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.

 

---

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.

 

---

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.

---

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.

The name “puritan” became almost exclusively associated with New England, but individuals who had pushed for a more extensive church reformation and for godly discipline scattered throughout the English Americas and the wider Atlantic. Moreover, not all New Englanders had ever identified with a Calvinist-inspired deeper reformation of the English national church.

Reformers who once hoped to work within the established church used the freedom that they found in migration to create a new church order. Across the Atlantic, distance and a lack of oversight liberated them from the constraints that the Church of England imposed. They fashioned congregationalism, a Protestant variant that embraced Calvinist theology and emphasized discipline and congregational independence. They agreed on this church order, which they described generally as “the churches of Christ” and with ecclesiastical specificity as “congregational.” 

In the meantime, in England itself, the godly shunted aside the Church of England and tried to use the power of Parliament to organize the creation of a better (to their lights) established church. That effort collapsed, even as the religious landscape fractured into numerous religious expressions. Presbyterians with ties to (or a deep admiration of) the Scottish kirke failed to gain control of England’s religious settlement. Independents—ecclesiastically more akin to the newly minted New England congregationalist orthodoxy—never had a chance to shape the national church settlement in England. Through the 1650s they gained a reputation for radicalism, particularly in London, that encouraged the church leaders in Massachusetts to distance themselves from them, effectively eschewing the term “Independent” for their own churches as a result. Meanwhile, others (including Baptists and, using the term “church” loosely, Quakers) furthered the fragmentation of England’s religious landscape.

By 1650, the puritan movement was effectively over, whether we understand it narrowly as a reformed movement willing to remain within and fight to improve an inadequate national church or more capaciously as a unified community of godly reformers working together to reorganize religion and society.

In England, subsequently, the term took on a political meaning. Nineteenth-century scholars concerned with the constitutional issues they saw as central to mid-seventeenth-century revolutionary upheaval dubbed it “the Puritan Revolution.” In this, they followed a revised meaning attached to the term that, by the early eighteenth century, had claimed “puritan” as encompassing only the moderate mid-century Parliamentarians dominated by the Presbyterians and opposed to regicide. Limiting the movement to this slice of it eliminated its radicalism, a narrowing that disavowed the radical religious roots of revolution by focusing on the Parliamentarians who opposed its excesses. If these moderates were the puritans, any “revolution” named for them could not have been especially revolutionary. 

These scholars rehabilitated the puritans into benign moderates who could serve as worthy antecedents to the Whigs, as Mark Goldie has shown in his assessment of late seventeenth-century “puritan whigs.” In this way, the term lost its original meaning (deriding those who sought other ecclesiastical forms and greater social controls) and came to denote the most moderate Dissenters, those who by 1700 were inspired by whiggish principles in favor of a limited monarchy and religious tolerance. The revolution associated with these moderates they dubbed “Glorious” for its lack of revolutionary violence, distancing it from the excesses of regicide and calls for drastic social transformation which they abhorred. 

The term has had its most lasting power in New England and has done the greatest damage to our historical understanding there. Like their counterparts in England, those godly men and women who migrated across the Atlantic were no more likely to value the appellation as their own. They did not describe themselves as puritan (nor, for that matter, did they use the phrase Perry Miller decades ago attached to them, “non-separating congregationalist”).

Free to do as they pleased, religiously speaking, the migrants moved beyond reforming the Church of England from within to establish their own version of a well-organized reformed church. If they hoped briefly that their example would inspire church-making efforts in England, that consideration was a distant second to their primary concern of creating the New England way centered around “churches of Christ” organized in each town in the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven. 

In New England, puritan came to mean (in its most narrow, religious sense), the new ecclesiastical and doctrinal forms hammered out in those three colonies. In this vein, much scholarship discussed the relationship between the church established in Plymouth Plantation (based on practices transferred from the exiled separatist community in the Netherlands) and those “puritan” churches organized in other parts of New England. As events unfolded, little distinguished the puritan from the separatist imports, although those older and increasingly irrelevant terms continued in use among scholars interested in identifying and understanding their interplay.

“Puritan” has been used capaciously, moving beyond acknowledging the relationship between the earlier English reform movement and the later New England church establishment. Every New England minister for a century has been declared a puritan, which has come to mean simply a clergyman serving in New England. 

The term is so entrenched that many people—whether scholars or a member of the wider American public—identify the local church establishment as “puritan,” as if that were the equivalent of a denomination or national church order such as Presbyterian or Anglican. Historians who study other aspects of early America or later periods of U.S. history have told me that they thought that New England churches adhered to a denomination dubbed “puritan.” Textbook maps have been known to distinguish puritan New England from Quaker Pennsylvania, as if there were some equivalences between the organized Society of Friends and a similarly organized institution known as “puritan.” Such an organization did not exist, and indeed has never existed.

Beyond the ill-informed sense that New England boasted an ecclesiastical form known as “the puritan church,” the term has come to stand in for the entire region in all its (usually unacknowledged) complexity. References to “Puritan New England” are common, even (or perhaps especially) in relation to subjects that have nothing to do with the difference among religious faiths and practices.

Using the word implies some religious connection, which fits with the idea that the region was uniquely devout, even when religion is far from the topic at hand. “Puritan” stands for the culture of New England, a culture that is assumed to be religious at its root. Scholarship too easily treats much of what occurred there, ranging from the execution of witches to fights over political economy or foreign policy, as if the puritanism of the region guided events. Popular opinion often derides the puritans as excessive religious hypocrites—a usage that inspires humorous (albeit historically inaccurate) Valentine’s Day cards denouncing desire and dancing as supposedly prohibited to puritans. Such joking references are, ironically, closest to the original meaning of the taunts aimed at overeager reformers.

This usage is both vague and exceedingly widespread. On some level, the term intends to mark the entire area (from the fishing villages of Maine through the merchant houses of Newport, Rhode Island, and on to the farms of Connecticut) as adhering, and adhering deeply, to a distinct religious culture. Puritan New England in this view represents a contrast to other British North American colonial regions, none of which are known for their overwhelming religiosity. In particular, the term sharply contrasts with the Chesapeake (and the mainland South more generally), where the settlers allegedly cared only for profit and attention to religion was purportedly weak to nonexistent.

The terminology of “Puritan New England” has become so common as a synonym for the region that some scholars and many laypeople reference all the people dwelling there as puritan—regardless of their degree of religiosity, of their specific religious orientation, or of the matter at hand. We have puritan fisherfolk, farmers, artisans, merchants. Indeed, everyone can be dubbed a puritan when it is a synonym for “English person living in New England.” That people who held the same commitment to reformed religion also resided in the Chesapeake cannot be accommodated in this false but pervasive binary.  

The sloppy way in which we use the term feeds the idea—popular in certain U.S. political circles—that one group who migrated to North America was intensely religious, created a region shaped solely by their faith, agreed on the necessity of making religion central to their lives, and established a model society to which the United States must return. This erroneous perception has been exploited by those interested in establishing the idea of the U.S. as a Christian nation from the first, an identity to which they declare that we must revert, by force if necessary.

This representation offers the antithesis to those taunts in the popular imagination, approving of the purported traits of the puritans without understanding their history or their faith any better than the makers of greeting cards do. When we are negligent about the realities of the past, we play into the hands of the Christian America mythmakers, who read the jeremiads Perry Miller discussed so brilliantly as straight reporting and who want to return to a day when all residents were required to sit and to listen to such a harangue. 

If pressed, most of us know that puritanism was not a religion, that not everyone in New England shared the same views, and that some people who were attuned with the congregational orthodoxy of (some of) the northern English colonies lived in other locations. Yet the shorthand use of a term that was somewhat outdated in 1630 became entirely inapplicable shortly thereafter. It not only fails to capture the religious culture of a region, but it is useless in any legitimate attempt to explain its entire history.

I propose we drop the term puritan and say what we mean—with due regard for whether we intend New England residents generally or want to say something specific about the congregationalist church order adopted widely, but not uniformly, in the region. I promise we won’t miss it! As proof of that point, I just published a long book review on a fabulous book on seventeenth-century debates over the imperial constitution (including its religious and political aspects) for the oh-so-rigorously edited William and Mary Quarterly. I never used the term and the editors never commented. Perhaps they noticed the omission, but they made no case for its inclusion, because of course it was absolutely unnecessary.

If I cannot persuade everyone to drop the term altogether—unless of course they are writing about late-sixteenth-century ecclesiastical and social reformers in the Church of England—could I at least get everyone to agree to use lower case: puritan?

 

Further Reading

Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs: The Entring Book, 1677-1691 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2016).

Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 105.

Adrian Chastain Weimer, A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

 

This article originally appeared in May 2024.

 

---

Carla Gardina Pestana teaches at UCLA. She writes about religion and empire in England’s Atlantic colonies, especially in the seventeenth century. Her most recent book is The World of Plymouth Plantation (2020). She recently persuaded the New England Quarterly editorial team of the wisdom of the lower case “p.”

The picture, in the collection at the Yale Center for British Art, is well known to scholars of early American history. Historian Mary Beth Norton’s graduate work was on the experiences of the American loyalists in the War of Independence––colonials who remained loyal to the British government and were exiled from America by the revolutionaries. In a short paper in 1973, she described Wilmot’s life and focused on the “second” painting behind the figure of Wilmot, which is an allegory of Britain’s beneficence to the loyalists. Since then, books by Simon Schama and Maya Jasanoff, respectively on experiences of Black exiles and of loyalists across the British Empire, also comment on the allegorical “second” painting within the Portrait and the diversity of people shown in it.

With a prior interest in the Wilmot family from my local history work, I was researching from a different perspective: how did the picture come about? The Portrait was painted in London, in the troubled times of Britain’s war with Napoleonic France and continued conflict with the United States about the boundaries with Canada. Wilmot, a member of Parliament and lawyer in Georgian Britain, had led a commission adjudicating compensation for the American loyalists who lost their property or position through the revolution. West came to Britain in 1763 from the American colonies, became the most-favored painter of King George III, and rose to be president of the Royal Academy. During and after the American Revolution, he assisted returning loyalists yet also maintained patriot friends. He saw himself as the “father” of schools of painting in both Britain and America, received students from America, and maintained his links with Philadelphia.

The Portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1812, its full title describing Wilmot’s public service for the loyalists. The Prince Regent and his sons, the Dukes of York and Cumberland, came for a royal viewing, and the artist Joseph Farrington, whose contemporary diary is much used by art historians, wrote that, “The portraits principally occupied his attention, & he continually referred to the catalogue for the names of the portraits, & remarked upon those that were like.”  There is no record that the Prince asked about Wilmot, but a newspaper review described West’s “portrait which claims the merit of being an historical painting, from the accompaniments which embellish the subject of the piece.” This description of accompaniments is evidence of the “second” allegorical painting that we see in the Portrait.

In the year of his death, Wilmot published a book about his work with the commission and included, as a frontispiece, a line drawing titled “Reception of the American Loyalists by Great Britain.” Commentaries originally thought it was drawn from a separate picture by West, but since the Portrait came to public view, it has been considered copied from the “second” painting within the Portrait. 

This was the state of play when, late one evening, idly scanning nineteenth-century English newspapers for “Wilmot” on the internet, I was shocked to find that British newspapers in early August 1863 described the Portrait being “entirely destroyed” by fire on a railway train. The Times report may be trusted for veracity, since Sir John Eardley-Wilmot was a judge and would have taken exception to misreporting. Three “valuable pictures,” it said, in the “safest and most commodious” van were “entirely destroyed” in the fire, including the “well-known portrait of Sir Eardley Wilmot’s grandfather, the commissioner selected by Mr Pitt to settle the claims of the American loyalists.”

In my research on the Portrait, I had looked at the web pages of the Yale Center for British Art, which provide excellent metadata documentation of their collection. The Portrait of Wilmot has a bibliography of thirty references, many with further net links. They included the catalog and newspaper reports from the 1970 sale and an analytic article prepared for a special display of the painting in 1983. But there was no mention of the fire. I contacted the Center’s curators and shared my finding of the newspaper reports. The picture’s provenance from the London sale, in the Center’s own records, and the painting’s actual presence in the gallery are at odds with the newspaper archive, which could not be explained.

I worked along several lines of inquiry to explore the newspaper report. First was to relate the frontispiece print in Wilmot’s book with the oil-painted Portrait as a whole. Benjamin West had worked across his career with engravers to produce prints of his paintings—it was important for his income since many of the paintings themselves did not sell. By 1811, West had engaged a young artist, Henry Moses, to engrave prints for a collection of his recent paintings. The technique of outline-engraving that Moses used was faster than fully modelled engravings and it suited the sharply defined figures in West’s work. Moses’ name as well as West’s is in the print collection and also on the frontispiece of Wilmot’s book.

My next approach was to trace the Portrait across time. Little is known of the Portrait since it was displayed at the Royal Academy and before it emerged in 1970. It was not recorded by West’s biographer of 1820, nor in the early-modern record of West’s work by Grose Evans in 1959. It is included in the major catalogue raisonné of West’s work in 1988, but that was well after the auction sale. I’ve found just one direct mention before 1970. Following his work with the American loyalists, Wilmot became active raising money for French émigrés fleeing to Britain during the French revolution. Margery Weiner, a retired civil servant, wrote a history of the French émigrés. In 1966 she gave a talk, serendipitously in the house where John Wilmot had once lived and which has become the local museum. In the talk as later published, she described visiting Wilmot’s descendent, Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, 4th baronet, who was “kind enough to show me the picture in his possession . . . with all the benefits of size and colour.” She did not mention a “second” picture within the painting. This is the only record of viewing Wilmot’s portrait before 1970.

The gallery metadata for the Portrait describes a label on the back, “Property of Late Sir John Eardley-Wilmot,” with the address of Mary Don, in Chenies Row, Chelsea. Visiting the local records office for Chelsea, I found Mary Don at this address as Sir John’s married daughter. I looked up Sir Eardley-Wilmot’s will, which instructed that “ALL the remainder of my property real and personal” should go to Mary, while adding that his nephew Commander John Eardley-Wilmot RN might buy from Mary, if they jointly wished and at an agreed valuation, four pictures: three other named ancestors and “my large picture of the Signing of the Agreement with the American Loyalists.” This last was presumably his name for the Portrait, loosely embracing Wilmot’s work, and would have been the Portrait that went to auction. How these four paintings relate to the three “valuable” family pictures that were apparently destroyed in the 1863 fire is unknown.

In my research about Wilmot, I found in the catalog of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, a print titled “John Wilmot Esq., 1788.” It is among many thousands of engraved prints, predominantly botanical and zoological, that a benefactor, Dr. Richard Hope, gave to the museum in the 1850s. Wilmot sits in the same pose as the Portrait but, instead of the “second” picture, a background curtain winds around a large fluted column, with trees further distant, while at the front there is no book on the table beside the pen and papers.

Oddly, this print is titled with the date “1788,” the year of Wilmot’s commission report, twenty years before he sat for the Portrait. Perhaps it was created later—but to what purpose? A possibility was for “extra-illustration.” In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was a vogue for adding print portrait sheets into existing books. Some portrait prints were created (or reproduced) to supply this market. Dr. Hope similarly gathered his large collection for its completeness as well as for the individual character of the prints. 

The Hope collection outline engraving imitates the work of Henry Moses, but it has no names at the base of the print, either of the artist (usually on the left) or of the engraver (usually on the right). Perhaps it’s an unacknowledged copy, but of what? If Wilmot’s Portrait was kept in the family, the image would not have been known. Did Moses make an engraving of Wilmot alone to complement the engraving of the loyalists that became the frontispiece? I have not found any record of this print in online catalogs of the period, although searching through archive boxes in London’s National Portrait Gallery does reveal a photograph of another copy in an unnamed private collection.

A last possibility for the Portrait was that it was recreated after the fire. Two other portraits of Wilmot come down to us, both earlier than Benjamin West’s and both in profile. He is shown with other members in a composite painting of the House of Commons in 1793 and 1794. It was made shortly before Wilmot stood down from Parliament and he is sitting in the front row, evidently an active member.

A second portrait was drawn by George Dance in 1803 for the series of drawings Eminent Persons, which were later published as etchings by William Daniell in 1811.

In the Portrait, Wilmot wears the black coat and white kerchief of a professional and sits at a desk, hands outstretched to his papers. Although his pose appears rather stiff, in many respects it is like the portrait West painted of himself when he was elected President of the Royal Academy, in 1793. West’s black coat is single-breasted while Wilmot’s is double-breasted. These are formal clothes but contrast with the sitters in most of West’s other portraits (mainly before the 1780s), who are more colorful.

The print of Wilmot in profile by Heckel or Dance, the print of Wilmot at the Ashmolean, West’s oil self-portrait in characterful pose, and the whole scene of the Reception frontispiece print would together have provided sufficient material to re-create the Portrait.

So, did the fire really happen? The Railway Passengers Assurance Company were the main insurers for railway accidents at that time. I searched the board minutes for 1863 through 1864, held at the London Metropolitan Archives, but their insurance only covered bodily harm of people, not for goods. I went to the National Archives in Kew, London, (where the compendious volumes of Wilmot’s Commission are also held) to look for the board minutes of the Great Western Railway Company. For August 5, 1863 I found: “Mr Grierson reported that a Van of furniture belonging to Sir Eardley Wilmot had been destroyed by fire . . . for which a claim has been sent in of £500 for the furniture and £98 for the Van. Instructions were given to . . . offer reasonable compensation for the Van & furniture. But to decline all liability for sundry pictures destroyed which were not insured.”

My opening question is unanswered. I’ve linked the painting with its engraving, searched out parallel images, found sought out evidence for inheritance, and I’ve confirmed the fire. But I haven’t found an explanation. Perhaps the attention of Commonplace readers and new approaches can lead to a resolution.

 

Further Reading

Note: “John Wilmot” was how Wilmot styled himself up to 1812, when by royal deed he joined his father’s name Eardley to his own surname, becoming John Eardley-Wilmot. His son gained a baronetcy, his grandson Sir Eardley-Wilmot 2nd Bt lost the pictures in the fire in 1863 and the heirs of Sir Eardley-Wilmot 4th Bt sold the Portrait in 1970.

I am grateful to Yale Center for British Art for guidance about the Portrait. Writing mentioned in the text includes: John Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission for Enquiring into the Losses, Services and Claims of the American Loyalists at the Close of the War between Great Britain and her Colonies, in 1783: with an Account of the Compensation Granted to them by Parliament in 1785 and 1788 (London: self-published, 1815); Mary Beth Norton, “Eardley-Wilmot, Britannia and the Loyalists: a Painting by Benjamin West,” Perspectives in American History 6 (1972): 119–31; Margery Weiner, John Eardley-Wilmot, A Man of his Time, (London: Edmonton Hundred Historical Society, 1970); Lucy Peltz, Facing the Text: Extra-illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britain, 1769–1840 (San Marino Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 2017).

 

This article originally appeared in May 2024.

 

---

Mark McCarthy is a graduate of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and an historian of Camden Town. Wilmot Place is the (unexplained) name of a local street. Lord Camden upheld democratic rights for the American colonists pre-Independence. A longer article on how Benjamin West’s painting of John Wilmot came about, in the context of British and American history, is awaiting a publisher.

There is always a bit of hesitation when ascribing ownership to objects whose original owner is long gone from this world. Luckily, however, Caroline stamped her garments with her laundry mark, C. A. Sutherland. A nineteenth-century laundry mark, as I like to tell museum visitors, serves the same function as writing a kid’s name in their underpants with a Sharpie when sending them to summer camp: it helps to ensure that the right garments come back to the right person after being washed. In this case, the laundry mark, coupled with the garments’ 1850s construction and style, affords a high degree of certainty that these garments, untouched for decades, did indeed belong to Caroline. Considered together, these garments provide rich insight into the tumultuous last year of Caroline’s life, fleshing out her experience of having become a bride, new resident of Illinois, young matron, expectant mother, and mother in rapid succession before her untimely death at age 23 in 1857.

Caroline Sutherland was born about 1834 in Columbia County, New York to what seems to have been a prosperous middle-class family. Her mother, Maria Wilbour Sutherland, had studied under Emma Willard at the Troy Female Seminary in 1822. Her father, John Sutherland, was a physician until his death in 1842. The 1850 census found 15-year-old Caroline and her widowed mother living in a household headed by her 24-year-old brother Samuel and his wife Mary. Samuel is listed as a farmer with $12,000 worth of real estate, on the high end for his near neighbors.

Nothing is known definitively about Caroline’s life in New York other than the fact that, like her mother before her, Caroline attended the Troy Female Seminary. She appears in its Catalog of Officers and Pupils for the 1851 to 1852 school year. The single known photo of Caroline, taken in the early 1850s, shows an attractive young woman whom family and local lore say was regarded as the “reigning beauty” of her town.

The survival of her small clothing collection (comprised of two chemises, three nightgowns, one apron, one pair of drawers, one apron, one pair of stockings, four caps, a petticoat, and a wedding gown) helps to fill in the gaps of Caroline’s story.

Caroline likely created some if not all of the undergarments and nightwear before her marriage. Single, middle-class girls were expected to help with housework in preparation for becoming housekeepers themselves one day. For example, Caroline almost certainly helped with the family’s sewing and mending and probably sewed her chemises and drawers herself. Although middle-class women often hired a dressmaker to make gowns, they typically still undertook the creation of household textiles, men’s shirts, children’s clothing, and their own undergarments. Even if a family hired live-in domestic servants (which the Sutherland family did not, per the 1850 census), these servants were usually given more laborious tasks like laundry and cleaning and at best helped, rather than entirely took over, the sewing. The small, even stitches and solid construction of Caroline’s personal garments reflect her mastery of the needlework skills that she would soon be called on to employ as the mistress of her own home.

Despite her sewing duties, however, the years before Caroline’s marriage were likely a relatively carefree period of her life, as it was for many middle-class women. The burden of household management would ultimately have fallen to Caroline’s mother or sister-in-law, leaving Caroline ample time for socializing. Her chemises, drawers, and petticoats were foundational garments that supported the dresses she wore while calling on friends, attending civic activities, and being courted by her admirers. The up-to-date hairstyle she sported in her photograph suggests that she followed fashion trends closely. This supposition is supported by the volume of her petticoat, with its cartridge pleated waist, which tells us her gowns had the stylish bell-shaped silhouette popular in the 1850s. These gowns were likely made by a skilled dressmaker who could create the precise fit and up-to-date styles that a well-to-do, fashionable woman like Caroline would have preferred. Caroline’s garments, photograph, and oral tradition combine to paint a picture of a beautiful young belle enjoying an active social life before she married.

No evidence survives to suggest when or how she met her future husband. Though also a native of New York, Reuben Layton was from Wayne County (outside Rochester) more than two hundred miles from Caroline’s home in the Hudson River Valley. He appears in the 1850 census as an 18-year-old clerk living in his parents’ household. His father, a farmer, owned $8,000 worth of real estate, making him the fourth most prosperous of his 20 nearest neighbors. By 1856, Reuben was living in Rockford, Illinois, and working as a clerk in the banking house of Spafford, Clark, & Ellis.

Likely a combination of New York roots and business interests brought Reuben into Caroline’s geographical vicinity in New York. At some point, the man described in a Rockford newspaper as “every inch the gentleman” won the heart of Chatham Center’s “reigning beauty.”

Caroline Sutherland married Reuben Layton on November 18, 1856, wearing a gown of figured, cream-colored silk with a lace “bertha” collar. Its construction was complicated, involving puffed and ruffled sleeves, support boning, and box and cartridge pleats at the waist to create the wide-shouldered bodice, fitted waist, and bell skirt. The rigor of construction, cost of the silk material, and importance of the occasion suggest that this garment was made for Caroline by a professional dressmaker.

Caroline’s choice of a white dress is telling. It confirms her status as a well-off middle-class woman. As textile historian Leimomi Oakes has pointed out, textiles in shades of white were difficult to achieve and hard to maintain, meaning that white wedding dresses were often signifiers of wealth rather than purity. The richness of the gown further suggests that her family likely approved of her choice of suitor, as they underwrote the cost (in both material and labor) of this expensive gown. Caroline’s dress was meant to be seen and admired.

Caroline’s white wedding dress also hints that she was forward-looking in her approach to both fashion and in contemporary ideals of marriage. Although women were married in white for centuries, Queen Victoria popularized the trend when she married Prince Albert in 1840. Moreover, Albert and Victoria were also held up as models of a companionate marriage wherein partners shared romantic love and mutual respect. Caroline did not make traditional or practical choices with her wedding dress or choice of husband. She did not marry a prosperous local farmer in her best dress and stay in New York to live near her family. She married an upwardly mobile clerk from Rockford, Illinois, in a stylish white dress. Something within her led her to imagine a new kind of life for herself, in a new state with a husband with whom she likely shared a new ideal of partnership based on mutual respect and romantic love.

Like many antebellum young people, the newly-married Laytons probably saw the west (as Illinois was then considered) as a land of opportunities for financial and social advancement beyond what their rural New York roots could offer. Indeed, within 15 years Reuben would amass $125,000 in assets. Yet the move would not come without hard work and the sacrifice of leaving behind familiar people and places. Caroline, in particular, would be tasked with managing a household in a new city far removed from her social and familial support network.

Before she married Abraham Lincoln, a young Mary Todd once contemplated the change in demeanor of a recently wed girlfriend and wondered, “why are married folks so serious?” Caroline Layton’s linen apron, stained with use, reminds us of the unglamorous side of newly married life. As a young bride, Caroline went from helping her mother and sister-in-law with domestic tasks in her childhood home to being fully responsible for the management of her own, smaller, household. Food preparation, cleaning, and managing lights and fires were labor intensive tasks in the nineteenth century, and the availability of domestic help was not guaranteed. Caroline may well have had a similar experience to her fellow New York transplants to Illinois, Eliza Farnham and Helen Edwards. Farnham, as a new bride in Tremont, scrubbed the floors of her new home because “if I had not, no one would.” Edwards cried the first time she churned butter in Springfield, Illinois, overwhelmed by the extent of her new domestic duties. Caroline’s starched apron represents the mantle of responsibility she assumed as a married woman. The garment is plain, serviceable, and without frills, symbolizing the reality of housekeeping that lay behind the romantic ideal of marriage.

Among Caroline’s first tasks in Rockford was to begin building a social and domestic support system to replace the one she had left behind in New York. She had extra reason to need this support, because she had become pregnant sometime around her wedding night. Caroline’s petticoat reflects the accommodations she made to her changing figure during her pregnancy. The waist has been expanded with a length of cotton string, increasing the circumference from 25” to 29”. One imagines her wearing these garments, perhaps in a pretty day dress with the waist let out, as she took the first steps towards building a network of supportive women around her. The wives of her husband’s business associates likely called to introduce themselves, as did her near neighbors. She might also have been able to hire household help, such as a full-time servant or a weekly washwoman. All of these relationships would have been vital to easing her physical burdens as well as her anxieties as she adjusted to the realities of being a pregnant new wife in a new state. 

Among Caroline’s cache of clothing is a linen nightgown with full, gathered sleeves and buttons extending the length of the front of the garment. Falling loosely from the shoulders, this garment would have been comfortable even in the very last stages of pregnancy. Indeed, Caroline may well have been wearing this gown (or one just like it) when she gave birth. In The Young Wife’s and Mother’s Book (1842), Pye Henry Chavesse recommends laboring mothers to “put on her clean night-gown, but to have it pinned up to her waist; to have a flannel petticoat to meet it; and then to put on a flannel dressing-gown.” As a middle-class woman, she likely would have had a physician there to attend to her labor (or “confinement,” in nineteenth-century parlance). Had Caroline been at home in New York, her mother or sister-in-law would have been by her side for emotional support. As it is, we don’t know who, if anyone, held Caroline’s hand in her new state as she labored. According to Caroline’s descendant (donor of her clothing collection), family tradition holds that her mother traveled to Illinois to be with her, but we will never know for sure.

After giving birth to her daughter, Florence, Caroline likely followed the nineteenth-century custom of observing a “lying-in” period of recovery. Like many women of her class, she may have had a hired nurse with her during this time. During the first several days postpartum she was expected to lie flat in bed, regardless of her level of energy. Within a week of giving birth to her first child in 1844, fellow young wife Julia Trumbull of Alton felt “perfectly well” and complained “it seems hard to be forced to lie in bed when one feels so.”

After a week or so had passed, new mothers were permitted sit up and eventually to leave their beds (though not their rooms). At this point in her recovery, Caroline likely exchanged her nightgown for her wrapper. Made of cross-barred muslin, this garment has a straight full front and a cartridge-pleated skirt attached to a fitted back. This wrapper would have been ideal for Caroline to wear as a mother to a newborn. The loose waist would not have constricted her midsection, and the button-front bodice would have accommodated nursing. At the same time, the garment was considered socially acceptable for a new mother to wear when receiving calls in the home when she was well enough to show off the baby to friends.

Caroline Layton may have felt, as fellow Illinois wife and mother Mary Lincoln did, that having a “loving husband and precious child” was the “happiest stage” of her life. Sadly, her happiness was not to last. The September 15, 1857, issue of the Rock River Democrat noted the death of “Florence, daughter of R. P. and C. A. Layton, aged 11 days.” The cause of death was not indicated, but such deaths were tragically commonplace in the antebellum Midwest, where infant mortality rates have been estimated at upwards of 40 forty percent. Caroline’s grief and the physical toll of childbirth may have left her weakened. On November 17, 1857, one year less one day after her wedding, she died at age 23. 

Caroline’s family undertook significant expense to bring her remains to New York for a funeral and entombment in the family vault. This decision reflected their financial means and suggested that they considered New York Caroline’s home, if no longer in life, then for her eternal rest. Her body was placed in an iron coffin with a glass face plate. Likely a hermetically sealed Fisk metallic burial case, these coffins were popular in the 1850s for transporting remains over long distances because of the excellent preservation they afforded. Indeed, when the family vault crumbled in the 1930s, trespassers described Caroline as almost unchanged by time.

The faceplate built into Caroline’s coffin also gave rise to a myth that created some confusion about her wedding gown. Once it became known that a beautiful young woman’s body was remarkably preserved in her coffin, locals flocked to the tomb to see her for themselves. These onlookers saw a white garment through the coffin’s faceplate and assumed that she was buried in her wedding dress. This rumor was doubtless fueled by the fact that Caroline was still a newlywed when she died. It is more likely, however, that they saw burial clothes or a burial shroud.

Antebellum burial clothes were garments for the dead that mimicked clothes for the living, albeit with faster and poorer construction. Burial shrouds were smock-like garments that opened at the back for ease of dressing the body. Both burial clothes and shrouds could have elaborate details, particularly from the waist up, where the deceased would be visible in a coffin. Describing the funeral of a 20-year-old woman in 1868, Helen Edwards of Springfield, Illinois, described her as a “young bride of death” and reported, “She looked lovely I am told, in her shroud of finest white merino, a rouche about her neck, and a veil of tulle fastened at the side with a pure white Paponica flowers in her hand.” To those unacquainted with the sometimes-elaborate nature of nineteenth-century burial shrouds, such a garment could easily be confused with a wedding dress.

Family tradition holds that after Caroline’s death, her clothing was packed into her trunk and returned to New York with her body. It remained with the family, passed down through multiple generations, until its donation to the Illinois State Museum in 2019. Yet one garment hints that not all of Caroline’s clothes remained untouched after her death. Her split drawers, made of linen and edged in the same drawn thread embroidery as one of the chemises, displays something I have never seen in any other historical garment.

Caroline’s laundry mark, stamped in the inner part of the waistband, was altered by a subsequent user. Her first and middle initials, CA, were crossed out, and “M H” written by hand in their place with indelible ink. Apparently, after Caroline’s death, her sister-in-law Mary Hoag Sutherland appropriated her drawers and replaced Caroline’s initials with her own. To modern readers, this may seem like it crosses a line of privacy or propriety. To a nineteenth-century housewife and mother of four children like Mary, perhaps it was an expedient way to save a few stitches on the construction of a new garment for herself. If Mary Sutherland made use of Caroline’s drawers after her death, she may well have helped herself to the chemises and nightclothes as well, although we’ll never know for sure.

Taken together, Caroline’s surviving garments paint a poignant picture of the last year of this young woman’s life. In November 1856 she was a Hudson River Valley bride in an ivory silk wedding gown. A year later she wore her burial shroud. In between, she moved west to Illinois and surely began expanding her social circle in her new home, even as she expanded the waist of her petticoat to accommodate her pregnancy. Her apron speaks to the physical labor she put into the effort of building her new life, while her nightgown and wrapper speak to not just the physical but the emotional journey of birthing and then burying a child shortly before her own untimely death.

Caroline Sutherland Layton was one of countless women throughout history who died young. Most of these women are forgotten, or at best, remembered as a line on a census or a name on a tombstone. Thanks to her family’s careful preservation of her clothing, a window into Caroline’s life has been preserved. In connecting with the things Caroline made, altered, and left behind, we connect with her humanity. We remember her not just as a statistic or ghost story, but as a person who experienced the joys and fears of becoming a young bride, wife, expectant mother, and mother during the eventful final year of her life.

Centering material culture when researching those with scant documentary evidence of their lives can help fill in the gaps of their experience. In Caroline’s case, analysis of her clothing illustrates both the aspirations and perils of those who moved west in search of a better life. Despite the advantages of status and prosperity, Caroline died a bereaved mother, far from her extended family.

 

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Martha Ehlers for entrusting this remarkable collection of Caroline Sutherland’s garments to the Illinois State Museum. Thank you to Dean Farmer for his meticulous research on Caroline Sutherland. Thank you to Dannyl Dolder for her top-notch photography.

 

Further Reading

Lyman Trumbull Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
Condell Family Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
David Davis Family Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library

 

Laura B. Bozeman, “The Genteel Frontier: Westward Expansion of Womanly Refinement,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation, 2014).

John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
Eliza Farnham, Life in Prairie Land (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

Eliza Farrar, The Young Lady’s Friend: A Manual of Practical Advice and Instruction to Young Females on Their Entering Upon the Duties of Life After Quitting School (New York: John W. Parker, 1853).
Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience: 1800–1915 (Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press, 1982).

Joan L. Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840–1900 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995).

Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Macmillan Press, 2000).

Ann Buermann Wass and Michelle Webb Fanrich, Clothing through American History: The Federal Era through Antebellum, 1786–1860 (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood University Press, 2010).

 

This article originally appeared in April 2024.

---

Erika Holst is the curator of history at the Illinois State Museum. Her publications include Historic Houses of Lincoln’s Illinois, Edwards Place: A Springfield Treasure, and Wicked Springfield: Crime, Corruption, and Scandal During the Lincoln Era, as well as several scholarly and popular articles. Her current exhibition, Growing Up X, explores the toys, technologies, and cultural touchstones that surrounded and shaped Generation X in their youth.

As someone who researches and teaches early American literature, stochastic parrots make me think of Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel about the tragedy that befalls a Pennsylvania family when they begin hearing unexplained voices in the air around them. A Gothic novel written decades before the telegraph was invented, much less the server farm, might seem an odd connection to generative AI. But Brown asks questions of agency, authenticity, and accountability that encourage us to consider how we grant such qualities to the mysterious voices that emerge from our machines.

Here’s a quick plot summary of Wieland: Clara Wieland narrates the novel as a long letter to an anonymous correspondent. She describes her family’s suffering after her brother Theodore murders his wife and children, and then seeks to murder her, all while claiming God directed him to these crimes. Prior to this violence, the Wieland family had been hearing unexplained voices that are revealed as the work of a mysterious stranger named Carwin. Carwin practices what Brown calls biloquism—he can both throw his voice and imitate the voices of others with uncanny precision. Carwin reveals to Clara near the novel’s climax that he used his ability out of a perverse desire to test the virtue and rationality of the Wielands, but pledges he did not command her brother to murder his family. Carwin later saves Clara from her brother’s assault by using biloquism to order Theodore to stop attacking his sister; this encounter restores Theodore to his senses, and he commits suicide in remorse for his actions.

Brown invented the word biloquism. In a footnote, Brown explains this term as essentially a synonym for ventriloquism, but within the story, Carwin emphasizes his ability to speak in two voices, telling Clara he can “mimic exactly the voice of another.” This definition differs from ventriloquism, which refers to the ability to speak without moving the lips, creating the illusion that the sound comes from somewhere other than the speaker. Etymologically, ventriloquism comes from Latin words for stomach and speech, while Brown coins biloquism to mean double speech. 

As the plot of the novel makes clear, the risk of biloquism lies not just in changing the perceived direction of speech, but in counterfeiting the voice of others. Carwin begins his challenge to Clara and her family with a seemingly innocuous imitation of Theodore’s wife Catherine, but later mimics Clara’s voice to convince her friend and potential suitor Henry Pleyel that Clara and Carwin are in a sexual relationship. I don’t think it’s too much of an anachronism here to say Carwin makes Clara the subject of a deepfake.

However, the novel shifts its suspense away from this impersonation toward the murders Theodore commits and the unexplained voice that inspires him. In this shift, the novel suggests two interrelated problems posed by biloquism: first, that we might not perceive the true source of a voice, since the biloquist can change the direction of his speech; and second that the authenticity of a voice cannot be guaranteed, since the biloquist can produce an accurate imitation of anyone.

Biloquism strikes me as a useful metaphor for considering generative AI because chatbots also have the capacity to “speak” from an unknown source and to imitate the voices of others. Theodore Wieland hears mysterious voices in the air, and while we know the source of a chatbot’s words, large language models pose a similar question of agency. A chatbot is not a human author, but the human using a large language model’s application programming interface doesn’t create the words on the screen, either. And given the vast quantity of data contained in a large language model’s training set, humans don’t have the ability to retrace the decisions within a chatbot’s neural network to understand why the program produced specific content. Such ambiguity underlies speculation that generative AI models might be approaching, or have already achieved, consciousness or sentience, like OpenAI chief researcher Ilya Sutskever’s provocative 2022 tweet that “it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious.” Sutskever’s qualified claim of slight consciousness gets to the philosophical problem we face in recognizing sentience in artificial intelligence. Lacking a universally accepted definition of human consciousness, how do we devise a universally accepted definition of machine consciousness? 

The primary plot of Wieland dwells in this kind of ambiguity where science and speculation begin to blur. Theodore’s madness and the unexplained voices inspiring him shakes Clara and her family’s belief in a rational universe. Yet the novel’s focus on the line between empirical knowledge and speculative belief draws our attention away from the problem of authenticity and imitation posed by biloquism. That tension within the plot of Wieland offers a heuristic for the more quotidian, rather than existential, problems posed by generative AI.

Like Carwin, chatbots such as ChatGPT can imitate the voices of other writers or speakers. Like Carwin, users of generative AI programs could also falsely create sexually suggestive material or other content designed to embarrass an individual. The spread of pornographic deepfake images of Taylor Swift on social media in January and February 2024 offers just one prominent example of this problem.

Wieland explores Clara’s loss of agency when her friends and family trust the false content Carwin can create more than their prior knowledge of her character. Clara finds herself with few options besides trying to persuade the man who has spoiled her reputation to repair it. It’s at this point in the novel, however, when Clara discovers that her brother has murdered his wife and children, that the plot shifts from concern over Clara’s reputation to concern over her very life. The problem of imitation and the questions of authenticity it poses cede precedence to questions of subjectivity and agency.

Deepfakes and other deceptive uses of generative AI represent an immediate problem, but as with Brown’s novel, we’re often more interested in the mysterious voices. As many AI scholars have noted, contemporary discourses of AI catastrophe, like visions of general AI systems that revolt against humanity, or fears of autonomous weapons systems that evolve beyond human control, tend to minimize human agency and cast AI as a problem for the future. When we focus on looming dangers of AI subjectivity in an imagined future, we also tend to imagine conflicts with a non-human agent. That potential problem can overshadow the existing and more pressing dangers that come from AI misuse by human actors.

Thinking about this problem through the lens of Brown’s novel suggests our tendency to prioritize one side of a two-part problem. Biloquism reminds us that the questions of agency posed by generative AI are also always questions of imitation and authenticity. Biloquism is a human skill, like generative AI is a human product. Brown explains in a footnote defining biloquism that “[t]his power is, perhaps, given by nature, but is doubtless improvable, if not acquirable, by art.” ChatGPT and other chatbots require improvement by the “art” of data labelers (often low-paid workers in the Global South) who flag inappropriate content in the program’s training set.

The novel’s voices and today’s chatbots participate in a discursive context defined by human choices and dependent on human interpretation, regardless of the reality of supernatural voices or the likelihood of machine consciousness. Non-human discursive partners take on only the subject positions that human beings choose to recognize. Brown’s novel asks us to think carefully about that tendency, and how it often enables people to evade accountability for their choices.

Carwin’s reluctance to take full responsibility for his actions at the novel’s climax presents a significant example. Carwin blames his initial choice to test the Wieland family with mysterious voices on the inspiration of his “daemon of mischief.” You don’t have to squint too hard to see the similarities between daemon of mischief and that familiar Silicon Valley buzzword, disruptor, and what better way to describe his effect on the Wielands than Facebook’s old motto of “move fast and break stuff”? Carwin further denies reponsibility when he tries to persuade Clara that he did not give Theodore the command to murder his family:

Catharine was dead by violence. Surely my malignant stars had not made me the cause of her death; yet had I not rashly set in motion a machine, over whose progress I had no control, and which experience had shown me was infinite in power? Every day might add to the catalogue of horrors of which this was the source, and a seasonable disclosure of the truth might prevent numberless ills. . . .

I have uttered the truth. This is the extent of my offences. You tell me a horrid tale of Wieland being led to the destruction of his wife and children, by some mysterious agent. You charge me with the guilt of this agency; but I repeat that the amount of my guilt has been truly stated. The perpetrator of Catharine’s death was unknown to me till now; nay, it is still unknown to me.

In this dialogue, Carwin displaces the burgeoning responsibility he feels for creating a context that would destroy the lives of the Wieland family. Carwin transitions from recognizing that his imitations exacerbated Theodore’s break from reality to placing the blame on an unknown force. The last line of this passage, where he states that he still doesn’t know who killed Catharine, even as Clara has just informed him that it was Theodore, indicates that Carwin seeks to maintain his belief in a power outside human control.

In the novel’s opening paragraphs, Clara tells her unnamed correspondent to: “Make what use of the tale you shall think proper. If it be communicated to the world, it will inculcate the duty of avoiding deceit.” There are plenty of examples of deception within the novel, and Carwin obviously represents an early example of the kind of confidence man that will become so prominent in subsequent American literature. But I don’t think Brown is just urging readers to be more cautious in avoiding scams and grifters here.

Instead, the kind of deceit the novel has in mind is the self-deception that occurs when we cast responsibility outside ourselves and make imagined external subjects responsible for decisions that are ultimately the product of our own cultural choices. Being aware of the possibility of such deceit strikes me as more essential than ever as generative AI becomes part of our classrooms, our workplaces, and our lives more broadly.

 

Further Reading

Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (March 2021): 610–623.

Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or The Transformation, ed. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett Publishing Co., 2009).

Kevin Roose, “A Conversation with Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled,” New York Times, February 16, 2023.

Oliver Whang, “How to Tell If Your AI is Conscious,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 2023.

 

This article originally appeared in April 2024.

 

---

James M. Greene is Associate Professor of English at Indiana State University, where he also serves as the Faculty Fellow for Artificial Intelligence. He is the author of The Soldier’s Two Bodies: Military Sacrifice and Popular Sovereignty in Revolutionary War Veteran Narratives (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020).

Yet, providing an account of what transpired in that series of famous meetings is much harder than one with a passing interest might suspect. The question of what took place behind closed doors over the summer of 1787 started to interest me as I was writing my book, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions. I worked with the Max Farrand edited collection of convention records throughout my graduate career and frequently turned to them to mine for evidence of what delegates thought (or at least expressed) about various topics. Among those was the issue of secrecy in government, including at the convention itself.

As I read through these records looking for what deputies reportedly said or wrote down about secrets and their place in politics, I began to reflect on how the secrecy surrounding the deliberations affected the very records I was consulting. The fact that the delegates met in secret rendered the process of forming the Constitution fundamentally opaque. The effect, as I argue in my book, was to help vest the finished product with an air of unanimous approbation and transcendent authority.

Too often, historians turn to records of constituent or legislative deliberations from the eighteenth century as a source to draw quotations from early American political figures, without questioning their accuracy. Even in meetings that were open to the public, the technological limitations of the era made recording speech anywhere near verbatim difficult—and this is on top of considerations like space constraints, printing costs, intended audience, or the distortions of memory. When a meeting was held behind closed doors, like the Constitutional Convention, there is the additional possibility of distortion due to the intervening time between when notes were taken and when they were revisited, edited, and published. Teaching with these types of sources highlights their limitations and, for me, forced a more critical engagement with them in my own scholarship. 

When I embarked on teaching a historical methods course for undergraduate history majors and minors, it struck me that using the records of the Constitutional Convention as a case study might be a useful way to get students thinking about the construction of the archive, biases of sources, and the challenge of conjecture in writing history. To set up a unit on working with primary documents to write a research paper, I devised a lesson plan to encompass a single 75-minute class meeting.

As preparation, I assigned the students a podcast interview with Mary Sarah Bilder on Ben Franklin’s World in which she discusses the findings of her book on the story of James Madison’s notes from the convention: Madison’s Hand. In addition to giving background on the convention and legislative note-taking in the eighteenth-century, Bilder goes into how she uncovered evidence about the way Madison wrote and then extensively revised his notes. The podcast provides a good entry point into the class session, especially to start thinking about what Madison’s notes—the most complete we have from that summer—can and cannot tell us about the Constitution and its formation.

To begin the exercise, I pass out a packet to each student containing all the notes included in the Farrand volume for a single day of the Convention: May 29, 1787. I selected this date because it is early on and evidently contained discussion of meeting logistics in addition to being the day the Virginia Plan was introduced. Furthermore, the different degrees of detail and points of emphasis in each set of notes immediately highlights the challenge of producing a definitive account of what transpired in that session. 

To start, I ask the students to read through the official journal (just two pages) for that date. Once they have done this, we pause and I ask them what strikes them about it. What impression do you get of the meeting that day and what was discussed? Did it seem like a long day? Could you get a sense of the feeling in the room? Could you look at this and tie any views to any specific people; would you feel comfortable quoting anyone from this source?

Students immediately note the brevity of the notes and the lack of any kind of speeches recorded—most conclude that they would definitely not be able to quote anyone from this record. The day’s meeting appears to have been short and mostly focused on establishing procedures. Many note an apparent consensus prevailing on the proposed rules and the introduction of “sundry propositions” by Mr. [Edmund] Randolph and a “draught of a foederal government” by Mr. Charles Pinckney, both apparently to be discussed later (Farrand 16). In terms of the feeling in the room, some students generally suggest it seemed efficient or matter of fact, while one or two usually conclude that there is little they could say about the atmosphere based on this source alone. What’s a historian to do in such a situation? First, look for additional sources.

In this instance, I have some at the ready for them. I give students a further ten minutes to read through the next set of notes: those belonging to Madison. These are much more extensive than the official journal record (seven pages); they include one vote tally on a particular question, they attribute names to ideas raised, and—perhaps most significantly—they present segments of fairly detailed speech from particular deputies. Most notable among these is the recorded speech Edmund Randolph gave to introduce the Virginia Plan, which Madison calls the “main business” of the day (Farrand 18). In fact, the bulk of his notes for this date are made up of a record of what Randolph purportedly said and the contents of the plan he laid out. Madison gives just two brief sentences at the end to note that “Mr. Charles Pinkney laid before the house the draught of a federal Government which he had prepared to be agreed upon between the free and independent states of America” (Farrand 23). 

When we debrief after their consideration of Madison’s notes, most students immediately identify how much more extensive they were than the official journal. Many come away with a different impression of the meeting that day; it was not devoted mainly to rules, but more to discussing the Virginia Plan. This record conveys more of a sense of gravity, even urgency, to the meeting that is not present in the official journal. Typically, one or two students remember Bilder’s discussion of how Madison revised his notes later and pick up on a difference in how Randolph’s plan is described as “the establishment of a national government” (Farrand 16) in the journal compared to “revising the foederal system” (Farrand 18) in Madison’s records. While some hesitate to say they would quote Randolph directly from these notes, most conclude that they would feel comfortable attributing particular ideas or points to him.

At this point, we pause and I have students read a page from Bilder’s book (pp. 180–81) in which she describes Madison asking Randolph in 1789 to recreate his speech from May 29, 1787, introducing the Virginia Plan. She recounts how Randolph handed over his notes, but refused to “dilate” the speech, as he put it (Bilder 181). Randolph apparently “found it impossible to retrace the subject” and noted that he would “mingle inadvertently much of what I have heard since, without being able to separate it from what occurred then” (Bilder 181). Nonetheless, as Bilder details, Madison proceeded to reconstruct the speech based on what Randolph had furnished and his own memory and existing rough notes.

I then ask the students if they would revise their approach to Madison’s notes based on knowing this detail about how he composed them. While some suggest this information is not too surprising and that they would continue to trust the notes about the same as they had upon first inspection, others’ confidence is more shaken. Usually someone says something along the lines of: the notes might not be totally made up, but to cite them as direct evidence of what was said seems tricky. I ask them what they would do if they were still intent on writing an account of that day’s proceedings. As good historians in training, everyone generally suggests seeking out more sources—specifically, wanting to cross-check with additional notes available from the date.

Luckily for them, I have curated those as well. I give them another ten minutes or so to flip through the last three sets of notes included in the Farrand volume for May 29: the notes of Robert Yates (about one page), James McHenry (about three pages), and William Paterson (about one page). All three sets of notes include little, if anything, of procedural discussions in that session; Yates and McHenry note Randolph’s focus on the defects of the Confederation, while Paterson merely lays out the points he proposes as part of the Virginia Plan; neither McHenry or Paterson note that Charles Pinckney introduced a plan at all.

Students usually identify some small points of convergence across several of the sets of notes. For one, Yates writes that Randolph gave a “long and elaborate speech,” (Farrand 23) which seems to confirm the sense that this was the focus of the day’s session—an interpretation further backed by McHenry’s first line that “Governor Randolph opened the business of the convention” (Farrand 24). According to Yates, Randolph “candidly confessed that they were not intended for a federal government—he meant a strong consolidated union, in which the idea of states should be nearly annihilated” (Farrand 24). This is backed by Paterson’s record, which has Randolph saying: “We ought to be one Nation” (Farrand 27). 

McHenry’s notes go into much more detail on Randolph’s criticisms of the confederation—its “imbecility,” as he puts it at one point (Farrand 25)—and also introduces the idea that the plan was presented as a response to defects in the state governments. A brief footnote at the end of McHenry’s records also advises that: “In all essential particulars McHenry’s copy of the Virginia Plan is identical with that of Madison. It is accordingly omitted here” (Farrand 27). The editor’s interjection seems to reinforce the accuracy of Madison’s plan report.

At this point, we take stock as a class of what we feel confident saying about what happened that day in the convention by considering the following questions:

Would you be able to/feel confident quoting anyone from the meeting? What about describing what they said or conveyed?

What is the effect of Madison including procedural notes where the others don’t? How does this create a sense of greater trust in his notes as more comprehensive or official?

Would you feel confident describing the length or mood of the meeting based on these notes?

What other sources would you want to consult in order to flesh out your description of what happened at the convention on this date? (This question provides a good opportunity to discuss how to weigh legislative notes with official journals and private correspondence, diaries, and/or memoirs. It also leads to a fruitful consideration of the lack of press reports due to the secrecy imposed on the convention and how that poses further limitations for historians.)

To conclude the exercise, I give the students a few final minutes to read from a secondary source describing this day in the convention: pages 66-67 of Carol Berkin’s A Brilliant Solution. What I like about using this passage is that Berkin’s book is clearly written to engage an interested audience beyond merely academics. As a result, she attempts to convey intangibles in her narrative—a prospect that provokes good debate among the students. How does she know that “Randolph struck a perfect note of humility and sincerity” (Berkin 66)? Was Madison “no doubt aware that all eyes were upon him” as the actual author of the Virginia Plan (66)? Is it accurate to say that after Randolph spoke of the confederation’s deficiencies “the specter of ruin and humiliation menaced the East Room” (Berkin 67)?

This can open a thoughtful conversation not only about how historians work and write, but also about how the Constitution is interpreted and the difference between history and law. The exercise generates questions about the role of conjecture in historical writing, particularly how historians attempt to account for gaps in the sources and build narratives to capture things like the mood of a room when the evidence doesn’t explicitly lay it out. We talk about whether a historian is responsible for indicating when something is conjecture in writing, how they can do this, and the extent to which they must walk the reader through their process.

Getting students to closely consider the available notes from a single day of the Constitutional Convention proves to be an engaging way to talk about the challenges of using primary sources to build a narrative of the past. More specifically, it can also give rise to questioning how the Constitution gets interpreted legally, particularly through the framework of originalism. Most students walk away convinced that it’s a lot harder than it might seem to know what the framers were doing or thinking over the summer of 1787. If it’s the only takeaway from the class, it’s a worthwhile one.

Further Reading

Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3 vol. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911).

Katlyn Marie Carter, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).

Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).

Carol Berkin, A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution (New York: Harper Collins, 2002).

 

This article originally appeared in February 2024.

---

Katlyn Marie Carter is an assistant professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).

Rooting around in one of those shops, I found it: a little tin so small that it could fit in your fist. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN was stamped on its label. I bought it without opening it. It cost two pounds.

At the time, I was enrolled in Dr. Gordon Fraser’s class, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Global Media Event.” Each student in that class was asked to develop a project that considered how readers around the world responded to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous anti-slavery novel. I still wasn’t sure about my research project, although I had a few ideas. I had read a lot of Toni Morrison, and I was thinking about The Bluest Eye and its Shirley Temple doll, a cultural derivative of the angelic little Eva from Stowe’s novel. Perhaps I could find British dolls referencing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I thought. But serendipitously, I found a mysterious tin labelled with the name of the novel I was studying in class. I felt obligated to investigate.

My friend’s heating was broken, so I sat in bed at four in the afternoon, shivering from the cold. I heated my palms with my breath and tugged at the tin. It was a roll of film. Holding it up to the light revealed its title: “Great Books Retold In Pictures” and “A Beacon Filmstrip.” So, I thought, this is a filmstrip. Whatever that is.

^{Figures 4a-e: Scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe part of Great Books Retold in Pictures. Click images to expand.}

When I get something in my head, I can’t shake it, and this was in my head. I scoured antique sites and publisher’s logs. The name “Beacon” turned up nothing related. In fact, I came to realize, the record of filmstrip publishers, or the use of filmstrips at all, is extensively erased. Predating wheely-TVs and PowerPoint presentations, filmstrips are a largely forgotten form of educational technology. They were invented in 1943 and used for geography, history, and science. A teacher armed with a filmstrip could project a series of still images onto a screen, guiding students through a pre-written educational script. The Irish Catholic journal, The Furrow, endorsed the use of filmstrips in a 1960 article, explaining:

“This learning process may be pleasant or unpleasant and . . . [we] would prefer it to be pleasant . . . We should never underestimate the value of pleasant sentiments . . . where knowledge is worse than useless unless it is accompanied by love.” Learning made “pleasant”: the act of showing filmstrips, to the Furrow, was an act of love. Peering at the mauve-tinted illustrations shaded and flattened in budget history textbook style, illuminated bleakly in the weak, cold afternoon light, I was skeptical. 

Back in Manchester, and hitting a wall in my research, I turned to my lecturer. Gordon was able to find records of a series of “Beacon Filmstrips” released under “Hulton Press,” which were recorded in a US Library of Congress Catalog for 1968. A hunt for “Hulton Press” led us to the UK government’s registry of corporations and to a company named “Hulton Educational Publications,” incorporated in 1959. We were hoping to find details about the company’s goals in its corporate filings. Why was it incorporated? Why did this British firm make an educational filmstrip based on an American novel? 

This is where the story started to get strange.

The company’s founder, Edward George Warris Hulton (1906–1988), was the son and heir to the estate of British publishing magnate Sir Edward Hulton, 1st Baronet. Hulton could only be described as a rabid anti-Communist. The journalist Tom Hopkinson explains that he was forced by Hulton to resign from his job as photo editor of photojournalism magazine, The Picture Post. In his autobiography, Of This Our Time (1982), Hopkinson reported that he had produced an expose on the allies’ treatment of prisoners during the Korean War. Hulton, who owned The Picture Post, was furious. Hulton said: “I cannot permit editors of my newspaper to become organs of Communist propaganda. Still less to make the great newspaper which I built up a laughing-stock.” Hopkinson got the last laugh, though. Shortly after his resignation, the magazine had lost so much money that it closed in 1957. This story gave me a picture of the person I was researching—the man who produced this “Beacon Filmstrip” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Anti-communism was inextricable from anything he might produce.

I looked back at the images in the old filmstrip. Could I detect Hulton’s aggressive anti-Communism in his twentieth-century illustrations of this nineteenth-century novel? There was something strange about the filmstrips’ retelling of the book. What I saw in the still images was a recurrent pattern of female suffering. Certainly, Stowe’s novel is organized around the experiences of women—mothers and young girls, especially.

^{Figures 8a-e: Scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe part of Great Books Retold in Pictures. Click images to expand.}

Jane Tompkins identifies Stowe’s focus on the experiences of women and girls as “a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman’s point of view.” And yet, in the filmstrip, I saw only some of the women from Stowe’s novel. The clever Cassy, who protects a fellow enslaved woman by pretending to be a ghost, is not visible in the filmstrip. The model Quaker women, whom Tompkins saw as guides to a future, matriarchal society, are also not visible in the filmstrip. Aunt Ophelia, the earnest Vermont woman who abhors slavery—not visible. 

In place of these figures, the filmstrip highlights helpless women endangered by a centralized authority. Again and again, the filmstrip shows its viewers images of women in states of distress. In fact, in twelve of the twenty instances of a woman’s appearance in the filmstrip, that woman is in a state of anguish—crying, weeping, begging for mercy. These depictions are antithetical to what Tompkins saw in Stowe’s novel: a reorganization of society around the values of women, a politics borne from maternal morality. Instead, the viewer encounters broken female figures who are dispersed almost at random amongst the scenes: helpless, disempowered.

Strikingly, the images in the filmstrip also resemble those in Hulton’s periodical, The Picture Post. A 1955 article describes the Korean women and children whose lives are torn apart by Communist reformation. A woman “walked for six months to get treatment for her son’s paralyzed arm.” Other women “conceive and bear their children in the dust, and do their business in the nearest ditch.” Hulton pushes the image of these women as human chattel, the currency of war. In a 1949 publication from the magazine set in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, The Picture Post describes the lives of the women and children rendered “Pawns” in “the Fashionable Game called ‘Cold War.’” They are emaciated “ghosts” scouring the countryside for stalks of wheat. Hulton’s magazine is much more interested in describing women alone in suffering than together in survival, and the article makes clear why this is the case. These women are “a fertile breeding ground for Communism.” In short, westerners need to protect these women—or the women will, defenseless in despondency, fall into the arms of Communists.

^{Figures 10a-e: Scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe part of Great Books Retold in Pictures. Click images to expand.}

Like any adaptation, the Beacon filmstrip calls attention to some parts of its source material and not to others. As I came to realize, Hulton’s filmstrip of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and his Picture Post description of refugee Arab women mask the same thing: women’s political autonomy. Looking back to Stowe’s text, I reflected on how the character of Cassy was Stowe’s subversive answer to those who try to control women’s bodies. Cassy is described as wild and heathenish, and is sexually exploited by her master Legree. And yet Cassy is the moral and political center of Stowe’s parable. This is where I fall head-over-heels for Stowe’s novel. Having lost her own child, Cassy takes a vital maternal role in advising the young, enslaved girl Emmeline. Cassy also stands up to Legree in an act of defense: despite the implications concerning the physical and sexual violence Cassy has been subject to at her master’s hands, she returns to the house to confront him when Legree targets Tom. Women help women and demonstrate profound bravery. This is Stowe’s vision, and it is the very thing that Hulton’s Picture Post and his filmstrip of Uncle Tom’s Cabin eliminates. Cassy does not appear once in the filmstrip. 

Of course, many have critiqued Stowe by suggesting that her novel is an example of what queer theorists have called heteronormativity, the unspoken assumption that the world is properly organized into male and female domains and that differences in sexuality are defined as deviancy. I understand why critics have come to this conclusion. And yet viewing Hulton’s revision of Stowe’s novel renewed my belief that Stowe was communicating something important about the role of women in a culture defined by the violent behavior of men. Stowe’s politics can be read through Cassy: a model of maternal strength as a political force. Her sacrifice, like Uncle Tom’s, is martyr-like. Her body, all that she has, is a buffer that protects Emmeline and others from the violence Legree would otherwise have directed at them. The “maternal values” that Tompkins highlighted as the core of Stowe’s philosophy, her political “reworking,” is not heteronormative or even conservative. Instead, Stowe offers an ideal of maternal feelings that fuel political action. This is as brave as it is overlooked, and it is the very thing that Hulton erases from the filmstrip.

In short, when I looked back at the Uncle Tom’s Cabin filmstrip, I realized that Hulton’s anti-Communist project obscured the very thing that I had appreciated about Stowe’s novel: its commitment to maternal values, feminine sentimentality, and Christian virtue—a society remade in the archaic image of Christian motherhood. The literary scholar Jim O’Loughlin has suggested that Stowe’s use of “iconography” and “stereotypical” visual images means that in practice her novel is directly linked to the racist depictions that followed its publication: the minstrel shows and racist caricatures. And yet throughout the Uncle Tom’s Cabin class, I felt inexplicably, passionately defensive of Stowe. Sometimes, I found it almost painful to hear my classmates’ exhortations about Stowe’s “white saviorism,” her supposed ignorance and arrogance. Stowe’s commitment to Christianity was unapologetic. It was this absolutism that, in practice, drove her to challenge racial injustice.

^{Figures 12a-e: Scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe part of Great Books Retold in Pictures. Click images to expand.}

Stowe’s use of direct address is brilliant. Through it, she makes clear these revolutionary aims, and she draws the reader in, offers them a seat. Many complain about this stylistic device, one that links women’s narratives as diverse as Charlotte Temple (1791), The Color Purple (1982), and Fleabag (2016). I love it. I love these texts. Stowe, in conversation with her reader, exhorts her to change the world. There’s something lovingly matriarchal about exhortation, as if we are sitting around the kitchen table: well let me tell you, well I’ll tell you this, and so I said to her I said. This is Stowe’s mode of address when she speaks to “the Women of the United States of America” or when she calls out to “You, mothers of America, you who have learned, by the cradles of your own children, to love and feel for all mankind.” This is Stowe’s mode of address when she writes, “By the sacred love you bear your child . . . pity the mother who has all your affections, and not one legal right to protect, guide, or educate, the child of her bosom! . . . And say, mothers of America, is this a thing to be defended, sympathized with, passed over in silence?”

I maintain that you can’t really understand Stowe’s method unless you understand that kitchen table culture: women catching up over (what in England we would call) a cuppa. I feel we ought to understand Stowe’s exhortation as iced tea on the porch after Sunday service, while the husbands do whatever husbands do. “As a mother . . . ,” “Dear mothers”: she wasn’t writing to twenty-first century Liberal Arts students whose most active socialization occurs at Thursday night pre-drinks. She assumes the primordiality of Christianity and maternal values—even treats them as necessary. To what extent should our politics reflect our religion, our morals, our maternity? Absolutely and essentially, she answers.

^{Figures 13a-e: Scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe part of Great Books Retold in Pictures. Click images to expand.}

The Beacon filmstrip I discovered in Glasgow showed none of this. Instead, it depicted women in distress—always in distress, always helpless and crying, always defeated. In the filmstrip, enslaved Black women were pawns in the struggle between white authorities, just as, in The Picture Post, Korean and Arab women were “pawns” of Communism and the “Fashionable” game of “Cold War.” Hulton’s filmstrip company was a footnote in his larger political and economic project. In his 1952 autobiography, When I was a Child, Hulton offers a list of griefs, grievances, and thwarted ambition. He links world politics (“social revolution and total war”) to his own losses. In 1921, he lost his father and much of his father’s newspaper empire. His mother was “shattered” by her husband’s death. His sister died at age twenty-two. The “political advancement” that he had expected remained continually beyond his reach. He ran for Parliament twice as a Conservative, in 1927 and 1931, but lost both times. Hulton is in his autobiography beset from all sides by threats to his wealth, political ambition, and ideology.

Hulton remained ambitious. Hopkinson, the photographer Hulton forced to resign, observed that Hulton in the 1950s “had not yet altogether given up his pre-war parliamentary ambitions.” The filmstrip, then, imperfectly reflects the values of an ardent anti-Communist who had continued to nurture conservative political goals. 

These political goals had no real place for female authority. Hulton’s publications regarded women not as co-authors of a political project but as endangered prizes to be won or lost. Examining the images in the Beacon Filmstrip reveals its failure to acknowledge the abiding, enduring power of kitchen table empowerment in Stowe’s novel. Stowe’s politics are organized around women talking, wrestling with the uses of power or the role of morality in the law. Stowe was deeply committed to maternal values, of the right-and-wrong that originates in feminine spaces. Stowe believed that politics ought to reflect the archaic good of maternal instinct.

I am grateful, then, that Stowe’s novel remains an important cultural touchstone, the kind of book that can function as the subject of an entire university class. Vital political progress will emerge from those spaces where women talk. Stowe understood this. Politics begins at the kitchen table, with iced tea on the porch after Sunday Service. Meanwhile, I found Hulton’s filmstrip discarded in an antique shop in Glasgow, stuffed between a plastic rocking horse and a box of forgotten family photographs.

 

Further Reading

Tom Hopkinson, Of This Our Time: A Journalist’s Story, 1905-50 (London: Arrow, 1982).

Edward George Warris Hulton, When I Was a Child (London: Cresset Press, 1952; London: Springwood Books, 1978).

Jim O’Loughlin, “Articulating Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” New Literary History 31, no. 3 (Summer, 2000): 573-97.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Janet Fagan Yellin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Jane Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 122-46.

 

This article originally appeared in February 2024.

---

Georgina Blackburn is a writer from East London currently studying MA English Literature and American Studies at the University of Manchester in Manchester, England. Having written many essays in the past, Georgina specializes in Southern American literature and American Gothic horror aesthetics.

Naturally, there’s a bit of overlap. Pynchon and I quote some of the same documents. We include many of the same characters—including Mason and Dixon. Both our books follow the surveyors through the mid-Atlantic and upper-Chesapeake, across three hundred miles of swamplands, dense deciduous forests, and the Appalachian range. Neither Pynchon’s story nor mine ends well, although they do end very differently. Pynchon’s ends with Charles Mason’s death in 1786. Mine ends at the turn of the twentieth century, as Americans were doing their best to forget Mason and Dixon’s line.

Pynchon’s novel and my history share another far more consequential commonality. Our books center on a region of the United States largely lost to history. Part of the reason, as I’ve already suggested, was the carefully plotted, well-funded, and remarkably effective campaign to erase sectional division from national memory. But even as historians have corrected the many distortions introduced by that campaign, others remain. Because the Mason-Dixon Line is America’s great divide, separating the nation’s historic sections, the North and the South, the lands on either side have long been understood as separate lands. Pynchon understands, and my book explains, the opposite is the case. Precisely because of their proximity to so notorious a geo-political demarcation, the borderlands adjoining Mason and Dixon’s original line were bound together. They may have been in-between lands but only very late in their history, following the passage of the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Act, did they become divided lands.

 

How Pynchon and I arrived in the same place, I can’t say. I can say our stories center on the same historical events and those events pointed us in similar directions. Let me explain.

I first read Mason & Dixon long before I started my own book on the Line. When it was published in the spring of 1997, I was seeking relief in art following another disappointing season on the academic job market. Historical novels offered especially well-calibrated relief—the sweet spot where pleasure reading meets research. Two books I remember most from those days are Barry Unsworth’s novel of the transatlantic slave trade, Sacred Hunger, and John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration, featuring a stunning portrait of James Buchanan, at the time one of only two contenders for the title of America’s worst-ever president.

I had read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and V some years before. Failing to conquer Gravity’s Rainbow, I was resolutely of the short-Pynchon camp. Michiko Kakutani’s Mason & Dixon review in the April 29th New York Times might have sent me back to long-Pynchon. Although, to be honest, short or long, I was likely to attempt Mason & Dixon. The novel’s subject matter landed squarely in my field of study.

After I read the book, I remember asking a foreign-born friend about Mason & Dixon. I figured she’d be enthusiastic since she was doing her Ph.D. in the history of early astronomical science. “I don’t identify with the culture,” she told me. I was appalled by the response. Exactly what culture did she not identify with? American culture? Pynchon’s book takes place before there was a United States.

In retrospect, I kind of see what she meant. Pynchon is an American novelist in every sense but you wouldn’t recommend him to a foreign visitor. The intimate struggles at the core of our national being don’t interest him in the way they did Melville or Faulkner or Roth or Morrison. In Pynchon’s America, most of us are busy buying muscle cars and steak knives while a few outliers, inclined to plumb the nation’s deeper realms, face a terrifying epistemological void.

Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon embody neither of these Pynchonian archetypes—they inhabit a world of producers rather than consumers. It is a starkly Newtonian world. There is light and there is dark. There are lines and there are circles. There are statements of truth and statements of abject fiction. But there is also a shadowy netherworld, not quite the dark web of Pynchon’s modern America, but something altogether more creepy.

Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, Mason & Dixon’s narrator, recalls a strange assemblage of travelers journeying in a Jesuit coach, “a Conveyance, wherein the inside is quite noticeably larger than the outside.” He joined the travelers before the French and Indian War, somewhere near the meandering waters of the lower-Susquehanna and the frontier outpost of Lancaster. One of the travelers, the “jovial Gamer” Mr. Edgewise, is heard to say,

We have passed, tho’ without comment, out of the zone of influence of the western mountains, and into that of the Chesapeake,—as there exists no “Maryland” beyond an Abstraction, a Frame of right lines drawn to enclose and square off the great Bay in its unimagin’d Fecundity, its shoreline tending to Infinite Length, ultimately unmappable,—no more, to be fair, than there exists any “Pennsylvania” but a chronicle of Frauds committed serially against the Indians dwelling there, check’d only by the Ambitions of other Colonies to north and east.

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow, despite the weighty authority of astronomical science, will be no better. 

On a glorious Sunday in September of 1765, Charles Mason took a break from surveying to visit a giant cavern near present-day Cavetown, Maryland, and not far from Antietam Creek. Locals, many of whom were Catholics, denied the customary glories of medieval architecture, used the wondrous grotto for religious services. But for Mason it provoked “a strong and melancholy reflection: that such is the abodes of the Dead: thy inevitable doom, O stranger; soon to be numbered as one of them.” The quote appears on page 497 of Mason & Dixon, copied verbatim from the official journal kept by Mason and Dixon, now held in the National Archives. Mason and Dixon recognized that their labors were unlikely to bring peace to the Maryland-Pennsylvania borderlands.

As Pynchon approaches the problem, it isn’t just that an accurately-plotted boundary line across the infinite variation of the natural world is an impossibility. Should the astronomers’ line deviate by an “Eye-lash’s Diameter,” it would leave a “an Unseen World, beyond Resolution, of transactions never recorded . . . where one may be lost within minutes of entering the vast unforgiving Thicket of Stalks.” The Maryland grotto is not a Pynchonian portal into some reality-bending cosmic abyss. But the work of scientifically-inclined human beings might be. Mason and Dixon of the novel never bother with the usual Pynchonian quest for what is only vaguely apprehended. These reluctant Prometheans must move on, their business too serious to dwell on portents of a lunatic netherworld.

A few months after Mason and Dixon landed in America, eastern Pennsylvania witnessed some of the worst ethnic violence in American history. Local vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys slaughtered a large group of Conestoga Indians outside Lancaster. The atrocity was followed by another murderous rampage, this time against surviving Conestoga elders, women and children, hiding in Lancaster’s only fortified structure, the town jail.

In Pynchon’s telling, Mason and Dixon had seen other acts of white savagery—the slave drivers of the Cape of Good Hope, where the astronomers had traveled to observe Venus’s transit across the face of the sun. There had even been a fair amount of white savagery at home in England too, especially the summer of 1745 when the pretender to the throne, Bonnie Prince Charlie, led his Jacobite band in a failed bid to reclaim Britain for the Stuart line. The Pretender’s fantasy ended in the Scottish Highlands, on Culloden Moor, after the army of King George II, led by his son, the Duke of Cumberland, slaughtered hundreds of Charlie’s Jacobite followers. In kindly England, all that sort of savagery was now ancient history. But in the colonies, it seemed, right-thinking Protestants “are become the very Savages of their own worst Dreams.”

Insofar as Mason and Dixon of Mason & Dixon are consumed by dark mystery, it is this—the savagery of their colonial brethren. As the Englishmen experience it, the American berserk requires no deep descent into some paranoiac’s dark realm. It’s right there, all along the Line. 

Early in their American journey, Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon overhear the most alarming public-house chatter: “The true War here is between the city and the back Inhabitants.” The latter never know where to direct their fury—marauding Indians or indifferent provincial authorities. Much like the neo-liberals of nineties Washington D.C., the grandees of Pennsylvania’s imperial capital at Philadelphia are too consumed by a noxious combination of commercialism and internationalism to be troubled by the seething white people of the not-so-distant frontier. The ensuing frontier rage constituted a clear danger, not only for the native peoples near the line, but for any perceived alien. “The worst sort of Celtick Degenerates,” as Pynchon’s Mason calls the Scots-Irish Paxton boys, are unlikely to discriminate between foreign-born astronomers and the true sources of their resentment. “Mason and Dixon look at each other bleakly. ‘Well, if I’d known ‘twould be like this in America.'”

Best to retreat to the safety of the astronomers’ temporary observatory at John Harlan’s farm, near the forks of the Brandywine. You can visit the site today, marked by the famed Star Gazers’ Stone, the original benchmark from which Mason and Dixon began plotting the Line. 

A year after the Paxton massacres, Pynchon sends Mason and Dixon to Lancaster (Mason recorded such a visit in the astronomers’ official journal), “where was perpetrated last Winter the Horrid and inhuman murder of 26 Indians, Men, Women and Children.” A guide, happy disaster profiteer, warns the two sightseers to mind their belongings. There’s nothing sacred even in Lancaster, land of the Pennsylvania Dutch and their solemn rites. The tourists keep coming, “some bring Sketching-Books, some Easels, others their Specimen Bags, but all converge thro’ the same queer Magnetism.” Bodies attract, dead ones no less than living. Such laws are the stuff of science, the creed that guides these English astronomical hirelings.

Mason and Dixon concluded their American survey in the fall of 1767, 31 miles short of its planned endpoint. Iroquois guides, appointed to escort the Englishmen and their party through some of the most contested lands in the world, determined that Dunkard Creek, north of present-day Morgantown, West Virginia, would be the end of the line. As the astronomers made the 232-mile journey back to Harlan’s farm, they checked the several hundred boundary markers they’d placed along the way. A few remain, weathered and chipped remnants of the work of Mason, Dixon, and their surveying party.

After completing a detailed map of their line, in September of 1768, Mason and Dixon returned to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. Dixon would eventually return to the northern English countryside of his birth, finishing his days surveying the lands of the lords of Durham. Mason migrated to America, but died shortly after arriving and now lies buried in Philadelphia’s Christ Church burial ground.

Pynchon doesn’t much bother with Mason and Dixon’s American legacy. Because the phrase “Mason-Dixon” remains so deeply embedded in national memory, few of his readers will doubt that the astronomer’s efforts to end one boundary dispute prepared the way for another, not between English lords tussling over land title and tax revenue, but between partisans fighting over the fate of America’s great shame, the institution of chattel slavery. It’s no coincidence that countless underground railroad stations, John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, and the Civil War battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg are not far from Mason and Dixon’s line. The Englishmen may have had some sense of the clinical derangement all around them, but with no United States, Mason and Dixon could never have anticipated their role in the great American cataclysm.

 

Further Reading

Edward G. Gray, Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2023).

Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York: Picador, 2004).

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1992)

John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (New York: Knopf, 1992)

 

This article originally appeared in January 2024.

---

Edward G. Gray was the author of Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2023) and Professor of History at Florida State University. He wished to thank Peter C. Mancall for his many incisive comments on an earlier draft of this essay.