There are two Jamestowns. The first is a physical location near the territory inhabited in the early seventeenth century by the Pasapeghs, one of the thirty or so indigenous groups who lived in a region they called Tsenacommacah. The English called these people Powhatans. The second Jamestown is a mythic place that reappears every fifty years and becomes the focal point of a national discussion about the meaning of “America.” The first place has been studied by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists; the other has been (and remains) fodder for politicians and entrepreneurial patriots. The tangible Jamestown was initiated by 107 English men and boys who settled there in May 1607. The imaginary Jamestown has been created and recreated by presidents and promoters who have seen opportunity in boasting that it is “the cradle of American democratic traditions, cultures, ideologies and principles,” in the words of the official anniversary Website. William M. Kelso’s Jamestown: The Buried Truth merges both Jamestowns and leaves the reader wondering where “truth” can be found.

As is obvious to every early American historian and thousands of other readers, books about Jamestown have never been so popular or received such wide attention as in this four-hundredth-anniversary year. Any serious review of the field will need to include Kelso’s study, which is one of the most significant works of American archaeology to appear in recent years. The University of Virginia Press has produced a beautiful book containing scores of images, many in full color. Kelso has given the press much to work with: he has been, as he reveals in these pages, the most important archaeologist working at what has become one of the most intensively studied archaeological sites in eastern North America. Digs at Jamestown have produced around seven hundred thousand artifacts.

In such able hands as Kelso’s, archaeological evidence can reveal a past hidden to those who study only texts. Careful digging in Jamestown has shown, for example, the size of dwellings, the contents of diets, and the range of goods that arrived in this small seventeenth-century outpost on the edge of the Atlantic economy. Even the garbage is revelatory: the abandonment of goods such as suits of armor reveals major shifts in settlers’ perceptions of the region and its challenges at any given time. When archaeologists find valuable clothing in graves, it suggests that colonists died of something so dreadful that none of the survivors wanted the hand-me-downs. An excavation of a well might reveal what kinds of pathogens, if any, invaded the bowels of those unfortunate enough to ingest them. This kind of analysis can provide clues into the desperate early months of Jamestown when sixty-seven of the first settlers died. Kelso and his team investigated these questions along with more mundane artifacts—such as Delft tiles, Elizabethan coins, conch shells from Bermuda, and a German stoneware bottle. These reveal, among other things, settlers’ engagement with the larger Atlantic economy. Kelso ably demonstrates how the analysis of human detritus can reveal what lies invisible in texts, thus substantiating the special role of archaeologists in the collective scholarly understanding of the past.

While archaeology lies at the heart of this study of the tangible Jamestown, other parts of the book promote the mythic Jamestown. “The American dream was born on the banks of the James River,” Kelso writes in the first sentence of his introduction. In case the reader becomes so lost in the minutiae of archaeological reconstruction that she or he forgets this motto (and to his credit Kelso is a far more felicitous writer than many who fill the pages of archaeological journals), Kelso repeats this theme in the last sentence of the book: “The American dream was born on the banks of the James River, at a place first called James Fort, in 1607” (214). Why such a deliberate redundancy? Perhaps because the mythic Jamestown has cast its spell over even the most scientific scholar to study the place. Yet some might question the idea that the “American dream” was born at Jamestown, and Kelso is too capable a scholar to ignore the fact that the establishment of a permanent English presence in North America proved nightmarish for Native peoples and Africans.

Nonetheless, it is hard for Kelso to shake off a heritage that seems at once so romantic and so compellingly patriotic. “The ideals that distinguish and guide the United States today trace back to the Virginia settlement where free enterprise, the rule of law, and the spirit of discovery took hold in the hearts and practices of the American people.” Those words are not Kelso’s. They come instead from President George W. Bush’s proclamation marking the anniversary, issued by the White House on April 6, 2007. This is how Kelso put it: “There is evidence that some of the immigrants worked hard and achieved a better life. Those who first met them at the shore usually did not share this good fortune. Still, a political system was born and migrated across the seventeenth-century Jamestown landscape establishing principles that would some day make possible a more equal access to that better life” (214).

There is nothing wrong with writing a work of history that emphasizes the contribution of a particular individual or group or place to a larger historical drama. Kelso, who spent many years digging at Jamestown, certainly deserves the opportunity to tell his readers about the significance of what can be found there. The question for many readers will not be the conclusion, which will either seem an accurate reflection of the American past or an apology for it. Instead, the issue here is the nature of historical truth. Presidents can be forgiven an excess of rhetoric, for in our time no one seems to expect them to speak honestly. But Kelso, the scholar, has claimed in this book that archaeological analysis has brought us closer to what he calls “the buried truth,” as if material objects tell only a single story that is obvious to those who unearth them.

It is true that documents often obscure as much as they reveal. But so do material objects, including those found at Jamestown. Remains from the site provide evidence about the complexity of the settlement’s founding but speak less explicitly about the decline of Native Americans or the birth of the English mainland slave trade. Those other stories, although equally true, do not fit so well into the versions of Jamestown that the current president and fellow organizers of the official anniversary celebration have been marketing to the nation in public spectacles, children’s stage plays, or trademarked mugs and caps. Sometimes archaeology helps to rebury elements of early Virginia’s past rather than reveal them as, for instance, when Kelso writes that “documents and digging lay bare the places of American democracy” (213). When Kelso lets the patriotic past promote the mythic over the tangible Jamestown, readers of this book will need to trust their judgment about where the truth lies.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Peter C. Mancall, professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California, is the director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute and author, most recently, of Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (2007).

A conventional biography of Richard Hakluyt the younger (1552?-1616) cannot be written. Famous for publishing collections of travel writings in order to promote English colonialization, Hakluyt left no personal papers. We know he married twice, the first marriage producing a son. Beyond dates of marriages, deaths, and births, no trace of his private life survives. Literally the only information of a quasi-personal nature comes from a passage in one of his published works, in which he describes the introduction to geography that would later launch him on his publishing career. It is an exceedingly thin record for a man whose name is so well known.

Peter C. Mancall skirts this problem mostly by focusing on the larger context rather than by trying to fill in what cannot be known with “might have beens.” The relative conservatism of his approach can be seen by contrasting Hakluyt’s Promise to Natalie Zemon Davis’s recent Trickster’s Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006). Unlike Davis, who uses general information to illuminate her subject, Mancall demurs almost entirely from speculative reconstructions. On one uncharacteristic occasion, he unequivocally declares the years 1590 to 1600 “the most personally painful part of his life” (196). This unusually direct factual statement depends on the knowledge that during this decade a number of people close to Hakluyt died, including his first wife. This tentative foray into the inner life of the man is not supported by the sort of ancillary information (for instance about early seventeenth-century attitudes toward death) that Davis would have used to fill this gap.

Mancall uses what has survived to depict Hakluyt’s interest in English expansion and especially colonization in the Americas. Using Hakluyt’s own publications as well as other exploration accounts that were available at the time, he charts the widening awareness of other places that Hakluyt both experienced and fostered. Mancall describes in detail the adventures of various explorers and analyzes Hakluyt’s editorial choices. In this treatment the geographer comes through as the consummate advocate for English involvement in the wider world. He argued relentlessly in favor of a greater role for England, trying to present the available materials in the best possible light. Reading Mancall will help the reader who is already familiar with Hakluyt understand the decisions he made about what to present and how to present it. The reader can also see the trouble he went to in order to collect what he published, interviewing travelers and pouring over their accounts. The reader who is less familiar with Hakluyt will get the flavor of his books, since Mancall provides detailed summaries of each. Hakluyt’s life’s work, to the extent that it is captured in his publications, takes center stage in this history.

Despite the evidentiary hole that has swallowed up most of what one would want to know of the life of this famous colonial promoter, the book jacket of Hakluyt’s Promise nonetheless claims that it “describes in detail the life and times” of its subject. It might not be entirely fair to hold an author accountable for publisher’s claims on book jackets—possibly not every press asks its authors to ghost write these embarrassingly effusive descriptions. Yet, the book itself brings to mind the “life and times” genre. It attends more to broad context than to its ostensible subject. The writing is also vividly detailed, making a bid for the popular audience associated with the typical “life and times.” Yale has produced a handsome volume, the lovely cover image of two geographers (from the 1516 Sebastiano del Piombo oil painting Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, His Secretary, and Two Geographers) hinting at the many illustrations inside.

Mancall does not entirely conform to the requirements of popular history writing, however, as he neglects to provide information on basic aspects of life in Elizabethan England. For instance, when discussing Hakluyt at Oxford, Mancall does not describe college life generically, though this would help readers see how Hakluyt would have spent his days, what he was expected to learn, and how he would have done so. Instead, Mancall limits himself to suggesting opportunities that might have existed for Hakluyt to learn about geography. He wants to explain the man’s future obsession, which the book’s subtitle refers to as “An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America.“

The “times” that Mancall explores are largely confined to what was contained within the covers of books. Many chapters offer lengthy descriptions of books that Hakluyt wrote or compiled. Since these publications make up the preponderance of surviving material, it is not surprising Mancall devotes so much space to them. In addition to these summaries, Mancall provided extensive descriptions of other products of the contemporary press. A chapter on Hakluyt’s time in Oxford in 1577 takes up an epidemic in that year and an earthquake that occurred three years later. Mancall lays out the debates in the press about how to interpret God’s intention in these events, reviewing differing messages that observers might have drawn, given the providential framework they all used. Leaving these topics to return to Hakluyt (who left no information on his experience of or views on these events), Mancall notes that these interpretive battles over community hardships “would have symbolized the traditional views of the Church of England and its orthodoxy” to Hakluyt (69). While speculation on earthquakes and epidemics makes for interesting reading, the relationship of any of this to Hakluyt is tenuous, and these popular publications offered a very odd angle on the views of a man trained as a Church of England clergyman.

The book’s title, Hakluyt’s Promise, refers to a promise or perhaps a resolution that Hakluyt made after he became interested in geography while visiting his older cousin at the Middle Temple in 1568. The cousin, also named Richard Hakluyt and also interested in geography, is dubbed “the lawyer” to keep his identity separate in the text. The effect may be to emphasize his identity as an attorney more than is warranted, since his biggest impact on his younger cousin’s life was as mentor. What precisely the younger Hakluyt may have promised himself at this moment is nowhere clearly stated, however.

The subtitle, An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America, is an accurate presentation of Mancall’s interests, although not entirely of Hakluyt’s. In his last years the geographer and promoter turned toward the East, expending more of his energies on promoting an English presence in that direction. He thought America a likely arena for English success, but like all his contemporaries, he valued the trade with the East above all else. Much of the obsession with America was with finding a way through it or around it, as in the famed but elusive Northwest Passage. One might even say that Hakluyt was mostly obsessed with how to get beyond America. Hence his late-life interest in the Orient did not represent a turn away from an earlier focus on America.

The book is thus perhaps of most interest to an American audience. For those who want a Hakluyt biography, this book will disappoint not only for the information about the man’s life that is unavailable but also for Mancall’s choice not to recreate the context of his life to the extent that surviving records make possible. For those who want a “life and times,” it comes a bit nearer to the mark, although it lacks the broad perspective on the larger society and its political and cultural framework that one might expect such a volume to contain. For those who, like Hakluyt himself and like Mancall as well, are interested in books, this volume offers a well-written guide through Hakluyt’s own writings, as well as those of other popular contemporary authors. While it cannot give us enough to understand how Hakluyt became obsessed with America or with expansion more generally, it clearly shows what he did with that obsession once he had been bitten by the bug of geography.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Carla Gardina Pestana is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University. She has written on religion and the early English Atlantic colonies.

A 1788 July Fourth parade in Philadelphia included an extraordinary group of seventeen clergymen representing Christian churches and a single synagogue, walking arm-in-arm before cheering crowds. Three years later, John Carroll, the United States’ first Roman Catholic bishop, was cordially received in that once most anti-Catholic of cities, Boston, by Protestant clergymen who treated him to “great civilities.” So begins Chris Beneke’s debut monograph, Beyond Toleration, and an auspicious and timely debut it is, as this still-new century has begun to ask fresh questions about religion and harmony in multicultural and religiously diverse societies, especially in Western countries faced with growing numbers of Muslims. Owing much to Thomas J. Curry’s The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (1986) and Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990), Beyond Toleration digs deep into the intellectual history of early American Christianity to explain how Americans could go from executing Quakers and barring Catholics from public office to codifying freedom of religion in state and federal constitutions. Certainly “late eighteenth-century America” was not “some inclusive nirvana” (10), but the hurdles to ecumenism and broad toleration had been significant; that they were overcome, Beneke shows, was made possible by the pluralistic nature of early American society.

Beneke offers a general history of Christianity in early America, concentrating on the development of a religious landscape in the early eighteenth century that came to resemble that of Europe after the Peace of Augsberg in 1555: cuius regio, eius religio (as the ruler, so the religion). Before 1730, most of the colonies strenuously enforced laws punishing “blasphemy,” “atheism,” and heterodoxy. Likewise, it was considered treasonous to criticize the government publicly, and questioning theological doctrines and otherwise criticizing churches or denominations was tantamount to heresy and dissent. Dissenters’ efforts to garner toleration and relief from ministerial taxation were harshly rebuffed in language replete with epithets such as “sectaries,” “infidels,” or “atheists.” This was so largely because in the late seventeenth and very early eighteenth centuries printing was controlled by the clerical intelligentsia. However, the importation of books from Europe was impossible to control, and those of John Locke expressed a new liberalism that attacked the notion of innate ideas and championed the right of private conscience in religious matters. The dissenters harnessed Locke in their defense. By the 1700s it was becoming clear that the law protected the right to private conscience, while religious societies (denominations) reserved the right to define and defend their doctrines through their own internal judicatory organs. The rapid proliferation of newspapers created an enormous forum for opinions by elites and the literate middle class alike, which made it completely impossible for the clergy to control the flow of ideas in the public sphere. Colonial governments decreasingly prosecuted citizens for blasphemy and seditious libel after 1715, and the liberalizing trends opened up by the influx of Lockean ideas forced churches to relax their guard against dissenting opinions.

Beneke credits the First Great Awakening for the fundamental right to private judgment in religious matters and for encouraging ordinary people to explore alternative expressions of Protestant faith. “[R]eligious boundaries . . . came under nearly unrelenting assault” (53) at this time and so did parish boundaries, as itinerant ministers moved from place to place up and down the eastern seaboard and—in the case of the era’s most famous preacher, George Whitefield—across the Atlantic. The activities and antics of the New Lights, had they taken place in the previous century, would have resulted in numerous imprisonments, prosecutions for heresy, and occasional capital punishments, but instead the New Lights were confronted by Old Lights who used Lockean language and what Charles Chauncy insisted had to be “gentle persuasion” to discredit the revivalists. The achievement of the Great Awakening was the belief that religious experience is inherently subjective. The rigid intolerance of the previous century had, by the eve of the Revolution, become intolerable.

“In religion as in politics, the call for unanimity was never more insistent than it was during the American Revolution, as distinctions once made between Churchmen and Dissenters gave way to distinctions between Whigs and Tories, Patriots and Loyalists” (193). In this Beneke follows Jon Butler’s claim that the Revolution was essentially secular in nature. A nation at war and struggling to define itself along liberal Lockean lines could no longer afford the distraction of religious bigotry. This made it possible for Protestant America to ally with Catholic France. However, for racial minorities there were no such magnanimous gestures. Indians and blacks were not considered citizens of the republic, and discrimination against them remained as virulent as ever. Church establishments, which had been the norm in the eighteenth century, declined rapidly as a result of the Revolution and disappeared altogether by the mid-nineteenth century, but that did not dilute the competition for adherents that is the hallmark of a religiously diverse society. An ecumenical spirit prevailed into the nineteenth century but only among closely related Protestant denominations. Beneke is assiduous in noting that any sense of quiet respect was not extended to the Mormons and was practically revoked from Catholics in the period from the 1830s to the 1850s. Even among Protestants, there developed a divide between evangelical and nonevangelical conceptions of scripture. The gains of the eighteenth century seemed to lose ground in the nineteenth. But that is not Beneke’s point. Instead, his point is that America experienced a rapid progression from intolerance, to tolerance, to religious freedom and equality.

There is much to commend here: the thoroughness of the research, the dovetail construction of the arguments, and the candid presentation of contrary evidence, which Beneke convinces the reader does not compromise his fundamental thesis. However, in his discussions of African Americans, Beneke relies a bit too heavily on Jon Butler for his understanding of African American Christianization and religio-cultural survivals from Africa; on these topics, Albert J. Raboteau, in the second chapter of Slave Religion (rev. ed., 2004), is more reliable. As to American Indians, Beneke notes that “by the late eighteenth century, Native American faiths survived mostly in fragments” (11), which was only true in those areas that had been thoroughly colonized. He should have stated that native religions persisted, especially in the West, but in altered forms suffused with elements of Christian theology.

In spite of these minor imperfections, Beneke eloquently demonstrates that while there was a legal revolution that amended the laws discriminating against dissenters and religious minorities, there was also a broader cultural process whereby ordinary and elite Americans of different faiths achieved a degree of religious harmony. Careful to note that religious establishments were maintained in the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods and that the scope of his study is limited to white, Protestant, male clergymen, Beneke is clear that in relative terms postrevolutionary Americans achieved something quite singular: the capacity to tolerate religious differences. Ours is the open, liberal, and tolerant society it is because of this achievement.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

John Howard Smith is assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University-Commerce, specializing in the history of religion in early America. His first book, “The Perfect Rule of the Christian Religion”: A History of Sandemanianism in the Eighteenth Century, is under contract to the State University of New York Press. He is currently at work on a second book, “To Hear News from Heaven”: A History of the First Great Awakening.

In the early 1790s, Annis Boudinot Stockton wrote to her daughter that “the Empire of reason is not monopolized by man” (22). Julia Stockton Rush was in a position to understand; her husband, Benjamin Rush, was a founder of the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia. A century later, women’s rights activist Lucy Stone recalled in a letter to fellow reformer Antoinette Brown Blackwell that she had “learned to stand and speak” in literary societies at Mount Holyoke Seminary and Oberlin College (275). These two stories bookend Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, which explains the entry of privileged white women into American civil society by examining their education in all-female schools, academies, and reading circles in the seven decades before the Civil War. Kelley argues that “although women also worked with men in parallel literary societies and reform associations, these exclusively female institutions were at least equally if not more important sites at which women gathered locally, regionally, and nationally to chart the nation’s course” (54).

Kelley begins with schools, noting that “approximately the same number of women and men were enrolled in institutions of higher learning” in early nineteenth-century America (41), a remarkable finding in itself. And these women were not studying merely ornamental subjects like embroidery and dancing; instead, Kelley’s research shows, women pursued a curriculum very like the one offered at male colleges, especially after 1820. Although middling as well as elite women attended seminaries and academies, those at single-sex schools were more likely to come from “families with significantly more access to economic, social, and cultural capital” (32). An education in the “values and vocabularies of civil society” prepared such women for both leadership in benevolence and social-reform organizations and “entry into the market economy as educators, writers, and editors” (32). And enter they did. However, although they positioned themselves “at the center, and crucial to the success, of the republican experiment” (27), they continued to couch their influence in the traditional language of family and home. Thus, these women struck a compromise: educational equality in Enlightenment terms but a still-circumscribed—though widened—sphere of influence.

Kelley’s extensive research makes clear that the educated women of the early nineteenth century reveled in their learning; the book is packed with quotations from letters and diaries that celebrate the joys of knowledge. Their dedication is also evident from their participation in literary societies and in the reading and writing they did as adult women, the subjects of the book’s second half. Literary societies at female academies, where members circulated their own writings and where they read and discussed books, “acted as schools within schools,” teaching members “to read critically, to write lucidly, and to speak persuasively” (117, 118). After graduation, many of these women replicated such circles among adult women. Engaging with a wide range of books in conversation and in writing, these women “sanctioned and supported intellectual productivity” (117). Crucially, Kelley argues, these mutual endeavors also gave women the confidence to step into civil society and work actively to shape public opinion.

Although Kelley’s interest is in the roots of women’s activism rather than in its fulfillment, her discussion of reading circles includes an extensive treatment of the connections between literary education and civic action. She shows that debates about the content and form of women’s education stood in for and reflected larger debates about women’s role in society. She traces the extensive networks that women built through literary societies and the ways that such networks built women’s influence within and beyond their communities. In particular, such groups focused on creating broader roles for women in civil society; Kelley locates the political development of such suffragists as Blackwell and Stone in precisely these circles.

Although the book focuses on white women either already members or aspiring to be members of the elite, Kelley is also attentive to the experiences of African American women. Her discussion of African American literary societies, drawing mostly on scarce clues in antebellum newspapers, is particularly thorough. As slavery was gradually eradicated in the North in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, African Americans found themselves subjected to increased racial hostility. For them, literary societies “were ideal vehicles for developing the arguments for, and the strategies of, resistance” (141). In Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Rochester, African American women gathered, like their white counterparts, to read and write together and to develop what Kelley calls “avowedly political subjectivities,” using meetings to sharpen their arguments against racism and slavery and as a prelude to publishing those arguments in the antislavery press (142).

A subgroup of literary women chose the writing of women’s history as their contribution to civil society. Kelley examines Judith Sargent Murray, Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Josepha Hale, Margaret Fuller, and a handful of other women who published works of history focused on women. Kelley’s careful analysis of these writers’ choices shows that their narratives were designed to claim for women a gender-inflected moral authority that justified their participation with men in creating the nation as a beacon to the world. Establishing the public voices of their female subjects, these writers simultaneously made themselves exemplars of civic actors for their readers.

Because Kelley proceeds thematically rather than chronologically, it is sometimes difficult for a reader to pick out the threads of change. With evidence from the 1790s joined in a single paragraph with stories from five decades later, shifts over time are sometimes buried under the wealth of detail. Yet, the thematic focus is also a strength, allowing Kelley to explore in great depth each of her topics and to make connections across region and time.

The book’s greatest strength is its archival depth and breadth. Drawing on dozens of archives in many states, Kelley recovers the experiences of well-known women like Blackwell and Stone but also of their little-known schoolmates. Learning to Stand and Speak presents an impressive number of examples drawn from the experiences of women across seven decades and at least a dozen states. These anecdotes and stories give Kelley’s analysis weight as well as color, peopling her schools and reading circles, private homes and social libraries with vividly present women and girls. Kelley’s painstaking research convincingly places education, especially reading in the context of mutual improvement, at the center of elite women’s antebellum experience. Two dozen illustrations are an outstanding addition to the text. Learning to Stand and Speak will be an important resource for all historians of gender, education, or print culture in early republic and antebellum America.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Lynda Yankaskas is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Brandeis University, where she is completing a dissertation entitled “Borrowing Culture: Social Libraries and the Shaping of American Civic Life, 1731-1851.”

How can we teach Americans about our violent and sordid urban past? Certainly the movie Gangs of New York introduced countless Americans to the idea that the nineteenth-century city was an inhospitable place with crime, slums, and a core of violence that boggles the imagination.  Gangs of New York was visually enthralling with a complicated love triangle and an overly simplistic plot that was more a mixture of The Godfather, Braveheart, and Gunfight at the OK Corral, than a reflection of the historical reality. The problem with the movie was that while it was evocative–with at times carefully detailed language and costume–it was wrongheaded in its historical narrative. The American movie public got no real sense of what it meant to live in the Five Points or what life was really like for any immigrant in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Martin Scorsese based his movie in part on Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York, a sensationalist book that was originally published in 1927 and rushed into a new printing to capitalize upon the release of the movie. In fact, Thunder’s Mouth Press also published Asbury’s The Gangs of Chicago and The Barbary Coast hoping to build on the interest generated by the movie. These books are much the same: they are a compendium of horror stories from the American past highlighting the urban underworld. Asbury was a popular journalist who did a great deal of research for these books, but who did not always carefully separate fact from fiction. In one incredible section of Gangs of New York, Asbury recites the “history” of the mythical Mose, the Bowery B’hoy who existed on the stage and popular imagination, but not in reality. Facts, however, do not get in the way of Asbury’s prose. He declared that Mose’s favorite weapon was the butcher’s cleaver–reminiscent of Bill the Butcher of the movie–and that he was eight feet tall and that “his hands were as large as the hams of a Virginia hog.” Mose once pulled an oak tree from the earth and flailed out at the Dead Rabbit Gang of the Five Points “even as Samson smote the Philistines.” He could lift a horse car over his shoulders, swim the Hudson in two strokes and around Manhattan Island in six (32-33). Perhaps the reader is supposed to know that all of this description is fiction. But Asbury does not distinguish it as such and he so frequently gets information slightly awry or exaggerates events that his books are virtually useless as a guide to the past. All three books are packed with gory details of a poverty that drove men and women into crime. He relished telling us about this gang or that gang, describing great fights, chronicling the activities of prostitutes and the many dives that existed in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. But we are left incredulous and wondering where reality based in sources ended and fiction began.

Neither the movie nor Asbury’s books help historians in getting Americans to understand the true nature of nineteenth-century urban America. Tyler Anbinder’s Five Points, however, offers us a better opportunity to introduce the general public to how historians understand the past. Based on prodigious research, Anbinder’s book is written for the all-too-elusive “educated reader.” Published by a commercial press, Anbinder’s book opens each chapter with a prologue that focuses on some story, usually about an individual, that highlights the thematic nature of the chapter that follows. The idea is to suck the reader in and get the reader thinking about thematic issues centered around America’s first great slum–the Five Points. The book begins with violence, always a nice hook for a popular audience, with a prologue on the 1834 race riot. Anbinder goes on to describe how Five Points became associated with crime and disorder. Anbinder builds a detailed socio-economic portrait of the Five Points as it developed before the Civil War. He describes the nature of Irish immigration, housing, working, politics, leisure, crime, and vice, and then religion and reform. He culminates this section of the book, which comprises the meat of his research and three quarters of the pages, with a return to violence in the 1850s and during the Civil War. The remaining one hundred pages describe the postbellum transformation of the Five Points with the influx of new immigrant groups–Italians and Chinese–and the initiation of urban renewal at the instigation of Jacob Riis.

As an academic I admire Anbinder’s achievement. Having used some of the same sources, I know how hard Anbinder has had to work to patch together a vivid picture of life in the Five Points. I wonder, however, if the effort has been worth it. Anbinder has filled his book with great stories of bare-knuckle fighting, barrooms, corrupt politics, and mayhem. There are also a host of great illustrations, including a color cover of an original painting of the Five Points that served as the model of the more frequently republished print that appeared on the cover of my first book. The detail and attractiveness of Anbinder’s book may or may not carry the general reader through more than 441 pages of text. But as an academic I am interested in what I learn that is new from a book and I want to see an author’s thesis that makes me think, “Gee, I wish I thought of that.” Anbinder states in his preface that he hopes “to set the record straight” about the Five Points. In this goal he succeeds both in the small and the large picture. For example, Anbinder convincingly argues, to the contrary of the movie Gangs of New York and Herbert Asbury, that there never was a Dead Rabbit’s Gang. More importantly, he demonstrates that while poverty and crime permeated much of the life of the Five Points, the immigrant groups who lived there strove for their piece of the American dream and ultimately succeeded in leaving the slum behind them. While recognizing that this thesis offers a corrective to the movie and Asbury, it is not a new idea for anyone familiar with the history of nineteenth-century urban America. Immigrant groups repeatedly crammed into city slums only to have the second generation succeed economically and move to better neighborhoods. In other words, Anbinder has only provided a case study for something we–the scholarly community–already knew.

Has Anbinder been successful in his other goal of reaching a popular audience? On April 15, 2003, I visited Amazon.com to get some means of answering this question. Anbinder’s hardcover book ranked 17,555, but his paperback was at 7,822. This ranking represents success by academic standards (and much better than the six-figure rankings of my own books), while Asbury’s Gangs of New York stood at 9,048. Unfortunately, millions have had their image of the Five Points warped by the cinematography of Martin Scorsese.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Paul A. Gilje teaches at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill, 1987), Rioting in America (Bloomington, 1996), and Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution which will appear in fall 2003.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

Lincoln/Net: Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project
http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/

With an emphasis on Abraham Lincoln’s years in Illinois, 1830-1861, and a wealth of material outside that period, “Lincoln/Net” is a multi-media, multi-purpose Website. Created and maintained at Northern Illinois University, “Lincoln/Net” represents a collaborative effort by educational institutions, archives, and museums, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, the Illinois State Archives, and the University of Chicago. Designed to reach a general audience, which the site’s creators believe “historians have largely abandoned in recent decades,” this online archive guides visitors through the sources in a focused way by bringing the “findings and debates of American historians” to the Internet. The goal is to help users think historically and to ask questions that make full use of the site’s databases. Accordingly, the materials have been grouped into eight thematic sections: frontier settlement; Native American relations; economic development; women’s experience and gender roles; African-Americans’ experience and American racial attitudes; law and society; religion and culture; and political development. There is, of course, significant attention devoted to Lincoln’s biography.

For each of the major themes, there is a guide to accompanying primary sources, with image galleries, maps, and audio and video clips. Slide shows offer good visuals and helpful narration, and they succeed in providing overall background context for major historical developments of the period. In the “Lincoln’s Biography” section, there is a similar organization in place, with a summary, primary sources, and visual images. To help viewers through this material, the site provides video clips of historical commentary by prominent historians, including Eric Foner.

Educators especially may appreciate the contents and organization of the site. The “Teacher’s Parlor” link takes visitors to well designed and engaging lesson plans. For example, in a lesson on alcohol and temperance in the nineteenth century, the lyrics and downloadable rendition of “King Alcohol” lend immediacy to the subject. The “lesson plans” section is divided into materials for teaching the antebellum era, the Civil War era, and the Gilded Age. With detailed objectives, clear instructions for background reading, links to primary sources, and exercises based on the site, the lessons are ready to use and linked to state standards.

Much of the site is easily adaptable to classroom purposes. Indeed, a laudable feature of “Lincoln/Net” is how user-friendly it is. Easily downloadable audio and video links can be readily integrated into the lessons on the site or used for creating new ones. Thirteen video clips comprise the “women and gender” video section. For the history of the Black Hawk Indian War of 1832, in which Lincoln served as a member of the Illinois militia, the site documents his activities but more importantly provides the larger historical context, with maps, first-person battlefield accounts, and government records. In the section on “Native American Relations,” the selections break down a full video, “Lincoln and Black Hawk,” into many discreet and briefer subsections. Other video clips include eminent scholars such as John Mack Faragher and Kathryn Kish Sklar presenting brief overviews of topics such as “Singing on the Illinois Frontier” and “Education, Culture, and the Patterns of Frontier Settlement.”

In the interactive resources section, visitors will find informative maps that can be manipulated to highlight topics of interest, such as the distribution of churches of different sects in 1850 and 1860; this distribution can then be explored to break the numbers down according to sect, for example. Other maps detail voting patterns in presidential elections from 1840 through 1864. Clicking on two interesting maps showing U.S. population distribution in 1850 and 1860 allows users to view the figures by state and by numbers of free blacks, slaves, and whites.

With links to other online archives, such as Mr. Lincoln’s Virtual Library and From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909, both at the Library of Congress, and to The Valley of the Shadow project on two communities in the Civil War, the site’s creators steer visitors to some of the best sites on the Web for those interested in the histories of slavery, race, and the Civil War.

“Lincoln/Net” seeks to foster deep historical understanding while reaching multiple audiences, including history buffs and educators. With a site that locates its central figure, Abraham Lincoln, within the context of numerous complex historical developments, “Lincoln/Net” promises to go a long way toward succeeding in its goals.

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

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

American Shores: Maps of the Middle Atlantic Region to 1850
http://www.nypl.org/research/midatlantic/index.html
New York Public Library

Wayne Bodle, author of The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (2002), teaches history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is finishing a book on the Middle Colonies from first settlement until shortly after the American Revolution.

The New York Public Library is one of the most distinguished research institutions in the world, and its renowned Map Room contributes to that reputation. American Shores is a searchable Website created by the library with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to bring a portion of its cartographic resources to your own reading room, no matter how far you are from the library’s famed lions on Fifth Avenue. The site’s focus, the Middle Atlantic, is a less-celebrated descriptor for a piece of the geographical pie that was first the Dutch commercial outpost of New Netherland, then colonial British North America, and finally the early national United States.

Definitions of that region are legion. The project’s choice—”from New York south to Virginia”—more closely follows the administrative usage of modern federal agencies than recent scholarly ones, which generally exclude Maryland and Virginia. Reflecting its title, the site’s definition more problematically places the region “east of the Appalachian Mountains,” without saying whether that includes their easternmost ridges, which parallel the Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna rivers and bisect the states in question. The project is not about definitions—its scope may reflect the contents of the maps in its constituent collections more than a definition of the region—but academic users should be aware of the implications of these organizational protocols.

The project itself seems designed to accomplish two objectives: to instruct visitors on the fundamentals and applications of cartographic scholarship and to let oriented users roam at will in search of early American spatial knowledge. This review takes the first objective on its own terms and the second one more literally, by testing it on an embryonic actual research project.

The iconic image of “American Shores,” a colorful strip of Atlantic littoral running from south to north (and left to right) from the central Carolina coast to near Riverhead on Long Island, suggests this double objective. Four clickable headers across the top of the site—”Overview,” “Basics of Maps,” “Maps Through History,” and “Geographical Areas”—summon a series of subheads running down the left side that preview the “Overview” section’s stated design to “highlight and explain a few of the hundreds of maps that have been digitized, and offer suggestions for using them in the study of historical topics or geographic areas.” With that opportunity either availed or declined, a large button—”Search Map Collection”—turns you loose into the database.

The clarity and utility of these preliminary elements varies considerably. The marginal subbars on the left border of the “Overview” section include the “Mid-Atlantic Region and [its] Wider World” and a group of narrower spatial frames from the “World” to the “Atlantic Ocean” to the “United States.” Each of the latter brings up a map or two, with commentary and an interactive “catalogue record.” Use of these maps provides a kind of tutorial on cartographic practice. The header “Basics of Maps” offers definitions used by specialists in the field and a “Note on the History of Cartography.” “Maps Through History” is both intriguing and strange. When clicked, it lays out an asymmetrical and somewhat fragmentary categorical catalogue of the Website as a whole (one presumes), under the subheads “Nautical New York,” “Coastal and Oceanic Nautical Charts,” “Early Transportation,” and, most oddly, “American Revolution Battle Sites.” The specific rationale for the selection of these topics—or why other and potentially equally useful subjects, such as “Religious Denominations” or “Newspaper Circulation Zones”—are not included alongside these idiosyncratic headings is never articulated. “Geographical Areas” leads to a more predictable, conventional survey of largely political jurisdictions into which the larger region has been divided, each with its selection of illustrated starter maps.

This arrangement serves as a noncoercive introduction to the map collection itself, with no requirement to linger, and an early opportunity to actually interact with the maps. Clicking on thumbnail sample maps enlarges them but also discloses that running the pan and zoom features “require[s] MrSid plug-in.” A link takes you to a proprietary Website with free software downloads, but nothing clarifies what you are to do next. Once inside the larger map database, the efficacy of the interactive features, including pan and zoom, seems to vary considerably.

Rather than just browse randomly, I wanted to go into “Search Map Collection” with an actual research project. By chance, the invitation to do this review coincided with an embryonic project fit to the region: an inquiry into a migration and settlement salient in the 1720s and 1730s southwest from Esopus (Kingston), New York, on the Hudson River, to the Delaware Valley at Mahackamack (Port Jervis), and then down both sides of the Delaware through the “Minisink Country” to the famous Water Gap. The settlement process involved multiple jurisdictions, ordinary farmers, mysterious folkloric ancient miners, and alarmed royal and proprietary officials in Philadelphia and elsewhere wondering why it was happening. With mouse at hand, the possibility of discovery beckoned.

The resulting trip was both bumpy and intriguing. Under “Search Map Collection,” the subhead “search maps” offered a clickable “New Search Page (Digital Gallery),” which led into an ambiguous new space. Titled the “NYPL Digital Gallery,” it was not clear whether this was a part of “American Shores” itself or an auxiliary New York Public Library (NYPL) domain. The new page offered two search boxes, one of which seemed connected to the “Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection and Others” and the second of which linked to the “Digital Gallery.” It presented some background information on the NYPL, the history of the Slaughter Collection, and a bibliography on cartographic history.

Wanting to get on the ground in the Minisink as quickly as possible, I tried keyword terms in both boxes. It was unclear if either was connected to a database defined by information in the maps in question or just to their titles, but trial and error suggested the latter. Queries directed to names on the ground in adjacent parts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania mainly went nowhere. Esopus produced no entries and Kingston only a few. Minisink, Wallkill, Shawangunk, and Mahackamack all failed. Queries aimed at counties in the area did better. Ulster brought up some maps, but figuring out how to manage and control the pan and zoom features was difficult. I wasn’t sure whether I was even in the “Digital Gallery” or was instead in the “Slaughter Collection,” reminding me of the fact that early American regions were themselves layered and contested, with royal and proprietary holdings, overlays from New England’s “sea-to-sea” charters, and other murky phenomena. Several queries into the “Digital Gallery” search box returned large numbers of photographs, which suggested that I had wandered out of the Map Room. My sense of challenge intertwined with frustration.

Flailing about digitally for orientation did not help. A click on “Browse: Names A-Z” disclosed an “alphabetical list of 13,636 names [of] artists, authors, publishers, collectors, and others responsible for the creation of items found on the site.” “Browse: Subjects A-Z” brought an even more unwieldy list of “over 58,000 subject terms [which] includes people, places and topics . . . ,” along with the unsettling news that “many gallery records do not have subject descriptions.” It was starting to get dark, and I wanted to get back to “American Shores,” or to any shores, for that matter. This page at least had a tool, “Explore Subjects,” with an “Exact Match” and an “Expanded Search” option, which turned up intriguing items. It was at least the third search box I had encountered since leaving digital Manhattan. It bore the disclaiming title “BETA,” but it gave some sense of at least partial closure, albeit hardly one of real completion.

“BETA” sounds like an appropriate grade for the project as a whole at this early point. Any inquirer using this site will by definition learn some things about cartography, cartographic history, and cartographic approaches to historical interpretation. They may very well come away with useful insights into their own specific project or object of research. Whether the site, in its current configuration, is recommendable over a straight Google search—under “Images” and with the keyword “maps” and their topic—may be a matter of some debate. But, recalling my own first research expedition between the actual stone lions on Fifth Avenue, as a high schooler—when a foray for a paper on Mao Tse-Tung revealed thousands of interesting sources but most of them in Chinese!—I would suggest patience, resourcefulness, and regular return trips. The site will doubtless be fine-tuned, and your own instincts for virtual navigation will mature.

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

The Sesquicentennial, the National Park Service, and a Changing Nation

It’s a great irony of our history: the places of such fierce combat during the U.S. Civil War became, in the decades that followed, quiet places of reflection and reconciliation, where veterans gathered to heal rather than cause wounds, where the nation looked for regeneration. For most of its history, the National Park Service facilitated this healing process, encouraging Americans to derive from these places of conflict common values and virtues that would bind rather than divide. But more recently, the role of the National Park Service and the Civil War sites it manages has become more complicated, reflecting evolving scholarship and the varied demands of a public that does not see the Civil War in monolithic terms. For the National Park Service and the nation at large, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is an important touchstone on an evolutionary journey that has provoked both praise and censure in a nation still struggling to reckon with its most tumultuous, destructive, and transformative epoch.

No historic event has a more complicated place in American culture than the Civil War. We can’t even agree on its name, re-phrased variously depending on one’s perspective: the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression, the War of the Rebellion (once the official U.S. government name), the War for the Union, the War for Southern Independence, the Second American Revolution. Born of conflict, the memory of the war has a conflicted history of its own. In the immediate post-war years, an abiding sectional hostility simmered—personal and deep, it was rooted in the immense personal loss suffered by American families and communities. Later, as the quest for reconciliation reigned, a narrative of mutual virtue evolved, statues of Confederate heroes went up in the U.S. Capitol, and federal tax dollars funded the memorialization of Confederate graves. Some protested angrily at theabsence of sectional hostility, at the seemingly easy acceptance back into the cultural fold of a people and section that had been bent on the Union’s destruction.

Many white southerners rallied around the memory of the Confederacy as they constructed a post-war society akin to apartheid. To many Americans—especially African Americans—the Confederate battle flag (indeed, the Confederacy itself) became not a symbol of courage and sacrifice, but an emblem of oppression.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Civil War’s battlefields in the process of national reckoning with our most deadly national epoch.

A people’s view of their own history always reflects the views of those who have power. In the decades following the Civil War, Southerners quickly regained political voice, and thus our American narrative has somewhat happily and uncommonly incorporated into its collective story the view of the ostensible losers in a national rebellion. Since the centennial of the war in 1961, the women’s rights movement and the subsequent upsurge in American women’s history has produced new work on the role of civilians in the war. Likewise, the Civil Rights movement gave voice to African Americans and other minorities, who have in turn sought (rightly so) to tell stories that reflect the immense and complicated role played by slaves and slavery in the evolution of the nation. Political power has expanded among all classes of Americans—rich and poor—and so history has delved beyond the Great Men of the past to reflect the experiences of everyday people. We are in a constant process of taking second looks at our past.

This process of re-examination has threatened the cherished view held by some Americans that our nation should have, as battlefield preservationist Jerry Russell has written, a singular, “shared understanding of American history,” a “culture that unites us, not one which divides us.” The Civil War would seem to be an obvious point of friction in that quest, but early in the twentieth century the war’s battlefields were places where sectional animosities and lingering resentments could be laid aside. They became (and remain) places where the common virtues of Americans North and South were celebrated, where by focusing on American “good,” the ugly blemishes of history could be painted over in the name of national unity. For more than a century, the war’s battlefields became something of a refuge for a nation still wounded by war.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Civil War’s battlefields in the process of national reckoning with our most deadly national epoch. It is likely that the United States preserves more acres of battlefield land in its borders than the rest of the world combined. For nearly a century—from the creation of the first federally owned battlefield site at Antietam in 1890—Americans demanded of their battle sites a congenial neutrality. At Manassas, the deed conveying Henry Hill from the Sons of Confederate Veterans to the National Park Service (NPS) stipulated that the government would “care for and preserve this battlefield without prejudice to either the North or the South” and not detract from “the glory due Confederate heroes.” At Fredericksburg in the 1930s, when someone objected to the NPS exhibits in the new visitor center on the Sunken Road, arguing that they ought to provide greater context for the battles, he received a rather terse reply from the NPS. “To what end?” the exhibit planner wrote. “The consequences of a major war are infinite … and these things shift with the bias of every writer.” Yet, he declared, “one result is simple, striking and indisputable … Death admits of no argument.”

In the long history of our battle sites, there have been few hard questions and little discussion of the larger issues that either gave rise to or were resolved by the war. Instead, the most intense debates raged about remarkably specific questions: was Sickles (not Lee!) wrong at Gettysburg? What if McClellan had committed all his men at once at Antietam? The battlefields became places of reverence, engines of empathy, platforms for national reconciliation (none of which are bad things). Visitors and NPS historians alike engaged in a rhetoric of affection and nostalgia that still persists. At the dedication of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in 1928, the keynote speaker from Massachusetts declared, “We do more than to dedicate these fields in memory of things which have passed. We consecrate them, in the spirit of Robert E. Lee and of Abraham Lincoln, to a more perfect understanding between the South and the North, and to an abundant increase in brotherly love.” A slim 1930s volume of regulations that governed the work of rangers at the nation’s various military parks admonished, “The story of the guides shall be limited to the historical outlines approved by the superintendent and shall be free from praise or censure.” This language still exists in the federal regulation governing licensed guides at NPS sites.

To be sure, interpretation at NPS sites has evolved over the decades, mirroring academia’s progression from a focus on great leaders to increased attention to the experiences of the common soldiers and civilians amidst war. This trend found its greatest expression in the proliferation of living history programs at NPS sites in the 1960s and 1970s. To the details of battle, the NPS added the details of the human experience. A 1978 publicity photo for a living history camp at Chancellorsville proclaimed, “Here at Chancellorsville the National Park Service has attempted to recreate in every possible detail the camp of a Confederate ordnance detachment.” But this trend only perpetuated the intense interest in the details of war—rations, equipment, uniforms, the fabric and rhythms of camp and battle—without reference to the war’s larger issues.

Interpretation of the battles themselves reflected change, too. The National Park Service sought to understand its battles and landscapes better, and so in the 1960s commenced an intensive effort to document battles through minutely detailed battle maps. Later, on-site historians gave increased, often singular attention to the experience of men in combat. The use of quotes from soldiers’ letters and diaries, carefully related to the specific site of a certain event, made for a powerful combination. While these efforts surely told us important things about the war on the ground, they did not challenge the concept of battlefields as a place of national refuge. The focus on shared experiences, shared sacrifice—the commonalities rather than the differences between soldiers—reinforced the traditional (and rather ironic) role of battlefields as places of congenial neutrality, healing empathy, and patriotic expression.

Of course, historians and the more learned fringes of the American public continued to explore the war’s many complexities in academic journals and thick books. New scholarship exploded myths, corrected long-cherished historical misperceptions, and provoked public discourse about the cause, purpose, nature, and significance of the war itself. But into the 1980s, the traditional role of Civil War battlefields as sanctuaries within our society remained largely unchanged: they were places of commemoration, places of reflection, sites whose stories reflect larger American virtues and honor most participants. Indeed, the dream of a singular, uncontested memory of the Civil War was a reality for a century on America’s battlefields. Historians working at these sites continued to focus on narrow themes of history and commemoration, largely avoiding controversy—and largely ignoring the swirl of new thought that engulfed Civil War historiography in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. Their cautious, non-controversial practice of history sustained the public perception of NPS historians as memorialists.

Many Americans have found comfort in this image of NPS sites and staff. But not all. In February 2011, my colleague Steward Henderson and I gave a tour, “Forgotten: Slavery and Slave Places in Fredericksburg.” We had given the tour before, but that day’s audience consisted of about 70 members from three historically black churches in Fredericksburg. The tour went well, with a high energy level all around. In the midst of it, an older gentleman pulled me aside and said, “Are you going to get in trouble for doing this?”

I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know,” he said. “Your bosses. I didn’t think you guys were allowed to do things like this.”

During the day, I received a number of comments along the same lines, expressing surprise that we, NPS staff at a battlefield site, would create a tour dealing with slavery. Clearly, this group of people perceived me and my colleague as part of an organization bound by rigid (if unspoken) limits of inquiry and interpretation, an organization at best ambivalent and at worst hostile to an interpretation of the war that strayed beyond traditional topics or sites.

But more importantly, the question highlighted a great irony: while the traditional role of Civil War battle sites as sanctuaries offers comfort to some, for others it is a barrier to their engagement with both the history of the war and the National Park Service. As one man explained at a community forum just months after the tour, sustaining a positive image of the war meant sustaining a positive image of the “white-supremacist Confederacy.” The American tradition of “celebrating” the war through its battlefields—re-enactments, pageants, concerts, idolatry, and even commemorative ceremonies—has become, to some, offensive.

Something else renders the National Park Service’s relationship with the Civil War and its battlefields more complicated than most. Tens of millions of Americans have a blood relationship with a Civil War soldier, the men whose deeds the battlefields were set aside to remember. These Americans often see the war not with the dispassion of a historian (even an amateur historian), but through the intensified lens of a family connection. Many visitors to NPS sites often understand the war in a way that reflects generations of conventional wisdom rather than historical knowledge acquired through formal study. Unlike any other event beyond our direct memory, the Civil War has constituent groups that patrol the intellectual universe, intent on protecting and advocating a specific memory of the war—usually one that reflects positively on their ancestors, communities, or regions. Historians have demonstrated that many aspects of this “true history” (as it is often called by heritage groups) are at best incomplete and at worst not true at all. Still, the beliefs endure in parts of the general public—and most commonly in those members of the public who visit National Park Service battlefield sites.

This personal connection to the past has helped shape our nation’s relationship with and understanding of the war. At least as it relates to the Civil War, we as a nation have permitted the personal motivations of soldiers (often imperfectly remembered or revised over time) to define the cause and purpose of war for the public. If you work at a Civil War site any amount of time—say, more than a week—you will hear something like this from a visitor: “My great-great-grandfather didn’t own slaves. He sure as hell didn’t fight to preserve slavery. He fought to defend his home, the way of life of his community and state. The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, and you are wrong to tell people it was.”

We have heard such assertions so often they qualify as a mantra. Of course, virtually every credentialed historian in America accepts a connection between slavery and the Civil War, and most of them see the connection as central to its cause, its progress, and its outcome. But to acknowledge, for example, that the South formed the Confederacy largely to protect the institution of slavery is to suggest to the millions of Confederate descendants that their ancestors fought to sustain what by any measure was a vile institution—perhaps the darkest stain on America’s national fabric. Many remain vehemently opposed to scholarly arguments about the war and slavery, and don’t hesitate to tell you. It was this vehemence—first articulated by the founders of the United Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy more than a century ago—that inspired the nation to simply avoid the topic and focus on the shared virtues of men fighting for life and principle (whatever they might have been) on our nation’s battlefields.

Since the 1980s—as scholarship from earlier decades started to take root in the American mind, and as scholars started exploring the role of historical memory in American culture—Americans have increasingly seen the Civil War not through the lens of personal connection, but through the prism of national purpose. This is by far the most important change in the cultural landscape of Civil War history in the last three decades, and it is one that portends dramatic change to come. Among those changes will be that America’s battlefields will likely no longer provide the quiet and happy historical refuge where history is neatly compartmentalized to provide comfort for Americans struggling to understand and reckon with their past.

The sesquicentennial is a touchstone in a process of change that began in the 1980s and will continue for years to come. The scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated clearly that the Civil War constituted far more than just a confrontation between men in uniform on battlefields, and the turn to studies of historical memory and historic places helped launch the National Park Service into a new era. Edward Linenthal’s Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991) gave NPS public history professionals important context on the evolution of the industry in which they worked. Later studies by David Blight and many others illuminated the conscious manipulation of memory in the name of national reconciliation, and its consequences—including, notably, the alienation of the African American community from the history of the Civil War.

The first recognizable hints of change came in 1991, when Congressional staffer Heather Huyck (who holds a PhD in history and was formerly an NPS employee) inserted language into new boundary legislation for Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park that directed the park to interpret not just military events, but the impact of the war on civilians. Similar language followed in other bills related to Civil War sites. Throughout the 1990s, NPS battle sites responded in various ways to the emerging scholarship and greater understanding of the foibles and virtues of seventy years of practicing public history on Civil War battlefields. In a new General Management Plan, Antietam National Battlefield placed increased emphasis on the relationship between the battle and the Emancipation Proclamation. Monocacy National Battlefield embraced themes that viewed that site through the lens of the civilians who worked and shaped the land. At Manassas, archeological investigations illuminated not just the battle, but also the lives of slaves and free blacks who lived in the area. By mid-decade, close observers could see change happening at many NPS battle sites.

In 1998, superintendents of Civil War sites across the country met in Nashville with an eye toward formalizing the changes already appearing at battle sites across the land. While the conference generated agreement for collective action on issues like recreational use, managing layers of historic resources, and road expansion in parks, the issue of interpretation clearly emerged as the headline. The Nashville conference commenced a process that would result in a service-wide interpretive plan, called Holding the High Ground. It was this plan that, a decade later, would become the basis for NPS involvement in the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In their introduction, the authors of Holding the High Ground stated:

The challenge that faces the National Park Service today is a huge one: to convey the significance and relevance of the Civil War in all its aspects while at the same time sustaining the Service’s invaluable tradition of resource-based interpretation (a concept that is at the very foundation of the National Park Service’s mission). … This plan urges a broader approach to interpreting the Civil War—it seeks to have parks challenge people with ideas, challenge them to not just understand the nature and horrid expanse of the bloodshed, but the reasons for it, and the consequences of its aftermath.

The plan acknowledged the inherent limits of battlefields as venues for interpreting the Civil War and urged an expanded definition of “Civil War sites” to include those that can vividly address “causes, politics, social change, the military experience, civilian experience, and the legacy.” Holding the High Ground also urged managers of Civil War sites to re-examine and expand how they interpret events and sites by giving voice to observers with perspectives beyond the military: civilians, slaves, and observers on the homefront. And finally, the superintendents embraced a broader set of themes that addressed everything from causes to the war’s evolution to emancipation to industrialization and the civilian experience to consequences and legacy. These themes constituted not a mandate, but an option, allowing each site to embrace those that most closely fit its story and resources. The superintendents realized that not every site can effectively interpret every theme, but collectively NPS Civil War sites can convey the immensity, complexity, and enduring relevance of the Civil War.

Holding the High Ground was a working document rather than a public proclamation. Though it received little notice outside the NPS, its vision for interpreting Civil War sites—as evidenced in new exhibits and interpretive programs—provoked an intense public debate that especially riled traditionalists. NPS Chief Historian Dwight Pitcaithley took to the road to argue in favor of a new vision for Civil War sites. Congressman Jesse Jackson weighed in, inserting language in a bill that directed NPS sites to interpret “the unique role that the institution of slavery played in causing the Civil War.” Traditionalists took to their computers and microphones in response. Given the historically gentle relationship between most white Americans and Confederate history, it is not difficult to understand why.

For decades, NPS battlefield sites had been placidly neutral places, where forgetting and remembering sometimes competed for ascendance. Staff at NPS sites had practiced history diligently and well, but usually played the role of memorialists. In the decade before the sesquicentennial, some feared that the NPS was abandoning its traditional role of honoring the men of both sides—often to the detriment of the Confederacy. A Confederate heritage advocate saw the NPS in harsh terms: “Not every ranger or guide exhibits hostility to all things Confederate,” he wrote, “but, the National Park Service, as a governmental agency, is avowedly hostile, and plans to present the story of the War Between the States as a simple conflict between good and evil.”

When in the early 2000s the NPS placed an interpretive panel in the museum at Manassas that discussed the nexus of slavery and the war, some members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans pondered a legal challenge. The SCV had once owned the heart of the battlefield at Manassas, and in conveying the land to the National Park Service in the 1930s had included a condition in the deed that required the federal government to manage and interpret the site in a way that would not detract from “the glory due Confederate heroes.” To some in the SCV, the new panel on slavery in the museum did exactly that; the Park Service had “become defamatory to the memory of our ancestors,” and in so doing had violated the 1936 deed restriction. Ultimately, talk of a lawsuit faded, but the episode highlighted the sensitivities of some organizations to a more scholarly interpretation of the war. The offending panel (by most measures mild in its interpretation) still stands in the museum.

The protests of heritage groups and a few individuals matter not because they threaten to derail efforts to broaden NPS interpretation at Civil War sites, but because they signal just how important the changes have been. Which brings us to the sesquicentennial itself. For much of the public, the 150th anniversary of the war has been the first time they have encountered this broader approach to interpretation at NPS sites. Harpers Ferry commenced the sesquicentennial in October 2009 with thoughtful, popular programs related to John Brown’s raid. Later events focused on Lincoln’s 1861 journey to Washington, fugitive slavery in Fredericksburg, emancipation at Antietam, secession at Fort Sumter, slaves at Lee’s Arlington House, mobilization at the Boston Harbor Islands, and civilians at Richmond. The NPS has published new booklets on slavery as a cause of the war and explored the role of Native Americans and other groups commonly ignored in traditional narratives.

Events during the sesquicentennial have demonstrated that the evolution of interpretation at NPS sites has largely been a process of addition, not subtraction. Events at battle sites continue to focus on the military conflict and to offer traditional interpretive and commemorative moments. At the heart of these events are the “real-time” programs, conducted on the precise ground where the battle took place precisely 150 years after the event. The proximity of time and place remains a powerful attraction to visitors to NPS sites, who have attended these programs by the thousands. But they also offer more. At Fredericksburg, “Ten Thousand Lights to Freedom” remembered the more than 10,000 slaves who crossed the Rappahannock River to freedom behind Union lines during the spring and summer of 1862. On the battle’s anniversary in December, more than 2,000 visitors, surrounded by tolling bells, joined a slow procession through the streets of Fredericksburg—a program intended to connect the story of the town to the story of the battle. In 2014, the culminating commemorative event at Spotsylvania Court House will include a procession that reflects on the experience of slaves and civilians before concluding with a remembrance of the fighting men and the immense cost of war at the Bloody Angle.

What has been the public response to these activities? There has been hardly a complaint, and most often the programs have been met with overwhelming praise. With few exceptions, programs have been at or near their capacity. More than 200,000 visitors attended 150th anniversary events at Gettysburg, and tens of thousands more flocked to Manassas, Richmond, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. Abetted by the incredible reach of social media, millions of people around the world have engaged with the National Park Service during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Some in the field of public history have seen the sesquicentennial as an intellectual destination for the National Park Service. Once we are done with the 150th, they say, it is time to declare victory and move to the next big thing (notably the centennial of the NPS itself in 2016). But for those working at sites related to the Civil War, the 150th is a chance to gauge where the nation and the National Park Service stand in an interpretive process that will continue beyond our lifetimes. It seems clear that the vast majority of the interested public has embraced the more comprehensive and just approach to Civil War history reflected in NPS programming and media over the last twenty years. Louder than the complaints from traditionalists that the NPS has done too much are complaints from some circles—notably academics—that the NPS has not done enough. In public history, the intellectual winds rarely wane, even if they do change direction.

The changing place of the Civil War in American culture presents the National Park Service with some profound and fascinating challenges. At their root are two competing phenomena: the Park Service’s traditional role as memorialists, and the increasing inclination of Americans to view the Civil War through the lens of national purpose, to lay claim to a national, not merely personal, narrative of the Civil War. As advocates for Confederate heritage clearly understand, seeing the Confederacy in terms of its purpose as a nation makes embracing the Confederacy—a nation founded in a quest to perpetuate slavery—a difficult proposition. Not long ago, the “chief of heritage defense” for the Sons of Confederate Veterans argued, “We don’t need to give visitors an entire history of the antebellum South so they come away with the idea that one side was the villain.”

Still, millions of Americans are descended from Confederate soldiers. Can the nation and the NPS continue to ignore or downplay the national purpose for which Confederates fought? Or should we simply help visitors distinguish between the stated purpose of the Confederacy and the myriad personal motivations that compel men to wage war for a nation? Is the Park Service’s traditional role as the nation’s non-partisan, bi-sectional facilitator of honor and reflection incompatible with its charge to practice robust, just history, which is often rejected as “politically correct” or “revisionist” by traditionalists? In thirty years, will the nation permit the National Park Service to manage a place called the “Stonewall Jackson Shrine?”

Here is another perspective on the same questions: can the National Park Service honor and memorialize Confederate soldiers (and by implication the Confederacy) and still hope to engage the nation’s African American community in the history of the Civil War and its legacy of freedom? For all its expanded programming, the sesquicentennial has failed to alter the basic reality that African Americans largely continue to avoid events or sites associated directly with the military experience of the war. Given the recent past, it’s not difficult to understand why. Clearly this is an issue that goes beyond simple programming; it might take a generation for the vast chasm between the African-American community and the legacy of the Civil War to be bridged. But, a start surely has been made during the sesquicentennial.

The National Park Service serves all Americans, with the charge to preserve places central to the nation’s identity and experience. The organization, however, invariably reflects rather than leads society in its exploration of our past. When the nation demanded it in the last century, the NPS emphasized themes of shared sacrifice, courage, and reconciliation. Until the 1980s the organization gave little thought to its narrow interpretation of the war. In response to the women’s rights and Civil Rights movements, the NPS has incorporated new themes in its interpretation and has expanded the number of sites deemed worthy of National Park status. Today, the National Park Service engages in a more diverse history than it did fifty years ago because our society is more diverse and demands a telling of history that reflects the experiences of its own communities and ancestors. The programming of the National Park Service will continue to evolve over time, pulled along by the demands of the society it serves.

We are, without question, in a period of historic change as it relates to America’s understanding of the Civil War. It is a messy and often painful process, especially in a nation with an aversion to cultural controversy and a preference for constancy. The sesquicentennial is not a turning point in that process, but a touchstone—a time to step back, to see and understand the progress made, and to ponder the profound challenges that lie just ahead.

Further reading

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Edward T. Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Champaign, Ill., 1991); J. Christian Spielvogel, Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2013); Kevin M. Levin, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (Lexington, Ky., 2012).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

John Hennessy is the author of three books and dozens of articles on the Civil War and preservation. He presently serves as the Chief Historian/Chief of Interpretation at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in Virginia.

A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

–Amendment II, United States Constitution

In April 1995, I joined three other scholars testifying before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime about our research into the meaning of the Second Amendment. As we gave evidence that the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to be armed and why the Founders believed it essential, the Republican members of the committee listened politely and with interest. Every Democrat on the committee, however, turned upon us with outrage and disdain. I felt startled and dismayed. The meaning of the amendment, at least for these representatives, seemed less a matter of evidence than of party politics. Sitting opposite us, arguing against an individual right, Dennis Henigan, general counsel for Handgun Control, Inc., presented the committee with a full-page advertisement from the New York Times signed by scores of scholars denying that a right to be armed existed. At this juncture one of my copanelists, Daniel Polsby, then a professor at Northwestern School of Law, pointed out that one signer, a colleague of his, was no expert on constitutional law, let alone the Second Amendment, and that to his knowledge none of the other signers had ever conducted research into the issue. For the scholars who put their names to that testimonial, the conviction that there was no individual right to be armed was an article of faith. The attitudes of both the politicians and the scholars are regrettable. We are all the losers when constitutional interpretation becomes so politicized that otherwise reasonable people are neither willing to accept, nor interested in, historical truth.

Political wrangles over the limits of constitutional guarantees are common, proper, and even necessary. The battle over the Second Amendment, however, is being waged at a more basic level, the very meaning of the amendment. This too is understandable where there is doubt about the Framers’ intent. But once evidence of that intent is clear, as it now is, further argument, even in the service of a worthy political agenda, is reprehensible. It becomes an attempt to revise the Constitution by misreading, rather than amending it, a precedent that puts all our rights at risk. The argument over the Second Amendment has now reached that stage. But first, some background.

Two important points should be kept in mind as we briefly review this history. First, the debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment is surprisingly recent. Second, many of those who question or disparage the right do so because they believe that guns, in and of themselves, cause crime. Until the end of the nineteenth century, few Americans doubted their right to be armed. The Founders believed privately owned weapons were necessary to protect the three great and primary rights, “personal security, personal liberty, and private property.” An armed people could protect themselves and their neighbors against crime and their liberties against tyranny. Madison and his colleagues converted their English right to “have Armes for their defence Suitable to their Condition, and as allowed by Law,” into a broader protection that took no account of status and forbade “infringement.” “As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize,” the Philadelphia Federal Gazette explained when the proposed amendment was first publicized, “and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed . . . in their right to keep and bear their private arms.” In the 1820s William Rawle, who had been offered the post of attorney general by George Washington, found, “No clause in the constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give Congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretence by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both.” Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, writing in 1840, agreed that the right of the people to keep and bear arms had “justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic.” And after the Civil War, the charge Southern whites were depriving blacks of their right to be armed was instrumental in convincing Congress to pass the Fourteenth Amendment.

Then politics intervened. Early in the twentieth century when American whites, fearful of blacks in the South and the millions of foreign immigrants in the North, wanted to restrict access to firearms, alternative readings of the amendment gained credence. In the absence of serious scholarship, constructions that reduced or eliminated the individual right to be armed seemed plausible, especially in light of the awkward construction of the Second Amendment and the sparse congressional debates during its drafting, both of which relied upon common understandings of the value of a society of armed individuals that had faded over time. These new interpretations emphasized the dependent clause referring to the militia, to the neglect of the main clause’s guarantee to the people. The theory developed that the Second Amendment was merely intended to enhance state control over state militia; that it embodied a “collective right” for members of a “well-regulated” militia–today’s National Guard–to be armed, not a personal right for members of a militia of the whole people, let alone for any individual. Even when an individual right was conceded, the amendment was proclaimed a useless anachronism. After all, twentieth-century Americans had the police to protect them while armed individuals would be helpless against a government bent on oppression.

Beset by fears and armed with alternative readings of the Second Amendment, restrictive gun legislation followed. In 1911 New York State passed the Sullivan Law that made it a felony to carry a concealed weapon without a license, or to own or purchase a handgun without obtaining a certificate. Discriminatory laws in the South kept blacks disarmed. The first federal gun legislation, the National Firearms Act of 1934, introduced controls on automatic weapons, sawed-off rifles and shotguns, and silencers, weapons popular with gangsters. It was more than thirty years before rising crime-rates, urban riots, and three political assassinations again led to demands for stricter federal firearms legislation. The resulting Gun Control Act of 1968 limited mail-order sales, the purchase of firearms by felons, and the importation of military weapons. Professor Robert Cottrol finds this statute “something of a watershed” for, since its passage, the debate over gun control and the right to be armed have become “semi-permanent features” of late twentieth century American life. And “semi-permanent” the debate remains as we enter the twenty-first century.

The argument over the Second Amendment became and remains intense and highly political because the stakes are so great. Americans suffer from a high rate of armed crime that many insist is caused, or made worse, by easy access to firearms. Eliminate these, the thinking goes, and streets will be safer. Thousands of federal, state, and local firearms regulations adorn statute books, but a Second Amendment guarantee of the right to be armed blocks the dramatic reduction or banning of firearms that gun-control groups seek. There is a deep desire on their part to believe no individual right exists. On the other side, the traditional belief that guns protect the innocent and deter offenders is even more widely accepted. Studies show the majority of Americans have always believed the Constitution guarantees them a right to be armed. Approximately half of America’s households have at least one gun, an estimated arsenal of some 200-240 million weapons, kept for sport and, more crucially, for personal protection. Every new threat to regulate weapons provokes thousands of additional purchases.

Both sides seek a safer nation. But whether one believes guns cause crime or prevent it, the Second Amendment figures in the political solution at every level. National elections turn on a candidate’s position on the right to be armed. A small Illinois town bans handguns completely; a small Georgia town requires a gun in every home. The state of Vermont, with no gun restrictions at all, boasts the lowest crime rate in the nation. In the name of public safety, the cities of New York, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C., impose ever tighter gun restrictions. In the name of public safety, thirty-three states–some two-thirds–now allow every law-abiding citizen to carry a concealed weapon. Is an individual right to be armed an anachronism? Not in their opinion. Other states are considering this option.

In this clash of strategies, political gestures and competing claims abound. The Clinton administration allocated millions of dollars for gun buy-back programs, knowing a Justice Department study found this approach ineffective. Flushed with the success of lawsuits against tobacco companies, public officials in thirty-one municipalities sued gun manufacturers claiming millions in damages for gun crimes. In response, twenty-six states passed legislation forbidding such suits. Philanthropic foundations finance research that favors gun control, some even establishing whole institutes for “the prevention of violence.” Notwithstanding plummeting rates of gun homicides, leading medical journals publish articles that proclaim guns a health emergency. They print seriously flawed research that purports to demonstrate that the presence of a firearm transforms peaceful citizens into killers, although studies of police records show the great majority of murderers are individuals with a long history of violence.

Nor has the popular press been shy in broadcasting its preferences. For seventy-seven consecutive days in the fall of 1989, the Washington Post published editorials calling for stricter gun controls. This was something of a record, but it is indicative of a national media in which three-quarters of the newspapers and most of the periodical press have advocated severe curbs on gun ownership and have denied a right to be armed exists. The press is entitled to its opinions, but unfortunately this bias has often affected and distorted news coverage. Every gun accident or shooting, every study that supports gun restrictions, is intensively reported, while defensive uses of firearms are downplayed along with scholarly investigations that tabulate these or that call into question the notion that legally owned firearms increase violent crime.

As a result, much conventional wisdom about the use and abuse of guns is simply wrong. Such reporting, for example, gives the impression that gun accidents involving young children are common and increasing when, in fact, they are happily rare and declining. The same is true of gun violence in schools. Do guns cause violence? In the thirty-year period from 1968 through 1997 as the stock of civilian firearms rose by 262%, fatal gun accidents dropped by 68.9%. Numerous surveys have shown that far more lives are saved than lost by privately owned guns. And John Lott’s meticulous study of the impact of statutes permitting citizens to carry concealed weapons found them of value in reducing armed crime. Yet, convinced advocates are unwilling to examine the evidence of the constitutional protection or studies that contradict their view of the danger of private gun use.

All this has taken its toll. Alone among the articles comprising the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment has, in recent years, come very near to being eliminated from the Constitution, not through the prescribed process of amendment, but through interpretations that reduced it to a meaningless anachronism. The low point came in 1975 when a committee of the American Bar Association was so befuddled by competing interpretations that members concluded, “It is doubtful that the Foundings Fathers had any intent in mind with regard to the meaning of this Amendment.” Leading textbooks on constitutional law, such as that by Lawrence Tribe, had literally relegated the Second Amendment to a footnote. Yet the American people remained convinced of their right to be armed despite textbooks and newspaper advertisements to the contrary.

Now scholarship has come to the rescue. The past twenty-five years have witnessed a growing number of studies of the Second Amendment, and these have found overwhelming evidence that it was meant to guarantee an individual right to be armed. In 1997, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in Printz v. United States, noting that the Court “has not had recent occasion to consider the nature of the substantive right safeguarded by the Second Amendment,” hoped, “Perhaps, at some future date, this Court will have the opportunity to determine whether Justice Story was correct when he wrote that the right to bear arms ‘has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic.’” Thomas added, “[A]n impressive array of historical evidence, a growing body of scholarly commentary indicates that the ‘right to keep and bear arms’ is, as the Amendment’s text suggests, a personal right.” Such evidence includes the individual right to be armed inherited from England; Madison’s intent to list the right to be armed with other individual rights, rather than in the article dealing with the militia; his reference to his proposed rights as “guards for private rights”; the Senate’s rejection of an amendment to tack the phrase “for the common defense” to the “right of the people to keep and bear arms”; and numerous contemporary comments. By contrast, nocontemporary evidence has been found that only a collective right for members of a militia was intended. The evidence has convinced our leading constitutional scholars, among them Lawrence Tribe, Akhil Amar, and Leonard Levy, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. In March 1999, Judge Sam Cummings of the Fifth Circuit, in the case of United States v. Timothy Joe Emerson, found a federal statute violated an individual’s Second Amendment rights. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a meticulously researched opinion, agreed that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep arms. As the Court of Appeals in Ohio pointed out when, in April 2002, it found Ohio’s prohibition against carrying a concealed weapon unconstitutional, “We are not a country where power is maintained by people with guns over people without guns.”

Since the evidence clearly shows an individual right was intended, we should now move on to discuss the prudent limits of that right. Yet that discussion can’t take place because denials of that right continue along with ever more tenuous theories to refute it, claims that the phrase “bear arms” was used exclusively in a military context; that the amendment resulted from a conspiracy between Northern and Southern states to control slaves; and that since the phrase “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” is set off by a comma it can be eliminated. But in early American discourse, as today, “bear arms” often meant simply carrying a weapon; there is no direct evidence of any conspiracy; and the elimination of every phrase set off by commas would play havoc with constitutional interpretation. Michael Bellesiles claimed to have evidence there were few guns in early America, Americans were uninterested in owning them, and therefore no individual right to be armed could have been intended. However, his results seriously underestimate numbers of weapons and distort the attitudes toward them. Other scholars looking through some of the same evidence have found widespread ownership of guns.

Why does the debate over original intent continue? Lawrence Tribe, who concluded there is an individual right after considering the new evidence, points to the “true poignancy,” “the inescapable tension, for many people on both sides of this policy divide, between the reading of the Second Amendment that would advance the policies they favor and the reading of the Second Amendment to which intellectual honesty, and their own theories of constitutional interpretation, would drive them if they could bring themselves to set their policy convictions aside.” The time has come for those who deny an individual right exists to set policy convictions aside in favor of intellectual honesty–and a more productive discussion.

Further Reading:  On the origins and constitutional interpretation of the Second Amendment see Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights (New Haven, 1999), chap. 6; Lawrence Tribe, American Constitutional Law, 3d ed. (New York, 2000), 894-903; Sanford Levinson, “The Embarrassing Second Amendment,” The Yale Law Journal 99 (1989); Don B. Kates Jr., “Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment,” Michigan Law Review 82 (December 1982); Robert Shalhope, “The Ideological Origins of the Second Amendment,” The Journal of American History 69 (December 1982); and Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (Albuquerque, N.M., 1984). The recent, landmark opinions in the Emerson Case by Federal Judge Sam Cummings and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals provide excellent and readable historical treatment and analysis of the intent of the Second Amendment and its legal history in the courts. See United Statesv. Timothy Joe Emerson, 46 F.Supp.2d 598 (1999) and United States v. Emerson, 270 F.3d 203(5th Cir. 2001). For up-to-date scholarship on the efficacy of gun control legislation and a review of the scholarly studies on the subject see John Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, 2d ed. (Chicago, 2000). Gary Kleck & Don B. Kates, Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control (Amherst, N.Y., 2001) is an excellent source of information on numerous aspects of the issue. Also see an older but important study by James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (New York, 1986).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Joyce Malcolm is a professor of history at Bentley College and senior fellow, MIT Security Studies Program. Her sixth book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 2002) was published in May.

Has a historian solved the mystery of Charles Brockden Brown?

The terrorists not only murdered but also mutilated their victims. They brained infants and burned men alive in front of their wives. In response, some on our side also began to kill and soon convinced the government to declare war. Anyone killing a terrorist would receive a bounty from the state. Only a small subset of our community remained calm enough to wonder why the terrorists were angry. To the consternation of their compatriots, this subset arranged a conference, where the terrorists explained why they had turned to violence: twenty years earlier, at the behest of a family whose role in our government was all but dynastic, we had taken their land by fraud.

In 1737, an agent of the Penn family, proprietors of the Pennsylvania colony, took advantage of a contract’s ambiguous wording to seize twelve hundred square miles of land from the Delaware Indians. Alan Taylor’s recent history of colonial America calls the act “perhaps the most notorious land swindle in colonial history.” The Walking Purchase, as the swindle has come to be known, got its name from the way it was perpetrated. Pennsylvania officials convinced Delaware leaders to sign away a tract of land along the Delaware River that could be walked in thirty-six hours. The Indians seem to have expected the walk to be roughly twenty miles, but one of the colony’s walkers managed to go roughly three times that far, because officials had arranged to clear the path ahead of time. Two decades later, when the once friendly Delawares attacked white colonists during the French and Indian War, only the most pious Quakers in the colony had the presence of mind to ask why. 

The independent scholar Peter Kafer believes that the Walking Purchase is the dark but true history behind one of the first Gothic novels ever written in America, Edgar Huntly, by Charles Brockden Brown. He sees references to the fraud in the 1799 novel’s geographic details and in its plot, which involves Delawares who have turned inexplicably violent. Once Kafer makes its case, it is hard to disagree. The incredible thing is that it took two centuries for Brown’s fiction to yield its secret.

I.

Charles Brockden Brown is the undisputed father of American horror. He imported Gothic novels into our literary tradition by writing and publishing four of them in 1798 and 1799. I remember when I first heard of him, as distinctly as I remember my first cigarette. A friend of mine called to tell me that he had just read a novel where one character spontaneously combusts, and another receives a vision from God telling him to kill his family. “You’d like it,” my friend said. “It’s crazy.” This was a compliment in our vocabulary. It described an artist who knew how to go to pieces, a feat we admired more or less the way that New Critics had once admired poets who knew how to put things artfully together. I took this friend’s advice about everything. He had told me to listen to Big Star and Yo La Tengo, and he had been right about them. 

His suggestion proved fateful. I quit smoking years ago, but I became a Charles Brockden Brown geek irrevocably. I always feel as though I have to apologize for this. Not one but two chapters of my book concern him, and when nonscholar friends volunteer that they have started to read it, those are the chapters I warn them about. It may be more than you want to know, I say.

But it is not more than I want to know. Brown’s prose style is clumsy, and his plots are ill formed, but my curiosity about him has seemed at times to be insatiable. He provokes it much the way Melville does: his novels are thick with allusions to the events of his day–glancing allusions that make you wish you were as familiar with them as he is. Like Melville, he seems to have lived out the tragic myth of the American writer, the bold experimenter who flies too high and is punished by a breakdown of some kind–possibly psychological, almost certainly financial–which leads, in turn, to a dramatic shift in style. There is the lure of esoteric meaning. Is Melville suggesting that Ahab was a Gnostic? Is Brown suggesting that Carwin belonged to the Illuminati? Maybe if you read the novels one more time you will figure it out. And most enticingly, Brown, like Melville, gives the reader the impression that he is playing with masks. You are not sure which mask is hiding his true intention, or whether he has any true intentions at all. There must be a reason the tree is an elm. There must be a reason the summerhouse has twelve columns. If only you knew a little more . . . 

In 1799, it was already conventional for a Gothic novel to have lurid and bloody episodes, a plot full of abrupt dislocations, and characters mysterious even to themselves. As Brown himself admitted, he merely updated the genre for the New World by replacing such European devices as “castles and chimeras” with American ones like “incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness.” And in 1799, it was already understood that Gothic novels were written with mysteries because puzzling over them was one of the pleasures they offered. Whether by design or shoddy workmanship, Brown’s Gothic novels have a generous number of loose ends and ragged seams, and ever since Brown was added to the canon, sometime in the last couple of decades, scholars have taken up his puzzles with a vengeance. Recently he has been examined in light of Federalist-era aesthetic theory, eighteenth-century nosology and etiology, the significance of land in America’s national myth, Philadelphia’s German community, and a well-documented 1782 murder. But although the circles of interpretation around Brown have been widening steadily, he himself has been strangely neglected. Surprisingly few researchers have looked in archives for documentary evidence about his life. There is a Library of America edition of his novels, but there has never been an adequate biography. 

There still is not one, exactly. Peter Kafer has chosen to write something less conventional, though just as exhaustively researched. Beneath each of Brown’s fictions, Kafer believes, lies an episode of history at odds with national myth. “Brown embellished, exaggerated, transposed, fantasized,” he writes. “But what he wrote was grounded in verifiable experience. And in memory.” Kafer aims to unearth these memories, and so he has written not a chronological narrative of Brown’s life but, fittingly, a series of detective stories. 

II.

For his alternative American history, Brown drew on what Kafer calls an “underworld of tribal knowledge.” The tribe in question was the Pennsylvania Quakers. 

According to a family history, the first Brown to convert to the Society of Friends was a farmer in Northamptonshire, England, in the middle of the seventeenth century. He was convinced by a traveling Quaker who began his testimony with the words, “O Earth! Earth! hear the word of the Lord.” Later the same man prophesied prosperity in America, and between 1677 and 1684, two of the farmer’s sons emigrated. 

The Society of Friends was not the only new and unorthodox religion in late-seventeenth-century Pennsylvania. As Kafer explains, the colony was a hotbed of mystics and seekers. While living in Chichester in the 1690s, the two Brown brothers nearly fell out when one was tempted to join a new sect led by George Keith. Keith had been converted to the Quaker faith by the same man as their father but had then moved on to Kabbalism and a belief in reincarnation. Keith’s group was allied with the Brethren in America, which also contained ex-Quakers and was led by Henry Koster, another student of the Kabbalah. Koster, in turn, had previously belonged to the Hermits of the Wissahickon, a group of mostly German pietists led by a mystic named Johannes Kelpius, who had come to Pennsylvania by way of London. If the Brown brothers attended the 1696 yearly meeting of the Society of Friends in Burlington–and Kafer suspects they did–then they heard Henry Koster defiantly assert that his sect was true to the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Society of Friends was not. Most in the audience were annoyed rather than persuaded, and in the end the Brown brothers remained Quakers.

To any reader of Brown’s first novel, Wieland, these stories of eccentric schisms and self-taught seekers will sound familiar. The novel’s narrator and heroine, Clara Wieland, explains that her family was German in origin. Like Johannes Kelpius, her father lived in London before coming to America. His more or less accidental reading of the words “Seek and ye shall find” in a history of the Camisards, a French Protestant sect, led to his religious awakening, which took the form of sedulous, idiosyncratic study of this Camisard history and the Bible. He emigrated to Pennsylvania because he came to believe that he had a religious duty to convert the American Indians, but he did not succeed as a proselyte. In his retirement, he built a temple where he worshiped alone, guided by his strict construction of the text of Matthew 6:6 (“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door”). As Clara explains, “He rigidly interpreted that precept which enjoins us, when we worship, to retire into solitude, and shut out every species of society.” His retreat thus paralleled that of the Hermits of the Wissahickon, who recorded that they felt called “to live apart from the vices and temptations of the world, and to be prepared for some immediate and strange revelations which could not be communicated amid scenes of worldly life, strife and dissipation, but would be imparted in the silence and solitude of the wilderness.” 

Here Kafer does some sleuthing that will take your breath away if you are a Charles Brockden Brown geek. In Brown’s novel, Father Wieland’s private temple is said to resemble a summerhouse. It is twelve feet in diameter, “edged by twelve Tuscan columns, and covered by an undulating dome,” and it sits on a rock beside a sixty-foot cliff overlooking the Schuylkill River, five miles outside Philadelphia. Kafer has discovered that in the nonfiction world, this location “turns out to be where the Schuykill meets the Wissahickon, and is where the Kelpius community lived.” Kelpius’s Hermits of the Wissahickon built a tabernacle on the site, with an architectural plan determined by Rosicrucian numerology. In the late eighteenth century, Brown could have toured the ruins. The portion still standing then was circular. Kafer prints a photograph of the riverside landscape as it appeared in 1999, eerily similar to Brown’s description of Father Wieland’s temple grounds. In a footnote, Kafer observes that Brown could have walked to the spot from the country home of a lawyer he studied with and that the adjacent property belonged to the family of one of Brown’s closest friends. 

To a Brown fan, this is heady. It is equivalent to telling a Melville fan that the Pequod has been located and raised from the deep. Wieland’s temple is crucial to Brown’s first novel. It is where “a cloud impregnated with light” seized on Clara’s father and scorched him, in an episode of either spontaneous combustion or divine punishment. And it is where, years later, Clara’s brother bantered with his friends about Cicero, until he too saw a mysterious light, on the night he began to hear the voices that would drive him mad. 

III.

In 1702 the two sons of the first Quaker Brown moved to Nottingham, Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border, where the land was fertile and the corruption of the city safely distant. In Nottingham, many of the Browns would become ministers, which was not a formal office among Quakers, but indicated a person who heard with some regularity the inner voice of truth and felt called to share it with others. 

The following generation of Browns married into another devout family, the Churchmans, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, they were highly respected in Nottingham. Into this pious, rural community Elijah Brown, the novelist’s father, was born in 1740. At the time, the most celebrated person in the family was Elijah’s uncle, the minister John Churchman. So great was Churchman’s moral prestige that in 1748, when the Pennsylvania Assembly was debating whether to pay for a warship, they listened at length to his opinion even though he held no governmental office and spoke merely as “a country man . . . having something to communicate.” He told them, of course, that a colony founded on Quaker principles should not arm itself. 

During the French and Indian War, Churchman was one of the Quakers who tried to restore peace with the Delawares, whom the Walking Purchase had embittered. The crisis so engaged him that it brought on a vision. Riding to a treaty conference in 1756, he saw a light as bright as a rainbow, in “a human form about seven feet high,” which he took to be an angel. (Shades of Wieland.) At a November 1756 conference, Churchman heard the leader of the Delawares declare that “this very Ground that is under me . . . was my Land and Inheritance, and is taken from me by Fraud.” According to Kafer, the money for the conference came in part from another of Charles Brockden Brown’s great-uncles and from the father of one of the novelist’s closest friends, both of whom probably also attended. In other words, to Charles Brockden Brown the Walking Purchase was not just an important piece of recent history but one that had touched his family particularly.

The fraud had originally come about this way. In 1737, to secure the rights to the southeast portion of Pennsylvania and to raise money for one of William Penn’s sons, Chief Justice James Logan pressured the Delawares to confirm what he said was a 1686 deed of land already sold to William Penn. In fact it was either the rough draft of a deed never executed or an outright forgery. The Delawares signed it nonetheless, perhaps because it seemed to involve land that had already been given to the Penn family by other treaties. It specified a tract extending north by northwest from present-day Wrightstown as far as could be walked in “a day and a half.” The Delawares were led to believe that this ambiguously worded distance was about twenty miles. That would have brought the whites not much further north than Tohickon Creek, which runs through present-day Point Pleasant and which approximated the Delawares’ sense of their southern boundary anyway. 

James Logan intended to stretch the tract much farther, however. After the treaty was signed and before the land was surveyed, Logan had a path through it cleared. During the official “day and a half” that the land was measured out, two of the three men hired by Logan as “walkers” quit from exhaustion, but a third managed to go sixty-four miles before collapsing–some forty-seven miles beyond Tohickon Creek. When the Delawares protested that they had been cheated, Logan made a military alliance with the Iroquois, who drove the Delawares out. 

IV.

Brown’s last novel, Edgar Huntly, is not, at first glance, about land fraud. Instead it seems to concern a young man in mourning who lives in the town of Solebury, Pennsylvania.

Edgar Huntly is distraught by the recent murder of a virtuous and wealthy friend. One night he visits the elm where his dying friend was discovered, and by the light of the moon he sees a naked sleepwalker digging and weeping. Naturally he suspects the digger of murder and decides to investigate. After watching a second night, he follows the sleepwalker into a wilderness area called Norwalk, described as “rugged, picturesque and wild,” where he loses him. Confronted by day, the sleepwalker confesses, but not to the crime of which Huntly suspects him. Then the man vanishes. In pursuit, Huntly returns to Norwalk, where he again sights his suspect and again loses him. Frustrated and agitated, he dreams of the “inquietude and anger” of his murdered friend. One night soon after, he goes to bed in Solebury and wakes up in a cave in Norwalk. He too has become a sleepwalker, and he has woken up in the middle of a bitter, violent war with the Indians. He picks up a tomahawk and begins to kill.

In suggesting a link between the Walking Purchase and Edgar Huntly, Kafer is following up a hint dropped by the amateur Brown scholar Daniel Edwards Kennedy, which was first mentioned in print by Sydney J. Krause in his historical note to the Kent State edition of the novel published in 1984. Kafer makes a compelling case. Some of the clues in the novel are explicit. When Huntly is surrounded by hostile Indians, he admits to the reader that “a long course of injuries and encroachments had lately exasperated the Indian tribes.” The bloodiest scenes in the book occur near the hut of Old Deb, an Indian who is said to have remained in the area after the rest of her tribe had departed and to have “originally belonged to the tribe of Delawares or Lennilennapee.”

But it is geography that clinches it. Solebury, the hometown of Edgar Huntly, lies about five miles southeast of Tohickon Creek, well within the region that William Penn had legally purchased long before the 1737 fraud. (When I consulted a modern-day map, DeLorme’s Pennsylvania Atlas & Gazetteer, I came up with mileage slightly different from Kafer’s. Tohickon Creek bends and twists dramatically, which may account for the discrepancy.) Although Brown never lived in Solebury himself, he may have felt some kinship to it; Kafer reports that among the earliest landowners in Solebury were the family of Charles Brockden Brown’s mother and the father of the Charles Brockden for whom he was named. Huntly leaves Solebury, however, to pursue his murder suspect into Norwalk, where most of the action takes place. Brown consistently locates Norwalk to the north of Solebury, but he gives conflicting descriptions of its extent. He first describes it as “a space, somewhat circular, about six miles in diameter.” But later he writes, “Norwalk is the termination of a sterile and narrow tract, which begins in the Indian country. It forms a sort of rugged and rocky vein, and continues upwards of fifty miles.” 

Norwalk is, therefore, a wilderness that either reaches six miles north of Solebury, which would put its northern edge roughly at Tohickon Creek, or reaches fifty miles north of Solebury, which would put it some forty-five miles beyond the creek. Sound familiar? As Kafer writes, succinctly, “‘Norwalk.’ North Walk.” On their way north in 1737, James Logan’s walkers would have passed by not only Solebury but every setting in Edgar Huntly. 

V.

The Quakers’ exposure of the Walking Purchase fraud altered nothing for the Delawares. The treaty remained in force. Back in Nottingham in December 1756, a dismayed John Churchman told his fellow Quakers that he heard a voice saying, “I will bow the inhabitants of the earth, and particularly of this land, and I will make them fear and reverence me, either in mercy or in judgment.” The gloom of Churchman’s ministry must have told on his nephew, because two months later, Elijah Brown left small-town Nottingham for Philadelphia, where he hoped to become a merchant. Exactly nine months after that, Kafer reports, “his father and stepmother had another son; and at this point they did a most peculiar thing. They named their new son Elijah–as if the other Elijah, a healthy seventeen-year-old . . . were dead.” 

It was not easy to move from pious Nottingham to worldly Philadelphia, and Elijah Brown never really succeeded at the transition. The one asset Nottingham might have been expected to provide, a sturdy moral compass, seems to have gone missing in his case. Kafer thinks the novelist may have been painting a portrait of his father in his third novel, Arthur Mervyn. The hero claims to be a nice boy from the country who has fallen in with bad company through no fault of his own, but he may, in fact, be as unscrupulous as Welbeck, the evil mastermind who is supposed to have misled him.

Some such ambiguity beclouded Elijah. He copied out extracts from the works of the atheist anarchist William Godwin and the deist feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in his commonplace books, which survive in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and so scholars have long known that his intellectual interests were not those of an altogether orthodox Quaker. Kafer has discovered that his career was not quite orthodox, either. His 1761 marriage to Mary Armitt brought him access to the good credit of her brother-in-law, Richard Waln, and he soon set himself up as a merchant. But in 1768 his fellow Quakers disowned him for failing to pay his debts and for misleading creditors about the extent of them, and he was never restored to their good graces. In the spring of 1770, in a desperate attempt to repay his brother-in-law, he went to the West Indies and smuggled tea. “Devious deliveries to one ‘Richd Somers’ at an out-of-the-way harbor in New Jersey would seem a long, long way from the Quaker principles of John Churchman and Nottingham,” Kafer comments. Elijah gave up on his ambition to be a merchant. Waln’s subsequent loans to his brother-in-law were acts of charity rather than business, and Elijah never repaid them. He continued to sell as a retailer until July 1784, when he was jailed for debt. The debt was of a “conciderable amount,” according to Waln, and it ended Elijah’s shopkeeping. After 1784 he worked as a conveyancer, copying legal documents and writing out the paperwork for real-estate transactions. 

Charles Brockden Brown was born into this struggling family in January 1771. In Wieland, when Clara recalls the mysterious light and explosion that burned her father in his temple, she notes,”I was at this time a child of six years of age. The impressions that were then made upon me, can never be effaced.” Kafer notes that the novelist was six years old during the most frightening of his father’s travails, which came during the Revolutionary War. To a child, its sights and sounds may have been just as inexplicable and traumatic. 

Quakers were sidelined from the Revolution by their pacifism and their refusal to swear oaths. It was not a sudden displacement, however, but the culmination of a decades-long process. The Quakers’ peaceable attitude toward the Indians had long ago wrong-footed them not only with the lordly Penn family and its allies but also with many of the common people who settled on the Pennsylvania frontier. In 1763 and 1764 a group of frontiersmen known as the Paxton Boys rioted. They murdered a score of Indians–in his Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York, 1976), the scholar Kenneth Silverman likened the massacre’s impact to My Lai’s–and then marched to Philadelphia, where they threatened to hang the colony’s most prominent Quaker politician. 

The Paxton Boys, as Quakers noted at the time, were “principally of Irish extraction.” That is, they were Scots-Irish Presbyterians, an ethnic group that was immigrating to Pennsylvania in droves. Quaker politicians retaliated with what historian Patricia U. Bonomi has called “a virulent anti-Presbyterian campaign.” In the long term, the campaign did not serve Quakers well. The Paxton Boys were the sort of people to whom power flowed, in the form of committees and militias, when the Revolution came. When John Adams compiled a list of potential traitors in Philadelphia in 1777, he probably got his information from people like them; everyone on his list was a Quaker. Many of those he named had helped to fund the 1756 conference with the Delawares where the Walking Purchase fraud was brought out–an overlap that, in Kafer’s opinion, “is not a historical coincidence.”

Kafer believes that by the time of the Revolution, the Quakers, although usually too couth to spell it out, understood Scots-Irish Presbyterians as their tribal enemies, more or less. In fact, when the British army occupied Philadelphia from September 26, 1777, to June 18, 1778, some Quakers appreciated their presence. “We may expect some great suffering when the Englis Americans again get possession,” one Quaker confided to her diary. (Not all Quakers dreaded American troops, however. While waiting out the occupation in rural Gwynedd, Sarah Wister flirted with American soldiers gaily; when she reported in her diary that the British had abandoned the capital, she brought out her best faux French and called the news “charmonte.”) 

After Adams’s 1777 list of traitors was expanded and refined, the people on it were rounded up. Quakers privately recorded the names of the men who made the arrests. Almost all were Scots-Irish. For example, at noon on September 5, 1777, Elijah Brown was arrested by James Loughead and James Kerr. (I can vouch for Kerr’s Scots-Irish genealogy, because I happen to be descended from him.) On September 11, 1777, Elijah Brown, sixteen other Quakers, and three outright Tories were driven out of Philadelphia in wagons. There had been no trials or hearings. When the prisoners applied for writs of habeas corpus, the Pennsylvania Assembly passed an act retroactively suspending the right to habeas corpus in their cases only. They were taken to Winchester, Virginia, where they were overcharged for their room and board. Over the winter, two Tories ran away and two Quakers died. Four of the exiles’ wives appealed personally to George Washington at Valley Forge, and at the end of April 1778, the exiles were finally allowed to go home. 

The Revolution did not, therefore, mean to Charles Brockden Brown what it may have meant to other boys who were then six years old. It took away his father. In Edgar Huntly, the narrator, just before he begins to kill Indians, explains, “Most men are haunted by some species of terror or antipathy, which they are, for the most part, able to trace to some incident which befell them in their early years.” Huntly claims that he is haunted by the slaughter of his parents by Indians. But as Kafer points out, from the perspective of the Brown family, “the native Indians weren’t the ‘savages.’ The Revolutionaries were.” The Indians in the novel seem to be standing in for the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who were, in real life, the deadly enemies of both Indians and Quakers. Kafer finds a further clue in the high number of Brown’s villains who are “Irish,” from Jackey Cooke, the wife-beater in Brown’s earliest attempt at fiction, to the sleepdigger of Edgar Huntly’s opening scenes, who was born to peasants living “in the county of Armagh.” 

In his novels, the son remembered the violence that had harmed his family when he was a child–violence that the rest of America celebrated every July 4 with cannons and fireworks. He did not take up his father’s quarrels, however, or his religion’s. If Arthur Mervyn, for example, is a portrait of Elijah, it expresses a deep ambivalence. It is a serious betrayal of Quaker ethics for Edgar Huntly to kill Indians. And it is perverse of Brown to have signaled the onset of madness in Clara Wieland’s brother with a vision of light like that seen by John Churchman in 1757. 

Kafer may have solved these mysteries, too. Charles may not have been able to represent his father as a hero because it was not the case. It turns out that Elijah was not exiled on account of his Quaker principles. He was arrested because even though the Revolutionary authorities had fixed the price of flour and were regulating its sale, he sold it, illegally, on the open market. And after they warned him not to, he continued selling it. He was, in other words, a war profiteer–though a very unskilled one, unable to survive his exile without borrowing even more money from the brother-in-law who had once sent him smuggling. 

Standing up for Quaker ideals would not have avenged Charles Brockden Brown’s father, and standing up for Revolutionary ideals would have betrayed him. Such was the genealogy of a new kind of American writing, which gave voice to confusion and terror. 

Further Reading:

No Brown aficionado can afford to be without Peter Kafer’s Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic, published in 2004 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Some of Kafer’s discoveries were revealed in two earlier articles: “Charles Brockden Brown and Revolutionary Philadelphia: An Imagination in Context,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography 116 (October 1972): 467-98, and “Charles Brockden Brown and the Pleasures of ‘Unsanctified Imagination,’ 1787-1793,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 57 (July 2000): 543-68.

Online, the Pennsylvania State Archives offers a transcription and a digital photograph of the Walking Purchase Treaty, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission reprints a 1972 essay on the fraud by William A. Hunter. The fraud is also discussed in Anthony F. C. Wallace’s King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700-1763 (Philadelphia 1949; rpt. Syracuse, 1990) and in Appendix B of Francis Jennings’s The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian tribes with English Colonies from its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York, 1984). 

The authoritative text of Brown’s novels is the Bicentennial Edition, published by Kent State University between 1977 and 1987 and overseen by Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid. The historical essays in each volume are in many ways unsurpassed, and Krause’s annotations for Ormond offer an excellent opportunity to those who wish to dive down the rabbit hole and into Brown’s idiosyncratic intellectual world. Penguin, the Modern Library, and the Broadview Press publish paperbacks of several Brown novels, and the Library of America sells a volume containing three of them. 

Brown’s nonfiction is harder to find, but Mark L. Kamrath, Fritz Fleischmann, and Wil Verhoeven are directing a supplementary edition of Brown’s reviews, essays, short fiction, letters, and poetry, to be published electronically and in six bound volumes. Scholarship on Brown has exploded in the last few years, and Bryan Waterman, a leading practitioner, offers an insightful overview of the field in “Charles Brockden Brown, Revised and Expanded,” Early American Literature 40 (2005): 173-91.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.4 (July, 2005).

Caleb Crain is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven, 2001). He is at work on a history of the 1851 divorce of the theatrical couple Edwin and Catharine Forrest.