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

 

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

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

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

OH.

OH NO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in June 2025.

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

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

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

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

Diplomatic Spoils

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

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

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

For-Proffit Government

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

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

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

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

Owenism After Utopia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stumping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In and Out of Office

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coroner’s Inquest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

Primary Sources

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

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

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

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

Secondary Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in June 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in May 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

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

 

This article originally appeared in May 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

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

 

This article originally appeared in April 2025.

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This article originally appeared in April 2025.

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

 

Broughton’s life took a turn in 1886 when she met American Baptist Joanna P. Moore (1832–1916). Moore encouraged Broughton to join a local Bible band in Memphis, which sparked her missionary work. In 1887, Broughton decided to leave the Memphis city schools to dedicate herself to this work. She attributed this decision to two intertwined experiences of sanctification and divine healing: although she had accepted Jesus as her personal Savior at the age of ten, she later experienced a deeper sanctification during a severe illness, surrendering all earthly attachments, and subsequently experiencing physical healing. Her confession parallels the testimonies of sanctification and healing used by Holiness Baptists, including Moore, to express their identity, emphasizing the sanctification of both soul and body.

In 1892, the Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society (WBHMS) appointed Broughton as a missionary. In this role, Broughton interacted with other American Baptist women, traversing the South and North to attend meetings. She spoke alongside white speakers at the northern meetings and was notably the only Black woman speaker at the Northern Baptist Anniversary meeting held in Saratoga, New York around 1895. Moreover, through her speeches and publications, she persuaded both Black and white audiences that Black women should be able to participate in the church and education.

One of those contributions was a speech entitled “Woman’s Work” that she gave at the National Baptist Educational and Foreign Mission Convention in Washington D.C. on September 14, 1893. This speech was published in the National Baptist Magazine in January 1894. In 1903, she expanded on those ideas by in the booklet, Woman’s Work: As Gleaned from the Women of the Bible, and the Bible Women of Modern Times. From 1902 to 1903, she also authored columns titled “Christian Culture Courses”—later referred to as “Christian and Educational Training Courses”—in the National Baptist Union, the official publication of the predominantly Black National Baptist Convention (NBC). The 1902 issue of The Union reveals that the Women’s Auxiliary Convention of the NBC appointed Broughton to this role to promote “The Highest Development of Christian Womanhood.”

In these writings, Broughton justified women’s roles in home, church, and education through her spiritual language and analysis. When exploring women’s roles in the home, such as housekeeping, and wifely and maternal duties—she highlighted three fundamental principles her denomination believed Black women should exemplify: 1) simplicity and cleanliness in dress and home; 2) a wholesome diet; and 3) moderation and abstinence. This emphasis appears to have been influenced by Joanna Moore’s Fireside School and by other individual Holiness advocates who believed that holiness—the fullness of the Holy Spirit—was expressed by both body and soul. Such Holiness exemplars taught women the importance of maintaining clean and orderly households to cultivate holy living. Because they understood their bodies as temples indwelled by the Holy Spirit, they likewise encouraged moderation in eating, abstinence from alcohol, cleanliness and simplicity in attire, and sexual purity.

 

It is noteworthy that Virginia Broughton referenced biblical figures like Eve, Jezebel, and an unnamed woman accused of adultery to discuss the concept of wifehood. She did not address how men had used these figures to impose negative images on women, but instead contributed to reshaping Black womanhood by reinterpreting these figures within the context of nineteenth-century traits of true womanhood such as submissiveness and domesticity. Many Christians who believed that Eve influenced her husband and brought sin into the world (thereby making women’s guilt greater) argued that women should now assume the role of passive subordinates within the patriarchal family structure. However, like most Holiness advocates, Moore regarded marriage as a partnership. Broughton likewise argued that women were created as trustworthy companions, helpers, and friends to men, citing the biblical example in Genesis 2:21–2 of the creation of Eve, the first woman, from the side or rib of the first man, Adam, and not from coarse clay.

Broughton also addressed the Jezebel stereotype, a damaging trope that depicted Black women as sexually promiscuous and unworthy of the protections afforded to white women. White men used this stereotype to justify their enslavement and sexual exploitation of Black women. Broughton acknowledged Jezebel’s persistence in doing evil, but also highlighted that a wife could be equally persistent in doing good. She did this by placing the story of Ruth—who remained devoted to her husband’s family even after his death—before the account of Jezebel. Furthermore, Broughton pointed out that Jesus, when confronted with the accusers of a woman caught in adultery, focused on the sins of the men rather than condemning the woman herself, as illustrated in John 8:4–11.

Similarly, Broughton sought to redefine motherhood. The primary duty of the ideal mother assigned to white women at the time was to raise her children to be exemplary Christians and citizens. Broughton, while embracing this idea, expanded the role of the mother beyond the household to encompass the community and humanity at large. She argued that women possessed the power to save humanity, citing Genesis 3:15, which foretells Eve’s offspring defeating Satan. She also noted that Moses—who led the enslaved Israelites out of Egypt—had two mothers who risked their lives for him. Broughton thus positioned Black women as central in nurturing leaders who advance the Black community, challenging the stereotype of Black women as merely a caring Mammy serving white masters.

Next, Broughton defended women’s roles in the church and in education, challenging male opposition to women’s right to prophesy. She reinterpreted 1 Corinthians 14:34, a verse often used to silence women in the church, by comparing it with other Pauline passages like 1 Corinthians 11:5, which directs woman how to prophesy, and Romans 7:25, which addresses the dual nature of flesh and spirit, to argue that while women in the flesh were made for man’s glory, those reborn in the Spirit could perform spiritual service with discernment. She also spoke of the Spirit being poured out on women as much as men, citing Joel 2:28 (New Revised Standard Version)—“I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” This Spirit-centered language and integrative biblical hermeneutic is a feature of the Holiness tradition’s advocacy for women’s right to prophesy.

From her first year in missionary work, she consistently devoted herself to promoting women’s Bible study in various ways. For instance, she participated in a local Bible Band, helping to improve both the biblical study and literacy of women. She also contributed as the assistant editor of Hope—Joanna Moore’s paper that women generally used for Bible study—specifically by developing study materials. She also taught Bible study at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College in Normal, Alabama.

As might be expected, Virginia Broughton’s prophesying, Bible study, and biblical interpretation provoked considerable male opposition, driven by the prevailing biases and men’s underlying of women’s religious authority of the time. Broughton was threatened with molestation, assault, and even murder. The intersectional discrimination prevalent in the late nineteenth century—rooted in the biases that women were inherently emotional while men were rational, and that Black people were naturally emotional and childlike—led to widespread doubt about Black women’s intellectual capabilities. Yet, Broughton challenged those biases. In her first autobiography, A Brief Sketch of the Life and Labors (1895), she noted that “so much has been done in Tenn. through the power of the Holy Spirit, working in woman, to overcome the opposition against her, that came from ministers and laymen who at first looked suspiciously upon our work, fearing we would trespass upon their territory, and thus disobey Paul’s instruction to women.” In her 1893 speech “Woman’s Work,” she further challenged this exclusion, declaring, “Isn’t it strange, men will suffer women to do all the drudgery; but when it comes to mental or spiritual work, men wish to exclude women; as if they thought women had all the muscular strength and they had the brains and thinking powers.”

Broughton demonstrated that men did not have a monopoly on theological interpretation by citing Hulda, a biblical woman who interpreted Scriptures for kings and priests. Broughton’s own exceptional intellectual abilities bolstered those claims. And indeed, Dr. S. G. Miller, the representative of The John C. Martin Educational Fund, was so impressed by her report on sermon outlines and responses to questions on biblical studies that he gave her a personal reference, leading to her appointment as a lecturer for the women’s department of the same Fund in May 1905.

Broughton also advocated for women’s mission work, emphasizing the importance of educating the heart, head, and hand. She asserted that the right of women to participate in organized mission work, a new field at the time, was granted through their baptism in the Holy Spirit and by the power of the Holy Spirit—in short, not from the male leaders of the church. She cited the example of Esther, who risked death to save her people by approaching the king unsolicited, applying this to the mission work of Black women. She argued that like Esther, through Black women’s mission work, God would save the Black race.

To this end, she enlarged and strengthened women’s mission work by challenging the biases that white people imposed on Black people. For example, she mentioned William P. Calhoun’s argument, in his book, The Caucasian and the Negro in the United States, that Black people would be eradicated and not saved. Countering this, she urged readers to uphold God’s commandments and abandon their ignorance and immorality. In particular, she encouraged women to focus on educating themselves and their descendants. She helped women and young adults to develop both their religious and as well as their intellectual, industrial natures by emphasizing not only Bible study but also industrial education.

Broughton demonstrated the agency and independence of Black people, while collaborating amicably with white individuals including Dr. Malcolm McVicar, superintendent of education for the American Baptist Home Mission Society. He realized from hearing the success stories of Broughton and her fellow women that Black people’s salvation and education ultimately depended on themselves. McVicar seemed to understand that he needed to support Black women as well as men as leaders in all religious, educational, and industrial activities. Broughton reported that under Dr. McVicar’s counsel and influence, women’s mission departments were established at several universities—Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, Ga.; Bible and Normal Institute in Memphis, Tenn.; Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C.; and Bishop College in Texas.

Broughton used oppositional rhetoric to highlight her defiance and explain how resistance to women’s efforts in the Holiness movement only intensified their cause. For example, she stated that a cruel warfare followed in the aftermath of the Durhamville meeting, one of the women’s district association meetings in West Tennessee. Detractors had a “cruel hatred for no other cause than her contention for holiness of heart and uprightness of daily deportment.” Broughton reported that this meeting had more intense spiritual manifestations, such as women’s revelations, visions, prophecies, spiritual testimonies, and Bible teachings, compared to earlier annual meetings. She likewise used the metaphor of artillery fire to describe persecutors’ fierce opposition to women’s activities, and the image of a red badge to illustrate the intensity of the trials endured by her and her fellow believers. Nevertheless, the women responded to the fiery trials by deepening their commitment to Bible study and holy living. Eventually, she reported that they triumphed and were able to grow their work. Consequently, Black women came to play a significant role in advancing every just cause that promotes human peace, uplift, and the glory of God.

Furthermore, she combined this oppositional rhetoric with Spirit-centered language and biblical typologies and noted that the new anointing and fullness of the Holy Spirit enabled her to endure the persecution resulting from the doctrine of sanctification. She similarly referred to Deborah, the ruler of Israel, as an example of a woman who used the gifts of God wisely, resulting in God using Deborah to lead Israel to victory over its enemies. Broughton noted that the reluctance of Barak (the male military commander) to go into battle without Deborah demonstrated his reliance on her for success.

Broughton depicted women and men as fellow soldiers, urging men to collaborate with women. She claimed that as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, male soldiers must labor together with female soldiers to win the battle against Satan. To support this, she quoted 1 Corinthians 11:11 (King James Version)—“Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man in the Lord,” and provided other Scriptural and historical examples, such as Esther and Joan of Arc respectively.

On one hand, Broughton maintained that women are fellows rather than usurpers of male authority; on the other hand, she urged men to cooperate by asserting that disobedience to God, especially obstructing the work which God accomplishes through women, would result in their death. She recounted an anecdote about a husband who, after threatening to kill his wife to prevent her from attending women’s Bible Band meetings, died shortly thereafter for reasons that were not recorded. According to Broughton, his contemporaries widely interpreted this man’s death as divine punishment for treating his wife this way, while also instilling fear even among his opponents.

 

Virginia Broughton, a Black intellectual Holiness Baptist, presented and exemplified an empowered and independent Black Christian womanhood while forming sisterhood with white women beyond the accommodation versus protest dichotomy. This contributed to the maturation of self-awareness among Black women and men and provided guidance for their advancement. This foundational work paved the way for the subsequent Black intellectual and cultural revival movements and the establishment of civil rights legislation, such as Title IV and VI, which ban sex discrimination in education. Despite these advancements, the intersectional discrimination experienced by Black women in church and educational settings persists. Though the symphony of Broughton’s legacy continues to resonate, her example surely invites us to compose and play the final harmonious chord of gender equality through our collective efforts.

 

Further Reading:

Braude, Ann. “Women’s History Is American Religious History.” Retelling U.S. Religious History, 1st ed., Oakland: University of California Press, 2023, pp. 87–107.

Broughton, Virginia W., and Carter Tomeiko Ashford. Virginia Broughton: The Life and Writings of a National Baptist Missionary. 1st ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010.

———. Twenty Years’ Experience of a Missionary. Chicago: The Pony Press, 1907.

Butler, Anthea D. “Unrespectable Saints: Women of the Church of God in Christ.” In The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, edited by Catherine A. Brekus, 161–83. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807867990_brekus.9.

Butler, Anthea D., et al. Women in the Church of God in Christ Making a Sanctified World. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Douglass-Chin, Richard. Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Johnson, Sarah. “Gender,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America. Newark, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010. Accessed May 6, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Lovett, Bobby L. The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780–1930: Elites and Dilemmas. 1st ed. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999.

Moore, Christopher. Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019.

Moore, Joanna P. “In Christ’s Stead.” Autobiographical Sketches. Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society, 1902.

Popkin, Jeremy D.. Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bayloru/detail.action?docID=485983.

Smith, Jessie Carney. “Virginia E. Walker Broughton (c. 1856–1934): Feminist, Missionary, Educator, Lecturer, Writer.” In Notable Black American Women, Book II, edited by Jessie Carney Smith, 57–60. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996.

Weaver, C. Douglas. Baptists and the Holy Spirit: The Contested History with Holiness-Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019.

Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–174, https://doi.org/10.2307/2711179.

White, Deborah. Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.

 

This article originally appeared in March 2025. 

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Ranmi Bae is a PhD student in religion at Baylor University. Her area of focus is the History of Christianity, in particular, the study of women, Spirit-led movements, and the interaction of Korean and American religious experience.

“Uncle Allen,” it turns out, was the alter-ego of Baptist minister Henry Allen Tupper. The tale of the American dragoman outwitting the Bedouin sheikh came from his 1898 book Uncle Allen’s Party in Palestine, which was a fictionalized version of a real trip that Tupper had taken to Palestine a few years prior. Written for a youth audience, it was a didactical work, with Uncle Allen teaching his niece and nephew about the Holy Land by responding to their questions.

It was not the only book that Tupper wrote about the trip. That same year, he also published Around the World with Eyes Wide Open, a more conventional travel narrative that he hoped would allow “others to share with me the pleasures and profits of my visits to many lands and among many peoples[.]” 

As Tupper’s simultaneous publications suggest, tales of travel sold well in the late nineteenth century, especially those involving the Holy Land. Beyond the “glow of romance” they offered readers, travel narratives provided crucial channels through which Americans encountered the wider world. In this, they joined the missionary literature that had proliferated with the growth of a global American mission network throughout the nineteenth century. At a time before newspapers had overseas news bureaus, it was often travelers and missionaries who taught Americans about the contemporary world (as well as their place in it). “Uncle Allen” happened to have a bit of the traveler, a bit of the missionary in him—Tupper’s father had served for years as the secretary of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board.

As might be expected, Tupper’s twin travelogues featured much of the same material. Among the overlap was the tale of the Bedouin sheikh. However, in Tupper’s more straightforward telling in Around the World with Eyes Wide Open, he made clear that the fantastical story was not his own; it was told to him by his real-life American dragoman, a man whose distinctive name would have likely been familiar to devoted readers of Holy Land travelogues. That man was Rolla Floyd.

Originally from Maine, Floyd and his wife Theodocia had come to Palestine as part of the much maligned Adams Colony of Jaffa. The colony was the creation of George Joshua Adams, an actor and religious adventurer who had taken up and then broken away from the Mormon faith in favor of his own millenarian vision. A compelling and persuasive preacher, Adams believed he had been called to prepare for the prophesied ingathering of the Jewish people by establishing an agricultural colony in the Holy Land. He successfully recruited forty-three families, including the Floyds, to set out from Maine on a ship called the Nellie Chapin in 1866.

They landed in September and began setting up their colony at a site near Jaffa. It was a disaster. Within the first two months, thirteen colonists died from illness. The colony’s first crops failed, and the colonists soon divided against each other and Adams, who publicly feuded with both his wife and the American vice-consul. Before long, the experiment fell apart altogether, with dozens of colonists finding passage back to the United States on the steamship Quaker City.

Their plight would be immortalized by that ship’s most famous passenger, Samuel Clemens, better known, of course, as Mark Twain. Reporting on the trip for the Daily Alta California, Twain found it difficult to pry information about the “complete fiasco” from the miserable survivors, noting, “They gave it reluctantly and in a very fragmentary condition, for, having been shamefully humbugged by their prophet, they felt humiliated and unhappy. In such circumstances people do not like to talk.” The Quaker City, Twain reported, had taken on “some forty members” of the colony, adding that others had already deserted. “We left in Jaffa,” he noted, “Mr. Adams, his wife, and fifteen unfortunates who not only had no money but did not know where to turn or whither to go.”

Among the “unfortunates” were Rolla and Theodocia Floyd. “When I left America I had $1,200…I gave to Mr. Adams,” Rolla wrote to his sister, Aurilla Floyd Tabbutt, in 1869. When the colony fell apart, he “got back 50 dollars.” Worse still, the Floyds’ son, a toddler, had died amidst the colony’s struggles—the fourth young child they had lost. However, the Floyds had remained supportive of Adams even as the majority of colonists abandoned him and had scraped by in the intervening two years “by being very saving[.]”

Rolla had also recently come into better fortune—he’d been contracted by the Ottoman government to run a stagecoach on the new road between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Already, he reported, some of the “great people” coming to the Holy Land would “not go in the stages unless I drive.” He soon was finding steady work as a guide and training as a dragoman.

Floyd’s operation grew into a success as pilgrim traffic to Palestine picked up. In 1874, the leading British travel agency Thomas Cook & Son hired him as their primary dragoman and then agent in the Holy Land. Among Floyd’s most illustrious charges during his time with the agency was former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, who wrote a testimonial noting that his guide’s “thorough knowledge of Bible references, history & traditions” had “very much added to the interest and pleasure of our visit.” Cooks touted their capable American dragoman in promoting their expanding eastern operations, even bringing him west during the offseason for promotional exhibitions in London, Paris, and Philadelphia.

Though an acrimonious rift between Floyd and Cook’s led him to leave the esteemed agency in the 1880s, Floyd’s services remained in demand through the end of the 19^th century. He successfully built an independent operation as an agent, gleefully and spitefully poaching Cook’s customers along the way. At times, too, he threw in with the other leading travel agency of the era, Henry Gaze & Sons. By the time Floyd stepped back from leading tours himself in the 1890s, he had become something of an institution. He was “the most noted dragoman in Palestine[.]”

 

Floyd’s unusual career was only possible because of a surge in western travel to Ottoman Palestine in the late nineteenth century. That surge not only secured his living but also brought the tremendous proliferation of Holy Land travel literature noted above. Floyd’s name frequently appears in these accounts. He was “that prince of dragomans[,]” a “man of great intelligence” and “splendid physique” who was “so well known all over the world[.]”

Floyd’s renown was a rare thing among dragomen, who were generally distinguished by their invisibility. Only a few merited mentions in travel accounts beyond endorsement or rebuke for the quality of their work. Most dragomen were natives of the region and so, where mentioned, were most commonly measured against travelers’ depictions of a benighted East mired in Islamic fanaticism and Turkish misrule. While some travel writers did find their dragomen stood out from this “Oriental” background—for their honesty, for their care, for their language skills or intelligence—more often they portrayed them as symbolic of it.

Rolla Floyd thus inevitably stood out as a Yankee Protestant (albeit an odd kind of a Protestant), something that boosted his business and bolstered his reputation. Native dragomen had to struggle to earn the trust of skeptical American and English clientele. Floyd, who had himself been trained by an Arab dragoman, was born possessing it. James Martin Peebles, for example, complained in his 1875 Around the World of “unwisely” hiring an Arab dragoman “because better guides can be employed in Jaffa at the same price”—most especially the “very candid, competent American gentleman” that Peebles regretted not hiring, Rolla Floyd. Later, once Floyd withdrew from guiding tours himself, travelers praised his management of the Arab dragomen. “Blessings on you, Rolla Floyd, you were our efficient, attentive and altogether satisfactory manager for many weeks,” one traveler wrote, reporting, “Shukry Hishmeh, prince of dragomen, is helping everyone with skillful hand and polite and cheery word.”

Undoubtedly, Floyd’s curious past as part of the Adams Colony also contributed to his renown—those travel writers who did dwell on him inevitably gave the colony some mention. Some took liberties. Edward Stansbury Wilson, for example, falsely reported Floyd had come to take “his station on Mount Zion” to watch the Mount of Olives in expectation of Christ’s Second Coming. “He expected to see Christ float down on the historic summit in a cloud of glory[,]” Wilson claimed. “But the Redeemer failed to come, and Mr. Floyd was so disappointed that he never returned to America.”

While Floyd had certainly been part of the radical millenarian experiment and sometimes speculated about the “signs of the times,” he did not consider himself particularly religious. His letters to his sister suggest that business interests, as much as anything, had brought him to Palestine and kept him there—he had planned from the beginning to operate stagecoaches and run a hotel. Still, Floyd was often noted as “the only one left of the unfortunate American colony[.]” (Even this was an exaggeration. The other most prominent “survivor,” Herbert Clark, also worked for Cook’s while serving for decades as the US vice-consul in Jerusalem.)

Floyd’s unusual visibility gives rare insight into how the largely-invisible dragomen shaped travelers’ understandings of the Bible and their perceptions of the Holy Land. His charges frequently cited him in their identification of holy sites and their interpretations of biblical passages. Floyd was widely considered an expert “in all matters which concern the geography and the historical and Biblical associations of the Holy Land.” Even so noted an authority as the historian and theologian Philip Schaff cited the American dragoman in interpreting the familiar passage from Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” The “needle’s eye,” Floyd had reported to Schaff, was not strictly a metaphor, but a reference “to the small door in Oriental towns which stands alongside the large and heavy gate[.]”

Travelers particularly delighted in sharing Floyd’s insights into the peoples of Ottoman Palestine. Henry Martyn Field reported that Floyd had “lived many years in Palestine, and travelling in every part of it, he has become well acquainted with the different tribes that inhabit the country across the Jordan, and with their sheikhs, who converse with him with the greatest freedom.” Besides Floyd’s insider knowledge, Field noted his “great physical strength and courage” helped him “keep the upper hand of quarrelsome muleteers” and deal with “the thieves who infest almost every village[.]” One report, published under the headline “A Muscular Christian Yankee in Syria,” claimed Floyd’s name was “worth a hundred rifles against any tribe in Syria.” Such claims often accompanied the retelling of one of Floyd’s tales of outwitting or out-muscling some venal Ottoman official or bloodthirsty gang of Bedouin brigands—stories like the one Henry Allen Tupper told about Floyd grasping the sheikh’s belt.

Tupper’s tale was fantastical, but certainly not unique in its recounting of Floyd’s exploits. It was one of many that showed Floyd as the ingenious, intelligent, sturdy American who could tame the wild East. What was unique to Tupper’s account, though, was his fictionalized repetition of it in Uncle Allen’s Party in Palestine. Writing as himself, Tupper recounted the story as Floyd’s: writing as “Uncle Allen,” it became his alter-ego’s own experience.

It was a minor liberty, almost certainly justifiable to Tupper by his crediting of Floyd in Around the World with Eyes Wide Open (as well as the fictionalized and didactic nature of Uncle Allen’s Party). Tupper was open and intentional in claiming Floyd’s story for “Uncle Allen.” 

Still, Tupper’s appropriation of the story does raise the question of what else Holy Land travelers might have less overtly purloined from Floyd and other dragomen—what thrilling experiences they might have claimed, what novel biblical interpretations they might have shared, what general impressions of the land and its peoples they might have repeated to their readers as their own.

Scholars have long argued the power of Holy Land travelogues in shaping westerners’ perceptions of Palestine. They have traced how these perceptions, over time and repetition, hardened into a kind of empirical knowledge of a benighted East—knowledge that alternately guided and justified the conduct of empires.

That the dragomen shared in the creation of that knowledge is undeniable, even as the influence of these oft-invisible men can be hard to trace. In the American dragoman Floyd, though, we catch glimpses of it—a “fine specimen of American manhood,” as one traveler put it, who was simply too big and too American for Holy Land travelers to ignore.

 

Further Reading:

Shimon Gibson, Yoni Shapira, and Rupert L. Chapman III, Tourists, Travellers, and Hotels in Nineteeth-Century Jerusalem (Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2013).

Reed M. Holmes, The ForeRunners, 2^nd edition (Tel Aviv: Reed and Jean Holmes, 2003).

Rachel Mairs, From Khartoum to Jerusalem: the Dragoman Solomon Negima and His Clients (1885-1933) (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

Rachel Mairs and Maya Muratov, Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters: Exploring Egypt and the Near East in the Late 19th-Early 20th Centuries (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Helen Palmer Parsons, editor, Letters from Palestine: 1868-1912 (Self-published, 1981).

Stephanie Stidham Rogers, Inventing the Holy Land: American Protestant Pilgrimage to Palestine, 1865-1941 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011).

Lester Vogel, To See a Promised Land (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993).

 

This article originally appeared in March 2025. 

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Walker Robins is a historian of American religion and foreign relations, with a special focus on the relationship between American Christians and Israel/Palestine. He is the author of Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel (University of Alabama Press, 2020). His work has appeared in First World War Studies, American Jewish History, Israel Studies, the Journal of Southern Religion, the Journal of Church and State, and Baptist History and Heritage Journal.

Bewilderment can also be a strategy; as much as it is a state of mind, it is also a state of play. Circumstances in which people are feeling extreme disorientation are potent breeding grounds for people who are willing to exploit it to take advantage in moments of crisis. They are chaos agents who, by design, seek to use the confusion to advance their agendas, especially in the political arena where privileges and rewards can be controlled, focused, and distributed unevenly. The past teaches us that we should be on the lookout for people who greet moments of extreme disorientation with sparkling eyes, for such moments can provide certain people with extraordinary power.

Perhaps the most pertinent example happened exactly 250 years ago.

As we approach a major anniversary of American independence, we should strive to remember just how bewildering a moment that actually was for millions of people in North America. Most certainly, the confession “I have no idea what’s going on” was exclaimed, in just the same exasperated tone as Klosterman, all over the American colonies on the eve of the American Revolution.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the wide-ranging boycott of all British goods known as the Continental Association went into effect. Passed by the First Continental Congress, this stinging measure was a significant escalation of the crisis within the British Empire. It shook people throughout North America, especially those who were skeptical of the patriot movement. Those people would soon be called loyalists, and they were completely bewildered about how the world that they thought they understood was changing right in front of their eyes. They were caught completely off guard by a political movement they wrongly thought was much smaller, less organized, and, while dangerous in its language, posed little actual threat to law and order in the British Empire.

Three hundred miles to the west of Philadelphia, in what is today Pittsburgh, feeling bewildered was almost a universal and everyday emotion on the early American frontier. If you lived anywhere near the Ohio River in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, you had watched as empires, trading schemes, and colonies came and went. The French had tried to control the region in the 1750s, then the British came and built an impressive fortress, Fort Pitt, at the source of the Ohio River. Impressive but expensive. In 1773, the cash-strapped British government decided to abandon it and let the colonists fight amongst themselves over who would control Pittsburgh.

And so they did. Virginia and Pennsylvania both claimed the region was theirs. In 1771, Pennsylvania made it part of Westmoreland County. Two years later, Virginia said, no, that same ground was West Augusta County. By the spring of 1774, there were two rival governments in Pittsburgh, each with their own leaders duking it out for control. Rivals from each colony tried to have their opponents arrested. Gangs marauded through the village looking for—and attacking—their enemies. Shots were fired. A Virginia partisan named George Aston stabbed the wife of Aeneas MacKay, a Pennsylvania official, and then two months later came back and swung a rifle butt at her head.

The man who ordered the assaults on MacKay and his wife was Dr. John Connolly. A man with a suspicious past—he claimed to be a physician but had very little medical training and he fabricated prestigious family relations—Connolly nevertheless impressed important people in Virginia society, especially George Washington and the royal governor, Lord Dunmore. Both of those men were proficient at trying to make the most out of confusion and they saw in Connolly a kindred spirit.

Connolly had recently moved to Pittsburgh, after his sister married the best tavernkeeper in town, and he used that connection to invite himself to dinner whenever anyone important appeared, George Washington among them. By the early 1770s, Connolly was becoming a big man in a very small village; the controversy that swirled about who would have sovereignty over Pittsburgh afforded him a host of new opportunities to raise his political profile and line his pockets. Dunmore met the wily doctor when he went west to visit the Pittsburgh region in 1772, and he quickly realized this was a perfect agent to advance Virginia’s agenda. When he finished his western tour and arrived back in the Virginia capital of Williamsburg, Dunmore set about pressing Virginia’s claims, first to Pittsburgh and then to points further west. The dramatic expansion of Virginia, he thought, would raise his political profile—and line his pockets, too. Dunmore appointed Connolly “captain-commandant” of Pittsburgh. Connolly was so excited, he wrote Washington to apologize that he couldn’t stop to visit Mount Vernon, because he had to go west to make war on Pennsylvania.

The civil unrest that Connolly prosecuted in the spring of 1774 was loud and attracted attention. Native peoples in the Ohio region watched in alarm as Pittsburgh collapsed into chaos. They knew that all this bewilderment would soon involve them, which it did. A vicious massacre of eight Native peoples a few weeks into the Virginia-Pennsylvania conflict turned everyone’s attention away from Connolly’s machinations in Pittsburgh. Everyone braced themselves for a war with the Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo peoples along the Ohio River. Dunmore decided to go on the offensive and not wait for a Native strike and ordered militias to get ready to march west. The climactic battle of what would be called Dunmore’s War happened along the Ohio River at what is today Point Pleasant, West Virginia, on October 10, 1774, just as the First Continental Congress finished up the details of their boycott in Philadelphia. That battle was a big one—1,100 Virginians faced nearly 800 Natives—and it was long and nasty. When it was over, seventy-five Virginians were dead and one officer had a lung protruding from a hideous hole in his chest. “We had a very hard day,” said another Virginia officer.

The battle at Point Pleasant, 250 years ago, shows how it is essential that we recognize how bewilderment can shape history. The confusion at Pittsburgh transformed into something else, something much more recognizable and familiar to colonists who were having a difficult time understanding what was going on.

They were encouraged to do so because Governor Dunmore and his man John Connolly grasped the power of bewilderment as a state of play. They understood how confusion as a constant state of mind can offer political opportunities. Chaos agents (like Dr. John Connolly) thrive in a climate of bewilderment. To gain advantage, they sow misinformation, cast aspersions on their opponents, and rile people up even to violence. They act decisively when knowledge about something—a boundary, a dispute—is imperfect. Or they take steps to turn something that is settled, like an election, and purposely bewilder it.

Donald Trump and his political chaos agents are not the first ones to sow bewilderment and then exploit it to their advantage. There were several of them at work in Pittsburgh in the 1770s, men who were supposed to be working for governments or kings but who were really only out for themselves. They were all trying to use confusion to improve their futures and fortunes and conquer the Ohio country. We barely remember their names, but what they did there would have consequences for a quarter millennium of American history.

The American Revolution offers a lavish buffet of examples of bewilderment, both as a state of mind and a state of play. A year after the battle at Point Pleasant, George Washington had taken command of a “Continental Army” outside Boston. Colonists all over North America marched and shouldered arms to fight against King George, its own baffling experience. Governor Dunmore was drawing up plans to cut the rebellion in two, and he enlisted his man John Connolly to pull his scheme off. The two plotted for Connolly to ride again to Pittsburgh and encourage the Native peoples he had recently fought to seek revenge on the Virginians. Connolly was to lead a Native invasion of northern Virginia while Dunmore would emancipate the enslaved people in Virginia and lead them on a military campaign against the rebellious colonies. Where should these two fearsome forces link up? Mount Vernon, they decided.

When John Connolly’s servant ran away to find Washington and inform him about this devious plan (his former friends?! At his house!?!) the General and Congress issued notices all over North America authorizing the arrest of Dr. Connolly. When Patriots did find him sleeping in a tavern near Hagerstown, Maryland, he would spend the next six years locked up in a Philadelphia jail, the longest held prisoner of the Revolution. Connolly was too effective a chaos agent to be allowed his freedom. Bewilderment as a state of mind and state of play created—and then destroyed—John Connolly.

Perhaps it is a comfort that even George Washington had to have been utterly and completely bewildered about the confusing events that swirled around him in 1774 and 1775. Washington has mostly come down through posterity as a man always in complete control: the confident man on horseback, the assured President, the plantation slaveowner. But at several points in his life, he was bewildered. From his very first brushes with fame in his early twenties, Washington continually found himself swept up in events he could not control or barely even understood. In 1775, however, he was in good company. For millions of people on all sides of the Revolution—loyalists, patriots, Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Native Americans, and British officials—the sentence “I have no idea what is going on” was thought almost constantly during those years.

History is supposed to be a tonic, an antidote against feelings of confusion and helplessness in the present. When we search the past, we do so to find answers, for surety. It is the job of the historian to sort out the confusion and offer explanations. But there is something valuable in recognizing the prevalence and power of bewilderment in the past. It was as much a part of eighteenth-century lives as it has become for ours. Understanding the choices people made because they had imperfect knowledge, because they felt lost, or were just reacting to impulses can help us sympathize with them. It even helps us understand our own modern predicament, as we fumble about to make sense of new political, media, and information landscapes. Maybe it can help us figure out what to do about resolving the bewilderment that was so clearly in so many of our minds over the past days, weeks, and years, Chuck Klosterman’s included.

More importantly, however, this emphasis on “seeing” how often bewilderment occurred in American history suggests an instructive and important warning. Taking a cue from them, we need to be on our guard against those who would seek to keep us in a perpetual state of heightened anxiety and confusion. Like Dr. John Connolly, they usually have ulterior motives. But perhaps, also like Connolly, we can hope that chaos agents will be exposed and destroyed by their own machinations.

Further reading:

My inspiration for interpreting encounter on the frontier as a bewildering experience is mostly influenced by James H. Merrell’s work, especially Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (Norton, 1999) and his essay “Shamokin, ‘the very seat of the Prince of darkness’: Unsettling the Early American Frontier,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830, Andrew R.L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds. (UNC Press, 1998). For more on the descent into violence in the Ohio Valley on the eve of the American Revolution, see Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (Hill & Wang, 2007), and Rob Harper, Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley (UPenn Press, 2018). For more on Dunmore, Connolly, and Virginia’s crisis in 1774-75, see the forthcoming book by Andrew Lawler, A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis that Spurred the American Revolution (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025).

This article originally appeared in February 2025. 

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Robert Parkinson is professor of history at Binghamton University and most recently the author of Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier (Norton, 2024). He is currently the Kundrun Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, writing a book on the grievances of the Declaration of Independence

The narrator’s sense of confinement and suffering without access to intellectual activity reflects Gilman’s own negative experience of Mitchell’s treatment in 1887, which she addresses in an essay, “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?” (1913). After detailing her time with Mitchell, Gilman describes his “solemn advice” after sending her home. He instructed her to “live as domestic a life as far as possible” and to limit her professional life by sticking to “two hours’ intellectual life a day.” He expects Gilman, a writer, to “never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as [she] lived.” Attempting to follow these directions, however, brought Gilman to the brink of a mental breakdown, so she quickly disregarded Mitchell’s advice in favor of returning to work. What resulted is her “touching pen” to critique the rest cure in embellished short story form.

Interestingly, in her searing depiction of the rest cure, Gilman does not incorporate Mitchell as a central character within the story. She briefly directly references him once. She writes, “John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!” (Gilman, 650). In this passage, the narrator’s opinionated friend is the mouthpiece for Gilman’s own less than glowing review of Mitchell. In a similar way, the character of John is a stand-in for doctors who followed Mitchell’s advice for the rest cure. Gilman represents the entire patriarchal medical institution of which Mitchell was a part through the more anonymous, representative character John. In this role, the character holds an almost comically, hyperbolic level of power through his profession and gender, allowing Gilman to emphasize the unethical treatment of patients through tactics of dominance and submission used by doctors like John and Mitchell.

Yet the most notable element in her embellished portrayal of the rest cure is her divergence from the conventional rest cure practice, in which Gilman omits a concrete explanation of the rest cure’s prescribed diet. She makes only a few oblique references to the narrator’s diet, such as the following: “So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again” (Gilman, 648). The inattention to feeding and eating stands in stark contrast to Mitchell, who makes diet central in his instructions for treating patients. In Fat and Blood (1877), his tome on treating neurasthenia and hysteria, Mitchell’s longest chapters by far are not on seclusion or rest, but on dietetics and therapeutics. He spends eighty pages on diet, compared to six on seclusion and twenty-two on rest.

 

Taking up the discrepancy in attention to diet, my essay’s questions solidify what does revisiting the story through its historical medical context reveal anew about its integral critique of patriarchy’s oppression of white women? And more specifically, based on Mitchell’s declaration that “It is difficult to treat any of these cases without a resort at some time more or less to the use of milk” (119), what is the significance of the so-called “milk diet”? My essay complements past feminist political readings focusing on the story’s symbolic qualities by providing a grounded historical understanding of the role of milk and diet in the methods of domination and discipline.

Inspired by the multidisciplinary fields of medical humanities and disability studies, I contend that more attention to the medical history and the embodied experience of the rest cure will give us a fuller picture of its dominating and disciplining nature, supplementing classic feminist critiques of the story that, to this point, often tend to rely on symbolic or metaphorical elements in the text. Consider how Tom Lutz studies literature of the turn of the century and finds that texts like Gilman’s feature “explicit narrative representations of neurasthenia” as a method for critiquing aspects of society, like gender oppression. For Lutz, neurasthenia is “especially attractive as an explanatory metaphor.” But which is it—an explicit representation? An explanatory metaphor? Or both? David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder caution against disability as metaphor in Narrative Prothesis (2000). Too often in literature, disability is used as a narrative prosthesis—or a “crutch,” a metaphor or symbol upon which the narrative hinges. This figurative use of the body and disability does not account for an individual’s embodied experience with “social and political dimensions.”

While much feminist scholarship attends to the madness as metaphor trope, in Conflicting Stories (1991), Elizabeth Ammons provides an interesting approach to the story’s symbolism that also considers experience of the body. Ammons reads the prescription of milk as part of the infantilization of adult women. She unpacks the “dramatic” symbolism of the milk diet: “Fattened, purified . . . the recovering Victorian patient of Mitchell’s rest cure blows up to resemble a woman steadily and unchangingly six-months pregnant, or a pudgy baby that yet cannot walk . . . Endlessly with child and at the same time a child.” She takes up milk symbolically to understand the power dynamic of the doctor’s dominance and the patient’s submission, achieved through infantilization. Milk, then, is a fitting symbol—as something of mothers fed to children. The rest cure paradoxically treats women as children to get them back to physical health so that they can go back to their domestic duties, which include getting pregnant, giving birth, and producing milk of their own.

I supplement such symbolic analysis of milk with a historical, grounded approach to the materiality of milk in the rest cure and in Gilman’s story. In what follows, I show how the rest cure began with a largely liquid diet of milk, draining patients of their energy, making them sleepy and supplicant, following that, controlling the patient through a strict regimen of diet, primarily focusing on achieving physical recovery rather than mental, to get the patients back to work as mothers capable of future reproductive labor.

Part 1: Drink Your Milk (and Maybe Eat a Cookie)

According to Mitchell, the rest cure begins with the milk diet “given alone by Karell’s method for a fortnight or less” which “enormously simplifies our treatment” (119). Later, Mitchell mentions Karell’s method again but still neglects to explain in full. What is Karell’s method? Examining medical writings by Mitchell’s contemporaries, including Karell, sheds fascinating light on this strange medical method. In “On the Milk Cure,” Doctor Philip Karell, physician to the Emperor of Russia, argues that, for several illnesses—including dropsy, neuralgia, liver diseases, faulty nutrition, inflammation of the stomach and intestines—he views “milk as the best and surest of remedies” (101). His cure entails milk being “scrupulously administered, and in strictly measured doses” (102).

Years later, in 1916, Doctor Edward Goodman remarked that the Karell diet may be for treating cardiac, renal, and hepatic dropsies. His study details the exacting regimen. First, feed the patient 200 cubic centimeters (a little under ¾ cup) of “raw or boiled milk, warm or cold” at 8 a.m., 12 p.m., 4 p.m., and 8 p.m. And nothing else. Though if the patient complains of hunger, you might give them a single zwieback (a kind of brittle German cookie) or a piece of dry toast.

The length of the diet depends on the patient’s condition. In Goodman’s context, the primary concern is an “edema,” or the swelling of the body caused by too much fluid trapped in the body, which can be treated by, amongst other things, limiting sodium intake. The milk-only diet length also relies on the patient’s “plea for more food.” Unsurprisingly, Goodman notes that the course of this “strict diet sometimes, nay, many times, meets with violent opposition from the patient.” So, after about one week of only 800 cubic centimeters (or 3 and 1/3 cups) of milk each day, increasing the diet with “salt-poor” solid foods begins. Goodman specifies after a week, try giving the patient an egg in the morning and a cookie at night. The next day, a piece of bread. After which, gradually increase the food over the next two to four weeks, but never let the patient consume more liquid than the 800cc of liquid each day.

How might a patient react to the Karell method as such, besides the aforementioned violent opposition and pleas for sustenance? According to Mitchell, the patient sleeps. He describes how the strict milk diet “gives rise to a marked sense of sleepiness” (125). Gilman captures a patient’s sleepy response to the rest cure, with the narrator struggling to write, even though she thinks it would “relieve” and “rest” her. Unfortunately, she reflects that “I find I get pretty tired when I try” (Gilman, 649). Later on, she notes, “Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much” (Gilman, 651).

It is not surprising that nearly starving a patient would cause them to sleep, because their energy supply, food, is so drastically limited. This enforced diet begins the treatment in a way that makes the patient supplicant to the doctor—with what energy could they protest this aggressive lack of nutrition? In theory, starting the “rest” cure off with rest sounds good, ideal even, but sleep caused by lack of sustenance is not the same as healthy sleep that replenishes energy.

Not terribly long after Mitchell’s and Goodman’s publications, in 1927, Doctors Smith, Gibson, and Ross critiqued the Karell diet for its noted lack of proper nutrition. “While this [Karell] diet greatly promotes the elimination of excess fluid, it is obviously inadequate because of its low energy value. Various modifications of the Karell diet have been recommended, but in each instance the caloric value has not been sufficient to maintain a normal metabolism” They continue describing that, during cardiac failure, “not only the heart but the entire body is in an exhausted condition.” Therefore, the patient’s diet must “not impose an excess load but still provide sufficient energy” (emphasis mine). Note that the language of energy and “caloric value” frame the issues of nutrition, hunger, and bodily functions. The calorie is a unit of measurement intended to signal the amount of energy provide by food according to Nick Cullather’s history of the calorie. Food can be transformed into its units, calories, and those units to their corresponding energy supply—low, high, sufficient, insufficient.

The calorie became popular in the early twentieth century, corresponding to a larger cultural understanding of energy that emerged in the nineteenth century alongside the creation of fossil fuel systems and an increase in energy use as Cara New Daggett explains in The Birth of Energy (2019). Work came to be governed through metaphors and physics of energy. The calorie is one such energetic metaphor used to understand an individual’s capacity for work. Think of the popular adage that “food is fuel,” in which fuel takes on greater meaning with the context of the pervasive discourse of energy. Considering the very real embodied experiences and consequences of diet, which the language of calorie and energy makes clear, reflection on the exclusive milk diet of the rest cure allows us to appreciate anew the truly negative valences of the rest cure. When so much of the rest cure relies on the patient’s total submission to the doctor, it’s notable that this opening tactic drains them of energy.

Part 2: Eat Up and Obey!

After the strict under-feeding diet of milk, and with the patient essentially starving, Mitchell switches his tactics to over-feeding. He notes that the patient “may be made,” that is, forced, to eat more than they otherwise might by “being fed by her attendant” (139). He also permits the patient to drink a small amount of alcohol each day because “a small amount is a help towards speedy increase of fat” (141). He slowly introduces the following large quantities of food.

After about a week of the exclusive milk diet, the patient may have a light breakfast. A couple days later, a mutton chop for lunch. In another couple of days, bread and butter three times a day. Within ten days, the patient is up to three meals a day, alongside 3-4 pints of milk (6-8 cups). At that ten-day marker, Mitchell adds 2-4 ounces of fluid malt extract each day. From here, the patient has some freedom in the meals, but Mitchell notes he likes to provide items with fat, like butter and cocoa and, of course, milk. The tenth day is also when he orders a bizarre but fascinating entrée, raw beef soup. The recipe for this delicacy entails an entire pound of raw beef transformed into soup overnight. By the third week, the patient begins to take cod-liver oil, given by mouth or, if it causes nausea or loss of appetite, by “enemata” or an enema, which is “doubly valuable” (141). At the time the patient is eating real food is also the time Mitchell likes to add “iron in large doses” (142). He notes that many patients are constipated by iron, so he again provides advice for supplements ranging from fruit to “enemata of oil, or oil and glycerin, or a glycerin suppository” (143).

Though they might seem too strange to be believed, Gilman’s narrator names many of these exact food items, including cod liver oil, raw beef, and alcohol: “John says I mustn’t lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat” (Gilman, 651). Reading that the narrator is “made” to ingest items she is not even fully aware of, as seen through her unsureness in the phrase “lots of tonics and things,” reminiscent of her confusion over “phosphates or phosphites,” makes clear how in complete control John, her husband and doctor, is over her body and what goes in it.

This is a strategy straight from Mitchell. He addresses the issue that some patients simply don’t want to take iron, in which case, you might add it to their fluid malt for about a month before informing them that they were taking iron the whole time. Or, if patients complain of iron-induced headaches or a feeling of fullness, you might just follow Mitchell’s advice that, “as a rule, I disregard all such complaints” (143). Mitchell ends his detailed explanation of the rest cure diet by bragging about how much food he can force his patients to eat: “Probably no physician will read the account I have here detailed of the vast amount of food which I am enabled to give . . . without some sense of wonder” (143). 

That Mitchell’s practices raise many ethical concerns perhaps goes without saying. Suffice it to say: Mitchell’s deceitful, patriarchal tactics of submission here are particularly glaring and are not purely mental, but physiological. He forces patients to ingest things into their bodies; of that food and the accompanying medicine, the patient is not always informed of what they are taking. Other orifices are invaded as well, such as with the common use of enemas or vaginal douches in the course of treatment. In American Breakdown, Jennifer Lunden describes this kind of top-down, manipulative treatment as a medical colonialism, in which bodies are treated as territories to be surveyed and claimed by doctors, rather than treating patients as subjects with agency and full partners in their treatment.

Gilman depicts this uneven power dynamic in the husband/doctor’s insistence that he knows best despite the narrator’s attempt to share her thoughts about her own illness, that she fears she is better in body but not in mind. In response, he insists she really is getting better and pleads, “Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?” (Gilman, 652). I hope readers of my essay recognize by now just how highly ironic this request is, considering deceit and manipulation are baked into the rest cure, as far as Mitchell is concerned. In sum, Mitchell’s rest cure relies on violent governance of bodies. For this reason, the diet component of the rest cure is an integral, if not the primary, method of conquering the patient and as such, diet is a necessary context for future readings of “The Yellow Wall-Paper’s” examination of the patriarchal, exploitative doctor-patient dynamic.

 

Further Reading:

Page numbers in text refer to Mitchell’s Fat and Blood unless otherwise specified from “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1991), 35.

Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 2, (April, 2007), 337-364.

Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke University Press, 2019), 4.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” New England Magazine 18 (1892), 647-656.

—.“Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?” The Forerunner 4 (October, 1913), 271.

Edward Harris Goodman, “The Use of the ‘Karell Cure’ in the Treatment of Cardiac, Renal and Hepatic Dropsies,” Archives of Internal Medicine 17, no. 1, (1916), 810.

Philip Karell, “On the Milk Cure,” Edinburgh Medical Journal 12, no. 2, (1866), 97-122. (Quotes from 101 and 102)

Jennifer Lunden, American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman who Brought Me Back to Life (Harper Wave, 2023), 67.

Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903 (Cornell University Press, 1991), 6 and 24.

David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prothesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (University of Michigan Press, 2000), 205.

Silas Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria 1877, 8^th ed. (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1911). 

Fred M. Smith, R. B. Gibson, and Nelda G. Ross, “The Diet in the Treatment of Cardiac Failure” JAMA 88, no. 25, (1927), 1943-1947.

 

This article originally appeared in February 2025. 

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Alexis Schmidt is a PhD candidate of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She studies work, energy, and exhaustion in turn-of-the-century US literature, primarily written by or about women. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “American Exhaustion: Energy, Bodies, and Literature in the Progressive Era.” Her scholarship has appeared in the Edith Wharton Review and Edge Effects and is also forthcoming in Studies in American Naturalism.