I have been working wood for as long as I can remember, although my earliest experiences on a small farm where I grew up were mostly of the crude carpentry sort. Rehabilitating and restoring three houses—one an 1885 Eastlake-style house designed by the first woman architect in Rochester, New York; the second an Andrew Jackson Downing Italianate pile in the countryside east of that city; and the third an amateurish “handmade” and somewhat crazy contraption in the New Hampshire woods—further sharpened my skills.

Eventually I had the good fortune to direct an exhibition design-and-construction operation in a medium-sized history museum in Rochester, an area rich in highly skilled graduates of the School for American Craftsmen at Rochester Institute of Technology and of Alfred University, which is also renowned for its school of the arts. Their talents and their willingness to share their knowledge and skills inspired me to think more broadly about my own experience with wood. After I moved to my present position at Northeastern University, I came to know many superb woodworkers who were members of the New Hampshire Furniture Masters and the Guild of New Hampshire Woodworkers.

When my editor at Viking suggested a book on wood’s place in history, culture, and consciousness, I jumped at the chance. Acquiring new and better skills—and new and better machines and tools—had prepared me to write Wood: Craft, Culture, History. In retrospect this was a surprising move, since I am not by nature fond of risk. And this is certainly a risky book.

Part of the risk involved is revealed by the difficulty in categorizing such a book. Academic historians and even my publisher don’t quite know where to place it on the shelves. Should it reside with books about materials, material culture, crafts, or history? Viking/Penguin lists it under “History of Technology.” Bookstores usually place it with “Crafts” and occasionally in the “History” section. It is certainly informed by cultural history and the history of technology, but it is also guided by works investigating workmanship and design (David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship [1968], Sōetsu Yanagi’s The Unknown Craftsman [1972]), architectural history (Christian Norberg-Schultz’s Existence, Space and Architecture[1971] and Nightlands [1996]), and phenomenology (Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space [1964]). This book also called for research and writing about botany and the physics of woods, though I cannot claim expertise in either botany or materials science. I do know that these attempts to understand wood have helped me in my own workshop, where I would like to think I now make fewer errors. To take one example, I now plan for wood’s expansion and contraction in the hidden joinery of my work, rather than trying to force the wood to remain static.

Writing this book also altered my work process at the bench. I have found that as much as I organize my notes and plan my arguments, there are moments as I write when a new idea or explanation simply appears. The woodworking equivalent to this is the solution to a design, shaping, or joining challenge that similarly presents itself. Whether writing a page or making a piece, these answers are no less valuable, whatever their source. Writing has taught me to let my elaborate plans and calculations ease their grip and let the tools flow. This is, however, not as easy as it sounds.

Contending with the physical characteristics of various woods and the way they respond to machines and the hand has also helped clarify how I think about history. Wood is infinitely variable and often unpredictable in the way it responds to being worked or to its environment. Good machines help us shape it with precision, but that exactitude can be ephemeral. Cutting and reshaping can relieve unseen physical stresses or tension deep inside the board or beam, turning our machined precision to mere approximation from one day to the next. This inconstancy seems to me analogous to the unpredictability, irrationality, and sheer orneriness that characterized human behavior in the past, and the historian’s paradigms, models, and methods analogous to the machines in the workshop. I suppose that explains why I am more comfortable with the humanistic side of history and with the intellectual and cultural history of my mentors, chiefly Warren Susman and Hayden White. The former directed my dissertation at Rutgers; the latter introduced me to history at the University of Rochester.

This project also had the largely unintended consequence of pushing my consideration of history in two seemingly opposite directions. On one hand, studying the history of a material that grows on or once grew on most of the world’s land mass logically meant that I had to examine wood in cultures other than that of the region I have studied for most my career—the United States. When I considered places of worship, I was drawn to what I think are the most inspiring wooden structures of religion—the stave churches of Norway and the elaborately carved marai of the Maori. My examination of wooden watercraft includes not only dugouts and bark canoes from Native Americans but also dhows, junks, and the behemoths of the “Age of Sail,” when wooden ships carried people and wooden barrels that held supplies, without which no boat could have ventured far from shore. Willow cricket bats, yew bows, and hickory-shafted golf clubs were transnational gear; some have been superseded by alloys and plastics, but some sporting equipment—such as the Irish hurley—is still made of purpose-grown native ash. I don’t know whether this book is world history or not, since that paradigm seems to me to be continually shifting. I am more comfortable thinking of it simply as cultural history.

As I cast a wider geographic and cultural net, I also began to consider more carefully the micro-view of woodworking, in particular, the history of individual artisans. Woodworking encompasses a multitude of specialized trades—coopers, wheelwrights, shipwrights, cabinetmakers, carpenters, carvers, and joiners, to name a few—and my reading and experience in the workshop turned me to examining these artisans and to thinking about their places in global history. In the aggregate, skilled woodworkers are often seen by both historians and the general public as possessing some sort of magical or mystical relationship to the material and the craft. While this might seem complimentary or positive, it in fact diminishes the artisan’s years or work, discipline, intellectual synthesis, design knowledge, and problem solving.

Studying the history of this essential material has made it clear that while wood provides the opportunity for using renewable resources, we do not seem to understand what this entails. Sustainable and managed forestry are not new concepts. In Japan and some of the German states, attempts to reforest began in the sixteenth century. For generations there have been purpose-managed forests of oak and sycamore (for the wine-barrel and stringed-instrument trades) in other parts of Europe, as well as more recent softwood tree farming in the United States and Canada for the paper and construction industries. These are exceptions to common practice. The British mowed down their oak forests to build ships and could not convince landowners to plant more trees that would take a century or more to mature. Giant redwoods and sequoias in the American West were felled as if they would magically return in less than five hundred years. The rainforests are burning as you read this. In the end, these purposes—closer consideration and appreciation of the actual work and skill of woodworking and a sense of history and urgency about what the geographer Michael Williams has called “the deforestation of the earth”—are, I hope, the chief contributions of Wood. I now try to use lumber from forests certified as harvested in an environmentally responsible manner, I save more of what I used to think of as “waste,” recycle what I can, and use wood with what once were thought of as blemishes, such as small knots and odd or unexpected colors.

Designing and building things crude and refined forced me to think about the problems, failures, and solutions that I encounter every day in the workshop. Working through a building project requires careful planning and an ordered sequence of tasks, whether that project is as small as a side table or as large as redoing a bizarrely angled room with nothing level or plumb and no right angles. It is an intellectual layering process, sometimes with only minimal chances to correct errors made early in the project. The same general method seems to me to apply to researching, conceptualizing, and writing history—the process is complex, layered, and often difficult to repair, especially those errors made at the outset.

I suspect that my learning from failure in woodworking (more than from success) has helped me slow down my work process in general. I no longer try to start new tasks late in the day or rush something to the finish when I am close to the end, since I have found that this is when most of my errors occur. I now try to do that with writing so less time is wasted “cleaning up” the mess from the previous day. In both endeavors I spend the last moments awake each night trying to figure out how I will tackle the next steps in the process.

Some woodworking is so complicated that I have to think through processes over and over again; it seems to me writing history is similarly complex, loaded with interdependencies. Mistakes are more obvious in the shop; but if they happen in the shop, they also occur when conducting research, thinking through an argument, developing explanations, and writing. This is a sobering—even fearful—thought. We usually are ignorant of what we do not know or what we missed and how we might have otherwise interpreted the information we have discovered. Did our hypothesis blind us to alternate interpretations or to seemingly irrelevant, but in fact important, evidence? Peer review, good editors, and colleagues who read our work are something of a safeguard, but none are a firewall. Lessons, experience, practice, mistakes, good books, and careful planning and execution make for better woodworking—and better history—but none ensure perfection.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Harvey Green, professor of history at Northeastern University and master woodworker, is the author most recently of Wood: Craft, Culture, History (2006). Common-place asked him to reflect on the ways his craft shapes his practice as historian and vice versa.

The pedagogy of national identity in a hybrid age

When I made the decision to teach a new civics elective at my school this spring, I did so believing it would be an iconoclastic act. To be sure, such courses—more typically their close cousin, the AP government curriculum offered by the College Board—are staples of many American high schools. Moreover, the subject of citizenship has been a fruitful focus of recent interdisciplinary scholarship in the work of writers like Stephen Carter, Linda Kerber, and Robert Putnam. So I can’t claim much originality for the idea behind the course.

Still, I embarked in the belief that at my progressive school, no less in society at large, the subject of civics retains more than a faintly musty air. People rightly associate it with mastering mechanical facts about the Constitution, as well as none-too-subtle indoctrination. And in a firmly secular milieu in which even the faintest whiff of evangelism is regarded with distaste, if not suspicion, the traditional goals of such courses—inculcating values like patriotism—strike some as antithetical to the project of fostering critical thinkers who question authority, a need that seems at least as pressing in the aftermath of the Iraq War as it did in the countercultural heyday of the Vietnam War. Part of my thinking, frankly, is that among the adolescents I teach, civics is so retro that it’s on the cusp of getting sexy.

But such marketing considerations were not primary in my decision to offer the course. Actually, much of my motivation came from other classes I’ve been teaching, like the U.S. history survey. That course, while sequenced chronologically, is also thematically centered on the concept of freedom. So, for example, the first unit is “Freedom and Empire (1492-1763),” “Freedom and Independence (1763-1789),” “Freedom and Slavery (1789-1865),” and so on. Much of the conceptual apparatus is derived from Orlando Patterson’s magisterial Freedom in the Making of the Modern World, in which we make distinctions such as those between sovereign, civic, and personal freedom; positive and negative freedom; and freedom versus liberty. Yet after teaching this course a few times now, I find myself having difficulty comprehending freedom as anything but a synonym for power—the latter a much more concrete concept and one much less redolent of the positive valences that seem to attach themselves so persistently to the former. Once an exceptionalist out of the old American Studies tradition, I now have a hard time distinguishing between this empire and others, whether they’re “empires for liberty” or not.

Yet I’ve also found myself feeling restless, and even irritated, with the reluctance on the part of some smart students to make any kind of active value judgments at all. I’m pitching in this semester to cover a section of an over-enrolled Nazi Germany elective, one session of which was recently devoted to the subject of propaganda at the time Adolf Hitler became chancellor. These students grasp very quickly the proposition that presenting any kind of information is at least implicitly a form of manipulation. And they were unfazed when I showed them a video on behalf of Barack Obama’s candidacy for president and asked if it was propaganda: of course. It’s when I asked them to evaluate the difference in content between the Nazi posters and the video clip and to render a judgment about the moral value of one document versus another that some of them seemed to have trouble. You go to the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, I told them, not the Ethical Relativism Fieldston School. That these people (many of them Jewish, no less) could hesitate in rendering moral judgments strikes me as a real problem, especially given the reality of people here and abroad willing to make harder, faster, and firmer judgments on the basis of much less information.

Indeed, it will often happen that students in my classes reply to an intentionally ambiguous question by answering, “It depends on where you’re coming from.” To which I rejoin, “And where are you coming from?” After some squirming, I’ll usually get an answer. I realize, of course, that my students may not be entirely representative and that there are broad swaths of this country where people are much more clear about their identity, civic and otherwise, than these kids. But I’ve been around enough settings, both at the university and high-school level, to know that a vein of passive ignorance slices across many demographic categories. To a great degree, it’s a function of their youth: it’s only when they leave home for college that they begin to recognize the peculiar contours of their racial, religious, geographic, or other experiences, much less embrace them.

Actually, this situation says less about kids than the adults responsible for their educations. Viewed through this lens, it’s clear that an emphasis on civic education has waxed and waned over the course of the past two centuries. If one can speak of a golden age in this context, it would have to be the early republic, when books like The New England Primer and Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book literally created a civil religion in which Jesus Christ and George Washington were on the same page. Without minimizing the sectarian or sectional tensions that accompanied this highly self-conscious project of nation-building, the William Holmes McGuffeys of this world had little doubt regarding the value of their mission or its ultimate success. We can never know just how the children who were spoon-fed his so-called readers felt about them, but the astonishing durability of these books—some were still being used in the early twentieth century—bespeaks a clarity that we can barely comprehend, let alone embrace.

Indeed, notwithstanding the resolutely upbeat tone of most civics textbooks, a sense of anxiety lurks in the margins of those published in subsequent generations. This anxiety is especially apparent in the Progressive Era. The push for “Americanization” in the decades after 1900 resulted in a huge outpouring of new textbooks, the (sometimes captive) audiences for which ranged from small children to assimilating adults. Produced against a backdrop of surging immigration, they pressed for a normative notion of American identity at a time of often fierce ethnic and religious tribalism.

By midcentury, the civic challenge facing educators seemed more ideological than cultural and the threats more global than parochial. It was during this period that the Pledge of Allegiance (introduced by Francis Bellamy in 1892) received a makeover—the phrase “under God,” which now followed “one nation,” was also added to U.S. currency—and “the American Way of Life” was juxtaposed implicitly against the alien allure of Nazism and (especially) Communism. Yet the very success of that way of life, premised as it was on consumer capitalism and personal fulfillment (the relationship between the two often maddeningly ambiguous), generated suspicions about the efficacy and even honesty of appeals to patriotic orthodoxy. So did the omissions of that way of life in which a sense of cohesion seemed to rest on irreducible exclusion. In the wake of the civil rights and antiwar movements, the whole notion of civics had become for many a contemptible joke.

This legacy of the ’60s has proven surprisingly durable and surfaced immediately in my own civics course. To get the ball rolling, I bought a dozen or so used textbooks from Amazon.com and distributed them largely at random on the first day of class. Among my favorites: The Land of Fair Play (1994), The Christian Citizen (1965), and The Pursuit of Happiness (1929), which, like a number of these books, was intended for use in a specific state, in this case Oklahoma. I asked the students to leaf through their particular book and analyze its handling of a given topic, comparing the discussion of that topic with the way they’ve been taught to understand it during in their own childhoods. With instinctive poststructuralist élan, they zeroed right in on the usual suspects. One student, for example, noted the absence of the word “slavery” in the index of his 1918 book. Another was struck by the use of the word “savages” to describe Native Americans in his 1951 text. A third was amused by a 1934 text reporting that “The Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1920, placed women on an equality with men the country over, so far as suffrage is concerned.”

The challenge for my students was to move from articulating the limits of other worldviews to articulating the contours of their own. Some didn’t seem to recognize, for example, that values like diversity and multiculturalism are no less social constructions than older civic virtues like republican motherhood or, for that matter, racial segregation. Or, if they did, they still found it difficult to make a historically contingent case for such commitments, recognizing their limits but affirming their value. Of course, one reason for this is that the very request to do so is asking a lot of a seventeen-year-old, much less someone a multiple of that age. Another is that it would involve recourse to still other values (loyalty, for example) that have been largely absent from much of the discussion in recent decades, for reasons that are certainly understandable but perhaps less certainly defensible.

Meanwhile, the historical sands shift beneath our carbon footprints. One example of this is the generational tide of race. I’m told that, depending on age, somewhere between one-third and one-half of the student body at my school who self-identify as students of color claim a multiracial background. It’s far from clear what this means or will mean. And it’s worth remembering that we are in any case still talking about a fraction of a fraction, since racial minorities only make up about a quarter of the student body in a school, like many of its kind, of highly manicured diversity. But I do think that some of the metaphors we’ve been using to replace “melting pot,” like “tossed salad” or “gorgeous mosaic,” are themselves growing unsatisfactory, suggesting a sense of segmentation at odds with the lived experience of growing numbers of people in the age of Obama, even of those who are not considered “of color”—a phrase that, as a presumably “colorless” person, I much dislike. Here I’m reminded of a prescient assertion by Frederick Douglass: “I would not be understood as advocating intermarriage between the races. I do not say that what I say should come to pass, but what I think likely to come to pass, and what is inevitable.” The day may be coming when being black or Latino will be comparable (though surely not identical) to being Irish or Italian, to name two elements of what used to be known as my own “racial” stock. John Calhoun’s worst nightmare now seems plausible enough, even if, as history teaches us, we should be chaste in our sense of confidence about the future.

Indeed, I’m always mindful that the entire notion of national identity itself may be destined for the ash heap of history. We live in an age of particularism; we live in an age of globalism, of gumbo and Honda. Whether or not the thing called a nation-state can survive such an age is an open question. But as long as there are people who continue to understand themselves in terms of some larger social category, a searching examination of that notion seems like a good idea. Indeed, it’s what I understand the very word education to mean, civic or otherwise. For now, at least, that thing we call the United States of America has possibilities worth talking about—and, yes, even being quizzed about every now and then.

Further Reading:

Important recent books with a strong civic dimension include Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York, 1994); Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Linda Kerber, No Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York, 1999); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000); Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington, Slavery and the Making of a Nation (New York, 2006); and Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (New York, 2007). My use of the theme of freedom in my U.S. history survey was shaped by Orlando Patterson, Freedom, Vol. I: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York, 1991). Michael Lind invokes Frederick Douglass in a provocative discussion of racial amalgamation in The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York, 1995).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, where he serves on the board of trustees. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003) and Imperfect Presidents: Tales of Misadventure and Triumphs, to be published in a paperback edition this summer by Palgrave Macmillan.

Lewis Evans and cartographic consumer culture, 1750-1775

Reading the Map as Object

What do maps published in the two decades leading up to the American Revolution want us to know? Judging by titles alone (A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America, for example), they want us to know three things: the location of a place (“in America”), its name (“Middle British Colonies”), and its national allegiance (“British”). By using labels such as “a General Map” they also announce certain genre-specific conventions: namely, that maps depict three-dimensional physical space in a vastly reduced, two-dimensional textual format; that they use dot and line markings to produce images of an unmistakable gestalt; and last but not least, that because this kind of visual representation is the result of geodetic surveys and mathematical calculations, maps—even the faulty ones—represent “reality” defined by emergent scientific standards of truthfulness.

If we go by map advertisements, however, the question “What do maps want us to know?” changes quite a bit. Considering the following example published on August 14, 1755, in the Pennsylvania Gazette, we’d have to say what maps (and their makers) really want us to know is that they are multiform and highly saleable objects.

Just published, A General MAP of the MIDDLE BRITISH COLONIES, in AMERICA: Viz. Virginia, Mariland, Delaware, Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, Connecticut, the Country of the Confederate Indians, &c. by LEWIS EVANS.

To be sold in Philadelphia, by the AUTHOR in Arch street; In New-York at the Printing-Office in Beaver street; at New Haven by Mr. JAMES PARKER; And in Cohanzy by Mr. EBENEZER MILLER, junior.

With advertisements like this, the cartographer Lewis Evans (c. 1700-1756) made history in North America for reasons that were as cartographic as they were uncartographic. A General Map of the Middle British Colonieswas one of the first American-made maps to receive fast approval from critics as different as Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson. Appearing just in time to serve those following the events of the French and Indian War, the popular map was quickly pirated on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, one measure of the map’s success was its staying power: it became a staple reference text consulted by map makers, travelers, authors, and politicians before, during, and after the Revolution.

Yet, just as the map’s primary appeal was driven by content (information was locally collected prompting many positive comments about cartographic accuracy), its attractiveness can also be explained by its material form. As indicated by the advertisement, Evans sold his map plain or colored, in single, loose sheets or folded and bound into a companion pamphlet entitled Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays (1755). According to other ads in the Pennsylvania Gazette, Evans diversified the map’s material form even further, offering it on different paper grades and on “silk.”

In addition to shaping the map’s physical form, material versatility influenced its internal content. On the face of it, A General Map of the Middle British Colonies depicts a media struggle in which words, numbers, and images vie for the map reader’s attention. Cartographic signs and symbols dominate the space provided by the map’s “imperial”-sized paper format of 49 x 64 centimeters. Mixed into areas not covered by curved river lines and stippled mountain marks are selected, non-cartographic inserts. Lengthy verbal narratives are shown in imitation of the two dominant modes of written transmission: they imitate manuscript (indicated by cursive fonts) and print (variably sized typography). Other modes of textual transmission, such as pictures and numbers, are included in the margins. Reading clockwise, the map balances a heraldic image (upper left corner) and a baroque frame design (title cartouche, center top) against professional symbols like the compass rose (lower right) and a densely packed statistical table (far lower right).

The tensions underlying these different modes of mediation get resolved in a second visual narrative. The Evans map creates a trompe l’oeil effect that suggests the map is less a means of communication than a material object. The dedicatory prose and the inset map in the upper right corner are drawn to look as if they were loose papers stuck inside the map’s frame (or here, grid). The note’s graphic imitation of rolled-up paper corners creates the illusion of material wear and tear. It thus establishes a visual imperative for the expected usefulness of the map. The Evans map presents itself here optically as a medium that is about the materiality of cartography, in this case about the fact that the map’s specific cartographic knowledge is contingent upon the materiality of paper and the range of paper uses: the map’s overall image combines attributes of a scribbler’s note pad and an engraver’s drafting table; at the same time, it hints at other materials associated, for example, with a carte de visite, a painter’s stretched canvas, or the cluttered surface of a reading desk.

A General Map of the British Middle Colonies, then, has as much to do with the production of geographic knowledge as with the production of print commodities. In examining Evans’s advertisements in relation to his map’s design we discover that the special emphasis on single-sheet paper objects corresponds with the growing consumption of large-sized printed products ranging from poster-like broadsides to picture prints to “hanging” paper. Single-sheet broadsides and prints (or “[wood]cuts”) easily outsold maps. But a closer look at printing advertisements shows that, during the same year Evans published A General Map, Philadelphians witnessed something of a local cartographic boom. During the 1740s, ads posted by bookstores, print shops, and general stores used the word “map” in about three ads per year. After 1750, the average number per year doubled and even tripled, showing two distinct peaks in cartographic advertising: twenty-two ads were published in 1754-1755 (the year Evans published his map) and twenty-five ads, in 1760-1761.

In the greater scheme of colonial advertising these numbers are relatively small but not insignificant when compared to the number of ads selling household goods. On the one hand, maps could be found listed with luxury items. Hence, the following ad from a 1750 edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette: “neat japann’d tea tables and corner cupboards, newest fashion’d silver snuf boxes, fine christal and garnet sleeve buttons set in silver and gold, best Hill’s silver watches, maps of Canaan, England, London and Pensylvania, fine long whale bone, etc.” On the other hand, maps were also offered with more mundane household objects. From a 1754 Pennsylvania Gazette: “Irish linen and Lancaster sheeting; variety of maps and fishing tackle, English RED CLOVER SEED, with sundry other goods, too tedious to mention.”

More frequently maps were advertised along with stationary paper, books, and pictorial prints. This pattern of advertizing was not specific to the Pennsylvania Gazette. Between 1750 and 1775 colonial newspapers generally located maps with goods that in turn were associated with literacy and refinement, in particular with interior decoration and visual culture. It was the unspoken assumption of ads like the one excerpted above that if a map is for sale it is also available for inspection. Yet, as David Bosse has shown, the various commercial venues that sold maps—such as stationers, book sellers, and general storekeepers—rarely displayed more than one map, if they displayed maps at all. A similar lack of map displays can be found in official administrative buildings. Existing inventories show that only a couple of colonial assembly halls—those in Boston and Philadelphia—displayed large maps. In short, though “map galleries” were familiar in Europe’s cultural capitals, there were none in the colonies.

However, the story of colonial map displays changes significantly when we look at interior spaces of public and private buildings reserved for the rites of conviviality and sociability.

Patrons of taverns and coffee houses would have seen frequent map displays; in one instance, a dozen maps were hanging on the walls of a York County tavern in Virginia. But these numbers pale when compared to those in colonial homes. In 1743, the house of the Salem merchant, Samuel Browne, displayed twenty-nine maps in the “lower entry room” and another sixteen in the “Chamber entry.” These numbers are exceptional. Yet, they indicate certain patterns surrounding the exhibition of maps. For example, the Philadelphia register of wills shows that while maps were not owned as frequently as, say, a “looking glass” or “pictures,” they tended to be listed with fair regularity and when recorded tended to come in multiples. “John Fox’s Will” simply lists “5 Mapps” (Register of Wills Philadelphia, November 20, 1749). The “Inventory of the Moneys Goods & Chattels Late the Estate of Richard Brockdeu” is more specific: “In Back Parlor: Looking Glass 3—15—0/ Ten Glas’d Pictures 3—0—0/ Two Maps Fram’d 0—15—0″ (July 21, 1756). And so is the “Inventory of the Goods and Chattels later the Estate of Judith Benezet . . . Widow,” which records “10 Looking Glasses including Sconces and 1 weather Glass 18—19—0/ a parcel of Pictures, Maps and painted canvas 4—15—0” (1765). If we analyze wills and registers in terms of socio-economic status, the pattern continues to be roughly the same though involving fewer maps as the assessed household value declines. Indeed, while we almost expect to find maps in upper class households, it may come as a surprise to discover that wills listing map objects show a fairly even distribution among households of high and low value.

The Map as Decorative Object

Evidence gleaned from wills and inventories demonstrates how from the midcentury onwards maps were absorbed into colonial homes less for geographic information, than as decorative objects. The most visible maps were wall displays, exhibited in domestic quarters earmarked for both sociable entertainment and solitary retreat. The wills of Philadelphians indicate that maps could be found in front, middle, and back parlors, in downstairs and upstairs hallways, studies, and even bedrooms. The Virginia Gazette documents the most likely distribution of maps inside the domestic space in ads like this one: “a very large Map (being Five Feet long, and Four Feet broad on Two Sheets of Elephant Paper), it’s not only Useful, but Ornamental, for Gentleman’s Halls, Parlours, or Staircases” (September 9-16, 1737).

In these spaces, wooden frames, glass panes, and hanging mechanisms such as rollers effectively turned maps of different sizes and qualities into “informal” wall maps (only the well-to-do could afford “formal” wall maps, which included multiple sheets and special decorative border designs). Once a map became a wall-hanging, it entered the material world of wall furniture. In that world, wall maps competed with other conspicuously sized paper objects, ranging from picture prints to wall paper. They also competed with textiles and fabrics, such as window curtains and “painted canvas,” especially if the wall map was a transfer print on linen or silk. When taken together, a wall map’s frame and pictorial quality elicited dialogues with images and materials provided by the visual arts, including genre paintings and portraits.

The decorative integration of maps did not stop with vertical walls. According to ads published in the Pennsylvania Gazette between 1750 and 1775, map displays occupied many of the horizontal spaces of colonial interiors. Fold-out book maps and folio atlases were consulted on tables and book stands where they served educational as well as decorative functions. Spaces such as the study and library required special shelves for storing the rolled sheets of large maps. Turning to colonial parlors and other spaces housing the rituals of sociability, we find that “geographical playing cards” brought miniaturized maps to the gaming table, not to mention to the card player’s chests. A different proximity between maps, map users, and social behavior was established in parlors where young women created needlework maps for future wall displays. In 1773 Philadelphians witnessed the arrival of a new textile fashion in the form of “map handkerchiefs.” By then an ad catering to those interested in parlor room décor had proffered “a most curious SCREEN, adorned with a Map of the Globe, Orbs, the Countries of Europe, &c.” The ad that is missing in this survey of cartographic ware is one advertizing the British-made Meissen figurine called the “Map Seller” (produced between about 1745 and 1769).

What does this all mean? The quick and easy answer is that maps were one of the prized “baubles” of British America. If we consider the increase of map ads after 1750, the widespread display of maps in public and private spaces, not to mention the maps’ repackaging from magazine insert to over-mantel decoration to dress fashion, it becomes all too apparent that maps were not only commodified objects but objects that actively participated in America’s first consumer revolution. In this context, the Evans ad and the map itself become examples of savvy product placement and the integration of cartography into the world of consumer goods. At the same time, Evans’s over-determined effort to depict the map in relation to other media suggests a carto-material culture that is not only subject to colonial market forces but that turns upon a widespread understanding of maps as decorative objects. Pairing this with the maps’ general presence in domestic settings, we catch a glimpse of how colonial attitudes towards cartography were informed as much by the codes of refinement as by a desire for a material experience of maps. All things considered, the Evans map now becomes an example of a sensuous understanding of cartography in which maps become prized objects vital to the experience of early American material life.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Martin Brückner, associate professor in the English department and Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware, is the author of The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006). His current book project explores the social life of maps in North America before the Civil War.

Mary Wilkes Hayley and celebrity in the early United States

Mary Wilkes Hayley was an ugly shrew. At least that is how the few historians who take notice of the sister of John Wilkes, the famous London radical, would have it. Mrs. Hayley (c. 1728-1808), as she was generally known, came to the United States in 1784 and stayed for eight years. During her sojourn, the sister of one of America’s great heroes may have been the first person to experience that fabled fifteen minutes of American fame. Her celebrity faded almost as quickly as it rose. Stardom needs constant tending, and in America, Mrs. Hayley dropped the ball.

In her day, Mrs. Hayley had a knack for being noticed. She reportedly raced around London in her chariot, always insisting on “breakneck speeds” from her coachman. She routinely went to trials at London’s famous courthouse, the Old Bailey, where she would sit in a place reserved for her. “When,”—everyone who writes about Mrs. Hayley repeats this tidbit—”the discussion of the trial was of such a nature that decorum, and indeed the judges themselves desired women to withdraw, she never stirred from her place, but persisted in remaining to hear the whole with the most unmoved and unblushing earnestness of attention.” Like her rakish brother, Mrs. Hayley “never permitted any ideas of Religion, or even of delicacy, to impose a restraint upon her observations.” She shared other traits with her brother: she was intelligent, witty, a good conversationalist, and, also like Wilkes, ugly. She had one brown tooth and looked so much like a man that someone who had never met John Hancock once assumed Mrs. Hayley to be her friend Hancock.

She was also a political ally of her brother. His fame came from fighting for liberty—and for being a libertine. John Wilkes’s first strike against government abuse of civil liberties came when he challenged general warrants (arrest warrants that specified neither the individual to be arrested nor the particular crime, thereby giving free rein to arresting agents). Wilkes (1725-1797) had been elected to the House of Commons in 1757 but had made no mark until he began publishing an opposition newspaper, the North Briton. In the forty-fifth issue of the paper, which appeared in April of 1763, Wilkes attacked the treaty ending the Seven Years’ War. Britain had defeated France in the war and had gained many French territories in the peace settlement. Nevertheless, critics of the government, including Wilkes, made much of the treaty’s perceived leniency toward the French. The audacious Wilkes, however, went farther than others by casting doubt on the probity of the king himself. As soon as his views appeared in the famous North Briton, no. 45, the government, now under the leadership of George Grenville, had him arrested for seditious libel. The arrest was carried out using a general warrant, and Wilkes immediately contested the warrant’s legality. Over the next few years, the courts came to accept his position. Meanwhile, he was expelled from Parliament for the alleged seditious libel and also prosecuted for publishing the obscene parody Essay on Woman. As his legal troubles mounted, Wilkes fled to France.

He returned from exile in 1768 and went first to the home of his sister and her second husband, George Hayley. Wilkes soon reentered the political fray, getting elected as MP for Middlesex (Greater London), first in March 1768 and then a few more times over the next year. But the government continued its assault on the notorious politician, repeatedly denying him his seat. This violation of voters’ rights—the government was denying Wilkes’s electors their will—cost Wilkes’s enemies dearly. Partly because of the ensuing controversy, the government of Prime Minister Grafton collapsed in 1770. Meanwhile, the indefatigable Wilkes exploited his popularity to get elected as a London alderman and later as the city’s mayor. Wilkes had made a name for himself by championing liberty in the general warrants and voters’ rights issue. In the early 1770s, he furthered his reputation as civil libertarian by forcing the government to allow parliamentary debates to be reported in the newspapers.

Wilkes’s fights against government power in the 1760s and 1770s coincided, of course, with the events that preceded the American Revolution. The Sugar Act, the Stamp Act crisis, the declaration of parliamentary supremacy over America, the arrival of British troops in Boston, the Boston Massacre (which was strikingly similar to the earlier St. George’s Fields Massacre, in which British government soldiers killed seven demonstrators protesting the incarceration of Wilkes in the nearby King’s Bench Prison), the Tea Act, and the Coercive Acts occurred between 1764 and 1774. Not surprisingly, then, many Americans saw in the Wilkesites English allies in the fight against government corruption and constitutional failure. They were all, American patriots believed, fighting for imperiled “English liberties.” In recognition of the common cause, Americans sent gifts to Wilkes and often invoked the number “45” in politically symbolic acts. Moreover, Americans, such as the Boston Sons of Liberty, corresponded with Wilkes in the hope that he would help force the government to reconsider its obnoxious policies. The astute politico reciprocated Americans’ admiration by speaking out on their behalf in Parliament, although after the colonists declared their independence, Wilkes’s support for them waned. Like other opposition politicians, he came to accept independence less as a matter of principle than of political expediency.

Wilkes’s brother-in-law George Hayley, also a London alderman and a member of Parliament, shared his famous relative’s initial sympathy for the American cause, although perhaps for different reasons. Hayley had substantial business ties to New England merchants including John Hancock and the Brown family of Rhode Island; in 1769, Hayley’s partnership, Hayley and Hopkins, arranged the insurance for a slaving voyage of John Brown. For Hayley, the imperial crisis was simply bad for business.

In 1781, George Hayley died. Hayley’s friend and fellow merchant Gilbert Deblois, an American Loyalist living in London, supposed that since Mrs. Hayley was “much taken up in the Gay world,” she would not continue her husband’s business, as widows often did. To Deblois’s “Surprize,” however, Mrs. Hayley did carry on her husband’s affairs and soon distinguished herself as a tough-minded businesswoman. “[S]he seems not to feel for any Body or thing but herself,” Deblois wrote. For in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, as American merchants struggled to manage their debts, she showed no sympathy in demanding payment. Mrs. Hayley pressured Deblois not to “Engag[e] in the American business here untill [his balance] is paid.” Across the water, a Rhode Island merchant also learned that Mrs. Hayley was a hard-nosed creditor when she refused him an extra two months to pay his debt. Her position, she explained to the beleaguered American, was simply a function of the market. If he could find better terms elsewhere, he was welcome to pursue them.

Mrs. Hayley was more than tough. She had pluck too. Her husband’s estate was owed substantial funds by various American merchants. And in 1784, Mrs. Hayley resolved to collect those debts in person. Her decision to travel for business did not make her unique. Businesswoman Elizabeth Murray of Boston, for instance, crossed the Atlantic to buy merchandise for her shop. But, as the press (which found ideal copy in this colorful lady’s life) made clear, Mrs. Hayley’s trip was no small shopkeeper’s errand. “This lady,” one paper reported, “has outstanding debts there to the amount of more than 20,000 pounds, and has the good sense and spirit to be her own attorney.” Too many London merchants, the account seemed to suggest, had relied on impotent agents to collect American debt. Taking a very different tack, another paper mocked Mrs. Hayley: A gentlelady traveling on business would set sail with a cargo of fripperies “so judiciously selected as to be capable of furnishing a new colony in the West, if Mrs. Hayley should be disposed to plant one.”

In May 1784, Mrs. Hayley arrived in Boston. Before she set sail, she had already made a savvy decision to shape Americans’ perceptions of her. According to a newspaper report, she had bought the American frigate, the Delaware, which had been captured by Britain during the Revolutionary War, and had renamed it the United States. (It sailed under Captain James Scott, who was often employed by John Hancock.) The stunt paid off. Hayley’s arrival in Boston was reported in newspapers from New England to South Carolina. Here, Americans were seeing somebody very different from the woman they met through business correspondence or the London press. This visitor was neither an aggressive merchant nor an object of ridicule but an enlightened friend of the new republic.

As Abigail Adams wrote, “nothing but the ardent desire she had to visit a Country so distinguished for its noble and ardent defence of the rights of Mankind could have tempted her at her advanced age to have undertaken a sea voyage.” “Sister of WILKES, who first in virtue’s cause/Stood forth the Champion of insulted love/Accept from Freedom’s Sons, the grateful strain/Which bids thee welcome to Columbia’s reign,” read a poem in The (Boston) Gentleman and Lady’s Town and Country Magazine, hailing her arrival. And when Mrs. Hayley bought a home in Boston, it was not as hard-driving merchant that the city welcomed her but as the sister of the famed defender of liberty. “The Sister of the celebrated John Wilkes” has “chosen this Place as one of the principal Seats of her Residence in America,” news reports from Boston boasted.

Ever alert to burnish her image, in October 1784, on the third anniversary of Lord Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, Mrs. Hayley commemorated the American victory with “a very brilliant firework” display in her garden. She again signaled her political sympathies when, with much pomp, she presented John Hancock with a new chariot. The gesture, one newspaper explained, “was a mark of her respect for the good conduct of this great patriot during the war.” In addition, she helped fund a variety of public and charitable projects—a very uncommon role for a woman. She contributed to a meeting house in Charlestown; gave three pounds to a fund for improvements to the Boston Common; was a founding member of the Massachusetts Humane Society, an organization devoted to the rescue and resuscitation of drowning victims; donated blankets to Boston prisoners and wood to Boston’s poor. She also won acclaim for supporting the young country’s artists. “Mrs. Hayley, the friend of civil liberty,” was “a patroness of the arts . . . A well chosen collection of pictures, the production of American artists,” decorated her home, said a “private letter from Boston” (obviously meant for public consumption) reprinted in newspapers. Through her patronage and beneficence, Mrs. Hayley made herself a fixture in New England. Money bought reputation, this shrewd operator knew. Moreover, with her largess, she may have tempered some of the indignation her debt collecting elicited. “Madam Hayly comeing [sic] to America, has sunk the Spirits of Many, as well as their Purses,” a friend wrote to Abigail Adams, and “few of our Merchants have escaped” her. By returning some of her wealth to the community, Mrs. Hayley could mollify Americans—especially those patriots who shared her family’s well-known politics but who also resented the power of their British creditors. The latter was, of course, a significant factor in the America’s departure from the empire.

In 1786, Mrs. Hayley married for the third time. Her new husband, Patrick Jeffrey, was a merchant and twenty years her junior. Jeffrey did very well by the marriage. Until legislative changes in the mid-nineteenth century, a woman’s property automatically became the property of her husband on marriage unless the couple made alternate arrangements in a prenuptial agreement—which the Jeffreys had not. “Mr Jeffries [sic] keeps the Keys now of Course being the head of the Family,” commented a correspondent to Abigail Adams after telling her about Mrs. Hayley’s remarriage. Samuel Breck, a Bostonian who as a youth had known Mrs. Hayley, made a harsher judgment. “Mrs. Hayley gave her hand and fortune [to Jeffrey]. Out of sixty or seventy thousand pounds sterling she did not reserve a shilling for herself.”

Not surprisingly, the marriage soon collapsed. In November 1792, perhaps prompted by fear that the Revolutionary crisis in France would soon make oceanic travel dangerous, the sister of John Wilkes returned to England. She was to spend her last years in the resort town of Bath before her death in 1808. When Mrs. Hayley died, newspapers in New England remembered her for “the benevolence of her mind and her extensive charities.” Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century recollections of New England life also recalled her as a “star” of Boston society. But other than brief anecdotes in biographies of her brother and the occasional mention in other histories, Mrs. Hayley has been mainly forgotten.

In part, perhaps, Mrs. Hayley stopped serving a purpose for Americans. When she came to the United States in 1784, less than a year after the signing of the peace treaty by which Britain accepted its loss of the thirteen colonies, Americans needed her. The “ardent desire” of the sister of the celebrated John Wilkes to see the new nation affirmed Americans’ decision to withdraw from the British Empire. Mrs. Hayley’s presence “in climes, where Liberty abides,” in the words of the poem in The Gentleman and Lady’s Town and Country Magazine, assured Americans that they were more than the citizens of a fractious union of weak states in a world of warring empires. They were architects of an exciting new political order.

Perhaps too, Mrs. Hayley, like so many other celebrities and notables who visited the United States immediately after the Revolutionary War, helped alleviate fears of urban elites that the cost of independence would be social and cultural isolation. The “blind philosopher” Dr. Henry Moyes, a Scotsman who gave popular lectures on chemistry and who also arrived in 1784 (ironically, he had traveled on the same ship as Mrs. Hayley), drew audiences in the hundreds up and down the eastern seaboard. Other notable visitors who arrived in the mid-1780s included Catherine Macaulay, the English radical and member of the Wilkes-Hayley circle in London; Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan leader of the Latin American struggle for independence; and Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, a French philosophe, antislavery leader, and later revolutionary.

But the early Mrs. Hayley—the independent-minded, culturally sophisticated, indomitable woman—quickly gave way to a very different Mrs. Hayley, one who sacrificed her wealth and celebrity for a dubious marriage. During her last years in England, according to Samuel Breck, Mrs. Hayley lived on no more than “a meagre allowance.” Fame and money, it seems, were inseparable, in republic and monarchy alike. Whatever commitment this skillful businesswoman and political radical may have had to the founding ideals of the United States, at the end of the day her detachment from this fundamental fact of Anglo-American life cost Mrs. Hayley her reputation. Had she been more strategic about her marriage, more willing to place financial self-interest before marital fantasy, she might have endured as one of the young republic’s great icons.

Further Reading:

For further reading on Mrs. Hayley and people around her, see John Almon, The Correspondence of John Wilkes, with His Friends, Printed from the Original Manuscripts, in which are Introduced Memoirs of His Life (London, 1805); William Beloe, The Sexagenarian; Or, The Recollections of a Literary Life, 2nd ed. (London, 1818); John Bullard, The Rotches (New Bedford, Mass., 1947); Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, 2006); William M. Fowler Jr., The Baron of Beacon Hill (Boston, 1980); James B. Gedges, The Browns of Providence Plantation (Providence, R.I., 1968); George Lyman Kittredge, The Old Farmer and His Almanack (1920; rpt. New York, 1967); Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (New York, 1996). On Wilkes and America, see Pauline Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 20 (1963): 373-395; John Sainsbury, “The Pro-Americans of London, 1769-1782,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978): 423-454.

For histories of female contemporaries of Mrs. Hayley, see Patricia Cleary, Elizabeth Murray: A Women’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America (Amherst, Mass., 2000); Kate Davies, Catherine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Oxford, 2005) (Davies mentions Mrs. Hayley in a footnote); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980); see also Harriet B. Applewhite and Darlene G. Levy, Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990). On Henry Moyes, see John Anthony Harrison, “Blind Henry Moyes, ‘An Excellent Lecturer in Philosophy,'” Annals of Science 13 (1957): 109-125.

Sources I consulted on Mrs. Hayley include, L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass, 1962); L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence, Vol. 7 (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Commerce of Rhode Island, Vol. 2, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 7th ser., vol. 10 (1775-1800); Gilbert Deblois Letterbooks, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence; Readex America’s Historical Newspapers.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Amanda Bowie Moniz, a former pastry chef in New York and Washington, is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at the University of Michigan.

On September 6, 1836, Moses Brown, the famed Quaker convert, devout abolitionist, civic reformer, and member of one of Rhode Island’s leading families, died at his estate on the east side of Providence at the age of ninety-seven. Son of merchant James Brown, Moses, along with his brothers Nicholas, Joseph, and John, was a fifth-generation Rhode Islander. Indeed, the history of the Brown family is inherently connected to the history of the city of Providence and, concomitantly, to the story of Rhode Island’s participation in the international slave trade. It was this latter portion of the Brown family legacy that haunted Moses and fundamentally altered his political, social, and religious outlook.

James Brown’s sloop Mary, which set sail for Africa in 1736, made the first slave voyage from Providence. Between 1725 and 1807, Rhode Island slave merchants accounted for nearly 60 percent of all slave-trading voyages to Africa. While the Brown family’s participation in the notorious trade was relatively minor in comparison with other families in the North, it nevertheless created a profound legacy, which journalist Charles Rappleye grapples with in his new book Sons of Providence.

The disastrous 1764-1765 voyage of the Sally started Moses Brown on a decade-long spiritual and moral transformation (74). Captain Esek Hopkins’s log reports 109 of the 196 slaves purchased in Africa died from sickness or suicide or were shot during an onboard rebellion. Shortly after the death of his beloved wife Anna in 1773, Moses manumitted his slaves and joined the Society of Friends. Rappleye’s aim is simple: to tell the story of how two prominent Americans, Moses and John Brown, reconciled the persistence of American slavery with the ideals sanctioned by the Revolution.

Rappleye’s work is an engaging narrative that places two prominent and influential Rhode Islanders in the broader context of early American history. Across sixteen tightly written chapters, we follow, among other things, the rise of Providence as a major mercantile port, the role of Moses and John in the Revolution, the critical decade of the 1780s and the politics of the early republic. Rappleye is the first writer to fully detail the life of John Brown. “John’s story,” as Rappleye notes in the introduction, “has never been told—in part, perhaps, because so much of it,” such as his war profiteering and his fervent defense of slavery, which rivaled any late antebellum Southern apologist, “smacked of the unsavory” (3).

Rappleye’s mining of the Moses Brown papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society and the vast Brown Family Collection at the John Carter Brown Library is impressive. But with the good sense and keen judgment that he is well known for in journalistic circles, Rappleye moves beyond a mere chronicling of major events in the lives of his subjects to a penetrating exploration of the Brown brothers’ vituperative debate over the nature of American slavery.

By focusing on this debate, Rappleye succeeds in making the story of Moses and John Brown more intelligible in human terms than it has often appeared in other scholarly discussions. As historian John Wood Sweet notes in his insightful book, Bodies Politic, the rivalry was a microcosm of the moral and political battle over slavery that was raging in Rhode Island and most of the North after the Revolution. Rappleye argues that no “other abolitionist had to face the reality of the slave trade so close to the center of his identity; no other slave trader had to fend off so persistent and so intimate a challenge to his prerogative” (345).

The contradiction between what Moses eventually saw as the moral clarity of the case against slavery and slavery’s relentless persistence was clear evidence that the revolutionary rhetoric employed against Great Britain now needed to be directed against the peculiar institution. In 1784 Moses and the Providence Abolition Society secured passage of a manumission statute. This was a significant achievement because the economies of Newport and Washington counties depended heavily on slave labor—more heavily than even parts of Maryland and Virginia. In 1787 Moses achieved an “unmitigated triumph,” according to Rappleye, when Rhode Island became the first state to prohibit residents from participating in the slave trade (248). While other states had banned slave imports, Rhode Island went a significant step further by restricting the activity of citizens who sought to profit from the trafficking of human cargo beyond the state’s borders.

Despite its many strengths, I found Sons of Providence unsatisfying in certain areas. Rappleye’s use of the sibling rivalry narrative framework limits his ability to cover the larger context of the Brown brothers’ differences. For example, what was the meaning of the Revolution for African Americans and whites in Rhode Island in terms of their understanding of race and citizenship? How fully do the Brown brothers’ differences reflect the broader tensions over slavery and revolutionary principles?

Historian Woody Holton presents a much more sophisticated argument than Rappleye in regards to the nature of Rhode Island politics in the 1780s and the heated debate over paper money. In his new book, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Holton recognizes that John and Nicholas Brown stood to make “enormous profit” from Congress’s 1785 requisition (80). Holton points out that “hardly anyone,” including Rappleye, “remembered that the currency emission” issued by the Rhode Island legislature in May 1786 “had primarily been not a life-line thrown to debtors but a direct response to the congressional requisition of September 1785” (81).

Finally, it is clear that Moses understood the conflict between slavery and the capitalist world view, as did other Quakers such as John Woolman, but Moses, as Rappleye notes, never addressed the use of Southern cotton in his factories (290). In the pages of the Providence Gazette and Country Journal from February 1789, John fully recognized his brother’s contradictory stance. John told Moses that as a “receiver” of the benefits of slavery, he was “as bad as the thief, and the receiver” was, in John’s mind, no different from the “kidnapper” (266). Rappleye might have cast his net wider here, noting how Moses’s position squared with that of his Quaker brethren or with that of supporters of the “free produce” movement. Perhaps his antislavery posture was not quite so representative. Furthermore, while Rappleye does provide some evidence for his claim that Moses “saw blacks not just as pitiable objects for philanthropy but as equal to whites in every human capacity,” I wanted to see more than just two pages in support of this notion (340-41). As historian William M. Wiecek has noted, abolitionists Lewis Tappan and William Lloyd Garrison both understood equality in terms of “equal opportunity for blacks.” But neither abandoned their belief in the idea of racial categories. Was Moses really so different?

Further Reading:

The writing and researching of Sons of Providence coincided with work of Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. The final hundred-plus-page report, “Slavery and Justice,” which was chaired by Brown University historian James Campbell, can be accessed online. The most detailed account of Rhode Island antislavery is Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven’s The Devotion of These Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network (Boston, 2002). See also James B. Hedges’s two seminal works on the Brown family, The Browns of Providence Plantations: Colonial Years (Cambridge, Mass., 1952) and The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Nineteenth Century (Providence, 1968). Patrick T. Conley’s Democracy in Decline: Rhode Island Constitutional Development, 1776-1841 (Providence, R.I., 1977) remains the authoritative political and constitutional history of Rhode Island for the period covered. Rappleye deserves considerable credit for moving past Mack Thompson’s description of Moses as a “reluctant reformer.” Rappleye argues that Moses’s Quaker faith was instrumental in all of his social and political endeavors. See Mack Thompson’s Moses Brown: Reluctant Reformer (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1962). Traces of the Trade, a new documentary by a descendant of Rhode Island’s D’Wolf family—the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history with eighty-eight trips to the African coast—is an official 2008 competition selection at the Sundance Film Festival.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Erik J. Chaput is a Ph.D. student in early American history at Syracuse University. His dissertation is entitled “Contested Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Rhode Island: 1842-1888.”

When not on the hunt but floating about with hours to exhaust, whalemen meticulously notched images or yarn into whichever whalebone pieces were most appropriate to their particular artistic talents and creative intentions. Representing American folk art at its best, scrimshaws were and still are breathtaking sights, for “each stroke, slowly [brought a whaleman’s] vision to life” (173). In Leviathan, Eric Jay Dolin has brought his own impressive vision of American whaling to vivid life. A new sweep of the American whaling industry as good as this one mustered all of Dolin’s imaginative artistry. Grand in its size, as the book’s title implicitly suggests, Leviathan comes in at nearly four hundred pages of text. Dolin has synthesized an immense amount of detail and source material, both primary and secondary; included beautiful illustrations; and balanced realism with romanticism. All of this makes Leviathan a fine and accessible study of American whaling, from the industry’s origins to its eventual fall.

Dolin divides the history of American whaling into three chronological periods. American whaling’s origins were in New England and areas around Cape Cod; hunters in small watercraft pursued right whales from shore. By the eighteenth century, whaling in Nantucket had become a highly lucrative deep-sea industry, with voyages extending for years at a time and with vessels traveling as far as South Pacific waters. During the American Revolution, whaling went into an economic downswing, just like other American blue-water enterprises. At war’s end, the whaling industry began to prosper, out of new hubs on the mainland such as New Bedford, Massachusetts. Whalers took greater economic risks to turn major profits: expanding their hunting grounds and securing foreign and domestic workforces for the Pacific. Ultimately, American entrepreneurs created a mid-nineteenth-century version of a global economic enterprise. This was the golden age of American whaling. From the Civil War through the early twentieth century, the American whaling industry—faced with new, crippling economic competition at home and overseas, along with diminishing numbers of whales—spun towards extinction.

Dolin’s book is divided into twenty relatively short thematic chapters. Though they vary in focus, Dolin keeps his entire narrative focused on one simple point: whaling was a capitalist enterprise dedicated to killing large animals. Though he tells much of this story from the standpoint of the hunters, he does not neglect the perspective of the hunted. In a particularly innovative chapter, Dolin focuses on the sperm whales’ bodies as sites where hunters and the hunted played out relations of power. Animals of grace and beauty but also raw ferocity, sperm whales demanded the awe and respect of pursuers. With whales as active agents in the chase, Dolin foregrounds the peculiar American relationship between whalemen and their prey.

Another strength of this book is its treatment of whaling culture. Whalemen’s songs and poems that pepper the book give Leviathan a homespun quality, one sure to attract popular readers. Whalers yearned for family members, wished for love and sex, drank and caroused in ports, and longed to prosper from any great catch. Scrimshaws had images of whales and songs or poems about the hunt, powerful expressions of the hold the industry had over whalers’ imaginations and desires. And the hold whales had over their pursuers never ended. The beasts that were part of a whaler’s social consciousness were never forgotten, as men’s recollections show. Furthermore, the structure of whaling boats and the nature of the labor, with close quarters and the collective pursuit of whales, brought whalers together as floating communities.

By the nineteenth century, urban industrialism began to undermine whaling’s distinct culture. A job many eighteenth-century seaport communities once viewed as a boy’s passage—you must try your hand at killing a whale to earn your manhood—came to be deplored as a “wage-slave” job for the working class. With more and more whalers hailing from farther flung places, captains and mates felt freer to abuse their authority. They no longer had to face the scrutiny of the whaleman’s family and friends in home ports. The Civil War, much like the Revolutionary War, brought a sharp downturn in the whaling industry. Unfortunately, the prospects of a revival after the war faced severe challenges. Dolin cites several long-term causes that doomed whaling: economic competition, shifting consumer tastes away from whale oil to gas and kerosene for illumination, and severely diminished hunting grounds. One product still brought home some money—the bowhead whales’ baleen, used in women’s corsets. Soon a better-equipped overseas industry surpassed the American whaling industry’s economic output. In the 1920s, the American whaling industry collapsed.

A narrative history can only do so much, particularly a book that covers such a long span of American history. However, Dolin largely neglects ethnicity and race in his study, two important categories of analysis that could have smoothly flowed into his narrative. He discusses the Native Americans involved with the rise of the Nantucket industry, but after that Indians are rarely mentioned, despite the fact that they continued to work on vessels well into the nineteenth century. Given Dolin’s respect for Melville’s classic, Moby Dick, it seems out of place for him to leave out stories about true-to-life Tashtegos and Queequegs. Also absent from Dolin’s story are African Americans, despite the fact that freed African slaves in the eighteenth century and African Americans in the nineteenth century filled major roles in American whaling.

One final criticism: to keep the narrative running smoothly, the text is devoid of any quantitative analysis. Considering that Leviathan is geared to a popular reading audience, the exclusion of tables is not surprising. Still, an appendix or two revealing numbers of voyages and their profitability (or lack thereof) could have buttressed Dolin’s arguments about market fluctuations over time.

Putting such criticisms aside, Leviathan is perhaps the best survey of the American whaling industry to appear in some years. In it, readers will find a fast-paced and intellectually sound narrative about the rise and demise of one of America’s most important industries.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Mark A. Nicholas is assistant professor of history at University of St. Thomas, Houston. He has published on Indians in the whaling industry. He is presently coauthoring a Native American history textbook for Prentice Hall and editing a collection of essays with Joel W. Martin concerning Indians and missionaries. He has two other Native American history books contracted for later publication.

In “our agreed upon national story,” historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes in the opening to her recent book, The Jamestown Project, the Pilgrims who settled Plymouth Plantation “are portrayed as the direct opposites” of those men and women who settled the earliest successful English colonial outpost at Jamestown. The Pilgrims, she writes, too often are portrayed as “humble people who wanted only a place to worship God as they saw fit,” as pious Christians who “lived on terms of amity with one another and with the neighboring Indians, relationships memorialized in the First Thanksgiving,” and as industrious souls who “occupied family farms and were content with self-sufficiency.” The Pilgrims, in popular consciousness, “are the forebears we prefer to acknowledge” (2).

While the large outpouring of books, both scholarly and popular, coinciding with last year’s four-hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Virginia may have done something to restore Jamestown to its national prominence, Kupperman has done a nice job in this volume of placing Jamestown in its Atlantic context. The Jamestown “project” was one of many in which adventurers could invest their money, and she describes clearly England’s growing interest in America. The storytelling in the opening chapters and her colorful biographies of figures who generally are little known in the scholarship of early English maritime expansion are welcome additions to the literature. As she has shown in her other work, Kupperman is entirely comfortable working with matters related to the English side of the Atlantic.

Kupperman, in fact, spends so much time exploring the background and the context for the Jamestown project that she only gets to the actual colony in the final third of her book. The colony, without question, had “uncertain beginnings” but, she argues, “the remarkable thing about Jamestown is that the investors and the colonists did not simply walk away from the project” (240). They persevered, and they “revised” the project. Martial law under the Virginia Company of London’s military regime kept the colony alive—barely—but something more was needed. Beginning around 1618, changes became evident. Some of these were initiated by the directors of the company, the colony’s sponsor, while the colonists initiated others by themselves. The result was a “mission and education program on a very dramatic scale” supported by donors at home, which “set the Jamestown project apart from all other English overseas engagements” (299); a commitment to “the kinds of diversified production that the company kept calling for” and not simply a single-minded devotion to commodity production; and the development “of genuine communities composed of families growing up away from Jamestown,” which, “like contemporary Plymouth in New England, increasingly resembled English country villages” (323).

From this discussion, Kupperman concludes that “the key to building English societies abroad, however messy and incomplete, was discovered in Virginia.” The colony established a model for success that all subsequent English colonies would follow: “Devolution—transfer of control to America—and fostering initiative on colonists’ own account were the answer to all those questions about how to motivate people and create new societies” (327). Private property, and the sort of political institutions represented by Virginia’s colonial assembly, provided the recipe for colonial success.

Readers familiar with the history of Jamestown will not find much that is new in this portion of Kupperman’s account, but they will be impressed by the skill with which she has integrated the recent archaeological evidence from Jamestown into her discussion. Kupperman has done a wonderful job, as well, in bringing to life individuals whose names and stories are passed by too quickly in the traditional accounts. This is an extremely well-written book infused with outstanding storytelling.

There are, however, questions that might be raised about the argument and Kupperman’s conclusions. Jamestown may well have discovered the recipe for colonial success, but other colonies did so as well, and they may have reached that point on their own. One must remember that the Plymouth separatists often saw Jamestown as an example of what not to do, even if they occasionally failed to learn themselves from the earlier colony’s mistakes. Furthermore, there can be no denying the great continuities that run through English colonization. If the means changed, the ends remained remarkably stable: to harvest the wealth of North America, establish an outpost against England’s imperial rivals, and to spread the reformed religion abroad. Many of the problems that existed before 1622 continued to shape colonial development long after that date.

And then there is the question of what, precisely, constitutes a successful colonial venture. Kupperman asserts that Jamestown was on the road to establishing a stable society, and she certainly has evidence to support her claim, but others within the seventeenth-century Atlantic community seem to have adhered to different measures of colonial success. Should we look for permanence? stability? something more? There is, in Kupperman’s account, relatively little discussion of slavery and indentured servitude in early Virginia. Slavery appears in the index only under the heading of “West Africa, slave trade.” Wasn’t bond labor, and in particular the institution of African slavery, at least in part responsible for the success of the Jamestown project? Was the denial of freedom to some essential for the survival and success of others in the colony? Certainly Kupperman is correct in arguing, as did Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan before her, that some of the servants who survived their terms of servitude managed to rise to positions of prominence in the colony. As Morgan has shown in American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), however, this upward mobility was a relatively short-lived phenomenon. Morgan argued, in what is still one of the most important discussions of seventeenth-century Virginia, that the colony’s success came only with the development of a social system that nourished the freedom of white men while at the same time making possible the unlimited exploitation of labor. Virginia achieved success only when its planters had established something approximating a herrenvolk democracy—all white men could be considered equal in Virginia because the presence of Africans and African Americans created a level beneath which no white man could ever fall.

Imperial interests in England, such as they were, also maintained a measure of success for the Virginia venture. Because Kupperman’s narrative ends so early in Virginia’s history, she does not address as closely as she might have done their understanding of the place of the Old Dominion within the empire. Given her mastery of the transatlantic dimensions of Early American history, one wishes her story had been carried farther forward in time. Certainly that James I initiated legal proceedings to take away the Virginia Company’s charter and to royalize the colony—a process that was complete by 1624—suggests that in his eyes the colony had not achieved a sufficient level of success. Indeed, it appears that by the standards of the Crown, success in Virginia would prove remarkably elusive. Order on the frontier remained always tenuous, and the king’s governors general struggled to preserve peace and order. The most significant shock to the system came in 1676, when the colony erupted in a rebellion that forced Governor Sir William Berkeley to flee to the Eastern Shore while the followers of Nathaniel Bacon torched Jamestown. Charles II, determined to restore order in his most important mainland colony, dispatched a royal commission backed by more than a thousand royal troops to crush the rebellion and restore order. The commissioners’ investigation provided ample evidence that the colony was locked in a fundamental social and political crisis. From the perspective of the Crown, the colony was not a success.

These are, of course, big questions over which historians of early Virginia have been arguing for many decades. To expect one historian to address all of them in one book is not realistic, and Kupperman is to be commended for all that she has done in this beautifully written volume. To place Jamestown in its proper Atlantic context, to explore the many other colonial “projects” with which it competed for attention and investors, to help synthesize the recent, exciting archaeological work from Jamestown, and to explain the difficulties and challenges that had to be overcome in order to plant successful colonies are all important achievements. For these reasons, and more, Kupperman’s book will be required reading for historians of Early Virginia.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Michael Leroy Oberg is professor of history at SUNY-Geneseo and author, most recently, of The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians (2007).

What did the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1801 mean for American democracy? What ideas and values followed him to the executive mansion, and what ideas and values departed with John Adams—or, more accurately, with Adams’s nemesis, Alexander Hamilton? Given the number of historians who have asked these questions before, Edward Larson’s achievement in A Magnificent Catastrophe is all the more impressive. He manages to make this familiar event both new and absorbing by appreciating its dire stakes and breathless contingencies. Through no fault of its own, Larson’s book is also very timely, because it reminds us that authoritarian government is rarely as popular as authoritarians say it is.

In some respects, this is a traditional political history that focuses on the major founders. Larson appreciates and even admires his characters, especially Jefferson and Adams. Indeed, with these two icons, he sometimes loses his critical edge: he claims, for instance, “Both men preferred farming to law or politics” (1), though they were both intensely ambitious politicians, and Jefferson was a plantation owner, not a farmer. But Larson is no hagiographer. Indeed, one of his great feats is to introduce his characters in all their flawed humanity: Jefferson, the sanguine philosopher-statesman who knew how to get past his own hypocrisies; Adams, the vain conservative who cussedly insisted on doing the right thing; Hamilton, the hot-tempered elitist who tried to bully the wrong people; and Aaron Burr, the talented playboy who dazzled some and disgusted others. More than a matter of style, the biographical pathos that Larson brings to each page enables him not only to describe but also to explain what happened during this election.

The engaging narrative works at two speeds: first, as a sequential play-by-play of the election year in each battleground state, and second, as a broader sweep over the postrevolutionary age and nation. We get a close-up look of early “electioneering” in Philadelphia and of street-by-street canvassing in New York City and then draw back to observe the fitful construction of Washington, D.C., and the aborted slave rebellion of Gabriel Prosser. We learn a great deal about the political peculiarities of each state while surveying the political landscape of the entire republic. We also learn how, when, and where High Federalism began to alienate Americans with its disturbing encroachments on the most basic forms of democracy and dissent.

Other than the date (December 3) on which the Electoral College met, there was no actual election day in 1800. Some states trusted their legislatures to choose electors; others allowed a popular vote; still others switched their method during the election year to favor the Federalist candidates, Adams and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, or the Republican challengers, Jefferson and Burr. The nascent parties thus locked horns in different ways in New York, and then Pennsylvania and South Carolina, and then Maryland, and then Rhode Island. As the results trickled in during the spring, summer, and fall of 1800, both sides kept a running tally of likely electoral votes. And all the while, Hamilton and other High Federalists conspired to dump the maddeningly moderate Adams.

The finest chapters reveal Larson’s keen eye for anecdotal detail and his deep knowledge of American religious history. His portrait of the New York City elections perfectly captures the inner culture and daily dramas of a partisan campaign: the exhausted operatives, the harried campaign headquarters, the incessant glad-handing and exhorting. Defeated in Hamilton’s backyard, the High Federalists then learned that Adams had pardoned John Fries, a Pennsylvania tax rioter they wanted to hang. As the Jeffersonians made startling gains in Pennsylvania and Maryland, as well, Federalists realized that the political center had shifted under their feet. Their fear of Jeffersonian rule grew vivid and often hysterical. If the Virginian was elected, one editorial warned, “the temples of the most high will be profaned by the impious orgies of the Goddess of Reason, personified as in France by some common prostitute” (94). Presumably, a vote for the Federalists would forestall such outbreaks of Gallic carnality.

But the outcome was always in doubt, and Larson wisely avoids a simple or synthetic explanation for Jefferson’s victory. By its very nature, this election was a series of discrete, close-run contests that played out within a general context of experimentation. The rules of the game were neither fixed nor certain, and even when Jefferson prevailed he really hadn’t; locked in a dead heat with his putative ally, Burr, the Virginian had to sweat through another round of backroom politicking before the Federalists in Congress relented in March 1801. Larson draws the curtain with a moving account of inauguration day and the divergent paths of the main figures. While the new president built a winning majority upon a broad middle ground of republican principle, Hamilton and Burr skulked to the sidelines, where they remained until the latter shot the former in 1804. Adams retired with his pride wounded but his integrity intact. He later explained himself to his old friend from Virginia before they both passed away on July 4, 1826. “It is a great day,” the New Englander noted of the nation’s jubilee. “It is a good day” (276).

Which brings us back to the question: what did Jefferson win? I should say that I read Larson’s book just after reviewing Terry Bouton’s Taming Democracy, which persuasively argues that most citizens, at least in Pennsylvania, were sorely disappointed by the ultimate outcome of the Revolution. They wanted a government dedicated to the good of the people, not the power of the nation or the wealth of the wealthy. They lost. By the mid-1790s, American statesmen agreed on a political economy that favored moneyed men in hopes of attracting investments from home and abroad. To be sure, Jefferson and his allies moderated the regressive policies of Hamilton, Robert Morris, and other trickle-down enthusiasts. But when Jefferson declared in the midst of the campaign that he was “religiously principled in the sacred discharge of [the debt] to the uttermost farthing,” we wonder if the range of political choices had already narrowed to the point where his victory did not threaten those who counted most (157). We wonder what sort of freedom there was to win.

Yet the cumulative lesson of Larson’s book is that Jefferson prevailed because he offered an alternative to the authoritarian and militaristic style of governance that the High Federalists had tried to impose. In New York City, the motivating issue for the hardscrabble immigrants who turned out to vote Jeffersonian was Federalist persecution of “enemy aliens.” In Maryland, the challengers got a late boost when the Federalists tried to wrest the power to choose electors from voters. In Virginia, the show trial and imprisonment of republican scandalmonger James Callender backfired on Federalist judges and their Sedition Act. And everywhere, the Hamiltonian tendency to wear dress swords and review soldiers ran counter to a popular spirit whose animating soul was impertinence. An unsteady amalgam of the competing desires for liberty and equality, that spirit implied a diversity of wills. It imperiled all forms of subordination and complicated each and every public measure; it was frustrating and inefficient. But it was also democratic, and that mattered then as it matters now.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

J. M. Opal is assistant professor at Colby College. He is the author of Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (2008) and is now working on a project tentatively titled, To Heal the Nations: The Search for Peace in the Early United States. He lives in Maine with his wife Holly.

Surely we’ve had enough of founders chic. Surely we don’t need another biography of a founder, “fallen” or not. Ordinarily I’d have no trouble agreeing with those statements, but in the case of Nancy Isenberg’s life of Aaron Burr, I’m willing to make an exception. Let me explain why.

When I was growing up, I spent part of the summer in Marietta, Ohio. On August afternoons I would visit the Campus Martius Museum, where I looked at dusty exhibits and absorbed the lore of “the first organized settlement in the Northwest Territory,” as Marietta liked to call itself. Some of the relics on display belonged to Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett, a strange couple who lived on an island in the Ohio River and got themselves involved in the Burr conspiracy. The conspiracy, I found out, was headed by Aaron Burr, the same Burr who killed Alexander Hamilton. Eventually, I grew up and learned more about the conspiracy from Abernethy, Malone, and other biographers and historians. None of them, though, erased the romantic story of Burr and the Blennerhassetts I’d discovered as a child. And so, in picking up Isenberg’s study of Aaron Burr, I arrived with more than the usual investment in her subject but also with a good deal of baggage and with the feeling that Burr was not exactly an A-list founder.

It is to Isenberg’s credit that her brief for the defense (Fallen Founder is very much that) convinces me I’m wrong to assume that founder biography is played out. And I’m certainly wrong, she makes clear, to see Harman Blennerhassett as the “tragic pawn” William Wirt called him at the treason trial (369). On the contrary, not only was Blennerhassett like Burr in many ways, but he was just not that important in Burr’s life. If I can now retire the unfortunate Blennerhassetts, it turns out that Burr, in Isenberg’s capable hands, is part of a story about the founding generation a good deal more interesting than the one we’re used to. His virtues, it seems, have been ignored—Isenberg says he “behaved with greater honesty and directness” (405) than his rivals Hamilton and Jefferson—and it is one of her major themes that Burr has the best feminist credentials of any of the founders.

What was he up to, this strange grandson of Jonathan Edwards? Isenberg gives us an erudite man of the Enlightenment equally skilled as an operator in New York politics. Whatever the charges leveled against him (as in connection with the gubernatorial election of 1792), Isenberg is sure they were unmerited. Clearly, he had his eye on the main chance, but then so did his contemporaries. Unlike them, though, he left little in the way of a paper trail, and trying to figure out what he had in mind, especially once he left the vice presidency in 1805, is a problem that students (including Isenberg) continue to grapple with.

The earlier years are no easier to decipher. We know what Jefferson thought Burr was doing in 1800, but what did Burr think he was doing? Isenberg absolves him of trying to supplant Jefferson. And so the question becomes, in her words, “Why did Jefferson, secure in office, decide to treat Burr as an outsider and exile him from political leadership?” (225). After the election, Burr found himself tangled in New York patronage struggles, and astute though he was, he wasn’t astute enough to come out on top in this case. Besides, for Jefferson, Burr threatened Virginia’s primacy among the Republican faithful. Burr had to go, and Jefferson had no trouble sacrificing him.

What was Burr to do, once the path to further political advancement was barred? The frontier beckoned, as it did for many, but Burr’s notions were wilder and grander than most, and he may have dreamed of arriving in the Ciudad de Mexico like a latter-day Cortes. Nevertheless, the “Burr conspiracy,” as Isenberg shows, was a fabrication by Burr’s enemies. Whatever the goals of his western adventure, they did not include dividing the United States. Isenberg may be too easy on Burr’s notion of invading New Spain (filibustering was illegal), but she’s right to insist that, whatever he intended, it wasn’t treason.

Isenberg breaks new ground in her treatment of Burr’s sexuality and the uses of sexual innuendo to destroy his career. Drawing on her essay “‘The Little Emperor’: Aaron Burr, Dandyism, and the Sexual Politics of Treason,” she explores the scurrilous journalist James Cheetham’s charges that Burr literally seduced a youthful band of followers, including Washington Irving’s brother Edward. One can imagine the use Gore Vidal would have made of this material had it come to his attention when he was writing his novel Burr. But alas for those who would add a founder to the gay pantheon, Isenberg’s Burr is relentlessly hetero.

Burr’s enemies proved all too able, with Hamilton and Jefferson doing everything in their power to destroy him and his reputation. There was something about Burr that brought out the worst in these men. “Hamilton’s charges, all along the way,” Isenberg explains in describing a pattern that began in the 1790s and ended only with the duel, “were outrageous, hypocritical, even hysterical” (263). But at least Hamilton operated more or less openly. Jefferson was another matter. Burr “did not adequately understand Jefferson” (364), who as we know was more than prepared to see him hang.

In 1807, with the end of the trial, it was over. Burr lived until 1836, but Isenberg dispatches those three decades in a chapter of thirty-eight pages, twenty of them covering the period up to his return from Europe in 1812. If other founders—Adams, Jefferson, Madison—had rich old ages, Burr’s last years are summed up with a description of a law suit or two and, inevitably, a few pages on the one woman he should never have met, Madame Jumel. Isenberg’s hero becomes a “stranger” (she quotes a contemporary), a man more suitable for fiction than inscription in the ranks of the founders. The final chapter (among the book’s best) tells us about the words invented for Burr after his death, the novels and dramas (or rather melodramas) that used his reticence to make him whatever authors wanted him to be.

Even Homer nods. Johnson would be surprised that Boswell’s first name is “Samuel” (58), just as the Danish author of Neutral Rights, J. F. W. Schlegel would be to find himself confused with the German Romantic K. F. W. Schlegel (381). Minor errors aside, Fallen Founder is a major advance in our understanding of Burr and his time. Nancy Isenberg is to be congratulated.

Further Reading:

Nancy Isenberg’s “‘The Little Emperor’: Aaron Burr, Dandyism, and the Sexual Politics of Treason” appears in Jeffrey J. Pasley et al., eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004): 129-58.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Herbert Sloan is chair of the department of history at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (1995). He is now at work on a life of Nancy Randolph—inevitably, given the size of the early republic’s elite, she and Burr knew many of the same people. He has yet to figure out whether that has any significance.

The desire for ever larger geographic scales as arbiters of historical truth should be apparent to anyone working in early American studies over the last two decades. The scholar working on a community, town, or city study is questioned on its relevance to the region. Those working on regions or towns are asked about their relevance to the nation. Those working on the nation find themselves fielding questions about the Atlantic, the hemispheric, or the transnational. Those working on the Atlantic, hemispheric, or transnational arenas are questioned on the scale of the global. Those working on the global … well, I guess the astronomical is next. To put it more pointedly, would moving forward to the universe be a return to the universal?

This caricature is a not entirely facetious response to historians’ desire for increasingly larger geographic scales. This may be the time to ask: How does the turn to the Atlantic, the hemispheric, and the transnational, with a glimmer of the global to come, in early American studies work to create a linear history of monumental scale? What are we doing in our never-ending rush to the ever-receding proper scale of early American history?These are questions worth asking, not least because our fascination with big, bigger, biggest has political consequences. If we take specific geographic scales as proper, as correctives to the distorted frames associated, most often, with the nation, we risk naturalizing contemporary political and capitalist relations. Specifically, when we treat the extranational as the proper scale and the nation as an artifice, as much recent work in both Atlantic and transnational early American studies tends to do, we assume that the sovereignty of the nation was waning in the eighteenth century, just like it is now. Seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century political, economic and social relations come to look peculiarly like the present. This kind of history writing makes the present normative; intentionally or not, it uses a picture of the past to secure contemporary relations of power as inevitable. Is there an alternative?In an especially lucid moment in one of the many interviews to which Michel Foucault was subjected throughout his career, he sketched his approach to what he called a “history of the present.” “The question I start off with is: what are we and what are we today? What is this instant that is ours?” he explained. “What concerned me was to choose a field containing a number of points that are particularly fragile or sensitive at the present time … The game is to try to detect those things which have not been talked about, those things that, at the present time, introduce, show, give some more or less vague indications of the fragility of our system of thought, in our way of reflecting, in our practices” (italics added). This kind of history writing does not seek the origins of a contemporary problem. It does not, for example, start with the workings of today’s global capitalism and look to the past for its origins. Instead, critical history thinks through how a contemporary organization of knowledge works in order to expose the fragility of a seemingly natural or culturally necessary order. A critical history of the transnational, the Atlantic, the hemispheric, or the global in early America would not simply trace the circulation of goods, track the migration of bodies through circuits of labor, and shore up the lineaments of complex trade networks in order to show how Early America was animated by fluid social and capital relations. It would not, in other words, intentionally or unintentionally, naturalize contemporary global capitalism. Instead, it would show that things and people have not always circulated this way; it would show that there is nothing proper or natural or culturally necessary about transnational circulation.

One might begin to locate the difference between traditional and critical histories of extranational early America in some of the most prominent works in Atlantic history over the last decade. In his immensely influential taxonomy of Atlantic history, David Armitage writes of the fluidities, flows, and hybridities of the Atlantic, letting the oceanic metaphor do a great deal of his critical work. In defining the cis-Atlantic as “national or regional history within an Atlantic context,” which, apart from the overall taxonomy, has been the signal contribution of his “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” Armitage notes that “[c]is-Atlantic history may overcome artificial, but nonetheless enduring, divisions between histories usually distinguished from each other as internal and external, domestic and foreign, or national and imperial.” The problem here is not the critique of artificial categories like “internal” or “imperial” but the implicit claim that the cis-Atlantic is not artificial, that it is somehow the proper register of historical truth. I am not suggesting that we reject the “cis-Atlantic,” which has proven to be a productive frame for engaging early American history. What we must do, rather, is pay careful attention to the ways in which such a spatial scale, when proffered as antidote to the artifices of the national and imperial, domestic and foreign, naturalizes contemporary spatial organization of global capitalism and secures relations of power as such.

If Armitage sought to liberate us from the artifices of the national and the imperial, external and internal, domestic and foreign (artifices which, it should be noted, are necessary insofar as they are part of the systems of knowledge of both early America and the Atlantic world, and impossible in that they never quite work the way in which they claim), Jack P. Greene, in an early, celebratory essay on Atlantic studies sought to liberate those of us working in early American history from power altogether. “Historians who are committed to a larger Atlantic focus will never be able to rest,” Greene wrote, “until the nation-state paradigm, the final trace of the paradigm of power, is finally divested of its hold on the historical mind.” Here Greene identified power with the narrowly political life of the nation, and as such, claimed that the more powerful the nation, the more likely it was to have an expansive empire, and the more it mattered. This is a curiously narrow conceptualization of power, and it led Greene along a liberatory path that ends in the Atlantic world. A critique of the nation-state is of course necessary, but one would be hard-pressed to mark it as the last bastion of power. It makes more sense to consider how invocations of the Atlantic and other extra-national scales might simultaneously displace the nation and secure other relationships of power, especially those of present-day global capitalism.

If Armitage and Greene, two of the most influential advocates of Atlantic history, tend to naturalize contemporary relationships of power by casting scale beyond the nation (in this case, the Atlantic) as liberatory and authentic, they also naturalize their brand of history by invoking the ocean as a natural, geographic form. As Armitage puts it, “The attraction of Atlantic history lies, in part, in nature: after all, is not an ocean a natural fact? The Atlantic might seem to be one of the few historical categories that has an inbuilt geography, unlike the histories of nation-states with their shifting borders and imperfect overlaps between political allegiances and geographical boundaries.” But is there anything particularly natural about the Atlantic as it is used in contemporary historical practice? As a number of scholars have pointed out, the Atlantic in contemporary scholarship is hardly an organic whole. Instead, it has any number of internal fractures: the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the Black Atlantic, and the Anglo-, Franco-, Luso-, and Hispano-Atlantics, to name but a few. As these prefixes suggest, the Atlantic, as the extra-national scale par excellence of early American studies, remains a political category, despite repeated references to its naturalness.

One of the key figures of the Atlantic world is the hybrid, a product of the fluidity of ocean currents, of the constant movement and circulation that animated the Atlantic world. Perhaps the paradigmatic figure is the Atlantic creole who populates the early moments of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in Ira Berlin’s account of Atlantic and North American slavery. The slave trading factories on the west coast of Africa were literally breeding grounds for hybridity. “European men took wives and mistresses (sometimes by arrangement) among the African women, and before long the children born of these unions helped populate the enclave,” he writes in Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Elmina, a major slave trading factory, “sprouted a substantial cadre of Euro-Africans…men and women of African birth but shared African and European parentage, whose swarthy skin, European dress and deportment, acquaintance with local norms, and multilingualism gave them an insider’s knowledge of both African and European ways but denied them full acceptance in either culture.” Berlin’s hybrid Atlantic creole is a complicated figure who tends to disrupt hardened oppositions between Europe and Africa, black and white, while also facilitating the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Paul Gilroy offers a powerful articulation of this type of hybridity in his pathbreaking The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Gilroy’s Atlantic is animated by “inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas;” its history “yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade.” The Black Atlantic, for Gilroy, is an “outernational, transcultural reconceptualisation;” it is a response to cultural nationalism and ethnic absolutism. Advocates of political positions ranging from the left to the right “have fallen back on the idea of cultural nationalism, on the overintegrated conceptions of culture which present immutable, ethnic differences as an absolute break in the histories and experiences of ‘black’ and ‘white’ people.” Against this, Gilroy offers “another, more difficult option: the theorisation of creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity. From the viewpoint of ethnic absolutism, this would be a litany of pollution and impurity.” Gilroy’s version of hybridity encompasses the sort of figures that Berlin found in the Atlantic origins of New World slavery. But it also embraces the cultural and political forms that emerge after centuries of diaspora. As Gilroy points out, when we “reconsider Frederick Douglass’s relationship to English and Scottish radicalism,” “meditate on the significance of William Wells Brown’s five years in Europe as a fugitive slave,” or explore “Martin Delany’s experiences at the London congress of the International Statistical Congress in 1860,” we are forced to realize that modernity itself is hybridized.

But are the hybrid, transnational figures created by the Atlantic world inevitably disruptive, simply because they cannot be reduced to stable racial categories or contained within the boundaries of the nation? In fact, these figures also animated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the service of both white racial consolidation and national imperial expansion. The figure is common, if overlooked, and I will take but two instances. The first comes from a canonical and, in some respects, archetypal trans-Atlantic text: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782); the other, from an obscure, nineteenth-century study of incestuous reproduction. Both texts, in different ways, construct a transnational, hybrid body bounded by whiteness as an agent of both imperial expansion into the continent and novel difference from its putative origins on the European continent. Here the transnational hybrid reinforces a white, nationalist and imperialist body rather than undermining it.

Letters from an American Farmer is, of course, a central player in the canon of Early American literature; it appears on countless college syllabi and is invoked by historians as different as Arthur M. Schlesinger and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. It is also, at least on its surface, a quintessentially transnational, trans-Atlantic text. Letters was written in English by a Frenchman, though a naturalized British subject, who adopted the identity of an American farmer to describe the new republic. In the decades after its publication it was translated into French, Dutch and German and printed in a half dozen locations around Europe. The transnational literary historical task would, perhaps, be to work out its place in an international print culture and the logistics of its circulation. Such an approach, which tracks a particular commodity, thus constitutes the transnational as a system of markets and trade networks. In this telling, casting Letters from an American Farmer as a national text is to impose artificial constraints on a more properly transnational text. Yet, a closer look at the transnational elements within the text itself works to a different end, not in the spaces between and among nations, but at the intimate level of the body, where Crèvecoeur creates a national creature out of transnational conjugality.

In Letter III, “What is an American?” Crèvecoeur distinguishes the body of the American from that of the European. The American, he claims is “a mixture of English, Scottish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have risen.” This national, distinctly American body is the product of transnational sexual relations. Significantly, those relations are exclusively white. In one of the most widely quoted passages in early American literature, Crèvecoeur asks “What, then, is the American, this new man?” He answers that the American

is neither an European nor the descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.

The American casts off “all his ancient prejudices and manners” and “receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” In America, “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” Crèvecoeur’s Americans are nothing less than the rightful heirs of western civilization; they are “the western pilgrims who are carrying along with them the great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry began long since in the East; they will finish the great circle.” While this is of course dependent on trans-Atlantic European migratory patterns, the transnational body is constituted at the intimate level of conjugality. And it is a body and conjugality created in discourse; hybridity is not only a critical concept that we can deploy historically to disrupt fixed categories of race and nation, it also has a history of its own, one that, in this case, is created in a very small transnational space.

If Crèvecoeur’s American, a transnational hybrid par excellence, disrupts European nationalities, it also forms the basis of a new national body, “a new race of men.” This, however, is not the Atlantic creole or the hybrid figure of the black Atlantic; rather, it is a white body, whose very existence is threatened by the possibility of cross-racial hybridity. When Crèvecoeur turns to the backcountry of the frontier, he finds degeneration and suggests that this is a product of the wrong kind of hybridity. “Thus our bad people are those who are half cultivators and half hunters; and the worst of them are those who have degenerated altogether in to the hunting state. As old ploughmen and new men of the woods, as Europeans and new-made Indians, they contract the vices of both; they adopt the moroseness and ferocity of a native, without his mildness or even his industry at home.” The problem here is one of the wrong kind of hybridity and the absence of white transnational bodies. In the backcountry what is missing is the transnational whiteness of the American; in its place is the national body of the European who degenerates in contact with Indians, turning into a savage who makes “the manners of the Indian native [seem] respectable.”

The threat of bodily and cultural degeneration that accompanies Crèvecoeur’s frontier disappears in the transnational white body of mid-nineteenth century physiology. In 1858, S.M. Bemiss, a Louisville physician, published an enormous statistical survey of incestuous offspring and their various maladies in The Transactions of the American Medical Association. After analyzing 873 cases, most of whom were located in asylums, Bemiss concluded “that multiplication of the same blood by in-and-in marrying does incontestably lead in the aggregate to the physical and mental depravation of the offspring.” Bemiss saw incest as a problem facing all classes and ethnic groups in the United States, claiming that the lack of systematic study of consanguineous reproduction could not have stemmed from a lack of evidence. “The neglect to accumulate statistical testimony as to the results of family intermarriage could not have proceeded from paucity of material,” he wrote, “since, not only do the pages of history teem with instances of such marriage, but they are found in almost every social circle, and should receive the earnest scrutiny of physiologists.”

Bemiss’s study lent statistical physiological weight to what was becoming the dominant justification of the incest prohibition in the antebellum United States. Rather than a moral and cultural law, derived in large part from theological sources, the incest prohibition was becoming a hard and fast physiological law, whose only reason lay in the possibility of hereditary degeneration. As the phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler wrote almost a decade prior to Bemiss’s study, “though the correctness of this general law, that offspring inherit the mental and physical characteristics of their parents, is unquestionable, yet it is modified by several sub-laws, or other hereditary principles, one of which is that the children of near relatives either fall far below their parentage, or else are mal-formed or idiotic.” Given the emergent force of this explanation of the incest prohibition, which was paralleled by the increasing inclusion of first cousins in domestic relations laws of kin restriction of marriage, it should come as something of a surprise that Bemiss found an exception to the physiological prohibition in the transnational, hybrid white body.

In a speech delivered before the Louisville Medical Club prior to publication of his report, Bemiss offered a speculative analysis that tied incest to the contours of national development. In the speech, the transnational body knitted westward expansion, incest, and immigration together into one problematic, if purifying, national project. Early communities in “the West … were separated from each other and from the older States, by miles of dangerous wilderness. It was natural that each community should be composed in a great degree of blood relations … When in their new homes, a scarcity of marriageable material would often render unions between relations expedient, and afterward, these covenants, arising at first from necessity, became a habit, often convenient in some respects, since it preserved estates within the family circle.” The small populations and geographical seclusion that led to frequent incest would presumably lead to higher rates of hereditary degeneration, and such might have been the case, Bemiss claimed, for isolated populations in “the valleys of the Alps” and “in this country, the Jews.” Yet miraculously, such was not the case in the West. There, “these pioneers were a hardy, robust people, living much in the open air, and undergoing vigorous exercise; having for their aliment wild game and the fresh products of a genial soil, and not addicted to any habits calculated to impair the integrity of their well-endowed constitutions. We would naturally expect conditions of life so favorable to the sound development of the bodily organism to overrule all counteracting influences,” and so, for Bemiss, they did. Despite his claims a year later, there was an antidote to incestuous reproduction—the sanguine environs of the West. The geographical blessings of the ever-expanding United States ameliorated the potentially degenerative effects of incest.

But if geography was one ameliorative, the constitution of the people was the other. Who were these intrepid, incestuous, robust pioneers of whom Bemiss spoke? They were Americans, of course, whose “extraordinary activity and energy” were “due to the composite nature of their blood.” The absence of racial purity in the United States, that is, “the ingrafting of nations differing in constitution and temperament from each other,” produced “the most vigorous people.” Transnational hybridity, ethnic and national intermarriage and sex, produced a vigorous national body that flouted the hereditary rules of incest. This was, however, hybridity within limits. “I do not look upon mulattoes as hybrids,” Bemiss wrote, “but think they exhibit less of vigor and vital force than are found in crosses where there is less contrast.” The racial characteristic of the nation—transnational hybrid whiteness—in its “ingrafting of nations” worked against the usually degenerative effects of incest. The force of the American national body is that it is always already a transnational, hybrid body bounded by race, and thus draws on the strengths of transnational Europe without suffering the degeneracy and decadence of the national European body. Yet, as both Crèvecoeur and Bemiss suggest, transnational hybrid whiteness, the raison d’êtreof which is, in both cases, imperial expansion, is always threatened by its colonial, subaltern subjects.

If we turn to the transnational as a critical frame in order to expose the fragility of the nation, where do we turn to the expose the fragility of the transnational? No one would deny that the transnational frame is enormously useful. But in tracing transnational, Atlantic, and hemispheric circulation and hybridity, in pursuing ever grander geographic scales, we lose sight of the intimate. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that the intimate but transnational body of racialized imperialism becomes encrypted, concealed by sometimes overly capacious scales. Here, a critical history of transnationalism acts as a thorn in the side of escalating geopolitical scales. After all, the intimate body—transnational, hybrid, and white—is the body of a democratic national imperialism. Crèvecoeur’s new American and Bemiss’s pioneer represent the disciplinary force of national-imperial expansion and white racial formation. In these two instances from the archive of transnational intimacy, transnational bodies do not disrupt race so much as secure it. They evidence national sovereignty that is on the ascent, not on the wane. For Crèvecoeur and Bemiss, the transnational is not the antidote to the nation but instead a necessary condition of national expansion.

Let me be clear: I am not making a revanchist argument for privileging the nation over and against the transnational. The intimate, transnational body, the nation, the Atlantic—no one of these represents theproper scale through which we can find an authentic early America. Too often transnational or Atlantic frames are self-congratulatory, as if we have somehow liberated ourselves from the artificial constraints of the nation and found the authentic and truthful. But let us pause for a moment—the authentic, the truthful, escapes from artifice and power? How have we reached this point and why do so many scholars seem relieved? Rather than relief we should feel a great deal of anxiety to be writing at the same scale and deploying the same terms as global capitalism.

This is a problem facing not just early American studies, but the historical discipline at large. Extranational scales have been invoked not only as the antidote to the nation but the discipline’s saving grace, moving us beyond an ill-fated dalliance with poststructuralism. This, in no uncertain terms, is a mistake, not least because it makes little sense to oppose the critical frames associated with poststructuralism and the current infatuation with extranational scales. Too often transnational and Atlantic studies in early American studies are marked by a precritical empiricism. Now that we have righted ourselves from the mistakes of discourse, language, and systems of knowledge, they seem to say, we can carry on with proper history writing. This is misguided, and indeed naïve, and the stakes of such a position are political, not just disciplinary. This should be most apparent in early America and the Atlantic world, the origins of which are coeval with European imperialism and the murky beginnings of modernity. We risk making all modernity a teleological march to the deterritorialized global capitalism of the twenty-first century when we abandon critique. And in doing so our self-congratulatory moves toward inclusion of bodies and things lost in the obscuring frame of the nation make us potentially complicit with that which many of us claim to oppose. If we ignore critical history, especially in regard to these extranational scales, we do so at great risk.

Further reading

The quotes on the Atlantic and the hybrid come from the following sources: David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York, 2002); Jack P. Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville and London, 1996); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). Crèvecoeur’s writings on the transnational body are from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, edited by Albert E. Stone (New York, 1981). S.M. Bemiss’s writings on incest appear in two places: “Report on the Influence of Marriages of Consanguinity upon Offspring,”Transactions of the American Medical Association (1858); and “On the Evil Effects of Marriages of Consanguinity,” Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal (1856). Critical history has its roots in the work of Michel Foucault, although it should not be read as simply a dogmatic adherence to his work. See, for example, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” and the essays and interviews collected in The Politics of Truth (New York, 2007). For a contemporary critical history manifesto, see Joan Wallach Scott, “History-writing as Critique,” in Manifestoes for History, edited by Sue Morgan, Keith Jenkins, and Alun Munslow (London and New York, 2007). For examples of what a critical transnational history of early America or the Atlantic might look like, see David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis, 2003); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, 2005); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Stanford, 2006). Despite being one of the texts that I engage with critically, any critical history of the Atlantic must begin with Gilroy’s still stunning book. Finally, the kind of critical history I am advocating here can be found in a new journal, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, published by the University of Illinois Press and JSTOR. The first issue will appear in Summer 2011.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.2 (January, 2011).

Brian Connolly in an assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida. He is completing a book on the curious conjunction of incest and liberalism in the nineteenth-century U.S. He is also one of the founding editors o fHistory of the Present: A Journal of Critical History.