heart—the tempered act of vaping, say, finds a way to sneak into those “clean zones.”

In the decades since the 18th and 21^st Amendments, though, the tide has certainly shifted in anti-tobacco’s favor. Though nothing like the (later repealed, of course) 18^th amendment crowned the anti-tobacconists efforts, decades later, in 1964, when the U.S. Surgeon General would issue his groundbreaking report on the dangers of smoking. I’m (just) old enough to remember old ashtrays lingering on in cars and even airplanes, but I’ve never been legally allowed to light up on a flight, even as I enjoy a mid-air cocktail or two. No, the anti-tobacconists would not meet much systemic success in the 19th century, yet had she lived an extraordinarily long life and were able to see today’s ubiquitous “No Smoking” signs, or the warnings labels on locked-up tobacco products, Margaret Woods Lawrence and her fellow anti-tobacconists would no doubt be very pleased indeed. Light up? Pass!

Further Reading:

Sarah Loring Bailey, Historical Sketches of Andover: Comprising the Present Towns of North Andover and Andover (Boston: Houghton, 1880).

Eric Burns, The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, Gender and the Social Gospel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

Washington Gladden, Church and Parish Problems: Vital Hints and Helps for Pastor, Officers, and People Edited by Meta Lander [Margaret Woods Lawrence] (New York: Thwing, 1911).

Jake Frederick, Riot!: Tobacco, Reform, and Violence in Eighteenth-century Papantla, Mexico 1st ed., (Liverpool University Press, 2016).

Meta Lander [Margaret Woods Lawrence], The Broken Bud: Or, Reminiscences of a Bereaved Mother (New York: Carter and Brothers, 1861).

Meta Lander [Margaret Woods Lawrence], Esperance (New York: Sheldon, 1865).

Meta Lander [Margaret Woods Lawrence], Marion Graham: or, “Higher than Happiness” (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee, 1861).

Meta Lander [Margaret Woods Lawrence], The Tobacco Problem (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1885).

Margaret Woods Lawrence, Reminiscences of the Life and Work of Edward A. Lawrence, Jr. (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1900), 71 and 216.

Thomas R. Marshall, Public Opinion, Public Policy, and Smoking: The Transformation of American Attitudes and Cigarette Use, 1890-2016 1st ed., (Blue Ridge Summit: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2016).

Carol Mattingly, Well-tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998).

James B. Salazar, Bodies of Reform: the Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

 

This article originally appeared in April 2025.

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Brian Fehler (Ph.D. Texas Christian University ,2005) is a professor of English and Texas Woman’s University, where he teaches graduate courses in history of rhetoric and feminist rhetorics and undergraduate courses in American studies and expository writing. A Lifetime Member of the Rhetoric Society of America, his articles have appeared in Rhetoric Review; RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly; GLR: Gay and Lesbian Review; Literature and Belief, and elsewhere. In his work, he employs methods of feminist rhetorical historiography and rhetorical circulation to recover and animate discourses of the marginalized of the past.