From roughly 1872 until his compulsory retirement from crime some forty years later, Kelly cut a swath through the maritime underworld of the Pacific Northwest. Local lore has it that he knew every inlet and back channel between Olympia, Washington, and Vancouver Island. Accounts pair him with the equally infamous Ben Ure, who is alleged to have combined cunning seamanship with outright brutality. Kelly’s story intersects also with the turbulent transformation of the region. That transformation contributed to the displacement of Indigenous peoples, the boomtown rise of Seattle, the tightening web of U.S. and Canadian law enforcement, and the cross-border networks of Chinese labor migration and the narcotics trade.

Separating fact from folklore in Kelly’s life is no easy task. Secondhand reminiscences and nautical gossip layer much of the available information. Aged and sensational newspaper accounts deepen the difficulty. Records are so sketchy that one can’t be sure whether he served two sentences in federal prison or seven. Nor is the historical record clear about whether he kept the Chinese people safe when smuggling them or tossed them overboard if Customs officials threatened. Sifting the verifiable from the embellished is therefore all but impossible. What I aim to do is share the claims and evidence that others have presented and let readers here decide.

His story is worth rehearsing for its relevance today. A trade war that was ongoing at that time continues. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Canadian border as porous as Mexico’s presently is. The U.S. was assessing duties on Canadian goods. To avoid paying them to his government, Kelly often dodged legal obligation to share his ship manifests. His story is pertinent also with the tariffs on Canada by the current U.S. presidential administration and the detainment and deportation of immigrants to the U.S. whom the government deems to be illegal. As in Kelly’s time, too, immigrants still face perceptions that they rob jobs and strip resources. Yet another point of convergence is fentanyl today and opium then, both substances opioids and both deriving from China, though the deadly fentanyl derives from precursor products in China.

Hazy Origins

Born in Britain in 1845, according to his genealogy in Family Search, Kelly served in the British Army, after which he sailed the high seas and gained the skills he deployed in his future work. It is said he landed in New Orleans during the Civil War on September 2, 1861, and joined an infantry named the Louisiana Tigers. If so, he was only sixteen. Both his names were common enough among Irish immigrants that mistaken identities are likely. Angry after the South lost the Civil War, he vowed that he would “never earn an honest living under the stars and stripes.” And so, he smuggled what goods he could. Products from Canada were being assessed steep customs duties, much like U.S. tariffs in 2025, and there Kelly saw an opportunity. Arrested in 1872 while smuggling silk from Canada and fined, he readily paid it to jump back in the game. The Tacoma Times and other newspapers place his birthdate between 1837 and 1839.

Physically he was 5’5,” his great-great-grandson Tom Day tells me, and he likely died in Los Angeles, not Louisiana. His dark hair receded in the decades that he plied the Salish Sea. Some fellow residents viewed him as “a tough customer. He had a round head, thick brown hair, tousled and uncombed, and a bushy beard grown up high on his cheek bones, so stiff and wiry it thrust forward at a truculent angle from his chin.” Bowlegged when these words were written, he also had bloodshot eyes and “wore a thin shirt and overalls—both dirty—and apparently nothing else. His feet were bare and so browned that evidently this was their usual state.” Those overalls became a signature. A mural in Anacortes, Washington, displays his image in overalls today.

Later photos show him shaven and shorn for appearances in court or—when he failed to offer legal alibi for his behavior—clad in prison stripes. His biggest boats were the Alert and the Katy Thomas, the Katy a 38-foot sloop that sported four sails, a steering wheel, and a broad beam of 12 feet. His sailing skills tilted that big boat over to its gunwale in rough seas. Built in 1894 on Waldron Island, it served him well till 1907. The Salish Sea, as the map here shows, is an inland water body shared by British Columbia and Washington state. Arrested innumerable times, Kelly paid thousands of dollars in fines. He lost a Whitehall rowboat and the Alert to confiscation, and he wore prison garb for many years in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. By some accounts he served seven terms in that prison and was in his seventies when he emerged the final time.

His domestic life was equally chaotic. “He married Lizzie Kotz in 1877 when she was sixteen and he was thirty-two. They had nine children in quick succession,” McDonald wrote, though Family Search gives their marriage date as 1878. Lizzie was an Indigenous woman of the Musqueam Tribe in British Columbia; Tom Day told me. In 1878, the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people were a Coast Salish nation living primarily at the mouth of the Fraser River in what is now Vancouver, maintaining deep cultural ties to their traditional lands while facing increasing displacement and restriction following British colonial land seizures and the Indian Act. A Canadian federal statute passed in 1876 by the Parliament of Canada, formally titled “An Act to amend and consolidate the laws respecting Indians,” the Indian Act governed (and still governs, in amended form) the legal status and the rights of First Nations peoples in Canada.

The couple built a cabin on the southwest corner of Guemes Island, a site thereafter dubbed Kelly’s Point. In time, they bought a 360-acre parcel on Sinclair Island, whose title was placed in her name to thwart confiscation because of his crimes. That title transfer confirms he never planned to earn his living within the limits of the law. One son drowned by tumbling down a well on the Sinclair property, leaving them eight kids to raise. Kelly was so often arrested and incarcerated that he depleted Lizzie’s patience and the funds his illicit pursuits had accrued. In October 1883, their Guemes Island property was auctioned publicly, “to satisfy the judgment against said defendant.” Unable to maintain the home and kids, Lizzie sold parts of that property first in 1884 and again in 1886 to discharge legal judgements. The Skagit Land Trust now owns the Kelly’s Point Conservation Area, a 27-acre property that includes 2,100 feet of shoreline.

Asian Trade

In the late 19th century, Chinese immigrants were benefiting the U.S. economy. Many communities in the West welcomed them, regardless of their legal status. They provided labor for agriculture, logging, mining, and manufacturing; dug quarries by hand and helped build the transcontinental railroad; and contributed to the growth of towns and cities through service industries such as laundries and restaurants. At the same time, Chinese immigrants were forced to endure discrimination and lower wages than their white counterparts. They faced hostility and prejudice due to the perception that they robbed locals of jobs. Fueled by economic anxieties and racial prejudice in the 1880s, white agricultural laborers in present-day Issaquah, Washington, murdered Chinese laborers. The perpetrators, brought to trial, were acquitted of their charges.

Lawrence Kelly capitalized on the Asian exchange. “The Vancouver–Puget Sound area was widely known as a ‘smugglers’ paradise’ in the opium trade, and Chinese and their American or Canadian guides used the same boats and routes to make the journey to the United States.” Men like Kelly, already active in the cross-border smuggling of products such as opium and wool, found a lucrative new niche by smuggling Chinese people, following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which curtailed lawful Chinese immigration to the U.S. (British Columbia would later impose the same curtailment.) Victoria became a hub for such immigrants, who could arrive legally in Canada in pursuit of job opportunities. Some chose to pay contract smugglers who conducted them across the U.S. border. Kelly and a cohort trafficked Chinese expats by weaving throughout the San Juan islands into safe and secret harbors on U.S. shores.

His sometime-partner Ben Ure, like Kelly, married an Indigenous woman. Ure lived at the north end of Whidbey Island on an eleven-acre island that took his name. There the couple ran a dance hall and saloon. Ure’s wife aided his hide-and-seek smuggling operation. Local lore says he camped her on nearby Strawberry Island in Deception Pass, for its view to the west, to deploy a signal fire after dark to bring ashore the Chinese that the men had loaded in Victoria. The same lore claims Ure devised the nasty practice of tying up the Chinese in weighted burlap bags. If Customs agents approached, the story goes, he flung them overboard. Immigrants had to be reckless and desperate to agree to be bagged up like corpses at the outset of their trip to the promised land.         

Another telling story with compelling detail has come down. An acquaintance conversing with Kelly, after seeing his sloop at Square Bay on the corner of Guemes Island, reported, “The two men chatted awhile, then Kelly shouted, ‘Come out, John, he’s O.K,’ whereupon the tall grass erupted Chinese. One seemed to have been hiding behind every bush around the bay.” “John” was a generic nickname imposed by white Americans. In newspapers, court records, and police logs of the time, Chinese men were often referred to generically as “John Chinaman” or simply “John,” regardless of their actual names. The name became a kind of racial shorthand, like “Pat” for Irish immigrants or “Ike” for Jewish immigrants. They paid Kelly to connect them with other Chinese. Whether Kelly succeeded always in uniting them with comrades is unknown, likewise whether he always saw to their safety after he had conducted them across the international line. Certainly, though, he needed to have some respectable intercultural communication skills to pacify his customers and to stymie potential mutinies en route.

Kelly was a coyote and a trickster. In immigrant circles, principally on the U.S.-Mexico border today, a coyote smuggles immigrants for a fee. A loanword from Mexican Spanish, it refers obliquely to the wild canine known for its cunning nature. This dual meaning reflects the perception of human coyotes as tricksters, as people who know how to navigate border landscapes and authorities with resourcefulness. Kelly admitted he sometimes lied to his human cargo and dumped them back on Vancouver Island if or when “officials threatened.”

Payment for passage could be substantial. “The cost of a border crossing along this route ranged from twenty-three to sixty dollars in the 1890s. One decade later, entry through Washington State could cost up to three hundred dollars.” That $300 equates to $10,000 in 2025 purchasing power. Multiply it by a boatload of Chinese people, all of them looking for a new life in the U.S., and it’s no wonder Kelly was willing to flout fines, jail, and prison time.

The depressant opium had close ties to Chinese immigration. That product derives from the same species of poppy used today to make codeine, morphine, and heroin. Even before the Exclusion Act, opium was heavily taxed in the U.S., arriving from Canada in inexpensive and plentiful quantities. Chinese immigrant communities in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland smoked a lot of it. Many Anglos— stereotypically sailors, laborers, and gamblers—indulged in opium as well. Kelly could transport the stuff from Victoria into towns in Puget Sound at a high markup, often right alongside compatible human cargo. Chinese wine and silks also often made the trip.

Little is known about the exact economics of his operations, but he might have leveraged legal cover to conduct his business. Smugglers like him sometimes operated fishing boats or freight schooners as disguises. His skills with sail and oar were so adept that Kelly could outrun slower steam-powered Customs boats in his sloops. His work also necessitated firearms. Kelly’s sloop the Alert held an arsenal. That boat was confiscated along with a load of opium, after which U.S. marshals sold it for $3,221.83. In other crimes he also chose to brandish weapons.

Opium smuggling at that time is comparable to fentanyl smuggling today. Both sedatives are made from raw materials manufactured in China and exported to U.S. markets. The British East India Company first grew opium in Bengal and sent it to China to address a trade imbalance. The British were buying large quantities of Chinese goods—porcelain, silk, and tea—but Britain sold too little stuff to China. Such an imbalance led to Britain using opium as a trade commodity with China to balance the national books, eventually causing widespread addiction.

Lawrence Kelly scored his opium from Chinese factories in Victoria. “Crude opium from India and China was cooked and made into round chunks as big as a bowling ball,” Calkins wrote in 1952. Chinese cooks simmered the gum and sap of the poppy over a charcoal fire, stirring and skimming as it simmered. The Ly Yuen factory in Victoria provided a steady supply, as did a half-dozen other thriving factories on Vancouver Island. It made its way to U.S. markets both as a smoking-grade and a pharmaceutical-grade product. Some 100,000 of the Chinese immigrants in the western U.S. used it. Many of them were addicted. White smokers also were known to have frequented opium dens in Seattle. Middle-class Americans ingested opium in the tincture called laudanum and in patent medicines that required no prescription. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton used opium orally to treat their ills. Edgar Allan Poe and Louisa May Alcott were reportedly addicted.

Opium for smoking was packed in small tins, each weighing about half a pound. To avoid the U.S. tariffs and inspections imposed in the 1880s, some tins were left unstamped—that is, missing the adhesive seal that showed the duty had been paid. “One of the more macabre methods was to send opium across the border in coffins.” Kelly sometimes hid the weighted opium tins by tying a line to an underwater ringbolt on his hull and dragging them, as if trolling for fish. On land the tins were toted in satchels or in greatcoats with yawning inner pockets. He also sometimes squirrelled the tins on beaches for retrieval later, a process known as relaying.

Like rumrunners a short time later, Kelly would have called himself an honest man and denounced the laws as wrong. Opium laws were never overturned like Prohibition was, though. Kelly paid his debts, raised a family, and served on the Sinclair Island school board. In 1886 in Tacoma, Washington, he was arrested with a load of “567 tins of opium, equivalent to 364 pounds. He was held on a bail of $3,000. In the end, he was fined only $100, but the seizure of his boat threatened to end his career.” Worse, he was sentenced to another term at the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. At that point in their marriage, Lizzie had to sell the last of their Sinclair Island acreage. Twenty-three years later, in 1909, the Opium Exclusion Act in Canada barred the export of opium, putting even more clamps on Kelly’s illicit career. By then, too, his legal and domestic failures had begun to grind him down.

His brutality is broadly alleged. “When danger threatened and his boat was trying to outrun the law, he is said to have bound his passengers and dumped them overboard to drown.” Moreover, “Dead Man’s Bay off San Juan Island came by its name because the tide often washed the bodies ashore at that location.” Others say he disguised the Chinese as vegetables in wool or burlap sacks. So certain was R.H. Calkins that the Chinese were thrown overboard in the heat of pursuit that he illustrated the practice in his 1952 book, captioning it “Evidence of Smuggling Destroyed.” Recent research also shows that some Chinese immigrant women and girls brought to the U.S. in the late nineteenth century were trafficked and forced into prostitution. Historians and other scholars today characterize their condition as a form of sexual slavery.

Illustrious scuffles

Another anecdote finds Kelly in Olympia, the capital of Washington state, in 1891. Docking and walking the fifteen miles from the water to Tenino, he boarded a southbound train carrying a satchel that held sixty-five half-pound tins of opium. Whether his movements had been tracked beforehand, or agent Charles Mulkey of Tacoma just happened to identify Kelly on the spot, he seized the satchel, discovered its contents, and arrested him. Mulkey then demanded that a witness on the train accompany the pair back to court in Tacoma. How Kelly emerged from that scuffle is not known, but he often paid his fine to keep his business active. Kelly would have had to offer up real estate as surety in lieu of a bondsman, which explains why Lizzie had to sell off the Sinclair Island property on his behalf in 1884 and 1886.

As the most active singlehanded smuggler on the Salish Sea, Kelly “pursued his chosen occupation with an obstinacy that seems almost admirable” Richardson wrote. In January 1904, agent Fred F. Strickling boarded a train in Sumas, Washington, and had Kelly dead to rights. Ordered to open his fresh new valise, Kelly resisted and fled down the aisle. He “leaped from the train, while it was moving at full speed, to escape capture.” Inside the valise that Kelly had abandoned, Strickling found sixty-five tins of unstamped opium. He pulled the emergency cord, the train backed up, and Kelly was found barely conscious, wounded badly from the tumble, wearing a pistol. In Bellingham he was arraigned, posted bail, and disappeared, making him a fugitive of the law. Kelly’s trades were small compared to competing commercial steamers, which could transport up to 3,000 pounds of unstamped opium in a single outing.

Busted smuggling alcohol, furs, opium, woolens, and humans, Kelly spent as much time in the calaboose as running contraband. He was also a thief. He grew desperate late in life, no longer able to support a family or afford a mortgage. In 1896 he swiped a toolbox a carpenter left on an Anacortes wharf. A search party, discovering him asleep in a cabin, clapped him into cuffs. “While their boat was docked, Kelly jumped overboard and disappeared into the water. He somehow swam away, even though he was handcuffed.” The thefts continued. “Because Kelly was known to be in debt due to his fines, he was suspected of the thefts, but no proof of his guilt ever surfaced.” Mothers and their children trembled at mere mention of his name. By this time, Lizzie was pulling far and fast away from her deadbeat husband.

A smuggler and a thief, Kelly also became a desperado as his fortunes declined. Afraid of risking prison once again, he buried opium on islands as stash. He treated his red-hot contraband like cash, awaiting a future that might be safer to distribute it. Islanders reported seeing him grubbing about for tins whose exact locations he had forgotten. He maintained a gruff interest in the Sinclair Island acreage after Lizzie had to sell it off. He threatened the new owners when they cleared a patch of ground above a spot where he had cached the drugs. Burnt and demolished tins that once contained the opium were discovered on the same site later.

His desperation reached a fever peak in 1898 when Lizzie moved to Anacortes and took away the kids. She moved there for a paid job as housekeeper for a man whose wife lay in the hospital. Furious that she was cohabiting with another man—no matter that his crimes had made her destitute—Kelly showed up drunk at the house armed with a pistol and threatened to murder her. She fled to a neighbor’s house. He dodged the marshal and came again the next day, whereupon Lizzie filed a formal complaint against him to protect herself and the children. In 1884 he had been charged with a deadly-weapon assault, unspecified “crimes against the laws of nature,” and “charges that would show him to be a brutal wretch in his own home.” In other words, he turned his desperation and his anger on his family and physically abused them.

Kelly has a reputation as a colorful character, despite all his grave misbehavior. That reputation traces to “a certain romantic aura connected with the intrepid smuggler who plied rough waters in an open craft, cached merchandise on secluded beaches, transmitted coded messages by lantern light, and rendezvoused with compatriots late at night—all the while remaining beyond the dogged pursuit of ‘revenuers,’” Moore wrote in 2014. The Frederic Remington painting Dying of Thirst in the Desert captures that period more realistically. Issued in Harper’s Monthly for March 1891, it shows a Chinese man abandoned by his smuggler. In the Salish Sea, islands stood in for barren desert sand. A group of Chinese people, deserted when a customs boat drew near, survived only by eating clams they dug by hand. Eventually a minister rescued them from “China Rock.” The grimmer details of his smuggling operation, impossible to confirm, have perhaps been calculatingly expunged from the historical record by his admirers.

Summing up
By the time he was in his seventies, Kelly found odds stacked high against him. His wife was gone, his property sold off, his rocky legal record tough to overcome. Then, too, “the customs office obtained better boats with more skilled crew including, in 1903, the 85-foot revenue cutter Arcata, a converted steam tug equipped with powerful searchlights, machine guns, and even a one-pound cannon accurate to 500 yards (and a captain eager to use it).” James McCurdy could already foresee Kelly’s end, when he wrote in 1910 that “the picturesque contraband ferry-man of the Northwest seems fated to soon become extinct.” The reports of Kelly’s final years disagree about his eventual end. Many claim he contacted the Louisiana chapter of Daughters of the Confederacy and went to a soldiers’ home to spend his final years, though Family Search reports him dying in Los Angeles at an unspecified time, which is also where his third child, daughter Patricia, lived with her husband, according to his great-great-grandson Tom Day.

Lawrence Kelly’s life straddled the blurred line between folklore and fact, between cunning seafarer and ruthless criminal. He was at once a family man and a fugitive, a neighbor on Guemes and Sinclair Islands and a menace to the authorities who dogged him. His story, pieced together from rumor, court records, and sensational newsprint, needs to be invented anew. He was a species of phantom. Smuggling linked him to global trade wars, immigrant struggles, and narcotics routes that foreshadow today’s debates over tariffs and borders. Similar struggles devastate U.S. families today. Whether Kelly is remembered as a “picturesque contraband ferry-man” or a brutal desperado, he embodied the contradictions of a region and an era in transition, his career fading with the age of sail and the tightening grasp of modern law enforcement.

Further Reading:

R.H. Calkins, High Tide, Marine Digest Publishing, 1952; Helen Troy Elmore, This Isle of Guemes, Caxton Printers, 1973; David Richardson, Pig War Islands, Eastsound, WA, 1990; Lucille McDonald, Making History: The People Who Shaped the San Juan Islands, Harbor Press, 1990; Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943, University of North Carolina Press, 2003; Priscilla Long, “White and Native American Hop Pickers Attack Chinese Workers in Squak (Issaquah) on September 7, 1885, HistoryLink, July 1, 2000, https://www.historylink.org/File/2746. Stephen T. Moore, Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox of Prohibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland, University of Nebraska Press, 2014; Farris, Megan S. North of Gold Mountain: Chinese Women in the Pacific Northwest During the Exclusion Era. Master’s thesis, Western Washington University, 2025. Western CEDAR. https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwuet/2420. David Lai, “Chinese Opium Trade and Manufacture in British Columbia, 1858-1908, Journal of the West 38, no. 3 (1999): 21-26; Lynn Weber-Roochvarg, “San Juan Islands: Smugglers’ Haven,” HistoryLink, June 7, 2025, https://www.historylink.org/File/23319; Elizabeth Gibson, Outlaw Tales of Washington, TwoDot Books, 2011. “Colorful Characters and Local Lore,” Smuggler Kelly and his legend. Mural no. 041 in Bill Mitchell Mural Project. Anacortes, WA. “Smuggler Kelly and his legend,” Colorful Characters and Local Lore exhibit, Anacortes Museum, 2008. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://www.billmitchellmuralproject.org/murals/041; “Execution Sale of Real Estate,” Puget Sound Mail, 11.11 (Sept. 8, 1883), p. 2; “At 73, ‘Larry the Dope Smuggler’ After 7 Times in Prison, Is Free,” Tacoma Times 7.106 (April 22, 1910), p. 6; “County News,” Northwest Enterprise, 1.43 (Jan. 13, 1883), p. 3; “Smuggler Kelly’s Troubles,” Anacortes American, 4.36 (Jan. 18, 1884), p. 1; James G. McCurdy, “Criss-Cross Over the Boundary: The Romance of Smuggling Across the Northwest Frontier,” Pacific Monthly, 23.2 (Feb. 1910): 182-93; Marge Davenport, Afloat and Awash in the Old Northwest, Paddlewheel Press, 1988; Holden, Brad. 2023. “Seattle’s First War on Drugs (1880–1925).” HistoryLink.org Essay 22666. https://www.historylink.org/File/22666; John Nowels, “Cartel-fueled Fentanyl Crisis Flooding Washington through Northern Border.” Spokesman-Review, August 10, 2025, 3; “At 73, ‘Larry the Dope Smuggler’ After 7 Times in Prison, Is Free,” Tacoma Times, April 22, 1910, 6; “History of Smuggling in the American San Juan Islands.” Heroes, Heroines, and History, February 20, 2019, accessed August 27, 2025. https://www.hhhistory.com/2019/02/history-of-smuggling-san-juan-islands.html; Karen L. Borell, Bowman Bay, Deception Pass State Park: A Cascadia Marine Trail Site History. WWTWA, June 21, 2017, accessed August 27, 2025; https://www.wwta.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/BowmanBDecPass_KarenBorel6_21_17.pdf;  “FamilySearch Person Profile, ID K262-3YC,” FamilySearch, accessed August 27, 2025. https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/about/K262-3YC; Tom Day, telephone interview, Sept. 3, 2025; Dying of Thirst in the Desert. ca. 1890. Catalogue number 01144. In Remington Catalogue, Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://centerofthewest.org/catalogs/remington/?view_id=1156.

 

This article originally appeared in February 2026

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Paul Lindholdt received his PhD from Penn State and has collaborated on or authored ten books. This article is part of his book-in-progress with the working title “Rogues and Renegades in the Evergreen State.” Find his professional website here.

Hale’s account implies that the other doctors involved not only examined the children but also attempted to treat their afflictions, and perhaps Griggs did as well. The doctors likely consulted their medical books for symptoms that aligned with what they saw. Griggs himself owned nine medical books and a grinding stone used to mix herbal remedies. Seventeenth-century medical books offered herbal treatments and tinctures for symptoms such as paralysis, apoplexy, and hysteria, which might have appeared to resemble those of the afflicted children. The Reverend Cotton Mather’s book, The Angel of Bethesda: an Essay Upon the Common Maladies of Mankind (1724), presents the following remedy for female fits and hysterical convulsions: “Take the Seeds of Parsnip in Wine, or in proper Water. Take twelve Drops of the Spirit Soot; (or, of [dried human] Blood, or of Harts-horn,) twice a day in an Appropriate Vehicle. This [is] also proposed as, An Excellent Tincture for Hysteric Convulsions. Take of Assa-foetida, or Galbanum, two Ounces; Dissolve them in Spirit of Wine, till a Red Tincture is Extracted. A Scruple of this, is to be taken in two or three Spoonfuls of Mugwort-Water.”

 

Most baffling for the doctors was the fact that the children’s symptoms were intermittent; they behaved normally and would suddenly fall into their fits and later recover and act normally. The medical books contained many remedies for paralysis or hysteria caused by unbalanced humors. But the books did not offer remedies for the effects of witchcraft or sorcery, which the girls’ untreatable symptoms seemed to indicate. As Cotton Mather put it, in cases like this, the doctors could not “go to the Devil to fight the Devil.” After the doctors’ failed remedies, the children “still grew worse,” and Griggs made his diagnosis.

The other doctors who were called in by Parris likely came from neighboring towns. The Salem records refer to several, including Dr. William Crosby of Rowley and Dr. John Barton of Salem. As for Dr. Griggs, Samuel Parris was already acquainted with him when both were living in Boston. They each attended the First Church of Boston, where Parris’s uncle had been the minister. Parris was in the process of preparing for the parish ministry under the direction of ministers of the First Church. Griggs and his wife, Rachel, attended the First Church and Rachel was also a church member, and their children were baptized in this church.

Hale’s account gives a detailed description of the puzzling symptoms the doctors faced in Salem Village: “These Children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any Epileptick Fits, or natural Disease to effect. . . . Sometimes they were taken dumb their mouths stopped, their throats choaked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move an heart of stone, to sympathize with them, with bowels of compassion for them . . . they were in all things afflicted as bad as John Goodwin’s Children at Boston, in the year 1688.”

In the case of the Goodwin children, several doctors were consulted, according to Cotton Mather’s account in his Late Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. Mather’s friend, the locally esteemed Dr. Thomas Oakes, concluded that “nothing but an hellish Witchcraft” was the cause of the children’s afflictions. An Irish washerwoman named Goody Glover was judged to be the culprit. She was arrested, tried, and executed, and the children recovered afterwards.

Hale’s account goes on to explain the immediate effect that Griggs’s diagnosis had on the village community: “This the Neighbours quickly took up, and concluded they [the afflicted girls] were bewitched.” The neighbors’ reaction was significant because a conflict had recently arisen over Samuel Parris’s ministry. The conflict led the village council to attempt to dismiss Parris from the village by cutting off his supply of firewood, stopping the payment of his salary, and questioning his ownership of the village parsonage. Parris’s neighbors likely suspected that the girls’ afflictions were caused by a witchcraft attack upon the Parris family. Parris had already preached a series of dark sermons about the devil operating in the village. In early January 1692, shortly before Griggs’s diagnosis, Parris declared from the pulpit that “Christ having begun a new work, it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it all down.” Attacking the girls in Parris’s house seemed part of Satan’s plan.

Following Griggs’s diagnosis, Parris summoned the local magistrates and religious authorities for their support. Hale reports that the local clergy who had “enquired diligently into the Sufferings of the Afflicted, concluded they were preternatural, and feared the hand of Satan was in them.” Griggs’s pronouncement of the “Evil Hand” triggered a three-part process that required physicians, magistrates, and the clergy to become involved. Griggs’s diagnosis was a necessary first step, but it alone was not a sufficient cause for the trials. Had the court found no one guilty, the process would have stopped. When the court of Oyer and Terminer made its first conviction, which was followed by an execution, the governor asked the leading Boston ministers to give their authorization. As the representative of the Boston clergy, Cotton Mather, though he cautioned against some of the unreliable “specter” evidence involved in the accusations, forwarded the church’s endorsement for a “speedy and vigorous Prosecution.”

Soon after the attack on the girls in Parris’s house, two other village girls became afflicted: twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, daughter of Thomas Putnam of the influential Putnam clan, and seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard, grandniece of Dr. Griggs’s wife, Rachel Hubbard Griggs. The attack on Dr. Griggs’s niece Elizabeth was possibly caused by her fear that her uncle had attracted the devil’s revenge by naming the devil as the cause of the girls’ afflictions. The attack on young Hubbard no doubt greatly strengthened the doctor’s conviction.

Today’s historians have little to say about Griggs beyond a few basic facts, the most important being the likely acquaintance between Parris and Griggs in Boston—hence Parris’s choice of Griggs to give the diagnosis. Given the scant information about Griggs, contemporary historians have avoided making moral judgments and assessments of his professional competency. But earlier historians were free with their opinions. Charles Upham, writing in 1867, suggested that Griggs’s generation of doctors offered witchcraft diagnoses to cover up their failed remedies: “They gave countenance and currency to the idea of witchcraft in the public mind, and were very generally in the habit, when a patient did not do well under their prescriptions, of getting rid of all difficulty by saying that an ‘evil hand’ was upon him.” In other words, a witchcraft diagnosis was a coverup for a doctor’s incompetence. But all professions have legitimate limits to their explanatory powers, and for the medical profession in seventeenth-century New England, that limit was perceived to be the difference between the “natural” and the “unnatural” or unknown.

In 1916, Andover historian Harriet Tapley wrote that Griggs was a weak-minded man who, she hoped, felt remorse in his old age: “For how much of this [tragedy] Dr. Griggs was responsible, it is not unjust to state that a large share of the subsequent heartaches might with propriety be laid at his door.” Moreover, “It is quite probable . . . after the trouble had blown over, perhaps his [Griggs’s] conscience may have been awakened to a sense of the part he had taken in the affair, and remorse may have attacked this weak old man.”

Did Griggs feel remorse? We do not know. Did the government or the courts express remorse when the trials were over? Governor William Phips closed the trial court in late 1692 and reported to his overseers in London that the whole tragedy was due to the great “delusion of ye Devil.” Remorse was not involved. The elderly, church-going Griggs might well have approved.

In 1949, freelance writer Marion Starkey pointed out in The Devil in Massachusetts that Samuel Parris owned a copy of Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences, an account of witchcraft among the Goodwin children in Boston in 1688. Starkey also states that “the Parrises may have also had first-hand experience of the case, since they appear to have been living in Boston at the time.” She suggests that “the little girls might even have been taken [by Parris] to see the hanging.” No professional historian would make such a speculation today, but it is possible that the children in the Parris household overheard the adults talking about witchcraft and the hanging. The execution of Goody Glover on Boston Common in 1688 was the first witchcraft hanging in Boston in over thirty years. Griggs and his family were also in Boston when Dr. Oakes made his “hellish Witchcraft” diagnosis, and Griggs might have become interested. We do not know whether Griggs or Parris attended the hanging, but just knowing about such a remarkable event taking place in the town where they were living may have influenced Parris’s choice of Griggs to make the key diagnosis.

In 1998, Dr. Anthony S. Patton, who was Chief of Thoracic and Vascular Surgery in Salem Hospital for many years, wrote an important biographical sketch of Griggs containing new information about his grand jury work and the state of the medical profession in seventeenth-century New England. As a practicing physician, Patton became interested in Griggs’s medical competence and moral character. He asked the question: Did Griggs simply give a conventional medical diagnosis of the Evil Hand? Or should he have known better and followed the lead of more educated doctors in Boston, such as Thomas Thacher, whose treatments for smallpox and measles were based on the scientific work of the English doctor Thomas Sydenham.

Patton concluded that Griggs was clearly a doctor of his time, practicing like most other New England doctors. Patton also asked whether Griggs “had to know of the possible consequences of his diagnosis.” This question, like those of Upham and Tapley, relies on the benefit of historical hindsight, which Griggs did not have. John Hale emphasizes that Griggs and the other doctors were called in at the first stage of the Salem episode, which concerned only the two girls in Parris’s house: “[The] beginning of which [the Salem case] was very small, and looked on at first as an ordinary case which had fallen out before at several times in other places, and would be quickly over.” It seems clear that Hale saw the outbreak in the Parris house as similar to the small-scale Goodwin case.

On the other hand, Patton notes that Griggs “could have protested or halted his niece’s damaging and continuing testimony against innocent people.” This seems plausible. If Griggs had any misgivings at all, he might have controlled his young grandniece, Elizabeth Hubbard, and stopped her from making dozens of accusations. But the fact that Hubbard often became afflicted in Griggs’s house and, according to the records, at least once in her uncle’s presence, likely strengthened the doctor’s conviction.

Curiously, Griggs played no further role once the legal process began. A search of all 950 digitized court records does not turn up his name in any of the examinations, depositions, or grand jury hearings. But as the new doctor in Salem Village and an acquaintance of Samuel Parris, Griggs may have considered it both responsible and beneficial to assist Parris in this critical moment. Two years later, it is also clear that Griggs had firmly aligned himself with the pro-Parris, pro-witch-hunt faction in the village. He helped Parris’s friend and supporter, Thomas Putnam Jr., in his attempt to contest his stepmother’s will, which gave her large fortune to her son, Putnam’s stepbrother, who was aligned with the anti-Parris, anti-witch-hunt faction.

In placing judgment upon Griggs, it is also useful to consider, as Patton does, the state of the medical profession in New England at the time. There were no medical schools, training programs, or qualifying exams. Training was informal, and men apprenticed themselves to an established doctor and became acquainted with the medical books that described hundreds of herbal treatments for common illnesses. Although Griggs was literate and read medical books, Patton noticed in the documents that he was unable to write and signed his name with a mark.

In 1697, the Massachusetts government decided to accept responsibility for the Salem tragedy and issue a formal apology. A recent series of setbacks in the province—crop failures, a large outbreak of smallpox, and repeated losses in battles against the Native Americans—were believed to have been God’s punishments for the injustice of the Salem trials. The government’s apology, however, was perfunctory and mainly blamed Satan. Samuel Sewall, one of the trial judges, was asked to write it. His statement referred to “Mistakes” that were “fallen into” regarding the “late Tragedie” caused by “Satan and his Instruments, through the awful Judgment of God; He would humble us therefore and pardon all the Errors of his Servants and People that desire to Love his Name.”

Yet Sewall himself delivered one of the most outstanding personal apologies in early American history. He stood up in his pew and bowed his head before the congregation while his minister, the Reverend Samuel Willard, read his apology and confession of guilt. Referring to himself, Sewall said in part: “Samuel Sewall being sensible, that as to the Guilt contracted . . .  he is, upon many accounts more concerned than any he knows of, Desires to take the Blame and the Shame of it.” It is difficult to imagine Dr. Griggs doing the same.

The foreman of the Salem jury, which handed down all the convictions, waffled about the jury’s taking full responsibility, saying that the jury had lacked the “knowledge in ourselves to deal with this sort of evidence” and that it was “sadly deluded and mistaken.” Mistakes were admitted, but taking moral responsibility was not in the mindset at the time. Again, Griggs might well have concurred. Sewall, however, showed that taking “the Blame and the Shame” for his role in the horrendous tragedy could be done. His courageous act is celebrated today in a large mural in the Massachusetts State House.

Patton also draws attention to a major change that was taking place in the English medical world in the mid-1600s due to the work of the prominent doctor Thomas Sydenham. Sydenham’s medical principles were those of observation, diagnosis, and experiential treatment. Could Griggs have read any of Sydenham’s books in Massachusetts in 1692? The books were originally published in Latin, which the unschooled Griggs could not read, and were first translated into English at the end of the century, after Griggs had died. In Sydenham’s Enlightenment medical environment, there was no place for the occult or witchcraft diagnoses. The “preternatural” was no longer a diagnostic category. As Patton points out, there was “a clear contrast between the training and thinking of the time in Europe and the lack of training and apparent lack of support in New England for scientific medical training.”

In the 1996 film version of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, Dr. Griggs examines Ann Putnam Jr., who cannot be wakened from her sleep. He tells her parents, “I fear there be no medicine for this; I have seen nothing like it before. There be no fever nor wound . . . and yet she sleeps.” Ann’s mother asks if the devil is to blame, and Griggs replies cautiously, “I shall do all I can Goody Putnam . . . but this may be a sickness beyond my art.” Thomas Putnam intervenes, declaring that there are “evil spirits about the village,” and urges Parris to tell the people the truth. Parris responds: “Not yet! I need time; I must think; I must pray.” Griggs agrees with Parris and decides not to reveal his diagnosis to anyone in order to give Parris time to gain control of the situation. After leaving the Putnam house, Griggs tells a crowd of onlookers that there is no witchcraft involved. Miller portrays Griggs as a weak-minded figure, willing to compromise his profession for Parris’s purposes.

Similarly, the historical Griggs accommodated Samuel Parris with the diagnosis he wanted, but unforeseeably the diagnosis turned the village conflict over his ministry into a witch-hunt against people who were supposedly Christ’s enemies in the village. Griggs, however, remains an obscure figure, despite his consequential role which helped to propel a divided community into a tragic conflict that is still remembered, studied, and dramatized today.

Further Reading: Anthony S. Patton, M.D., A Doctor’s Dilemma: William Griggs & the Salem Witch Trials. (Salem: The Salem Witch Museum, 1998.); Katherine Knight, Secrets of the 17^th Century Medicine Cabinet (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2024).

 

This article originally appeared in February 2026

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Benjamin Ray is the Daniels Family, NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Emeritus, University of Virginia. He is the author of Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), an associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, gen. ed. Bernard Rosenthal  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Director of The Salem Witch Trials Digital Archive.

Billings was a self-taught composer, a lifelong member of Boston’s South End working class, and an active associate of the Whigs who spearheaded the American Revolution. He was a companion of Samuel Adams, with whom he often sang psalms. Paul Revere engraved the frontispiece for his first tunebook. And he tanned leather for most of his life.

Not surprisingly, he’s been the subject of scholarly work, including at least three monographs written by music historians, though their focus is musicological. These studies make some passing connections between Billings’s music and his life and times, but provide little linear narrative and granular detail of the sort expected in biography. We learn almost nothing about his personal life and private thoughts.

I’ve been writing about the quirky composer since my second book, How Sweet the Sound (2004) and always find more to say about him. “Lamentation over Boston,” his colorful adaptation of a Hebrew psalm to the American revolutionary cause, helped fuel my interest in what became Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (2016).

Existing scholarship leaves much work to be done reconstructing Billings’ family life and situating him in the political and cultural events of revolutionary Boston. Personal information on him is in short supply: Billings left behind no journals and only one letter. As Louis Benson wrote in 1915, “The personality and work of this one-eyed, illtaught, and enthusiastic natural genius, form an engaging theme, from whatever view-point it be approached. The only adequate materials for studying him are the music, treatises, prefaces, &c., contained in the series of his tune books.”

So what sources are available to historians and biographers? First of all, his musical output. The Complete Works of William Billings were published in four large volumes between 1977 and 1990. They run to more than 1500 pages, mainly musical transcriptions of his pieces but also prefaces and other miscellaneous writings included in his tunebooks, along with extensive commentary by the editors.

Several of his pieces have found their way into hymnals and other collections, including “Jordan,” “Creation,” and “When Jesus Wept.” Billings is especially beloved of shape-note singers, who regularly sing his pieces. Also called “fasola,” shape-note singing is an American heritage music, sung around the country by devotees every weekend. It is almost never performed for an audience; everyone who comes to a “lesson” is expect to participate. This entails sitting along one of the four sides—comprising treble voices, altos, tenors, and basses—of the distinctive “hollow square,” the rotating song leader standing in the middle. Shape-note singers use music first compiled in the 19^th century, and notated in four distinctive shapes: ovals, squares, triangles, and diamonds. The most widely used shape-note collection, The Sacred Harp, first published in 1844, includes fourteen of Billings’ works.

From the beginning Billings was publishing prose along with music, starting in 1770 with his first tunebook, the New-England Psalm-Singer. His second, The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778), features Billings’ writing at its most ebullient. It includes a lengthy letter “To the several Teachers of Music,” “A Musical Dictionary,” a letter “To the Goddess of Discord,” “An Encomium on Music,” “A Musical Creed; In Imitation of St Athanasius,” and an odd piece titled “Jargon”:

 

Let horrid Jargon split the Air,

And rive the Nerves asunder,

Let hateful Discord greet the Ear,

As terrible as Thunder

Arguably, the highwater mark of Billings’ literary career came in 1783, when he served as editor of Boston Magazine—for only one issue before being removed, apparently for his uncouth taste. Billings was drawn to lurid tales and animal allegories. The best known of these, titled “The porcupine, alias the hedge-hog; or, The fox turned preacher,” was published by Benjamin Edes, a Son of Liberty who also printed the staunchly Whig Boston Gazette.

The editor leaves the reader with no moral or conclusion to take away from the gruesome tale. And maybe that was part of the problem for customers. “A Boston Magazine…& who is the director? Mr. Billings, the psalm singer,” wrote an indignant reader named John Eliot. “I send you a subscription paper put into my hands. It is one way of getting rid of it.” His taste for gore might also have accounted, according to historian Michael Broyles, for Billings helping to publish The American Bloody Register in 1784. Modeled on so-called “execution sheets,” cheap tabloids popular on the streets of English cities, The Bloody Register offers “a true and complete history of the lives, last words, and dying confession of three of the most noted criminals…together with the dying confession of Alexander White, a murderer and pirate.”

That’s pretty much it for Billings’ writings. No journals or diaries. Only a handful of letters sent or received. The paucity of sources on Billings stands in striking contrast to the immense archive and historiography on revolutionary Boston, in which he is almost never mentioned. Even Stacy Schiff’s recent biography of Samuel Adams, which describes his singing, includes not a single reference to Billings. (Though Kenneth Silverman, in his massive study of art of the Revolution, credits Billings with being “one of the liveliest prose writers in eighteenth-century America.”)

The archives seem to have been well combed over by the authors of William Billings of Boston (1980), the eminent American music historian Richard Crawford and his co-author, David McKay, who did most of the archival digging. Significant spadework was also conducted by editors of the four-volume Collected Works, one of whom was Crawford.

My own search of family records, death notices, and wills in the New England Historic Genealogical Society turned up previously unreported discoveries. I found details about William Billings’ wife Lucy Swan’s family, based in Stoughton, Massachusetts, as well as about their eldest daughter, Abigail, her husband Amos Penniman, and their descendants. For years I’ve harbored a fantasy that a trove of personal papers might surface in someone’s attic, or mis-catalogued in a dusty archive. At this point that seems highly unlikely. There are many aspects of Billings’ experience, including some of the most important ones, researchers may never have access to.

But his life was too rich and interesting to leave alone. Billings seemed to me a bona fide Boston working-class hero and Renaissance man: he composed music, he wrote hymns and fanciful stories, he tanned leather. Could I write Billings into a historical novel, based on extensive research into his life and times, but filling out the many details of his personal life absent from the archive? That would solve the problem of the dearth of sources. When historical details are nonexistent, make them up. Not usually considered sound advice to historians, granted, but possibly warranted under these circumstances.

There were some other and possibly better reasons to attempt fiction. One had to do with audience. I thought historical fiction might be a way to reach a broader readership than a standard biography would, especially for a less familiar name like Billings. The challenge of writing in a different genre also appealed. During the pandemic I published my first novel, Learning from Loons, and mostly enjoyed the process of fictional invention.

Billings’ life certainly had a novelistic quality. It followed a kind of fall, rise, and fall—not quite rags to riches and back, but close. He began life with some advantages. He apparently received some early schooling. But at age 14, Billings’ father died, leaving his wife and children nothing from his estate. He was apprenticed to a tanner and began learning the trade, while also picking up sufficient knowledge of music to become a singing school instructor. Soon he began composing his own music, and at age 24 published his first tunebook.

Four years later, in 1774, Billings married Lucy Swan, a few months after meeting her at a singing school he taught in Stoughton, Mass. They had six children that survived childhood. He continued composing and teaching prolifically during the 1770s and 1780s, allowing him to buy a house on fashionable Newbury Street. And then, in Renaissance-man fashion, Billings turned his attention to literature.

After that, Billings’ fortunes declined. In the 1790s, he was required to take work as a scavenger and streetcleaner. His last musical work was an anthem, now lost, performed after the death of George Washington. Billings himself died in 1800 and was buried in an unmarked grave on Boston Common, where his devotees commemorate his death each year.

Some other facts about Billings: he had a voracious appetite for snuff and his appearance was unforgettable. “Billings was somewhat deformed in person,” wrote Nathaniel Gould in 1853, “blind with one eye, one leg shorter than the other, one arm somewhat withered, with a mind as eccentric as his person was deformed.” (Given that Gould was born in 1781, and Billings wasn’t teaching many singing schools in the 1790s, it’s unclear whether they actually met.) It is intriguing to speculate how Billings’ career might have been shaped by these disabilities, and what produced them. Judging from his occupations, they failed to constrain him much. He was apparently a successful tanner, a job that required considerable strength and dexterity. He traveled around New England to teach singing schools, which required considerable stamina and working as a Boston street clearer cannot have been easy.

In order to capture a variety of perspectives on Billings, I decided to structure my novel in three parts, each with a different narrator. Part One is narrated by Billings’ wife, Lucy. It begins with their meeting at the singing school in Stoughton in 1774. It relates their courtship, marriage, early years in Boston as fighting broke out, the privations of living in Boston under siege, and the birth of their first daughter, Abigail. Billings himself narrates Part Two. It recounts his childhood, coming of age and apprenticeship to a tanner, and increasing involvement in Whig politics and Boston’s music scene. It ends with the publication of his landmark tunebook, The New-England Psalm-Singer, in 1770. Part Three, narrated by the Billings’ eldest daughter, Abigail (nicknamed  Nabby), takes place in William’s final days. It consists of flashbacks and stream of consciousness that take place in her father’s final days, and at his visitation and burial. These events prompt Nabby to recall surprising conversations she had with her mother, Lucy, on her deathbed. Her account gives us a glimpse into the hidden underside of her strange, driven father.

As I worked on the novel I took inspiration from some recent historical fiction: Hilary Mantel’s superb trio of Cromwell novels, and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. Of course, the illustrious example of Johnny Tremain also came to mind. Rereading it, I learned something remarkable about its author, Esther Forbes, who pulled off a publishing coup amid World War II. She managed to win a Pulitzer in 1943 for a biography of Paul Revere and a Newbery Medal the following year for Tremain, which she wrote in roughly eight months. Even Jill Lepore hasn’t done that.

These and many others have shored up my sense that fictionalizing Billings is not out of line for an historian of American music. My guiding principle was same as Margaret Atwood’s: Respect the facts as far as possible but extrapolate when the story called for it. As an academic historian, I felt some tension between adhering strictly to the known facts and the desire to tell a compelling story. One illustrative challenge was imagining William’s early life. For some reason I imagined him as a first-born or only child. That would have simplified the fictional task. But judging from his parents’ marriage date, he must have had older siblings. Then I discovered some notes I’d taken earlier but overlooked. According to Frank Metcalf, he was the fourth child born to William and Elizabeth Billings. Later archival research confirmed that Billings had a younger sister; I found a 1756 reference to a Mary Billings in the records of the New South Church, where William’s parents were members. 

I was sorely tempted to play around with what I knew about Billings’ birth family. But having hewed to the facts until then, why change course over a handful of siblings? I decided that elaboration where the facts were lacking was one thing, indeed necessary to creating a novel; adding or eliminating family members whole cloth was another matter. Of course, in the case of Billings, many of the “facts” come from sources written long after the fact and are far from unimpeachable, with later writers reiterating without verifying the work of earlier writers; some of the tales told about him are likely apocryphal.

That said, one of the most enjoyable parts of writing the novel was recreating encounters with historical figures: Samuel Adams, which several sources indicate did take place, and with Phillis Wheatley, which doesn’t exist in the historical record but seemed plausible, given the small circle of creatives in Revolutionary-era Boston. A somewhat lesser-known person, a shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hewes, also wanders into my narrative.

The Musical Tanner is now complete. But even with an accelerated schedule, a novel would take much longer to get through the editorial and publication process than I had, if I wanted to reach readers during the year when many people will be thinking, however briefly, about the American Revolution. So I decided to publish it on Substack in serial form. Every Friday appears a new chapter, free of charge, scheduled to finish up sometime before July 2026.

All of us are about to be barraged with information about the nation’s founding. It’s time this unique and prolific early American got some of the recognition he deserves. I continue to work on a more conventional biography of Billings, taking a deeper dive into his rich published corpus. A colleague from Tulane, Dr. Leonard Raybon, founder of the Sacred Nine Project on early American religious music, has composed a one-act musical program that captures through musical pieces Billings’ life; we hope to stage it in venues around the country over the next year. But for now I’m happy to have my research represented by historical fiction. And that elusive trove of personal papers may yet surface. I’d be thrilled if this article encourages the scholar who eventually discovers them.

Further Reading:

Atwood, Margaret, et.al., AHR Forum: Histories and Historical Fictions. American Historical Review, Dec. 1998.

Barbour, J. Murray, The Church Music of William Billings. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960.

Barrett, Andrea, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. New York, Norton, 2024.

Benson, Louis F., “The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Worship. New York: Hodden & Stoughton, 1915.

Billings, William, The Complete Works of William Billings, edited by Hans Nathan, Karl Kroeger, and Richard Crawford. Boston: American Musicological Society & The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1977-1990.

Brewer, Charles E. Singing Sedition: Piety and Politics in the Music of William Billings. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2017.

Broyles, Michael, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Cook, Nym, “William Billings in the District of Maine, 1780.” American Music 9:3,

Autumn 1991.

Gould, Nathaniel D., Church Music in America. Boston: A. N. Johnson, 1853.

Lepore, Jill, “What Was the American Revolution For?” The New Yorker, 10 November 2025.

McKay, David P., and Richard Crawford. William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-century Composer. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Metcalf, Frank J., American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music. New York: The Abingdon Press, 1925.

Schiff, Stacy. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2022.

Silverman, Kenneth, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1976.

Young, Alfred F., and Harvey J. Kaye. Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

 

This article originally appeared in January 2026

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David Stowe teaches religious studies at Michigan State University. A musician and historian, he has published several works of non-fiction, most recently Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (2016) in addition to short fiction, poems, and a novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in January 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in December 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

Secondary Literature:

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

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

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

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

 Primary Sources:

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in November 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in November 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

The Whitney Legend

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

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

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

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

So goes the legend. What actually happened?

What Actually Happened, Part 1: The Gin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Actually Happened, Part 2: Interchangeable Parts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

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

 

This article originally appeared in October 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Committed

to Mary Jane Meek Hopkins, 1817-1893

 

In the hush of empty archives,

microfilm wheezes under my fingers.

Then, there—the scribbled court document

telling of your commitment

to the asylum, the long list of those

testifying to your lunacy—brother-

in-law, neighbors, the man who

will soon foster your children for a price

and later own your father’s mill.

 

I do not know these witnesses’ intentions.

Just you with six children under eleven

and no way to even add and subtract

yourself. Your husband dead in the ground

too soon. I imagine the impending cold,

your hands blistered now from chopping

firewood, your own hunger, the high

wailing of sniffling babies, manure

piling up in the barnlot, flies hovering.

 

Mary Jane, bless you—somehow,

you got out of that cell they put you in.

By next census, you are living

back at home with all your children,

and no man. You raise them.

Nothing else may be yours, but they are.

The force of that rises over all

the millstones grinding, the men

learning long division.

 

Under Leaves and Vines

 

Alone, I drive across West Tennessee

             into afternoon sun, quiet except

for the semis thundering through

             the trees that wink in the wind

on either side of the highway,

 

as if to prove primeval peace waits

              somewhere beyond swarming traffic

and the lingering ghosts of war.

               These forests veil the truth.

I turn north toward Lexington,

 

through Parkers Crossroads, where

                one hundred sixty years ago

men slaughtered each other

                 in the cotton fields

and fell face-first among

 

the forest’s bullet-blasted trees.

                 Hero or coward didn’t matter.

They died right here, where I pass under

                 seemingly innocent cloudless sky.

On this trip, I drive back

 

through time and breathe

                 the smoke of the burning bodies

of horses, mules, and men,

                 witness woodlands

shattered to rubble, fields riven

 

with deep-dug entrenchments bleeding

                  into the creeks, their waters retching.

All along these routes, up and down

                  towns and counties, over and over

in 1862, farms went up in flames

 

while women and children hid

                  in barns and fields, hoping there

would be something left to eat.

                  I have watched the day-by-day

on an animated map of the Civil War

 

—how the borders moved up and down,

                  back and forth across these plains. Now,

the new grass lies—flat and clean—

                  while alfalfa, corn, and soybeans reach

their apotheosis. My people,

 

most of them, come from this ground,

                   loess and fragipan, loam and silt,

site of layers and layers of suffering.

                   Along with a few remaining affections,

my heart holds this enemy, my homeland.

 

Even if I wish honeysuckle and kudzu

                   could erase the wrongs—that forests would win

real peace—I know the vegetation cannot cover,

                    much less heal, this past. There is perhaps

delusion in still hoping anything can.

 

The Wrong Cause

based on the letters of Confederate soldier

William H. Meek (1837-1864),

who fought at Brice’s Crossroads

and died a few weeks later at Grenada, Mississippi,

of gangrene after being shot in the shoulder

by a Union sharpshooter

 

Further Reading

 

Relevant Family History

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

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

 

Nineteenth-Century Women’s Mental Health and Property Rights

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

More direct accounts and historical focus can be found in:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Civil War in West Tennessee and Northern Mississippi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Attempts at Confrontation and Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Erasure or Black-Out Poetry

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in July 2025.

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