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. 

This research sheds light on the identities of the previously unidentified enslaved individuals in the Colonel Ashley House and corrects the historical record on those that were already known to history by untangling facts from fiction. An in-depth analysis of the thirty surviving Ashley family account books housed at The Trustees of Reservations and the Sheffield Historical Society was conducted in tandem with an expansive search for the names of enslaved and freed Black people in the southern Berkshires and nearby Canaan and Salisbury in Connecticut. By pairing the archival discoveries found in the Ashley family account books with bills of sale, census data, court records, land deeds, local vital records, newspaper advertisements, probates, other account books, and tax records, the lives of nine individuals enslaved by the Ashley family were pieced together. These findings will inform a re-interpretation of the Colonel John Ashley House in Sheffield that is stewarded by The Trustees of Reservations. 

Only the earliest surviving Ashley family account books from 1771 to 1786 discussed people in bondage in the Ashley House. We know that in 1771, Colonel Ashley owned five enslaved people over the age of fourteen, and his son General John Ashley Jr. (1736–1799) enslaved three others over the age of fourteen. The contours of when the other enslaved individuals were liberated in the time after Bett and Brom’s case in 1781 remains opaque. Brom and Elizabeth Freeman—likely with Betsey Freeman in tow—won their freedom from Colonel Ashley and stopped working for him entirely. Zach Mullen appears to have settled his 1781 freedom suit with Colonel Ashley out of court and won his freedom; his brother Adam Mullen also appears to have gained his freedom in 1781. It cannot be determined if Colonel Ashley and General Ashley immediately freed Caesar, Harry, and the other unidentified enslaved people in their households. Moreover, recent scholarship has questioned the characterization of slavery suddenly ending in 1783 with complete liberation. 

The records of the Ashley family from 1782 through 1785 became less thorough in this pivotal moment of transition. Colonel Ashley never recorded the labor of his enslaved men again after 1781. The scant records that do exist from this period detail the coercive indenture of John Sheldon—a man still enslaved to the Sheldon family—to Colonel Ashley in the Spring of 1781. Concurrently in 1781, Jupiter Rogers and his sons, Will and Issac, began to work for paid wages from the Ashley family. Along with the various white laborers that consistently worked for the Ashleys before and after 1781, these Black men helped with the continued maintenance of the vast Ashley estate during this intervening period. Some of the formerly enslaved individuals of the Ashley family may have continued to work for the family directly after gaining their freedom. Adam Mullen mowed and carted for Colonel Ashley by at least 1782; the same may have been the case for Harry and Caesar.

Following these first few transitional years, other individuals formerly held in bondage by the Ashleys also returned to work for the household. Even after his bonded servitude ended, John Sheldon remained, living and working for the Ashley family for the rest of his life. Harry and Caesar both regularly worked for spurts of waged contracts for the Ashleys. Eventually, Zach Mullen and Colonel Ashley came to a tenant farming arrangement in 1789; he and his family would rent one of Colonel Ashley’s many homes with a garden lot in exchange for him working for wages. For the remainder of Colonel Ashley’s life, these men’s labor was supplemented with the work of indebted white laborers and free Black workers, including Ebenezer, Jacket (Jack), Lumblelow (Lem), Lyd, Lyfe, Benejah Abro, Ebony Freeman, Guy Johnson, Jacob Bows, Jeptha Holland, Jupiter Rogers, Isaac Rogers, Will Rogers, Peter Davis, and Richard (Dick) Sheldon (This list only reflects Black individuals who worked for Colonel Ashley, not his son General. John Ashley or his grandchildren.) Why would Zach Mullen return to work for a man who had imprisoned, abused, and enslaved him according to his 1781 freedom suit? Why would any of the men and women previously enslaved to the Ashleys continue to work for their former enslavers?  

Following the end of the Revolutionary War, the 1780s and 1790s marked an unstable economic period in Massachusetts history, marred by socio-economic tensions and flurries of common court cases over debt that culminated in the 1786 Shays’ Rebellion. Given this fraught climate, some freed Black people struggled to establish themselves financially following their years of unpaid servitude. Colonel Ashley was an exception rather than the rule with his will’s provision for his estate to support the formerly enslaved Harry, Zach Mullen, and John Sheldon; many other enslavers gave their former “servants” nothing after their 1783 freedom, and no other white person’s will in Sheffield provided for people they formerly enslaved. The land ownership of the Mullen brothers, for example, ebbed and flowed according to “down cycles” in the farming economy and amounting outstanding debts. Tenant farming for Colonel Ashley enabled Zach Mullen to escape the cycles of debt and lawsuits that plagued his brother Adam Mullen. Other Black individuals served as short-term, seasonal laborers to repay their debts to the Ashley stores or earn supplemental wages to support their own often multi-generational farms. The Ashleys continued to denote their Black laborers in their account books as “Negro” and often without their family names. A single account book contains entries for “Zach Mullen,” “Zach Mullen Negro,” and “Zach Negro.” The end of slavery in Massachusetts did not mean equality; the Black community in Sheffield still worked for people who did not bother or refused to learn their names, left their births and deaths unrecorded in local records, and buried them in unmarked graves.

While working for the family, white and Black laborers boarded at the Ashley House, rented houses and land from the Ashleys, or commuted from their own nearby household. Of the thirty-two “all other free persons” recorded in Sheffield in the 1790 Federal Census, only five of these Black families, totaling sixteen people, had their own household. From 1790 to 1800, the Black population grew exponentially in Sheffield because of its proximity to New York and Connecticut, where slavery was still legal. The 1800 Federal Census recorded 103 “all other free persons, except Indians” in Sheffield with a total of nineteen Black households. In the margins of these white elite-dominated account books, Black community ties and kinship networks are revealed through three-way exchanges for goods and services to friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family. When the Ashleys accounted for the “days lost” from labor of their waged Black workers, they recorded that many individuals returned home to Claverack, NY, Salisbury, CT, or Sheffield for holidays like the Fourth of July, Christmas, and New Years. In other instances, they went home to help with the harvests and hunting. Both women and men attended Black election day festivities in Boston and Hartford, often purchasing a new suit of clothes, borrowing cash, and losing two days of work for the occasion. Black men took time off work to participate in Black Training Days in Canaan and possibly Great Barrington that paralleled the white military and social holiday of the same name. Through their holidays, continued familial networks, and the establishment of independent households, the interconnected Black community of southern Berkshire County and northern Litchfield County engaged in forms of interpersonal and spatial resistance, even while many still labored under the watchful eye of their former enslavers. 

The thirty surviving Ashley family account books and various loose notes interspersed within their pages illustrate how Colonel Ashley and his descendants predicated their rural, regional empire on the work of enslaved men and women that enabled his stores, farms, mills, and households to be profitable entities. Their work allowed for Colonel Ashley to wear many hats, as a gentlemen farmer, innholder, judge, lawyer, mill owner, selectman, and shopkeeper. No bills of sale for any person enslaved to the Ashley family survive, —except for a woman named Mary purchased by General Ashley Jr. in 1789 and freed under the terms of an indenture. Enslaved people were often sold off as property to settle debts, but the Ashley family’s high level of economic stability prevented them from ever being forced to sell. No surviving account book mentions the enslaved labor of any women in either Colonel Ashley or General Ashley’s households. Our knowledge of Elizabeth Freeman and her daughter Betsey’s enslavement to the Ashleys derives from her freedom suit and the subsequent stories told by the Sedgwick family. Colonel Ashley probably owned at least one other enslaved woman in his lifetime, as did General Ashley. Their unknown identities demonstrate how archival bias obscures our knowledge of these women’s names, pasts, and futures outside of bondage. These individual biographies seek to foreground the experiences of all the individuals held in bondage by the Ashley family. In doing so, this research reevaluates how we tell the story of Elizabeth Freeman, the Colonel John Ashley House, and the wider Black community in the early republic Berkshires.

Brom [Bram] (? – ?)

Brom was enslaved in the home of Colonel Ashley by 1771. One possibility for Brom’s origin could be that he was sold by Captain Ruluff Dutcher (1738–1803) of nearby Canaan, Connecticut—the son-in-law of Colonel Ashley—after Captain Dutcher inherited an enslaved man called “Broom” or “Abram” from his father in 1758. No transactions survive to confirm this theory. According to the earliest Ashley account book, Colonel Ashley entrusted Brom with trips beyond his watchful eye, including frequent trips to cart ore from his open pit in Salisbury, Connecticut back to his Ironworks in Sheffield, courier tasks with goods from the Ashley store to Salisbury, and wagon trips to Claverack to fulfill wheat orders. He may have been the “Colonel Ashly’s negro” that drove his sleigh in the bristling cold in January of 1773 from Sheffield to Westfield for General Ashley’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Mary Ballantine. Beyond operating with the most autonomy of all the enslaved people in the household, Brom also may have had some training to work in Colonel Ashley’s bloomery forge. Brom sued Colonel Ashley for his freedom as Bett’s co-plaintiff in May 1781 and won. There is no evidence to suggest that Brom was Bett’s “common law husband” or that he also moved with the Sedgwicks to Stockbridge. The recent theory that Brom changed his name to Cato Brum, went to work for the Sedgwicks as their “horse-servant,” and ended his life in prison seems implausible, especially given Catharine Sedgwick’s descriptions of Cato as youthfully misbehaved. Like Elizabeth Freeman, Brom ceased all work and contact with the Ashley family following his suit, and the details of his life after gaining his freedom are lost to history.

Caesar [Ceaser, Ceas, “Ceser Negro”] (? – ?) 

Caesar was enslaved by Colonel Ashley by at least 1776. “Ceas” frequently carted with Brom heavy loads of ore from the Salisbury “Ore Hill” back to Sheffield; by 1780, “Ceaser” carted some loads on his own. After gaining his freedom, Caesar continued to work for Colonel Ashley in the 1780s for wages. In the 1790s, Caesar stopped working for the Ashleys or purchasing goods from their stores for a number of years, suggesting that he had professionally emancipated himself from the family. Entries for Caesar at the General Ashley store appear again consistently from 1798 to 1800. By 1798, Caesar had a son old enough to perform some labor for General Ashley to repay his debts for purchases. 

Around the time of Caesar’s reappearance in the Ashley account books, he may have adopted a new name. “Ceser Negro” and Caesar Freeman (ab. 1759–1845) are possibly the same person because entries for both names in different hands appear in 1798 in the Ashley account books. Caesar Freeman also started paying taxes in Sheffield in 1798. However, there were numerous Black men named Caesar in the area; thus, it is also possible that they were two separate individuals.

Harry [Heary, “Harry Negro”] (? – ?)

Harry may have been enslaved to Colonel Ashley around 1771 following his sale by John Upham of Claverack, New York. A runaway advertisement for an enslaved man named “Harry” suggests that he resisted the sale but was ultimately forced to return to Colonel Ashley’s ownership. Harry first appears in Col. Ashley’s account books in 1784, fetching a cow for a white tenant on Colonel Ashley’s land. After gaining his freedom, he consistently harvested and completed other physical labor for Colonel Ashley in the 1780s and 1790s while living at the Colonel Ashley House. He also purchased various goods from General John Ashley’s nearby store. Harry returned to Claverack for holidays, suggesting that he maintained his family connections in his former home. He played the fiddle and attended community events, such as the Canaan training day and the Boston Election Day. Notably, Harry only paid taxes once in 1791 and never appeared as head of a household in a federal census. If Harry ever took a last name is not known. He continued to work for Colonel Ashley up until the colonel’s death in 1802; Colonel Ashley provided for his continued care in his will. Harry then went to work for Colonel Ashley’s grandson William Ashley (1773–1849), and his trips to Canaan became more frequent. At some point before 1812, Harry married an unknown woman. His final entry in an Ashley account book was in 1816, but when he died cannot be determined.

John Sheldon [“John Negro,” “Old John,” “Black John”] (? – ab. 1810)

John Sheldon was previously enslaved to Colonel Elisha Sheldon (1740–1805) of Salisbury, Connecticut. For the repayment of a debt, Colonel Ashley recorded in his account book that “Colonel Sheldon’s negro John came to live with me May 9, 1782.” John was indentured or “loaned out” to Colonel Ashley with the agreement that he would return to Salisbury to help harvest. Colonel Ashley and Colonel Sheldon renewed John’s indenture to Colonel Ashley for another year in May of 1783. While slavery in Massachusetts was illegal by 1783, John was still legally enslaved to the Sheldon family in Connecticut. The Sheldon family moved to Vermont around 1790, and account entries for John Sheldon no longer mentioned his enslavement to the Colonel Elisha Sheldon or indenture to Colonel Ashley. Throughout the 1790s, John worked for wages alongside other Black and white laborers of Colonel Ashley and made minimal purchases at General Ashley’s store. He traveled the least out of any of the formerly enslaved men employed by Colonel Ashley. From 1798 to 1802, John paid taxes in Sheffield under the names “John Negro” and “John Sheldon negro” for the small amount of real estate and personal property he accumulated. In his will, Colonel Ashley provided for John Sheldon. On December 24, 1807, William Ashley paid his sister Jane Ashley Clark (1784–?) for her remainder of the settlement of Colonel Ashley, including around thirty-three dollars for the “support of John & Zack.” It is possible that John Sheldon lived with Jane after 1802 or that she handled his support monetarily. By October 11, 1810, entries appear in William Ashley’s account book for outstanding debts of “John Negro Deceased.”

Adam Mullen [“Adam Negro”] (ab. 1751–?)

Adam Mullen was probably born in Salisbury, Connecticut to unidentified parents around 1751. By 1756, he and his older brother Zach Mullen were enslaved in the household of John Dutcher (1708–1777) of Salisbury. To repay the damages on a court case over a debt to Jeremiah Hogeboom [Hannah Hogeboom Ashley’s brother] (1711–1784) of Claverack in 1757, John Dutcher handed over to the sheriff Adam, Zach, and two enslaved fifty-year olds—Tom and Mary—who may have been his grandparents. At some point before 1771, Adam and Zach were sold to Colonel John Ashley.

Adam Mullen carted ore from Salisbury to Colonel Ashley’s Ironworks starting in 1775 until 1781. His brother Zach Mullen, Brom, and Elizabeth Freeman gained their freedom from Colonel Ashley in 1781; based on his appearance in the 1781 Sheffield tax records, Adam Mullen also gained his freedom around the same time. Unlike his brother, Adam continued to work for the Ashley family directly after gaining his freedom and returned to living with Colonel Ashley around April 1784. Adam Mullen owned land along the Konkapot River beside the Ashley estate, which he sold in January 1787. The identities of Adam’s daughter—who was born by the mid-1780s— and his first wife went undocumented in the archival record. His son was probably Jacob “Jack” Mullen, who moved to Pittsfield by 1810. Adam Mullen remarried in 1806 to Prudence Steward in Sheffield.

Adam Mullen continued to buy goods from the Ashleys throughout his life and sometimes performed labor until 1807. Afterwards, Adam accumulated debt with various parties that brought cases against him at the Court of Common Pleas as he conducted business outside of the Ashley realm and their extended credit to be repaid with labor. In 1803, Thomas Stevens—a blacksmith of Sheffield—was listed as Adam Mullen’s “Trustee” in a case; Stevens possibly acted in a guardianship role similar to those imposed by the Overseers of the Poor. Adam may have worked for Thomas Stevens in some interrelated iron capacity. By 1805, Adam rented his own bloomery forge “together with the tools & implements” from Ziba Bush until around 1808. An 1807 deed for land recorded the sale of “about an acre of land, with a Dwelling-house & barn thereon standing, and the same on which Adam Mullen now lives,” which may have been from when he worked at the Bush forge. Adam Mullen was likely responsible for providing the iron for the fixtures on the “good well made & well iron bound wagon” he and Elisha Smith sold to Philander Hurlburt without ever fulfilling the order. An 1810 lawsuit over debts owed by Adam Mullen to Colonel Ashley’s grandson, William Bull Jr. (1757–1841), would be his last recorded appearance; the final years of his life are otherwise unknown.

Zach Mullen [Zack, Zachariah, Zackariah, Zacheus, Zaccus, “Zach Negro”] (ab. 1746–1817)

Zach Mullen was probably born in Salisbury, Connecticut or New York State to unidentified parents around 1746. By 1756, he and his younger brother Adam Mullen were enslaved in the household of John Dutcher (1708–1777) of Salisbury. Zach, Adam, and two enslaved fifty-year olds—Tom and Mary— were deeded to Jeremiah Hogeboom as payment for an outstanding debt. At some point before 1771, Hogeboom sold Zach Mullen and Adam Mullen to Colonel Ashley.

Zach never appeared in the earliest Ashley account book when he was enslaved, but his brother Adam did. In April 1781, Zach Mullen brought his grievances against the Ashleys to court and became the first enslaved person in the Ashley House to sue for their freedom. Zach’s case took the typical form of freedom suits; he sued on the grounds of abuse through a “plea of trespass.” His case was delayed three times until it was eventually dismissed. Colonel Ashley and Zach settled out of court around the time that Brom and Bett won their case. He gained his freedom, and he and his brother were taxpayers for the year 1781. From 1781 to 1787, Zach interacted with the Ashley family minimally and only worked sporadically for Colonel Ashley to pay for purchases at the Ashley stores. He may have owned his own land based on the taxes he paid, or he may have lived on his brother Adam’s property nearby until 1787. On November 1, 1789, Zach Mullen, his unidentified wife, his daughter, and possibly his son moved onto a “farm where Stephen Tuttle formerly lived” with a house and “a good garden spot.” They lived here continuously until 1805. Zach Mullen managed and tended this land and earned wages from Colonel Ashley for various labor, mostly consisting of managing the crops and caring for livestock.

The 1790 federal census recorded Zach Mullen as having a household of six people, possibly including his family and members of Adam Mullen’s family. Colonel Ashley’s will provided for Zach’s continued support if he needed it. In the year directly proceeding his death, William Ashley paid Zach for his continued work caring for “the property belonging to Col. Ashley’s estate” and, in another instance, paid him for tending Colonel Ashley’s stock. Sometime in the late 1800s to early 1810s, Zach may have lived and worked for Colonel John Ashley, 3rd (1767–1823), who by then resided in the deceased Colonel Ashley’s home. On December 24, 1807, William Ashley paid his sister Jane Ashley Clark from the Colonel Ashley estate, including around thirty-three dollars for the “support of John & Zack.” Furthermore, in the last year of his life, William Ashley recorded that Zach boarded at his home and his apparel was paid for out of the estate of Colonel Ashley. On March 28, 1813, Zach Mullen moved in with William Ashley and began to work for him. Zach Mullen died on October 13, 1817, in William Ashley’s home.

Elizabeth Freeman [Bett, Betty Freeman, Mumbet, Mum Bett] (ab. 1744–1829)

Elizabeth Freeman was born as Bett sometime between 1742 to 1744 in an unknown location. Many sources point to her birthplace to be in Claverack, New York because they believe she was previously enslaved to Pieter Hogeboom. Theodore Sedgwick II (1780–1839) remembered that “Mum Bett…first lived in Claverac, Columbia county, in the state of New-York, in the family of a Mr. Hogeboom. She was purchased at an early age by Col. Ashley.” However, while she could have been inherited or purchased by Colonel Ashley and his wife Hannah Hogeboom Ashley in 1758, no surviving evidence can be found to conclusively support Claverack as her birthplace. The identity of her parents cannot be determined, though, a friend of Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Martineau, claimed that her parents came from Africa. Elizabeth Freeman kept in contact with her parents or possibly brought possessions of theirs with her when she was sold or given to the Ashley family. In her will, she bequeathed her daughter Betsey Freeman “1 do. [gown] received of my father” and “a short gown that was my mother’s.”

Folklore tells that Elizabeth Freeman was sold or inherited alongside her sister Lizzie. The evidence of Lizzie’s existence comes singularly from the story of Elizabeth protecting Lizzie from a blow delivered by Hannah Hogeboom Ashley with a hot “large iron shovel.” The Sedgwicks do not discuss the existence of Lizzie beyond this narrative, and nothing suggests that she moved with Elizabeth Freeman to work at the Sedgwick house in 1781. In their investigation on Elizabeth Freeman, Emilie Piper and David Levinson theorized that Lizzie could instead be her daughter, Betsey Freeman. Elizabeth Freeman gave birth to Betsey, or Little Bett, in the early 1770s. The identity of Betsey’s father is unknown. Theodore Sedgwick II recalled that Elizabeth Freeman married at a young age and had Betsey with her husband who died fighting in the Revolutionary War. At present, no recorded soldier who died in service can be identified that fits these parameters. Other researchers have claimed that Brom was her common-law husband, which also lacks substantiation. In her 1781 freedom suit, Bett was labeled a “spinster” and, in her later land transactions in Stockbridge, she was addressed as “singlewoman Spinster,” rather than widow. However, any possible common-law marriage she may have had could be ignored and unrecognized by the legal system.

While enslaved in the household of the Ashley family, Bett—as she was called when she lived in the Ashley House—helped with the domestic chores and served the Ashleys, alongside various short-term white female servants and possibly other enslaved women lost to history. One anecdote attests that Bett began practicing nursing and midwifery as early as 1775, implying that she learned the craft while enslaved in Sheffield. The surviving Ashley account books never recorded Bett, but her role in the household operated outside the bounds of Colonel Ashley’s accounting of his farm, store, potash, mills, and ironworks. Her invisible labor can be discerned in entries where Colonel Ashley sold items like “my wife’s butter” or “a chocolate cake”—goods that Bett undoubtedly would have played a role in producing. Bett also likely tended to the household linens and repaired domestic textiles and apparel. Her will included a linen pocket handkerchief with an embroidered “B”, a pair of cotton hose embroidered with “B.F.,” and two muslin handkerchiefs embroidered “E.B.P.” As one of her roles was likely to mark each textile to help with the laborious process of laundering, Bett would have learned some basic needlework skills that she put to service for her personal use. Given that the Ashley family lived in a rural country context, she may have also performed agricultural labor, tending to the livestock and garden.

In 1781, with their lawyers Theodore Sedgwick and Tapping Reeve, Bett and Brom sued Colonel Ashley for their freedom. They were the first enslaved persons to sue on the grounds of unconstitutionality, and their case claimed that slavery was incompatible with the new 1780 Massachusetts constitution. On August 22, 1781, at the court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington, the case Brom and Bett vs. Ashley was decided in favor of Brom and Bett. They were awarded thirty shillings. At this point, Bett officially took the name “Elizabeth Freeman.” Afterwards, she went to work for her lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick, in Sheffield and moved with the family to Stockbridge in 1785. By 1803, she owned land and, about 1807, left the Sedgwicks’ household to live in her own home with her extended family. Elizabeth Freeman died on December 28, 1829, and was buried in the Sedgwick family plot in Stockbridge.

Betsey Freeman [Betsey Humphrey, Betty, Little Bet] (ab. 1775–1858)

Betsey Freeman was the daughter of Elizabeth Freeman and an unidentified father. Different contemporary records cite her birthdate as 1770, 1772, and 1775. Thus, Elizabeth Freeman most likely gave birth to Betsey when she was still enslaved to Colonel Ashley, making the infant Betsey enslaved to him based on the status of her mother. Whether Betsey was the only child born to Elizabeth Freeman cannot be determined, but she is confirmed to be the only one to survive to adulthood. In her early years, she lived in bondage at the Colonel Ashley House and, then after her mother won her freedom in 1781, moved into the Sedgwick household in Sheffield and later Stockbridge. Catharine Sedgwick remembered her as “rather impish” and an exaggerated storyteller, while the compiler of Catharine’s letters, Mary Elizabeth Dewey (1821–1910), described Betsey as a “shiftless creature, a mere pensioner upon the [Sedgwick] family in which her mother had been a trusted friend.”

Sometime before 1803, Betsey Freeman married Jonah Humphrey (1778–ab. 1835), a member of the close-knit Black community in Stockbridge. In 1803, Humphrey and Elizabeth Freeman purchased land together. Betsey would live in this home until 1840. The couple had two daughters: Elizabeth Humphrey Van Schacck (?–1815) and Mary Ann Humphrey Drean (1804–?). Around 1835, Jonah Humphrey left Betsey and their daughter Elizabeth to move to the new southern Liberia colony of Bassa Cover with their daughter Mary Ann. In 1840, the executors of her mother Elizabeth Freeman’s estate sold the family land in Stockbridge, and Betsey Humphrey moved to nearby Lenox for the remainder of her life.

Mary (? – ?)

Mary was formerly enslaved to William Van Ness (1710–ab. 1790) of Claverack—the husband of Hannah Hogeboom Ashley’s sister. On May 5, 1789, General John Ashley Jr. purchased the “time” of “Mary a negro woman” in an indenture agreement. General Ashley first bought Mary from William Van Ness, freed her, and then rebound her to him as an indentured servant for ten years. Scholar Joanne Pope Melish described this indenture as supposedly being an arrangement Mary “agreed” to, but “Mary’s agreement would almost certainly have been made under duress on “free” ground in Massachusetts as the only way out of continued enslavement in New York. This kind of pressured service, whose legality seems dubious at best, was obviously calculated to extend the slave relation rather than to mitigate it.” Colonel Ashley recorded in his account book that “General Ashley sent to Wm Van Ness” on August 4, 1789 “10:0:24 of iron in which was 2 set of wagon tire,” possibly as a partial payment for the purchase of Mary. She may have been related to other enslaved people possibly inherited by members of the Hogeboom family from the patriarch Pieter Hogeboom (1676–ab. 1758). Right before the death of Gen. Ashley in 1799, Mary’s indenture to the family ended. The details of her life after her indenture ended are unknown.

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As is the case with many historic house museums, the Colonel John Ashley House’s role as a public institution began as a testament to a triumphant war hero and local legend of Sheffield, centering elite white male identity in the process. Narratives around Elizabeth Freeman and certainly the identities of any enslaved or free laborers existed only secondarily. Yet, the Ashley family and the wider Sheffield community’s maintenance of the Colonel Ashley House and its family history resulted in the critical preservation of historical materials. The survival of thirty family account books enables a reevaluation of its history. Revisiting archival material related to the Ashleys and the production of these biographies allows for a new type of engagement and interpretation of the house. As we enter the first stages of the house’s reinterpretation, The Trustees of Reservations is committed to illuminating all the stories of those who lived and were enslaved in the Colonel Ashley House in tangible, permanent, and meaningful ways. The Colonel Ashley House Interpretation Center, situated in a separate building open year-round, will receive a refurbishment and a new exhibition based on these findings. A part of this approach will be to better explicate how the Colonel Ashley House has physically evolved over time through visual aids. This is an important aspect of the conversation surrounding how spaces that enslaved individuals lived and slept in may no longer be accurately reflected in the surviving structure, or even exist. Along with the inclusion of these biographies, the new interpretation within the house will recenter and better educate the public on how the realities of everyday life in bondage in the Colonel Ashely House and rural New England more generally. This ongoing, multi-phase reinterpretation will seek to engage other nonprofit organizations and the Black community to make an impactful and enduring contribution to raise awareness about slavery in the North and its enduring consequences. 

Further Readings and Notes on the Sources:

The following account books are referenced throughout this article in abbreviated form. To mitigate the further spread of myths and misinformation regarding those enslaved at the Col. Ashley House, these biographies derive from evidence found in surviving primary source materials and the below citations provide references for retracing such information. The thirty surviving account books are accessible to the public by appointment at The Trustees of Reservations’ Archives & Research Center in Sharon, MA and the Sheffield Historical Society’s Mark Dewey Research Center in Sheffield, MA.

Colonel John Ashley, Ashley Account Book 1, Ledger, 1768-1786, Colonel John Ashley Papers, 1755-1818, The Trustees of Reservations, Archives & Research Center.

Colonel John Ashley, General John Ashley, and William Ashley, Ashley Account Book 2, ledger, daybook, memorandum, 1777-1819, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center.

Colonel John Ashley, and General John Ashley, Ashley Account Book 3, ledger, memorandum, 1786-1796, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center.

General John Ashley and William Ashley, Ashley Account Book 5, daybook, 1794-1795, Colonel John Ashley Papers, 1755-1818, The Trustees of Reservations, Archives & Research Center.

General John Ashley and William Ashley, Ashley Account Book 7, daybook, 1796, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center.

General John Ashley et al., Ashley Account Book 9, daybook, ledger, 1798-1801, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center.

William Ashley, Ashley Account Book 10, index, ledger, 1791-1805, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center.

William Ashley, Ashley Account Book 11, daybook, 1799-1806, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center.

William Ashley, General John Ashley, and John Ashley 3^rd, Ashley Account Book 12, daybook, memorandum, 1792-1812, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center.

William Ashley, Ashley Account Book 15, daybook, 1806-1807, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center.

William Ashley, Ashley Account Book 18, daybook, memorandum, 1819-1826, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center.

On slavery in the North and public memory, see Joseph Carvalho, “Uncovering the Stories of Black Families in Springfield and Hampden County, Massachusetts: 1650–1865,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts Vol. 40, no. 1/2 (Summer 2012): 70–3; Nicole Saffold Maskiell, Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry (Cornell University Press, 2022), 17–8, 23; Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Marla R. Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Joining Reinterpretation to Reparations,” Museums & Social Issues 15, no. 1–2 (July 3, 2021): 75–6; Andrea C. Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021), 67; William Dillon Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 117–21, 136; Marc Howard Ross, “Slavery and Collective Forgetting,” in Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 94–5, 99, 118; Elena Sesma, “‘A Web of Community’: Uncovering African American Historic Sites in Deerfield, MA,” Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage 2, no. 2 (May 18, 2015): 133; and Gloria McCahon Whiting, “‘Race, Slavery, and the Problem of Numbers in Early New England: A View from Probate Court,’ William and Mary Quarterly 77 No. 3 (July 2020): 405-40.

On background of enslavement at the Colonel John Ashley House, see “Entry for John Ashley,” Sheffield, The Massachusetts Tax valuation List of 1771, Massachusetts State Archives, volumes 132-134; Ashley Account Book 1, 165–6, 173–4, 199, 222–3, 226–9, 291, 294–6; Colonel John Ashley, “Notes regarding work of “Adam” for John Ashley,” 1784-1785, note laid in Account Book 1 (pp. 160), Colonel John Ashley Papers, 1755-1818, Archives & Research Center, The Trustees of Reservations. Ashley Account Book 3, 113–6, 127–8, 133; Ashley Account Book 10, 47; Ashley Account Book 2, 28, 46, 56; “John Ashley, Esq., Sheffield 1802 (Record no. 2195),” in Berkshire County, MA: File Papers, 1761–1917, vol. 1: Berkshire Cases 2000–3999, 5; “Entries for Sheffield,” U.S. Census, 1790, 1800, Sheffield, Massachusetts; and Myron Stachiw, “Col. John Ashley and His Web of Commerce, 1735-1802,” unpublished report (Sheffield, MA: The Trustees of Reservations, 2002); Bernard A. Drew, If They Close the Door on You, Go in the Window: Origins of the African American Community in Sheffield, Great Barrington & Stockbridge (Great Barrington, MA: Attic Revivals Press, 2004).

For the biography of Brom, see: “Christopher Dutcher,” September 15, 1752, Probate Records, 1743-1817: Probate Court, (Litchfield District), 101–5; Ashley Account Book 1, 112, 174, 167, 205, 210, 237, 245, 256, 266–7, 281, 300, 306; George Ballantine, ed., Journal of Rev. John Ballantine: Minister of Westfield, MA, 1737-1774 (Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books, Inc., 2002), 2443; Brom & Bett vs. J. Ashley Esq, Court Records, Berkshire County Courthouse, Great Barrington, Mass., Inferior Court of Common Pleas, May 28, 1781, vol. 4A; Emilie Piper and David Levinson, One Minute a Free Woman: Elizabeth Freeman and the Struggle for Freedom (Salisbury, CT: Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area, 2010) 132, 136–7; Gelston Hardy, “Mum Bet vs. Ashley: A Little-Known Case Involving Slavery Which, If It Had Been Followed NATIONALLY, Might Have Prevented the CIVIL WAR,” unpublished paper, (Dewey Research Center: Sheffield Historical Society, 1974), 2–3; Drew, If They Close the Door on You, 11, 44; “Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick I,” Stockbridge, MA, April 1, 1804, Catharine Maria Sedgwick Online Letters, Massachusetts Historical Society; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ed. Mary Kelley (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 110.

For the biography of Caesar, see: Ashley Account Book 1, 174, 245, 256, 267, 287, 300; Ashley Account Book 2, 42; Ashley Account Book 11, 250; Ashley Account Book 9, 61, 63, 70, 75, 84, 87, 115, 124, 139, 150, 160, 184, 200, 211, 271, 296; Sheffield, Massachusetts Assessor’s Tax Lists and Records, Sheffield Historical Society, Mark Dewey Research Center, year 1798; “Entry for Caezar Freeman,” July 29, 1844, Massachusetts State Vital Records, 1841-1925, Deaths Registered in Sheffield 1845.

This Caesar Freeman of Sheffield and Great Barrington should not be confused with the Caesar Freeman of Stockbridge that married Margaret “Peggy” Hull, sister of Agrippa Hull.

For the biography of Harry, see: “Runaway Advertisement for Harry,” Connecticut Courant (Hartford, Connecticut), no. 329, April 16, 1771, 3; Ashley Account Book 1, 107; Ashley Account Book 3, 21, 42, 46, 61, 102, 108, 117, 124-5, 128, 130, 197; Ashley Account Book 5, 70; Ashley Account Book 2, 75, 163, 181–2, 223, 226, 247, 256, 270–7; Sheffield, Massachusetts Assessor’s Tax Lists and Records, year 1791; “John Ashley, Esq., Sheffield 1802 (Record no. 2195),” NEHS, 5.

For the biography of John Sheldon, see: Ashley Account Book 1, 291, 295–6; , Ashley Account Book 2, 45; Ashley Account Book 3, 128–9; Ashley Account Book 7, 66; Drew, If They Close the Door on You, 48; Sheffield, Massachusetts Assessor’s Tax Lists and Records, years 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801, and 1802; “John Ashley, Esq., Sheffield 1802 (Record no. 2195),” NEHS, 5; Ashley Account Book 12, 108.

For the biography of Adam Mullen, see: “Attachment, 1757 Dec 8,” Litchfield Historical Society, Wolcott Family Collection: Miscellany, Connecticut County Court (Litchfield County), 1753-1757, Folder 9, Item 4; Ashley Account Book 1, 237, 245, 281; Sheffield, Massachusetts Assessor’s Tax Lists and Records, year 1781; “Adam Mullen, to Samuel Bellows Sheldon, January 30, 1786, vol. 24, (Massachusetts Land Records 1620-1986: Southern Berkshire Registry of Deeds), 263; Col. J. Ashley, “Account regarding work of “Adam” for John Ashley”; “Entry for Jacob Mullen,” U.S. Census, 1810, 1820, Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Ashley Account Book 3, 18, 26; Ashley Account Book 11, 291; Ashley Account Book 15, 299; “Jared Canfield vs. Adam Mullen,” April 18, 1803, case no. 95, Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas records, 1760–1860, vol. 20, 401–2; “Ziba Bush vs. Adam Mullen,” April 1807, case no. 233, 1809, Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas records, 1760–1860, vol. 27, 61–2; “Philander Hurlburt vs. Elisha Smith,” January 4, 1808, case no. 195, Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas records, 1760–1860, vol. 24, 13; Asahel Olds, to John W. Hurlbert, September 21, 1807, vol. 46, (Massachusetts Land Records 1620-1986: Southern Berkshire Registry of Deeds), 83; “William Bull vs. Adam Mullen,” March 16, 1810, case no. 368, Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas records, 1760–1860, vol. 27, 373–4.

For the biography of Zach Mullen, see Adam Mullen as well as “Zach Mullen vs. John Ashley Esq.,” April 1781, case no. 20, Berkshire County, Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas records, 1760–1860, vol. 4, 24; Sheffield, Massachusetts Assessor’s Tax Lists and Records, year 1781, 1784, 1785, 1788, 1789, 1798, 1799, and 1800; Ashley Account Book 3, 60, 77, 91, 109, 111, 119, 126; Colonel John Ashley, “Account regarding work of “Zach” for John Ashley,” 1787-1789, loose note, Ashley Family Genealogy Files, collection of the Sheffield Historical Society, box 2; “John Ashley, Esq., Sheffield 1802 (Record no. 2195),” NEHS, 5, 78; “Entry for Zacheus Mullen,” U.S. Census, 1790, Sheffield, Massachusetts; Ashley Account Book 11, 246; Ashley Account Book 2, 87, 94 –5, 101, 217–8; Ashley Account Book 12, 26; Ashley Account Book 18, 95.

Zach Mullen’s son-in-law also resided with the family in 1795. Moreover, a man named Elijah Mullen (ab. 1784–1860) was born around 1783 in Sheffield to either Zach Mullen or his brother Adam Mullen. Elijah Mullen had a household of four people in Sheffield in 1810, possibly including Zach Mullen. By the 1820 federal census, he had moved to Pittsfield.

For background on the Elizabeth Freeman, see Piper and David Levinson, One Minute a Free Woman; Sari Edelstein, “‘Good Mother, Farewell’: Elizabeth Freeman’s Silence and the Stories of Mumbet,” The New England Quarterly 92, no. 4 (November 1, 2019): 604, 611; Arthur Zilversmit, “Mumbet: Folklore and Fact,” Berkshire History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 5–6.

For the biography of Elizabeth Freeman, see: Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., The Practicability of the Abolition of Slavery: A Lecture, Delivered at the Lyceum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, February, 1831 (New York, NY: Printed by J. Seymour, 1831), 14, 16; Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. 2, 3 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 104; Elizabeth Freeman, Stockbridge, 1830 (Record no. 4959),” in Berkshire County, MA: File Papers, 1761–1917, vol. 1: Berkshire Cases 4000 –5999, 4; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” Bentley’s Miscellany, 1853, Vol. 34, 419; Piper and Levinson, One Minute a Free Woman, 63; Beth Luey, “”One Minute’s Freedom”: The Colonel John Ashley House, Sheffield,” in At Home: Historic Houses of Central and Western Massachusetts, Bright Leaf (Amherst, MA: Bright Leaf, 2019), 47; Hardy, “Mum Bet vs. Ashley,” 2–3; Elizabeth Freeman and Jonah Humphrey, to Enoch Humphrey, April 1, 1809, vol. 47 (Massachusetts Land Records 1620-1986: Southern Berkshire Registry of Deeds), 751–2; Enoch Humphrey, to Elizabeth Freeman and Jonah Humphrey, April 1, 1809, vol. 47 (Massachusetts Land Records 1620-1986: Southern Berkshire Registry of Deeds), 233–4.

If sister Lizzie was a real person enslaved in the Ashley House, a possible explanation for her not joining the Sedgwick household could be that she was already married and opted to stay with her spouse in Sheffield. Most of the wives’ names of the enslaved men in the Ashley household are unknown; Ashley Account Book 1, 43, 93; “Elizabeth Freeman, Stockbridge 1830 (Record no. 4959),” NEHS, 4; Felicia Y. Thomas, “‘Fit for Town or Country’: Black Women and Work in Colonial Massachusetts,” The Journal of African American History 105, no. 2 (March 2020): 204–6; Brom & Bett vs. J. Ashley Esq, 1781; Piper and Levinson, One Minute a Free Woman, 118.

For the biography of Betsey Freeman, see: “Entry for Betsey Humphrey,” U.S. Census, 1850, Lenox, Massachusetts; “Entry for Betsey Humphrey,” U.S. Census, 1855, Lenox, Massachusetts; “Entry for Betsey Humphrey,” April 21, 1858, Deaths Registered in Lenox 1858; Piper and Levinson, One Minute a Free Woman, 133, 137–9, 157; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, ed. Mary E. Dewey (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1871), 73, 327.

For the biography of Mary, see: “Indenture in two parts between J. Ashley and Mary,” 1789, Sedgwick Family Papers, 1717-1946: miscellaneous manuscripts (Theodore Sedgwick), bound ed., collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Melish, Disowning Slavery, 96–7; Ashley Account Book 3, 134.

Acknowledgements: 

Thank you to my curatorial and archives team at The Trustees of Reservations and the Sheffield Historical Society for supporting and encouraging this deep exploration. Thanks to the Connecticut State Museum, Great Barrington Historical Society, Litchfield Historical Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives, and UMass Amherst W.E.B. DuBois Library for their assistance and for opening their archives to me. The three Ashley family account books stewarded by The Trustees and the Col. Ashley House historic photograph collection were recently digitized thanks to a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This research was made possible by support from the Decorative Arts Trust in their sponsorship of a Peggy N. Gerry Curatorial Fellowship at The Trustees.

This article originally appeared in January 2025

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Olivia R. Scott (Livy) is the Decorative Arts Trust Peggy N. Gerry Curatorial Fellow with The Trustees of Reservations at the Colonel John Ashley House. This work marks the first of more forthcoming research into the enslaved population of the Berkshires and the reinterpretation of the Col. Ashley House and its historic interiors.

The next important announcement is that in the past month, Jordan Taylor has moved on from his role as the Commonplace production editor. Since we relaunched the site in 2021 with new articles, a new format, and new URL, Jordan has been instrumental in shaping the look and feel of the work that we have published. I want to thank him for his amazing work and wish him the best in his new position as the Manager of Digital Content for Colonial Williamsburg. I also have the pleasure to welcome Katy Telling to Commonplace as our new production editor. Katy is a PhD candidate in History at William & Mary and also manages social media for the Omohundro Institute’s Octo as well as Women Also Know History.

It is now time for me to move to my plea for your support and turn to submissions. I want to follow up on my final point from last year’s note about submissions to Commonplace, but before I that, I would like to pause and have you read a few seemingly unrelated excerpted paragraphs from an unpublished piece titled “‘Bachelors, Look Out!’: Working Men’s Masculinity and Light-Reading Articles in 1830s New York City Pro-labor Newspapers” that I wrote in 2002 when I was in graduate school. Feel free to skip down if you want, but I think it will make sense on the other side.

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The labor agitation guidelines set down at the inaugural 1834 National Trades’ Union Convention included a mandate that union members should “refuse honor and office to every man who does not promote by a good example and deeds of benevolence the welfare of his fellow beings.” Published in the September 6, 1834, issue of the official National Trades’ Union newspaper, such principles informed the audience (union members and potential members) of acceptable labor organizing behavior and provided some of the contours of an ideal worker identity. Within that same issue, the newspaper’s editors used the limited available space to publish a series of riddles under the title, “A Good Wife.” Noting what a “good wife ought to be like,” these riddles included that she should be, “like a town clock, keep time and regularity,” but should also, “not be like a town clock; speak so loud that all the town can hear.” While these riddles offer scholars an opportunity to probe contemporary humor for ideals of marital and gender relations, their inclusion in one of the nation’s first pro-labor newspapers also raises the question of the relationship between articles like “A Good Wife” that were seemingly separate from political economy content and more recognizably labor-related articles such as the proceedings of the National Trades’ Union Convention.

Reading papers like the National Trades’ Union, The Man, The Union, The Democrat, and the Working Man’s Advocate, New York City’s workers learned about the bank war, monopolies, Loco-Foco politics, and labor unrest. The editors of these newspapers: Ely Moore, George Henry Evans, John Commerford, and John Windt, read like a who’s who of 1830s New York labor activism, and eager readers clamored to hear their opinions. Alongside these articles however, each edition also contained what The Man referred to as “light-reading articles” such as poetry, marriage announcements, humorous aphorisms warning about abhorrent behavior, advertisements, and other news of the day. More than just filler clipped from out-of-town papers to pad the publication, these articles often appeared on the front page and usually occupied more than two full pages of a four-page newspaper. Journeymen readers expected anti-bank discussions to appear side-by-side with anecdotes about how artisans’ wives should act and did not see them as mutually exclusive. This analysis of pro-labor newspapers considers these articles and their importance to readers as a crucial aspect of the cultural lives of Jacksonian working men . . .

Like many light-reading articles, discussions of marriage often used humor to make a point. A report in the National Trades’ Union on July 25, 1835, from frontier Chicago noted that women were in demand and “some have thirty suitors at a time, and duels are not infrequent to obtain the prize of beauty: even old maids find a ready market, after a few shots.” Editors noted that they ran the article “by way of circulating the most important information; and hope those interested will profit by it.” This humor could also be used as a weapon of social criticism when the institution of marriage was not respected. The National Trades’ Union ran another story on May 2, 1835, entitled, “New way to get a husband,” that described a woman who tricked a lawyer into marriage. The older woman feigned illness and sent for the attorney to draw up her will. She exaggerated the sum of her estate and when she “thought proper to be again restored to health,” was visited by the lawyer who soon popped the question, only to later find out about her tiny estate. The lawyer, never a popular character in pro-labor papers, had been beaten at his own game in his attempt to marry for money . . .  

Lawsuits for “Breach of Promise” were not just simple reminders that men should respect the institution of marriage; they were specifically punitive matters, reflecting the economic aspect of becoming a husband. The loss of a potential husband could mean economic devastation for a single woman and could not be forgiven by simple emotional excuses. At a time when average wages for skilled working men in New York City ranged from $1.00 to $2.00 a day, reported fines were often exorbitant and usually reflected  the middle class background of the men involved in the cases. However, this type of light-reading article prescribed a certain set of guidelines for any man’s engagement. Their inclusion in a pro-labor newspaper localized the message for artisans and infused it into part of a masculine worker identity. One example of this genre from The Man on April 27, 1834, described a jury that “returned a verdict of 5,000 dollars for the plaintiff, the whole amount claimed in the declaration. Have a care, young men!” The heavy fines reflected that marriage as an economic contract under laws of coverture needed to be protected accordingly; artisan readers could identify with the message of masculine obligation even if the judgements clearly fell outside their financial purview . . .

Bachelors were also popular topics of conversation in 1830s New York City, from pro-labor newspapers to middle-class novels and health reports. This was not a new fear. Newspapers identified bachelors as dangerous and destabilizing members of New York society going back to the eighteenth century. It was an exaggeration that bachelors ran rampant and that marriage was under attack by rogues, but the threat certainly felt real when highlighted repeatedly in the press. Low marriage rates for working men in the city and the notion that certain men did not even want to participate in the institution flew in the face of the papers’ pro-marriage message. In The Man’s March 7, 1834, daily “Marriages” column, a notice even ran under a blank space, declaring, “If people won’t marry, we can’t help it.” . . .

Even if they were not set up as examples to follow on the issue of love, pro-labor newspapers could recognize bachelors as an important group of readers and even treated them with compassion on occasion. One article in the May 16, 1835, issue of the National Trades’ Union warned readers of an attempt in Maine to pass legislation that would “tax ‘old Bachelors for the benefit of Maiden Ladies of a certain age.’” The article, entitled “Bachelors, Look Out!” declared that “an old bachelor would experience affliction enough, in all conscience, without being compelled to pay for it.” The appeal ended with the notion that if the bill passed, “the poor bachelor will be goaded on to matrimony by the relentless tax man. What think, ye, bachelors?” Rather than lechers, these old bachelors were victims of a scheme to take their money. It was a double blow because the taxes were for the benefit of women that these same men had either been unable or unwilling to marry. Outside forces sometimes excused bachelors for the failure to marry entirely. In a short note on May 10, 1834, The Man reported that the “Portland Courier says that the young ladies of that town have formed an Anti-Matrimonial Society.” While this seemingly relieved bachelors of their responsibility to marry in one case, the institution of marriage faced a number of other difficulties in the mid-1830s . . .

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Ok, we are back. I thank those of you who read through something I wrote in graduate school. It was never published, but it was sent in to a journal, and that brings me to the issue of submissions. With a few exceptions, most of what we publish at Commonplace comes to the journal as an unsolicited submission, rather than a commissioned article. We depend on you for what we produce. So whenever possible, I like to provide a look behind the curtain of how we do things here at Commonplace. In the context of asking for you to send in your work for consideration, I want to discuss the term “revise and resubmit” and how it got me thinking of something that I wrote more than 20 years ago. I wrote the paragraphs above as part of a piece that I submitted to a journal and after I received back a response to revise and resubmit, never resubmitted. I am sure that I got very busy with other things, but it was clear that the readers (both reader one and the dreaded reader two) had not accepted my main argument that there was something important to learn in these light-reading articles that might inform us about how white working men in the New York organized labor movement constructed their identity as family members and workers. Fair enough. The argument may not have been convincing or I had not done enough analysis of the material to convince them. The reason why I never went back to my “Bachelors, Look Out!” piece was that the suggestions sent to me in asking me to revise and resubmit the submission wanted a very different article than I was proposing. It may have worked for the journal had I have followed through, but it was not the discussion that I wanted to have. The story I wanted to tell was not what they wanted to publish. Again, fair enough.

Why am I revisiting this now as part of a call for submissions to Commonplace? Since we are asking you to put your work out there for us to review and decide whether or not it should be published, I want to let you know that whenever possible I avoid asking authors to revise and resubmit their work. Of course, every submission that we receive is different and there have been occasions when we have asked an author for a modified version of a resubmission, but those have been quite rare. I have reviewed submissions for numerous publications and asking for a revise and resubmit is very common and at some publications almost seems to be the default. If you ask for the revisions up front, you can be more assured that what comes back fits what you are looking for in the first place. We have not tended to approach submissions to Commonplace this way.

I have said in several venues that I never really know which articles will generate the most readers, so I feel that it is important for authors to not to lose their unique voice. What I look for in a submission is whether I think it can potentially work as a piece that will interest at least a portion of our diverse readership. If it can, I am usually open to working with the author to respond to the editorial board members’ comments and to get it ready for publication in a way that works for us while staying true to the author’s vision. If it does not fit, I try to be honest about that up front and suggest that they find a better venue. I hope this helps explain the process a bit better for potential authors and encourages some of you to consider submitting your work to Commonplace. If you have any questions about doing so or want to pitch me a piece, please reach out at commonplacejournal@gmail.com.

 

Happy New Year!

 

This piece originally appeared in January 2025.

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Joshua R. Greenberg (@joshrgreenberg.bsky.social) is the editor of Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. He is the author of Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (2020) and Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840 (2008).

This way of telling history has much to recommend it, and the examples I have named are wonderful pieces of historical storytelling that deserve to be read. They are vivid and entertaining; the stories effectively use narrative to illustrate important historical trends. But when historical figures are seen as important primarily because of the most dramatic moments of their lives, we can sometimes make it more difficult to see the hard, repetitive, boring work of making social change. After all, world-changing heroism is not just a matter of dramatic escapades, grand accomplishments, literary achievements, and firsts. History also changes because of strange, flawed, deeply human people doing unremarkable, tedious, and often boring work. 

David Ruggles was an extraordinary man who spent much of his life doing this kind of unglamorous work. Much of Ruggles’ work was like the work of thousands of other activists, men and women, black and white, who created the Underground Railroad through thousands of unrecorded, unremembered, obscure acts of courage, which often resulted in compromised or incomplete victories. At times, this work must have been boring: writing writs of habeus corpus; tracking expenses for Vigilance Committees; typesetting; delivering letters; cooking food to serve to fugitives or cleaning their bedclothes. Of course we should acknowledge Ruggles’ extraordinary feats. But the Underground Railroad could not have existed without the difficult, self-consciously un-historical, often boring, work that served as the movement’s foundation. This is why the (somewhat dull) story of the brig Brilliante is worth your attention.

It was December 1836. The days were short, cold, and dark. It very well might have been raining. Since moving to New York in 1827, Ruggles had become a trusted member of the antislavery activist community in New York City. The previous November, Ruggles founded the New York Committee of Vigilance with a core group of four others. Since then, they had conducted their work of attempting to free fugitive slaves through legal and illegal means. On December 3, Ruggles heard from one of his contacts that a known Portuguese slave ship, the brig Brilliante, had arrived in port. Ruggles wanted to verify this report, so he headed down to the docks and spoke with a white sailor, who confirmed that five enslaved men were on board and that the ship would be in New York City for a few weeks for repairs.

The legal status of enslaved people in New York State was complex. By 1827, slavery was illegal in New York. However, because of an 1817 state law that was still on the books, non-residents could still bring enslaved people into New York for up to nine months without having to free them. But Ruggles reasoned that the captain of the Brilliante couldn’t take advantage of this loophole because the Brilliante was a foreign vessel. Congress had outlawed the international slave trade in 1807, clarifying and extending the prohibition on slave-trading in 1818 and 1820. In short, bringing enslaved men from outside of the U.S. into New York Harbor violated these Federal laws. So, on Friday, December 10, Ruggles headed over to the office of the New York District Attorney, a man named William M. Price. After receiving Ruggles’ report, Price did nothing.

Ruggles returned on Monday, December 12, to check in on Price, who said he would “attend to it.” Ruggles left the District Attorney’s office with instructions from an office assistant to find out the name of the captain of the Brilliante. Ruggles came back again the same day and asked to talk to the Deputy Marshall, who said he didn’t have time deal with the matter that day and that he’d deal with it tomorrow. Ruggles responded, “but she”—the Brilliante—“may be gone.” The Deputy Marshall said that he needed more information and told Ruggles to come to his house that afternoon. But when Ruggles arrived at the house, there was, mysteriously, nobody home. 

Already, you may want to stop reading this article and go do something more entertaining. Ruggles probably would have liked to go and do something else, too. In this story, Ruggles probably spent most of his time walking: from his home to the docks to various offices, homes, and institutions, then back again. In December, New York City was rainy, and sometimes snowy. The streets of New York were famously the filthiest in the United States, too, lined with privies piled high, which overflowed into the streets. Loose pigs and dogs snuffled in the mire. As a black man, Ruggles would not have been allowed to take one of the brand-new horse-drawn streetcars. He would have had to trudge through puddles and filthy snow.

To return to our story: on the evening of Monday, December 12, Ruggles wrote a notice that would appear in the New York Sun the next morning. The note narrated Ruggles’ experience to drum up outrage against the District Attorney’s inaction. On Tuesday morning, Ruggles went to the District Attorney’s office again (another trudge through filthy snow), only to be, as he put it, “rather uncivilly, [shown] the door!” The District Attorney, clenching his fist, bellowed at Ruggles, “go out of MY OFFICE!”

Ruggles published another account of his adventure in the Evening Post. At that point, it was probably embarrassing for the District Attorney’s inactivity to be exposed so publicly. So, by the end of the day Tuesday, the captain of the Brilliante was arrested, and the enslaved men held on his ship were put in a debtor’s prison while the case proceeded. Finally. After all that work, all the stonewalling by officials, all the early-morning treks through the streets of New York, justice would be done! Right?

Of course not. Now there was a court case, which started on December 16. In summary, the captain of the brig argued for his innocence based on a technicality. (The men on board the Brilliante, he argued, should not be considered slaves because they were part of the ship’s crew and would not be sold in the United States.) The District Attorney accepted this argument without questioning the captain or introducing any other testimony, then discharged the captain. But the enslaved men were kept in the city’s debtor’s prison for four days, even though they hadn’t been charged with any crime, probably to prevent volunteers from liberating them.

Ruggles and three others went to the debtor’s prison on December 20, one of the darkest days of the year, probably walking once again through frozen filth. They asked: by whose authority are these men being held? The jail-keeper blamed the Sheriff and Marshall. So Ruggles went over to the Sheriff ’s office. (Another walk). The Sheriff said that he had nothing to do with it. Next, Ruggles went to the District Attorney’s office. (Another walk.) The District Attorney was not in, but his assistant told Ruggles that the men were being held as the captain’s property, which was illegal in the United States, according to Ruggles. Ruggles and his companions went up to see the Deputy Marshall. (Another walk.) He was also not in. They gave up and went home. It must have felt like they had walked all over the city. And their reward was: precisely nothing.

The next day, an unnamed person, likely a member of the Vigilance Committee, stopped the Deputy Marshall on the street and asked why the men were still being held in prison. The Deputy Marshall said that they shouldn’t be in jail and wrote a note ordering that the men be released. Ruggles and his companions brought the note to the jailhouse, but the jailkeeper refused to release the men. Ruggles told the jailkeeper that he had no legal authority to hold the men. The jailkeeper seemed not to care. “I shall risk it,” he said.  Members of the Vigilance Committee filed a writ of habeas corpus. But before they could finish that process, the slaves had already been moved back aboard the ship, where they were now trapped. It was defeat after infuriating defeat.

Finally, on Christmas Eve, a group of armed black New Yorkers (reportedly not including Ruggles) boarded the brig Brilliante and managed to rescue two of the men. When they returned later to get the rest of the men, they were unfortunately rebuffed. After all that work, only two men were freed. After all those days—all those words written, all the walking around the city, contacting official after official—all Ruggles got was a painfully incomplete victory. 

And even that small victory was not without its costs. On December 28, around 1:30 in the morning, Ruggles was awoken by the loud sounds of knocking on his door. Soon, three men had forced open his front door, brandishing pistols and knives, menacing Ruggles’ landlady, and yelling at Ruggles. Luckily, the police soon arrived and arrested two of the men. But when Ruggles went to City Hall the next day to press charges, he was imprisoned for a short time because the constable had an arrest warrant that allowed him to arrest any black person that matched a description of an escaped slave. The men who forced Ruggles’ front door would probably have kidnapped him and sold him into slavery in retaliation for his efforts to free the slaves on the Brilliante.

If all this trudging back and forth between various offices, houses, and jails sounds less like heroic activism to you and more like a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, that is my point. Slogging for miles through slush and snow in the dark and the cold, following the legal processes, trying to force public servants to do their jobs, knowing the law, understanding court procedures—this is what it was often like to actively work against slavery. Infuriating, complicated, annoying, tedious.

This brand of heroism can be hard to talk about, especially in public-facing histories, which must be not only accurate but entertaining. Sometimes, it seems as if historians work to make the work of activism seem as dramatic and colorful as possible. But it is important, too, to understand that much practical abolitionist work probably didn’t feel heroic or historical or impressive at all. Much of it was the frustrating and incomplete result of sheer doggedness. The story of the brig Brilliante reminds us that history is not just made by firsts: It’s made by repetitive efforts, too. Ruggles’ tedious brand of heroism serves to remind us of the thousands of other acts of quotidian courage performed by thousands of forgotten people, who had jobs and small businesses and children, but who were nonetheless willing to spend hours and hours walking through filthy snow.

Further Reading:

Primary sources:

David Ruggles, The First Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance, for the Year 1837, Together With Important Facts Relative to Their Proceedings (New York: Piercy & Reed, 1837),  https://reader.library.cornell.edu/docviewer/digital?id=may839002#mode/2up.

David Ruggles, The Mirror of Liberty, vol. 1, no. 1 (New York: David Ruggles, 1838).

Edwin Williams and John Disturnell, New York as it is, in 1837 (New York: J. Dusturnell, 1837).

Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1918).

Laws Relative to Slaves and Servants, Passed by the Legislature of New-York, March 31st, 1817. Together with Extracts from the Laws of the United States, Respecting Slaves (New York: S. Wood & Sons, 1817).

Longworth’s American Almanac, New York Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1836).

Secondary sources:

Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement (New York: Amistad, 2006).

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of America’s Fugitive Slaves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Graham Russell Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Jesse Olsavsky, The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022).

This article originally appeared in December 2024. 

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Isaac Kolding is a PhD candidate in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research focuses on the intersection between radical abolitionist rhetoric and literature in the nineteenth-century U.S. His writing appears in American Literature, American Literary Realism, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

In 2018, the State of Hawai’i commemorated the 150th anniversary of the gannenmono or first year people, the nearly 150 Japanese laborers imported to work in the Kingdom’s sugar fields. It was the “first year” (1868) of the Meiji Emperor’s reign, ending over 250 years of relative peace and harmony imposed by the essentially hereditary military dictatorship of the Tokugawa family. Though these gannenmono are often regarded as the first Japanese in Hawai’i, many of their countrymen had already visited the islands for at least sixty years, and probably much longer than that. These occurrences had probably been going on for centuries, but not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did a few end up in places where literate inhabitants recorded their arrival rather than just incorporate them into oral records. A few by the nineteenth century luckily were rescued at sea by the increasing numbers of (primarily) American whaling and merchant ships.

Earlier pre-contact unrecorded encounters were likely. One scholar speculated, for example, that the Hawaiian feather kahili, a symbol of nobility and power unknown elsewhere in Polynesia, possibly derived from the somewhat similar Japanese keyari. Not everyone agrees, but the possibility is there. Or, perhaps, the Hawaiian game of konane is a derivative of the Japanese game of go. More ominously, some scholars suggest that Japanese drifters, not Captain Cook, may have introduced syphilis and other diseases to Hawai’i.

We are on firmer ground when the historical records document Japanese drifts. In 1793 a group of sixteen drifters managed to reach an island in the Aleutian chain and spent eight years living in several different Siberian settlements. Many died, but the survivors eventually were taken to St. Petersburg and presented to Czar Alexander I. Given a choice, six of the survivors opted to remain in Russia rather than risk the potential penalties of returning to Japan, but four of them boarded a Russian ship in July 1803, and after a lengthy trip the ship stopped at the Sandwich Islands (as they were then generally called) to resupply. There is no record of these Japanese leaving the ship, but if they did that should qualify them as the first known Japanese to set foot in the Hawaiian kingdom. The ship then sailed for Nagasaki and after some delicate and sometimes angry negotiations with local authorities, the four were returned to Japanese officials thirteen years after their shipwreck. The incident prompted the Shogun’s government to decree that no foreigners (in this case Russians) should ever be allowed to disembark on Japanese soil.

Three years later, in March 1806, eight survivors of the ill-fated ship Inawaka-maru were brought to Honolulu after being rescued by the American whaling ship Tabour, under the command of Captain Cornelius Sole. Their ordeal began on November 7, 1805, when they ran into a storm that severed their rudder; they cut down the junk’s mast to improve stability and for more than seventy days they drifted helplessly, surviving on a little rice at first but mostly on rainwater and fish.

Captain Sole took them aboard, and, realizing that they were starving, gave them only tea at first to not worsen their condition. A couple of days later they had their very first taste of bread and two months later they reached Honolulu. Nearly 500 men and women gathered to gawk at the strangers as they disembarked from the Tabour. King Kamehameha delegated responsibility for the Japanese to Kalanimoku, his prime minister. Kalanimoku, who often used the name Billy Pitt in deference to the late British Prime Minister, gathered fifty men to build a house for the Japanese. It took just four days, after which Kalanimoku assigned a cook and two guards to help the new arrivals. And when curious onlookers increasingly came to stare, Kalanimoku built a fence built around the house to keep strangers away. 

One of the sailors, thirty-four-year-old Hirahara Zenmatsu (generally known as simply Zenmatsu), eventually returned to Japan, where under lengthy interrogation, he related his story. It seemed to him that most Hawaiian men were more than seven feet tall and weighted between 240 to 320 pounds (in English equivalents). The women were almost as large. They wore no clothes except perhaps a small square of tapa as loan cloth. He reported that they did not have pots or pans but cooked in fire pits in the floors of their houses by covering red hot stones with mats soaked in sea water. Taro, sweet potatoes, meat and chicken were placed in the pits and essentially steamed. Despite the warm climate there were no mosquitoes, but there were many flies and fleas. Surprisingly, perhaps, Zenmatsu claimed the Hawaiians had no religion (no God or Buddha) and had no rituals to celebrate either holidays or weddings. They were apparently happy: every day they just ate, slept, and had sex! 

After three- and one-half months, on August 17, Zenmatsu and his companions left for Macau on a ship appropriately named Perseverance, whose Captain Amasa Delano offered to take them to China, hoping that from there they could make their way home. As they left, several hundred Hawaiians showed up to see them off, bringing taro, sweet potatoes, beef, pork, and chickens and one by one bade the Japanese goodbye. “We were so deeply touched,” Zenmatsu wrote, “that we all could not hold back our tears.” Despite the auspicious ship name, however, their return home was a sad journey. They got to Macau in mid-October but after two months they were sent to the Dutch settlement of Batavia (Jakarta), Java. They remained for four more months subjected to tropical diseases, which led to the deaths of three of them. Only three of the eight reached Nagasaki on a Dutch ship on June 17, 1807. One more died shortly after and still another committed suicide rather than submit to interrogation. Only Zenmatsu remained. After more than five months of interrogation, he was allowed to return home, but he also died within six months.

It was more than a quarter century before the next documented group appeared. In December 1832, a Japanese junk washed ashore off Waialua, Oahu, with four survivors. Transferred to Honolulu, they remained for eighteen months before securing passage on a ship bound for Kamchatka in Russian Alaska, apparently hoping to make their way down the Siberian coast and reach the northernmost islands of Japan. One of them died at the Russian American Company settlement, but the remaining three made it to Sitka and from there to an island north of Japan. Their fate is unknown as they left no records.

We know much more about the next group of castaways in Hawai’i because one of them, Jirokichi, managed to return to Japan where he was grilled for three years. His testimony, written down with illustrations, was hand copied multiple times in a three-volume work entitled Bandan (Stories of Barbaric Places). This story began in 1838, when the American whaling ship James Loper, under the command of Captain Obediah Cathcart, came across a drifting Japanese junk, the Cho ja-maru. Aboard were seven very weak men, who by that time had been drifting for five months.

The most formidable, by sheer talent, rather than rank or formal education, was Jirokichi. After a month of recuperation, Jirokichi and two of his fellow shipmates chose to remain on the James Loper to help with whaling. The others were transferred to two other nearby ships. Jirokichi meticulously observed all the operation of the huge (by Japanese standards) ship and the process involved in whaling. He also observed differences in Japanese and American sailing practices. Cathcart surprised the Japanese when he told them in the middle of the Pacific that the next morning they would arrive at an island. They were even more surprised when his prediction came true, and they reached Hilo on Hawai’i Island.

In Hilo, Cathcart handed the Japanese over to a community of Chinese settlers in town. The Japanese and Chinese could not understand each other’s spoken languages, but they could communicate through writing. While in Hilo, Jirokichi later related, they had been taken to see sex workers, but they found the girls unappealing. The three soon realized that despite the seeming hospitality of the Chinese, their real motive was to put the Japanese to work in the newly developing sugar cane fields. Cathcart, eager to help, took the Japanese from Hilo to Lahaina on Maui Island and put them into the custody of his friend the Reverend Dwight Baldwin. They even stayed in Baldwin’s house, the one essentially destroyed in the tragic 2023 fire that wiped out most of the town of Lahaina.

The Yale-educated Baldwin took great interest in the drifters and their country , never having seen any Japanese before. He wrote a lengthy article for the Polynesian newspaper on August 1, 1840 recounting what he learned. Jirokichi, he reported, though apparently illiterate, was much more intelligent than his two companions, and by this time was “catching up” with both the Hawaiian and English languages. The same edition of the paper reported that Queen Victoria had announced her intention to marry Prince Albert of Saxe Coberg and that the wealthy American John Jacob Astor had died. So, while Baldwin studied the Japanese, Jirokichi closely studied the strange customs, inventions, and beliefs of his Maui host. 

On meeting an American woman and child, Jirokichi noted that she was “very pretty and seemed gentle.” Her hair was reddish, her eyes almost white. The child, only four or five years old, had hair that “had already become completely white!” Baldwin’s house itself fascinated him: objects that were not found in Japanese houses such as ovens, and doorknobs intrigued him. Japanese houses did not have western style doors, let alone doorknobs. Japanese cooking did not lend itself to baking. 

After a few weeks on Maui, the three Japanese were sent to Honolulu, where hopefully they would have better luck finding a ship bound for China. They were there united with their four shipmates who had been staying in the home of a prosperous Chinese dry goods merchant. The three new arrivals, with a letter of introduction from Reverend Baldwin met Reverend Hiram Bingham, at that time in the process of designing Kawaiahao Church. 

In the following days and weeks, they explored the port city. Jirokichi continued to make extensive notes of how people lived, their plants and animals, military defenses, the houses he saw, and how to make adobe bricks. He saw windmills, a printing plant, poi making, sugarcane processing, and, most shockingly for the Buddhist Japanese, the slaughter of cattle. He described poi, cigars, craft making, and surgical procedures, all previously unknown to him. They even had an audience with King Kamehameha III. Jirokichi described the palace grounds, which included several buildings and a huge parade ground surrounded by a wall. The surrounding area was heavily fortified with big cannons every few steps. He unfortunately said little about the conversation with the king, but thought that he showed them more deference than he did his own subjects. They were offered poi, but found it tased sour and kept their mouths firmly shut. When they were then served watermelon, they were quite happy. 

During their stay, their Captain Heishiro became ill and died. Levi Chamberlain, missionary and extensive diarist, wrote that the captain’s four companions,“came to mingle their tears and perform superstitious ceremonies over the body” when they learned of his death. The king also called at the house to pay his respects. Reverend Bingham conducted a funeral service and had him buried in the church cemetery. “He left,” Chamberlain wrote, “a wife & children in Japan—three sons & two daughters.” Meanwhile no China bound ships appeared, so they returned to Lahaina and worked in the cane fields for a time, but the heat was too great for them, and they returned to Honolulu by canoe. They spent the next ten months there because the Opium War made Chinese ports unreachable. 

Hawaiian friends suggested they might have better luck trying to get home via Russian Alaska. They sailed for Alaska and spent the next ten months in soldiers’ barracks in Kamchatka. Jirokichi, despite his small size, amazed the Russians with his strength. He could carry three bags of rice at once (no Russian could) and he also defeated all comers at sumo wrestling. They hated the Russian food, but eventually a ship showed up and returned the six men to Japan via Sitka to the Kurile Islands.

Sent to Edo (Tokyo), they were subjected to extensive questioning. Two of them soon died, and Jirokichi himself was grilled for three years before finally being allowed to return home after eight years away. His interrogation included meeting with scholars, one of whom, Koga Kinichiro, wrote Bandan recounting their adventures. Many of the extensive drawings were apparently by Jirokichi himself.

The men and boys described above were not the only Japanese castaways to spend some time in Hawai’i. The most well-known did spend some time in Hawai’i, but their achievements elsewhere are better known. John Manjiro (as he came to be called) learned the whaling trade, spent time in New England, where he was educated, and after a few years worked in the California gold fields to earn money to return home. He went by way of Honolulu, where he met up with three friends who he had left there several years before. They convinced a sea captain to take them near (but not to) Japan and made their way ashore in a small whaling boat. 

The other, known as Joseph Heco, was rescued at sea with several shipmates and taken to San Francisco in 1851. As a precocious teenager over the next few years, he became the first Japanese to meet an American president (he definitely met two and probably three), the first Japanese to become a naturalized American citizen, and the first Japanese (along with his shipmates) to be photographed.

During this period, the United States Government, hoping to extend its influence across the Pacific, was in the process of preparing an expedition led by Admiral Matthew C. Perry to “open” Japan (by force, if necessary) for trade and re-coaling of naval ships. When Heco and his shipmates arrived in San Francisco, authorities, baffled by what to do with them, suggested, naively, that they should be returned immediately to Japan. The Japanese government, according to this line of thinking, would then be so grateful that they would gladly open their ports. Heco and a few of the shipmates and a couple of American friends, sailed to Hong Kong, hoping to meet up with the then formulating Perry expedition. Inevitably delays discouraged them and they returned to San Francisco.

Finally, in 1853, and again in 1854, Perry sailed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay demanding that Japan end its isolation and sign a treaty with the United States. The resulting Convention of Kanagawa (1854) had a clause that specifically protected American castaway sailors who might end up in Japanese waters and perhaps by implication (though not explicitly) Japanese castaways as well. Only one of Heco’s fellow castaways was with Perry, but he was so frightened that he refused to come on deck the entire time Perry was in Edo. 

The story is not yet over. By 1860, Heco and Manjiro were both back in Edo, among the very few people fluent in both English and Japanese. The primary European language then known in Japan was Dutch. Heco, an American citizen, got a job in the new American consulate in Kanagawa. He also founded the first (though short-lived) Japanese newspaper, having seen in San Francisco, Honolulu, and elsewhere how this medium resulted in the rapid spread of news throughout the population. He also established an import/export business, primarily with San Francisco contacts. Manjiro, on the other hand, was appointed as interpreter in 1860 to the first official embassy of the Empire of Japan to the United States of America.

And we still have the gannenmono, impossible without Perry’s missions. The negotiations with the Japanese government to bring workers to Hawai’i were carried out by Heco’s good friend from San Francisco, Eugene Van Reed, who would go on to become Hawai’i’s first consul general to Japan. The two friends left San Francisco for Japan, stopping in Honolulu, where Heco, who had been seasick most of the trip, stayed behind for a time to recover before eventually returning to his homeland.

Further Reading:

Chamberlain, Levi, “Journals, 1822-1949” (typescript copy), Vol. XVI, November 5, – August 14, 1832. Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library.

Kawada, Ikaku, et al. Drifting toward the Southeast: The Story of Five Japanese Castaways: A Complete Translation of Hyoson Kiryaku (a Brief Account of Drifting toward the Southeast) as Told to the Court of Lord Yamauchi of Tosa in 1852 by John Manjiro (Spinner Publications, 2004).

Kono, Hideto and Kazuko Sinoto, “Observations of the First Japanese to Land in Hawai’i,” The Hawaiian Journal of History, 34 (2000), 49-63.

Oaks, Robert F., “Golden Gate Castaway: Joseph Heco and San Francisco, 1851-1859.” California History, 82, no. 2 (2004): 38–58, 63–65.

Plummer, Katherine. The Shogun’s Reluctant Ambassadors: Japanese Sea Drifters in the North Pacific (Portland: The Oregon Historical Society, 1991).

Plummer, Katherine, trans. A Japanese Glimpse at the Outside World 1839-1843, ed. Richard A. Pierce (Kingston, Ontario and Fairbanks, Alaska, The Limestone Press, 1991).

 

 

This article originally appeared in December 2024.

 

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With a PhD in Colonial American history from the University of Southern California, Robert F. Oaks taught for several years in Texas and California. Unable to attain a tenured position, he re-invented himself as a pseudo techie and worked for many years at Bank of America in the technology division. Upon retirement, he returned to his love of history, though now more interested in Asian and Hawaiian history. He now lives in Honolulu with his husband.

I recently chanced upon abundant documentation of Call’s case in the Digital Maine Repository of the Maine State Archives. Immediately I recognized how unusual it was. For several years I’ve been hunting up abortion stories carried in U.S. newspapers before 1860, amassing well over 230, the vast majority occurring after 1845. Stories deemed newsworthy typically started with a dead woman and a coroner’s inquest. Surprisingly few progressed to trial and fewer still to conviction. Nonetheless, dramatic accounts entered the news stream, commanding regional and national reprintings.

This Maine case was different: it was conspicuously missing from any and all newspapers, the woman did not die, and no coroner was involved. The convicted doctor appealed the verdict unsuccessfully and then sought pardon from the governor. He submitted dozens of sworn depositions along with petitions signed by over six hundred men and women in Lincoln County, drawing their opinions solely from oral information networks. And the orchestration worked: Dr. Call was pardoned. 

This extensive pardon file is rare and revealing. It contains detailed depositions from Deborah and her family. It presents community voices, medical evidence, and commentary from prominent legal spectators. It all happened in a time and place that was teetering between the old common law and Maine’s first statute criminalizing abortion. 

That’s what immediately excited me. Dr. Call was charged under Anglo-American common law, which held that only post-quickened abortions were criminal. (Quickening occurs halfway through pregnancy when the mother first feels fetal movement.) Maine passed its first abortion statute in 1840, not long after the pardon of Dr. Call. Could there be a connection?

Before 1840 only three states (New York, Ohio, Missouri) explicitly criminalized abortion in the first half of pregnancy, adopting statutes that retained the common law’s prohibition on post-quickened pregnancy, where a “child” was “destroyed,” and adding a more lightly penalized section covering the procuring of a “miscarriage” on “any pregnant woman.” Nothing in those three states’ newspapers or legislative debates indicates that abortion was a salient public issue, and until now this has seemed to be Maine’s story as well. The new laws emerged during routine legal code revisions, and the dualism of child destroyed/miscarriage procured found in New York in 1828 became a template that other states borrowed. Maine too borrowed this wording, but it broke new ground in completely discarding quickening while introducing a concept labelled “attempted” abortion. My excitement grew when I learned that the judge in Call’s trial, the Hon. Samuel E. Smith, was just ten months later appointed to the small commission charged with statute revision. Bingo: a direct connection between trial and new law.  

Finding this kind of connection is important for critiquing the historical reasoning of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision of 2022. The Dobbs decision pointed to the gradual accretion of new state statutes from the 1820s to the 1880s to bolster a claim of widespread moral abhorrence of abortion in all stages of pregnancy because it ended pre-born life. Alternate explanations advanced by historians include concerns over patient safety, support for pro-natalist policies, alarms about wives shunning maternity, and rivalry with non-mainstream medical providers. Further, the Dobbs decision paid no heed to subtle variations in the new laws, variations that signal the thinking behind statute creation. We know far too little about the circumstances that produced those earliest laws, and, except for New York City, we know little about actual enforcement. This Maine trial, remarkably documented, affords us a view of both public and legal thinking about early abortion law in the U.S. (see the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians Amici Curiae brief in the Dobbs case).

Dr. Moses Call was thirty-one years old and single when he was charged. A New Hampshire native, he attended medical schools in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, before opening a practice, around 1834, in Damariscotta, Maine, a small river village then situated in the township of Nobleboro, which had a population of 2,000. The township was rural but not isolated. Ports on the Atlantic, fourteen miles downriver, launched ships constructed in Damariscotta, while the first federal Post Road (historic Route 1 today) sliced through Nobleboro on its ambitious course from eastern Maine all the way to Florida.

While we lack newspaper coverage of this trial, the pardon file supplies a rough narrative of the alleged crime, as framed post-trial by the defense lawyers. Crucially, we don’t hear the prosecution’s case in these documents, except by indirection and also by the formal indictment. Yet that case won victory at trial and on appeal. What was being strategically finessed or omitted from the pardon file?   

One thing not omitted was the startling and violent language of the full indictment. “The said Call . . . with force and arms, did unlawfully, knowingly, and inhumanly, force and thrust a certain surgical instrument up and into the womb and body of one Deborah Chapman . . . she then being quick with child.” (This language came word for word out of a legal treatise published in Maine a year earlier, lifted from a British treatise of 1816.) The indictment placed this forceful event on July 17th. On July 18th, Chapman allegedly “brought forth the said child . . . dead.” To this charge, Dr. Call insisted he was completely innocent, and Deborah and her family insisted she never was pregnant. Yet he was found guilty.

Fourteen deponents living near Deborah’s parents, Thomas and Abigail Chapman, testified that they saw the young woman frequently that summer and never judged her to be pregnant “by her form or dress.” The assumption was that a post-quickened pregnancy was visible. Several had visited her father’s house on July 18th, a Monday, when Deborah was “unwell” and Dr. Call was summoned. Some recalled seeing her industriously washing floors and churning butter, tasks that were inconsistent in their minds as a prelude to the intense contractions of labor. 

Five detailed depositions from Deborah’s immediate family focused on the events of July 18th. Her mother watched Deborah carry heavy buckets of water from a distant well. The girl helped prepare the midday dinner and ate it, but soon “was taken sick” and went to bed upstairs. Both parents stated that she was late on her “monthly returns,” something not unusual for this young woman of “slender constitution,” according to her father. “She has never been a rugged girl,” the mother said; Deborah had “the habit of passing her times”—missing her periods—“for a month or two and then she is always very sick.” So there was an established pattern of missing her period followed by a heavy flow. After visitors left, the girl moved to a downstairs bedroom, where her pain worsened.  

In the late afternoon, Dr. Call arrived and stayed just over an hour. He joined the family at tea, after administering a pain medication that quickly made the girl “easy.” The family described who was in and out of the room, concurring that Dr. Call was alone with Deborah for only five minutes. Afterwards, the brother entered and observed no blood on the doctor’s hands. He saw bottles in the doctor’s portable medicine chest but no visible instrument. The doctor departed, leaving additional pain medicine for use as needed. The next morning, Deborah was fine, her appetite restored. The older sister did the laundry on the 21st and observed nothing unusual, namely blood, on Deborah’s underclothes. The sisters shared a bed; a pregnancy or abortion could not have escaped notice, the older sister insisted. No one was asked or volunteered when her “monthly returns” arrived. 

Deborah’s deposition, as funneled through the Justice of the Peace recording it, sounded strident and firm, perhaps more so than while giving testimony in the witness box, often an intimidating experience. She emphasized she had recurrent problems with “painful menstruation.” She was alone with the doctor for just five minutes. Never once in her life had she been to his office, she said, though she had seen him several weeks before the 18th (a point left unexplained). She had never “been with child in my life,” never delivered one, never had an abortion. Her emphatic declaration stopped short of proclaiming she had never had sex. She also described a visit by Henry Chapman, twenty-five years old, and Harrison Chapman, twenty-three years old, both first cousins to each other and to Deborah. By now, she knew that gossip about an abortion was circulating. She confronted Henry, who vehemently denied instigating rumors. (Also absent from her deposition: any hint that she and Henry had once been courting.) Henry blamed the rumors on Abraham Chapman, an uncle to all three who lived close by. 

Deborah further stated that Abraham soon came by and insisted that Dr. Call was the source of the rumors. He outlandishly claimed that Call was showing the fetal remains to select others. (Criminals usually try to hide proof of their crimes.) Abraham offered Deborah, she said, an astonishing $500 to play along in a plot to land the doctor in state prison “where he should have gone years ago,” a dark hint at a career of criminal acts. Her sister Sally, present in this interchange, described Abraham as abusing Call “in language of the coarsest and vilest kind, heaping epithets of all kinds upon him.” Deborah rejected the bribe, concerned that Abraham and others were determined to wrong Dr. Call, “who at least in this affair is innocent.” Was the phrase “at least” a careful legal hedging by the recording Justice of the Peace, or was Deborah herself shrewdly distancing her own claim of innocence from a doctor of questionable reputation?  

A bundle of pardon depositions revealed apparent malfeasance during the trial in a Wiscasset lodging house hosting an inappropriate mix of guests. Lodgers included Abraham and Henry, the prosecution’s star witnesses, along with two more Chapmans, youthful cousins Harrison and Michael, witnesses for the defense. An additional three lodgers were potential jurors summoned for duty. Harrison, Michael, and one juryman deposed that Abraham and Henry openly discussed the case with one and all. Abraham treated the jurymen to liquor, and he and Henry each bunked with a juror. The deposing juryman withdrew from the jury panel feeling he had heard too much, but the other two served. There was a clear implication that one had taken a bribe for his promise of a guilty verdict.

A crucial prosecution exhibit was a note in Dr. Call’s handwriting advising on patient care and referencing something expelled—the “it.”

If you should flow, that is bleed much, take a table spoon full of the large phial every 15 minutes till it stops – you will not flow till it is away . . . . After the flowing has stopped, should you have pain, take 50 drops, that is a small teaspoon full of the small phial every hour till easy.

We don’t know which medical expert the prosecution called to explain these sentences as instructions for recovery from an instrument abortion, as the indictment specified. From my reading of many scores of criminal abortion stories, I know the typical moves: after a pregnant woman’s uterus was probed in a doctor’s office, she went elsewhere to await contractions and expulsion a day to a week later. These instructions could in theory map to that scenario as post-operative care. 

After the trial, the pardon team found a physician a county away who flatly declared that only an ignorant person could mistake this as a recipe for abortion. Dr. Call’s prescription, he wrote,

is not in my opinion what one conversant with abortion would direct were he desirous of accomplishing it; . . .  further it is my opinion that such directions as the above would be strictly in accordance with good practice for a variety of difficulties about the uterus and vagina such for instance as Polipus, Mole, etc.

Uterine polyps and moles were standard entries in obstetrics texts of the time. A mole is now understood to be a blighted but still-growing embryo, requiring induced removal if no natural miscarriage occurs. If the first vial contained ergot, this instruction might plausibly work. Ergot, a fungus that grows on rye grain, actually intensifies uterine contractions and was used to speed up slow labors. Physicians disagreed about its efficacy as an abortifacient in mid-pregnancy. 

At trial the prosecution linked this scrap of paper to Deborah Chapman through testimony by Henry, who claimed Dr. Call left it tacked on his door early on July 17. A close neighbor flat-out disputed this in the pardon case: Mrs. Ann Curtis claimed that Dr. Call wrote this prescription for her womb complaint three years before. Emphasizing that she was a mother of eight (so definitely not one to seek abortions), she stated that “something unnatural grew” in her womb, “which after a number of days came away. It was not a child, nor anything like an abortion.” In short, a miscarried mole. A heavy flow with pain ensued, hence the prescription. Sometime later, she said, unruly children raided a desk and scattered papers outside, and the prescription was lost. If this was true, someone living nearby—for example, Abraham—might have found it and hatched a scheme to convict Dr. Call.

More depositions from farmer Nathaniel Bryant and others placed Call four miles northeast of the village on July 17th from 9 a.m. until late in the day, with dated receipts and calendar notation as confirmation. A final set of depositions came from Wiscasset townspeople who observed Abraham and Henry contaminating jurors in several stores during the trial.

These were very effective pardon documents: the girl was not visibly pregnant, she had little private contact with Dr. Call on her “unwell” day, he had a seemingly airtight alibi for the 17th, and she was offered a huge bribe by an unpleasant uncle who detested Call. Taken together they suggest that no abortion ever took place.

The unusual presence of prominent lawyers and judges at the trial suggests that this event was something out of the ordinary. The most notable was the septuagenarian judge Prentiss Mellen, who traveled fifty miles from Portland to sit in the courtroom. Mellen was once a U.S. senator and served fourteen years as the chief justice of Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court. Mellen expressed great surprise at the jury’s guilty verdict. Another spectator, Lincoln County State Senator Lucius Barnard, declared it a “strong case” for a pardon. Erastus Foote Esq., who once served as Maine’s attorney general and was now a counsel to Call, characterized the evidence of Deborah being quick with child as “quite insufficient.” “Even the abortion, on the testimony, was contradictory and doubtful.” Deborah’s quickness was not substantiated, Foote thought, but he was less certain about the abortion. 

Another spectator, probate judge Nathaniel Groton, asserted there was “no evidence” of any abortion, and besides, was it really criminal? Abortion was something “our legislature have never seen fit to enact any statutes upon.” Nor did the public want to see more stringent laws on this, he claimed in this somewhat convoluted sentence: “The offense, if committed, has none of those urging [urgent?] demands upon the laws for punishment, to be found in our statutes.” The Hon. Josiah W. Mitchell from Freeport, co-counsel to Call, expressed “outrage and astonishment” at the verdict. He named Henry Chapman the central witness and villain of the trial, “a base, vaunting wretch who had often boasted of his success in the seduction of females.” Mitchell said that Henry implicated himself in Deborah’s alleged pregnancy.

If all these pardon documents were truthful and complete, then how did this case ever get cleared for trial? That was the job of a grand jury and the state’s attorney, one Edwin Smith. One deposed grand Juror revealed that only five people appeared before it: two doctors, Abraham Chapman and wife, and nephew Henry. The doctors were, legally speaking, duds: Dr. Albert Clark of Bristol admitted he “knew nothing of the facts, but said he could prove the crime by other witnesses”; Dr. Samuel Ford of Damariscotta said “he knew nothing except for hearsay.” Somehow the intemperate Abraham and the unreliable Henry came off as men of probity to the grand jury.

Perhaps Henry gained credibility with the grand jury by telling them a story he later told under oath in 1842. Henry maintained that Call approached him shortly before Henry’s testimony at the 1836 grand jury to offer the younger man a substantial bribe to keep silent about Call’s acknowledged role in the abortion. Why Henry took this claim to a Lincoln County prosecutor six years later is unknown. That attorney followed through and charged Call with subversion of justice by inciting perjury. Evidently pockets of animus still dogged Call. A jury trial ensued and quickly found the charge meritless. But it might well have swayed the 1836 grand jury. 

That the doctors Clark and Ford led off the grand jury inquiry is very revealing, despite contributing no material facts. Many depositions by neighbors obliquely referenced a malicious backstory which they believed accounted for a sham trial. Clearer details came from two attorneys, Mitchell and Mellen. Defense counsel Mitchell referred to a prior lawsuit over slander—“defamation of character”—brought by Call against Clark, who lost, after which angry handbills and “a garbled pamphlet” attacking Call went public. Mitchell advised his client to delay the abortion trial to let the clamor die down, but Call insisted he needed to clear his name. Mitchell was sure the abortion trial was “got up” over “vindictive feelings.” 

The Hon. Prentiss Mellen also attacked Clark and Ford. Call had been “grossly slandered in his professional character” by these two men, Mellen told the governor, and he had reason to know, because he represented Call in the slander trial, winning “a handsome verdict for damages.” That probably explains why he made the trip to witness the abortion trial of his one-time client. After the guilty verdict, Call rehired Mellen to appeal his case to the Supreme Judicial Court. Mellen was confident of victory: what better lawyer than the venerable ex-chief justice, facing three younger justices he had once mentored?

Mellen expected to win a new trial with a two-pronged attack. He mounted a procedural challenge relating to law and he presented evidence of jury tampering. The court ruled he could pursue only one path, not both, at the defense’s choice. Mellen went with tampering and was surprised when the high court ruled that the claim was not fully persuasive and lacked rebuttal testimony. Mellen and Call lost the appeal.  

An appeal must be based on legal error. Mellen could not argue that Deborah was not quick with child, or not pregnant at all; that was a matter of fact decided by the jury, not to be relitigated. How did the jury conclude she was quickened, the criterion essential to the common-law crime? Ordinarily, there were several ways: witnesses could attest to a visible pregnancy. If the woman dies, an autopsy can reveal the size of an enlarged uterus. Fetal remains can show gestational age, as can ascertaining the date of the last menstrual period. I’ve seen all these strategies in other trials, but none apply here, because Deborah was alive, evincing no physical evidence of the alleged crime. So how did Henry prevail, when Deborah’s family insisted she was never pregnant? More crucially, why was he accepted as a credible witness, if he impregnated Deborah as several deponents suggested? The alleged bribe of Henry by Call fuels suspicion: why would Call confess to Henry and then bribe him to keep it secret? Far more likely is that Call knew that Henry already knew, because they had conspired. In many cases I’ve seen, the presumed father who arranges the abortion can be charged as an accessory to the crime. Yet that didn’t happen; Henry was the star witness for the prosecution, and the jury bought his version.

Perhaps the slander trial with doctors Clark and Ford can help us. Strikingly, no depositions mentioned the substance of the slander. The team orchestrating Call’s pardon had to steer carefully. They needed evidence of sufficient preexisting malice to motivate a false abortion accusation, without replicating the actual slander lest it damage Call’s reputation with the governor. Groton, the probate judge who wondered if abortion even was illegal, handled the slander delicately in his letter to the governor. He praised Call as “a man of talents above the ordinary grade,” who “from the nature of his profession and the extent of his practice, has been the subject of considerable attention by his professional brethren,” costing him “great expense in defending himself.” What did he mean: “from the nature of his profession” and “great expense” to defend himself? This seems a broad hint that Call carried on a special sideline practice in abortions.   

That seems very plausible to me. A career built on illegal procedures after quickening could raise concerns with other doctors. Dr. Ford practiced in Call’s village, so he was wired into the local reproductive grapevine—hearsay, he admitted—informing him about Call’s willingness to end pregnancies, quick or not. Possibly professional jealousy soured Clark and Ford. In the 1850 census, Dr. Call reported property value that made him the fourth richest man in Nobleboro, behind a few ship builders and a large storeowner. Doctors Ford and Clark were about the same age as Call, but his property value in 1850 was equivalent to theirs combined. It appears he had a lucrative practice. Finally, despite the “handsome verdict” Call won for slander, his lawyer knew suspicions lingered; hence the advice (unheeded) to postpone the Chapman abortion trial. Seen from this vantage, the whole point of the trial was to bring him down, and if it took $500 and $100 bribes, Clark and Ford were willing to pay, to see Call sent to state prison.

I see three plausible narratives of the events before the trial; perhaps there are more. In the first, Deborah was or feared she was pregnant by Henry, at a stage too early to swell her belly. The couple did not wish to marry, so Henry engaged Dr. Call. The procedure could have been an acknowledged abortion, or, if early enough, a common medical treatment to restore menstruation by removing blockage. The signs of early pregnancy were indeterminate, which is precisely why quickening was so crucial as the only legal proof of a living pregnancy. In this scenario, Deborah’s procedure perhaps took place a week or so before July 18th, in accord with her admission that she saw Call once then. Call’s open visit on the 18th thus addressed a rebound episode of cramps needing analgesics—or, more deviously, a staged episode of cramps, to keep the parents in the dark about why Deborah was missing her “returns.” It can take some weeks for menstruation to resume after an abortion or childbirth.  

A second variation postulates an instrument abortion on the very early morning of the 17th, before Dr. Call rode west to his day-long alibi. Deborah’s intense household chores on the morning of the 18th could have been a tactic to hasten the miscarriage. I’ve encountered young women in my set of abortion stories throwing themselves down stairways or riding horseback, to hasten or provoke a miscarriage.

What does not at first square with either of these scenarios is Deborah’s fervent sworn testimony about never having been “with child” nor having undergone an abortion. Yet if she convinced herself that she was only having treatment for a delayed period, she could swear to these statements. The larger denial, of having sworn to no treatments at all by Call, is the stickler. Yet an unmarried girl in pregnancy trouble might conclude that a false oath was the best path to save her reputation.

The third scenario adopts the framing of the pardon case. Doctors Clark and Ford, hungry for revenge over their costly drubbing in the slander trial and angry over Call’s rumored willingness to perform illegal abortions, maliciously partnered with Abraham and Henry Chapman who were quite willing to lie under oath in exchange for bribes. In this scenario, Deborah never was pregnant. Henry at some point must have been truly courting her, to make the false pregnancy seem plausible. But why would he throw her under the bus like this, and ruin her reputation? Maybe he and Abraham assumed the enormous bribe would bring her on board. The uncle said as much, according to Deborah: he belongs in prison, everyone knows that, just say you were pregnant and collect an easy $500. Maybe she first agreed and then reneged?

The pardon process began as soon as the high court rejected Call’s appeal, in late November 1837. Most of the depositions were attested between Dec. 14th and 18th, and a few on the 20th. The governor and council issued their decision on Dec. 22, 1837, in Augusta, a good day’s ride away. It took me a lot longer than three days to make sense of these many documents, so I wonder if some fix wasn’t in already. The pardon went the whole distance, proclaiming Dr. Call not only exempt from punishment but completely innocent.

Meanwhile statute revision had begun in mid-1837. Judge Smith, prominent as a thrice-elected governor before he became a Lincoln County judge, joined the revision committee, soon aided by his brother Edwin Smith (the prosecutor of Call) and Prentiss Mellen (defender of Call in the slander and appeal cases). The job involved processing ten years of new law passed since the 1830 edition of statutes, editing and streamlining the whole, and suggesting new laws as well, to be vetted by the legislature. These three men had just endured a contested trial on the uncomfortable subject of a woman’s reproductive body, one that necessarily turned on the elusive concept of quickening. Despite representing opposing constituencies—the state, the plaintiff, the defendant—these three men found that actual quickening was difficult to establish in a case where the woman lived. So they scuttled the whole question, borrowing the two-part law from New York but with a key innovation: both sections applied to “any woman, pregnant with child, whether such child be quick or not.”

How then were judges and juries to decide which section of the law applied? I think the statute writers assumed the wording spoke for itself. The destruction of a child before birth called to mind an actual death of a recognizable child, and not a mass of tissue weighing under an ounce or two. In early gestation, it might not even be visible. The lesser offense provision punished an attempt with the intent to disrupt pregnancy, not the resulting disruption. This would cover cases where medicines given to induce abortion proved, not surprisingly, to be ineffective and the woman stayed pregnant. It could cover cases where indeterminant or invisible products of early conception were expelled. And it could even cover an operation on a chaste woman, as Deborah Chapman claimed to be. The statute writers crafted a way to charge and convict Dr. Call for operating on a woman who was not actually pregnant.

“Attempt” in fact became the summary word for this law. In the published statute book, there appears a marginal gloss alongside each section. The first tag was “procuring abortion,” and the other “attempting to procure abortion.” While the Dobbs decision was not wrong to put Maine’s law in the column of states penalizing abortion in all phases of pregnancy, the actual crime it calls “miscarriage” is not the death of an unborn life begun at conception, as the Dobbs decision would have it, but the moral wrong of intending to conceal an illicit pregnancy. We can see this in the telling decision of the revision committee to create a completely new chapter of the criminal code to house this law. They bundled existing laws about adultery, sodomy, fornication, blasphemy, and gambling into a new chapter titled “Offenses Against Chastity, Morality, and Decency.” By placing the abortion law there, they signaled that abortion in itself was a morals violation concerning sexual chastity rather than a crime involving fetal death.

Only when the mother died did the charge escalate to second degree murder (in an abortion) or to manslaughter (in miscarriage). This escalation was a long-standing feature of Anglo-American law, when unintentional deaths occurred in the commission of a crime. Maine newspapers provide evidence of just two Maine abortion trials in the twenty years after the 1840 law, and both involved dead mothers and charges of second-degree murder. The first, in 1843, ended in acquittal. The second in 1851 led to the conviction of a mill-town doctor with a reputation for helping mill girls out. Dr. James Smith of Saco drew a life sentence at hard labor in the state prison; high public interest centered on an unusually horrifying disposal of the young woman’s body. But Smith appealed, hiring a top Portland lawyer (recently U.S. attorney general in the Polk administration, and soon to-be justice on the U.S. Supreme Court). The entire conviction was reversed on a technicality (a “writ of error”). The high court’s decision tied itself in knots parsing the words of the abortion section of the 1840 law, with paragraphs of confusing medical claims about miscarriage, fetal viability, premature births, and abortion, most of it not relevant to the writ of error. In the end, the reversal rested on the original indictment’s failure to include intent (“to destroy such child”). Dr. Smith was a free man, facing a hue and cry in the New England press.

Just two newsworthy cases in twenty years suggests a thin record of enforcement. Perhaps there was a trickle of misdemeanor cases in the county courts, yet to be uncovered? Yet absent the death of the mother, abortions rarely came to light, when all parties concerned strive to keep it private. An unusual mid-century physician in Hallowell published statistics of 1,000 births in his two-decade career and noted with mild disapproval that “cases of abortion occur too frequently in this community. . . most of them among married women.” Physicians were the most likely to know about these things, either in hearing scuttlebutt from patients (like Doctors Clark and Ford in Lincoln County), from dealing with complications caused by inexpert abortions, or from doing the procedure themselves. It is no surprise, then, that the biggest push to criminalize abortion in the U.S. came at the behest of the American Medical Association, which lobbied every state government in 1860 to pass or tighten laws on abortion.

Meanwhile, Dr. Moses Call continued to practice in Lincoln County into the 1870s, making a splash in national news circuits when his considerably younger second wife filed for divorce. Among her complaints, in the nine-day trial, was her discovery that he was a convicted abortionist; after 40 years, the Call/Chapman case finally broke into newsprint! The estranged wife was awarded custody of a young son and an extraordinary alimony of $14,450, a further indication of a Dr. Call’s unusually profitable profession. Henry Chapman married, had five children, and lived out an obscure life into his fifties as a ship joiner. Deborah also married, but not until age 31, a long delay suggesting reputational fallout from the locally infamous trial. Her marriage lasted nineteen years, until her death. Most unusually, she never bore a child.  

 

Further Reading

James C. Mohr’s classic, Abortion in America (Oxford University Press, 1978), provides an indispensable overview of the nineteenth-century criminalization of abortion.

Cornelia Hughes Dayton gave us the first microhistory of a 1740s abortion case in Connecticut: “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village,” William and Mary Quarterly 48 (Jan. 1991): 19-49. There is a rich companion website with original documents.

Brook Lansing Mai has a recent excellent addition to the microhistory genre involving a French immigrant in New York City in 1844: “‘The helpless French girl’: Seduction Narratives in a Nineteenth-Century Abortion Trial,” Gender & History 36 (July 2024): 313-26.

Aaron Tang, a law professor, offers the most comprehensive account of state statutes up to 1868: “After Dobbs: History, Tradition, and the Uncertain Future of a Nationwide Abortion Ban,” Stanford Law Review 75 (2023).

Maine Digital Repository holds the pardon file: Moses Call Files.

Ancestry.com and Genealogybank.com provided essential sources for scoping out the cast of characters.

 

This article originally appeared in October 2024.

 

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Patricia Cline Cohen is the Edward A. Dickson Emerita Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (Knopf, 1998) and co-author of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (University of Chicago Press, 2008). In 2020, she embarked on a study of U.S. abortion practice and law from 1800 to 1860, and she continues to make progress on her joint biography of Mary Gove Nichols and Thomas L. Nichols, who in the 1850s notoriously advocated for women’s bodily autonomy.