Anxieties of influence in the postbellum slave narrative

Once upon a time, there was a southern-born woman living in Harlem who would chastise her granddaughters with these words: “Remember, girls, you’re not anyone: you’re Virginia Teamohs!” I constituted half of the team of those wide-eyed miscreants and chafed under the awesome and vague burden of a Reconstruction-era politician ancestor. Little did I imagine, as a girl in 1960s New York City, that George Teamoh, my great-great-grandfather, suffered from his own anxiety of influence—and that I would one day write about Teamoh’s “problem” with his dominating literary ancestor, Frederick Douglass.

Most readers familiar with Douglass have likely read the 1845 Narrative of the Life of a Fugitive Slave. His later autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), are less on the stack of well-read slave narratives. It’s safe to say, however, that fewer have read Teamoh’s God Made Man, Man Made the Slave than any of Douglass’s books: it was not even published until the early 1990s and only then by a small southern university press. Teamoh, however, has an important role in the history of black autobiography, particularly the postbellum slave narrative.

In the pages of his autobiography, Teamoh demonstrates a sharp memory and a sense of humor that Douglass would have appreciated. Where Teamoh and Douglass notably intersect is in their joint incursions into the chilly waters of post Civil War black autobiography. As the critics William Andrews and Frances Foster have noted, the attitude of the audience for the post-1865 slave narrative was signally different from that for those published before the onset of the Civil War. Later narrators, Andrews and Foster have agreed, argue for reconciliation and cooperation; although they do not shrink from detailing the abuse that was slavery, such autobiographers were often inspired by the first fruits of Reconstruction to urge cooperation between whites and blacks, if not to acknowledge the tangled bonds remaining between the formerly bound and the freeborn.

By the 1870s and 1880s, Douglass and Teamoh had become international travelers and political activists, achieving varying measures of fame. Yet the causes of their people, and thus their own books and good works, became—as the nineteenth century neared its close—overshadowed by what the historian Rayford Logan termed “the nadir,” commonly called Jim Crow.

But while I was still a graduate student, the historian Peter Kolchin urged me to look into my ancestor’s experience and explore in greater detail the genesis of his narrative. Perhaps, I came to believe, it was time for Teamoh to join Douglass in the pantheon of great narrators of the slave experience.

Assembled in two sections—the first in 1874, the appendices in 1883, around the same time as Douglass’s Life and Times—the eighteen blue-fronted copybooks in which Teamoh wrote his life story reside in the Library of Congress’s Carter Woodson papers.

Teamoh did not publish—perhaps was not able to publish—his autobiography during his lifetime and in fact noted in a preface that he wrote at “the request of many friends.” Whether during his lifetime any of those friends laid eyes on the text, to give feedback, offer corrections, or just satisfy personal curiosity, I cannot say.

Such readers might have found that Teamoh was not the stylist of his better known peer. God Made Man, Man Made the Slave has neither the tight economy of Douglass’s 1845 narrative nor the rhetorical surety of the Marylander’s 1855 autobiography; neither does it share the heft of Douglass’s Life and Times. Teamoh, though, saw himself quite clearly as an author, one taking his place in a tradition of African American writers. And the biggest star in that tradition at the time of his manuscript’s composition was Frederick Douglass.

There are several occasions on which Teamoh’s readers can see the long shadow of Douglass. The first comes in that preface mentioned earlier. Teamoh introduces his manuscript in the following manner:

It but rarely falls to the lot of one … a slave of fifty years … to narrate, in any intelligent form[,] the history of his life … it seems almost incredible, when we learn of those who have done so … Frederick Douglass, whose towering intellect, out stripping all who have preceded him in this country, has been … the most successfull [sic] of self-made men … the editorial genius of all Europe has pronounced in his favor.

Teamoh invokes other forebears, notably William Wells Brown, whose books exhibit “exalted thought great originality, comprehensiveness and scholarship.” Yet he returns, pointedly, to Douglass, noting that “I have seen … ‘My bondage and my freedom.’” Curiously Teamoh then asserts that “the crudity of [Douglass’s] writings however is plain evidence of his never having been schooled, or at least not so by routine.” What do we make of an assessment that at once acknowledges Douglass’s “towering intellect” and yet dismisses My Bondage and My Freedom—viewed today by some critics as the apogee of Douglass’s autobiographies—as an awkward, unschooled effort?

We might approach this question by first recognizing that Teamoh and Douglass shared a generation—they were born a year apart (and would die within a decade of one another); similarly, both were born into bondage, and both experienced the work regime of slavery, as field hand and shipyard worker. The two men shared another important trait as well: both fled their enslavement and both made their way to freedom as sailors, although they did so fifteen years apart (Douglass self-liberated in 1838; Teamoh in 1853). Each spent a brief amount of time in New York City as new runaways, and each went on to live and work for a time in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Both men would return to the South after the Civil War—a hallmark of the postbellum slave narrative, as William Andrews has pointed out—although only Teamoh returned to his native state to live.

Perhaps these commonalities are not surprising given the small numbers of former bondspeople able to commit their experience to autobiography, but Teamoh and Douglass had much else in common as well. Teamoh moved in the circles of men and women who counted Douglass among their friends and fellow abolitionists: Teamoh and Douglass each knew the noted antislavery figure William C. Nell; Teamoh was a member of Nell’s “Lyceum” or Adelphic Union Library Association. Nell’s presence in Teamoh’s life and narrative points to the additional possibility that Teamoh and Douglass actually knew each other.

Consider the brief passage in which Teamoh speaks admiringly of the black activist and historian Nell. “His whole life … has been one eternal round of devotion to the slave,” Teamoh wrote. But what immediately follows this tribute is the telling observation,

Douglass, on a certain occasion while speaking of the many who from time to time had in his employ as Clerks, writers, &c. after calling them over severally by name, said he, “then there is Nell, the only one I have ever known who was willing to work without any pay.”

On what occasion Douglass made this remark Teamoh does not say. Yet at the time to which Teamoh refers—the mid-1850s—he and Nell were both residents of Boston, and Douglass, a frequent visitor. It’s not such a stretch to assume that Teamoh either heard this remark in a private conversation with Douglass or heard it in an address, perhaps delivered before a Lyceum meeting.

Whether or not the two men actually had conversational exchanges, there is no disputing the commonality of their experience. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the two men’s reflections on that famous fugitive’s asylum, not to mention the land of wealth, New Bedford, Massachusetts. Here was not just a common destination for these two self-liberated former slaves but also a touchstone for the ideals of freedom and citizenship both sought.

For Douglass, his new home “took him by surprise, in the solid wealth and grandeur there exhibited.” Fifteen years later, the city still impressed: the newly arrived Teamoh called it “that wealthy city.” The seaport indeed boasted the ability to make men’s fortunes—and support a multiracial, multicultural community.

Perhaps the most signal event for black southerners in “the Fugitive’s Gibraltar,” a phrase perhaps coined by Teamoh himself, was the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. When Douglass arrived, with his free wife Anna Murray Douglass, much of the burden of his capture would have laid with his putative owners; by the time Teamoh set foot in the unabashedly abolitionist whaling town, southern slave owners could successfully command northern governments to do the dirty work of remanding Americans back into perpetual slavery—and worse.

Between Douglass’s and Teamoh’s arrivals, New Bedford’s fugitive slave population nonetheless increased. This could in part explain one fundamental difference in the two autobiographers’ experiences. In 1855, Douglass recalled, “I put on the habiliments of a common laborer, and went on the wharf in search of work … Happily for me, I was not long in searching. I found employment, the third day … stowing a sloop with a load of [whale] oil.” Nevertheless, Douglass did not experience some sort of multiracial utopia in New Bedford. After deciding to pursue his previous career as a skilled caulker, Douglass found that “every white man would leave the ship” the minute he came aboard to caulk. Still, Douglass was able to take some solace in the fact that he found work with relative ease, possessed all of his pay, and “supported … self and family for three years.” In the midst of it all, he also found time to join a church and become involved in the antislavery movement.

Teamoh knew work would be hard to find when he arrived during the winter of 1853-1854. With the “cold weather … now fast putting in,” he found himself forced to ask for help, “notwithstanding [the townspeoples’] repeated manifestations of kindness.” Teamoh also notes—again, I think of the ever-increasing numbers of fugitives in the 1850s—”Once there you were ‘free indeed,’ and then thrown on your own resources after a few weeks of indulgence.” Teamoh similarly found prejudice among white skilled laborers in the shipyard, although unlike Douglass, Teamoh was in his thirties when he arrived, a man who had worked on the USS Constitution while a slave. Now literate, he wrote a letter of protest to the local paper—and was satisfied to see black caulkers hired. Yet employment remained difficult, particularly during the winter off-season, and Teamoh eventually left, first for Providence and then Boston, the last northern city in which he would live.

In Boston, a half-brother would help situate him within the black world of the city’s west end, and his friendships with movers and shakers like William C. Nell would help him find work.

One could say that Douglass left New Bedford to rise within the ranks of antislavery activists, propelled by his talent for oratory, good looks, youth, and perhaps good fortune; Teamoh would leave in search of work and connections, lonely for the family sold away from him down south.

In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass closes with the words, “never forgetting my humble origin, nor refusing, while Heaven lends me the ability, to use my own voice, my pen, or my vote, to advocate the great and primary work of the universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race.” For his part, Teamoh hopes that his story may be “the last book that will ever be written by the untought [sic] Negro of this country” and plaintively avers that “with bleeding feet I pressed my weary way over the flinty rocks of life which have been so amply bridged for others of my race” (emphasis mine). Douglass and other black men who took to the stage during Reconstruction did not, like Teamoh, have their homes foreclosed and their political ambitions thwarted by their own Republican party. Nonetheless, Teamoh struggled to end on an optimistic note, closing with the comment that he “can only trust that this good work [of racial uplift] will be pushed forward with a zeal commensurate with the cause” (106).

In March of 1867, almost two years after the Civil War ended, the newspaper of the AME Church, the Christian Recorder, carried an item submitted by George Teamoh. The announcement requested any information regarding two of his three children; they had been sold away from their mother in 1853 and might, he noted, be in Texas. A few years ago and over a century and a half after Teamoh’s oldest children were taken from their parents, I received an email from the Reverend Dana Teamor. “I am your cousin,” she wrote; “I found out about God Made Man, Man Made the Slave and wanted to tell you that I am one of George Teamoh’s siblings’ descendants—and that there are a number of us.” I have learned, too, that the Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Old Dominion University in Virginia hosts a George Teamoh Colloquium series. While I may never locate Teamoh’s grave, I am finding his influence has yet to disappear. Despite his somewhat pessimistic assessment, Teamoh and his legacy remain with us.

The author would like to thank Samuel Otter and Robert Levine; an earlier version of this essay aired at the Melville-Douglass Sesquicentennial at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Further Reading:

See two important essays, one by William L. Andrews, “Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley,” Black American Literature Forum 23:1 (Spring 1989): 5-16, and the other by Frances Smith Foster, “Autobiography after Emancipation: The Example of Elizabeth Keckley,” James Robert Payne, ed., Multicultural Autobiography. American Lives (Knoxville, Tenn., 1992): 32-63.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

Rafia Zafar is professor of English, African American, and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Among her publications are We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870 (1997) and, with F. N. Boney and R. L. Hume, God Made Man, Man Made the Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh (1992). Her essays have appeared in Early American Literature, Gastronomica, and other journals.

Few general readers now pick up the American book that prompted Sydney Smith to ask “Who reads an American book?” In truth, few general readers ever did. Adam Seybert’s Statistical Annals—an eight-hundred-page, six-pound volume, printed in the dimensions of a modern metropolitan phone directory, with 175 numeric tables describing population, commerce, and debt—aimed at nothing less than a full representation of the United States in book form, but the massive book was not for the masses. Without governmental intervention it may have had no readers at all. Seybert’s colleagues in Congress believed the book would be “necessary and acceptable to every functionary of the Government of the United States” but that it could never be “popular,” and in April 1818 they passed an act to subscribe for five hundred copies. The public had bought a work of American literature.

Hoping to find a market for Seybert’s book beyond the politicians and institutions of higher learning to which Congress distributed Statistical Annals, Philadelphia printers Thomas Dobson and Sons ran off at least a thousand more copies at their own risk. Brave booksellers in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia advertised the book in late 1818, and favorable reviews in U.S. newspapers appeared the next year; nonetheless, supply radically surpassed demand. Would the government step in again? In 1821 the printers begged the Senate to purchase eight hundred additional unsold copies “at a reduced price.” They met with defeat but may have sold some of these toxic assets to the author himself. Thirteen years later, Seybert’s sister Elizabeth Rapp petitioned the House to purchase three hundred copies that remained in the family at the time of her brother’s death in France in 1825, but she had no more luck unloading Seybert’s American book than the printers had.

A child of the Enlightenment, Seybert presented his few readers with “facts and data,” not “mere opinions” or theoretical “speculations,” information that would form the basis of future policy debates (as it did) but was not itself subject to debate. His book serves as a prime example of what historian Patricia Cline Cohen has called the “quantitative mentality” of the early United States; it also represents one stage in the evolution of what literary scholar Mary Poovey has described as “the modern fact,” those pieces of numeric evidence whose status before or beyond interpretation made them useful building blocks in economics and the social sciences. The demographic and commercial “facts” presented by Seybert that captured the most attention from his U.S. contemporaries—his ratios of free to unfree persons charting the growth of slavery from 1790 to 1810 and his tables showing the imbalance of trade with other nations—were the same ones that led Sydney Smith to focus the concluding remarks of his January 1820 review on the failure of the United States to export important cultural products and on the questionable claim of white Americans to be “the greatest, the most refined, the most enlightened, and the most moral people on earth.” After all, Smith asked, “Who reads an American book?” And how moral could the white population really be in a country that could count—thanks to Seybert’s American book—”every sixth man a Slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?”

The nine historians featured here treat literature as evidence, but they do not see the books they recommend as repositories of neutral “facts.” Carolyn Eastman considers the readers of a frequently reprinted “true account” of Caribbean pirates. Vincent Brown discovers a new perspective on contemporary immigration debates in a policy pamphlet about Jamaican slavery. Caroline Winterer sees an intellectual path not taken in a scientific essay on the origins of racial difference. Joyce Chaplin returns to a natural history of the American South and to a pre-Darwinian moment in the relation of science with religion. Sarah Knott finds, in the pages of a forgotten novel, a generational change in the history of the emotions. John Wood Sweet sees challenges to early national politics and to our own understanding of the meanings of freedom in a rare eyewitness account of the Atlantic slave trade produced in Connecticut by a native of Africa. François Furstenbergdescribes a famous biography as a national glue between readers in distant regions. James Sidbury recovers a bound manuscript pamphlet written by a resident of Sierra Leone, a man who had returned to the region of his birth after slavery in South Carolina and service with the British during the American Revolution. And Matthew Mason recommends a first-person account of one man’s life under slavery in the antebellum United States, a crucial document for historians who hope to write the history of the domestic slave trade.

The works selected are wide-ranging examples of the rich literature of early America, but because what counts as literature has changed so fundamentally since the time of Seybert and Smith, some of the selections may strike readers as decidedly nonliterary. Presses in Colonial British America and the early United States issued nearly one hundred thousand non-periodical imprints before 1820. In this vast sea of books, pamphlets, and broadsides, the small islands of writing most modern general readers call literature are statistical outliers. Novels, poems, and plays, for instance, represent only about 3.5 percent of the total items printed between 1640 and 1819; and since American presses issued works by European authors, the percentage of texts most modern readers would describe as “American” is significantly smaller. Asked to write short “blurbs” about American books they teach and study, the historians here go beyond the questions of who wrote or who read American books, of whether certain books meet our contemporary and narrow definition of literature, to suggest what effects these books had in the past and why such books should be read—and reread—today.

Alexandre Exquemelin, Bucaniers of America: Or, a True Account of the Most Remarkable Assaults Committed of Late Years Upon the Coasts of the West-Indies, by the Bucaniers of Jamaica and Tortuga, Both English and French (1678). Reprint, London: William Crooke, 1684.

Even though Bucaniers of America wasn’t published in America until the nineteenth century, it circulated around the Atlantic like its subjects, its author, and the images that portrayed the book’s action. Alexandre Exquemelin had been a buccaneer himself before he temporarily retired and turned author in Amsterdam in 1678, so he wrote with authority about vivid characters like Bartholomew the Portuguese, Rock the Brazilian, and the exceptionally brutal Francois Lolonois—men who disrupted both Caribbean trade and orderly state and empire building. Translated into German, Spanish, French, and English editions in increasingly larger print runs, the book appeared in early American libraries within twenty years of its original publication.

Exquemelin’s book figured America as a site of action and adventure—and the printers who kept new editions on the market made sure to underscore this aspect of the book’s appeal. In what was at least the fifteenth edition (1704), a London printer explained in a preface, “Indeed, the wondrous actions, and daring adventures therein related, are such as could not but transport the most stupid minds into an Admiration of them,” he stated frankly. Pirates surely failed to exhibit “Justness and Regularity” of Christian men, he acknowledged, or even the “tolerable morals” of ordinary men. Yet they inspired the “greatest Astonishment imaginable.” The printer touted the book as fodder for the imagination, a means of transporting oneself to a world of wonders. To enhance the imaginative work of such texts, printers added numerous evocative cuts displaying dynamic scenes of torture, sea battles, and swordplay. These were far from the static illustrations of harbor scenes or portraits of other contemporary books: Bucaniers of America told tales of action in both text and image.

By the 1720s Bucaniers of America was one of several titles available on pirates; enterprising printers even took to compiling omnibus editions that combined Exquemelin’s account with those of Charles Johnson, Woodes Rogers, and other writers. Each new volume contained illustrations and tales that built on Exquemelin’s original themes and codified the textual and visual repertoire of pirate themes. As a result, stories about pirates appeared in dozens of editions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, guaranteeing that pirates would be known for the “wondrous actions” and “daring adventures” that took place in the Americas—adventures to be enjoyed vicariously by readers everywhere.

Carolyn Eastman

Carolyn Eastman is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and author of A Nation of Speechifiers: Print, Oratory, and the Making of a Gendered American Public, 1780-1830 (forthcoming).

Anonymous, An Essay Concerning Slavery and the Danger Jamaica is expos’d to from the Too great Number of Slaves, and the too little Care that is taken to manage Them, and a Proposal to prevent the further Importation of Negroes into that Island. London: Charles Corbett, at Addison’s-Head, over-against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet-Street, 1746.

Teachers of history face a contradictory challenge: we seek to encourage our students to recognize how different the past was from the present, while, at the same time, prodding them to see how issues in the past resonate with current concerns. If we are successful, the very strangeness of the past throws similarities of predicament or process into sharper relief. One of my favorite early American texts, published in 1746, does this beautifully. It warns of the dangers of unchecked immigration to America and urges a labor policy that would favor assimilated residents over new migrants; this much is familiar. But the treatise is discussing a slave society burgeoning with the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade.

An Essay Concerning Slavery is a pamphlet, written in response to a rebellious conspiracy in St. John’s Parish, Jamaica, discovered in 1744 and allegedly organized by a dozen slave drivers, themselves enslaved, on different plantations. The anonymous author worries about the racial composition of the colony, as we would expect: “By the Poll-Tax in 1740,” he notes, “it appeared that the Negroes were ten times more in Number than the white Persons.” More surprisingly, he offers the natural rights argument against slavery, even while recognizing emancipation as impractical for an empire grown rich off the labor of the enslaved. Yet both his abolitionist sentiments and his racial fears are subordinate to a more general concern about the number of alienated, oppressed workers with no stake in maintaining the existing order. His proposal to save the colony from being “over-run, and ruined by its own Slaves” features a racially flexible social reform: ensuring a due proportion of free people “of one Colour or another, white, black or yellow, since white Men enough cannot immediately be got,” preventing slaves from entering trades or being employed in domestic service, and limiting them to “the Field or such kind of Drudgery as cannot be carried on but by them.” Drivers, especially, should be free men.

Responding to the labor migration that had made Jamaica the most profitable colony in British America, the author of the Essay urges a reconsideration of the society’s terms of inclusion and hierarchy. Students see in this text how an antislavery sentiment they undoubtedly share emerges from an anti-black racism they commonly condemn; they see how a concern to perpetuate a brutal system may lead to the advocacy of a more plural social elite; they see an eerily familiar anti-immigration argument emerging from the peculiar circumstances of a place in the past. Hopefully, they also see how history unfolds in discernible but unpredictable patterns.

Vincent Brown

Vincent Brown is Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History at Harvard University and author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008).

Samuel Stanhope Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. Philadelphia: Robert Aitken, 1787.

Among the most memorable phrases in an age that gave us so many is Samuel Stanhope Smith’s “universal freckle.” He didn’t coin it, but he used it to great effect in his landmark Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). What made people around the globe look so different? For Smith it was environment, not a separate creation. The differences between whites and blacks were not in kind but degree; dark skin was just a lot of freckles that had spread together, like cookies in the oven. Freckles would come and freckles would go, but the theological truth of a single human family was eternal.

Smith was a minister and a philosopher in an age when it was fine to be both, happily knitting science to Christian revelation. His Essay was recognized for what it was: among the most important examinations of race produced in Enlightenment America. It was cheered across the Atlantic by Scottish philosophers such as Dugald Stewart and by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. It was soon reprinted in Edinburgh (1788) and London (1789), a sign of its appeal in transatlantic debates about race and science.

Today we all remember the more pessimistic racial ideas Thomas Jefferson expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia (also published in the 1780s). Jefferson thought that the physical and mental differences he observed between blacks and whites might be unchanging, views that looked ahead to the kind of hereditary racism that became increasingly popular before the Civil War. But it was Smith who best captured the more optimistic outlook of his own age, when it seemed that the human family might all share parts of a universal freckle.

Caroline Winterer

Caroline Winterer is associate professor of history at Stanford University and author of The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2002) and The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (2007).

William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. Embellished with Copper-Plates. Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791.

William Bartram was America’s most influential naturalist. He was also its most unflappable. According to him, every near-death experience out in early America’s wild green yonder was yet another uplifting example of cosmic beneficence. Only consider how Bartram, discovering that a wolf had sneaked away provisions stored near his sleeping self, commended the creature’s mercy for stealing his food rather than ripping his throat out.

This year, when it’s all Darwin all the time, Bartram’s view of nature is especially interesting as the before picture: red in tooth and claw yet, somehow, providentially good. Bartram extols nature as divine Creation and savors the American frontier as a sensory riot in which he thwacks alligators, dines on raccoon pilaf, and snuffs the sweet-scented plant he uproots while tumbling down a hill. His readers ate it up and ripped it off—notably Coleridge in “Kubla Khan” (1816), where American wilderness becomes: Xanadu!

Even Darwin cited Bartram but glimpsed unprovidential trends within nature’s relentless hunger. Did Darwin deprive science of religion? It may be truer that he deprived it of literature. Darwin theorized brilliantly about death; Bartram wrote brilliantly, even on death: “the bee quite exhausted by his struggles, and the repeated wounds of the butcher, became motionless, and quickly expired in the arms of the devouring spider, who, ascending the rope with his game, retired to feast on it under cover of the leaves; and perhaps before night, became himself the delicious evening repast of a bird or lizard.” Available in paperback.

Joyce Chaplin

Joyce Chaplin is James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University; she is the author of An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (1993), Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (2001), and The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006).

Samuel Relf, Infidelity; or The Victims of Sentiment. A novel, in a series of letters. Philadelphia: W.W. Woodward, 1797.

Samuel Relf’s Infidelity; or The Victims of Sentiment has been forgotten by posterity, forgotten even by those feminist critics who recuperated the sentimental novel, a victim at once of sentiment’s embarrassing quality outside its immediate moment and of our political concerns. Why read the tears penned by a twenty-one-year-old gent of dubious talent? Why linger over a tale of rebellious young love and married women, an indulgent nod to Goethe’s Sorrows and Sympathetic Attachments of Werther, complete even with a Cavern of Meditation where—unironic, this—the stones make sympathetic echoes and the stream flows fuller in the company of human anguish? Infidelity was, arguably, the first free-standing Philadelphian novel, graciously dedicated to the fifteen-year-old daughter of Anne Bingham, the city’s Federalist salonniere. The novel’s interest—cued not least by that dedication—resides in the generational relations it exposes and the story it reflects about the shifting historical fate of sensibility, the era’s striking commitment to the self’s sensitivity. Relf’s insight is the cultural disjuncture between an older generation of sentimentalists—Bingham’s generation, who invested the American Revolution with sentimental hopes to create a new and more sensitive society—and a rising youth. Heirs to the revolution and its social utopianism, this younger generation turned sentiment inward and onward. Raised in the mainstream of revolutionary sentiment, that is, young ladies and gents were compelled to reinvent sensibility, pressing it to greater solipsism and excess. They focused less on remaking society and more on refining their exquisite selves. Counterposing older and younger friendship circles, Relf’s novel captures the generational divide that frayed the Revolution’s sentimental hopes and framed sensibility’s initial post-revolutionary fate.

Sarah Knott

Sarah Knott is associate professor of history at Indiana University, coeditor of Women, Gender and Enlightenment (2005), and author of Sensibility and the American Revolution (2008).

Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, But resident above sixty years in the United States of America. Related by Himself. New London, Conn.: C. Holt, at the Bee-Office, 1798.

More than twelve million people survived the middle passage from Africa to the Americas, but only about a dozen left behind eyewitness accounts. One of them was Venture Smith.

His brief Narrative (1798) offers a sweeping, bottom-up view of the colonial dynamics that brought together—and kept apart—disparate peoples and places in an increasingly global world. Although Smith was illiterate, his narrative voice was distinctive and personal. He challenged several major developments in late-eighteenth-century discourse: the sentimental style that dominated Anglophone antislavery writing, the recurrent claim that people freed from slavery in the North were incapable of virtuous citizenship, and the pervasive emphasis on the “free market” as the basis of American pursuits of happiness.

Smith’s memories of his West African childhood are dramatic and detailed. His account of slavery along the shores of Long Island Sound emphasizes ongoing negotiations over violence, labor value, and the limits of civil society. And the story of how he secured his freedom—through an agonizing series of bargains and betrayals—stands as a powerful rebuke to those inclined to view the ideologies of liberty and sentiment as detached from African American agency.

Smith is often hailed as an American hero, a self-made man who triumphed against the constraints and prejudices of his time. Fortunately, his story is much more interesting than that. In it, slavery and freedom are not easy opposites. Alongside pride in his own achievement is an awareness of brutality, injustice, and sadism. And his commitment to commercial values is colored by doubt about the ultimate worth of money, the wounds it can heal, and the happiness it can secure.

John Wood Sweet

John Wood Sweet is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (2003), and coeditor of Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (2005).

Mason Locke Weems, The life of George Washington with curious anecdotes, equally honourable to himself and exemplary to his young countrymen. 9th, greatly improved/embelished with seven engravings. Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1809.

I knew of Mason Locke Weems long before I ever read anything he’d written. Hack historian, bookseller, clergyman, and most of all epistolary genius, Weems is now best known for his account of George Washington and the cherry tree—a story that he almost certainly invented and then popularized in his 1809 Life of George Washington. Written and then revised between 1800 and 1808, the biography was a runaway bestseller: by 1825, it was in its fortieth edition. The book was a product of Weems’s many years traveling the country from New York to Georgia selling books and pamphlets and gathering knowledge about his readers’ interests. No surprise the book became so popular.

What is more surprising is to discover that the “curious anecdotes” that appealed to readers in the early nineteenth century still captivate readers today, at least if my students’ reaction is any gauge. The book is beyond corny, and yet somehow it charms every group to which I’ve assigned it. Despite themselves, they are drawn into the stories of Washington’s childhood and Weems’s thrilling account of the American Revolution. Even my Franco-Canadian students are somehow moved.

Students’ instinctive suspicions, bred over a lifetime of corporate advertising and patriotic shilling, seem to fade. Many stop reading the book as propaganda or even as homework and begin reading it as entertainment. Where most of my classroom discussions have me trying to knock down students’ skepticism, Weems provides a rare opportunity to teach a text from a position that produces naïveté. He allows us to ponder questions of readership—both historical and contemporary—to wonder why Weems and his countrymen were so fascinated with Washington’s childhood; and to investigate role of heroes in building a nation. Even his silences—where are Washington’s slaves?—speak eloquently about the work of forgetting in the nationalist imaginary.

Abraham Lincoln fondly recalled reading Weems’s biography of Washington as a child. As I listen to my students discuss the book enthusiastically, I occasionally let myself imagine that I am hearing a faint echo of what drew readers two hundred years ago to Weems’s delightful account.

François Furstenberg

François Furstenberg is assistant professor of history and holder of the McConnell Foundation Chair in American Studies at the Université de Montréal; he is the author of In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (2006).

John Kizell, “Apology for For the Conduct of John Kezell And His associates Occasioned By the Strictures And Denunciations by the Rev. Daniel Coker In His Journall Letters and Informations In the fourth Annual Report,” a manuscript pamphlet in the Ebenezer Burgess Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

During the summer of 1821, John Kizell decided to defend his reputation. A native of present-day Sierra Leone, he had been sold into South Carolina as a child but escaped bondage by joining the British during the Revolution. Following the war he settled briefly in Nova Scotia before returning to the region of his birth as an early settler in Britain’s Sierra Leone Colony. He offered his talents as a cultural broker to the first expedition sent out by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to found a black American settler society in Africa. The leaders of the group followed Kizell’s advice and settled at Sherbro Island, about one hundred miles south of Freetown, Sierra Leone. The island proved unhealthy, the white leaders of the expedition had difficulty negotiating with native headmen for land rights, and the expedition collapsed in the face of high mortality and uncertain security. Surviving settlers followed Daniel Coker, a black minister from Baltimore, back to the British colony at Sierra Leone. Coker made Kizell a scapegoat for the expedition’s failure.

Upon learning that he was taking the blame, Kizell wrote what must be one of the earliest English-language books written by an African American in Africa. He folded large sheets in half and sewed them together. In large and decorative cursive, he inscribed the title on the front, “Apology for For the Conduct of John Kezell And His associates …” Using creative spelling, unsystematic punctuation, and passionate argument, he expressed his anger and sense of betrayal. His text shines new light on the history of Liberia and the ACS, but it shines even brighter light on the cultural power of the book for people who struggled to acquire literacy. In his belief that a self-bound pamphlet would carry greater authority than a mere letter, Kizell provides a glimpse of the battles that many forgotten victims of slavery must have fought to influence debates over their fates. That his manuscript pamphlet sat in the Massachusetts Historical Society waiting to be discovered by a twenty-first century scholar reminds us how high were the barriers keeping them out of those debates.

James Sidbury

James Sidbury is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810 (1997) and Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (2007).

Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, who lived forty years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia as a slave, under various masters, and was one year in the nave with Commodore Barney during the late war. New York: John S. Taylor, 1837.

One of the very best entries in the large genre of the slave narrative was written by Charles Ball. Published twice in the nineteenth century, under two different titles, Ball’s testimony—including a gripping account of not one but two escapes from the Deep South—remains an invaluable first-person account of the domestic slave trade in the early nineteenth century.

This trade victimized Ball in its very early stages, when it was known more as the “Georgia trade” than as the trade to the Deep South, which ultimately wrenched around one million people from their homes in the older slave states. Recent (and burgeoning) scholarship on the slave trade—all of which draws on Ball’s descriptions of the early form and effects of this interstate human trafficking—has placed this coerced Great Migration at the center of the antebellum African American experience, replacing the plantation that stood at the center of earlier scholarship. After all, the trade affected not only the million or so people sold, but also their kinfolk left behind. Moreover, the threat of sale hung with menacing uncertainty over every slave—sold or not—in the United States. Ball’s narrative offers a compelling description of the human drama involved in all of this. It matches better-known slave narratives both in the adventure of his escapes and the power of his testament to slave resistance.

Matthew Mason

Matthew Mason is assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University, author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (2006), and coeditor of Edward Kimber’s The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson (2008).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Eric Slauter, associate professor of English and director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago, is the author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2009).

In Scraping By (2009), Seth Rockman takes a close look at the laborers who turned Baltimore into an early national boomtown. Common-place asked him: can the struggles of working people during the great expansion of capitalism in the United States suggest any lessons for Americans today in devising strategies to deal with unemployment, poverty, and inequality? Or is our situation today decisively different from that faced by Americans in the early republic?

You’ve asked me to consider whether “the struggles of working people during the great expansion of capitalism in the United States suggest any lessons for Americans today in devising strategies to deal with unemployment, poverty, and inequality? Or is our situation in the early twenty-first century decisively different from that faced by Americans in the early republic?”

My instinctive response to these questions is to plead ignorance: “I am merely an historian of the early republic United States, and I have no particular insights to offer about anything after 1840, let alone about 2010.” This reticence owes to the memory of one of my first seminars in graduate school, when a book that explicitly engaged contemporary concerns was dismissed as “presentist.” One still sees this label in grumpy book reviews that lament the loss of historians’ once-unimpeachable objectivity. With a few more years of perspective on the profession, my sense is that “presentist” is the label applied to scholarship whose relevance you dislike. Yet this recognition hardly qualifies me to say anything intelligent about subprime mortgages and toxic assets.

That said, I don’t believe that the past is irrelevant to the current state of the American economy, and it would be hard to read Scraping By without noticing the many gestures toward contemporary labor arrangements, social welfare practices, and barriers to upward mobility. The book’s introduction mentions undocumented workers and informal markets for day laborers in the parking lots of home-improvement superstores. It also explicitly compares the pre-industrial economy of the early republic United States to our current post-industrial economy, especially in the centrality of a service sector whose workers labor under the multiple disadvantages of race, sex, and legal status. Not surprisingly, one reviewer—approvingly, I should add—called the book “a moral and political commentary on the conservative free-market ideology of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century America.” So it would be disingenuous for me to claim that I was not trying to engage the present when I cut off my particular slice of the historical past.

At the same time, though, I do not think Scraping By offers “lessons” to anyone actually struggling with unemployment or economic dislocation. I labor under no illusion that writing a book about the past serves to alleviate poverty, save perhaps my own. This is a discussion I often have with undergraduates in the courses I teach about class and capitalism. We agree that scholarly production is inherently political, but not often speedy in effecting social change. If insuring that service workers received living wages were your goal, it would make sense to become an activist, lobbyist, or labor organizer. However, it would seem foolhardy to write a book about discussions of “living wages” in the 1830s in hopes that a policymaker or employer would read your book, make the analytical leap from the past to the present, and translate that epiphany into higher wages. I don’t say this to denigrate the concept of “radical history,” but merely to acknowledge that there are more expeditious means to improving the material circumstances of the economically disadvantaged.

Claims that charity destroys character and work builds it connected the early republic to contemporary concerns in very obvious ways.

When I began my dissertation in the 1990s, I envisioned a project that would explore the contours of labor at the intersection of slavery and capitalism. Frederick Douglass attracted me to Baltimore, and while the seeming anomaly of wage-earning slaves captured my attention, so too did the existence of Irish street urchins whom a slave could pay in bread for spelling lessons. I hoped to construct a labor history of unskilled labor, a study that would find the majority of urban workers toiling without the prerogatives or pretenses of craft skill. Since day laborers and domestic servants left very few of their own words in the archive, I was heavily reliant on what middling and elite commentators had to say about the early republic’s laboring people. To my chagrin, they sounded a lot like Newt Gingrich! Admittedly, it was 1995 and difficult to escape the “welfare reform” debate in American politics. Of course, it wasn’t just rhetoric that categorized the poor as “worthy” and “unworthy,” but also policy proposals that were eerily familiar to any student of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as when Mayor Giuliani sought to require public labor from New Yorkers receiving public assistance. Conservative intellectuals like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Marvin Olasky invoked a mythical golden age when the poor were not indulged, but rather “made useful” both to themselves and to society. Claims that charity destroys character and work builds it connected the early republic to contemporary concerns in very obvious ways. This ended up being very fruitful for the dissertation and book I would complete in the following years.

For one, social scientists produced some fascinating research in the wake of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act that President Clinton signed into law. Almost all of it highlighted the incredibly hard work of being poor, as well as the hidden costs that make poverty very expensive for those living within it. Books like Katherine S. Newman’s No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (1999) and David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor: Invisible in America (2004) strengthened my thinking about the structural causes of poverty, while reports from the Brookings Institute’s Metropolitan Policy Program offered concrete observations—for example, how the lack of full-service grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods prevented working families from gaining the economies of bulk food purchases—that forced me to reconsider the survival strategies of families two hundred years ago. The most obvious influence was Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2000), in which the author took several minimum-wage jobs in order to report on the impossibility of translating hours and hours of work into enough to live on. I was not going to be able to time-travel to work on Baltimore’s mud machine (a dredging contraption featured in a chapter of Scraping By), but Ehrenreich’s book inspired me to write a book that would trace—in the most material terms—how people went about finding and keeping jobs, translating labor into income and income into subsistence, relying on informal and illegal exchanges to make up the difference, and engaging charity and public welfare when all else failed. When people would ask me about the book I was writing, I would frequently say, “Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, circa 1818.”

Something surprising happened as I focused my attention on the material aspects of working-class survival and the structural impediments to upward mobility: I found far more commentary along these lines emanating from the early republic itself. Most notably, Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey began producing tables that compared a female seamstress’s yearly earning with her yearly expenses, and found that fulltime labor was practically a money-losing proposition. When Baltimore lawyer Ebenezer Finley spoke on behalf of that city’s seamstresses in 1831, he declared their deservingness of “living wages,” a term I certainly did not expect to see so early on. I also found white commentators in 1830s Baltimore who attributed the plight of the city’s free black population to the material hardships of poverty and unemployment, rather than to innate racial inferiority. All told, the causes of poverty and the role of the state in alleviating it elicited an early republic debate that was more robust than the one that dominated American politics in the 1990s. After all, the 1820s had a Thomas Skidmore calling for property redistribution, and a Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen touting state-operated compulsory boarding schools as a means of enforcing equality.

The troubling category of “illegal workers” offers another possibility for thinking about the present via the past. Who were the “illegal workers” in early republic Baltimore? Runaway slaves, of course, who presented themselves as free to employers disinclined to ask many questions. Some of these runaways sent money or supplies to relatives still enslaved in the Maryland countryside; others used their earnings to try to negotiate their own purchase. Yet vulnerability to recapture left such workers with little leverage in the urban labor market and subject to being underpaid or cheated. After 1832, free people of color who migrated to Maryland from Virginia and North Carolina were also considered “illegal,” although urban employers made no pretense of respecting the law banning their hire. Then, as now, the severest penalties fell upon workers themselves, who faced astronomical fines and the prospect of temporary re-enslavement in order to pay them. The “illegal” workers of early republic Baltimore traveled great distances over hostile terrain so that they could work ridiculously hard jobs in hopes of improving the prospects of their families. Sound familiar? A few years ago, after police raids on several Baltimore businesses resulted in the arrest of 69 undocumented workers who would soon face deportation, I published an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun on this longer history of “illegal” workers. Insofar as the city’s African-American population was reputedly hostile to Latin American workers they deemed as rivals in a tight labor market, I hoped that the gentle comparison of runaway slaves to today’s undocumented workers might ease tensions and promote new solidarities. Judging from the several flames I received over e-mail during the next several days, I was wrong.

Scraping By says little about the financiers who inflated the speculative bubbles that popped in 1819 and 1837, and while one does not encounter the early republic analogues to Goldman Sachs in its pages, there is a certain familiarity to a story in which the bad decisions made by those at the top of the economy reverberate to the detriment of those at the bottom. A group of malfeasant bankers lost the savings of many of Baltimore’s low-income families (especially widows) in 1834, and the refusal of those responsible to open their books to investigators prompted a riot the following year (see Common-place, July 2003). And the instability of the national banking system sent the economy plunging into depression for the last years of the decade. When all was said and done, however, these economic upheavals did not radically alter the prospects of the workers on the lowest rungs of the labor force. In the best of times, a job unloading ships, digging foundations, stitching coats, or emptying chamber pots offered a completely precarious livelihood, one that usually required dependence on other family members’ incomes and labor in order to meet basic subsistence needs. If the working poor were able to weather economic crises without much additional dislocation, it was because the very same survival strategies were necessary in flush times as well. I suppose, then, this is a lesson that Scraping By can tell us about the present.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.4 (July, 2010).

Seth Rockman is an associate professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of Welfare Reform in the Early Republic (2003) and Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, which won the 2010 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award and was the co-winner of the 2010 Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians. He is currently writing a book on “plantation goods”—the shoes, shovels, hoes, and hats manufactured in the North for use on Southern slave plantations.

Norumbega Harmony is a choral ensemble organized at Wellesley College in 1976. Since the beginning we have sung weekly in the traditional manner from The Sacred Harp (1844), the classic Southern singing school tune collection, but we are primarily dedicated to the preservation, promotion, and performance of New England psalmody from the colonial and early American periods. Our repertory consists of unaccompanied psalm and hymn tunes, fuging tunes, set pieces, and anthems in three and four parts. The lyrics come principally from the English Evangelical poets Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley and their imitators.

This music was composed between 1770 and 1820 by itinerant singing masters who were hired by New England parishes and towns to teach music theory, vocal production, and basic psalmody repertory. These masters, including William Billings, Jacob French, Timothy Swan, Daniel Read, Abraham Wood, Supply Belcher, and Daniel Belknap, wrote hundreds of original compositions and published dozens of tune books. We have researched, edited, and published many rare works by them in The Norumbega Harmony: Historic and Contemporary Hymn Tunes and Anthems from the New England Singing School Tradition (2003) and recorded a selection of them in Sweet Seraphic Fire: Singing School Music from The Norumbega Harmony from New World Records.

Our approach to this music is collaborative. As singing master I have ideas about the sound and sense of a tune from the period grounded in my experience of Sacred Harp singing and my study of period tune books and sacred poetry. But Norumbega’s members also contribute fundamentally to the final shape of our interpretations. We encourage every singer to lead at our singings and to learn as much as possible about the singing school’s music, history, and religious significance. When we learn a new tune, we sing it for weeks in the hollow square with different leaders. Eventually the work flowers into a synthesis of tempo, phrasing, vocalism, stylistic interpretation, and textual understanding that we all recognize and own. Then, and only then, will we perform it at selected venues—churches, libraries, colleges, and universities—where we can teach about the tradition’s history as well as present its music.

We are especially pleased to sing in historically appropriate venues, which are abundant in our region. Period churches with galleries are especially valuable, since early New England choirs and musical societies supported congregational singing and performed anthems from the elevated position that galleries provided. The acoustics of these churches also match the compositions we sing, sometimes creating extraordinary effects for our audiences. But we do not appear in period costume. In my opinion, such costuming increases the performative distance between singers and hearers instead of mediating it. Our goal is to bring our audiences into the musical, emotive, intellectual, and spiritual world of colonial and early American religious culture to which this music gives quintessential expression. We want them to hear it, understand it, and feel it. Looking like John and Abigail Adams does not further that project.

Sound files:

“New Canaan,” fuging tune in D, Oliver Holden, The Union Harmony (Boston, 1793). Text: “The Lord Jehovah Reigns,” Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David (London, 1719), Psalm 93. Track taken from Sweet Seraphic Fire: New England Singing-School Music from The Norumbega Harmony, Norumbega Harmony, Stephen Marini, singing master (New World Records 80640-2: Recorded Anthology of American Music). Courtesy of Norumbega Harmony, Inc.

“Maryland,” fuging tune in A, William Billings, The Singing Master’s Assistant (Boston, 1778). Text: “And must this body die,” Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (London, 1709). Track taken from Sweet Seraphic Fire: New England Singing-School Music from The Norumbega Harmony, Norumbega Harmony, Stephen Marini, Singing Master (New World Records 80640-2: Recorded Anthology of American Music). Courtesy of Norumbega Harmony, Inc.

“Happiness,” anthem in A, Jacob French, The Psalmodist’s Companion (Worcester, Mass., 1793). Text: “Sing, O daughter of Zion!” Zephaniah 3:14-15. Track taken from Sweet Seraphic Fire: New England Singing-School Music from The Norumbega Harmony, Norumbega Harmony, Stephen Marini, Singing Master (New World Records 80640-2: Recorded Anthology of American Music). Courtesy of Norumbega Harmony, Inc.

“Buckfield,” fuging tune in C, Abraham Maxim, The Oriental Harmony (Exeter, N.H., 1802). Text: “When strangers stand and hear me tell,” Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (London, 1709). Track taken from Sweet Seraphic Fire: New England Singing-School Music from The Norumbega Harmony, Norumbega Harmony, Stephen Marini, Singing Master (New World Records 80640-2: Recorded Anthology of American Music). Courtesy of Norumbega Harmony, Inc.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Stephen A. Marini is singing master of Norumbega Harmony. He is the Elisabeth Luce Moore Professor of Christian Studies and professor of American religion and ethics at Wellesley College.

Units of account, constitutions, and media of exchange

To be one or not to be one? That is the question currently confronting Europeans as they decide whether or not to adopt a supranational constitution. Over two hundred years ago, North Americans faced the same question. The big difference between the American and European experiences is that the Americans united politically before they created a monetary union and integrated economically. The Europeans integrated economically and formed a monetary union before attempting to unify politically. To appreciate this fundamental difference, we need to take a broad view of the political and economic histories of both continents.

Like Europe today, North America in 1750 was divided into numerous polities. Thousands of native tribes controlled the great bulk of the continent, though imperial powers had made limited gains. The Russian empire laid claim to the far northwest; the French empire, to the northeast; the Spanish empire, to the south and west; and the British Empire clung tenaciously to a foothold in the east. Small though it was, the British portion was further subdivided into thirteen colonies, some controlled by the Crown and others, like Pennsylvania, by proprietors.

Over the next century and a half, the new natives—the ones of European extraction—by degrees forced the European empires and the original natives to relinquish control of the continent. The vast bulk of the land fell under the control of three new empires: the Canadian in the north, the American in the center, and the Mexican in the south. The extreme south of the continent, sometimes called Central America, remained fragmented, probably because the American empire wished it so.

In retrospect, the formation of those three empires appears to have been well neigh inevitable. But the present distorts historical reality. The formation of an American empire (which I call the United States despite the fact that the Mexican empire also dubs itself the United States . . . of Mexico) was not foreordained. Because they stretched for over one thousand miles from north to south, the British colonies were quite dissimilar economically. The far north, which was taken from the French during the French and Indian War, was a frigid source of furs. The far south, by contrast, grew semitropical crops like rice and indigo. Even the large temperate zone in between was far from homogenous, some areas being more suitable to fruits and vegetables, others to wheat, and still others to tobacco. Natural-resource endowments varied too. New York was blessed with a fine port and a highly navigable river. New England sported many fast rivers suitable for powering mills but not for moving commodities. Pennsylvania had rich farmlands and iron and coal deposits. Virginia boasted fine soil and numerous navigable waterways.

Cultural differences abounded as well. In the far north, most people spoke French; in the far south, many spoke a pidgin language composed of bits of English and sundry African tongues. Many New Yorkers still spoke Dutch, and Pennsylvania had so many German speakers that the legislature ordered the laws promulgated in both German and English. Welsh reigned in some regions. Among English speakers, ethnic and religious differences dominated. Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and sundry smaller sects vied for power and patronage, as did members of at least four different British ethnic groups. The differences between a Scots-Irishman and an East Anglian may seem trivial to us today, but they were quite profound then, extending from dialects to ways of thinking about wealth, family, marriage, and education.

It must also be noted that not all of those asked to join the United States agreed to do so. Despite much prodding from the United States, the denizens of the far north set off to create an empire of their own. The French in Quebec were just too different to assimilate, and to this day they threaten to fracture the Canadian empire. Moreover, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River formed a natural boundary between the two empires for almost half their westward extent. Most of the rest of its empire America purchased with money and blood, not by inducing others to join it.

With this view of things, it is difficult to imagine that the American empire ever formed at all. If the unification of the United States was not foreordained by religion, language, culture, politics, or ethnicity, why did the polities from Georgia to Massachusetts join in union in 1788? Why did they stay together (at least until 1861)? And strive to grow? For the same reason that many Europeans today want to unify—efficiency. By combining politically, the independent states economized on their defense and foreign policy costs, created an enormous zone for the free trade of goods and people, and forged a monetary union. Lincoln may have exaggerated when he claimed that “divided we fall,” but he had the direction right. Californians are richer today than they would have been had they not united politically and economically with the citizens of Maine, Florida, Washington, and all points in between.

But of course history does not so much repeat itself as rhyme. Europe’s path differs from that taken by the United States, which joined first politically, then soon after monetarily, and only slowly economically. A loose sort of political union emerged out of the Revolution, but the national government remained extremely weak. Congress could not directly tax the citizenry but instead went hat-in-hand to the several states for table scraps. It emitted paper money—the infamous Continental dollars—but so too did the states. The union was so weak that the states laid tariffs on each other’s produce.

The ratification of the Constitution in 1788 considerably strengthened America’s political union. The national government gained the power to tax citizens directly and to enact tariffs. States lost the right to lay tariffs on goods imported from other states and also the power to emit legal tender paper money. With passage of the Mint Act in 1792, the United States established a bona fide monetary union by defining a uniform unit of account, the dollar, in terms of both gold and silver (to be precise, 371.25 grains of pure silver or 416 grains of standard silver or 24.75 grains of pure gold or 27 grains of standard gold).

Confusion arises, even among scholars, because many Americans in the nineteenth century complained about the lack of a common form of cash. Those complaints were justified but were directed at the various media of exchange, or cash instruments, then in circulation. Before the gold (and silver) strikes in California, the U.S. Mint never came close to producing enough gold and silver coins to satisfy the demand for money, so most payments were made with foreign coins, bank notes, checks, and small chits issued by storekeepers, toll bridges, and the like and not with U.S. silver dollars or gold eagles (ten dollar coins). Because only the foreign coins and the handful of U.S. coins in circulation were a legal tender and then only at rates closely corresponding to their actual metal content, the different varieties of cash, though inconvenient, did not constitute different monies but merely different ways to pay. After 1792, the U.S. dollar unit of account, to wit a known quantity (see above) and fineness of gold or silver, was the means by which all Americans reckoned value in both current and credit transactions.

Additional confusion arises because some Americans after 1792 continued to keep their account books in colonial pounds, shilling, and pence. They continued simply because they were accustomed to doing so. But the conversion rates between the colonial currencies and the dollar were essentially fixed by the mint and foreign coin rating acts, so the use of colonial pounds was merely nominal. The fact that Joe Farmer might have put seven shillings, six pence Pennsylvania currency instead of one dollar in his account book was of no economic consequence because by law 7s. 6d. was equal to $1 and vice versa. An analogous case today occurs in places like Ithaca, New York, where “community money” circulates. Each Ithaca “Hour” is by law equal to ten dollars. Whether Ithacans keep their accounts in Hours or dollars doesn’t matter because there is no exchange rate between the two, only an invariable conversion rate. Just as an inch is an inch whether measured using the English or the metric system, a dollar is a dollar whether it is called a dollar or a tenth Hour or 8s. York money or 7s. 6d. Pennsylvania currency.

The dollar provided Americans with a common numeraire, a uniform way of expressing economic value. Combined with the large internal free-trade zone created by the Constitution, the United States slowly grew more economically integrated. Colonists had easily slipped from one colony to another, and some limited regional trading took place. Only over the course of the nineteenth century, though, did a truly national economy, with a high degree of regional specialization, emerge. By the twentieth century, most goods and many services were made for the national market, as opposed to the international or merely local markets.

The Europeans have taken a somewhat different approach to unification. They first enjoined some economic unification by forming a common market. But they kept immigration barriers relatively high. They next created a monetary union. Like the U.S. monetary union, the European monetary union concentrated first on establishing a common unit of account, the euro, and only later introduced a common medium of exchange, euro-denominated notes and coins. In Europe, however, the euro was merely a unit of account for just a few years. In the United States, the dollar was mainly a unit of account for over a century. Most importantly, Europeans moved toward political unification only recently, and so far they have botched it badly.

I hesitate to say that the Europeans have gotten things backwards by starting with free trade, then forming a monetary union, and only then attempting political unification. But European policymakers do need to realize that political unification is not the inevitable result of monetary union. Europe has had monetary unions before, including the Latin and Scandinavian monetary unions, none of which led to political unification. Instead of hoping that economic pressures will force a political compromise, policymakers should study the formation of the Canadian and American empires closely. What prevailed in those cases was the creation of a frame of government that safeguarded citizens’ rights to liberty and property and, just as importantly, ensured a good degree of local autonomy.

The European constitution currently under consideration may be too long, too vague in some places, and too specific in others to be ratified. Just ask the French and the Dutch.

Failure this time around would not necessarily be a bad thing. The United States needed two attempts to get it right, and Canada too needed time and experience. Moreover, the European monetary union can continue to function without political unification, especially if the flow of human and financial capital between members is further liberalized.

Continuation of the monetary union and common market to a large degree mitigates the risk of war by raising its expected costs and reducing the likelihood that a rebel could prove victorious. Again the American experience is instructive. The rebellious Southern states abandoned the currency union and free trade zone along with their seats in Congress in 1861 and paid dearly for it. Losing access to the euro and to the free-trade zone is a huge barrier to armed conflict, even bigger I daresay than the geographical dispersion of McDonald’s. And as long as European countries can refrain from shooting at each other, all should be well, even if it takes another year, decade, or century for political unification to come.

Further Reading:

For more about ethnicity in colonial America, see David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1989). The best survey of the colonial American economy is still John J. McCusker and Russell Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985). Recent general treatments of the early U.S. financial and monetary systems include Robert E. Wright, The First Wall Street (Chicago, 2005) and Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen, Financial Founding Fathers (Chicago, 2006). Technical discussions of the early U.S. monetary union include Ron Michener and Robert E. Wright, “State ‘Currencies’ and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Clarifying Some Confusions,” American Economic Review (June 2005), 682-703 and Ron Michener and Robert E. Wright, “Development of the U.S. Monetary Union,” Financial History Review (forthcoming). On the Latin Monetary Union, see Henry Willis, A History of the Latin Monetary Union (Chicago, 1901). On the history of monetary unions more generally, a good place to start is John Chown, A History of Monetary Unions (New York, 2003). The McDonald’s hypothesis is discussed in Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, 1999).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Robert E. Wright teaches business history at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His most recent books include First Wall Street (Chicago, 2005) and, with David Cowen, Financial Founding Fathers (Chicago, 2006).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pedagogy of national identity in a hybrid age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

Lewis Evans and cartographic consumer culture, 1750-1775

Reading the Map as Object

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Map as Decorative Object

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Wilkes Hayley and celebrity in the early United States

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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