Intimate Atlantics: Toward a critical history of transnational early America

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.

Fig. 2. Title page of Letter III: What Is An American? Page 48 from Letters from an American Farmer …, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1793). Taken from a reprint of the original book, Albert & Charles, New York, 1925. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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.

“That great natural curiosity”: The Old Man of the Mountain as Lusus Naturae

Sometime between midnight and 2:00 A.M. on May 3, 2003, the seven hundred tons of Conway granite known as the Old Man of the Mountain lost their grip on Cannon Mountain in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, and crashed hundreds of feet into the talus slope below. As the rock dust began to clear, the New Hampshire Division of Parks and Recreation opened an online Scrapbook for those “mourning the loss of this familiar icon” to report their “remembrances” of the Old Man. Letters poured in, sometimes accompanied by photographs or poems, memorializing the profile. New Hampshire natives and nonnatives alike report themselves “deeply saddened,” even “devastated with the news” that “the Old Man passed away,” and explain that losing the Old Man is “like losing a member of one’s family.” But while some recommend his reconstruction, many join the Schindler family of New York in pleading, “Please, please, please!!! Don’t let the Governor put up some bogus plastic ‘Old Man of the Mountain’ to replace the original.” “Men can never recreate what nature carved out thousands, possibly millions of years [ago],” observed one mourner. “Trying to ‘recreate’ the Old Man,” explained another, “would cheapen what God/Nature created.”

The popular conviction that the Old Man of the Mountain was a deliberate and irreplaceable work of “God/Nature” demonstrates the longevity of the nineteenth-century identification of this granite formation as a natural curiosity. A visiting college student in 1831 seems to have been the first to label the profile–which measured sixty feet from forehead to chin, and hung fifteen hundred feet above the floor of Franconia Notch–”that great natural curiosity,” meaning a rarity of nature that evoked a sense of wonder. By midcentury, regional guidebooks were proclaiming it “one of the greatest curiosities in the world,” and calling the Franconia Notch–site of the Basin, the Flume, and the Pool, as well as the profile–”a huge museum of curiosities.”

"Old Man Above the Clouds," stereo card, ca. 1884. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — “Old Man Above the Clouds,” stereo card, ca. 1884. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

More specifically, the Old Man represented a kind of curiosity called the lusus naturae, a play or joke of nature. As the seventeenth-century Danish physician Olaf Worm had observed, “Nature has joked (lusit) uncommonly in all the outward appearances of natural things.” Stones shaped like coiled serpents, shells that resembled flowers, tree fungus formed like the human ear: all illustrated nature’s playful tendency to shape some natural forms to resemble others, often crossing the boundaries between the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. And one of the most common forms of the lusus naturae was the geological formation that resembled a human profile, whether of King Arthur, St. Vartan of Armenia, or Christ himself. The identity of the Old Man of the Mountain was playfully debated: was it Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or Daniel Webster? A Titan, a Sphinx, or “some hoary patriarch of antiquity”? A Roman warrior in a metal helmet or a “Revolutionary worthy” in a three-cornered hat? Whoever he was, the Old Man of the Mountain was “a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne observed in his short story, “The Great Stone Face” (1850).

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, natural historians had usually seen the lusus naturae as a phenomenon that defied scientific explanation. But the Old Man of the Mountain was a creature of the nineteenth century: first noticed by Euro-Americans–workmen on the Franconia Notch road–in about 1805; first mentioned in print in 1827, in the American Journal of Science, edited by Yale geologist Benjamin Silliman; and increasingly recognized as an important tourist attraction after 1830. And the rising interest in the profile paralleled a growing fascination with the science of geology, which was entering American college curricula, and drawing popular attention among the middle and upper classes, in the 1820s and ’30s. Professional geologists and amateur rock hunters flocked to the White Mountains (which included the Franconia Range), regarded as a superb site for the study of geomorphology. On a trip to the region in 1832, Hawthorne described one fellow tourist as “a scientific, green-spectacled figure in black, bearing a heavy hammer, with which he did great damage to the precipices, and put the fragments in his pocket.” The partnership between geology and tourism was strong: while tourist guides expounded upon the geological forces that had shaped popular destinations, geologists’ reports included “scenographical geology,” the discussion of “those striking features of our scenery, that are the result chiefly of geological changes, and which produce landscapes abounding in beauty and sublimity.” The Old Man of the Mountain was thus a lusus naturae for a highly geological age.

By the early nineteenth century, the science of geology was seriously coming to terms with the immense age of the earth. A century earlier, most geologists had worked within the seemingly unassailable assumption that the history of nature was coterminous with the scriptural account of the Creation. By this calculation, the age of the earth was roughly six thousand years, and Adam and Eve had arrived on the scene just a few days after God’s fiat of light and the emergence of dry land. But the findings of eighteenth-century natural historians such as the Comte de Buffon and James Hutton began to suggest that the earth was perhaps millions of years old, and to detach human history–reported in Holy Scripture–from the considerably longer history of life forms–recorded in the fossil record. The new geology even uncovered an extensive “Azoic” period, before the appearance of any life forms, evidenced in rock that contained no fossils. These findings informed the dominant system of rock classification at the end of the eighteenth century. “Primary” or “primitive” rock was the oldest type, unstratified and non-fossil-bearing, typically found in mountain regions. “Secondary” rock came next, with its fossil-bearing strata, typically found in the lower hills. “Tertiary” or alluvial rock came last, a mixture of unconsolidated rock and gravel, typically found on low land.

The earliest geological assessments of the White Mountains indicated that “These mountains every where present a primitive character” and “are now such as they came from the hand of their Creator; venerable from their age, and sublime from their elevation.” For well-informed geologists, this view did not necessarily date the White Mountains to the earliest moments of earth-history, since the process of earth formation was increasingly understood to be gradual and ongoing, or “uniformitarian.” But for many nineteenth-century visitors to Franconia Notch, this fragment of geological knowledge offered all the grounding they required to claim that the Old Man of the Mountain was original to the Creation as recorded in the Book of Genesis. In 1850, Mrs. Mary Glover–later known as Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science–suggested that at the very moment when “creation vast began,/ And loud the universal fiat ran, / ‘Let there be light!” the Old Man of the Mountain had risen “from chaos dark set free” as “a monument of Deity!” This view proved surprisingly resistant to modification by Louis Agassiz’s glacial theory of New England geomorphology, which was gaining ground among geologists by mid-century. In 1878, the poet Charles Fletcher Lummis addressed the Old Man of the Mountain saying, “From out the womb of Chaos wast thou born, / When the first sunrise from the gates of morn / Stepped forth celestial and drew back the bars / Of darkness.” But even when Romantic tales of the profile’s origins rested on the Biblical Creation myth, many still assumed the new geological sense of deep time, which assigned an immense age to the earth before the beginnings of human history. The Old Man of the Mountain, wrote Thomas Starr King in 1859, “was pushed out from the coarse strata of New England thousands of years before Adam.”

And therein lay the wonder of wonders that was the Old Man of the Mountain. The hand of God had sculpted a human face in primitive mountain rock many thousands–perhaps millions–of years before he created humankind. Across that lonely time gap separating Adam and Eve from the creation of the earth, and even from the oldest living forms documented in the fossil record, the Old Man had endured: “Confronting Time with those sublime, / Impassive, adamantine features.” The Franconia profile was thus enlisted to the task of offering theological reassurance to Americans confronting the terrors of geological deep time. First, the profile offered a demonstration of the most persuasive Enlightenment argument for the existence of God, the argument from design, classically stated in William Paley’s Natural Theology: or, the Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity: “There cannot be design without a designer.” Just before entering Harvard Divinity School in 1842, Transcendentalist Samuel Johnson wrote of his encounter with the Old Man: “Nothing I have seen so wonderfully evidences the Action of an intelligent Author of Nature than this,” “the most perfect transcript of living man that ever was produced.”

Second, the ancient profile clearly indicated which creature from his vast Creation the “Author of Nature” most valued. Just as the earlier scientific revolution in astronomy had threatened humankind with insignificance by vastly expanding the spatial compass of the universe, the revolution in geology challenged human self-importance by vastly expanding the temporal duration of earth history. How important could humankind be, given the many (and multiplying) geologic eras that had elapsed between the formation of the oldest Azoic rock and the first appearance of human creatures on the earth? To this troubling question, the Old Man of the Mountain offered a soothing answer: however late humankind’s arrival on the scene, the Franconia profile proved that man had been God’s central purpose all along. As an unidentified orator (usually supposed to have been Daniel Webster) famously proclaimed, “Men put out signs representing their different trades; jewelers hang out a monster watch; shoemakers, a huge boot; and, up in Franconia, God Almighty has hung out a sign that in New England he makes men.” What was most important was that God Almighty had hung out that granite sign some millions of years before he created the life form it advertised, proclaiming his ultimate purpose in the very medium, Azoic rock, that had initially seemed so threatening to human self-importance.

Third, and perhaps most important, the Old Man of the Mountain was uniquely situated to bridge the “abyss of time” formulated by the new geology. The most unsettling aspect of geological deep time was the loneliness of pre-Adamic history, a time span of many millions of years that had gone unwitnessed by human eyes. The nineteenth-century appeal of the Old Man of the Mountain lay in the Romantic fantasy that a granite profile–New Hampshire’s “oldest inhabitant”–had served as the eternal witness to all earth history, human and prehuman. As a White Mountains guidebook explained in 1846, “During unnumbered ages he has held his solitary vigils here, looking down with ‘infinite dignity’ upon changes no human eye has witnessed.” Poet Harry Hibbard attributed the Old Man’s undoubted wisdom to “all that thou hast had a chance to see, / Since Earth began.” Though “Man’s life-tide ebbs and flows as flows the sea,” wrote Charles Lummis, “Thou lookest out upon eternity.” By 1878, John Townsend Trowbridge was imagining the Old Man as an eyewitness to all the processes of geomorphology, including Agassiz’s glacial age and, somewhat paradoxically, those processes that had shaped the profile itself:

With unconcern as grand and stern,

Those features viewed, which now survey us,

A green world rise from seas of ice,

And order come from mud and chaos.

Canst thou not tell what then befell?

What forces moved, or fast or slow;

How grew the hills; what heats, what chills,

What strange, dim life, so long ago?

High-visaged peak, wilt thou not speak?

One word, for all our learned wrangle!

What earthquakes shaped, what glaciers scraped,

That nose, and gave the chin its angle?”

In the end, the Old Man did actually “tell” what geological forces had created him. Before his final tumble from Cannon Mountain, twentieth-century geologists had concluded that, though the Conway granite of the profile formed 181 million years ago and the Cannon Cliffs were first plucked out by glacial action about 12,400 years ago, the particular configuration of granite ledges that made up the Old Man of the Mountain had appeared relatively recently–perhaps shortly before those road workers noticed him in 1805 (a possible explanation for the failure of the earliest explorers and settlers of Franconia Notch to make any mention of this natural curiosity during the half century before 1805). The Cannon Cliffs are the most active bare rock slope in the White Mountains; they are being steadily eroded by a geological process called exfoliation–which probably would have peeled off the Old Man’s face years earlier had construction workers not strapped it to the mountain with turnbuckles, first in 1917 and again in 1958.

When the Old Man finally went, he took with him the remains of his most devoted caretaker, Niels Nielsen, who had provided annual maintenance of the profile from 1965 to 1991: adjusting the turnbuckles, applying epoxy to granite fractures, and doing his best to stabilize this beloved monument. After Nielsen’s death in 2001, his son David honored his father’s labor by placing his ashes in the Old Man’s left eye, unintentionally ensuring that his father’s remains would soon be buried with the Old Man’s in the talus pile below. In the end, the Old Man of the Mountain proved just as mortal as the race of creatures whose face he resembled, the race that had tried and failed to ensure that the Old Man would last forever. Nevertheless, his “birth” (to echo a favorite metaphor of his nineteenth-century admirers) was well timed to coincide with the geological discovery of deep time, and to reassure generations of Americans of their ultimate importance within the divine scheme of Creation.

Further Reading: For a useful and accessible anthology of nineteenth-century writings about the Old Man of the Mountain, see John T.B. Mudge, ed., The Old Man’s Reader: History & Legends of Franconia Notch (Etna, N.H., 1995). Since the landmark’s collapse, Robert Hutchinson has compiled a memorial volume, The Old Man of the Mountain (San Francisco, 2003), filled with historical and contemporary photographs. The richest collections of printed works about the Old Man are located in the White Mountains collection at Dartmouth College, and at the New Hampshire Historical Society. Click here for online discussions of the Old Man’s demise. On the history of geology and the age of the earth, see Francis C. Haber, The Age of the World: Moses to Darwin (Baltimore, 1959); and P. Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago, 1984). On the geological history of New England, see Chet Raymo and Maureen E. Raymo, Written in Stone: A Geological History of the Northeastern United States (Hensonville, N.Y., 2001).

This article originally appeared in issue 4.2 (January, 2004).

Karen Halttunen teaches in the history department at the University of California, Davis, where she also serves as U.S. faculty adviser to the History and Cultures Project, a community of K-16 teachers who collaborate for the improvement of history teaching in Northern California. She is the author of Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982) and Murder Most Foul: The Killer in the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and is currently writing a study of geology, landscape, and memory in nineteenth-century New England.

Giving Voices

Four poems of seventeenth-century America

Gone forever, probably, are histories by the likes of Francis Parkman and Henry Adams that relied on atmospheric renderings of time and place. So much more leisurely and pleasurable they remain to read than the specialized and data-laden monographs that have become the stock-in-trade of professional historians today. And yet scholars may in time begin again to wish for some pleasing medium between the two extremes—between history written with the help of the muse, that is, and history written as if it were a science. History’s ability to accommodate a lay readership hangs in the balance. In his 1989 essay “Where is History Now?” the irascible Jacques Barzun built an extended lament that “theory, generality, abstraction have by now displaced the concrete imagination of past events.”

In the following poems I set out to address Barzun’s lament. Instead of focusing on the mercantile and clerical elite, as so many students of early New England have, I focus most on individuals from low and middling classes who were more occupied with passing the bread than passing into heaven. Popular beliefs—prodigies, portents, myths, wonders, and lore—were as important to them as the words of Cotton Mather and his kind.

To lay hands on prodigies and lore of these folk is often difficult. The books and pamphlets where they reside are rarely part of the literary canon as we have received it, rarely available in anthologies or from university presses. The scholar accordingly must burrow deep into dusty repositories and comb through cabinets of microfiche to grasp hold of them. Between the lines, buried deep in the least likely passages, among small tidbits of oral lore, they can be heard but only faintly. The present poems aim to give their voices volume.

Sarah Hawkridge

Timid as a titmouse
My breath rose
Each night your hand lifted the latch.
Six children, Mister Cotton,
Six rings of birth fire for your name.

The gift of speech,
The gospel fire,
Did it come upon you
Unaware? You heard my poems
Only rarely, when I dared.

Bedtimes I settled on you
Like a wreath.
The walls sustained our
Silent straining, each to each.

Husband, father, scourge of faith,
You plucked my hem
Last night
From your death-bed.
And I could not sway you
From your fancy, could not pray,
So firmly you clung to me.

American Triptych

Thomas Wannerton

Too unwieldy, my rifle, no matter how wolves
Skulked about our sheep-cotes after dark.
And so I would not carry it afield.
For my laxness Tom scolded me and downed
A pint of kill-devil rum in a draught
To charm away all harm. My herbal served
Me better: that fat folio of Gerard
Kept the gathered leaves pressed fresh.
Last night when I got home, Tom
Drank again, slept in fits, and woke up
Shouting: Wolves as many as Hannibal’s troops
Lay siege to the house, he cried. One ram
Lunged from his voice, tried to jump a fence
And bawled and thrashed there, impaled on a stake.

Richard Foxwell

His ears grew upright, no round folds.
The tavern candle daubed them oxblood.
Tongues of smoke issued from his pipe
And curled along his cheeks. Into his Port
He stirred sugar and told me how
To read the New World by its omens:
Listen outside of town when the moon is full,
The wind spent after blowing. One night
A sweet voice did call to him: Foxwell, Foxwell,
Test your wings. Amid the clouds he saw
A fire, with men and women dancing
Naked in a ring. He would have joined them, worn
His hair in tufts as they did, and minced
Burn-free in the flames, did he not
Love the comforts of his pipe and cup so much.

Michael Mitton

Reeds and the beech trees leaning, sea gusts
Trumpeting across the cove, geese rose
Off the water yelping then crumpled
Before we heard his gun thud.
He swung the wounded birds like plummets.
Neatly afterward in his log he wrote
The lot, charge, wind drift, shot, and distance
Alongside what fees the meat might fetch
In Boston. A great hunter, a nonpareil, his eye
Can out a fowl’s at three rods, and yet
His hands curl just like mine in every way.
The housewives who buy his wares
Bend to their task on the beach and send
The plucked down lofting across the waves.

Fig. 2

Mary Dyer

Whoever comes to see my stillborn girl
Might flinch to find my face
Within the crowd. But there I’ll crane
And press with all the rest
As if the news concerned an inner light
Flashed from some saint’s eyes.

Winthrop ordered her displayed this afternoon
To ripen the fruit of my unquiet mood.

Unearthed by spades to please another round of guests,
She calls me now to rise from my own bed
And join her on the stage.
It distresses her that scales still blind each eye
And each ear hears a voice
Summoning folks to view the error of my ways.

If they speak true who say a corpse will bleed
Anew when viewed by he who’s slain,
Let Winthrop come and watch the fresh blood well.
He’ll call it magic when her wounds
Gape wide again and spill to prove his guilt.

The Great Awakening

Today in meeting Mr. Edwards said
We all should tumble into Hell
Were God a moment to withdraw the web
That suspends us. How well
The spinner must have spun, how full of dread
We stand before the bench to pay
Our tribute. Chokes and sobs and vows
Rose from the congregation Edwards hailed.
He laid his hand upon a babe’s brow
Who slumbered through the sermon: “Nor will they
Be spared, the innocents, our mistakes
Having stained them.” So he invoked
Our sins in tones as low as though he prayed.
And yet the infant woke
Whose mother hushed her and shone red with shame.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

Paul Lindholdt is associate professor in English at Eastern Washington University and the author of essays and poems in American Quarterly, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Sewanee Review, Skeptic, and Wild Earth. His Canoe and the Saddle: A Critical Edition is forthcoming in 2006 from Bison Books.

Frontiers of Body and Soul

Ephrata’s émigrés in Virginia

In the mid-eighteenth-century world of competing global empires, the Ephrata monks of Pennsylvania and Virginia existed in an excruciating limbo between Protestant and Catholic, French and English, “savage” and “civilized,” male and female, mystic sexuality and corporeal celibacy, asceticism and ceremony, individual and community. Ezekiel Sangmeister, a former carpenter’s apprentice and German immigrant who joined the Ephrata sect in 1748, vividly captured the personal cost of this spiritual and social marginality in his memoir of life first in the Ephrata Cloister and then at a breakaway Ephrata commune in Virginia. This remarkable source describes a brief moment before the Seven Years’ War, when the sect actually flourished. During these years Sangmeister and his cohort of male Protestant celibates experimented with fluid categories of confession, ethnicity, and gender. The strange utopian communities this undertaking produced probed the limits of religious toleration in the American colonies, but in the end, those limits proved more powerful than this band of pietistic Protestants. Most of them were forced from their incongruous homosocial communal cabins back into the heterosocial world of marriage and conventional domesticity.

The original Ephrata Cloister emerged from a group of mystic, Protestant hermits scattered along Cocalico Creek in central Pennsylvania. An orphaned former baker’s apprentice from south Germany, Conrad Beissel, became the leader of the oxymoronic hermit-commune in the mid-1730s. Beissel adhered to a form of Protestant pietist mysticism, drawn partly from the theology of German Lutheran Philip Jakob Spener (1635-1705). Spener’s theology stressed the experiential aspects of faith, demanding that believers strive towards piety, by which he meant sinless living in accord with biblical dictates. A subset of such pietists, including Beissel and those who joined him, believed that if they could shed their sinful corporeal impulses, they might achieve a mystical union with what they believed to be God’s female aspect, the Virgin Sophia. That Beissel’s extreme pietism took hold was clearly a function of the unsettled nature of Lutheranism in Pennsylvania. Having left the established Lutheran church of their homeland, German migrants to the region found themselves in the novel situation of being able to choose among traveling preachers, some educated, some not, some ordained, some not, all claiming to be the true Lutherans. Conrad Beissel stepped into this confusing ecclesiastical landscape and offered the Germans living near his commune on Cocalico Creek a clear path to salvation.

Before long, however, Beissel and his followers began showing signs of division. The most divisive argument pitted Beissel against three similarly orphaned German brothers, the Eckerlins. Apparently the eldest of the Eckerlin brothers, Israel, who himself had a significant following in the commune, clashed with Beissel over the management of the newly built cloister. In 1745, only four years after Beissel made Israel Eckerlin his second in command, the conflict reached a boiling point, and Eckerlin left for Virginia where he and his brothers Gabriel and Samuel established a successful commune of their own. Beissel’s loyal “brothers” and “sisters” burned Israel’s writings, the Eckerlin brothers’ house, and the fruitful orchards first planted by the Eckerlins.

Three years after Israel Eckerlin fled for Virginia, another orphaned German mystic found his way to the Pennsylvania commune. Ezechiel Sangmeister arrived with fellow carpenter’s apprentice Anton Hellenthal in March 1748 and spent four years living in Beissel’s community. Sangmeiseter, like Beissel and the Eckerlins, had already traveled German-speaking Europe learning his trade and trying to find religious communities tolerant of his mystic pietism. Ultimately, this quest brought him to the Ephrata Cloister on the North American frontier.

Sangmeister’s memoir, entitled Life and Change, tells a detailed, if highly subjective, history of one man’s life in Ephrata and beyond. Neither Sangmeister nor Hellenthal had a pleasant experience in Ephrata. Sangmeister felt he was rushed into his decision to join the sect and was perpetually concerned by what he considered crypto-Catholic ceremonial practices, including tonsure (the shaving of the head) and “shameful lust” arising between the brothers and sisters. “Brother Anton’s” plight was dramatically worse. He suffered a mental breakdown, was placed in chains, then managed to escape and wander the woods until he regained his senses. During Sangmeister’s and Hellenthal’s stay at the cloister, the Eckerlin brothers returned and encouraged those discontented with life on Cocalico Creek to come with them to Virginia. Sangmeister and Hellenthal eventually took the Eckerlins’ advice and snuck away from Ephrata “a little after midnight” on October 2, 1752.

Immediately upon their departure, Brothers Ezechiel and Anton experienced the extent to which their bodies, emaciated by ascetic practice and hidden beneath Ephrata’s flowing white robes, challenged the gender categories of those around them. Sangmeister reports that the men “were still wearing the full Ephrata-habit so people everywhere thought that I was the husband and Brother Anton was the wife.” Sangmeister was twenty-nine years old and would have had Ephrata’s requisite long beard to denote his masculinity. Anton, however, must have been significantly younger or at least unable to grow a beard; thus, in the flowing robes, he was mistaken for a woman.

Ephrata monks experienced an intentional and dramatic physical transformation. While Pennsylvania magistrate and Indian agent Conrad Weiser lived at Ephrata, those who had known him before barely recognized him. The brothers and sisters desired androgyny as part of their quest to abandon the body and its drives for a mystical communion with the Virgin Sophia. Their theology held that Adam’s fall began with his division into male and female. Mystics such as Sangmeister wished desperately to reclaim the spiritual purity Adam had abandoned. Not surprisingly, this ambition produced all sorts of struggles with sexual urges, many of which Sangmeister detailed in his memoir. In the service of this androgynous ideal, men like Weiser and Gabriel Eckerlin, who had married before coming to Ephrata, were encouraged to divorce their wives. Of the women who joined the female cloister, a striking number—including the wife of the prominent printer Christopher Sauer—fled their husbands to do so. Other couples vowed to live chastely while remaining married.

No women traveled with Sangmeister to form the Virginia commune so Brother Anton fulfilled the womanly duties of housekeeper—and did so badly in Sangmeister’s assessment. Sangmeister assumed the European male’s traditional role of breadwinner. He worked among the settlers as a carpenter, cabinetmaker, and medic, but his unmarried state exposed him to accusations of womanizing. For an Ephrata monk, already deeply troubled by his sexual urges, such intimations simply reinforced the need to avoid all women. But that was not enough. He would also have to avoid animals, particularly those liable to mate. For Adam too, he thought, met his “downfall” by “looking with the animals and their breeding.” Thus God had “no other solution” but to “get a woman” for Adam. Sangmeister also feared that he and his brother would be tempted to engage in bestiality should they keep cattle.

As the Ephrata outpost attracted “restless people, who came partly out of curiosity and partly to waste time with all sorts of discussions,” Sangmeister decided he and Hellenthal required a “little house on a mountain” to which one could escape for solitude and prayer. But while Sangmeister enjoyed his solitude “for several days, sometimes even almost weeks with great pleasure,” the neighborhood erupted in “tumult” as locals debated whether Sangmeister’s “little room” on the mountain was used for “practicing alchemy” or whether he and Anton “were really catholic [sic] and worshiped our idols there.” Sangmeister and Hallenthal tore down the meditation cabin shortly before locals notified the colonial authorities of its existence. By Sangmeister’s telling, a court clerk, Colonel Wood, organized a three-man party, including a militia officer, to investigate claims against the brethren. Wood was satisfied, the cabin gone, and peace restored, but only temporarily.

On July 9, 1755, British general Edward Braddock and Virginia militia lieutenant colonel George Washington marched nearly two thousand men headlong into a French and Indian attack, leaving nearly one thousand men dead, including Braddock. Braddock’s stunning defeat left the European settlers of the Shenandoah and Monongahela undefended targets of French and Indian raids. For the Ephratites, the attack was particularly damaging. After this slaughter by agents of a Catholic state, men whose celibacy and asceticism suggested Roman Catholic priests were an almost inevitable target of the region’s renewed anti-Catholicism.

Among the brothers, Samuel Eckerlin was most at risk. His regular journeys to and from Winchester, Ephrata, Sandy Hook, and the Eckerlins’ settlement on the Monongahela, to sell medicine and medical advice, left him vulnerable to arrest for spying. And in 1756, he was indeed detained and nearly hung. However, a fellow medic, “Commisary Walker,” who had known Samuel in the Eckerlins’ first settlement in southwestern Virginia, vouched for him and escorted him to Williamsburg to ask for clemency from Governor Robert Dinwiddie. Walker also advised Samuel to retrieve Israel and Gabriel from the Monongahela before they fell victim to the Indian violence raging in the wake of Braddock’s defeat. He refused, and Walker’s prediction became reality.

Two more Ephratites were soon arrested as well. While Samuel waited in Williamsburg for clemency, his brother Israel and Brother Anton were taken into custody at a fort on the South Branch of the Shenandoah while traveling from the Monongahela to Sangmeister’s cabin. When Samuel returned from Williamsburg with a pass for free travel in the Allegheny Mountains, he was in no rush to liberate his brothers. Instead, he dispatched Brother Ezechiel to ride to them. As he passed through country already ravaged by Indian-colonist violence, Ezechiel encountered men from the fort who insisted Samuel’s presence would be required for Israel’s release. Samuel demanded that Ezechiel change from his monastic garb into a quilt coat, which Sangmeister described as “stiff from dirt and bear fat,” before the two men returned together and secured Israel’s release.

Sangmeister, like the Eckerlin brothers, also fell under suspicion as a potential spy for the French and their allied Indians. He and a traveling companion, an aging servant who had completed his time with the Eckerlins, stopped at an abandoned farm with a “fresh Indian track in the sand.” The soldiers nearby were no less wary of Sangmeister than they had been of the brothers Israel and Anton. They thus detained him and his fellow traveler for questioning. Sangmeister reported that while he “felt their anger,” he “gave them short answers.” Following the incident, the travelers again took refuge in what they thought was an abandoned house, but Sangmeister awoke to find the owner and three men, who “attacked us like thieves and scolded, ranted, and raved like the devil and it seemed just as though they were going to shoot us on the spot or kill us otherwise.” After surviving this incident, the two travelers stumbled upon another farm where they confronted “five armed men and a woman with red hair.” When Sangmeister asked directions, the group unleashed a stream of verbal abuse “too dreadful for words” and declared that the travelers were “positively spies.” The settlers insisted that “whenever one of you Dunkers [German Baptists] has come through this area we have always had new savage attacks directly afterwards.” The settlers attacked them for being “the cause [of] all the murder and misfortune in this country, and [declared] they would have absolutely no misgivings about shooting us.” One man revealed that the settlers planned to ambush and kill Sangmeister and his companion, but an approaching storm scattered the would-be attackers and allowed the Ephratites to return home safely.

The slight cultural space for Protestant monks and pacifist hunters vanished from the Virginia backcountry as it became the violent military frontier of the Seven Years’ War. In March 1757, Samuel Eckerlin emerged from the Allegheny Mountains to give Sangmeister a long treatise written by his brother Israel. Four days later, he was arrested again as a spy and taken to Winchester, Virginia. Although Sangmeister and his neighbors were able to raise the thousand pounds bail for Samuel, life for the Ephratites was becoming extremely difficult.

As frontier violence escalated, the expansion of German settlement down the Shenandoah Valley came to a halt. When a settlement six miles from Sangmeister lost twenty-five people to an Indian raid and neighbors’ hostility continued escalating, the German Settlers began their exodus. Some followed a religiously awakened shoemaker, Johannes Martin, back to Pennsylvania. Samuel Eckerlin set off for Williamsburg yet again to defend the Eckerlins against charges “that they sided with the French and Indians[,] that they were sp[ie]s and trying to bring tumult and d[e]struction to the land.” Sangmeister’s neighbors “became hostile” as well, leading to a similar plight for the Ephratites. Some of the neighbors suggested they “be hanged together,” while others leaned towards burning the monks’ house with them in it. Sangmeister was uncertain whether “the savages or . . . so-called Christians” posed a greater threat. Making matters worse, with each successive panic over Indian attack, Sangmeister stayed home while his neighbors took up arms. When asked to give spiritual guidance to one such assembly of armed settlers, Sangmeister traveled to address the group. Upon arrival, his pacifist scruples overcame him, and he went home without speaking.

Autumn 1757 brought with it the end of the Eckerlins’ settlement on the Monongahela. In November, Samuel was ordered to lead the Virginia militia to his brothers. After an emotionally and physically torturous journey, Samuel and his militia escorts arrived at the settlement only to find “everything ravaged, devastated, and burned by the savages, which from all outward signs and appearances happened around harvest time in the year 1757.” The soldiers took the destruction as belated evidence that the Eckerlins were innocent. When the Eckerlins’ servant eventually escaped his native captors and returned to Virginia to tell his tale, he reported that the Eckerlins were tortured until a French officer interceded on their behalf. The French were unsure what to make of the white-robed men, assuming them to be some form of “religious people.” From Fort Duquense, Israel and Gabriel Eckerlin were taken first to Montreal, then to Quebec, where they may have been placed in Jesuit custody. From Quebec they likely sailed on a prison ship for La Rochelle, France.

Unlike Israel and Gabriel Eckerlin, Ezechiel Sangmeister survived not only the Seven Years’ War but also the American Revolution. In 1764, he returned to Pennsylvania, where he settled into a comparatively normal household life with three siblings—two brothers, and a sister of whom he was particularly fond—near Ephrata but not in Beissel’s cloister. Likewise, the surviving Eckerlin brother, Samuel, eventually found his way back to Ephrata, where he continued to sell and practice medicine. Although Sangmeister survived, his vision of a frontier hermitage was no longer a possibility. He never managed to flee society as completely as Israel and Gabriel Eckerlin. That decision saved his life but killed his dreams.

One Nation-One Semester

High-altitude flights across American History

It was early December, the end of the fall semester, and I was sitting in my office, having just taught my last class. The usual mixed feelings of exhaustion and elation had given way to equally predictable and tangled emotions: relief and regret. Though the class had gone well, there were the inevitable pangs of disappointment over missed teaching opportunities and the regular resolves about how to make it all work a little better. Surely I could shake up more members of the cell-phone generation—reaching them sooner and challenging them more deeply—the next time around.

But there would be no next time. This wasn’t just the last class of the 2006 fall term; it was the last course in my short and enjoyable thirty-two-year teaching career at Duke. With a knock on the door, a history department secretary asked in an off-hand way if I could “help move some furniture in the graduate lounge?” Even as we chatted going down the hall, I had no inkling that I was innocently being ushered into a retirement celebration cooked up by busy graduate students—the same kind of unpretentious and energetic young historians that I had been working with for more than three decades.

Peter Wood (at left), working at his dining room table with fellow textbook authors Elaine May, Jackie Jones, Vicki Ruiz, and Tim Borstelmann. Photo by Elizabeth Fenn.

After I mastered my total surprise, we toasted each other in champagne and cider and devoured a homemade cake. They even gave me a little clock, marked, “With Best Wishes and Thanks”—which sits on our mantel piece, the perfect gift for an early American historian. Before they dispersed to grade term papers, we chatted about the U.S. history text, Created Equal, which I was revising for its third edition, and the unusual class I had just finished, entitled One Nation-One Semester.

Since then, I have had a full year to think about both those topics and the surprising, satisfying way that they came together. I can now see more clearly, in retrospect, that working hard on a U.S. survey with four impressive American historians boosted me out of my engaging, comfortable “colonial” world. It gave me the renewed excitement about big-picture historical themes I needed to attempt such an unorthodox final fling.

What did I learn from teaming with other scholars to tackle an undergraduate text, writing the eight colonial and revolutionary-era chapters of a one-thousand-page U.S. survey for Pearson Longman? To state the obvious first: lots of teamwork is involved in such an extensive collaboration. Fortunately, after nearly a decade of drafting and revising, sharpening and expanding, the friendships among our far-flung team are stronger than ever. We set out with a desire to weave together the political history we had learned as students with the social history we were practicing in our research. We wanted to tell a story that was more inclusive than the one we had inherited, not just in terms of race, class, and gender, but in terms of geography as well. Along the way, we learned a lot about the mysteries of textbook publication and the complexities of outsourcing. (One draft map came back to us with the Atlantic labeled as the Pacific!) I also gained some basic insights into student demography, our professional blinders, and my own shifting sense of the relation of the forest and the trees.

As a writer, I learned something that should have been obvious to me. If most of tomorrow’s students of American history will inhabit the Web, many of today’s most committed students attend community colleges. When I first arrived in North Carolina to teach on Duke’s gothic campus back in 1975, the struggling tobacco town of Durham also contained a small vocational institution devoted to industrial education. I paid no attention a decade later when that school added a university-transfer program to its curriculum and changed its name to Durham Technical Community College. A similar school in neighboring Alamance County became Alamance Community College in 1988.

The huge expansion of community colleges that took place around me in North Carolina was also going on all across the country. But somehow, with my nose buried in research notes and recommendation letters, I had missed most of it. Working on Created Equal has finally given me a chance to gain a better sense of this explosion and to meet some of the impressive teachers and students at places like Collin County Community College in Texas. (Since Created Equal now exists in an Advanced Placement edition for high schools, I have also had a chance to talk shop with scores of dedicated history teachers at recent AP annual meetings, sponsored by the College Board.)

I am now intrigued, as a textbook coauthor, by how readily many of my peers still dismiss the enterprise of textbook writing. Granted, I once rowed in that same boat, and I would still agree that these tomes seem far too numerous, too costly, and too bulky. Some of these “aircraft carriers,” as students often call the largest behemoths, are also too bland, stilted, or old-fashioned. But one could argue that for writers and readers alike surveys represent a strong antidote to the overspecialization and narrowness that has bedeviled our field. (If only our profession’s overabundance of monographs could be converted into ethanol!) Sadly, most historians have lost the art of talking in persuasive general terms to the broad public, while most citizens and public leaders have all but given up on seeking useful commentary and insights from academic historians.

Helping to design a survey text may be one way to make the best research in our profession available to a broader audience. But such overviews are harder to write (and certainly less lucrative per hour spent) than most colleagues suspect. So for me the main motivation became personal. Could I pull together the diverse threads of early American history into coherent and suggestive chapters? Could I run a swift and respectable first lap in the U.S. history relay race, getting Created Equal off to a suitable start before handing the baton off to my teammates (Jackie Jones, Elaine May, Tim Borstelmann, and Vicki Ruiz)? It was an exhausting leg but also a satisfying one.

In retrospect, I wish I had tackled such an assignment earlier in my career, since it forced me to read widely, weigh priorities, and hone my prose. It improved my teaching in ways I had not foreseen, since it obliged me to get above the trees and look at the general contours of the entire forest. Undoubtedly, this extended exercise in exploring wider vistas set the stage for one last, highly enjoyable pedagogical experiment: One Nation-One Semester.

Why would anyone ever tackle such a course, attempting to cover all of American history in a fifteen-week semester? I had learned from experience that the standard two-semester survey had several weaknesses. For one thing, the pace, though brisk, often seemed slow to impatient, instant-messaging sophomores. And even aspiring history majors sometimes bogged down in such historical twilight zones as the 1720s, the 1830s, or the 1950s. Also, for credit-counting undergraduates, the luxury of a two-semester overview cut into their busy course plan, so they often settled for only half of the year, skipping over how the saga begins or never discovering how it ends up. This was especially true for scientists and other non-history majors who were eager to build on their high school knowledge of the American past but who could not spare two terms to delve into the national attic.

In a department where many professors shun year-long survey courses and where drawing non-majors into history classrooms is always a plus, the experiment seemed plausible. So I jumped at the chance. It would put an exciting wrap on a teaching career that had included such prior adventures as Native American History, History and the Visual Image, and the History of Documentary Film.

Besides, I had once covered the same ground at a much faster speed. Years earlier, a dean at Duke’s Fuqua Business School had called unexpectedly, inviting me to meet with an international group of MBA students and “give them some background in American history.” When I asked how many days or weeks this survey would take, he suggested, “I think three hours would be enough. Feel free to take the whole morning, but leave time for breaks and discussion.”

“You bet,” I said, though he couldn’t see the expression on my face. I decided to emphasize four themes—pulled from dozens—that seem necessary to understanding America’s past. My short final list, as I recall, included our Christian, and predominantly Protestant, religious roots; our unusual ethnic and racial diversity; and our long track record as an entrepreneurial, capitalist nation; along with our distinctive geography and abundant natural resources. Armed only with several handouts, I tracked these variables across the 1700s, the 1800s, and the 1900s. We even had time for breaks between centuries and for discussion at the end!

What probably sounds like a useless cop-out or an exercise in lunacy turned out to be, from my perspective, a novel exchange, full of new insights, juxtapositions, and connections. The invitation to transit the vast territory of the American past at a velocity of Mach 2.0 had come about as a chance encounter, a “busman’s holiday” joyride. But this brief Top Gun exploit, talking about U.S. history while moving at twice the speed of sound, proved to be one of my most exhilarating and memorable teaching experiences.

By comparison, History 103, with its eye-catching title, One Nation-One Semester, would be a leisurely fly-over in a Lindbergh-era biplane. I would meet twice a week with thirty students, giving two midterms and a final exam. If all went according to plan, we would fight the U.S.-Mexican War and visit Seneca Falls before fall break in mid-October; we would be approaching Watergate when Thanksgiving arrived. Since I was most familiar with Created Equal, we would use that text to guide us, along with a connected book of primary source readings.

Naturally, we would keep an eye on main themes that had intrigued my team as we were writing Created Equal, such as the remarkable diversity of both the American land and the American people, the ebb and flow of power between the nation’s elites and its democratic masses, and the large and ever-shifting relationship between the United States and the wider world. But we would also track themes that seemed most important to class members or that emerged during the semester: the persistence of discrimination; the scope of American religious tolerance over time; the democratic, or tyrannical, strength of the public media. With the 2006 political campaigns in full swing during much of the fall term, party politics was in the air, though we worked hard to avoid predictable red-blue debates and to de-escalate the still-simmering “culture wars” wherever possible.

I assigned a money-saving, unbound version of Created Equal, punched for three-hole notebooks. This limited the resentments that arise from high prices and from having to lug a large book around campus all semester. Also, bringing two new chapters to class each week, instead of thirty, underscored the sense that we were constantly progressing onto different terrain, not wandering in circles through the same hinterland. Each session we would tackle one chapter and some connected documents.

On the first day of class, I distributed a handout urging students, among other things, to read assignments carefully in advance . . . and to get enough rest. (Lack of sleep had reached epidemic proportions on campus in recent years, and I wanted everyone to bring their minds, not just their sleepy bodies, to our sessions!) I had learned over time that many Duke students prefer to play their cards close to the vest, so the sheet also urged everyone to speak up freely. “Engaged give and take, with respect for varied opinions—and the right of everyone to change their views, generally makes for the liveliest classes.”

Before “closing the cabin door,” I reiterated the non-stop nature of our mission, so that anyone looking for a more leisurely flight was free to exit. No one departed, so I divided the students into ten groups of three. After that, on their assigned weeks, all members of one group would take responsibility for doing the reading early and posting brief, suggestive responses (signed and proofread) on our electronic blackboard site. That way, the rest of us could read these “postings” before class, and they often helped to shape and advance our lecture and conversations.

For me, and for most who took part I gather, the experience was overwhelmingly positive. It would take another column to discuss all the individual breakthroughs that occurred along the way. But the general pattern was clear. Even more than in most American history classes, this wide overview (mixed with lively discussions in a class of limited size) allowed lots of students to get beyond the strange barrier that often separates personal and family history from broader events and patterns.

Many of us who have become historians did so because we intuited these connections; they intrigued us from the start, so they often seem self-evident. But it does not take much time in front of history classes to realize that most students, having conceded the most obvious ties (or claimed the most self-serving ones) often resist more subtle or unflattering linkages between our personal and our collective heritage, at least until given space to open up. This kind of rapid overview provided an excellent space for finding and exploring such meaningful links.

By term’s end, two things struck me particularly, one that I anticipated and one that I did not. I knew at the outset that we would obviously be sacrificing “depth” all along the way, but I figured that much of the detail that students cram into their minds or their computers during a survey course is lost or forgotten within months anyway. So I was willing to trade elaboration for connections.

In short, I hoped that our accelerated speed would bring diverse periods, people, and problems into useful proximity. It is harder to induce and capitalize on such juxtapositions in a course that moves at a statelier pace. From the start, I described our journey as a rapid airplane ride at a rather high altitude, where we were giving up the benefits of a hike in the woods for the advantages of seeing wide vistas and the ways that changing historical landscapes fit together in logical and surprising ways. To illustrate this, I regularly traced our “flight” with a simple chalk timeline across the long blackboard at the front of the room. The far left side became the most distant, pre-Columbian, North American past—our initial runway, so to speak. The right edge of the board became the present, and as the term progressed we were steadily approaching that familiar landing zone.

But as we were traveling forward in time, week-by-week from left to right, we could also think our way back through the twentieth century, moving from right to left. This provided the teaching tool that I had not expected. In our discussion on any given day, we could pause to explore different generations of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents in the most recent century and how they might have viewed the subject we were discussing. It became clear early in our flight that even while we were still talking about Puritan religion or Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, we could also talk about historiography. We could, to put it another way, triangulate a given topic, looking back at it from several different chronological vantage points.

These interludes were often only brief asides, but they soon became a key part of the course. I would go to the right side of the board, standing “in the present,” and we could look back together along the timeline toward the worlds of the students’ recent ancestors. Then we could all comment on how those individuals, diverse as they were, might have understood the same topic that we were discussing. Perhaps they learned about it in an American school of the 1920s or the 1960s, or in some distant foreign country, for that matter.

Take Columbus, for example. Clearly his voyage looked quite different in 1792, when colleges, rivers, and cities were eagerly being named “Columbia,” or in 1892, when the expanding United States was beginning to look overseas. A century later, viewed from the vantage point of 1992, Columbus’s saga was seen from still another angle by many. Alfred Crosby’s seminal book, The Columbian Exchange (1972), had had two decades to sink in, and the decimation of indigenous Americans from exposure to new foreign diseases had become a topic of active debate.

Similarly, a class discussing the Civil War and Reconstruction period in 1915, when D. W. Griffith’s racist extravaganza, The Birth of a Nation, was being promoted in movie theaters and praised from the White House, would have different assessments of that past era than a cohort that had watched reruns of Edward Zwick’s 1989 film Glory while still in high school. Likewise, history students during the 1950s, the heady postwar era of penicillin and the Salk polio vaccine, surely had more trouble comprehending the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 than undergraduates in the 1990s, who were suddenly confronting the horrendous AIDS epidemic on a global scale. As we zoomed over recent decades late in the semester, we had already glimpsed some of the different ways that earlier generations experienced their own present and understood the national past.

Needless to say, our ground speed sometimes seemed especially fast during our long decent across the twentieth century. (“Keep an eye out on Tuesday for the New Deal, coming up on the left side of the plane. We will be passing over World War II shortly.”) But by the time we landed safely in early December, most of the passengers, and the pilot too, had a refreshed sense of the terrain of American history and also of the changing ways in which historians and other citizens have viewed this varied and continuous landscape.

As a historian, I have been lucky enough to go on lots of long archival hikes over the years, and I look forward to others. Still, I always wanted to fly extra fast across American history at least once before I retired. Now I can say that I did it. It proved a liberating trip, and I learned a great deal along the way. These days I am finding the steady pace of the little clock on the mantel to be plenty fast enough.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Peter H. Wood has written about colonial slavery, the demography in the early Southeast, the French explorations of LaSalle, the history of North Carolina, and the black images of American artist Winslow Homer. He has served on the boards of the Highlander Center, Harvard University, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; his most recent book is Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream (2004).

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change?

Early missionary printing in Thailand

Imagine what it feels like to find yourself in the backseat of a black limousine, speeding through congested Bangkok traffic as part of an armed convoy! This is exactly where I found myself in December 1982. At least the car was air conditioned, but that seemed small consolation at the time. I didn’t feel much better when we were waved through a checkpoint into a large compound protected by coils of barbed wire. I was not sure what I had done to deserve this treatment, but from all appearances it hadn’t been good.

Let me explain. In early 1980, my partner, later to become my wife, had enlisted in the Peace Corps and had been assigned to Thailand to work as a field worker in malaria prevention. At the time, I was employed by the Bibliographical Society of America as an editor to complete the final volumes of its long-term project, Bibliography of American Literature, based in an office at the Houghton Library at Harvard College. I had also become interested in and, more and more involved with, what was then an emerging discipline in the United States, the history of the book. This new discipline, which was inspired by work of French scholars in what they termed histoire du livre, had been introduced in America by two influential books of the 1970s: Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) and Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 (1979).

In 1980, when my partner left Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Thailand, it seemed that it might be a good idea if I were to find a topic for research that would justify occasional trips to Thailand, so that we could visit. What about the history of Thailand’s introduction to printing? One of the major arguments of Eisenstein’s book was that the introduction of the printing press and the subsequent rise of “print culture” had profoundly affected European society during the Renaissance and Reformation, though this thesis was being hotly contested by other scholars. Perhaps a similar study of the introduction of printing into Thailand, a Buddhist society that was certainly literate without the benefit of printing, would provide a useful test case.

Preliminary investigations proved promising. The introduction of printing into Thailand, then Siam, had been chiefly the work of Western missionaries: preliminary efforts were made by French Roman Catholic missionaries at the end of the eighteenth century but more permanently by American Protestant missionaries from the 1830s. Furthermore, the archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), one of the leading missionary societies that had played a role in early Thai printing, were right there in the Houghton Library, and thus I would have ready access to important primary materials. The archives of other American missionary societies were available on microfilm, and their work was also documented in published reports and periodicals, which were also at hand. So I set to work with my investigations, evenings and weekends, and compiled a checklist of early Thai imprints and gathered evidence of its impact. Looking back, I suppose I imagined that my investigations might end up in a decisive graph that would map the number of pages printed against the number of Buddhist converts to Christianity and that that data would thus support or undermine Eisenstein’s thesis.

One of the first tracts printed by American missionaries in Bangkok. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Miss 721.8.

Here is what I discovered. Regular contact between Thailand and Europe dates from the early sixteenth century. The first Roman Catholic missionaries settled at Ayutthaya (then the capital of Thailand) in 1554 and in 1674 wrote to France requesting printing equipment. No evidence survives that this early request was granted, and the honor of being the first printer of Thai belongs to another French missionary. In 1788, Arnaud-Antoine Garnault wrote from Pondicherry in India, reporting that he had had a catechism and a primer printed in romanized Thai. In 1796, with Garnault now settled in Thailand, the first press arrived there, sent from France, and over the next few years it was used to produce a few small books and pamphlets, also in romanized Thai.

If the early efforts of the Roman Catholic missionaries were limited, both in scope and intended audience, this was not the case of the American Protestant mission presses that were established in Bangkok in the 1830s. During the final decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, an outburst of evangelical religious enthusiasm swept both England and the United States. This revival, in part a reaction against the rationalism and deism of the Enlightenment, led to the founding of various societies dedicated to distributing tracts, translating the scriptures, and funding missionary activities at home and abroad. As with their Roman Catholic predecessors, Protestant missionaries in Asia followed in the footsteps of merchants. The lucrative trade of England and the United States with India, China, and Southeast Asia inevitably drew Protestant evangelicals to these areas, and early in the nineteenth century a number of missions and missionary presses were established there, most famously at Serampore, a Danish trading center just upriver from Calcutta. The Serampore press became a veritable factory for scriptures in Asian languages.

The first printing in Thai characters was accomplished at Serampore in 1819: a Catechism of Religion that had been prepared by the American Baptist missionary Ann Hasseltine Judson for distribution to a small community of Thai prisoners of war in Burma. In 1823, this Thai font was shipped to Singapore, where the London Missionary Society (LMS) had established a press late the preceding year. Plans to establish a printing center foundered, however, and it was not until the end of the decade that the type was put to use, a direct result of the first visit by Protestant missionaries to Thailand in 1828 and 1829. The primary goal of this visit was to distribute Chinese tracts among the junks that regularly traded between Thailand and southern China, but the missionaries recognized the opportunities for missionary work among the Thais as well. Accordingly, they had six thousand copies of a tract and seven hundred copies of the Gospel of Luke and the first six chapters of the Gospel of John printed at the LMS press, and when one of the missionaries returned to Bangkok in 1831, he carried the tract with him—the first printing from moveable type in Thai characters to find its way to Thailand.

The LMS missionaries also wrote to several American organizations asking for help with this new missionary opportunity, and as a result in 1833 American Baptists sent a missionary to Bangkok from Burma to establish a permanent mission there. The following year the missionary arm of the Congregational Church of America, the ABCFM, established its own mission in Bangkok. The ABCFM took possession of the LMS printing establishment in Singapore, and in July 1835 brought it and an old-fashioned press to Bangkok from Singapore. In July 1836, the Baptist Board sent a trained printer, together with a proper press and equipment, to Thailand. The Baptists had not, however, been able to acquire Thai type for their press; the Congregationalists were willing to share their type, and with this combination of resources and expertise, a dozen or so tracts were prepared over the next eighteen months. When the Congregationalists received two new presses and other equipment in 1837, these too were shared with the Baptists. This cooperation came to an end in May 1838, and from then on the Protestant missionaries in Bangkok maintained two separate printing establishments, the Baptist “Mission Press” and the “ABCFM Press.”

Another early tract on inoculation and vaccination. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Miss 721.8.

Over the next decades, the American missionary presses printed tracts and books at a prodigious rate—hundreds of thousands of pages were produced! Most of this material was of a religious nature, intended to aid in the project of Christianizing the local population; by far the greatest achievement of the Baptist Mission Press was the publication of the New Testament in Thai, completed in 1843. But the press also produced nonreligious publications, including textbooks, two works intended to aid in the study of the Thai language, and from 1847 to 1851 an English-language almanac entitled the Bangkok Calendar. The output of the ABCFM Press was also largely religious in nature, mostly tracts that explained the message of the scriptures and Christianity in simple language. Other works included a series of almanacs in Thai, produced annually from 1843, and the Bangkok Recorder, the first periodical produced in Thailand, which appeared monthly for eighteen issues from July 1844. It contained summaries of foreign news and tables of prices current, as well as more general educational material—such as discussions of chemistry and the human circulatory system—and entertaining stories and fables. This press also produced several works on Western medical practices (including treatises on vaccination and midwifery), a work on Western astronomy, and a series of woodcut maps with the place names given in Thai. English-language promotional and informational material was also printed for friends and supporters in the United States. Both presses also produced some Chinese-language material, aimed at the local Chinese community as well as China itself.

There is some evidence of experimentation with printing by Thais themselves before the arrival of the American missionaries, but clearly the Protestant tracts and the technology that produced them spurred renewed curiosity. Experiments continued but were, with a single exception, of little success. In several instances, Thais collaborated with the mission presses, most notably in the production at the ABCFM Press of 10,700 copies of a broadside version of King Rama III’s May 1839 proclamation against the sale and use of opium. This was the Thai government’s first official printed document. In 1850, the Baptist press began printing, at the expense of a Thai nobleman named Kh’un Mote, 125 copies of a two-volume edition of the laws of Thailand, but the work was suppressed by order of King Rama III and was only issued in incomplete form under the more enlightened regime of his successor, King Rama IV. This person, who as chau fa yai (crown prince) served as the head priest of an important Buddhist monastery in Bangkok, was the first Thai to establish a true press. In 1841, the ABCFM missionaries, with whom he collaborated, reported that he had acquired a printing press and type and type-casting equipment from England with the intention of printing the Buddhist scriptures in romanized Pali. Early in 1843, the ABCFM Press presented him with some of the new Thai type it had produced, but in 1848 he is reported to have invented a new script, called ariyaka, for use in printing the Pali language. This new script required only forty-one matrices for a full font rather than the nearly one thousand required for the Khmer script, which had traditionally been used for the Pali scriptures in Thailand. In late 1849, the chou fa yai ordered a lithographic press from the United States, which he then used to produce several works, mostly in the Pali language using his ariyakascript.

All very interesting, but most of this information was well documented in the outstanding collections at Harvard University. In addition, I had discovered that Harvard possessed what turned out to be the most important surviving collection of early Thai imprints, largely hidden on the shelves of the Widener Library and the Harvard Divinity School library, which had earlier incorporated the library of the Andover Theological Seminary. Among many things, I discovered a copy of that 1839 royal proclamation on opium. But to complete my research, I was eager to discover what evidence of the impact of printing remained in Asian collections.

And this brings me back to that armed convoy in 1982. During a visit to Bangkok the preceding year, I had consulted the collections in the research library at Chulalongkorn University, to little avail, but the librarian had provided me with an introduction to Kamthon Sathrikul, who was not only the owner of the largest textbook publishing firm in Thailand but also an expert on the history of Thai printing. Earlier in 1982, during a business trip to the United States, Mr. Kamthon had called on me at the Houghton Library, where I showed him the fruits of my research. He was clearly interested and enjoyed seeing actual copies of books that had been printed in Thailand nearly a century and a half earlier, but when I brought out the copy of the royal proclamation, his excitement was palpable. Its existence and text were well known in Thailand, he explained, but no other copy was known to exist. This was a treasure, indeed!

Accordingly, I arranged to have the proclamation properly conserved and to have high-quality photographs made for presentation to the National Library of Thailand. When I returned to Bangkok in 1982, I carried these with me when I visited the library. As I registered in the reading room, I explained to the staff that I would like to make an appointment to see the national librarian, as I had a gift to the library from Harvard University. I then settled down to examine material from the library’s collections; their holdings of early Thai imprints were unfortunately limited but included the first copy that I had found of the treatise on midwifery, which turned out to be illustrated with simple anatomical woodcuts that must have been prepared locally. As I worked away, I was interrupted and introduced to a serious-looking, middle-aged woman. Communication was difficult, as her knowledge of English was as limited as mine of Thai, so we proceeded with the usual exchange of greetings that polite etiquette in Thailand required. Only gradually did I realize that this was, indeed, the national librarian herself!

A Grammar of the English Language, prepared with the assistance of the Thai crown prince, later Rama IV. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. KF 7665.

I had expected that any appointment with the librarian would be scheduled for some future date, if at all, but I now suppose that the Harvard name had worked its familiar magic. Once I understood the situation, I explained to her, as best I could, the purpose of my visit and showed her the photographs that I carried with me. If anything, her reaction was even more excited than Mr. Kamthon’s had been. After carefully taking possession of the photographs, she immediately invited me to her office, where she proceeded with the standard sign of hospitality in Thailand and ordered two bottles of ice-cold Coke. But before the drinks arrived, I found myself whisked away and sitting with her and the photographs in the back seat of a car, part of an armed convoy, sirens screeching, careening through the streets of Bangkok.

As it turned out, I was being delivered to the Ministry of Culture in order to be introduced to the minister himself. Once he arrived, there was considerable conversation, which I only vaguely followed, but he was also clearly interested in the photographs. The Coke finally arrived. Our meeting was brief, and I was soon returned to the National Library, where I continued my work, but every year since then, I have received an elaborately illustrated desk calendar, together with a form letter of thanks, from the Ministry of Culture. Unfortunately, the calendar does not reach me until March, as it is sent by surface mail, but it still reminds me of that unexpected meeting many years ago.

This was just the most extraordinary of my experiences while researching the history of early Thai printing. During my trip to Southeast Asia in 1982, I also managed to visit the National Library of Burma in Rangoon, where I hoped to discover evidence of Adinoram Judson and his wife’s missionary activities among Thai prisoners of war. Alas, the collections of the library were meager and scarcely historical, and access to them was limited, especially as the humidity had swollen shut many of the drawers in the card catalog. I had better luck in Calcutta; at the National Library of India—now housed in the residence of the last viceroy of the British Empire—bibliographers arranged for me to visit the collections of Serampore College, which occupies the buildings of the Serampore mission. The college’s collections, which incorporated those of the mission, were spotty but rich in historical material, especially as the missionaries had adopted the practice of infusing the paper they used with arsenic in order to discourage insect infestation.

But all in all, my research in Asian collections proved disappointing. In retrospect, that result is understandable, given that the climate and politics in these countries have not been conducive to the preservation of documents from that period. Furthermore, I had followed those early Western missionaries in believing in the effectiveness of the printing press as a means of proselytizing. In 1835, the American Baptist Board of Missions had expressed its faith that the printing press was “the great instrument of enlightening the world” and its belief that the board’s “chief reliance must be placed on this, among the means of saving mankind.” In 1859, however, a Congregationalist missionary in Bangkok was forced to admit that, despite the many hundreds of thousands of pages that had been produced and distributed, only eight or ten Thai and little short of one hundred Chinese souls had been saved over the previous thirty years. It is hardly surprising that the best documentation of early Thai printing survives in the great collections in the West.

An example of the decorated paper used for binding early Thai tracts. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Miss 719.

I do not consider my project a failure, though I eventually abandoned it, for it did give me a reason to visit a number of interesting collections and to meet many fascinating people. Nor do I reject Eisenstein’s thesis that the printing press acts as an agent for change, though my project did make me recognize that the press’s impact may be more subtle, but perhaps more far-reaching, than I had first understood. If it proved to be an ineffective tool for Christianizing the Thai people, it must have played an important part—in ways that neither I nor the Western missionaries had imagined—in the great transformation of Thailand into a modern nation.

One Man’s Skull

Here is an 1880 description of a human skull from the List of Specimens on display in the Anatomical Section of the United States Army Medical Museum:

(292) Cranium M. aet. C.40, Cap. 1495 c.c., L. 187 mm., B. 141 mm., H. 136 mm., I.f. m. 49, L. a. 391 mm., C. 467 mm., Z.d. 145 mm., F. a. 70°. “Vendovi,” chief of one of the Fiji Islands. Received in exchange from the Smithsonian Institution.

We can learn this much from the description’s cryptic phrases: a man from Fiji had died at about age forty. Someone had taken his skull, measured it, inside and out, and logged it into the museum’s collections as specimen 292. A reader versed in craniology would picture the skull parsed out in its angles and volumes. Most of the rest of us would stop at the nouns: the man’s name, his station, and his origin. Specimen 292 was the skull of a man the museum called “‘Vendovi,’ chief of one of the Fiji Islands.”

Odds are that “Vendovi” never planned to have his skull end up in the United States, let alone in a museum display case. The skull took a great long trip from Fiji to New York and then through several collections in Washington. It is sometimes troubling to find human remains on display, but museum visitors were little troubled by this head, and brochures touted it as one of the museum’s star attractions. Perhaps visitors would have responded differently had they had a piece of information dropped from the cataloger’s description. Thirty years before it wound up on the Army Medical Museum’s List of Specimens, one collector had labeled it the skull of “the Feejee Chief and Murderer.” Murderer? Murder would have been too sensational to slip into a medical museum’s scientific description. But there must be a story behind specimen 292.

Here is the beginning of that story: Vendovi was brought back to the United States in 1842, a prisoner aboard one of the ships of the United States Exploring Expedition. On June 10, 1842, four ships from the expedition sailed into New York harbor. The U.S. Ex. Ex., to use the popular shorthand, was nineteenth-century America’s greatest voyage of oceanic discovery. In August 1838, when the small fleet of six ships left Norfolk, Virginia, to sail south to Antarctica, out across the Pacific, back to the coast of Oregon, and then back to New York via the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, the United States had no Pacific Coast (or didn’t have one yet). But just in case, the U.S. Ex. Ex. would demonstrate to the great powers—England, Russia, and France—that the United States was ready to jostle for position in the Pacific.

Controversy swirled around the expedition’s commander, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, but even accusations against him, of unjust punishment dished out in high-handed ways, could not diminish the value of the charts his surveyors produced or of the forty-odd tons of natural treasures the expedition’s corps of scientists collected.

Vendovi was a prize among the specimens, and the expedition’s naturalists knew it. While the ships waited for a pilot in the waters off New York’s Sandy Hook, Charles Pickering, a senior member of the scientific corps, wrote to America’s preeminent skull collector, Dr. Samuel George Morton, and told him to come quickly to New York. “Our Feejee Cheif [sic] is on his last legs and will probably give up the ghost tomorrow. As you go in for Anthropology, it would be well worth your while to come on immediately, for such a specimen of humanity you have never seen, and the probability is, that you may never have the opportunity again.”

"Vendovi." Drawn by A. T. Agate, engraved by R. H. Pease. From Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1842, by Charles Wilkes, U.S.N., vol. III (Philadelphia, 1845). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — “Vendovi.” Drawn by A. T. Agate, engraved by R. H. Pease. From Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1842, by Charles Wilkes, U.S.N., vol. III (Philadelphia, 1845). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Pickering knew that his “specimen of humanity” from Fiji was particularly interesting to an “anthropologist” like Morton, who was trying to sort the world’s diverse peoples into races. He also knew that any existing systems of racial categorization would have to be adjusted in light of what he discovered on his voyage with Wilkes. The racial diversity of the Pacific was so staggering to Pickering that he began to argue that the standard five races—the Ethiopian, the Mongolian, the Malay, the American, and the Caucasian—could not possibly account for all the people he had seen. Fijians were particularly puzzling; they had dark skin and curly hair but sharp features. Were they a race of their own or a mix of many?

Maybe a live Fijian would help race-expert Morton solve this puzzle. Morton owned a few shrunken heads from the Pacific. These were not difficult to obtain. American whalemen occasionally brought them back, even though missionaries and government officials in Australia and New Zealand were trying to stop the trade. But full-size human skulls from Southeast Asia and the South Seas were still rare in American collections. (Morton once complained that there was not a Malay skull to be found in all of Philadelphia.) He knew that most sailors still did not like packing pickled or even cleaned human remains in a ship’s hold. Dead bodies went overboard.

But here was Vendovi who had been good enough to carry his own skull all the way from the Pacific. On that long trip, Vendovi became friends with the crewmen. He crops up in their accounts, playing a Jews harp, telling them about love in Fiji, adding to Fijian vocabularies, and telling harrowing tales of a mysterious flood that destroyed island villages (which, his American companions assured him, was caused by an undersea earthquake off the coast of Peru, not by the Fijian gods). Vendovi was especially close to the pilot, Benjamin Vanderford, an old Salem hand who had learned Fijian during his years in the bêche-de-mer or sea-slug trade. When Vanderford died, Vendovi’s heart was broken, the sailors said. Maybe it was to humor sorrowful Vendovi that Wilkes named an island in Puget Sound “Vendovi Island.” Vendovi is still on our maps.

In June 1842, Vendovi was dying in New York harbor. If Morton could rush up from Philadelphia, he might have the rare chance to compare measurements of a man, alive and dead. But Morton was not a man to do anything quickly, and while he dawdled in Philadelphia, Vendovi died in New York. Fortunately Wilkes had made notes. Vendovi was five feet, eleven inches tall; had a facial angle of sixty-seven degrees; a head that measured twenty-two inches; a foot of eleven and a half inches; an arm of thirty-four inches. He had thirty-two teeth and a resting pulse of sixty-five beats per minute.

"Vendovi." Woodcut; sketched by A. T. Agate, engraved by J. W. Paradise. From Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1842, by Charles Wilkes, U.S.N., vol. III (Philadelphia, 1845). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — “Vendovi.” Woodcut; sketched by A. T. Agate, engraved by J. W. Paradise. From Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1842, by Charles Wilkes, U.S.N., vol. III (Philadelphia, 1845). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

When Vendovi’s heart stopped, New York’s penny press had a field day with the dead man’s story. The Herald reported that he had died of “consumption in consequence probably of having no human flesh to eat.” “We have understood that the body of the Fejee chief, Vendovi is about to be embalmed by the learned faculty of the University of New York. We hope Dr. Mott will be prevailed upon to deliver a lecture on his remains.” As far as I can tell, there was no lecture about the remains, but we know that Vendovi’s head, cleaned of flesh, went to Washington; his headless body, to a cemetery in Brooklyn. In just a few years, the specimen skull, tattooed with its number 292, turned up on display in case 37 in the Great Hall of the United States Patent Office, part of the collections of the Smithsonian precursor known as the “National Cabinet of Curiosities.”

From the cabinet, from the pages of the penny press, and from tales of the Wilkes expedition, the story of Vendovi made its way into American culture, coloring the stories of Herman Melville’s white whale and P. T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid,” two of the greatest imaginary creatures to come out of midcentury America.

But it would be wrong to leave Vendovi among the creations of the American imagination. His skull’s more interesting “object lesson” may lie in the real man and what we can learn from him about the history of Fiji and Fiji’s encounter with the modern world and its search for profits.

Wilkes had been instructed to map the reefs around the islands of Fiji, an archipelago considered so dangerous—for its seas and its cannibals—that sailors heading there sometimes prepared their wills and insurance companies refused to underwrite voyages. But by the late 1830s, America’s Pacific interests were substantial enough to compel the government to send Wilkes to chart Fiji’s uncharted waters. According to one of his marines, Wilkes had also been instructed “to revenge some injuries and insults that the Chiefs of some of these islands have committed on American ships and citizens.” Vendovi, it seems, was wanted for murder, accused of masterminding the deaths of eleven men who were curing “bêche-de-mer” (more commonly known as sea slugs) on a Fijian beach in 1834.

A history of the “bêche-de-mer” trade might be one lesson too many to take from the poor skull, but if it were not for the lowly sea slug (holothuria), Vendovi would not have become specimen 292. In the 1830s, Salem traders, who had cut down and sold off Fiji’s valuable sandalwood, found they could make good money by drying and selling the sea slugs (which abounded in Fiji’s coral reefs). They shipped the dried sea slugs to Manila or directly to Canton, where the prized soup ingredient fetched handsome profits.

But catching and drying sea slugs was a delicately orchestrated, labor-intensive practice, and—even though some Fijians were pleased that it maintained a flow of trade goods into island villages—to insure profits Salem traders meddled their way into Fijian ecology, economy, politics, and labor practices. Traders drew local men from traditional tasks and put them to work harvesting and drying sea slugs.

Map of Fiji Islands. Lithograph by T. Sinclair. From The Cannibal Islands; Or, Fiji and Its People (Philadelphia, 1863). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

It did not take long for the sea-slug trade to fall on hard times. In an all too familiar pattern, a commercial market reduced the sea-slug population, although the trade was playing its part in Fijian politics. And the nine or ten men (Americans, Tahitians, Hawaiians) drying sea slugs for the “Charles Doggett” were killed, probably by Vendovi and his kinsmen. It is not entirely clear why Vendovi might have helped murder the men. Some said he was just being a Fijian and giving vent to a uniquely Fijian kind of violence. Others said he was after the “Jew box” that contained the trader’s supply of whale’s teeth, made plentiful by sea-slug traders but still highly valued by Fijian chiefs.

Whatever Vendovi’s role in the murders, Wilkes carried out his orders to arrest the man. He sent Captain William Hudson to capture Vendovi. Hudson invited all the locals to a party on his ship. He was sure that Vendovi would come, but when he did not show up, Hudson locked up all the Fijians and said he would hold them until someone brought him Vendovi. A half-brother and political rival volunteered to go after the man he and his family knew as “Ro-Veidovi.” While Americans and Fijians waited through the night for the pair to return, the foreign sailors put on a black-faced minstrel show to entertain their Fijian guests. It is hard to know what the audience thought of Jim Crow mounted on the back of his dancing donkey, but the Americans thought the Fijians were amused.

It is also hard to know what the Fijians made of Ro-Veidovi’s trial, particularly the principal evidence against him. The latter had been taken under oath from a yarn-spinning white beachcomber widely known for his vivid imagination (his great boast of 150 wives). While the Fijians wept, the Americans slapped Ro-Veidovi in irons, cut off his great head of Fijian hair, and carried him off to teach him a lesson: “to kill a white man is the worse thing a Fijian man can do.” The Americans told themselves that the whole affair was a lesson in American justice. Historians of Fiji think Ro-Veidovi was surrendered for Fijian reasons, one opening salvo in the great wars of the 1840s.

News of Ro-Veidovi’s fate in America (if not the fate of his skull) would make its way back to Fiji and become one piece of the story Fijians told themselves in the 1840s as their kingdoms of Rewa and Bau fought bloody civil wars. A prophet had once described the fates of the four brothers of the King of Rewa.

That one would die a natural death, another would float away, two would be killed, the most diminutive of the whole would be made king, and principal chief of Bau would be shot during a war with Rewa.

Ro-Veidovi was the man who had floated away. The Fijians waited for the rest of the prophecy to come true.

The Americans sailed away, although they were not through with violence on Fiji, and an ugly scene unfolded just weeks after Ro-Veidovi’s capture. Two Americans were murdered in an altercation, which seems to have happened too quickly for anyone to understand. In their grief and rage, the Americans burned Fiji villages, but as their anger waned, the slaughter of innocents disturbed even the mourning sailors. The most eloquent of them wondered if America’s “path through the Pacific is to be marked in blood.”

Have we begun to fill out the cryptic caption on specimen 292? Pickering, Morton, and Wilkes thought they had taken the measure of the man and his skull. We might better use specimen 292 to take a measure of American culture in the early 1840s and to begin to chart differing American and Fijian versions of this improbable encounter from the great age of American expansion.

Race, Class, and Upheaval in Revolutionary Virgina

In his extensively researched, clearly written analysis of Virginia during the War for American Independence, Michael McDonnell provides an authoritative study of enslaved Virginians, bound white laborers, tenants, and small farmers—the majority of Virginia’s population—as they sought their own brand of liberty and freedom. During their fights for independence, these Virginians often encountered a conservative, nervous elite who steadfastly clung to traditional hierarchies and who hoped to preserve as much of the political and economic status quo as possible. Each side, however, quickly realized that to attain their objectives they had to take or keep liberty and property from the other: whatever political or economic power lower-sort Virginians hoped to win, they had to take from elites, and whatever property and power elites sought to preserve, they had to keep from lower-class white and black Virginians. This multi-layered internal conflict—one of the ironies of the struggles for freedom waged by the racially and economically diverse inhabitants of North America during the Revolutionary era—characterized the struggle for independence in Virginia and sits at the center of McDonnell’s study of how race and class relations altered Virginian society during the Revolutionary War.

In the process of telling a rich, complex story, McDonnell focuses on three interrelated issues that drove the movement for independence in Virginia. Virginians continuously struggled to muster enough people for military service. Initially, elite Virginians wanted to arm lower-class whites to protect the colony from slave rebellions, but as the war with Britain intensified and the possibilities for slave revolts increased, Revolutionaries desperately sought to put more soldiers in militia units and in the regular army. However, middling and lower-class men continued to avoid that service. When Virginia’s rulers enticed them with promises of land and money, poorer Virginians took advantage of the need for soldiers and pressed for promises of even more money and more land. While elites stopped short of giving in entirely, the combined threats of an inadequately protected Virginia, the growing possibility of slave revolts, and the danger of a British invasion compelled elites to enact drafts that cut across class lines, to allow a somewhat more democratized political arena, and to grant promises of even greater bounties, which went largely unfulfilled after the war.

To pay for military service, Virginians in power had to levy and collect taxes. But racial and class tensions pushed them to alter the way taxes were assessed and collected. Rather than make poorer people pay a disproportionate share of the taxes, the regular method in Virginia, Revolutionaries distributed widely the cost of the war as a way to encourage more people to pay their assessments and accept military service, which included serving on slave patrols. In 1777 and 1778, for example, legislators began taxing the value of landed and human property instead of simply taxing acreage, and inventories, quit-rents, and incomes were also assessed, which meant that wealthier men would pay more taxes than they had in the past and that they would also pay a greater share of taxes. Legislators also made provisions for the popular election of the tax commissioner, a move designed to generate popular support for the law. Elites had hoped the new tax law would spread out the pain of paying for the war more evenly among Virginians of all classes and might ease the sting of a new draft, but lower and middling Virginians balked at the draft and then voted into office new men who represented their perspective. Taken together, McDonnell argues, disputes over service and taxes helped create a political world that, after the Revolution, was characterized by interest-based politics and dominated by middling men.

Enslaved Virginians’ persistent attempts to acquire their personal liberty shaped nearly every discussion of taxes and military service. Blacks knew that conflict among whites offered them the best chance to improve their condition by escaping slavery, and enslaved Africans “made the first bid for independence,” doing so before Lord Dunmore issued his famous proclamation (49). Once conflict between Revolutionaries and the British started in earnest, enslaved Africans began making their way to British camps, an exodus that deeply troubled white Virginians. While slave owners were losing property and labor, the British tacitly promised to put guns in the hands of escaped slaves, increasing the likelihood of what white Virginians feared most—armed slave uprisings. That fear, as much if not more than others, McDonnell argues, drove Revolutionaries in authority to concede political and economic power to lower- and middle-class whites in several desperate attempts to put men in the field to protect against the dual threat of the British and armed escaped slaves.

After the war, the general movement for independence inspired some Virginians to push for manumission, and a manumission law passed in 1782 eased some restrictions on masters who wanted to manumit their slaves. Other whites, however, remained angry that some enslaved Virginians joined the British during the Revolution and, after the war, sought to limit changes in manumission laws. Moreover, middling white Virginians believed the Revolution had given them the chance to secure their property claims, and for them, that meant owning land and slaves. While this middling sort lobbied hard to decrease taxes on property of all kinds, they also besieged the Virginia legislature with proslavery petitions that limited attempts to reduce slavery in the state. As McDonnell shows, abolitionism in Virginia was short lived.

But McDonnell does more than describe the nearly constant racial and class tensions that plagued Virginia during the Revolutionary period. He restores contingency to the movement for independence and agency to the actors to show how Virginians of varying classes and races defined liberty and scrambled to secure their rule over others. And he illustrates how some rebels classified their rebellion as legitimate, in part, by outlawing any movement that challenged their authority. In this excellent study, McDonnell outlines the brick-by-brick construction of legitimacy and authority during the Revolutionary era and thereby offers a blueprint for how historians should examine the attempts by various groups of Americans to acquire liberty and independence in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Resisting State Authority on Passamaquoddy Bay

In this short but exhaustively researched book, Joshua Smith provides a detailed account of the maritime smuggling trade between Maine and New Brunswick. The story begins in 1783, the year that the former became an American state and the latter a British colony, and ends in 1821, the year that the New Brunswick government’s efforts to control its plaster trade were abandoned. Aside from this commerce, smuggling from the United States was largely the product of the British Navigation Acts, which banned American ships from the new colony’s ports, and the 1807 American trade embargo, which banned the colony’s ships from American ports. Most of the resulting smuggling took place on Passamaquoddy Bay, which the author describes as “one of the great smuggling centers of the Atlantic world in the first decades of the nineteenth century” (66).

Passamaquoddy was an ideal location for smuggling because of “the indeterminate border, frequent fogs, numerous secluded coves, beaches, and islands, and its placement at the interface between the mighty commercial British Empire and the rising agrarian American republic” (13). But this was not smuggling as we normally think of it, with low-bulk, high-value commodities such as alcohol or drugs hidden in small compartments. Rather, the main products in question were American flour, salt beef, naval stores, and New Brunswick gypsum or plaster. The latter may have been “mere stone,” as one observer noted, but its properties as a calcium-rich fertilizer made it highly valuable to farmers in the American wheat-raising heartland of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Indeed, it may well have been “British North America’s most valuable export to the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century” (97).

The plaster trade through Passamaquoddy Bay jumped from one hundred tons in 1794 to thirteen thousand by 1802 (42), and it would continue to increase thereafter. Because of its low unit value and the high freight rates, producers transported the product across the border on their own small vessels, thereby upsetting the merchants of Saint John who wished to carry it in their larger vessels directly to market in New York and Philadelphia. By necessity, such an activity took place largely in the open and depended on the support of the local populace, which ensured that customs officials had little choice but to turn a blind eye if they wished to remain in the community. Indeed, these officials generally played a supportive role in what was often a complex process of evading state regulations. Crown customs officers operated quite independently, for they were not responsible to the colonial government, and their American counterparts were equally corrupt. During the embargo period, for example, a shipload of plaster would be nominally seized by the U.S. customs officer; it was then valued at 25 to 50 percent of its real worth by court-appointed appraisers who were usually plaster merchants and smugglers themselves. When a bond for this amount was put up by the owners of the plaster, the ship was released, effectively meaning the owners still made a profit while the appraisers were paid a per diem by the government and the customs officer received a portion of the plaster’s value as a reward for the “seizure.”

Smugglers also used more violent tactics such as kidnappings and beatings in order to intimidate the authorities, leading to the so-called flour war and plaster war, but Smith insists these were not examples of preindustrial popular resistance, in the Thompsonian sense. Rather, the smuggling business represented the effort of small producers (who claimed simply to be free traders) in an economically marginal environment to take advantage of external market demand, and it contributed to the growth of the local middle class that took part in it. The fact remains, however, that the farmers who were also the builders and owners of the coasting craft that carried the gypsum were claiming the fruits of their labor by defying the political economies of mercantilism.

Loyalties were largely to the local community, and the border only strengthened those ties by necessitating mutual cooperation against outside authority. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the smuggling trade represented a refusal “to believe that their neighbors across the border were different from themselves” (10). Borderland studies generally examine long-established populations that have been divided by an arbitrary boundary, but this was not the case for Maine and New Brunswick. Many of those who settled north of the border did so for political reasons. Smith’s assumption that smuggling fostered a mutual sense of community is clearly true, to some extent, and all preindustrial rural populations shared a deep distrust of outside authority, but smuggling could and can take place between peoples of distinctly different values and cultures who were and are simply willing to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by an international boundary. In his concluding chapter, Smith provides some interesting examples of a common borderland outlook on Passamaquoddy Bay, but he also states that—contrary to the charges of New Brunswick’s governing elite—there is no evidence that the colonial population had been infected with “a leveling American ideology” (106).

While he leaves the impression that the boundary line and customs duties represented a hindrance to local economic development, Smith does not dispel the possibility that the opposite was true. Certainly, the Passamaquoddy area experienced sudden prosperity during the embargo and War of 1812. Further research is required, then, to test some of this study’s assumptions, and little reference is made to the broader borderlands literature. But the book is well written, with relatively few typos or errors (e.g., on page 116 one sentence states that William Newcomb died in 1796 while the next says that this took place on October 2, 1795). The most glaring oversight is the failure to include a map to guide the reader through the complex geography of the Passamaquoddy area. Borderland Smuggling is, in short, an interesting and informative account of how material self-interest and local loyalties trumped broader allegiances in the northeastern borderland of the early nineteenth century.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Jack Little is a member of the history department at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. His most recent books are Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792-1852 (2004) and The Other Quebec: Microhistorical Essays on Nineteenth-Century Religion and Society (2006). Forthcoming in 2008 is Loyalties in Conflict: A Canadian Borderland in War and Rebellion, 1812-1840.

Bread and Butter Activism

For too long, studies of working class activism have focused almost exclusively on working men’s public lives—on their political and social activities and their developing class consciousness. In recent years there has been a growing interest among historians in examining the private lives of men. Yet while these studies have revealed a great deal about middle- and upper-class men as husbands, fathers, and breadwinners, the domestic experiences of working men remain invisible. Thus far, our entire understanding of working-class households—our entrée into this private world—has been through the eyes of women.

In Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Market Revolution in New York, 1800-1840, Joshua R. Greenberg bridges this gap in the literature, providing scholars of the early American republic with an entirely new perspective on both the private and public lives of working men. As Greenberg persuasively asserts, political activism and demands for higher pay, better working conditions, and protection of craft integrity were “closely intertwined” with men’s “lived domestic experiences” (intro.: para. 3 [note that this review references the e-book by chapter and paragraph number]). Men and women, particularly of the working class, did not reside in separate spheres. The practical day-to-day needs of a growing family—from putting food on the table, paying the rent, and providing a proper education for children to laying away some money to provide for the unknowns of sickness, injury, and death—remained at the forefront of men’s concerns as they ventured out of the household and into the workplace. Thus, any attempt to comprehend the motivations of workers in forming unions, organizing political parties, or otherwise engaging in collective activities must begin in the household.

Reflecting this interdependence of the private and public, Greenberg devotes the first section of this study of organized labor in New York City to an analysis of the household and neighborhood composition of the men who actively participated in the labor unions and workers’ political parties. Greenberg compares a “sample” of these organized working men against the average demographic characteristics of journeymen. He concludes that activists were more likely than the average working man to be older, married men who headed large households. Thus, in direct contrast to the stereotypical young, single, male worker with no household responsibilities and a loose moral compass, those most likely to resort to collective action were men with the greatest domestic responsibilities. Greenberg then couples this statistical overview with case studies of a house carpenter and a printer, both of whom (he alleges) serve as “typical examples of organized working men” (chap. 2: para 39).

This first section comprises the weakest portion of the book. In repeatedly employing the term “sample”—and then in statistically comparing this demographic data with that of average journeymen—Greenberg misleadingly implies that he has compiled representative statistics on a randomly selected sample of organizing men. In reality, Greenberg’s “sample” instead consists of those activists about whom he could locate demographic information. Since people with stable household lives are more likely to leave their imprint in historical records, it is perhaps not surprising that Greenberg found them to be older, married men with domestic responsibilities. Nor does Greenberg indicate what percentage of all organizing men his “sample” represents. While much of the problem in compiling this type of demographic information lies in the limitations of the historical record itself, Greenberg needs to be much more forthcoming regarding his method and much more circumspect with respect to his results. Likewise, I am skeptical with regard to his “typical” working men. Printer Theophilus Eaton, for example, was a failed entrepreneur who tried to make his fortune first as the publisher of a political newspaper and later as the author of a book of poems and of a gazetteer that reflected “a mercantile bent” (chap. 2: para 16). None of these characteristics seems truly representative of the “average” journeyman.

However, the aforementioned weaknesses of this first section do not undermine Greenberg’s overall argument. Even without being able to demonstrate definitively that organizers were more likely to be family men, his next two sections convincingly show that working men viewed their market relations and couched their arguments for collective organization in domestic terms. While past studies of early nineteenth-century workers’ movements have focused on the political content of pro-labor newspapers and pamphlets, Greenberg reconsiders these publications more holistically. Discussions of a living wage, paper money reform, and barriers to entry into crafts appeared alongside marriage notices, debates over how best to provide an education for workers’ children, and poems about domestic life. As reflected in these publications, there was no line separating the public rhetoric of workers from their private interests.

Furthermore, these domestic interests infused the political language itself. In demanding better compensation and security in the workplace, workers emphasized their fundamental duty as husbands and fathers to provide for the material as well as the “moral, spiritual, and emotional” well-being of their families (chap. 5: para 50). On the one hand, this equation of workplace complaints with domestic hardships was politically expedient. Women and children were more sympathetic victims than male laborers. Yet this language regarding the household responsibilities of male breadwinners was not limited to external tracts intended to sway public opinion. Even when these organizations internally discussed the merits of providing health insurance, death benefits, or strike pay, their debates revolved around the ability of workers to adequately fulfill their domestic duties.

Advocating the Man presents historians of the early republic with a fresh perspective on the daily trials, tribulations, and motivations of laboring men. Greenberg’s unique angle nicely complements the existing literature on working-class households and labor activism, yet it will simultaneously force scholars of the period to rethink their entire approach to investigating working men. Rather than viewing laborers as solely the product of their work relations and public experiences, future studies will now be obliged to consider the role of domestic concerns in shaping these men’s public activities.

Intimate Atlantics: Toward a critical history of transnational early America

Further reading

“That great natural curiosity”: The Old Man of the Mountain as Lusus Naturae

Giving Voices

Sarah Hawkridge

American Triptych

Mary Dyer

The Great Awakening

Frontiers of Body and Soul

Further Reading:

One Nation-One Semester

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change?

Further Reading:

One Man’s Skull

Further Reading:

Race, Class, and Upheaval in Revolutionary Virgina

Further Reading:

Resisting State Authority on Passamaquoddy Bay

Bread and Butter Activism

Further Reading: