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. 

Advertisements and articles in periodicals show us that marine specimens were highly sought after at American anti-slavery fairs. Issues of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator tell us that the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar in Faneuil Hall had a “Botanical series of British Alga, Mosses and lichens in books and mahogany eases” in 1847, “Sets of Mosses, Lichens, Flowering Plants, Depatica, Zoophytes, Algae, Fungi, Ferns and Grapes . . . Sea Mosses exquisitely arranged in baskets and shells” in 1848, and a “collection of British Sea-Weed and shells” in 1850. Seaweed in particular, was a common sight. Reports on the sixth Rochester Anti-Slavery Bazaar in The North Star boasted: “Of the contributions of the Manchester box, none attracted more general attention than the beautiful portfolios of dried plants and seaweeds.” Note how curation is particularly prized in these descriptions. These plants are not scattered or loose, but set in books, eases, baskets, shells, and portfolios. 

The interest in ocean specimens continued to grow over the course of the nineteenth century. In another instance, a report of the twenty-third National Anti-Slavery Bazaar in an 1857 issue of The Liberator explains: 

Natural and scientific curiosities and collections were as abundant as literary ones. There were algae from every coast sent by the ladies of Britain and the prisoners at Belile. Here were ferns from every field, and shells from every sea, scientifically arranged, or poetically described.

From these accounts, it seems that seaweed and algae held the most appeal for amateur oceanographers. Seaweeding, or algology, was a popular practice throughout the nineteenth century. As the phrase “scientifically arranged, or poetically described” shows us, there was an implied connection between seaweeding and literary practice. The two met most vividly in the seaweed album. The process of making an album was fairly simple, and laid out in many popular instructional guides. One would begin by walking down the coast to find these specimens, and then, once at home, place them in a large basin filled with water, lay the seaweed flat, insert a stiff piece of paper underneath it, and carefully spread the damp seaweed with a large pin. Very soon, one’s blank book would be filled with colorful seaweeds of all kinds, possibly accompanied by scientific labels, transcribed poems, or other details like the date and location of collection. Beginning in Britain, this trend offered mobility, solitude, and scientific curiosity to hobbyists and professionals alike and was particularly enjoyed by women. Seaweed collectors saw the coast and the ocean as an ecosystem that could be appreciated, studied, and even preserved.

The presence of algae, seaweed, and other treasures of the deep at American anti-slavery fairs speaks to the reach and widespread popularity of this practice. Obviously, the funds that would be raised by capitalizing on this trend were a major motivation for organizers. However, by turning to seaweed as a material curiosity and symbol, anti-slavery activists also transformed this trend in three major ways. First, they used this trend to shift the Atlantic Ocean from a place of violence and separation into a space of witnessing and potential connection. Secondly, these albums established a place for scientific curiosity in abolitionist circles, implicitly critiquing the racist and exclusionary institutions which produced scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century. Finally, the album I will discuss in this article asserted God’s promises to the enslaved by displaying the seaweed as an example of godly design.

Consider, for instance, an account of an antislavery fair from The Liberator which inserts the entirety of the poem “Sea Weed’s Address.” Following the opening epigraph “Where the Atlantic rolls, wide continents have bloom’d,” the address “to the American public” reads:

Regard us not as strangers! our race rose

At the creative word that call’d forth thine,

And with the doomed earth share in part thy woes,

And like thee for a new creation pines.

It continues:

Hast thou forgot the Lord, that we have heard.

Oft on our shores the cry of blood and strife,

And every vagrant breeze our groves that stirred.

Hath sighed the mournful tale of human life!

And the winds wail the sorrows they have seen,

Oppressed, and the oppressor every where;

For the abolitionist, these marine specimens were not separate from the world of suffering or an aesthetic distraction, but rather, through a common origin and shared environment (represented here by the “vagrant breeze” and wind), a witness to slavery’s horror. Unlike scientific practices which regard the seaweed as distinct from the economic, legal, and social conditions of slavery, this poem suggests that oppression reaches even the deepest depths of the ocean. In this cry, “Regard us not as strangers!” the seaweed implicitly announces itself as an abolitionist, also pining for a “new creation.” When looking closer at the presence of marine specimens at American anti-slavery fairs, it becomes clear that these objects were more than items of natural curiosity. 

The plants and marine specimens washed ashore are entities which have left the cycle Gardulski and Sharpe outline—not through the kind of agricultural cultivation and harvesting we see in the exploitative economy of Southern slavery, but through a different system of chance, discovery, and curation. Thus, a new network, or even ecosystem, of abolitionist exchange and trade rises to the surface. Yet we cannot forget that the seaweed leaves the depths and enters the surface world as a commodity. Remembering Sharpe’s note on residence time, this return to market is uncomfortable and highlights a skepticism scholars maintain towards the emancipatory power of this exchange. In fact, it is exactly seaweed collections at the Boston fair (as seen in “Sea Weed’s Address”) that Teresa Goddu in Selling Antislavery describes as a means for “fairgoers to enjoy the rewards of sentimental exchange without becoming too closely identified with suffering” —an example of what she terms “nonslave items” that “allowed white shoppers to buy purer reflections of their liberal subjectivity.” While they cannot escape their status as commodity, however, some anti-slavery seaweed albums did more than affirm a burgeoning liberal consumerism. 

What happens if we deemphasize the white consumer, and focus instead on the act of creating the album? More specifically, how might the hand of a Black seaweed album maker complicate this exchange and allow us to read this curatorial work as literary and scientific exercises in critiquing liberal subjectivity? Few scholars who have worked on nineteenth-century seaweed albums have noted the way this craze reached American anti-slavery societies. The major reason for this, I suspect, is fairly straightforward: very few are still intact or easily accessible. The most complete example of an abolitionist seaweed album I have seen thus far is Sea-weeds collected on the British coast, presented to the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar, a manuscript held at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library.

Sea-weeds is filled with seaweed specimens carefully curated and arranged by William G. Allen and Mary King Allen, an interracial couple who moved to England in 1853 to escape racist mob violence (their story would go on to inspire Louisa May Alcott’s “M. L.”). In England, William Allen, a Black educator and lecturer, maintained close correspondences with American abolitionists. Sea-weeds, then, testifies not only to the Allens’ continued participation in anti-slavery societies while in exile and their interest in natural science, but also functions as an affirmation of their “controversial” marital union through the shared byline of “W & M.A.” 

The Allens’ assembled book, which was presented to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, provides a unique glimpse into the intersections of natural science and abolition; a pursuit that may encapsulate the kind of Foucauldian “counter-science” Britt Rusert has termed “fugitive science.” With the front page announcing its connection to the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar, the book announces itself as a political object, setting it apart from seaweed albums or instructional books which foreground the plants. The generic title, Sea-weeds collected on the British coast, is vastly overshadowed by the green stamp of its anti-slavery destination. Even the conventionality of the title has the charge of political sentiment, as the British coast was the couple’s place of refuge.  

The front cover of Sea-weeds also includes a poem which proclaims “Oh! call us not weeds, but flowers of the sea.” Variations on these verses appear across many seaweed albums, sometimes attributed to an Elizabeth Aveline. In the opening pages, another poem accompanies a seaweed arrangement set to look like flowers:

Not the spoils of conquered dead,

Ocean’s willing offerings these!

From her treasure house not riven,

But of her abundance given.

Though these lines are fairly generic, the reminder that these plants were not “conquered” nor “riven” seem to again champion a less extractive and exploitive form of exchange.

American consumers would have already been familiar with albums like the Allens’ Sea-weeds, which arrived from Leeds in 1853. The audience for this album was likely other scientific enthusiasts who owned relevant equipment of their own, as one description notes that appreciating “most of the specimens in this book, requires the aid of a lens, to discover half its beauties.” The Allens themselves drew from popular seaweed collection guides, as some of the pressed seaweeds include scientific names and a number of longer descriptions or poems. For instance, in the description of Scarlet Plocamium, a common and particularly red type of seaweed, they attribute the description to Marine Botanist and Philip Henry Gosse’s The Ocean. 

The inclusion of Gosse, the English naturalist who introduced the first public aquarium to the London public, is worth lingering on here. Not only does this citation reveal the Allens’ scientific knowledge, it also ties their work with Gosse’s own criticism of slavery. Gosse’s letters, first published in the magazine The Home Friend in 1855 and later collected in the book Letters from Alabama, recount the work he did while tutoring at the Belvoir plantation in Pleasant Hill. He describes the brutality of slavery, ending one letter in September 1838 with the proclamation:

In spite of the beauty and grandeur of the country, the lucrative remuneration which a person of education receives for this talent and time, and the rich and almost virgin field for the pursuit of natural history (no small temptation to me), —I feel slavery alone to be so enormous an evil, that I could not live here: I am already hastening to be gone.

As Sea-weeds precedes Gosse publishing his letters, it seems unlikely that the Allens knew about Gosse’s experiences in Alabama. Yet this sentiment about the inability to do scientific work (in other words, to extract knowledge from the American natural world while the violence of slavery persists), is one magnified in William Allen who was, prior to his escape to England, teaching at New-York Central College as the second ever Black college professor in the United States.

Sea-weeds thus fits into Allen’s larger body of work as another testament to the obstacles Black Americans faced when they sought an education (even when they were, as Allen was, free and wealthy). In Allen’s A Short Personal Narrative, he recalls how his early education was dependent on the political climate of Virginia, the goodwill of others, and the “Free Papers” and permissive documents that he terms a “curious specimen of American literature.” His early schooling as a free youth was “destined to be of short duration” following Nat Turner’s rebellion, which led Virginia to abolish “every colored school within their borders.” He gained new schooling through soldiers at Fort Monroe and found access to libraries through slaveholders (he comments himself that this “seems like a paradox”), before attending the famous Oneida Institute. Sea-weeds shows us not only the range of Allen’s intellectual work, but also the conditions that could encourage or preclude that work. 

Of course, the Allens’ escape to Britain was not simply about research. It was, first and foremost, about the threats of violence they faced following their marriage. Sea-weeds demonstrates how fiercely William Allen defended his union with Mary King as a legitimate and pious one. Attributed to “W & M.A.”, Sea-weeds’s byline reads as a proud defense of their relationship as man and wife, as collaborators in anti-slavery organization, and partners in scientific research. In Allen’s personal narrative, The American Prejudice Against Color, the professor recalls the moment he and King decided to leave the country. He recounts their resolve, stating, “we would obey our heart’s convictions, though all the world should oppose us; that, come what would, we would stand by each other, looking to Heaven to bless us, and not to man, for either smiles or favor.”  

Their faithful decision to look “to Heaven to bless us, and not to man” is deeply resonant with the way Sea-weeds uses the language of scientific observation to reassure the reader of God’s promises. The collection’s final entry, titled “Conclusion” connects the beauty and complexity of the seaweed with religious creation. These qualities, the Allens write, ought to be read as affirmations of God’s care:

If God so clothe these obscure caverns and submerged rocks, will He not much more care for those whom he has redeemed with the blood and conformed to the image of His Son? . . . If, by searching into the laws by which He governs the Universe, the mind attains a calm and quiet enjoyment, as unmixed with evil as anything earthly can be, how much more conducive to his happiness must that knowledge be which ‘aketh wise unto Salvation!’

Like the seaweed which addresses readers of The Liberator above, the specimen in the Allens’ album is treated as something akin to the human body (or at least its clothes), and then, as proof of God’s word. Thus, we see that seaweed collection at the anti-slavery fair was not simply an extension of a larger scientific trend or craze. Rather, abolitionists like William and Mary King Allen used the seaweed album to reflect on their own state of exile, to critique slavery’s relationship to systems of scientific knowledge production, to uplift their marriage, and to find religious promises in the obscure and submerged.

 

Further Reading

A Singularly Marine & Fabulous Produce: The Cultures of Seaweed (New Bedford: New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2023).

Stephen Hunt, “‘Free, Bold, Joyous’: The Love of Seaweed in Margaret Gatty and Other Mid-Victorian Writers,” Environment and History 11:1 (Feb 2005): 5-34.

Molly Duggins, “Pacific Ocean flowers: colonial seaweed albums” in The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture, ed. Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (New York: Routledge, 2017), 119-34.

Maria Zytaruk, “Preserved in Print: Victorian Books with Mounted Natural History Specimens,” Victorian Studies 60 (2018): 185-200.

Sasha Archibald, “Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album,” The Public Domain Review, March 9, 2022.

William G. Allen, The American Prejudice Against Color: An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily the Nation Got Into an Uproar (London: W. and F. G. Cash, 1853).

R. J. M. Blackett, William G. Allen: The Forgotten Professor,” Civil War History 26:1 (1980), 39-52.

Teresa A. Goddu, Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

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

 

This article originally appeared in October 2024.

 

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Charline Jao is a graduate student in the Literatures in English department at Cornell University. Her research on nineteenth-century abolitionist print culture has appeared in American Periodicals and the Cornell Rural Humanities Pamphlet Collection, and is forthcoming in Comparative Literature.

Stubbs was a mixed-race free man. At the time of Free Poll’s escape he was working as a sailor on the Enterprize, a privately-owned ship with a commission from the American government to capture British merchant vessels during the Revolutionary War. According to newspaper reports, the Enterprize successfully apprehended several “prizes,” then sailed them to Philadelphia to sell the ships and their cargoes. It was a dangerous business, but one that sometimes paid off. Like other sailors, Stubbs probably received a small portion of the profits, perhaps enough to support himself and his wife for a short while.

After living as a free person in Baltimore for ten months, Free Poll must have learned that Stubbs had returned to Philadelphia, so she traveled the ninety of so miles north to join him. The City of Brotherly Love contained a growing Black population, some enslaved, some legally free, and others who had fled bondage. Free Poll and Mark Stubbs now lived in Pennsylvania—the first state to pass a gradual emancipation law in the United States, giving encouragement to Black and sympathetic White Revolutionaries that the excessively cruel system of slavery might be on the road to extinction. The law, however, did not grant Free Poll her liberty legally. She would have to remain on guard against re-enslavement by slave catchers for the rest of her life.

Like all advertisements, the notice written by Kerr reflected the deep prejudices of the enslavers themselves—an important point to bear in mind when we read these advertisements today. He described Free Poll as “artful,” when the likely reality was that she had learned to be clever in dealing with White people. Enslaved people had to pay keen attention to enslavers, who claimed them as property and exercised significant power over their bodies and lives. Those in bondage commonly devised ways to disguise their own feelings to deceive their so-called masters. Not only did Kerr portray Free Poll as deceitful and cunning, but he also ridiculed her marriage with Stubbs. Since neither enslavers nor the law respected the legitimacy of marriages of the enslaved, Kerr refused to recognize Stubbs as Free Poll’s husband in his advertisement, referring to him instead as her “husband, as she calls him.”

Modern readers need to be especially suspicious of character descriptions contained in advertisements like this one. For example, Kerr characterized Free Poll’s mixed-race husband as a “notorious villain,” probably not based on his actual behavior and actions but rather on his audacity in marrying and giving sanctuary to an enslaved woman who had eloped from the man who claimed to own her. What Stubbs most likely wanted was simply to live with his wife in freedom. Indeed, even James Madison recognized that many Blacks who fled enslavement were merely “coveting that liberty for which we [White Revolutionaries] have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, & worthy the pursuit, of every human being.” (Madison never emancipated any of the people he claimed as human property.)

In contrast, like all White people who published newspaper advertisements, what Kerr desired was to re-enslave Free Poll for his own financial benefit. He feared that she and her husband “may set up for themselves” in Philadelphia, meaning that they could enjoy the liberty so ardently sought by White and Black Revolutionaries at the time.

This account of Free Poll’s bid for freedom is taken from Freedom Seekers: Stories of Black Liberation in the American Revolutionary Era and Beyond, a new online resource that transcends existing compilations of advertisements by creating a curated set of histories or “stories,” each building from a single advertisement, often augmented by other sources. Freedom Seekers launched on July 4, 2024, and will run through to the commemoration of the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of American Independence. It will eventually feature hundreds of narratives of freedom and independence across the British and American Atlantic World in the revolutionary era and beyond. Demonstrating their dedication to ideals of liberty fundamentally at odds with those of Thomas Jefferson, tens of thousands of enslaved people absconded, risking their lives to liberate themselves. Their actions were both personal and political as they freed themselves and challenged the system of racial bondage. These brave bids for freedom generated numerous newspaper advertisements describing the freedom seekers and offering rewards for their capture. The information contained in those notices, along with research in related sources, enables us to reconstruct, reimagine, and commemorate many of their stories—a primary purpose of this project. While the project’s major focus will be North America during the American Revolutionary Era, the project will also extend chronologically between the seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries and will range across the North American and British Atlantic World. 

There are now many published collections of newspaper advertisements for enslaved people who escaped, both printed and digital. Online collections often feature searchable transcriptions and statistical databases of many thousands of freedom seekers across space and time, enabling researchers to learn a great deal about enslaved people in the aggregate. During the past few decades scholars engaged in the labor-intensive work of transcribing advertisements and tabulating various characteristics of escapees to provide a structure within which to understand aspects of the lives of individual freedom seekers. For example, using statistics calculated from numerous advertisements allows us to assert, with some confidence, that Free Poll was considerably older than most people who fled, that she planned her escape meticulously in comparison to other escapees who carried fewer items, that she ran during the warmer months just as many others did to maximize their chance for freedom, and that she ultimately headed for Philadelphia—a popular destination for many freedom seekers during and after the Revolutionary Era.

However, as scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Marisa Fuentes have argued, the tabulation of enslaved bodies in such databases can implicitly reaffirm the treatment of enslaved people as property to be enumerated. If not done carefully, such work may inadvertently echo enslavers’ objectification of enslaved people and their bodies as property. In addition, what often is lost in the compilation and utilization of statistical databases of freedom seekers is what most fascinates those who read them, namely the tantalizing hints the advertisements contain about the stories of individual men, women, and children who resisted slavery by escaping. Databases reveal the bigger picture of numbers and patterns, but they can also obscure the details about individuals, their lives, experiences and whatever else can be gleaned from the few dozen words of a newspaper advertisement and whatever related records that exist.

In rare cases it is possible to research and write a great deal about a single freedom seeker, as in the case of Ona Judge who escaped from George and Martha Washington. The surviving records related to Judge are exceptional, however, and most freedom seekers remain obscure and largely hidden from our view. Often all we know about them is contained in the brief newspaper advertisement penned by an enslaver, a source that is inherently biased. Yet these advertisements have fascinated readers since their first appearance, and a combination of contextual research and imagination can allow the freedom seekers to reach across the centuries and transcend the words used in advertisements by enslavers to categorize and define the enslaved.

We warmly invite people to participate in this project of recreating the stories of freedom seekers. During the next several years, we welcome contributions from academics, graduate students, undergraduates, and members of the public. These contributions will be reviewed and, if accepted, edited and published on the website. This web-based resource will feature numerous short essays (usually no longer than about 1,000 words) based primarily on advertisements for people who fled enslavement. We will include the stories of freedom seekers from across the British Atlantic World, from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, although our project will focus in particular on the American Revolutionary era. The resulting resource will breathe life into these short newspaper advertisements, revealing as much as possible about the enslaved people who challenged their bondage and sought freedom.

We hope that professors, teaching assistants, graduate students, and other teachers may use these stories in the classrooms. We have found that students are fascinated by these advertisements. They relish the challenge of careful textual analysis and research to learn more about the people and places recorded in an advertisement and to carefully establish a greater sense of the person who challenged their own enslavement and the system of slavery itself. At the University of Wisconsin, where Freedom Seekers is based, an undergraduate internship program in the History Department is supporting students in researching and writing stories for the website. Furthermore, each year the project’s Anansi competition will provide cash prizes and additional publication in Clio for several of the best essays submitted by graduate students. 

The project website includes a page with materials that can be utilized by instructors who would like to make the research and writing of stories into a class assignment. It is challenging to imagine an accurate story of a freedom seeker when most of what still exists are only the words of his or her enslaver as recorded in newspaper notices. The “For Instructors” section of the Freedom Seekers website features detailed resources and strategies for researching advertisements and the people they describe. This can begin with a careful reading of the language used to describe the person who had escaped: a reference to African ethnicity or to African “country marks,” for example, encourages research into African heritage and ethnicity, and the Middle Passage endured by the freedom seeker.

Advertisements might also include descriptions of scars and other injuries that marked the bodies of freedom seekers. References to a clipped ear and whip-scarred back, along with adjectives such as “artful” or “cunning” can be read as evidence of long-term resistance by the escapee. Researchers can also look for more advertisements, which may provide further information about how long a person was free, and perhaps where they were suspected of having gone. Some advertisements include lengthy descriptions of clothing that may enable a detailed reconstruction of the person’s appearance. There are strategies for exploring locations mentioned in advertisements, such as the place a person had escaped from, and perhaps the place where they may have gone, as well as the journey between the two. It is often possible to learn more about the White people who placed advertisements or are mentioned in them, and this too can provide contextual information for understanding the situation of the freedom seeker before their escape. 

We are living through a time of deep crisis in our nation, and the meaning and significance of freedom and democracy are as controversial today as they were in the late eighteenth century. Our project asks what freedom meant in the eighteenth century, exploring how for many people in North America and across the Atlantic World, liberty meant an end to slavery. Demonstrating their dedication to ideals of liberty at odds with the practices of men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, tens of thousands of enslaved people absconded, risking their lives to liberate themselves. Their actions were both personal and political as they freed themselves and challenged the system of racial bondage.

It is our hope and expectation that the accumulation of hundreds of freedom seeker stories will provide a new kind of community-built resource, one that will enable us to think about enslaved people who resisted their bondage as individuals rather than as statistics. Freedom Seekers will show how all kinds of men, women, and children who escaped were important actors in the challenge not just to their own enslavement but to slavery more broadly. It will require us to broaden our thinking about the American Revolution to encompass a related but distinct set of bids for freedom and independence.

 

Further Reading

Karen Cook Bell, Running From Bondage: Enslaved Women and their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (New York: Atria Books, 2017).

Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown, eds., “Pretends to Be Free”: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019; originally published in 1994).

Daniel Meaders, Advertisements for Runaway Slaves in Virginia, 1801-1820 (New York: Garland, 1997).

Simon P. Newman, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica,” William and Mary Quarterly (OI Reader app), June 2018, 1–53. https://oireader.wm.edu/open_wmq/hidden-in-plain-sight/hidden-in-plain-sight-escaped-slaves-in-late-eighteenth-and-early-nineteenth-century-jamaica/ [accessed September 9, 2024].

Billy G. Smith, “Free Poll (May 1781),” Freedom Seekers: Stories of Black Liberation in the American Revolutionary Era and Beyond, https://freedom-seekers.org/story/free-poll/ [accessed July 15, 2024].

Billy G. Smith, “Resisting Inequality: Black Women Who Stole Themselves in Eighteenth Century America,” in Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger., eds., Inequality in Early America (Hanover, N.H: University Press of New England, 1999), 146-49. 

Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, eds. Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

Lathan A. Windley, ed. Runaway Slave Advertisements: a documentary history from the 1730s to 1790, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).

 

Major online collections of freely available freedom seeker advertisements include:

Freedom On The Move.

Discover Enslaved People in the Newspapers.

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia.

North Carolina Runaway Slave Notices, 1750-1865.

Runaway Slaves in Britain.

Runaway Slaves in Jamaica (I): Eighteenth Century.

 

This article originally appeared in September 2024.

 

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Antonio T. Bly is the Peter H. Shattuck Endowed Chair at California State University, Sacramento. He has published several books and articles on people who escaped slavery, servitude, and marriage, including most recently “‘Indubitable signs’: Reading Silence as Text in New England Runaway Slave Advertisements,” Slavery & Abolition 42 (2021), 240-68.

Simon P. Newman is Emeritus Brogan Professor of History at the University of Glasgow, and an honorary fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His most recent book is Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (2022).

Billy G. Smith is Emeritus Malone Professor of History and Distinguished Professor of Letters and Science at Montana State University. He has published widely on class, poverty, and race in early America and the Atlantic World, including extensive work on freedom seekers. His recent publications include “Mapping Inequality, Resistance, and Solutions in Early National Philadelphia,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 110 (2021), 207-29.

Gloria McCahon Whiting is E. Gordon Fox Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England (2024).

Madison was talking about the three-fifths clause of the United States Constitution. Appearing in Article I, Section 2, the clause read:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

At its most basic, the three-fifths clause stipulated that three-fifths of the enslaved population of a state would be counted alongside five-fifths of the free population for determining how many members in the House of Representatives each state received. Three-fifths of the enslaved population would also be subject to “direct Taxes,” should Congress impose any. But because the number of Electoral College votes would be determined by adding the number of Senators a state received (always two) to the number of House members a state was entitled to, a higher enslaved population would give a state greater influence over both the House (where all tax bills had to originate) and over the choice of president.  

Madison’s phrase—divested of two fifths of the man—sounds akin to the most common way that scholars, teachers, and anyone else talking about the three-fifths clause today describes what it did: that it counted each slave as “three-fifths of a person.” This phrasing suggests a shared presumption among whites that black people were only fractionally human. There is certainly no shortage of examples of whites arguing precisely this, especially in the antebellum era. And, at first glance, that appears to be what the three-fifths clause is doing. The fraction “three fifths” is in the text itself, and though the word “slave” is never used, the clause is clearly talking about enslaved Black people. There are understandable reasons why it is so easy to assume that defenders of slavery on some level had to believe that Black people, free or enslaved, were innately not fully human. 

Yet this phrasing is, at best, misleading. So far as I can tell, commentators on the three-fifths clause in 1787 and 1788—its defenders as well as its critics—did not use this phrase. Madison’s line appears to have come the closest, and even he did not mean that Black people were only sixty percent human. In fact, his argument, like that of other defenders of the three-fifths clause, rested on the assertion that enslaved Black people were three things simultaneously: subordinates to whites, legally the “property” of their owners, and human beings, through and through. Southerners like Madison had a vested interest in acknowledging that enslaved people were people, since states with large enslaved populations—Madison’s home state of Virginia most of all—would gain greater representation in the House and the Electoral College through the inclusion of three-fifths of the enslaved population.

Denials of Black humanity, free and enslaved, coexisted with explicit acknowledgment that enslaved Black people, though legally deemed “property,” were people. Either could be invoked at different moments by the Constitution’s defenders (who called themselves federalists) as well as its critics (whom federalists pejoratively labeled antifederalists) to drive home specific arguments they sought to make. But arguments that enslaved people were people, and those claiming they were “property,” did not divide cleanly along political or sectional lines. When we presume that arguments in defense of slavery and denials of full Black personhood had to go hand-in-hand, we can easily miss or minimize how important it was for those defending the Constitution’s protections for slavery to acknowledge, and at times even emphasize, the personhood of the enslaved. Closer attention to the debate over the three-fifths clause during the public ratification debate reveals how central the personhood of the enslaved was to the Constitution’s protections for slavery, and how explicit slavery’s defenders were that Southern states stood to gain by it.

To be sure, whites North and South called the people they enslaved “property” constantly. They often used words like “Black” and “negro” as synonyms for “slave,” reflecting a tendency to equate Blackness with bondage. They frequently compared Black people to animals, especially beasts of burden. Slavery itself was brutal and, by its very nature, dehumanizing. Whites could (and did) claim that Black people, free and enslaved, were innately “inferior.” They could (and did) question whether Black people were capable of comprehending political ideals like liberty and equality, even when petitions or the prospect of violent revolt by the enslaved clearly proved otherwise. Most eighteenth-century whites denied that Black people deserved to enjoy the same political rights as white American citizens.

Yet none of these arguments should be taken as evidence that white people patently refused to acknowledge, let alone were somehow incapable of knowing, that Black people, free and enslaved, were people. Critics of the three-fifths clause, especially Northern antifederalists, stressed the personhood of the enslaved to underscore how brutal slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade was. A New York antifederalist, writing under the pseudonym Brutus, did precisely this in the fall of 1787. “What adds to the evil is, that these states are to be permitted to continue the inhuman traffic of importing slaves, until the year 1808,” the pseudonymous Brutus explained in his third letter, linking the three-fifths clause to Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, which forbade Congress from “prohibit[ing]” the slave trade “prior” to that year. “[A]nd for every cargo of these unhappy people, which unfeeling, unprincipled, barbarous, and avaricious wretches, may tear from their country, friends and tender connections, and bring into those states, they are to be rewarded by having an increase of members in the general assembly.” 

Frightening as that was, the prospect of increased, perhaps insurmountable Southern power was not the only concern on many Northerners’ minds. Another was what including three-fifths of the enslaved population in each state implied about the relative equality of Black and white people. Abraham Fuller, a delegate at the Massachusetts ratifying convention, thought “the rule of proportion . . . five slaves to three freemen” was “but equal, for slaves are but chattels.” But his colleague, Francis Shurtliff (spelled “Shurtleff” in Theophilus Parsons’ notes), “want[ed] to know whether five smart negro slaves are to be equal to three of our children.”

This was the most typical way to characterize the three-fifths clause: not as a fraction (“three-fifths of a person”), but as a ratio (“five slaves” treated “equal to three freemen”). The point was to stress the comparative representation of enslaved and free people, and often, to compare the relative value of enslaved and free labor, not to claim that the Constitution rendered each enslaved person forty percent less human than their free counterpart. Not all enslaved Black people would count toward apportionment. That could certainly be interpreted as a reflection of “inferiority”: of enslaved labor, of enslaved laborers, or of Black people more generally. Any given white person could hold one or more of these views at the same time. But none meant that enslaved Black people were not people. That very fact provoked the cringeworthy comparison between “smart,” productive “negro slaves” and white children at the Massachusetts ratifying convention. It was also on the mind of North Carolina antifederalist William Goudy, who combined this worry with concern about direct taxes in one blunt statement: “I wish not to be represented with negroes,” Goudy stated flatly, “especially if it encreases my burthens.”

To emphasize the hypocrisy of Southerners’ insistence that slaves were “property,” and to challenge the political advantage Southern states stood to gain courtesy of the three-fifths clause, Northerners frequently compared Black people to beasts of burden. For all his sympathy for human victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Brutus made this very comparison in the very same letter in which he referred to enslaved Africans as “unhappy people”: “If this be a just ground for representation, the horses in some of the states, and the oxen in others, ought to be represented,” Brutus wrote. “For a great share of property in some of them, consists in these animals; and they have as much controul over their own actions, as these poor unhappy creatures, who are intended to be described in the above recited clause, by the words, ‘all other persons.’” Dehumanizing comparisons like these reflect Northern white fears of both increased Southern political power, on the one hand, and even the remote possibility of Black citizenship, on the other. The personhood of the enslaved lay at the heart of both fears. The point of such comments was to claim that because Southerners called enslaved people “property,” it made as much sense to count animals owned by Northern whites toward apportionment as it did to count enslaved people owned by Southern enslavers. Which was to say, not at all.

By our twenty-first century standards, that argument is absurd. It was absurd by eighteenth-century standards, too. And federalists, especially those from the South, had a ready answer. Three-fifths of the enslaved population counted toward apportionment, and beasts of burden didn’t, because enslaved people were not animals. This claim was in no way incompatible with either whites’ widespread belief in Black “inferiority,” or enslaved people’s legal status as “property.” Slaves, federalists countered, were persons, just as the Constitution said they were.

“It is true, that slaves are property,-but are they not persons too?” one Southern federalist, writing under the pseudonym A Native of Virginia, asked readers: “Does not their labour produce wealth? And is it not by the produce of labour, that all taxes must be paid?” Enslaved peoples’ general status as subordinates to free persons, and their more specific status as wealth-producing possessions of their masters that had monetary value of their own, did not change the fact that they were people. “The Convention justly considered them in the light of persons, rather than property,” A Native of Virginia continued, “But at the same time conceiving their natural forces inferior to those of the whites; knowing that they require freemen to overlook them, and that they enfeeble the State which possesses them, they equitably considered five slaves only of equal consequence with three free persons.” 

A Native of Virginia was addressing Southern criticism that focused on the potential tax burden the three-fifths clause imposed. Referring to enslaved people’s “natural forces” as “inferior” and clearly distinguishing between “three free persons” and “five slaves,” A Native of Virginia nonetheless challenged Southerners who might be “accustomed to consider their slaves merely as property; as a subject for, not as agents to taxation.” A Native of Virginia reminded readers that that was not all enslaved people were. The three-fifths fraction provided due consideration for enslaved people as property whose labor and bodies were sources of wealth, and as persons fundamentally different from beasts of burden. That was why not all of them would count toward apportionment, like free persons, but it was also why not all of them would be subject to “direct taxes,” either. “What rule of federal taxation so equal, and at the same time so little unfavourable to the southern States,” A Native of Virginia asked readers, “could the Convention have established, as that of numbers so arranged?” Thus, the argument went, the three-fifths clause ought to satisfy those inclined to believe representation should be based on wealth, and those who believed it should be based on population, since enslaved people counted in both categories.

This was why Southern federalists saw no contradiction in calling slaves “property,” and no shame in admitting that counting three-fifths of the enslaved population alongside all of the free population “was highly favourable to the southern interest.” A pseudonymous federalist, An American, reminded Southerners how much they stood to gain if the Constitution were ratified. “By the present arrangement, you may enjoy the weight and power of five votes and a half for 168,000 slaves, being three fifths of your whole number of blacks,” An American told members of the Virginia ratifying convention in a piece published in a Pennsylvania newspaper in May 1788. “Power has been given to your state with no sparing hand. You (suffer me respectfully to say so) of all the members of the union, appear to have the least cause of complaint.” What made it possible was that enslaved people were people, not merely possessions. Whatever tax burden Southern states would carry would come with additional representation: a more than fair trade-off by any estimation. 

This argument for Southern power also proved compatible with the very arguments that Northerners brought up to disparage Southern slavery: that slavery was inherently less efficient and productive than Northern “free” labor, and that it was inherently more risky because slaves could revolt at any time. Both these inherent risks, and the advantages the South stood to gain if the Constitution were ratified, stemmed from the simple fact that enslaved people were people. In fact, the very risks inherent to slavery justified the power the Constitution conferred on slave states. Some “who opposed an unlimited importation” of Africans, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney told his colleagues in January 1788, thought slaves dangerous because they could be convinced by “an invading enemy” to “turn against ourselves & the neighbouring states, and that as we were allowed a representation for them in the house of representatives, our influence in government would be increased in proportion as we were less able to defend ourselves.” The very fact that slave societies were more vulnerable to revolts because slaves were people made it all the more necessary that Southern states receive some consideration for them in the Constitution. An American called them “a dangerous species of population,” and believed that, “when proper arrangements shall be made and occasion shall require,” the South “can rely on the most useful and friendly aid from the north.” In other words, the protections required to maintain this system of enslaving people would, in effect, bind the Northern and Southern states together via a shared interest in maintaining security from slave violence.

Collectively, Southern federalists pointed to the personhood of the enslaved to argue that whatever power the Constitution vested in slave states via the three-fifths clause was not the outrageous act of rank hypocrisy that Northern antifederalists made it out to be. Rather, the three-fifths clause prudently reflected slaves’ dual status of property and persons simultaneously. A Constitution that denied either status completely would not distribute political power and potential tax liability in a way that reflected the basic reality of slavery as an economic system or as a legal regime that rested fundamentally on the coerced labor of human beings. 

That was Madison’s point. Because an enslaved person worked for a master, and not for themself, and because an enslaved person could be sold, brutalized, and chained by their enslaver, that enslaved person “may appear to be degraded from the human rank, and classed with those irrational animals, which fall under the legal denomination of property.” But Madison argued that that understanding was incomplete. The enslaved were also “no less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society; not as a part of the irrational creation; as a moral person, not as a mere article of property.” This was not simply because they were “protected” from brutalization unlike other forms of property and “punishable” for offenses, Madison explained. It was rather because the law deemed it so. The “mixt character of persons and of property”—what Madison called enslaved people’s “true character”—“is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied that these are the proper criterion; because it is only under the pretext that the laws have transformed the negroes into subjects of property, that a place is disputed them in the computation of numbers; and it is admitted that if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the negroes could no longer be refused an equal share of representation with other inhabitants.”

Madison admitted that this benefited Southern states. But Northerners could not have it both ways. They could not count the enslaved “in some degree as men, when burdens were to be imposed,” but omit them from the apportionment tally by arguing they were strictly property. They could not “reproach the southern States with the barbarous policy of considering as property a part of their human brethren” and then turn around and “contend that the government to which all the States are to be parties, ought to consider this unfortunate race more compleately in the unnatural light of property, than the very laws of which they complain!” The Constitution already counted “other inhabitants” (like white women and children, though Madison did not list these examples specifically) on a one-to-one basis with free white men. By this measure, Madison suggested, counting three-fifths of the enslaved population was something of a bargain for the North. Would Northerners prefer all slaves counted toward apportionment?

For Madison, as for other defenders of the three-fifths clause, an enslaved person was not “three-fifths of a person” because they were their master’s property any more than they were only “three-fifths” the property of their master because they were a person. It should be obvious that none of this makes slavery more “humane.” It means that the Constitution gave enslavers a vested interest in acknowledging that the people they claimed as “property” were people. The three-fifths clause allowed enslavers to exploit the humanity of people they enslaved, to use the fact of their personhood, for political gain. Whether defending or criticizing the three-fifths clause, participants in the public ratification debate were convinced that how the Constitution treated enslaved people—as “property” and as “persons”—would be the key to the future of slavery, Southern power, and racial hierarchy. 

 

Further Reading

Primary sources related to the three-fifths clause and the ratification of the Constitution may be found in:

The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution Digital Edition, ed. John P. Kaminski, Gaspare J. Saladino, Richard Leffler, Charles H. Schoenleber, and Margaret A. Hogan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

 

Secondary sources:

Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Jan Ellen Lewis, “The Three-Fifths Clause and the Origins of Sectionalism,” in Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2021), 254-80.

Jan Ellen Lewis, “What Happened to the Three-Fifths Clause: The Relationship Between Women and Slaves in Constitutional Thought,” Journal of the Early Republic 37 (Spring 2017): 1-46.

Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

Matthew Mason, Slavery & Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).

Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

Christopher D. E. Willoughby, Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

 

This article originally appeared in September 2024.

 

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Nathaniel C. Green is Professor of History at Northern Virginia Community College. A specialist in early U.S. political culture, he is the author of The Man of the People: Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency (University Press of Kansas, 2020; paperback, 2024). He is currently at work on a book-length study of the three-fifths clause, tentatively titled Three Fifths: The Constitution, Slavery, and the Toxic Politics of Compromise.

Because of its prime location in the increasingly connected circum-Atlantic world, New London offered shoppers a dazzling array of imported goods from which to choose. On June 6, 1798, the Connecticut Gazette advertised, for example, that the Eleven Sons was in from Liverpool with one hundred crates of crockery ware “among which are a number of elegant Dining, Breakfast, and Tea Services.” While an elegant serving dish might have pleased Richard’s mother or one of his older sisters, the gift seeker moved on, stopping only when the wares of a local potter drying in preparation for firing revealed something that seemed like it would help pave the way for the child’s future success: a four-and-one-half-inch-tall savings bank made of durable stoneware clay.

While people have been stashing their savings in clay and other types of containers for millennia, it was the creation of both a national bank and a mint after the American Revolution that must have made the idea of gifting a savings bank particularly appealing. Here was a place a growing boy could store the nation’s new decimal coinage. The bank would promote one of the habits the recently deceased Benjamin Franklin had been praising as essential in every edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac published since 1732. So popular were his adages about saving and other virtuous behaviors that a British publisher had begun printing a set of playing cards in 1793 that illustrated them. One of the cards features a young, well-dressed man avoiding the town stocks by eschewing horse race gambling. “For age and want,” the card recommends, “save while you may, no morning sun lasts all the day.”

The New London savings bank must have additionally appealed to Richard’s gift seeker because it also promoted industriousness. Fashioned in the distinctive shape of a skep or the upside-down straw basket used for millennia to house honey-producing bee colonies, the bank asserted that saving depended on persistent hard work. When Paul Revere included a skep encircled by bees in the top right portion of the border of a Masonic summons he engraved in 1772 for a meeting of St. Peter’s Masonic Lodge in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he was following a long Masonic tradition of using the beehive symbol that would soon be explained by Boston-born Thomas Smith Webb in his Freemason’s Monitor or Illustrations of Masonry, the first edition of which was published one year before the savings bank’s creation: “The beehive . . . teaches us that, as we came into the world rational and intelligent beings, so we should ever be industrious ones.”

What may have appealed most to Richard Williams’ gift seeker, however, was that the beehive-shaped savings bank was not yet leather-hard and therefore presented an opportunity to record a personalized message on its broad surface. When mixed with water and brushed on the bank, powdered cobalt oxide imported from Europe’s Ore Mountains would settle into any incisions the potter was instructed to add. Later, after the repeated addition of salt to the kiln over the several days of firing that stoneware requires, the message chosen for the toddler would appear in bright blue under an attractive glass-like glaze produced when the salt vaporizes:

Richard Willimas [sic]

Mind and Save your Silver Money so that you can be a Man

Be comming

New London, Jun 9th 1798

Called out by name, or at least a recognizable version of it, Richard is urged to save his money and thereby become a certain kind of man, namely a “Be comming” or “becoming” one. While the position of the adjective may have been necessitated by the bank’s size and shape, its placement after “Man” underscores the hope that Richard would become not just a wealthy man, but a gentleman. The Bible’s “God Almighty” and Shakespeare’s “the devil incarnate” are two examples of well-known postpositive adjectives that the bank’s purchaser may have been imitating in the hope that by instilling in the two-year-old the habit to save, he would grow up to be a member of the elite.  (It is possible that there is also a pun here that plays on the savings bank’s shape. Richard will hopefully come to be an industrious man or bee.) 

While, at first glance, the New London savings bank and its eloquent message thus appear to follow Franklin and Revere in asserting that one’s own labor and personal discipline will be enough to propel a child into a prosperous adulthood, a closer look at its composition and its owner’s family reveal that slavery was an inextricable part of how wealth and the props of the wealthy were created in early national maritime Connecticut. 

Of the many Richard Williamses in the vicinity of New London in 1798, the one of an age to most likely warrant being given a savings bank was baptized in Essex on June 19, 1796, the son of a shipwright whose rise was a direct result of his involvement in building the ships that supplied the slavery plantations of the West Indies. Samuel Williams was born in 1751 to the owner of a river-powered ironworks on the Falls River branch of the Connecticut River. Samuel expanded his father’s business vertically, adding a gristmill, a sawmill, and finally a shipyard, as revealed by archival records and a thorough archeological excavation conducted by a team at Wesleyan University in 1990. By employing some fifty men and boys at any given time, the Williams Shipyard produced slightly more than one ship a year out of nails, fittings, boards, planks, and timbers all produced on site. A proto-industrialist, Richard’s father became wealthy enough from supplying ships for the West Indies trade that he was able to convert the small cape-style home he owned into the full two-story home where the savings bank likely found its place overlooking what had become a sixty-acre empire.

In their forays back-and-forth between Connecticut, the West Indies, and ports in between, Williams-built ships would likely have conveyed the main ingredients used in making the bank and then glazing it: stoneware clay, a deposit of which was discovered in the late seventeenth century extending from South Amboy, New Jersey, to Staten Island and Long Island, New York, and salt, which was imported from the West Indies in greater amounts than sugar, molasses, and rum. 

Salt’s ability to extract water from fish muscle and transport the salt into it, leaving the remaining, less active water less accessible to microorganisms, helped transform Britain’s small seaboard Atlantic colonies into a new nation by allowing its fishermen to preserve the cod they caught on Georges Bank for long-distance export. So central was the role of salted cod in moving the North American seaboard from the periphery to the center of global trade that it continues to be celebrated in the form of the “Sacred Cod” that has been hanging in the chambers of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, first in the old state house and now in the new one, since the first half of the eighteenth century. 

Salt was so ubiquitous in fishing communities that when Samuel Williams’ Connecticut River neighbor Venture Smith, the African prince stolen into American slavery at the age of six, was a young man working and saving to purchase his freedom in the mid eighteenth-century, the means on hand to test the prodigious strength he employed to that end was salt. He wrote in his autobiography, which is marked with the same place (New London) and date (1798) as Richard Williams’ savings bank, “I took up on my knees a tierce of salt containing seven bushels, and carried it two or three rods. Of this fact there are several eye witnesses now living.”  Astoundingly, Smith carried a cask containing 420 pounds of salt between thirty-three and almost fifty feet. (Today, the world record for lifting an Atlas Stone is 630 pounds, but this does not entail carrying the stone any distance except up and over a 48-inch-tall bar.) Such was his strength that Smith was able to work enough hours to save the far above average amount his master charged him for the liberty that was rightfully his own. Unlike Richard Williams, however, Smith was forced to bury his savings in the ground after one of his masters opened his chest and stole one of the promissory notes he had hoped to use towards his self-rescue. Worse, the reward for Smith’s bee-like industry was tainted by repeated examples of continued ill treatment even after he became a free landholder in Haddam Neck, Connecticut. 

One such occasion took place when Smith was returning home from New London by ship and a hogshead of molasses was lost overboard when the ship docked at a Captain Hart’s wharf in Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Even though Smith had already gone onshore when the accident happened, Captain Hart forced him to pay for the loss. ‘‘Such a proceeding as this,” Smith writes in his Narrative, “would in my native country be branded as a crime equal to highway robbery. But Captain Hart was a white gentleman, and I a poor African, therefore it was all right, and good enough for the black dog.’’ Captain Hart’s molasses had traveled from a West Indies plantation, the product of the same kind of enslaved labor that Smith had expended throughout his young adulthood. For planters, merchants, and captains alike, the treatment of people of African descent could be justified by this idea, so formidably expressed by Smith, that they were akin to animals.

New England summers are not long or hot enough to allow for the evaporation of large amounts of salt water and thus the price for salt was driven almost entirely by the high cost of importing it from abroad. Salt was shipped from Liverpool, where brine was pumped out of mines and evaporated by heating it, and from Portugal and other Mediterranean countries where salt was raked from where it had evaporated in shallow ponds or along rocky shores. After the British claimed ownership of what is now Turks and Caicos in 1764, Britain’s mainland colonies imported the cheaper coarse salt raked there by enslaved people until the American Revolution disrupted this and all other foreign trade. Connecticut’s General Assembly went so far as to offer a bounty to anyone who could create a salt works and be the first to produce five hundred bushels of salt. When this failed to yield enough for the colony’s needs, the Council of Safety deputized an agent to impress ships of sixty to one hundred tons for service in acquiring salt from the West Indies. A list in Connecticut’s state library of the ships chartered reveals harrowing accounts of the trials endured in the pursuit of salt, such as those of the Betsey, which returned from the West Indies to New London with 3,000 bushels of much-needed salt in August of 1777 only to be captured, scuttled, and set on fire by a British frigate off of Montauk Point the following year. 

By the time Richard Williams was turning two in 1798, large quantities of salt were once again arriving regularly in New London from multiple foreign ports. On June 6, 1798, three days prior to the date on his savings bank, the same advertisement in The Connecticut Gazette announcing the arrival of one hundred crates of crockery ware also announced that six thousand bushels of salt had just arrived via Liverpool. However, potters’ preference for coarse and thus less expensive salt makes it likely that the salt whose vaporization in the kiln produced the glaze on Richard Williams’ bank was not from this or a similar Liverpool shipment but rather was raked from one of the islands where climate factors combine to evaporate sea water quickly and where there was enslaved labor to collect the salt left behind. Mary Prince describes in her 1831 autobiography the miserable decade of her young adulthood she spent enslaved raking salt on Turk’s Island:

I was given a half barrel and a shovel, and had to stand up to my knees in the water. . . . Our feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone, afflicting the sufferers with great torment. . . . If we could not keep up with the rest of the gang of slaves, we were put in the stocks, and severely flogged the next morning.

It was a relentless circle of brutal exploitation in which the salt raked by Mary Prince and other enslaved people was sold to northern fishermen who sold it back southward in the form of salted fish with which to feed the enslaved who raked the salt.

Those who benefited from the circulation of salt came to include Richard Williams, who became a successful Essex shipwright in his own right and whose prominence there got him elected to the Connecticut state legislature in 1851. The only cause for doubt in attributing the salt-glazed bank to this Richard Williams is Samuel Williams’ decision to give his son a middle name that honored one of Essex’s three original families, the Pratts. In the archival records, Samuel’s son often appears as Richard P. Williams. While it is troubling that there is no “P” on the savings bank, it could be that it was Richard who decided to use his middle initial in adulthood. If the survival of his savings bank in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is any indication, the Richard Williams who owned it seems to have believed that his rise was a result, not of his connections, but his individual efforts. Rather than smashing the bank once it was full of coins, as was and remains customary for clay and glass piggybanks, either he or someone who also appreciated the tenets of individualism used a chisel to carefully enlarge the coin slot and thereby extract the saved silver coins while preserving all the words incised in it.

No one, it seems, was ever bothered by the transposition of two letters in the name Williams. Perhaps the bank’s purchaser did not notice the error upon receipt of the fired bank. Readers recognize words by global letter patterns, not by the identity and position of each letter, and they are thus quick to silently correct transposed adjacent letters without even realizing it. Given that the bank’s purchaser did not reject the bank after it was completed, he or she may not have noticed the error until arriving back in Essex. Today, however, the transposition seems fated, a small reminder of something much larger baked into American salt-glazed stoneware produced prior to the demise of plantation slavery. In her autobiography, Mary Prince testified to what she endured to produce its attractive glaze:

Sometimes we had to work all night, measuring salt to load a vessel; or turning a machine to draw water out of the sea for the salt-making. Then we had no sleep—no rest—but were forced to work as fast as we could, and go on again all next day the same as usual. Work—work—work—Oh that Turk’s Island was a horrible place!

This article has traced the hidden double role of slavery in the salt-glazed stoneware savings bank, first in a family’s firm conviction that individual virtues were the reason for their rise even despite its patriarchs’ involvement in the West Indies trade, and second in the labor of the enslaved in raking the salt that gives the bank and its message its deceptive luster. Of course, just as another Richard Williams may have owned this savings bank, there could be early American stoneware that was glazed with salt from England or Europe. However, to insist on as much is to erase Venture Smith and Mary Prince’s experiences. Their voices make clear that the circulation of salt and salted fish between New England and West Indies slave plantations shaped everyone’s lives as indelibly as cobalt oxide seared in fire.    

 

Further Reading

On New England pottery: Lura Woodside Watkin, Early New England Potters and Their Wares (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).

On Connecticut River Shipbuilding and the Williams Family: Essex Historical Society and Essex Land Trust, Falls River Cove, vol. 1 of Follow the Falls, https://engage.overabove.com/follow-the-falls-volume-1-falls-river-cove/0627097001526997901; Shirley H. Malcarne and Donald L. Malcarne, “The Williams Building (Boat) Yard, 1790-1840: A Study of an Early Essex Ct. Enterprise and the Ships it Sent to the Sea” (1991); Wick Griswold and Ruth Major, Connecticut River Shipbuilding (Charleston: The History Press, 2020).

On salt: Konrad A. Antczak, Islands of Salt: Historical Archaeology of Seafarers and Things in the Venezuelan Caribbean 1624-1880 (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2019); Cynthia M. Kennedy, “The Other White Gold: Salt, Slaves, and Turks and Caicos Islands and British Colonialism,” The Historian 69 (no. 2, 2007): 215-30; Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (New York: Walker and Co., 1997); Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Walker and Co., 2003).

On slavery in New London, Connecticut: Taylor Desloge, “New London: A Fault Line in the Story of Freedom and Slavery in the Atlantic World,” Segregation and Community on New London’s Hempstead Street, https://segregationnewlondon.digital.conncoll.edu/why-new-london-a-fault-line-in-the-battle-over-slavery-and-freedom-in-the-atlantic-world/.

On Mary Prince and accounting, see Katrina Dzyak, “Atlantic World Accounting and The History of Mary Prince (1831),” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, accessed June 11, 2024, https://commonplace.online/article/atlantic-world-accounting/.

 

This article originally appeared in August 2024.

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Elise Lemire is Professor of Literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of Battle Green Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston and other titles. Her book Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts is available on Audible.

Captain Whipple called the older of the boys “Prince,” which was probably a callous joke on his royal pedigree. The other boy was given the common slave name “Cuffee.” Both lived and worked in Whipple’s house and stable.

When the revolution advanced to the point that patriots began setting up shadow governments, Whipple became a member of New Hampshire’s first independent assembly. He attended the sessions in Exeter accompanied by Prince, who had grown into an imposing strong man of twenty-five. When the assembly tapped Whipple to represent the state in Philadelphia, he rode south with Prince as his squire and personal servant. When the Continental Congress slowly lurched toward declaring independence, Whipple was one of the firebrands who never wavered from the course and earned the enduring respect of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. As the delegates to the Continental Congress assembled that summer of 1776, Whipple wrote his friend John Langdon on June 24, 1776, with exciting news: “Next Monday being the 1st of July, the grand question is to be debated, and I believe determined unanimously. May God unite our hearts in all things that tend to the well-being of the rising empire.” Whipple did not sign the Declaration of Independence with Hancock’s flair but scratched his dignified signature with the other patriots on that vellum. Whipple was not the only signer who had been a slave trader.  John Hancock’s partner in his Boston merchant house, James Rowe, also trafficked in humans.

Some weeks later Whipple was commissioned into Continental Army with the rank of captain. This required Prince to also enter the nation’s service but without formal rank or place in the army as the patriot cause then recognized only white soldiers. Whipple and Prince didn’t face battle at this time as they fled with the rest of the skeletal American government to Baltimore when the Redcoats seized Philadelphia.

On Christmas Eve of 1776, Whipple and Prince crossed the Delaware with General George Washington’s army to conduct a surprise attack on the British flank. The details of their actions during this battle are lost. The next year, Captain Whipple was given command of New Hampshire’s First Brigade and ordered to march west to meet Burgoyne’s redcoats. As he had done hundreds of times Whipple charged Prince with attending their horses and retired, but the next morning found the work still undone. According to Portsmouth’s local newspaper editor at the time, Charles Brewster, this led to the following exchange:

Prince appeared sulky and in ill humor and his master upbraided him for his misconduct.

“Master,” said Prince, “you are going to fight for your liberty, but I have none to fight for.”

“Prince,” replied his master, “behave like a man and do your duty, and from this hour you shall be free.”

Prince wanted no other incentive; he performed his duty like a man throughout the campaign, which ended in the surrender of Burgoyne, and from that day he was a freeman. 

This story is likely apocryphal on a number of grounds. First, according to the records of the New Hampshire Adjutant General, William and Prince served from Sept. 27, 1777, to Nov. 15, 1777. However, Prince clearly was not free in 1779, two years after he supposedly was promised his freedom, because he was one of nineteen black men who that year petitioned the New Hampshire Assembly for their freedom.

These men, describing themselves as “natives of Africa, now forcibly detained in slavery, in said state,” humbly but directly asked for some legislation by which “we may regain our liberty and be ranked in the class of free agents, and that the name of slave may no more be heard in a land gloriously contending for the sweets of freedom.” Prince and the other enslaved men had no fondness for their fetters and felt acutely the contradiction between American ideals and their condition. They were, they said, “born free to a country, where (tho’ knowledge, christianity and freedom, are their boast) they are compelled, and their unhappy posterity, to drag on their lives in miserable servitude.”

They rested their argument on many solid rocks of antislavery argument. On the grounds of natural law: “Nature gave them life and freedom, upon terms of the most perfect equality with other men; that freedom is an inherent right of the human species, not to be surrendered, but by consent, for the sake of social life.” On the grounds of religion, they objected that their enslavement was not Christian: “Is it from the sacred volumes of christianity? There we believe it not to be found!” On the grounds of the principle of property: “our present masters, will not be sufferers by our liberation, as we have most of us spent our whole strength and the prime of our lives in their service.”

New Hampshire’s legislature read and tabled this petition at their session the following year. When Prince jumped the broom with his bride Dinah Chase, a free black woman from nearby New Castle, he did so as another man’s property. Dinah’s legal owner signed her manumission papers on the day of her wedding, but it would not be until 1784, three years later, that William Whipple would finally put his famous signature to another declaration of independence, that most dear to Prince, his own manumission.

But even this act was not quite a fulfillment of some wartime promise. Whipple chose to execute his manumission when his claim to human property was shaken and made uncertain by legal currents roiling New England. To the south, the Massachusetts Superior Court had essentially rendered slave property unenforceable in that state’s courts in a series of rulings (citing the freedom suit of Elizabeth Freeman) that involved Quok Walker, a man who stole himself away from his master and was able to defend his self-possession in court. New Hampshire had just drafted a constitution and its bill of rights was sufficiently broad to leave property in human beings on dubious legal ground. 

William Whipple’s long delay in fulfilling his promise of freedom to the man who had loyally served him and his cause could be seen as an act of hypocrisy. Whipple was certainly knowledgeable of the legal decisions that were shaking the foundations of Yankee slavery in Massachusetts and elsewhere. He served as a justice in the New Hampshire Superior Court from 1782 until his death in 1785. Such an interpretation would be consistent with the way other American founders, like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, have been reframed in recent years. But such conclusions are too easy because it was quite possible within the worldview of a wealthy and powerful white American, which Whipple undoubtedly was, to both hate slavery yet remain reluctant to free any particular enslaved person.

There is plenty of evidence that William Whipple sincerely wished slavery would die a swift death in the new republic. When the dashing young patriot and aide-de-camp of General Washington, John Laurens, proposed raising a regiment of enslaved men in South Carolina on the promise of their freedom, Whipple was elated and wrote a friend, “The last accots from S. Carolina were favorable. A recommendation is gone thither for raising some regiments of Blacks. This will I suppose lay a foundation for the emancipation of those poor wretches in the Country, & I hope be the means of dispensing the Blessings of freedom to all the Human Race in America.” Like Benjamin Franklin, Whipple most likely viewed slavery as a force that endangered the dream of America becoming a land filled with white immigrants. During the war, Whipple expressed his vision of America as a land peopled by (presumably white) emigrants: “The prospect of laying a foundation of liberty and happiness for posterity, and securing an asylum for all who wish to enjoy those blessings, is an object, in my opinion, sufficient to raise the mind above every misfortune.” Many, maybe even most, patriots opposed slavery not because they deeply sympathized with those chained, but because they viewed slavery as being responsible for growing the black population which they believed would always be a rebellious and criminal element of society.

Despite being cheated of years of freedom by the man who claimed to own him, Prince Whipple chose to live in his shadow, spending the rest of his life living in a small house in William Whipple’s backyard where he and his wife Dinah raised six children. His decision raises eyebrows today. Why would a man remain loyal to another who dehumanized and ultimately betrayed him? The answer lies not in Prince Whipple’s misplaced feelings of loyalty, but instead reveals the overwhelming danger and oppression that faced “free” black people in supposedly “free” northern states.

Prince Whipple would have heard of many African American veterans like himself who were taken back into the ownership of a white man after they took off their uniform. The full story of the numbers and experiences of black Revolutionary War veterans forced back into slavery has never been told—quite the opposite—as their experiences don’t fit comfortably within the heroic storyline of the plucky patriots fighting for liberty. Evidence for the ongoing suppression of the truth is that the writers closest to these events were more aware of them and knowledge of this tragedy seems to have faded as the centuries passed.

In 1842, an ancient white veteran of the Continental Army, identified only as Dr. Harris, spoke before the Congregational and Presbyterian Anti-Slavery Society, at Francestown, New Hampshire and wondered,

Now, the war is over, our freedom is gained—what is to be done with these colored soldiers, who have shed their best blood in its defence? Must they be sent off out of the country, because they are black? or must they be sent back into slavery, now they have risked their lives and shed their blood to secure the freedom of their masters? I ask, what became of these noble colored soldiers? Many of them, I fear, were taken back to the South, and doomed to the fetter and the chain.

While the proportion of African American Revolutionary War soldiers who were dragged back into bondage cannot be precisely determined, it is clear that this danger was one that lurked in the fears of many, even in the North. Legislative hearings held in Rhode Island after the war established that at least two of the black men promised their freedom had been re-enslaved and taken to the South. A substantial number of lawsuits were lodged in state courts around the nation on behalf of black war veterans who had been falsely promised their freedom. These suits pointed to the tragic fact that black veterans could not protect themselves from re-enslavement. Rather, they depended on community networks in black neighborhoods in larger cities and the help of powerful white patrons to defend their freedom.  

Free black men and women in the early years of the American republic knew that what little freedom and property they had could be stolen in an instant. Their survival often depended upon cultivating the patronage and protection of powerful white men. Prince Whipple was painfully aware that the scope of his freedom did not extend beyond the ability of his namesake to intervene in the courts or with local officials on his behalf.

Freedom did bring new opportunities for Prince and Dinah, but it did not release them from the control of their former masters, who now assumed the role of their patrons. Prince and Dinah certainly understood the important social, economic, and legal protections that white patrons brought them. They could not enjoy these protections on their own, even with their freedom and a questionable claim to citizenship. They knew from the painful experiences of other African American families in New England, even of other black veterans of the Continental Army, that their ability to hold property, to remain a resident in their town, or even to keep their family together, depended on their maintaining a close personal relationship with a white man of position and influence.

Many accounts of Prince’s postwar life note that his former owner, William Whipple, granted Prince use of a “small corner patch” of the yard behind his house where he and his brother Cuffee erected a small house in which they, their spouses, and their children lived. Few note that in New England at this time it was common for black families to be “warned out” by town officials and forced to move west or to one of the larger cities in the region. None observe that it was also common for town officials to force black families to surrender their children to neighbors as “apprentices,” meaning that they would be worked as unpaid servants until they reached maturity. When Prince and his brother accepted William Whipple’s offer of settling their families in his backyard, they were also accepting his protection.

Prince and his brother Cuffee Whipple were technically free, but clearly dependent on their former master’s family. This situation was common in a world where freedom was a matter not so much grounded in law but in practice. Prince worked odd jobs, including some manner of dining service at a local ballroom, and was known as a jack-of-all-trades. Cuffee also worked as a servant, and earned additional money entertaining guests with his violin.

Most remarkably, Dinah taught black children, first out of their small home, and then more formally under the sponsorship of a white benevolent association, the “Ladies Charitable African Society.” Dinah’s school, like other black schools in New England, faced constant threat from those who believed the existence of such institutions would induce other black Americans to settle in the town. Dinah was still operating her school when Connecticut prosecuted Prudence Crandall, a white teacher, forcing her to close her school for black children in 1834 or the following year when a mob attacked and destroyed the Noyes Academy, an integrated school in Canaan, New Hampshire. Dinah’s ability to educate several generations of Portsmouth’s black children depended on her family’s subservient relationship with the leaders of the town.

But patronage had its limits. Later in life, in her seventies, after Prince, Cuffee, and Cuffee’s wife had all passed away, Dinah still lived in the little house she didn’t own in her husband’s former master’s garden. After William Whipple’s widow died in 1832 and the property was passed to her children, Dinah was moved to a house the heirs owned in a black neighborhood. Perhaps it is not unreasonable to speculate that even though social pressures were not enough to break the Whipple’s long-standing feelings of noble obligation to their former black servants, they were enough to shuffle them out of sight.

In 1851, the German artist Emanuel Leutze debuted his epic, life-sized painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” which quickly became one of the most iconic portraits of both the father of the nation and of the Revolutionary War. In that famous image, Washington stands tall over the soldiers rowing across the icy river, one of whom is a black man. Prominent historians still mistakenly believe that this man was Prince Whipple, an African American whose image was adopted as the emblem for all black soldiers of the Revolutionary War. 

It is now known that Leutze had probably never heard of Prince Whipple. Rather, he included the image of a black rower because Washington’s flatboat symbolized the American nation and Leutze strove to represent a variety of ethnic types to complete this metaphor. Additionally, Leutze was influenced by the much earlier depiction of Washington’s army’s crossing by Thomas Sully that also included a single black figure among those poised around the great general. Sully, painting his canvas in 1819, was much closer in time to the events depicted and knew that Washington was accompanied throughout the war by one of the men he enslaved, William Lee. Sully surely had seen John Trumbull’s portrait of Washington with Lee poised on horseback in a fantastical turban as he worked for him as a studio assistant. In the end, the figure of the black soldier drawing his oar was partly an artistic trope that Leutze was repeating rather than an attempt at historical accuracy. 

Nevertheless, soon after Leutze’s masterpiece appeared, several writers identified Prince Whipple as the rower. William C. Nell, a writer and assistant editor with Frederick Douglass’ newspapers, published Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in 1854 and wrote:

In the engravings of Washington crossing the Delaware . . . a colored soldier is seen, on horseback, quite prominent, near the Commander-in-Chief,–the same figure that, in other sketches, is seen pulling the stroke oar in that memorable crossing. This colored soldier was Prince Whipple, body-guard to Gen. Whipple, of New Hampshire, who was Aid to General Washington.

Curiously, Nell himself identified another black soldier who took part in that crossing, though he chose not to associate him with images of Washington on that occasion. In his book, Nell quotes a newspaper clipping about Oliver Cromwell, a black soldier who served with New Jersey’s Second Regiment. Cromwell fought battles from the beginning to the end of the war and even remembered seeing the last soldier fall at Yorktown. Like Prince Whipple, he also paddled across that frozen river and fought at Trenton. But because Prince was the property of a man Nell thought was close to Washington, he credited him with being the actual figure made iconic in paint. 

The debate over who was the man Leutze depicted in his masterpiece of Americana faded once Currier and Ives rendered the painting as a lithograph and it was republished in many of the illustrated magazines that rose to popularity in the Jim Crow era. Catering to white audiences, Currier and Ives chose to remove the black rower from the scene. Interest in the man so plainly visible in the actual canvas still hanging in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art only revived in the 1960s when the NAACP distributed newspaper features extolling the exploits of America’s black soldiers of the revolution. 

Emanuel Leutze depicted a black man carrying the father of the nation across the Delaware into battle for his nation’s freedom. Whether or not that man was in fact Prince Whipple, Prince metaphorically never stopped paddling that boat. America to him, and to men like him, was a land of freedom only as far as the powerful white man standing over them allowed.

 

Further Reading

Elliot Bostwick Davis, Thomas Sully: George Washington and the Passage of the Delaware (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2016).

Karsten Fitz, “Commemorating Crispus Attucks: Visual Memory and the Representations of the Boston Massacre, 1770-1857,” Amerikastudien / American Studies, 50:3 (2005): 463-84.

William Lloyd Garrison, The Loyalty and Devotion of Colored Americans in the Revolution and War of 1812 (Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1861). The quote by Dr. Harris appears on p. 6.

Glenn A. Knoblock, “Strong and Brave Fellows”: New Hampshire’s Black Soldiers and Sailors of the American Revolution, 1775-1784 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2003).

William C. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855).

Mark J. Sammons & Valerie Cunningham, Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004), pp. 68-70, 93-94.

Natalie Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2, ed. Kathleen Luhrs (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 16-24.

Judith L. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2017).

 

This article originally appeared in August 2024.

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Timothy Messer-Kruse is the author of Patriots’ Dilemma: White Abolitionism and Black Banishment in the Founding of the United States of America (Pluto Press).

Downing understood how dangerous the “wilderness” was for Black Americans in the years after Appomattox. If the new republic was to be a biracial democracy it needed to be guided by a federal commitment to its most vulnerable citizens, especially in an era of unprecedented violence. The reign of terror in the South that followed the war was stark, with white vigilantes roaming through rural and metropolitan areas, disarming Black Union soldiers and threatening and killing community leaders. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his classic work Black Reconstruction in America (1935), civil wars are “doubly difficult to stop,” for it becomes all the more likely that “war may go on more secretly, more spasmodically, and yet as truly as before the peace.”

Historian Manisha Sinha’s deeply researched account of the “fraught and contested” period of Reconstruction covers in detail the efforts of George Downing and other reformers to expand the scope of American democracy after the Civil War. Sinha also greatly enlarges the temporal boundaries students are accustomed to (1865 to 1877), by covering the end of the nineteenth century—including labor reform movements, the subjugation of Native American tribes in the West, and the rise of American imperialism—into the Progressive era with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment. In Sinha’s engrossing work, Reconstruction is both a “transregional and transnational” story (309). Sinha moves beyond Eric Foner’s classic, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (published in 1988)—not necessarily disagreeing but broadening the definition of Reconstruction’s overthrow to go well into the twentieth century. Sinha, drawing from the influence of Foner who served as her graduate school advisor, considers the contested nature of American democracy by examining the fissures within the republic created by disputes over race, gender, citizenship, nation-state building, immigration, law, political economy, and empire. Sinha’s new work builds on the themes presented in her award-winning book The Slave’s Cause (2016).

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is engaging, elegantly written, provocative, and destined to become the new standard text on the period. Sinha’s approach allows her to tell a fast-paced story that is deeply informed by decades of research and teaching. Sinha’s grand narrative incorporates a deep reading of the secondary literature and a fresh examination of primary sources, in a similar vein to historian Nell Irvin Painter’s classic work, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1987), succinctly capturing the political, social, and economic forces at play. Over the course of a dozen cogently written chapters, Sinha demonstrates how the U.S. military that battled against southern counterrevolutionaries was redeployed to the West to engage in the Indian Wars. Southern efforts to disenfranchise Black Americans were repackaged and deployed in the North to target immigrants and the industrial working-class. Of particular importance is Sinha’s treatment of the women’s suffrage movement. Sinha clearly demonstrates how the failures of Reconstruction led not just to the loss of an interracial democracy, but also delivered a crushing blow to the equal rights battle for women.

Sinha begins by weaving together several strands of the emancipation story usually treated separately: abolitionism, the story of liberated slaves and missionaries who worked with them, and accounts of slaves achieving their freedom in the tumult of war. Sinha chronicles how abolitionist reformers, Black and white, male and female, understood the meaning of the Civil War and fought for change after four years of brutal carnage came to an end in April 1865. As the abolitionist U.S. Senator Charles Sumner proclaimed in June 1865 to the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society: “Liberty has been won, the battle of Equality is still pending.” 

Building on Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, Sinha uses the phrase “abolition democracy” to detail the new vision of democracy that radical Republicans and Black leaders came to embrace in the postwar period and into the twentieth century. For classroom teachers, the author’s discussion of what she calls “grassroots reconstruction”—the significance of a “range of actions by disenfranchised groups on the ground to expand the boundaries of national citizenship and belonging”—will serve to expand the curriculum in rich and meaningful ways. Sinha’s mining of Freedmen’s Bureau records offers readers a “glimpse into how freedpeople tried to deploy it in defense of themselves, their homes, families, and communities, even when confronted with racist or unsympathetic agents” (131). Sinha also details the impact of the Union Leagues and Republican clubs, along with Black conventions, and the actions of Black leaders at constitutional conventions in the South. 

The “main concern of Reconstruction was the plight of the formerly enslaved, but its fall affected other groups as well, from women and workers to immigrants and Native Americans” (xvii). Sinha succeeds in her stated goal to put Reconstruction in a “broad transnational context” and to “demonstrate that its long death has as much to tell us as its short-lived triumph” in the 1860s and early 1870s (xix). Her coverage of the Lost Cause mythology clearly demonstrates how it was not just nostalgia for the old House of Dixie. Rather it became the ideological handmaiden of American imperial efforts, drawing strength from southern redeemer views and the concomitant anti-Native American ideology used to justify subjugation out West.

Sinha devotes considerable coverage to the movement for land redistribution at the end of the war to examine how the policies of Lincoln’s successor in office, Andrew Johnson, eventually led to an overthrow of the radical Republican agenda. Building on the research and themes presented in the work of historians, including but not limited to, Douglas Egerton’s The Wars of Reconstruction (2014), Gregory Down’s After Appomattox (2015), William Blair’s The Record of Murders and Outrages (2021), and Fergus Bordewich’s Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (2023), Sinha chronicles how Reconstruction ultimately failed due to the use of violence, economic coercion, racist terror, and an unsympathetic U.S. Supreme Court. African Americans vigorously resisted Jim Crow and the application of a separate-but-equal doctrine. In Louisiana, Kentucky, Florida, Tennessee, Maryland, and Oklahoma, Blacks challenged separate coach laws. Under Jim Crow travel, Blacks could not move freely from one coach cart to another. Sinha demonstrates how late nineteenth-century Jim Crow statutes were not just part of southern exceptionalism, but rather became mainstream during the Progressive period and the ideology of regulation in the early twentieth century. 

One omission in Sinha’s engrossing story is a deeper engagement with scholarship relating to reconstruction in the North. Hugh Davis’ important work, “We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less” (2011) tells the story of Black leaders and protests against inequality in education, public accommodations, and political life. Like Octavius Catto in Philadelphia, George Downing protested against segregated travel in the North. After being thrown off a railroad car in Washington, D.C. in 1869​​—an incident that caused Charles Sumner to bring it up on the floor of the Senate—an indignant Downing penned an editorial for the New-York Tribune, drawing on Roger Taney’s infamous ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case for the title, “Have Black Men Any Rights that Railroad Conductors are Bound to Respect?” Downing maintained that “the day had gone by when railroad companies or other corporations can thus, through their agents, unnecessarily and brutally injure the feelings of a man . . . who is willing to pay his fare, simply because of his color; for he has not only a growing moral sentiment at his back, but the ballot in his hand, and he will not yield.” Another important part of the northern story of Reconstruction to consider is contained in Janette Thomas Greenwood’s First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862-1900 (2009).

Sinha addresses the push for women’s equality in two separate chapters, one focused on the traditional period of 1865 to 1877 and the second, “The Last Reconstruction Amendment,” covering the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment. The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was, as Sinha notes, a milestone in the history of reconstruction of American democracy. Sinha rightly notes that the women’s rights movement had its genesis in the abolition movement. During the Civil War, women “became foot soldiers in the civilian arm of the federal government” under the auspices of the United States Sanitary Commission and army nurses (201). As historian Carol Faulkner notes in Women’s Radical Reconstruction (2003), the design, implementation, and administration of Reconstruction policy was pushed along by female activism. In 1863, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the Women’s National Loyal League. In 1864, Black women formed an independent Ladies Union Association to aid the needs of wounded and sick Black soldiers. And immediately following the war, feminists “relaunched the women’s conventions,” which had grown in size in the antebellum period. Sinha provides a rigorous account of the dynamics during the postbellum period with its many developments, including an account of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) and its “fight for universal suffrage for black people and for women,” along with the eventual split within the women’s suffrage movement into two wings over the wording of the Fifteenth Amendment. Unfortunately, the split into the American Woman Suffrage Association, under the leadership of Lucy Stone—a central character in Sinha’s work—and the National Woman Suffrage Association, under Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, led to a twenty-year schism. As Sinha argues, the “abandonment of abolitionist feminists’ dual commitment to racial and gender equality” had “long lasting consequences for the American women’s movement” (195). The “deployment of racist logic for women’s rights would find new adherents” in the late nineteenth century (226).

In a chapter entitled, “The Conquest of the West,” Sinha makes the case for how the processes connected with the “unraveling of southern Reconstruction” were intertwined with the “reconstruction of the West” (309). As she notes, it was the insurgency against Reconstruction policies led by southern Democrats that “mirrors the wars against the Indians” in the American west (330). The “waning of Reconstruction” also “set the stage for the final campaign in the brutal subjugation of the indigenous nations,” as the U.S. “diverted the energies” from “emancipation to empire” (308). Building on the work of historian Heather Cox Richardson, Sinha carries her story of the West to the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of the Lakota Sioux. Teachers will benefit from Sinha’s extended discussion of how abolitionist views of the Indian Wars and the construction of reservations, along with global imperial efforts at the end of the nineteenth century, were shaped by the struggle for Black citizenship. These same forces also led to the counterrevolution against the Republican use of active federal intervention in the economy, paving the way for a laissez-faire conception of the economic order. 

Manisha Sinha’s grand narrative will become a staple for high school and college educators. Despite the proliferation of scholarship on Reconstruction over the last thirty years, an understanding of the definition of citizenship, the meaning of equality, the relative powers of the national and state governments—all major Reconstruction issues discussed by Sinha—continue to be lacking. If The Rise and Fall of the Second American Revolution achieves the readership it deserves, this problem will be rectified. Moreover, students will have a deeper understanding of important questions of citizenship, national belonging, and the role of the state in our fractured twenty-first century political world. Indeed, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic shows how Reconstruction and its legacies “continue to shape the contours of our democracy” (153). As George T. Downing deeply believed, America existed to “work out in perfection the realization of a great principle, the fraternal unity of man.” America’s “mission,” according to Downing, was ordained by God to create a “composite” nation, the “tendency was to blend different virtues and powers” into one civilization. In an 1881 speech at Harvard, the stalwart reformer Wendell Phillips, preached the necessity of “education” for America to keep functioning as a democratic nation. Manisha Sinha’s scholarship will help in this process.

 

Further Reading

William A. Blair, The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight Over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Fergus M. Bordewich, Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023).

Hugh Davis, “We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less”: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North During Reconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1935).

Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014).

Carol Faulkner, Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper Collins, 1988).

Eric Foner, The Secret Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).

Janette Thomas Greenwood, First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Caroline Janney, Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army After Appomattox (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

James McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987).

Heather Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

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

 

This article originally appeared in July 2024.

 

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Historians Erik J. Chaput, Ph.D., and Russell J. DeSimone are the co-creators of the award-winning Dorr Rebellion Project website hosted by Providence College. Chaput teaches American history at Western Reserve Academy. They are the authors of numerous articles on early American history, including “George T. Downing and the ‘Fraternal Unity of Man’: The Battle for an Abolition Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America” (Newport History, Summer 2024). In January 2025, their edition of the Selected Writings of Thomas Wilson Dorr will be published by the Rhode Island Publications Society. They are currently at work on a biography of George T. Downing.

There is so much to share about what I enjoyed during my museum visit on December 27, 2023. First, as a researcher, narrative consultant, and advocate of grammar and language in history communications to tell a fuller history, I commend the museum on their meta approach to context and nuance with this exhibit. I refer to this grammar and language as “(un)redacted grammar and language” because they do not obscure who did what to whom. In comparison, redacted grammar and language, like the passive voice, omits the doer of an action, most often, the perpetrator of violence or a crime in a sentence.

An example of the (un)redacted grammar and language that I observed in the exhibit:  interpretive signs that named who enslaved the Black people featured in the art. For example, the sign that accompanied the ceramic pottery of the Black New York City potter and businessman Thomas W. Commeraw included the White man who enslaved him, a fellow potter, a White man, and a German immigrant to the US named William Crolius:

For decades, a misreading of Thomas W. Commeraw’s name led art historians to assume that he was of European descent. In fact, he was African American, formerly enslaved by potter William Crolius.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the semi-indictment of historians who, for decades, assumed that Mr. Commeraw was of European descent because they misread his name. Note that I say “semi-indictment”—keep reading until the end to learn why.

As a historic preservation architect, it was a treat to see that the AFAM curatorial team included the surviving remains of a cemetery headstone. What’s more, the accompanying interpretive sign highlighted the commercial development threats that burial grounds of enslaved and free Black people continue to face in the US. Although, the stone appeared to be in the way of traffic—in the name of life safety, the architect in me notes circulation paths whenever I am in a public or private space and if they are efficient for human travel. Plus, I viewed this section as curators paying homage to the Black ancestors whom White people enslaved whom the curators included in the exhibit. To me, it read as a shrine, and I treated it, to the best of my ability, as such, sitting on the one bench in this part of the exhibit and reflecting on the lives of the names that AFAM printed in the round object hovering over the headstone. Something like this, well, shrine, deserved a niche for quiet reflection on the lives of the unnamed, now-named Black figures.

As a Black woman, without reading the interpretive sign before reading the inscription on the headstone, I felt it in my body, the weight of what I was looking at. The stone marked the final resting place in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, of two Black male teenagers, Lonnon and Hagar. As someone inscribed on the stone, perhaps a fellow enslaved Black person, these teens were servants to a man named Christopher Phillips. With this and everything I just shared, this shrine deserved to be in a more sacred place than in the middle of the circulation path.

With this in mind, I would have placed the headstone with the names hovering above it in the nook that includes the exhibit about great Black craftspeople, creatives, scientists, and inventors like Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker. To maximize space, in the former site of the headstone, I would have removed some of the paintings on the wall. I say this because the greatest shift in the narrative about Black people that we need is about our intelligence—we need more attention placed on all of the inventions we developed in the early years of the United States and more emphasis on our creativity.

With “Unnamed Figures,” AFAM aligns with a burgeoning trend by other peer museums nationwide in their evolution of interpretations of legacy works. The exhibit, in its language guide about their reason for not capitalizing the “w” in White people, referenced the Baltimore Museum of Art’s language updates to their interpretation:

It can be appropriate and, indeed, restorative for curators to reconsider and update the title of an object—as in the case of the Baltimore Museum of Art’s recently retitled portrait “Charles Calvert and Once-Known Enslaved Attendant,” which has been known throughout its history by a variety of titles, including “Charles Calvert” and “Charles Calvert and His Slave.”

For “Unnamed Figure,” AFAM chose not to follow the route of BMA and instead kept the past title. They explained:

In the context of this loan-based project, we have chosen to provide past assigned titles as a reflection of the objects’ multilayered histories within multiple collections.

To educate the public even further about their language choices, AFAM complemented the exhibit with a language guide, accessible via a QR code on the “what’s in a name?” sign that takes viewers to the language guide in the Bloomberg Connects App. I commend them for this educational technology integration. While the exhibit is no longer at AFAM, if you are interested in viewing it, there is a virtual walkthrough of the exhibit on Vimeo.

A key component of the language guide explains the capitalization of the “B” in Black people and the choice to lowercase the “W” in White people. Understandably, AFAM’s reason for using White people with a lowercase “w” is to distance themselves from the practice of self-proclaimed white nationalists who capitalize the “W” in White people to assert the superiority of the White race. However, what we concede when lowercasing the “W” in White people are: (1) white supremacy is only something that white supremacists can do (it is not, white supremacy is a spectrum of human behavior that does more harm than good such as perfectionism), and (2) white nationalists have the power to control the narrative about race.

Capitalizing the “W” in White people does convey the power of whiteness, as it should, not from a white nationalist perspective, but because the power of whiteness is so subtle in our society, it is the air we breathe. There is behavioral science to support this claim. Yet we, especially White people, do not interrogate the power of their whiteness enough. And therefore, whiteness negatively affects the lives of people who are not White on a regular basis, for centuries, as evidenced in the interpretations in this exhibit. So, for us to see it as the powerful negative force that it is, this narrative that “White people and anyone who appears to be as White as possible are a standard for goodness, intelligence, and who is safe,” we must capitalize the “W” in White.

This practice of unredacting the facts of artwork and objects to tell a fuller story about them is prominent in AFAM’s peer museums in New York as well. As Karen Rosenberg shared in her review of the exhibit, “Now, Black Figures Have a Name, a Frame and a Show”:

Even as New York’s museums deliver a season of exhibitions in which the Black figure is emphatically, profoundly present, these institutions are reckoning with legacies of absence, invisibility and anonymity.

The article states that New York’s museums are, “reckoning with legacies of absence, invisibility, and anonymity.” But are the American Folk Art Museum with “Unnamed Figures,” and other museums really “reckoning with legacies of absence, invisibility, and anonymity,” if those who committed the erasure, White curators, collectors, and art historians, remain unnamed figures in the exhibits, redacted?

AFAM opens the exhibit with the following paragraph that makes no mention of who unnamed the figures:

Black figures and faces seldom appear in American art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When represented, they are typically placed in secondary positions, subjected to marginalization and portrayed as lacking individuality and interiority. Often, they go unnamed, implicitly excluded from the story of the picture.

AFAM filled the exhibit’s interpretive signs with one of the most prolific forms of redacted grammar and language, the passive voice, written from the perspective of a third-person narrator who omits themself from what they are witnessing. In this, the narrator, a White curator or someone adhering to white supremacist ideology has removed the White museum professionals from the erasure of Black figures and faces.

Is the New York Times article telling a fuller story about the exhibit if it does not investigate why an exhibit like this exists, why White curators, collectors, and art historians erase, or perhaps more specifically, ignore the Black people and the context of enslavement in artwork? Do we truly grasp why “Unnamed Figures” matters without this context and how to prevent White people and others from repeating race-based ignorance in our collective memory and in the archives? Without this context, in the article and in the exhibit, clearly stating the race of the curators, collectors, and art historians, we as a collective society are missing a fuller story about the “Unnamed Figures.” And we are missing the true restorative justice in the archives that we deserve. 

As a Black person who left “Unnamed Figures” feeling a sense of healing and uplift from this attempt at truth-telling in museum interpretation, this missing piece of accountability in the story would have made me feel whole.

While the New York Times article described one section of the exhibit uplifting—the section about Black makers—as a Black person who has never experienced an exhibit like this before, one that provided so much context about the artwork with such nuance about white supremacy and enslavement, the entire exhibit was uplifting to me because of this truth-telling in museum interpretation. I recommend this exhibit, and, to enhance your museum exhibit, I recommend downloading the Bloomberg App, where you will have access to the exhibit guide.

My only other note is on the name of the exhibit itself. As with the interpretative signs that give details about each section of the exhibit, the name itself does not hold enough accountability for the historians, curators, and archivists, and thus lacks what is truly needed for restorative justice for harm caused in these incomplete archival practices. Perhaps, “Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Redaction in the Early American North” or “Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Erasure in the Early American North” are better fits as the words “Redaction” and “Erasure” are forms of the verbs to redact and to erase, both of which communicate intentional action to withhold information, which is what the White historians and museum professionals did in the past.

Thinking back on the exhibit, I love how the curators concluded it with a statement on Black people’s desire to control or reclaim the narrative about them. From the exhibit, I learned that we asserted our agency of self through portrait photography. At the time, in the late 1800s, Black people trusted photography more than portraiture because, from their perspective, given the prevalence of White people’s derogatory depictions of Black people at the time, blackface in particular, a photograph was independent of the lens through which White people chose to see Black people, a lens of inferiority to them. Weeks after visiting the exhibit, I see that my writing of this review and the advocacy in how society tells the story about the Black experience is in the same spirit of the Black ancestors in attempting to control or reclaim the narrative about us.

 

Further Reading

American Folk Art Museum, “Virtual Insights: Reasserting Black Presence in the Early American North,” Vimeo, April 17, 2024.

“News: American Folk Art Museum,” American Folk Art Museum, accessed December 27, 2023.

Jeff Richman, Christine Hanauer, Jim Crolius, Kimberly Vickers, William Liebeknecht, Rick Ciralli RCGLASS, Joe DeSanto, Joan Smitth, Lawrence Duffee, and Meta Janowitz, “Crolius Potters,” Green-Wood Cemetery, accessed February 13, 2012.

Karen Rosenberg, “Now, Black Figures Have a Name, a Frame and a Show,” New York Times, December 21, 2023.

k. kennedy Whiters, “Redacted: A Grammar + Language Survey,” Redacted: a Grammar + Language Survey, accessed January 17, 2024.

k. kennedy Whiters, “White with a Capital ‘W,’” Substack, accessed January 17, 2024.

 

This piece originally appeared in July 2024.

 

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k. kennedy Whiters, AIA, is a preservation architect and social scientist in Queens, New York, who researches redacted grammar and language in history communications/storytelling via the initiative she founded in 2021 called “(un)Redact the Facts.” kennedy is the founder of two businesses based in New York: first, the preservation studio wrkSHap kiloWatt, home to (un)Redact the Facts, Black in Historic Preservation, and Beyond Integrity in (X), and second, the studio kW Architecture, PLLC, a full-service architecture, owner’s rep, and home inspection studio.

1786. In the cobblestone streets of Morlaix, nestled along the rugged coast of Brittany, the footsteps of three young Acadian sisters—Marguerite Rosalie, Anne Suzanne, and Marie Esther Richard—echoed amidst the industrious rhythm of daily life. Two of them, who were deported as children first to England and then to France, had settled as tailors in the small Breton city, where the Acadian refugee community had relocated. In a report drafted in 1786, Morlaix’s subdelegate stewardship chronicled the sisters’ plea for an exemption from the tailors’ guild, a plea borne not out of a desire for monetary gain but rather a fervent hope to safeguard their livelihood. “Since they are quite busy, they are not asking for payment. But worried they will be bothered by the tailors’ guild, they ask to be granted an exemption to practice their trade,” the stewardship remarked. The Richard sisters’ efforts to attain economic independence demonstrate how refugee women respond and recover from crises. Without the economic support of a male figure, these women encounter challenges in securing assistance for themselves, as well as for their children and parents. Paradoxically, despite being refugees, the Richard sisters managed to empower themselves, breaking away from traditional roles to assert their own agency. What factors facilitated this transformation, and how did humanitarian aid either uphold or challenge gender norms within the settler-refugee community of Acadians? Additionally, how did imperial policies intersect to advance the expansionist agendas of empires?

The scarcity of archival sources presents challenges in constructing a complete narrative of the Acadian women’s experience of the 1755 deportation. Sporadic references to these women appear in French colonial archives, state archives in the United States, and provincial archives in Canada. However, these archives do not contain testimonies or comprehensive accounts of the deportation. These administrative archives predominantly document the public sphere, wherein men typically held privileged access to direct negotiations and decision-making processes. Some Acadian women refugees, like Vénérande Robichaud (1753-1839), left letters, but many others submitted petitions or complaints that historians have ignored until today.

Exploring these documents prompts a deeper understanding of humanitarian action that needs to be reexamined from both historical and historiographical perspectives. Instead of being a simple expression of innate compassion towards distant individuals or groups, humanitarian aid often reflects various hierarchies and power relations. These dynamics can have diverse impacts on the recipients of aid, particularly in colonial contexts where former settlers suddenly turn into new refugees. Let me acknowledge something here: historians usually emphasize the transformation of refugees into settlers, who eventually become the “mothers” or “fathers” of new nations, assuming humans typically seek meaning in renewal, rather than loss. But is that really the case? Can history provide us with counter-narratives of “rebirth”? 

Within the context of the French Atlantic, one could examine analogous historical events, such as the evacuation of neutral Caribbean islands like Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Saint Lucia in 1730; or the aftermath of the 1791 rebellion of enslaved people in the colony of Saint-Domingue, which pushed thousands of colonists and free people of color to flee in Louisiana; or even the deportation of settler populations from the Saint-Pierre and Miquelon islands to Nova Scotia in 1793. Among these historical forced migrations of French settlers lies the 1755 Acadian deportation, during which settlers were forcibly removed from their homes and dispersed among the colonies of British North America. As a result, former Acadian patriarchs experienced a decline in their social statuses and a significant portion of women were suddenly regarded as impoverished widows or employed as working-class laborers. Despite these adversities, some women refugees managed to assume new roles within the community. However, this process of empowerment conflicted with traditional gender roles prescribed by humanitarian aid efforts, which tended to confine women to domestic responsibilities while elevating certain male figures to spokespersons for community needs.

Most of the French Acadian settlers in eighteenth-century Acadia (or later Nova Scotia) hailed from rural backgrounds, where women were primarily trained in domestic tasks such as laundry, cooking, and farm work, in addition to fulfilling their maternal duties. Upon Acadia’s transfer to British rule in 1713, efforts to assimilate Acadian settlers commenced immediately. Many Acadians resisted taking the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, but once urged by the Catholic Church, which retained a strong influence, most of them finally took it. The 1755 deportation, executed by young conscripts from the neighboring colonies of New England, forcibly removed the Acadians from Nova Scotia as Great Britain did not believe they were trustworthy subjects.

The expulsion of 1755, commonly known as the “Grand Dérangement,” refers to a series of forced migrations and deportations that began in August 1755 and extended until 1763, orchestrated by the British colonial authorities during the French and Indian War. Over the years, the Acadians had developed a distinct culture, blending French, Indigenous, and later British influences. The British colonial Governors, however, perceived the Acadians as a potential threat due to their French Catholic heritage and their geographical proximity to New France, the adversary of British colonies. Consequently, between 1755 and 1763, approximately 10,000 Acadians were forcibly removed from their homeland following the orders of Major Charles Lawrence, Governor of Nova Scotia from 1754 to 1760. These operations of expulsion and deportation were characterized by brutality and the separation of families. Acadians were dispersed to various locations, including the American colonies, Great Britain, France, Louisiana, and the Caribbean. 

Women were not granted any special treatment. They often suffered in confinement aboard ships or in barracks upon their arrival in British North American colonies. The colonial authorities ordered the confinement of isolated Acadian women who had lost parents or children, in workhouses or even prisons. In 1756 a small group of Acadian women and their young children who had managed to escape deportation in the Beaubassin region were trying to flee to Ile Saint-Jean, but British soldiers arrested them. They sent them to Georges Island, not far from the port of Halifax, using many warehouses as prisons. These women were held there for several weeks until Canadian authorities arranged a transfer. These carceral initiatives reverberated within the French empire, evidenced by administrators in Guiana soliciting the establishment of an asylum, or maison de santé, in Sinnamary to accommodate the distress experienced of a considerable number of settlers, orphans, and Acadian families in 1778 and 1782. Indeed, imperial humanitarian interventions often became intertwined with expansionist interests. This duality underscores the intricate relationship between humanitarian ideals and imperial ambitions, raising questions about the genuine “altruism” behind such endeavors and the extent to which they served to legitimize and perpetuate imperial power. As a result, the unique confluence of humanitarianism and colonial violence played a significant role in the development of trans-imperial governmental experiments. 

In Massachusetts, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s efforts to provide aid and support to Acadian refugees led him to agree to the group’s requests for material aid within his colony. He wrote in retrospect in his History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, “Many of them went through great hardships, but in general they were treated with humanity.” Despite these representations, Acadian women faced significant challenges, including precarious social conditions and lack of status. Acadian women refugees established in the villages of Massachusetts with their families and remained entirely devoted to domestic life. Reverend Ebenezer Parkman from the town of Westborough, Massachusetts, wrote in his diary that Marie-Madeleine and Marie-Josèphe LeBlanc, aged 16 and 13, “weave, sew and wash laundry all day.” These two sisters lived with their parents, whom Parkman welcomed in his house.

The General Court of Massachusetts issued Acts from 1755 to 1756 to distribute Acadians to different townships within the colony. While affluent townships like Cambridge readily welcomed some families without demanding immediate payment from the General Court, others, facing economic strain, either rejected Acadians outright or insisted on reimbursement for resettlement costs. Struggling with inadequate food and shelter, the refugees voiced their grievances regarding their unjust living conditions to joint committees for each county appointed by the House of Representatives and the Governor’s Council. Some Acadian male heads of households, informed by the British tradition of petitioning, initiated the practice. They drafted petitions addressed to the General Court, outlining their diverse concerns. The proximity between a few Acadian male leaders and Massachusetts elites (Louis Robichaud and Edward Winslow in Cambridge for example) allowed them to negotiate more directly with authorities to obtain their passage on French and Catholic territories. Lured by land allocations, these initiatives to leave were shaped by a settler-colonial imaginary crafted by married, middle-aged, physically capable men who imposed their will on the entire group, ultimately compelling them to relocate to Canada, Saint-Domingue, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon islands, and Louisiana, where many members of the group succumbed to illness. Other refugees, neither welcomed nor imprisoned, died wandering.

Despite enduring manifold tribulations throughout their exile, numerous Acadian women eventually reintegrated into the community upon their departure to Canada in 1765. Governor James Murray’s proclamation, published in the Quebec Gazette on March 7, 1765, offered land to new settlers, particularly Acadians. In Canada, their welfare fell on the Catholic clergy, who assigned a distinct role to Acadian women as symbols of piety and guardians of the Catholic faith. Archbishop Henri-Marie Dubreil de Pontbriand, in a missive to Quebec parishes in 1767, depicted these women as martyrs who, while enduring privations, steadfastly upheld their faith, traditions, and culture amidst adversity.

This was not always the case. Acadian women refugees were often compelled to adapt to their new realities such as in France during the 1760s and 1770s. Women’s access to the job market was often restricted, and their wages remained significantly lower than those of men. Despite these obstacles, many refugee women attempted to support themselves through various means, such as lacemaking or laundry work, albeit earning meager incomes. After spending two years in English ports, from 1758 to 1773 the French authorities agreed to provide financial assistance to Acadian refugees who had relocated there, offering asylum as well as a daily allowance for accommodation, food, and an additional support for children. However, this assistance proved inadequate to meet the diverse needs of individuals and families, especially after 1777 when the subsidy was reduced. Some Acadian women, like Rose Bonnevie, sought additional support directly from Pierre Etienne Bourgeois de Boynes, minister and secretary of the Navy from 1771 to 1774. Bonnevie highlighted the challenges faced by many female refugees in coping with extreme poverty. In a long complaint written on March 30, 1773, she told her story: “The English having come to ravage this Canton, Jacques Bonnevie, their father, lost everything he owned, had to take refuge with his entire family in Restigouge, at the entrance to the Canada River, in the Bay of Chaleurs . . . While they were refugees on the French island of Miquelon, he was given land, he founded a fishing establishment and was then sent to Cherbourg in February 1768, devoid of any furniture and almost without clothes.”

Her complaint indicates that these women had become knowledgeable about the legal culture of ancien régime France. A form of grassroots citizenship culture probably circulated among diasporic networks. Many women refugees relied on state subsidies for their survival. This situation led to requests for more subsidies and for better women’s inheritance rights, supported by the government. For many young daughters, being left without male support meant facing financial hardship. When Acadian refugee Françoise Pitre passed away, the secretary of the Navy requested in 1784 to transfer her pension to her daughter, Ozilde Lavergne, stating that she too was “Acadian.” In this context, humanitarian aid served to narrow the definition of an Acadian to the ambiguous category of “colonist” to whom the metropole owed reparations and who had the potential to inherit this identity. However, these claims to inheritance were ultimately nullified by the French Revolution and the Decree of February 21, 1791, article 3, which stipulated that “the aid should be personal and extinguished after the recipient’s death.” In the immediate post-revolutionary years, an increasing number of French settlers (including many planters and enslavers) returned to France, primarily from Saint-Domingue but also from the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Among them was Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, who later became the first Empress of the French as Napoleon’s wife and is better known as Joséphine de Beauharnais.

After the issuance of the Decree of 8 Frimaire an II (November 28, 1793), which extended aid to all these refugees, the category of “colonist” (or colon in French) became clearer and more homogeneous for the administration. Maintaining colonist status required staying on French soil, so one might wonder if the end of inheriting refugee status suggests it was only a temporary condition. Moreover, one could interpret humanitarian aid to the “colonists”—no longer perceived as “refugees”—as a means of safeguarding and preserving the colonies themselves.

In their petitions, Acadian women used specific terminology and expressions to signify national affiliations. In the petition submitted by Marie Luce Coissy and her daughter, Marie Magdelaine Cire, to the Secretary of the Navy in Rochefort, France, in October 1787, she uses the term “patrie,” traditionally used to signify a national community in prerevolutionary France, to refer to Acadia. Women’s use of the language of nation has not been thoroughly examined by historians when compared to the ways in which Acadian men articulated national belongings and political loyalty in their petitions. 

Contrary to the situation in Massachusetts, where humanitarian aid facilitated the transformation of Acadian refugees into migrants, in Canada and France, the Acadians were regarded as settlers (habitants) and at times, colonists (colons). In 1764, French foreign minister Etienne-François de Choiseul initiated resettlement projects to populate colonial territories. He therefore focused on Acadian families where women would play a reproductive role. Choiseul supported land development in Saint-Domingue, specifically at Mirebalais and Môle Saint-Nicolas, led by naval officer Count Charles Henri d’Estaing. However, this controversial project contributed to d’Estaing’s downfall. A year later, Acadian families migrated to Louisiana under harsh conditions, arriving in two groups totaling 552 individuals. The French provided them with military support and supplies, including ammunition, from the King’s warehouses in New Orleans for their resettlement in Appeloussas on April 30, 1765.

Similarly, the settlement of Acadians on Belle-Ile-en-Mer, an island off the coast of Brittany, in 1765, amid a population of less than 5,000 inhabitants, marked a significant demographic shift. Economic hardships persisted for many Acadian women, leading to complaints and petitions on “the misery” of the island. Many Acadian women on the island encountered great economic difficulties, which they often reported to members of the Catholic clergy. Madeleine LeBlanc complained to the rector of Belle-Ile-en-Mer about “the overall misery of the days.” The priest or missionary often acted as a mediator with French administrators and the refugees just as the Acadian patriarchs acted as intermediaries between Acadian families and the British administration.

A parish priest provided the sisters Marie, Geneviève, and Henriette Achée, “daughters of the Achée widow” with a pass that attested to their “good and sound morals.” Dating from May 26, 1773, it was used to reach the town of Morlaix from Belle-Ile-en-Mer. It indicates that the sisters were “no longer able to survive here due to the poverty of the land.” The pass contained a note from the rector of the Bangor church on the island where they were established stipulating that they were “aggregated to the Acadians established on Belle-Ile-en-Mer, are of good life and morals” and that “they celebrated their Easter lent in the said parish.” These passes are central documents to understand the mobility patterns of Acadian widows and their children. Their movement was not contingent upon following a familial patriarch. Rather, they were compelled to seek authorization from a male figure of authority outside their community to facilitate their individual relocations. 

Despite experiences of dispossession resulting in extreme poverty, marginalization, and lack of support from transnational diasporic networks, the humanitarian imperial resettlement plans reconfigured Acadian communities along gender lines. Some women refugees, such as widows or orphaned sisters, paradoxically gained empowerment through the acquisition of new social skills necessitated by the need to address petitions to administrations, seek employment to support themselves, or even explore new marital opportunities. When requesting assistance, these women also presented a memory of their Acadian past and community that has never been studied. In a sense, within an imperial context, humanitarian assistance inadvertently provided some Acadian women refugees with a platform unlike they had ever had before. 

The examination of humanitarian politics vis-à-vis French settlers remains absent in the historiography discussing late modern Atlantic empires. The existing scholarship leaves unresolved questions about whether aid increased the former settlers’ dependence on imperial administrations (ultimately leading them to become useful “colonial communities”) or, conversely, if the various social crises they caused led to increased resistance and autonomy against imperial directives. Hence, the diverse portrayal of Acadian women by external observers challenges simple labels and probably suggests deeper cultural and historical uncertainties about the “Frenchness” or “Britishness” of their Atlantic world.  

 

Further Reading

Archives Nationales (AN), « Secours aux réfugiés et colons spoliés », F/12/2740-2883.

Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM), « Personnel Colonial Ancien », Collection E 1, 40, 308 ; « Secrétariat d’État à la Marine, Correspondance à l’Arrivée », Collections C13 A 45, f.115, 118, 130, C14, E 318 Bis, Aix-en-Provence, France.

Massachusetts Archives Collection, “French Neutrals”, vols. 23 and 24, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, MA.

Archives départementales d’Ile et Vilaine (ADIV) « Collection C 2453 », Archives et Patrimoine Ile et Vilaine, Rennes, France.

1755: L’Histoire et les histoires, http://cfml.ci.umoncton.ca/1755-html/.

 

Printed Sources

Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774, Comprising a Detailed Narrative of the Origin and Early Stages of the American Revolution, vol. 3 (London: John Murray, 1828).

The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, The Ebenezer Parkman Project, https://diary.ebenezerparkman.org. Henri Têtu, Charles-Octave Gagnon, Mandements, lettres pastorales et circulaires des évêques de Québec, vol. 2 (Québec: Imprimerie Générale A. Coté, 1880).  

Secondary sources

Uriel Abulof, The Mortality and Morality of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Saliha Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire. Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541-1954 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Carl Brasseaux, Scattered to the Wind: Dispersal and Wanderings of the Acadians, 1755-1809 (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991).

Christophe Cérino, « Les Acadiens à Belle-Ile-en-Mer : une expérience originale d’intégration en milieu insulaire à la fin du XVIII^e siècle », Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 110, no. 1 (2003): 115-24.

Nathalie Dessens, “The Saint-Domingue Refugees and the Preservation of Gallic Culture in Early American New Orleans,” French Colonial History 8, no. 1 (2007): 53-69.

Hilary Doda, “Scissors, Embellishment, and Womanhood: The Material Culture of Acadian Sewing to 1755,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 50, no. 1 (2021): 62-95.

John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme. The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 390.

Alan Forrest, The Death of the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Netta Green, “Longing for the Beheaded Father: Inheritance and Departmental Statistics under the Directory and the Consulate, 1795-1804,” French Historical Studies, 47, no. 1 (2024): 71-102.

Naomi Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian. A North American Border People, 1604-1755 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004).

Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora. An Eighteenth-Century History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Allan Potofsky, “The ‘Non-Aligned Status’ of French Emigrés and Refugees in Philadelphia, 1793-1798,” Transatlantica 2 (2006), http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/1147.

Frédéric Régent, “Revolution in France, Revolutions in the Caribbean,” in The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, ed. Alan Forest and Matthias Middell (New York: Routledge, 2016): 61-76.

Peter Stamatov, The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires and Advocacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Adeline Vasquez-Parra, “Local Affairs or Imperial Scandals? The Rise of an Atlantic Legal Culture of Citizenship among Colonial Communities in the French Caribbean (1697-1789),” Journal of Early American History 12, nos. 2-3 (2022): 211-47.

Adeline Vasquez-Parra, Aider les Acadiens ? Bienfaisance et déportation, 1755-1776 (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2018).

 

Many thanks to the George Godfrey Rodrigue Jr. Family Trust for granting permission to use the unique artwork by Louisiana artist George Rodrigue (1944-2013); to François LeBlanc at the Centre d’Etudes Acadiennes Ansselme Chiasson, Université de Moncton, Canada for providing the oath of allegiance; and to Netta Green, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for bringing the « Secours aux réfugiés et colons spoliés » to my attention.

 

This article originally appeared in June 2024.

 

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Adeline Vasquez-Parra is an associate professor in American history and civilization at the University Lumière of Lyon in France and researcher at the Laboratoire Triangle UMR 5206. She has contributed articles on the Acadian deportation to scholarly journals such as Revue Historique, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Acadiensis, and the Journal of Early American History. She is currently working on a comprehensive history of the province of Québec from its origins to the present day.

Our crises exceeded these, of course, as we and others around the world grappled with mortality, grief, economic loss, food insecurity, homelessness, social dislocation, anxiety, and depression. The first person to die of COVID in Utah was my next-door neighbor, a close friend of our family’s. But as the course staggered on, these crises never seemed to outstrip the capacity of Melville’s story to offer some illustration and commentary, if not relief. One routine assignment was to formulate a conceptual question about the primary text, then to analyze the way two literary critics have approached dimensions of the question, and finally to propose an analytical response to the question which converses with these critical views. This assignment led many students toward the field of disability studies. The backdrop of the pandemic brought to the fore the investment in ideas of complex embodiment within “Bartleby.” As I modeled the assignment for my socially isolated, increasingly anxious, and depressed students, what emerged from the story and two works of literary criticism about it was a model not just for writing but also for living in a liable, contingent world.

Four years on, a disability-informed reading of “Bartleby” seems to address even more urgently the crises our students face. The COVID-19 pandemic has not abated as much as it has settled into cases of chronic illness (including mental illness), which are met mostly with the advocacy and compassion fatigue Melville’s story dramatized in the nineteenth century. Like Bartleby, many of our students in need of accommodations find themselves against the limits of what administrators, teachers, and peers deem “reasonable.” Melville’s story does not offer solutions, but it does suggest to those who experience disabilities exacerbated or caused by the psychic and physical ravages of the pandemic that they are not problems to be managed but rather bearers of hard-won knowledge.

When Herman Melville’s narrator erupts in frustration with his silent, stationary employee, he gives vent to questions at the heart of the story: “What shall I do? . . . What ought I to do? What does conscience say I should do with this man, or rather ghost?” (18). These questions are entangled with another question, whose answer seems to hold the key to the narrator’s problem: what is wrong with Bartleby? If he can identify Bartleby’s defect, the narrator believes he can muster an appropriate response. The story ends with the narrator still searching for the elusive facts that could solve the puzzle of his scrivener’s behavior or calm his own conscience, but his failure in this regard hasn’t dissuaded many readers from pursuing the same questions.

Over the last generation, the field of disability studies has reoriented interpretations of “Bartleby” by disregarding these questions in favor of new ones: What does Bartleby know? And what can readers learn from him? After all, Bartleby’s position at the margins of society, and finally at the margin between existence and whatever lies beyond, gives him access to forms of embodied and existential knowledge many people lack. Since the story goes to such lengths to detail Bartleby’s deviance from the norms of the law office in which he works under the narrator’s employ, such questions imply the distinct possibility that the very fact of human diversity, in all its irreducible variety, can teach us as much about the ultimate mysteries of life and death as we can ever hope to know.

Two critical treatments of Bartleby from the field of disability studies foreground the meanings Bartleby’s presence illuminates, rather than obscures. Kari Nixon’s reading of the short story proceeds from a series of novel (if mostly tacit) assumptions: there’s nothing wrong with Bartleby; the narrator’s obsession, then, with “medical categorization and definition of human individuality rather than accepting and upholding the value of difference” is inexplicable, hinging on unethical; the problems in the story emanate from misguided responses to Bartleby rather than with Bartleby’s behavior; and these responses are a missed chance to appreciate what Bartleby has to offer. Nixon pauses on a few minor interactions in the story that have mostly escaped critical attention and which indicate Bartleby’s inclination to cooperate and comply—if he’s approached on the right terms. As she points out, Bartleby has a range of responses beyond the iconic, confounding phrase “I prefer not to.” But these responses are not always spoken (sometimes, for example, he can be persuaded to “noiselessly slide into view” when called) and so fail to register as meaningful alternatives to the deadlock of human will that ensnares the plot (Melville 7, 16). The responsibility for the failures in “Bartleby,” Nixon concludes, extends to contemporary readers who follow the narrator in making Bartleby into a puzzle to solve. “Instead of hearkening to Melville’s ultimate claims about the value of purely accepting and embracing diversity and inscrutability,” she argues, “we struggle instead to make the inscrutable the comprehensible, and the strange a mere amalgamation of the familiar.”

But Nixon’s conclusions create a dilemma for modern critics drawn to her conviction that Bartleby should be seen—as all humans—as a source of knowledge rather than frustration. Even as she validates Bartleby’s idiosyncratic way of functioning in the world, Nixon asks that we draw a curtain over the very dimension of Bartleby’s identity, his difference, that could show us what only he knows about a meaningful way of being in, and finally leaving, the world. Certainly, as Nixon insists, Bartleby has knowledge worth accessing. But in charging us to respect his “inscrutability,” she leaves readers yearning to discover: what is it he knows?  

While Nixon strenuously avoids naming or even fully acknowledging Bartleby’s neurodiversity (as a matter of principle, it seems, she never uses the term “disabled” to refer to the scrivener), Stuart Murray is more willing to study Bartleby’s difference and pursue the critical implications of a rudimentary diagnosis. In a sense, Murray commits the sin for which Nixon faults the lawyer and readers, but he demonstrates that something generative, and even generous, can result from taking up disability itself as a meaningful analytic category. Although he acknowledges that clinical medicine would not recognize the condition of autism until the 1940s and that a fictional character’s disability can never be a realistic portrait, he still notices, “the narrator’s descriptions of Bartleby time and again echo the descriptions of impairments—of communication, imagination, and socialization—that would come to be central to twentieth-century outlines of autism.”

Bartleby’s difference thus named and categorized, Murray is able to explore a more significant concern: “the critical consequences that come with the admission of the fact of a narrative autistic presence, namely the manner in which Bartleby’s subject position then determines the various analytical interpretations that can be mobilized in discussions of the story as a whole.” To ignore—or even scrupulously gloss over—Bartleby’s disability is to deny that it is the presence (or at least the representation) of autism in the story that generates its chief tensions. Crucially, Murray argues, “the story leaves the space of autistic presence undisclosed and open, and invites interpretations that might make sense of it.” Legal, economic, political, religious, humanitarian, and philosophical readings all fall short, for Murray, to the extent that they fail to recognize that it is first and foremost the difference of disability that creates the interpretive space, or the ambiguities, they seek to fill. Bartleby’s autism is an observation or a conjecture, not an argument about the story. But if no meaningful interpretation ends with that fact, Murray argues, any meaningful interpretation begins there.

As they define the critical field in which they intervene, both Murray and Nixon cite a pioneer of disability studies, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who helped frame the terms of a field that insists we see people like Bartleby “not as objects of study but as knowledge producers.” Garland-Thomson was featured prominently in a section of a 2005 PMLA issue, edited by Michael Davidson, Tobin Siebers, and Rosemary Feal, that articulated the grounding assumptions and radical potential of the emerging field. It begins with a reappropriation of the term “disability,” which can no longer mean “defect.” Simply put, Garland-Thomson proposes, “Disability is a story we tell about bodies. It is a received yet pliable story that changes over time and across place.” Once we understand the narrative origins of the category, we recognize that disability, like other matrices of identity, is constructed in specific environments and in response to specific needs and desires. As a guiding principle, “disability studies points out that ability and disability are not so much a matter of the capacities and limitations of bodies but more about what we expect from a body at a particular moment and place.”

When we understand these features of disability, we begin to grasp the proposition at the heart of the field: “Every life devolves into disability, making it perhaps the essential characteristic of being human.” Death is the breaking of the body’s vital organs, whether slowly or suddenly. Just as there is no life without death, there is no death without disability. Disability studies reframes our understanding of “inscrutable” characters like Bartleby, but more tellingly, it also stands to reveal to us the inscrutable reaches of our own pasts, possible presents, and certain futures.

With these convictions of disability theorists in view, we can return much more fruitfully to the question of what knowledge Bartleby has on offer. Both Nixon and Murray lead us to this question without answering it, leaving us the important work of grappling with possible responses. If we understand that Bartleby occupies the position of a subject experiencing disability and facing death, and that we will each come to occupy the same position (if we don’t already), he emerges as a kind of guide. The pandemic startled many people who were serene in illusions of their health and ability into a heightened awareness of their physical vulnerability. The margin of human experience in which Bartleby exists is also a precipice, which commands a view we all will see. What will we behold, and how can we possibly prepare?

Bartleby’s position gives him incomparable authority on the question. He is a young man in the last few months of his life. The urgency of his mortality sneaks up on the reader, as it sneaks up on the narrator. Does it sneak up on Bartleby? Probably not. One has a strong sense of Bartleby as someone who understands and deeply feels the facts of his own disability and untimely death. His characteristic responses to others can be seen as his strategies for managing this knowledge. “When disability enters our lives, often our only available responses are silence, denial, shame, or determined and desperate vows to ‘fight it,’” Garland-Thomson observes. If we imagine Bartleby’s silence as bound up in denial or possibly shame around a disability he recognizes but lacks the medical lexicon to fully comprehend, it takes on a semantic complexity. We begin to realize the stunning depth of knowledge this silence covers when Bartleby has his last conversation with the narrator. He is incarcerated, emaciated, hours from death. He stands at the edge of an unfathomable beyond. His short life is all but behind him, and eternity stretches ahead. To the narrator, he says simply, “I know where I am” (30).

This is Bartleby’s singular gift, one borne of his preference to be stationary (quarantined, we might even say), to become one with a place to such an extent that he cannot be extricated from it. When he stands at the threshold between disability and death with this knowledge, we finally understand that the places with which he’s so familiar are the very places most of us, including the narrator, spend our lives trying to avoid. Who wants to dwell on, much less in, chronic suffering, physical deterioration, mental distress, the agony of our final hours? Any sane person runs from the thought. But Bartleby’s expertise derives from the fact that he is not, from an ableist perspective, sane. He has occupied the position of disability as he now occupies the position of dying, and he knows where he is. With something more than sanity, Bartleby has learned how to domesticate, and then inhabit, the inhospitable. This is knowledge worth recruiting, especially in an era of long COVID and rising rates of other chronic illnesses. To come to know foreboding places, and to learn how to live in them, is what it means to be human.  

 

Further Reading

Daniel Diez Couch and Michael Anthony Nicholson, “Silent Eloquence: Literary Extracts, the Aesthetics of Disability, and Melville’s ‘Fragments,’” Leviathan 23, no. 1 (March 2021): 7-23.

Michael Davidson and Tobin Siebers, “Introduction: Conference on Disability Studies and the University,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 498-501.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Disability and Representation,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 522-27.

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,” in Melville’s Short Novels, ed. Dan McCall, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2002), 3-34.

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

Stuart Murray, Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).

Kari Nixon, “If You Don’t Know Me by Now: The Failure of Care in ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener,’” Disability Studies Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2014): np.

Samuel Otter, “Introduction: Melville and Disability,” Leviathan 8, no. 1 (March 2006): 7–16

Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

 

This article originally appeared in June 2024.

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Mary Eyring is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Brigham Young University, where she teaches courses on early American literature, early American studies, and disability theory. Her book Saltwater: Globalizing Early New England Grief will be published by the Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press in 2025.