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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

Nathaniel Philbrick wrote a wonderful account of the U.S. Ex. Ex. in Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York, 2003). Although lacking Philbrick’s narrative drive, there is still much of value in William Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (Berkeley, 1975). The best accounts of the materials collected by the naturalists of the U.S. Ex. Ex. appear in the essays published in Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, eds., Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (Washington, D.C., 1985). The official accounts of the voyage and related materials are available online.

First-hand accounts from the voyage are scattered in archives around the country. I have used “The Journal on Board the Vincennes” of Simeon A. Stearns in the manuscript collections at the New York Public Library and the Diary of William Hudson from the American Museum of Natural History. Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick have edited The Private Journal of William Reynolds: The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York, 2004). There is little doubt that Reynolds was the best writer to sail with Wilkes.

To understand the wars in Fiji, it is best to begin with Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago, 2004) and his “The Discovery of the True Savage,” originally published in 1994 but reprinted in Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York, 2000). Readers interested in the “bêche-de-mer” trade will want to start with Mary Wallis, Life in Feejee: Five Years Among the Cannibals (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2002), originally published anonymously in 1851, and R. Gerard Ward, “The Pacific Bêche-de-Mer Trade with Special Reference to Fiji,” in R. Gerard Ward, ed., Man in the Pacific Islands (Oxford, 1972): 91-123.

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

Ann Fabian is dean of humanities at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and a professor of history and American studies. She is writing a book about skulls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

The social history of eighteenth-century Virginia has been the subject of much scholarly discussion. For some representative works, see Edmund S. Morgan American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1976); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982); John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783 (Williamsburg, Va., 1988); Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, Va., 1992); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000).

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

Thomas J. Humphrey teaches at Cleveland State University and is the author of Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution (2004). He is also coeditor, with John Smolenski, of New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas (2005).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

The standard labor history of the early republic is still Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984). Notable works on the lived experiences of working men include Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill, 1987), Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York, 1992), and Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1986). The literature on working women includes Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Chicago, 1988) and Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York, 1979). Some works that do examine the interaction of working men and women include Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, 2002), Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995), and Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill, 1991). Finally, the much more developed literature on masculinity, which almost exclusively focuses on middle- and upper-class men, includes E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), David C. Pugh, Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, Conn., 1983), Shawn Johansen, Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America (New York, 2001), and Stephen Frank, Life With Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore, 1998).

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

Sharon Ann Murphy is an assistant professor of history at Providence College. Her forthcoming book is tentatively titled Security in an Uncertain World: The Social History of Life Insurance in Antebellum America.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence

Despite the fact that print culture, abolitionism, and the American legal system matured together during the nineteenth century, they are strange bedfellows in many scholarly studies. For print scholars, slavery and abolitionism remain at the margins of “book history.” For many abolitionist scholars, exemplary antislavery reformers remain those “passionate outsiders” who defined themselves against mainstream institutions, including those of politics and law. As Jeannine DeLombard shows in her wide-ranging and thoroughly researched study, print, abolitionism, and the law formed lasting bonds in the early republic. “During the three decades preceding the Civil War,” DeLombard writes at the outset of her indispensable book, “slavery was on trial in the United States” (1). No mere courtroom drama, abolitionists’ case before the “bar of public opinion” had lasting consequences for northern liberty, southern defenses of bondage, and the coming of the Civil War.

DeLombard begins Slavery on Trial by placing antebellum abolitionism in a dynamic historical context. By the time her study gets rolling in the 1830s and 1840s, new-style abolitionists like Garrison and Douglass had already shed their movement’s elite beginnings by focusing intensely on print culture. Realizing that immediate abolitionists formed a small minority, new-style reformers turned to mass media to make their case. DeLombard argues that abolitionists had to first “decriminalize” their movement before the public at large. At the same time, antebellum abolitionists came to see legalistic discourse—including metaphors of trials, prosecutions, eyewitness testimony, and cross-examinations—as an essential means of battling bondage in the public arena.

Thus did the antislavery movement use American print culture to create a national trial on slavery. As DeLombard observes, both the adversarial model of American law that came into vogue during the early nineteenth century and the discourses long associated with criminal litigation inspired antebellum abolitionists to become the architects of a courtroom-like drama that condemned slaveholders and their apologists. “[A]bolitionists’ trial trope facilitated a radical reconceptualization of civic participation in America,” she notes. “By patterning their behavior on the personae of the criminal trial, those who approached the bar of public opinion challenged prevailing hierarchies of race, gender, class, and condition by modeling new forms of civic presence” (222).

At the heart of abolitionists’ legalistic print strategy was the notion that the American people could upend formal decisions rendered in courts of law. In prosecuting their case, DeLombard comments wittily, abolitionists “effected a change of venue” from courts to print (18). This “extralegal” maneuvering was far from evidence of abolitionists’ anti-institutional thinking. Rather, antislavery reformers viewed print as a critical part of the civic realm—an essential institution. Moreover, this brand of popular constitutionalism—the view that the people out of court could render a verdict as powerful as any judge—borrowed from a tradition of popular sovereignty dating to the eighteenth century. Jacksonian democracy abetted popular constitutionalism by not only emphasizing the power of the people but by resurrecting Americans’ age-old fears of arbitrary figures (namely recalcitrant judges) foiling liberty. DeLombard shows that well before the famous fugitive slave trials of the 1850s, fears of “atrocious judges” figured prominently in abolitionist discourse (18).

DeLombard makes her own case more powerful by reading deeply in both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist archives. While Garrison, Douglass, and Stowe make headlines, so too does the rather obscure Latimer Journal and North Star, which began publication after the real trial of a southern fugitive in Boston got underway in 1842. For DeLombard, it serves as a window onto the parallel legal universe created by abolitionist printers (9). Similarly, William MacCreary Burwell’s White Acre vs. Black Acre (published in 1856) illuminates “the surge of proslavery and Southern responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that deluged trans-Atlantic print culture throughout the 1850s.” Though not the best known anti-Stowe publication, she writes, it shaped the “South’s countersuit” against abolitionists (177). Because most southern ideologues favored non-legalistic defenses of slavery (the very terms of the faux criminal trial worried masters), abolitionist propaganda put them in a difficult position. White Acre vs. Black Acre mocked abolitionist printers’ advocacy for slave victims and parodied the very notion that slavery was a crime.

As DeLombard points out, antislavery writers’ support of black victims left “little room for the free black abolitionist” to either imagine life beyond bondage or take a front seat at the prosecution’s table (26). Citing Douglass’s midlife complaints against white reformers, she notes that African Americans were often relegated to supporting roles as witnesses. Nevertheless, African American publicists contributed mightily to the national prosecution of slavery. As she asserts, Frederick Douglass became one of the era’s “most influential literary abolitionists” both for his incredible “renderings of the slavery debate as a criminal trial” and its limitations to black reformers (27).

What difference did it make? DeLombard argues that abolitionists transformed northern conceptions of sectional interest. If during the 1830s abolitionists defended themselves against charges of extremism, then by the 1850s their constant manipulations of the printed sphere—and reactions from Southerners—had convinced many white Northerners that liberty itself was on trial in America. As slaveholders and their allies undermined freedom of the press, many northern citizens felt betrayed. That the struggle over black slavery ultimately became a battle over white rights is certainly not news; but DeLombard’s journey to that conclusion makes clear that abolitionists forced the issue by maintaining their prosecutory zeal. Indeed, by the time of John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry, both Northerners and Southerners seemed ready to go beyond the world of a make-believe courtroom.

One of the legends of Civil War studies is that American culture violently divided in 1860 because of the unique presence of hectoring abolitionists who called slaveholders evil (nowhere else in the Atlantic world did a Civil War occur because nowhere else did a slave regime face such comparative moral blasts from reformers). DeLombard shows clearly that this is no legend. Abolitionists were not simply yelping from the sidelines (nor did slaveholders overreact to their prosecutorial campaigns). No, abolitionists, comprising just a few percentage points of the American population during the 1830s, rose disproportionately in prominence by the 1860s because they used a key American institution—print—and resorted to well-known legal discourses (criminal trials) to build their moral case against bondage. DeLombard illustrates that abolitionists knew precisely what arguments they were making. She also shows that they should never be discounted in studies of print, American legal culture—or the coming of the Civil War.

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

Richard Newman teaches in the history department at Rochester Institute of Technology. His new book, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church and the Black Founding Fathers, will be published in March with NYU Press. He is also coeditor of the series Race in the Atlantic World, published by the University of Georgia Press.

With the publication of The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer has cemented her status as one of the leading experts on the classics in early America. Remarkably prolific, she has published an impressive array of insightful articles on various aspects of American women’s evolving relationship to the classics. While incorporating into The Mirror of Antiquity the findings of these articles and, to a lesser extent, the discoveries of her equally superb book, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2002), Winterer adds much previously unpublished material as well.

The most fascinating portion of The Mirror of Antiquity is Winterer’s thoughtful discussion of the conflicting demands of eighteenth-century American society on aristocratic women. Winterer writes, “Ancient history was acceptable for women, but the classical languages (especially Greek) were not; admiring the heroism of Cicero or Scipio was acceptable, but tying the heroism to prescriptions for modern statecraft was not; reading about ancient orators was acceptable, while declaiming aloud less so. A woman’s conversation should be ornamental but not instructive in its own right; she should have learning enough to take an interest in her male companion’s conversation, but not be so learned as to surpass his grasp of the subject. The precarious balance between feminine frivolity and petticoat pedantry was so difficult to achieve that magazines and books rushed in to fill the void with advice” (14-15). Affluent women were expected to acquire this moderate degree of knowledge with little or no formal schooling in the classics.

In the nineteenth century the educational opportunities of upper- and middle-class women increased considerably. In fact, the United States became the only nation to establish large numbers of female academies and colleges that taught the Greco-Roman classics. Classical education led to the formation of female reading societies and other social networks that proved crucial to the reform movements that rocked antebellum America.

Meanwhile, the founders’ preference for the Roman republic gave way to the Jacksonian glorification of Athenian democracy. As a result, college students, both male and female, studied the masterpieces of Athenian drama, including Sophocles’ Antigone, for the first time. The play proved ripe with meaning not only for the question of women’s proper role in society but also for the controversy concerning the classical theory of natural law, one of the principal ideological tools of the abolitionist movement.

Nevertheless, Rome did not fade completely from American thought. A number of abolitionist editors compared runaway slave women with Roman heroes who had also risked death on behalf of liberty. By contrast, the legend of Cornelia, the mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus who once responded to a frivolous lady’s request to see her jewels by presenting her sons, continued to provide dual lessons in motherhood as the appropriate focus of women’s lives and in frugality. Ironically, the latter lesson was often inculcated through depictions of the story on various mass-produced luxury items, such as silk embroideries and fans.

Indeed, the love-hate relationship between the Industrial Revolution and the classics is one of the most interesting aspects of nineteenth-century classicism. While the simplicity and frugality taught by the classics were often marshaled to combat the materialism of the industrial age, it was the new factories and railroads that filled middle-class homes with classical knickknacks for the first time and steam-powered presses that churned out inexpensive new editions of the classics and periodicals that discussed them in detail. Even ordinary homes were now adorned with classical objects, such as small statues, busts, and urns, as badges of taste and culture. Tables, mantels, teapots, pitchers, ewers, urns, candelabra, and even stoves were richly ornamented with caryatids, cupids, griffins, scrolls, columns, cornucopias, garlands, satyr masks, lyres, grapevines, and other classical motifs. Greek decorative motifs, employed on a large scale for the façades of the neoclassical buildings that dominated every county seat, were also used on a small scale for windows, cornices, and fireplaces, according to a very high standard of craftsmanship. Inexpensive English translations of the classics, combined with cheap journals that obsessed over the details of ancient life, now allowed even uneducated women and men to become conversant in Greco-Roman history and literature.

Meanwhile, an increasing popular interest in classical mythology proved liberating for American women. The focus on mythology by such women as the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller demonstrated how the expansion of classical interest beyond political history and theory, the great preoccupations of the founders’ age, to encompass drama and poetry could give politically disfranchised women and others focused on self-improvement a greater connection to the classics than had been possible in the eighteenth century.

Winterer’s rumination on the Statue of Liberty brings a fitting close to the book. The classically educated Emma Lazarus dedicated a poem entitled, “The New Colossus” (1883), to the robed icon with the strikingly classical features. The poem that famously ends, “Give me your tired, your poor . . .” actually begins with a declaration of American superiority to the ancients eerily similar to the numerous proclamations of American nationalists over the previous century. The poet’s very obsession with antiquity, in a poem dedicated to a neoclassical icon, lends an ironic tone to her declaration of independence from the ancients. In short, like her forebears, Lazarus doth protest too much.

I have only one caveat to add to my praise for this excellent book. The subtitle’s end date of 1900 is misleading. Three-quarters of the book concerns the period 1750-1820; only about ten pages of the work regard the post-Civil War period. Winterer’s focus on the late eighteenth century is certainly defensible, since the classicism of American women in this period has been explored far less than that of the nineteenth century (in stark contrast to studies of the classicism of American men, which have tended to focus on the founders). But, in view of the few pages devoted to the late nineteenth century, an end date of 1860 in the subtitle would have conveyed the content of the book more accurately.

Nevertheless, The Mirror of Antiquity is the best treatment of American women and the classics from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century ever published. Lucid, thoughtful, and well researched, it is certain to become its own object of study, a classic.

Further Reading:

For more information on the education of American women in the nineteenth century, see Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, 1985); Christie Ann Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York, 1994); Mary Kelley, “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 83 (September 1996): 401-424; and Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006). For more information about classical decorative motifs in middle-class American homes see Wendy A. Cooper, Classical Taste in America, 1800-1840 (Baltimore, 1993).

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

Carl J. Richard is a professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette whose books include The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (1994), Twelve Greeks and Romans Who Changed the World (2003), The Battle for the American Mind: A Brief History of a Nation’s Thought (2004), Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield, and The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States, forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

In this impressive book, David Brion Davis, one of our foremost historians of slavery, provides us with a comprehensive historical narrative of the central place of slavery in the making of the New World and of the movements to abolish it. The book opens with the famous rebellion aboard the ship Amistad (1839) and the equally famous legal cases surrounding it, addressing the issues of the international slave trade, racial slavery, abolitionist opposition, and the place of slavery in the American political and judicial system. Davis uses this incident as a jumping off point to provide us with a sweeping historical overview of the rise and fall of slavery in the United States and the Western world.

Well known for his magisterial works on slavery that span world history, Davis begins his story in antiquity. He compares the relatively favored and socially mobile slaves of Babylon with those held by the Tupinamba in preconquest Brazil. The latter murdered and cannibalized their slaves, revealing, Davis argues, how slaves were dehumanized and seen as animals. The process of enslavement was comparable to the domestication of animals. According to Davis, slavery can be best defined as reducing human beings to the status of chattel property, what he refers to as the “animalization” of human beings. Such a definition would incorporate Orlando Patterson’s definitions of slavery as “natal alienation” from the society of one’s birth and the general dishonoring of slaves in societies of their enslavement. Thus Plato compared the slave to the body and the master to the soul, and Aristotle claimed that some people were slaves by nature. In the New World, slavery would be equated with race and antiblack racism.

Davis traces the roots of racism in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions that used the biblical “Curse on Ham” story to justify the enslavement of Africans and equated blackness with sin, slavery, and pollution. These ideas received a powerful impetus with the rise of the pseudoscience of race during the Enlightenment, which linked Africans and apes in the Great Chain of Being. They percolated into the thought of Thomas Jefferson, the American apostle of liberty, who crudely speculated that black women had sexual intercourse with apes. While some Enlightenment figures criticized slavery, the “scientific” and philosophical ideas of the day bolstered notions of racial inferiority among some famous thinkers including Hume, Kant, and Voltaire.

It was precisely at this time that the European voyages of discovery and the start of the Atlantic slave trade linked the destiny of West Africa with that of the New World or, in Davis’s words, made Africans integral to world history. With great clarity, he argues that although African participation enriched a few elites, the insatiable European demand for slaves resulted in a holocaust of African lives and geared the internal economies of Africa for slave production. Various European powers entered and dominated the African slave trade in its dismal four-hundred-year history. The failure of Indian slavery, as large numbers of Native Americans succumbed to European diseases and warfare, sealed the fate of Africa and people of African descent in the New World.

The Spanish and the Portuguese exported the slave-based sugar-plantation economies of the islands off the coasts of Africa and southern Europe to the Western Hemisphere. While slavery also became legal in all the British colonies, it was in the plantation colonies of the West Indies, Virginia and Maryland, and South Carolina and Georgia that it became the central socio-economic and political institution. In the nineteenth century, sugar, tobacco, and rice would soon be joined by other staple crops dependent on the use of slave labor, like coffee in Brazil and cotton in the southern United States. Slavery thus flourished and contributed considerably to the wealth of European nations and the early American republic. In two excellent chapters about the American South, Davis shows how slavery gave rise to a slave society that constructed an elaborate proslavery argument to justify the enslavement of African Americans. He also shows how it created distinct black cultures and communities that allowed slaves to survive the daily brutalities of the slave system.

However, the enslavement of Africans was challenged systematically in the Age of Revolution when slave rebellions, national revolutions, and abolitionist movements inaugurated emancipation in much of the West. In the second half of the book, Davis shows himself to be as astute a scholar of abolition as of slavery. Antislavery writers drew ideological inspiration from revolutionary ideas. Even more than the American and French revolutions—which abolished slavery in the northern states and led to one of the first national emancipation decrees in France—the Haitian revolution, the only instance of a successful slave rebellion in world history, spelled the doom of slavery. Massive slave rebellions convulsed South America and the Caribbean. In the United States such attempts proved to be suicidal. Beliefs in the superiority of free labor and the iniquity of human bondage spurred the growth of an Anglo-American abolitionist movement. Religious revivalism further led the movement to view slavery as a moral evil and sin, an idea that influenced Abraham Lincoln, who was not so much an abolitionist as antislavery in conviction.

Davis’s last chapters trace the politics of slavery and emancipation during the Civil War and the political career of Abraham Lincoln. He shows growing southern aggressiveness over the expansion of slavery into the West and in plans to reopen the African slave trade. In the North, abolitionism evolves from a minority position to a broad-based political antislavery represented by Lincoln’s Republican Party, which was committed to the non-expansion of slavery in the West. The Civil War, Davis argues cogently, was a revolutionary moment in American history when the actions of runaway slaves, Congress, radical Republicans, and the president inaugurated emancipation and the arming of black men in the Union Army. During Radical Reconstruction, the nation even experimented with notions of black citizenship and an interracial democracy before the “redemption” of the South inaugurated the long nightmare of segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching.

In a short epilogue, Davis extends his epic tale to Cuba and Brazil where Lincoln and abolitionists like Clarkson, Wilberforce, Garrison, and Sumner inspired emancipation movements. This book is perhaps the single best work we have on the rise and fall of slavery. As Davis perceptively concludes, the Western Hemisphere and the “devastated continent of Africa” (331) still live with the historical legacies of modern racial slavery.

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

Manisha Sinha is an associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

When asked to contribute to this discussion of Bercovitch’s landmark work, I decided that I wanted to reflect on the impact of The American Jeremiad upon my small piece of the current jigsaw puzzle of Americanist scholarship, the study of Jewish American literature and culture.

Like many other scholars of my generation, I suppose, I narrowed my Americanist focus in the mid-1980s for a combination of reasons, personal and political. It was in the air, it was in the blood. The idea was to oppose the totalizing, to celebrate ethnicity, and to embrace difference, and like other fields of Ethnic Studies, Jewish Studies was on the rise. But what I found when I began to survey the field of Jewish American literature gave me pause. From Abraham Cahan and Mary Antin to Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and beyond—so much of the literature commonly studied in Jewish American literature courses were narratives of assimilation or the adventures of already deracinated Jews. What I found, in other words, was not difference, but an aversion to difference, the anxiety of ethnicity, Jewishness under the pressure of America. Here were self-styled marginal men and women streaming into the American literary mainstream. Here were writers denying as publicly as possible that they were Jewish writers only to be celebrated by readers and critics as standard-bearers of the tribe. I was perplexed. When I looked beyond the Jewish American canon to the unstudied literature of the earlier Sephardic and German waves of immigration—I was, after all, trained as an early Americanist—I found something even more startling: Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, writing under the byline of the American Jewish Novelist, retelling the story of Hanukkah in the words of Thomas Jefferson and Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, in a Fourth of July sermon, berating the retrospective Jewish traditionalists for not seeing the American Revolution as the fulfillment of the Revelation at Sinai. Here, I thought, was not difference but a bold-faced relinquishing of Jewish difference in the name of the American consensus. It was not what I was looking for. All this, as I said, gave me pause. But there was something that struck me as even stranger. I was not the only scholar who noticed what I noticed. But was I the only one to think it was in the least bit peculiar? As a very wise man once said, I felt like Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes.

So I turned to other disciplines—to history and sociology—and I found more of a willingness to recognize a perceptual problem in American Jewish culture. In 1988, sociologist Steven Cohen published a study of American Jews whose titular question, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival?, touched off a scholarly controversy in the following decade that came to be known as the assimilationist-transformationist debate. Both sides agreed that something significant, something pronounced, something unusual had happened to Jews in America. But was it the triumph of assimilation, that bogey-man of modern Jewish pulpits, the great enemy of Jewish difference, or was it the emergence of a new, transformed, revitalized, and responsive Jewish culture, a creative assertion of difference in an American context? Some fine scholarship issued from these debates, such as Jonathan Sarna’s analysis of what he called “the cult of synthesis” in Jewish American culture. But while this half-empty/half-full tug-of-war raised significant questions and laid bare the ideological divide, it answered little.

Something significant, something pronounced, something unusual had happened to Jews in America. But was it the triumph of assimilation, that bogey-man of modern Jewish pulpits, the great enemy of Jewish difference, or was it the emergence of a new, transformed, revitalized, and responsive Jewish culture?

So I turned back to The American Jeremiad, and here I found a way out of the maze. Bercovitch offered an approach to American culture that allowed for a more nuanced understanding of assimilation, an approach that did not denigrate difference, or resistance, but was skeptical about how different difference really was, was curious about the way resistance resisted. In America, he suggested, consensus did not necessarily mean ideological uniformity or behavioral conformism but “symbolic cohesion,” not uncritical allegiance but a shared rhetoric that could sustain a complex constellation of competing values and even encourage dissent—as long as it was dissent in the name of America, as long as consent and dissent were made to correspond.

Bercovitch opened the way for a deeper appreciation of assimilation and transformation and for a nuanced revaluation of Jewish American literary creativity. The patriotic bluster of Wise and Kohler could be seen not simply as surrender to the American consensus, as the cooptation of Jewish difference, but also as a reappropriation of the rhetoric of the jeremiad, an inversion of Christian supersessionism, a Judaization of America—consensus and dissensus conjoined, a rhetorical triumph through surrender. And those members of the canonized and lionized mid-twentieth century cohort of writers and intellectuals—Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, Howe, Kazin, and Fiedler—their frenetic emergence onto the American literary stage flaunting the Jewishness they purported to leave behind, brandishing their alienation as a badge of acceptance, both in and out of the game: here, too, was the complex product of the American jeremiad, the astonishing achievement of the art of assimilation.

Looking at Jewish American literary history through the lens of the American jeremiad suggested that the answer to Steven Cohen’s titular question, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? was an emphatic, Yes, in thunder! An answer that could satisfy neither side, a sure sign of its explanatory power.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

Michael P. Kramer, Professor Haver at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, is the author of Imagining Language in America, From the Revolution to the Civil War (1992), and the editor (with Hana Wirth-Nesher) of The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003) and, most recently, of Before the Flood: Early Jewish American Writing (Studies in American Jewish Literature 33:1, 2014). He is co-editor of The Turn Around Religion in American Literature: Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch (2011).

I have never been in a down-and-dirty fist fight. I have never been roughed up by the police. I don’t hunt. I do not own a gun or knife and do not know anyone who does. And, of course, I have not performed military service. I am, then, in every respect typical of the vast majority of historians who have opined about violence and the American Revolution since the Vietnam era. The history of violence in revolutionary America, where written at all, has for the most part been written by pacifists, as Richard Maxwell Brown, writing in the shadow of the Vietnamese freedom struggle, noted acerbically. But this is also a history written by the victors, in which critical denunciation of the violence inflicted by white revolutionaries on Tories, on local white minorities, and on African and Native Americans, is crowded out of the master narrative by invocations of “The Glorious Cause.” Even those many American historians who note the extreme violence that has characterized much of the internal history of the United States of America, let alone American actions with respect to peoples overseas, have struggled to incorporate this understanding into narratives of the American Revolution. Yet this tendency has not stopped a significant minority of historians—employing concepts of “othering” or “enemyship” drawn more broadly from the behavioral sciences—from arguing that the American experience, whatever that was, is globally normal. “That’s just the way revolutions work” goes the knee-jerk mantra.

There are some good reasons for the puzzling treatment of violence in the American Revolution, but the consequences of the academy’s failure to come to terms with the scale and nature of the nation’s violent birth have had, for most of the twentieth century at any rate, the unfortunate tendency to present America as an exceptional case. Take the obvious question: Did revolutionary America generate the headline-grabbing violence familiar to history from the French experience as “Terror”? The default response to this question is “No.” If by “the” or “a” Terror we understand the exemplary public execution of socially and politically prominent individuals on quasi-judicial principles so situational as to be subsequently incomprehensible then, no, America did not experience a Terror. The American Revolution was not characterized, for however brief a period of time, by the erection of a gibbet in every cross-roads hamlet on the continent. A large part of the explanation for this can be found in the fact that Loyalists and British nationals left America before they could be executed. Adjusting for population, the American Revolution produced five times as many émigrés as the French. In addition, the most obvious subversive scapegoat and candidate for execution—the African American slave daring to claim freedom for himself—had a monetary or military value that trumped his affront to the revolutionary claims of white freedom fighters. The fact that some visible internal enemies of the Glorious Cause were worth more at auction in the West Indies or serving as substitutes in the Continental line than they were dead helped prevent one kind of Terror.

However, if we mean by Terror something closer to the reality of the French example—an internal civil war of extraordinary violence, justified by the rhetoric of a country in peril and folded into a formalized war for independence directed against external troops and their savage native allies, a terror erupting with particular force whenever and wherever these two wars collided—then the answer is “Yes,” the American Revolution generated a Terror. Discussions of violence at the conference generally accepted that the revolutionary era was marked by an interleaving of forms of violence and the thick loyalties such forms create. Perhaps recent events in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, and Syria have once more sensitized academic writers to the violence that accompanies and prompts the collapse, implosion, or overthrow of established states. If so, how might such sensitivity re-birth the study of the American Revolution? Perhaps by prompting (once more) the question of whether, by virtue of its inherent violence, the American Revolution could or could not have produced an outcome other than the federal constitutional settlement.

David Hendrickson has ingeniously described that federal settlement as a peace pact between American states familiar with violence and all too conscious of the possibility of near-perpetual internecine warfare on the continent. This argument at least accepts the prevalence of actual, rhetorical, and imagined violence in the United States of America in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But is Hendrickson’s metaphor of the Constitution as a “system” analogous to the Congress of Vienna justified? That America’s violent revolution did not produce civil war of the kind that Hendrickson’s federal “peace pact” was designed to prevent raises interesting questions. We know from the example of slavery that long-enduring polities can be built on long-enduring violence, and we would not describe slave societies as ever or exactly “peaceful.” Why do people perpetuate, by continuing to live within, societies in which violence, both threatened and actual, is a constant of life? The standard answer is that they become inured to it, that violence is something done to people. (By whom? Through what agency? Why?) Sophie Wahnich’s ingenious In Defence of the Terror twists the received wisdom in ways that historians of American violence might find instructive.

In the French case, Wahnich argues, it was the people who launched the slogan of “la patrie” in danger and thereby put Terror on the agenda: “Citizens asserted their sovereignty by demanding to be the first agents of public safety.” So too in America, where committees tasked by citizens with protecting them from internal and external enemies sprang up before Congress convened and in advance of the sanction offered by the Continental Congress. It was the people of the several states, not Congress or state legislatures, who first demanded that a test of loyalty be a condition of citizenship. And in locality after locality it was “the people” who were prepared to use violence to ensure that their own safety and the safety of their loved ones was secured at the expense of the physical, mental, and political well-being of real or imagined enemies. Of course, “the people” also delegated the right to inflict pain and violence on their enemies both to the several states and the federal center, but the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is one among many prominent manifestations of an equally powerful desire to keep matters of public safety local. In America this version of the revolutionary settlement is celebrated, while in France it is lamented. In the French case the appropriation of popular sovereignty through the claim of the people to command their own defense is lamented for producing the twisted logic of Robespierre, the dictatorship of Napoleon, and the counter-revolutionary theories of de Maistre.

What moral might we draw, then, from the study of the much more long-established and equally violent defense of local safety in the case of America? What might we gain from asking why the American case is celebrated not just by the modern Tea Party movement but also by muscular liberals who hold it is as an article of faith that one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs? Jefferson backed away from the position that blood was the tree of liberty’s natural fertilizer. We know now that too many omelets are bad for the health. Having established that the American Revolution was indeed violent and that its violence lay at the heart of state-formation in the era, will the American academy bring forth a revisionism comparable to that of Francois Furet, for whom the Terror of the French Revolution prompted reflections on the Gulag and the matrix of totalitarianism? To its credit, the American academy has produced humane denunciations of the perversion of the logic that ends justify means in the case of American foreign policy. Will it now domesticate that critique?

Further Reading

Richard M. Brown made his dig that histories of violence have been produced predominantly by pacifists in Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York, 1975). Interesting post-Yugoslavia reflections on the Terror can be found in Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution (London, 2012).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Peter Thompson is Sydney L. Mayer University Lecturer in American History at Oxford University.

The imperialist imagination from filibustering to reality TV

The Empire is back, and no, I’m not referring to Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Nor am I talking about the imperialist-sequel America of George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, and preemptive strikes. Not directly, anyhow. The latest iteration of CBS’s Survivor, TV’s longest-running reality show series, is to be set, yet again, in the tropics. “Survivor Guatemala: the Mayan Empire” began filming in June. According to CBS News (always happy to plug its lucrative reality-TV franchise), officials in Guatemala are hoping that this latest Survivor will spur American tourists to visit the country’s remarkable Mayan ruins. 

That may well happen, and good luck to Guatemala and its infomercial. But as edifying as it might be for large numbers of Americans to steep themselves in someone else’s empire, Survivor is probably not the best vehicle for encouraging educated foreign travel. Previous Survivors have been set in Palau, Vanuatu, Panama, the Marquesas, the Amazon, and the Australian outback. But they looked pretty much the same: plenty of bathing suits, and bugs, attempts to spear fish, and beach-front shack construction. More importantly, contestants did the same things in these diverse settings. They formed and broke alliances, romanced one another, struggled with the heat, and competed in physical and mental challenges that rewarded individual strength, willpower, and agility—all in the pursuit of a million-dollar prize for one driven winner. The longevity of Survivor can perhaps be attributed to the fact that for the purposes of the competition, these tropical and quasi-tropical settings (even, oddly enough, the Australian outback) are effectively interchangeable. Contestants may occasionally interact with photogenic indigenous peoples in highly scripted and heartwarming ways or bear witness to the natural wonders around them (by swimming with stingless jellyfish, for instance), but none of this faux exoticism interferes with the business at hand, which is to endow the strongest, toughest, and most Machiavellian American with a big pile of U.S. greenbacks. In Survivor, it’s “American values” that are rewarded and endlessly strategic individualism that prevails. Sorry, Guatemala, but Survivor is ultimately about one empire only, and that one is America’s.

Nor is Survivor unusual in co-opting the tropics in the service of American enterprise. Temptation Island, The Real Gilligan’s Island, and portions of The Great Race—in all of these reality shows the tropics function as fantasy spaces, where otherwise undistinguished individuals can single-mindedly pursue riches and usually sex as well. Where is this new Gilligan’s Island? Does it matter? Like the first Survivor, originally set on an unidentified beach on an unidentified island, the TV tropics are fiercely anonymous and never actual countries whose governments, cultures, and societies have significant bearing on the behavior of the American interlopers. Of course particularity of place is not a noted strongpoint of reality TV. Even shows that are explicitly about their locations tend toward the universal. (Is that glossy nightclub on MTV’s The Real World in San Diego or Paris? Is that Jacuzzi in Austin or London?) Or they revel in cliché. When strapping young American men are exported to England on VH1’s Kept, for instance, they compete in polo matches, attend formal parties with royalty, and prepare spotted dick (a British dessert) in their attempts to become the kept man of ex-supermodel and ex-wife of Mick Jagger, Texas-born Jerry Hall.

But the TV tropics are something special, not only for their anonymity and interchangeability, but also because of their unequalled appeal as the setting for these shows. Why are the tropics so appealing to reality-TV producers and viewers? True, bathing suits bring in better ratings than parkas, but Jerry’s “boys” manage to find opportunities to shine, and show skin, in temperate Old England, while the aspiring male strippers/models of VH1’s Strip-Search and the Oxygen Network’s Mr. Romance rarely wear shirts or venture out-of-doors. The promise of the tropics is not so much the bikini (although bikinis are clearly important) as the certain victory of American values abroad and the ability of Americans to survive and become rich by dint of will and sexiness in a “primitive” environment.

Survivor was a sequel from the start. The appeal of the tropics as idealized location for the triumph of American enterprise and individualism is nothing new and, in fact, is a reoccurring theme in periods of American imperial expansionism. The tropics were similarly visualized in the two decades before the Civil War, when the conviction that America had a God-given Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent shaped presidential elections and helped justify a bloody war against Mexico in 1846. Thirteen-thousand Americans and twenty-thousand Mexicans died in that war as America’s popular literature extolled the opportunities for American men in the “fertile tropics” of Mexico. As Americans debated whether or not to annex all of Mexico as spoils of war in early 1848, Sam Houston, founding father of the Republic of Texas, assured a large crowd of New Yorkers gathered at a public meeting that Mexico was meant to be settled by Americans. He recommended that they “take a trip of exploration” to Mexico, find some “beautiful senoritas” and “if you should choose to annex them, no doubt the result of this annexation will be a most powerful and delightful evidence of civilization.” Equating personal and national annexation, Houston promised that what was good for the country would also be good for the individual and suggested that Mexican men were too unworthy as opponents to even factor into the equation.

Although the so-called all-Mexico movement failed, and midcentury expansionism ended with Mexico transferring half of her territory to the United States, expansionists continued to gaze longingly to the south. Tropical travel narratives, in both book and article form, proliferated in the 1840s and 1850s and offered a vision of the tropical portions of the Western Hemisphere, from the Caribbean to Hawaii, as ripe for American takeover. Less concerned with the civilizations of the south, than with spreading American civilization to the south, travel writers repeatedly pointed out that “the enterprise of the states” was all that was needed to turn tropical land into “a paradise” and contrasted the “slothful” and “lazy” local men with the energetic and hard-working American settlers who were bound to displace them. Appealing both to expansionists convinced that America’s Manifest Destiny was yet to be fulfilled and to displaced workingmen searching for opportunity, these narratives of Americans in the tropics promised, as Survivor and its kin do today, that yesterday’s failure in the United States could be tomorrow’s success in the tropics.

The tropics thus offered the perfect second chance to the American man willing to make the effort. The leading magazines of the day, including Harper’s, Putnam’s, and the Atlantic Monthly all ran travelogues that situated tropical lands firmly within the reach of America’s Manifest Destiny. These exotic locales, whether in Central America, the Caribbean, or the Pacific, were imbued with the promise of both romantic and economic success, predicated on the fact that any American man, even a failure, had the strength, intelligence, and will to succeed among the lesser men of the tropics. Within this genre, the equivalent to Survivor’s million-dollar paycheck was the indigo, sugar, or banana plantation, or possibly a yet-undiscovered gold mine, complemented by a beautiful local woman. Unlike in Survivor, however, the American’s competition for this prize was the supposedly lazy and racially inferior native man, and the conclusion, a foregone one. As one booster of the annexation of Mexico wrote in 1857, “it is now for a new race, a race possessed of iron will, to turn” these lands “to account.”

Filibusters, mercenaries who attacked countries in the Caribbean and Central America with disturbing regularity in the 1840s and 1850s in hopes of gaining new U.S. territory, also visualized the tropics as sites of easily won victory for American men. The chorus to a song sung by Cuban filibusters declared “O Cuba is the land for me,/I’m bound to make some money there! And set the Cubans free—.” (One filibuster, Narciso López, made three attempts on Cuba with American recruits between 1849 and 1851.) An 1856 poem in the New York Picayune celebrated the brief victory of filibuster William Walker—who ruled Nicaragua for less than a year before fleeing to the United States in the face of a stronger Central American army—by declaring that Nicaragua was a place:

“Where all things grow without the taming of a plough,
Where men grow fat by feasting, sans the sweat of brow.
Offers its steaming wealth to those who like to seek it,
And own their masters, if they’ll stick by and keep it.”

Even the forty-niners traveling through Nicaragua and Panama in the great race to the gold fields of California imagined the possibilities for “men of enterprise” of “our own race” in lands where so much grew “in the greatest luxuriance, and without apparent cultivation.” One gold-rush travel guide declared that Central America, and not California, was in fact “the real El Dorado” and advocated the immediate annexation of the Central American isthmus.

What the tropics so seductively promised was success to Americans simply by virtue of their being American, reassuring them of the universality of their values. The tropics were appealing not only because they were inhabited by scantily clad women but because the supposed racial superiority of the American Anglo-Saxon and his culture seemed to insure success to the individual who, borrowing a slogan from Survivor, was willing to “outwit, outplay, and outlast” his competition. From the antebellum travel narrative through reality TV, some things just haven’t changed. Being an empire means never having to say you are sorry for turning the rest of the world into backstory for your own national drama.

Further Reading:

All quotes are taken from Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum Empire (New York, 2005). On the American image of Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico War, see Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York, 1985). On cultural production after the war see Shelly Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley, 2002). On images of foreign lands in antebellum America, see Bruce Albert Harvey, American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865 (Stanford, 2001). The best study of filibustering is Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 2002). On imperialism and American culture in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, 1998).

Outstanding examples of the antebellum expansionist travel narrative include: Peter F. Stout, Nicaragua: Past, Present and Future; a Description of Its Inhabitants, Customs, Mines, Minerals. Early History, Modern Filibusterism, Proposed Inter-Oceanic Canal and Manifest Destiny (Philadelphia, 1859); William V. Wells, Explorations and Adventures in Honduras, excerpted in “Adventures in the Gold Fields of Central America,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 12 (February 1856): 315-36; and Marvin Wheat (as “Cincinnatus”), Travels on the Western Slope of the Mexican Cordillera in the Form of Fifty-One Letters (San Francisco, 1857).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.1 (October, 2005).

Amy S. Greenberg is associate professor of history and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University and acting director of the Richards Civil War Era Center. She is author of Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York, 2005) and Cause for Alarm: the Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, 1998). She is currently conducting research for a cultural history of the U.S.-Mexico War.