This special issue of Common-place explores food. It particularly investigates the production and consumption of food during the age of experiment, that period between 1820 and 1890 in the United States after the soil crisis of the early nineteenth century disrupted customary agriculture and before scientific agriculture became institutionalized nationally in the system of experimental stations legislated into being by the Hatch Act (1887).

Just as current experimentation in agriculture is driven by the increasingly deleterious effects of conventional agriculture on the land (the mineralization of soils, the depletion of aquifers by “thirsty” GMO crops, the growing toxicity of fields subjected to heavy-handed and repeated chemical supplementations), the nineteenth-century age of experiment began in response to a soil crisis. The need to renovate fields whose fertility had been exhausted by repeated plantings of cash crops such as tobacco, cotton, and corn led farmers to introduce new cultivars into new rotations employing new manuring schemes. Change brought benefits. The range of fruits and vegetables available at market expanded, and the great age of plant and livestock breeding commenced. During this period, reading became a necessity for food growers and an advantage for food preparers. A world of agricultural letters burgeoned after the launching of The American Farmer in 1819. A rich cookbook literature also grew expansively decade by decade over the course of the century. The era of experiment was marked by several features besides the recourse to print culture: the widespread abandonment of the old humoral picture of nutrition and medicine and the adoption after 1845 of the food chemistry of Justus Liebig; the organization of agricultural societies and cooking schools; the integration of farms and households into local, regional, and national food markets; the rise of market growers and seed brokers; the creation and promotion of model farms and plantations; the expansion of the world of competitive exhibitions in fairs and livestock shows, and the shift from hearthside to stove top cookery. One can also point to the proliferation of sumptuary ideologies and food philosophies aimed at perfecting the body while purifying the spirit.

Food Studies in 2011 has become a complex set of engagements between what had been different inquiries. Best known to historians, perhaps, has been the recovery of the creative kitchen and garden labors of women and domestic servants in the conduct of common life, the approach exemplified by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household or Rebecca Sharpless’s Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens. Then, there is the search for origins, the attempt to trace cultural legacies, an approach exemplified by Karen Hess’s The Carolina Rice Kitchen. Another approach, associated with lived history projects, is the recovery of old cooking practices in works such as William Rubel’s The Magic of Fire: Hearth Cooking. Gardeners have engaged in horticultural recoveries, exploring the bio-archive in germ plasm banks to restore landrace grains and heirloom plants to cultivation and promote their culinary use; gardener, writer, and heirloom seed champion William Woys Weaver serves as a case in point here. Then there is the exploration of agricultural literature to locate the best practices of pre-industrial farming in an attempt to supply an effective alternative to the chemical supplementation schemes, GMO plant breeding, and water-intensive cultivation practices of conventional farming.

In this issue the contributions reflect all of these approaches. Jan Longone, the cookbook collector and scholar, shows us the genre in light of its representational innovations, rather than as a vehicle for transmitting the cultural past. Trudy Eden in her examination of the problems of interpreting recipes does treat the past—the experiential past of the recipe reader making sense of the bespoken dimensions of the written instructions. Eden suggests what more we have to know to make the dishes work. As a challenge to cook-readers, the editor has gathered a representative sampling of recipes to adapt to home use. Michael Twitty, who demonstrates antebellum African-American hearthside cooking for historical sites, reflects on what he has learned beyond what has been captured in the written record, about that distinctive and influential foodway. Caroline Sloat, using a wealth of primary sources, meditates on the unrestrained harvesting of wild pigeons, which offers a foretaste of the twenty-first century depletion of the oceanic fisheries. Three pieces treat, respectively, grains, fruits, and vegetables. Glenn Roberts, one of the most celebrated restorers of the world’s landrace grains, explains how and why these ancient crops have become imperiled and what is being done to keep them in cultivation. Bernard Herman discusses the cultivation of the fig and its survival on the landscape despite its minimal circulation through the market system. I explore the place of root vegetables in the operation of farms, and how the tastes of animals mattered as greatly as humans in instructing the creation of new varieties by plant breeders. The contents of the issue fulfill the imperatives of the new Food Studies: to view eating as an agricultural act, to understand consumption in conjunction with production and processing, to view instruction in light of practice, and the past in tension with the present.

What, in the end, are the stakes of these recoveries? Repatriating cultivars developed during the experimental age (when taste stood foremost amongst the desiderata in breeding, not transportability, eye appeal, or disease resistance) restores pleasurability to the center of the eating experience. For growers, the recovery of the best practices of pre-industrial growers arms those who desire an alternative to our increasingly costly industrial system with knowledge of how to build soil, improve taste, and enhance the productivity of grains and vegetables. This is a knowledge that contemporary organic farmers have in large measure lost. Farming will not be right in the United States until the bees fly above our heads and the earthworms replenish the soil beneath our feet. When science marries with old wisdom and gastronomy encourages agricultural sustainability as well as pleasure, then the new initiatives in food studies will have borne fruit.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.3 (April, 2011).

David Shields is McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina and Chairman of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. His most recent books are The Golden Seed; Writings on the History and Culture of Carolina Gold Rice (2010) and Pioneering American Wine (2009). His website, Traditional American Vegetables, about heirloom vegetable gardening and cookery, will be launched on May 1, 2011.

The early republic

“Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War,” I say, responding with the title of my book-in-progress. It’s my answer to a question as common at academic cocktail parties as chardonnay: “So … what are you working on now?” Two responses to my book’s topic have been memorable. The first, by an American studies scholar, was earnest appreciation: “Good! We need a book like that now!” Behind that affirmation was a deep frustration with the cultural politics of the Bush era, with its successful exploitation of a particular narrative of American religion and patriotism—to which my book, he imagined, would be a historian’s reply. The second response was from a historian who, raising a quizzical eyebrow, asked, “Religious skepticism? What religious skepticism?”

Alas, my own dissatisfactions with Mr. Bush cannot be mitigated by the notion that at least he inspired my research project. I’m reminded of a colleague who recently published a book on warfare and American history from the colonial period to the late twentieth century. Reviews discussed the study as if it had been inspired by the Iraq war. The author certainly did not claim to live in a cultural vacuum, unaffected by the current state of affairs; still, his project began two decades ago and is based on exhaustive research. Histories, though written in a particular time and place and from a particular point of view, may inspire op-ed pieces but shouldn’t be confused with them.

My own project was initially sparked by reading the Ezra Stiles Papers at Yale in the late 1980s. Stiles (1727-1795), a Congregationalist minister in Rhode Island and then president of Yale College, struggled with doubts about the truth of Christianity when he was a young man and wandered for a few years in what he later called the “darksome valley” of deism and skepticism. I was especially struck by the extent to which Stiles’s doubts were his secret shame, concealed even from his family and closest friends as he shivered with fever on what he thought was his deathbed. After the American Revolution, the Reverend Stiles watched with grave concern as other doubters and deists came out of the closet and started to achieve positions of social prestige and political power. This was especially worrying at a time when states were rewriting their constitutions and reframing the relationship of church and state. There were few outspoken critics of Christianity like Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary War hero from Vermont who published Reason, the Only Oracle of Man in 1785. But Stiles saw dangerous trends in voters who were indifferent to a candidate’s religious opinions and in public sentiments that seemed to oppose not only government establishing a particular Protestant sect but even the state merely patronizing and privileging Christianity in general. Stiles, therefore, understood religious skepticism first as a personal psychological struggle, later as a matter of intellectual debate (safely confined to the republic of letters), and finally as an ideological and political problem threatening the new American republic.

At the time I wondered to what degree Stiles’s concerns could represent much more than his own religious and intellectual development. He was, after all, a clergyman’s son in a region famous for the lingering habits of Puritanism, so dabbling in deism and skepticism might have seemed particularly radical and dangerous. He was also a revealing but not necessarily a representative thinker, and perhaps he was just projecting his own experience onto the nation. But reading and research in the years that followed have convinced me that from the creation of the first American republic in the Revolution to its dissolution in the Civil War, the relation of skepticism and faith would be played out again and again in similar terms but in different contexts.

For most people in this period, skepticism was more than the anxious uncertainty of doubt; it was doubt elaborated as a tool of inquiry and critique. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America, too, the term “skeptic” primarily and popularly referred to religious skeptics—that is, those who questioned or criticized the truth claims of what was considered to be true religion—Christianity—and not to the rare epistemologist using classical arguments or Cartesian methods to deny certainty in all forms of knowledge. There had long been plenty of sermons and tracts written for doubting Christians, who usually had doubts about the state of their souls or the pertinence of this or that Christian doctrine to their own lives. The skeptic, however, stepped outside the whole belief system, examining it from a critical distance and finding it wanting.

Faith, on the other hand, meant more than intellectual assent to a set of doctrines. It was a commitment of the whole self, a hope and trust that, if genuine, ought to be the foundation of an entire way of life and vision of the world. Beliefs, we might say, are linguistic formulations that try to give expression to and elaborate the cognitive content of faith as a lived experience; skepticism is the systematic critique of those beliefs and therefore of the rational dimensions of the faithful way of life.

For spiritual power and authority, Protestants looked up to God through his word, they looked alongside themselves to fellow followers of Christ as they built Christian communities, and they looked within themselves for the work of the Holy Spirit. Skepticism attacked the authenticity of the scriptures, challenged the idea that either the sociability of religious affections or the historical success of the church attested to the truth of doctrine, and contested the notion that subjective experience could evidence contact with things supernatural and divine. Skepticism and faith were in a dynamic tension that was critically important to understanding the development of a dominant Protestantism.

By retracing my steps to my encounter with Ezra Stiles in the library, I don’t mean to suggest that the project was incubated entirely in the archives. No research is completely unconnected to personal experience. That doesn’t mean religious history, any more than other kinds of history, entails one of those confessional prefaces in which the author discloses his or her personal relationship to the faith tradition being examined. Perry Miller’s atheism and George Marsden’s evangelicalism no doubt influenced each man’s studies of the Protestant theologian Jonathan Edwards, but the evaluation of their books should aim at the cogency of their interpretive arguments in relation to the available evidence rather than at the scholars’ biographies. The historian’s own religious belief or doubt is one of many factors shaping his or her particular perspective, a point of view that provides moments of both blindness and insight when trying to imagine the past. My own perspective as this project developed has been at least as powerfully shaped by my understanding of the disciplinary field I entered and the communities in which I learned and taught.

In graduate school I became convinced that the history I had learned previously had too blithely ignored the religious issues and experiences that were so vital to so many people in the American past. I imagined myself going off to teach in a public university, and in my own courses and scholarship, at least, doing something to rectify that imbalance. Instead, my first teaching job was at a small midwestern college that was committed at once to the liberal arts, a global and multicultural perspective, and to being “a school of the Church.” Faculty didn’t have to sign a confession of faith but were asked on job interviews about their view of the school’s religious mission; faculty meetings began with a prayer and teachers were encouraged (though not required) to attend daily chapel. The most ardent supporters of the college’s religious identity manifested an ecumenical tolerance toward diverse religious points of view but a subtle—and at times not so subtle—unfriendliness to secular humanism. Just as working with religiously committed scholars in graduate school had deepened my appreciation for the intellectual depth of perspectives rooted in faith, my experience at that Christian college helped me more easily imagine the closeted lives of skeptics in the early republic. I hope these experiences help me to write sympathetically and critically about religious skeptics and people of faith.

The historical imagination, of course, has to be disciplined by the accepted rules of interpretation and by the traces left behind by past lives, just as tennis involves lines, a net, and a fuzzy yellow ball to be whacked back and forth—it is not just the artful swooshing of a shiny racket. The second cocktail-party response to my project—”What religious skepticism?”—was asking if, in fact, there was even a ball to be put in play here.

Readers of the standard religious histories will ask the same question. The eminently quotable Alexis de Tocqueville said, after all, that Americans were skeptical about everything but religion. Our own America—where churches thrive, supernaturalism sells, spirituality can trump other issues at the ballot box, and God consistently gets great poll numbers—has long been considered the Western world’s exception to the secularization and disenchantment that was expected to attend modernity. Whereas previous historical explanations of this state of affairs looked to our supposed Puritan heritage, more recent interpretations have focused on precisely the period of my study. In the decades immediately following 1776, according to one prominent account, American Christianity was democratized, its surge of religious revivals revealing a religious movement that absorbed and directed the radical, egalitarian, populist, individualistic energies of the Revolution. In the early nineteenth century, according to another, as proselytizers and promoters vigorously competed for adherents in a denominational free market, a higher proportion of Americans formed closer associations with Christian institutions, ideas, and practices than ever before. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, according to a third, Americans created a powerful intellectual synthesis fusing republican political ideology, common-sense moral reasoning, and evangelical Protestantism. A rich and deep historiography shows us how the evangelicalism that emerged from what’s called the Second Great Awakening shaped the politics of the second party system; how activist Protestantism fueled the great movements for social reform; how religious faith and scriptural argument provided the foundations for proslavery, antislavery, and every conceivable moral argument; how Christian views of Providence and creation dictated understandings of nature, history, and progress; and how pious sentimentalism was the beating heart of family life. Christianity refined and polished the genteel, rocked the cradle of the middle class, and provided both comfort and a language of resistance for the poor, the oppressed, and the enslaved.

So where were the skeptics? Some of the Founding Fathers—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson most notably—were deists who believed in a creator and in morals derived from nature but not in the divinity of either the Bible or Jesus. While these gentlemen kept—or tried to keep—their heterodox views to themselves, small groups of other deists, inspired by Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1794) and the lectures of former Presbyterian minister Elihu Palmer, organized a few deistical societies and published newspapers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The socioeconomic transformations wrought by new markets and new modes of industrial production after 1815 launched a new generation of social and religious radicalism. From the mid-1820s to about 1840, reformers like Robert Owen, Frances Wright, and Abner Kneeland identified themselves as religious skeptics and freethinkers—or “free enquirers”—who doubted or denied most or all of Christianity’s claims about God, man, and salvation. Their point of view was aptly summarized by a loyal reader’s testimonial in one of their free-thought newspapers in 1829. “I am now a sceptic … I live for this world, because I know nothing of any other. I doubt all revelations from heaven, because they appear to me improbable and inconsistent … I desire to see men’s wishes bounded by what they can see and know; for I am convinced that they would thus become more contented, more practically benevolent, and more permanently happy, than any dreams of futurity can make them.” As with the deists, the free enquirers’ energies were divided between criticizing traditional (supernatural) religion and trying to offer an alternate vision for life in the world.

Christians called the deists and free enquirers “infidels,” a pejorative term that some of the latter would defiantly adopt as their own, the way that some activist homosexuals in the twentieth century adopted “queer.” They are understudied: the standard works on deism and organized free thought in the period were published in the 1930s and 1940s; the first half of a short study by Martin E. Marty titled The Infidel: Freethought in American Religion, published in 1961, has nearly been the last word on the subject. Certainly the efforts of these small groups of infidels were dwarfed by the legions conducting religious revivals, creating missions and moral reform societies, distributing Bibles and Christian tracts, and building churches across the land. Just as certainly, though, the experiences of people labeled infidels and the ideas branded as “infidelity” have remained hidden because of the stories we have chosen to tell about the nation’s religious past. Even if few Americans publicly challenged Christian truth claims, Christianity’s hegemonic triumph remains to be accounted for, and the reasons why and how the skeptical critique continued to haunt American Christianity need to be explained.

Seasoning the narrative of American religious history with the stories of a few vocal freethinkers is not enough—just as adding female or African American voices is not the same as analyzing the construction of gender or race. Many observers in the early republic looked beyond the strident infidels to note the sociopsychological entanglement of skepticism and faith as a central issue in American religion. In 1840, Orestes Brownson, sounding like Ezra Stiles in the 1780s, argued that “there is not much open scepticism, not much avowed infidelity, but there is a vast amount” that was “concealed” and “untold.” Other commentators agreed with Brownson. One in 1829 believed that “the number of decided infidels, is probably much more limited than that of a sort of skeptics who are content to remain suspended in doubt whether the Christian revelation is true or false,” but who for the time being continued to respect Christianity as the custom of the country and an amiable superstition. A decade later, the Christian Secretary prepared a series of articles attacking skepticism and infidelity because the editors had come to the same conclusion. Calvinist biblical scholar Moses Stuart suspected that there was not a small number among the upper classes who would abandon the Bible if doing so became socially respectable; Catholic convert Gardner Jones claimed that at least a third of the professing Protestants in New York City in the mid-1830s had followed the logic of Protestantism to its conclusion and were privately “decided infidels.” A twenty-four page essay in The Spirit of the Pilgrims focused not on outspoken freethinkers or closeted skeptics but the way that doubt could hollow out Christianity from within. New-fangled ideas encouraged Christians to doubt one traditional doctrine, qualify a second, and throw out a third, until believers “have been gradually and unconsciously drawn away from their old belief … They begin with doubting; they next give up, and are finally in danger of ending in the disbelief of almost everything but that they are themselves very exemplary believers.”

Self-proclaimed deists, skeptics, and freethinkers were so threatening because they gave voice to the doubts Christians had about their own faith or about the fidelity of the fellow in the next pew. Putting skepticism back into the story of American religious history in this period, therefore, involves attending to—and explaining—both the “not much” skepticism that was open and avowed and the “vast amount” that Brownson and others insisted was hidden and silenced. It is possible, of course, that the specter of the dangerous infidel, threatening the religious foundations of society, was conjured out of nearly nothing by paranoid Christians and by cynical politicians. Some did anxiously exaggerate the threat, like the Calvinist apologists, who blamed Universalists for destroying the foundations of faith, and the Universalists, who blamed Calvinists for the same; others exploited popular fears of anti-Christian subversives, like the Federalists, who tried to link Jefferson’s deism and the horrors of the French Revolution to Republicanism, or the Whigs, who later tried to tar working-class Jacksonianism with religious infidelity. But the story of the relation of skepticism and faith is more than the tale of a few marginalized freethinkers and artificially induced moral panics. Religious skepticism touched—and in some cases transformed—more lives than we might expect in the early American republic.

Examining the personal, social, and political dimensions of the relation between skepticism and faith does involve recovering the experiences of some of the small vocal minority who came out of the closet—Paineite radicals like Elihu Palmer or socialist freethinkers like the Scottish-born reformer Fanny Wright, for example. But it also involves looking at the skeptical phases in the spiritual biographies of people known for other commitments—like Orestes Brownson (who ended up as a Catholic), William Miller (eventually a founder of Adventism), Horace Mann (the liberal education reformer), William Alcott (the prolific writer on health and education reform), or Abraham Lincoln. It entails rescuing the obscure and forgotten from the archives, with, for example, the rich stories of the Methodist preacher-turned-skeptic John R. Kelso and the skeptic-turned-Methodist preacher John Scarlett, or the skeptical-scientist-turned-spiritualist-medium Robert Hare, or the story of a young woman’s struggles with religious skepticism in an autobiographical novel by Alice Hayes Mellen. Historical biography can also illuminate larger social relations and the workings of politics. To cite another example, consider the case of Dr. Thomas Cooper, the polymathic scholar and strident religious skeptic who was the president of South Carolina College in the tumultuous decades before and during South Carolina’s nullification controversy.

But sometimes communities, public events, or institutions themselves need to take center stage to illuminate the ways that religious practices and identities were both constructed and challenged—how some became the commonsensical norm and others were pushed beyond the boundaries of respectability. The deistical society in the village of Newburgh, New York, which became infamous for satirizing Christianity by giving communion to a dog and baptizing a cat in 1799 and which was linked to the Clintonian faction of the state’s Republican party, speaks to how Americans were trying to come to terms with the relation of religion and politics both nationally and locally. The Massachusetts blasphemy trials of the freethinker Abner Kneeland in the 1830s, set in the context of lesser-known trials and disputes over religious oaths in courts and legislatures, show how law and politics helped shape Americans lives in relation to what Christians believed was God’s word, Christ’s church, and the work of the Holy Spirit.

To study skepticism and faith in this way is to go beyond familiar treatments of the topic, which have tended to stay within the confines of intellectual history as traditionally conceived. Richard H. Popkin’s half century of scholarship—most recently The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (2003)—is an essential philosophical foundation. Helpful, too, is Franklin L. Baumer’s Religion and the Rise of Scepticism (1960), though it also deals with European intellectuals and not America or “nonintellectual groups,” despite Baumer’s thinking the latter was “of immense importance” and “a whole story in itself.” James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (1985) “offers us intellectual history in something like the grand manner” of Perry Miller, as a blurb on the back cover notes. Though a fascinating study, the first half of the book oddly functions as a kind of extended prologue to the emergence after 1865 of “unbelief” in God as a viable alternative for a small group of thinkers. Turner’s is not a study about the struggle with doubts about God, the Bible, and the church. It is a story of how Christians, especially clergymen, hitched Christian beliefs to Enlightenment rationality and empiricism—an arrangement that for some collapsed rather dramatically in the later nineteenth century. If there were unrecognized weaknesses in the reasonable Christianity fashioned in the earlier decades, there were also more obvious tensions between skepticism and faith, tensions that were experienced and recognized long before the Gilded Age and by more than just intellectuals.

These tensions can be found even where we might least expect them. William Smyth Babcock, for example, was a Freewill Baptist preacher in Vermont during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Because he severed his connection to his church’s Monthly Meeting in 1809 to preach free from any denominational control, he has been used to illustrate the “individualization of conscience” in Nathan Hatch’s acclaimed Democratization of American Christianity (1989). But there is more to Babcock than this. For him, skepticism about the truth of Christianity was both a personal problem and a threat to his community. He had converted to Christianity about a month before his thirty-fifth birthday in 1799. He had been a deist and had begun reading the Bible in earnest earlier that year to sharpen his arguments against it. Instead, he made a public “Declaration of the Christian Revelation” in January 1800 and argued that, while deism could only lead to “one boundless dream of Doubt,” the Bible really was a genuine offer of eternal salvation by God Almighty. Not everyone was convinced. In the journal begun after his conversion he mentions two neighbors—an unnamed man and a Mrs. Durge—who still clung to the “Error of Deism.” And even Babcock had his lapses. Two days after a “lovely” conference and covenant renewal with his Baptist brethren, Babcock woke up to hear a friend singing a hymn. Suddenly the idea that God had walked the earth as Christ “appeared trifling & absurd,” and “for a few minutes I disbelieved the whole Christian System” and felt drawn back toward the “Deistic temptation.” Two weeks later, bemoaning a journey that would take him away from his flock, he again felt his faith wobble. “[W]hat a strange Medley of faith & unbelief I am … And if it were intelligible I should say; I had been believingly disbelieving; or unbelievingly Believing.” That he could at once feel such a deep commitment to Christian fellowship and yet doubt its very basis made the experience all the more baffling—and important.

William Alcott was a prolific writer, focusing on education and health reform. Robert H. Abzug features him as one of the “body reformers” in Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (1994), describing the evangelical Alcott as offering a sort of supplemental Christian redemption through control of the body, promoting rigid dietary practices and physical regimens that became almost like a new Mosaic law. But among the many books that Alcott published under his own name is an anonymous one that scholars have overlooked: My Progress in Error, and Recovery to Truth (1842), an autobiographical account of his decade-long struggle with religious skepticism in the 1820s. As a young man he modeled himself on Benjamin Franklin. Although he regularly attended church and even taught Sunday school, “passing” as a Christian, he doubted or disbelieved the doctrines he heard and taught. He cultivated the habit of critically examining anything he was supposed to trust according to tradition or current public opinion; he enjoyed pondering paradoxes and debating religious and philosophical issues in taverns. Keeping his true sentiments hidden from his neighbors, he secretly corresponded with liberal Unitarians in Boston and became well acquainted with Owenite Free Enquirers. Reading Fanny Wright’s lectures to his family, he was moved to tears and was tempted to become an apostle of religious skepticism and free inquiry. Even after his conversion to Christianity, Alcott found himself occasionally wandering back into the wilderness of doubt. More importantly, in his later career as a health and education reformer he recognized lingering “habits of thinking, and feeling, and reasoning, and acting, formed in the school of skepticism.”

The accumulation of such stories—not just as religious biographies but as tiles in a larger mosaic of American cultural politics—suggests that those habits lingered in the broader society as well. By the time Abraham Lincoln had turned from his earlier skepticism about Christianity to see himself as an instrument of Providence, and Christian soldiers in North and South marched righteously off to war, the triumph of American faith over deists, infidels, and doubters can seem complete. But the nature of that faith, and the manner of its triumph, calls out for more free inquiry.

Further Reading:

On Ezra Stiles, see Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor (New Haven, 1783). See also Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999): chapter 5, and Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles (New Haven, 1962). Three important studies of American religious history in this period are Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); and Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford and New York, 2002). Quotations are from “Communications. Prossimo,” The Free Enquirer (Dec. 3, 1828); Orestes A. Brownson, Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted (1884), in The Works of Orestes A. Brownson (New York, 1966): IV, 315; “Infidelity,” Christian Register (July 18, 1829): 114; “Scepticism and Infidelity,” Christian Secretary (Oct. 4, 1839): 2-3; M. Stuart, “Article I. The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels, by Andrews Norton,” The American Biblical Repository (April 1838): 265-343; Gardner Jones, “Infidelity—Its Consequences!” The Catholic Telegraph (June 27, 1834): 244-6; “Natural History of Enthusiasm,” The Spirit of the Pilgrims (May 1830): 256-79, quotation on 277; Franklin L. Baumer, Religion and the Rise of Scepticism (New York, 1960): 4; William Smyth Babock, “Declaration of the Christian Revelation Made Friday Evening January 16th 1800 at Weathersfield Vermont” (“boundless dream of Doubt”) and “Journal,” William Smyth Babock Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.; other quotations are from journal entries for July 28, 1801; Aug. 21, 23, and 26, 1801; and Sept. 7, 1801.

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

Christopher Grasso is the editor of The William and Mary Quarterly and a professor of history at the College of William and Mary. He is the author most recently of “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 95:1 (June 2008): 43-68.

Here’s why I was holding back my experiences at the NYC tea party from earlier this week:

The night turned chilly as dusk settled into darkness, and a dampness hung in the air from the rain that had fallen earlier in the day. In a sea of citizens who said they were fighting for freedom, I saw young men dressed as American Indians. I saw tea being brandished in protest. And I heard plenty of anger about taxes and tyranny.

This wasn’t Boston on Dec. 16, 1773. I was in New York City on April 15, 2009.

Read the rest in the Washington Post Outlook section.

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

Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.

A Currier & Ives lithograph from the early 1860s captioned “WHAT IS IT? OR ‘MAN MONKEY’” provides a telling illustration of nineteenth-century curiosity. Its title refers to the diminutive, stooped, black figure standing in the center of the image. But it might also describe the response of the white spectators who surround him and are invited to question the nature of this “most singular animal” combining “characteristics of both the HUMAN and BRUTE species.” The image thus hints at the kinds of things the U.S. public would have considered curious, as well as the ways the public expressed its curiosity. In the nineteenth century, the showman P. T. Barnum transformed the longstanding practice of exhibiting human curiosities into a profitable business. As the lithograph promoting the attractions in Barnum’s American Museum demonstrates, freak shows were considered acceptable entertainment for consumers from across the social spectrum, including women and children. It also suggests that human exhibitions provided opportunities for exchange between viewer and spectacle. In contrast to displays of inanimate objects, living curiosities were expected to interact with the customers who paid to see them.

In the lithograph, the spectators stand close to the What Is It? but they still maintain a respectful distance; they look but they do not touch. This scene differs markedly from accounts of white working-class and African American spectators, who had little concern for the polite conventions obeyed by more elite museum goers. Their more rowdy displays of curiosity were particularly volatile in the case of racial exhibits like the What Is It?, which raised questions about the humanity of black people precisely at the moment when the U.S was poised on the verge of civil war over the question of slavery. The What Is It? was advertised as a hybrid of man and monkey discovered in a distant and exotic place that was “the wilds of California” when the exhibit toured in London, but was more often said to have been discovered in Africa. Although the creature was often represented as “docile . . . and playful as a kitten,” he belonged to roughly the same genre as the more menacing wild men, savages, and cannibals promoted by Barnum and other showmen of the time.

The wild man was a stock sideshow personality, along with other common types such as fat ladies, tattooed people, giants, and midgets. During the period of their greatest popularity (roughly 1840-1940), freak shows consistently trafficked in representations of people of color that combined pedagogy and entertainment, pseudoscientific jargon, and fantastic hyperbole. In doing so, they offered simplified answers to the pressing concerns about race that would have preoccupied their predominantly white audiences, already anxious about slavery and its aftermath, the great waves of seemingly inassimilable immigrants, and imperial expansion. Freak show savages offered a simple equation of race with monstrous bodily deviance. As the black body in front of them was transformed into a hypervisible spectacle, audience members could believe that they in turn blended together into a transparent, homogenous whiteness. Those most anxious about their own status as citizens applauded the reassuring vision of nonwhite bodies that absolutely could not be assimilated.

Indeed, whether presented as foolish and docile or wild with rage and bloodlust, the unassimilability of the dark-skinned body was the dominant message conveyed by the racial freak. As W.C. Thompson explained in his 1905 memoir, On the Road with a Circus, “[T]he original circus wild man, the denizen of Borneo, was white, but his successors have almost invariably had dark skins.” The predictability of such connections between wildness and dark skin was confirmed by journalist Scott Hart, who noted as late as 1946 in the popular miscellany Coronet, “[M]ost Wild Men from Borneo are amiable Negro boys from about the circus lot who are trained to growl, flash a set of fake tusks and eat raw meat . . . The Wild Man is always from Borneo. The Bear Woman is from the darkest wilds of Africa. The Pinheaded Man is from the jungle-ridden regions of Somewhere.” The formulaic print “ethnographies” that often accompanied these exhibits associated wildness with remote geographical locales. An undated pamphlet on Waino and Plutano, the Wild Men of Borneo who were exhibited between 1852 and 1905, for example, informed the reader, “Borneo is an island so large that England, Ireland, and Scotland might be set down in the middle of it. The interior of this vast island is a dense forest, inhabited by a race of humanity very little different from the animal creation.” Couched in pedagogical terms, such explanatory narratives perpetuated commonly held assumptions about the physical and cultural otherness of non-Western and non-white people.

In contrast to the presentation of physically disabled freaks, who during the course of their performance might answer questions, lecture the audience about their unusual bodies, or demonstrate their capacity to perform everyday activities, the wild man was deliberately inarticulate, his snarls and roars a sign of his absolute inability to communicate through language. “I was all stripped ‘cept around the middle and wore a claw necklace; had to make out as if I couldn’t talk. ‘Twas mighty tiresome to howl and grin all day,” recalled a former wild man quoted in Thompson’s memoir. Sometimes eating raw meat, biting the heads off live animals, or drinking blood, the wild man’s voracious and indiscriminate appetite epitomized western audiences’ understanding of “savage.” Often described in the terms of popular evolutionary science as a “missing link,” wild men (including the docile What Is It?) were said to come from a lost species located somewhere on the developmental chain between human and beast. While such acts were a regular part of low-budget traveling carnivals, they were equally popular in more reputable venues such as World’s Fairs and museums and among middle-class audiences such as the group in the lithograph.

Authenticity was always an important part of the freak show’s promotional rhetoric, which advertised exhibits as LIVE! TRUE! REAL! GENUINE! Despite such hyperbolic claims of veracity, the exotic act was the most easily and regularly fabricated of all attractions. More often than not, those advertised as Zulu warriors, Wild Men from Borneo, and Dahomeans were actually people of color from local urban centers. Although a number of men played the part of Barnum’s What Is It?, the most famous and longstanding was William Henry Johnson, a developmentally disabled black man from New Jersey. The journalist William C. Fitzgerald noted the financial benefits of such fraudulence in an 1897 Strand Magazine article on side shows: “Certainly it is far easier and cheaper to engage and ‘fit-up’ as the ‘Cuban Wonder’ an astute individual from the New York slums, than to send costly missions to the Pearl of the Antilles in search of human curiosities.” The memoirs of former sideshow managers and employees are unapologetic about the fabrication of ethnographic freaks. Indeed, the creation of a wild man is a recurrent chapter in the formulaic genre of the carnival memoir. Hart told the following story:

On a platform before the tent a tense, narrow-cheeked man related how the unfortunate individual from Borneo knew the whereabouts of neither father, mother, nor home, and that five thousand dollars would be paid anyone providing such information. Inside the tent, a fat rural woman said, “Oh, ain’t that awful!” A child asked, “You reckon he can get out?” But when dinnertime came, the Wild Man was taken to meet a distinguished local circus fan and his wife. In the ensuing pleasantries, he created a very happy social impression. With professional awareness, however, the Wild Man failed to mention that he came from South Carolina.

Hart reveled in the discrepancy between the exhibit’s deliberately mystified promotional rhetoric and the mundane, but quite respectable, activities of the Wild Man upon leaving the display platform. But other stories demonstrated a less salutary arrangement between performers and their managers. Thompson described the career of Calvin Bird, “a negro who hailed from Pearson, GA [who] toured most of the country, mystifying all who saw him and sending them away impressed with a conviction that he was all he was represented to be. Not until he appeared at a Syracuse hospital with a request that his horns be removed was the secret of his unnatural appearance disclosed. Under his scalp was found inserted a silver plate, in which stood two standards. In these, when he was on exhibition, Bird screwed two goat horns.” In contrast to the comfortable arrangement between Hart’s wild man and his promoters, Bird suffered bodily harm for the sake of his act, the victim of abusive surgeons and greedy showmen. Bird’s harrowing experience led Thompson to conclude, “[T]he life of the professional wild man is an unhappy one at best.”

Such anecdotal evidence bespeaks the pragmatic, and often cruel, opportunism of sideshow managers, who cared only about the lucrative consequences of maintaining a steady supply of unique and varied attractions. Accounts of their fraudulence are numerous and unsurprising. After all, it was the showman’s job to create illusions that amused and deceived his customers, and the wild man conformed to prevailing beliefs about racial inferiority. The standard was set by P. T. Barnum, who began his career in 1835 by exhibiting a racial freak, the elderly, disabled slave named Joice Heth who claimed to be the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington. A black woman whose body was contorted with age and years of hard labor was easily transformed into a sensation through Barnum’s skillful publicity campaign. When an autopsy following Heth’s death revealed her to be no more than eighty, Barnum deflected controversy by professing himself the victim of a hoax devised by Heth and her former owners. Barnum’s autobiographical writings provide different and somewhat contradictory accounts of these events, but they are consistently uninterested in proving that Heth was what she claimed to be. In some versions, Barnum conspires with Heth to deceive the public, while in others he is innocent, but in each version he establishes humbug as the rule rather than the exception in the showman’s trade.

These examples attest to the discrepancy between black actor and stage persona. But while it is not particularly surprising to find that racial freaks were actually local people of color tricked out in costume, the audiences’ role defies our expectation: rather than credulous, audiences seemed rarely to believe what they saw. For instance, having viewed the What is It? at Barnum’s Museum in 1854, the New York lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong opined, “Some say it’s an advanced chimpanzee, others that it’s a cross between nigger and baboon. But it seems to me clearly an idiotic negro dwarf, raised, perhaps, in Alabama or Virginia. The showman’s story of capture (with three other specimens that died) by a party in pursuit of the gorilla on the western coast of Africa is probably bosh.” Strong distinguished himself from more credulous observers by describing the showman’s fantastic account of peril and adventure as “bosh.”

Such skepticism was common among diverse groups of patrons, but the most striking responses were registered by black spectators. In numerous instances, African Americans looked with suspicion and disbelief at racist performances, refused to enter into their fiction, and loudly enjoined the audience into collective incredulity. In his 1913 biography, circus veteran George Middleton wrote, “In the side show we have a big negro whom we had fitted up with rings in his nose, a leopard skin, some assagais and a large shield made out of cows’ skin. While he was sitting on stage in the side show, along came two negro women and remarked, ‘See that nigger over there? He ain’t no Zulu, that’s Bill Jackson. He worked over here at Camden on the dock. I seen that nigger often.’ Poor old Bill Jackson was as uneasy as if he was sitting on needles, holding the shield between him and the two negro women.”

The women in Middleton’s anecdote disrupted the exhibition by speaking directly to the stage. The gesture of recognition–”I know you!”–dispelled the illusion of the wild man’s absolute otherness, relocating him within the community of onlookers. Instead of a Zulu, he was Bill Jackson; rather than hailing from Africa, he was a dock worker from New Jersey. The account humorously transforms the shield intended as a sign of tribal savagery into a barrier to protect the guilty man from the female customers he was supposed to terrify.

Such examples invite us to turn from an analysis of the content of freak exhibition to questions of spectatorship. The racism of wild men and cannibal acts was crude and obvious, but why were audiences so ready to interrupt these performances? The freak show implicitly situated the viewer in a particular relationship to its content; however the response of actual spectators did not always conform to structural expectations. In the scenes I have described, the cry of recognition utterly disrupted the action taking place onstage and provoked the audience to join in a ritual of communal disbelief. It was impossible for the wild man to continue beyond that moment, for his act depended on the illusion of his absolute inscrutability. Only during a live encounter can the viewer’s response register with and alter the course of the dramatic action. An important ingredient in the audience’s enjoyment of freak shows seems to have been precisely this capacity to actively deconstruct the visual evidence presented to them. The combination of interruption, misidentification, and the possibility of fraudulence contributed considerably to the show’s appeal.

The pleasures of unmasking were part of a broader nineteenth-century preoccupation with the figure of the confidence man, whose reliance on trickery and deception was the unsavory counterpart to the Horatio Alger story of legitimate success gained through hard work and ingenuity. Barnum’s hoaxes ingenuously tapped into the public appreciation for the pleasures of questioning, debate, and evaluation. Ferreting out deception at the freak show doubtless filled audiences with satisfaction in their ability to distinguish between a scam and the real thing. George Templeton Strong took manifest pride in recognizing the What is It? as an ordinary African American and not a missing link. But even more striking were the scenes of recognition that addressed racial boundaries and identifications among African Americans, who uniquely stood on both sides of the stage as viewers and performers. A black audience contemplating the spectacle of a black man performing as an African savage would have a particularly savvy understanding of the slippery nature of theatrical representation. To hail the savage as “one of us” would be unacceptable because it threatened to equate African American spectators with the professed barbarism of Africa. But to stop the savage performer in his tracks gave the lie to that equation and, in the process, substantiated the power of the black “gaze”: a subversive rejection of the freak show’s conventional wisdom.

Revisiting these anecdotes tells us something about nineteenth-century curiosity, but also about our own attitudes towards spectatorship, consumption, and desire. While we no longer exhibit people of color as freaks, white audiences continue to enjoy the spectacle of African American basketball players, dancers, and musicians. Black spectators still confront the dilemmas of identification when they see black film and TV actors relegated to idiotic, exaggerated, or marginal roles. Greater access to media industries has enabled black comedians, filmmakers, actors, and activists to respond critically to racial stereotypes. At the same time, contemporary spectacles are far more carefully choreographed and insulated against the kinds of spontaneous outbursts that disrupted nineteenth-century performances. Looking to the past reminds us that, while curiosity may remain a constant, its forms and objects change over time. We may also realize the importance of focusing our own curious gaze not only on the objects, but on the complex responses of the onlooker who contemplates them.

Further Reading:

For more academic studies of the freak show, see Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago, 2001); Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago, 1985); Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York, 1997); James Cook Jr.  The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, 2001); Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York, 1997); Bernth Lindfors, ed.,  Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington, 1999) and “P. T. Barnum and Africa,” Studies in Popular Culture 7 (1984); Robert Rydell,  All the World’s A Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 1984); Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture (New York, 1996) and Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York, 1996). Fredrick Drimmer’s Very Special People (New York, 1983); Daniel Mannix’s Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others (San Francisco, 1990); and James Taylor and Kathleen Kotcher’s Shocked and Amazed: On and Off the Midway (Gilforld, Conn., 2002) are extensively illustrated, readable overviews written from the perspective of freak show fans. On the life and career of P. T. Barnum, see Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 1997); Neil Harris,  Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago, 1973); Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt,  P. T. Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman (New York, 1995); Benjamin Reiss,  The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, 2001); A.H. Saxton,  P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York, 1989); and Barnum’s own autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs (1869; rpt. New York, 1970).

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

Rachel Adams is associate professor of English at Columbia University.

The Blue Planet we call it now that we can see our earth from space. The Great Ocean—Moana, the Pacific—covers a quarter of the globe’s surface and gives the planet its blueness. Six thousand years ago the greater part of the ocean was without people. Its islands were without the vegetation that would make them comfortably habitable.

The story of how people have encompassed this ocean is most remarkable. I would like to tell it in part.

For forty thousand years—sixteen hundred generations—peoples had penetrated the western edge of this ocean down a corridor of islands—a “voyaging corridor” Geoffrey Irwin, the New Zealand sailor-archeologist, has called it—that reaches a thousand kilometers into the southwest Pacific. Papua-New Guinea, Bismark Archipelago, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Santa Cruz are the islands’ names we now use—in the creole of exploratory language. They are intervisible, or are near enough to one another to give signs of their presence. They lie in a sort of shelter band between the northerly and southerly cyclone belts.

For forty thousand years—probably more—these islands of the voyaging corridor had been settled to the last headlands. We have no name for these settlers. I will call them the Sea People of the West. For forty thousand years these Sea People lived on the edge of Moana, the Great Ocean. All the islands of this Great Ocean, to their north, east, and south were empty of humanity. About six thousand years ago, that was about to change.

On this eastern edge of the Sea Peoples of the West venturing down the voyaging corridor, systems of weather and seasons reached out over them from the Asian regions behind them. But also on this eastern edge, they caught the weather and seasons created by the vastness of the Great Ocean. Looking east, the wind, and the sea with the wind, beat regularly into their faces from northerly and southerly directions. But from their backs the monsoonal seasons drove westerly against the regular easterlies. It was an annual cycle easily remembered. But there were other cycles every four or seven years, when the west winds won more easily and frequently over the east winds. We, the urbanized of the twenty-first century, who live so far from the more particular signs of seasons and change, have only recently come to recognize these other cycles. We call them El Niño. Six thousand years ago the fishermen on the far eastern edge of the Pacific on the coasts of Peru would have recognized the catastrophic consequences of El Niño, in the warming of their waters, and the equally disastrous opposite, El Niña, their cooling.

Nearly as far as one could be away from Peruvian waters on the Pacific, other fishermen would have recognized these ordinary and extraordinary cycles in the weather. The cycles gave these seamen a westerly reach against an easterly regularity. The cycles gave these seamen a security that made their adventuring possible. They could sail to the east on a westerly with the assurance that an easterly would bring them home.

About six thousand years ago, after who knows how many exploratory attempts, settlement voyagers reached out across the twelve hundred kilometers of open sea to the island clusters of Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. For three thousand years, these peoples made a homeland of the sea enclosed by Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. Hava’iki, they called it. They sailed the circuit of the sea with confidence. They traded. They raided. They adventured. They were blue water sailors. Their bodies responded to the sea’s demand on them. They were the largest humans on earth. They were survivors in wet and cold. They were at home on the sea, day and night and in all seasons. They learned that with the horizon all around them and a vessel in motion, the old land order no longer prevailed.

I take the liberty of inventing a name for this people who made this next step to Hava’iki. I call them the Sea People. Such a name is not really mine to invent either by right of scholarly knowledge or by right of a historical past that is mine. Scholars with far more knowledge than I have other names for my Sea People: Austronesians, Archaeo-Polynesians. The islanders of the Northern, Southern, and Central Pacific, whose ancestors the Sea People are, as yet have no name for them, though I ride a wave of their energy as they seek a name in the past that will give them identity in the present. They seek a name for the ocean habitat that is theirs.  Pacific, South Seas, Polynesia, even Oceania are not theirs. Sea of Islands, they are suggesting, is a name that taps a mythic consciousness of themselves. Both the Sea and its Islands raise poetry, song, dance, story, history, and politics in them. I have a story to tell of how, two thousand years ago, voyagers moved out of their homeland, Hava’iki, to the far eastern edge of Moana, the Great Ocean. It is the most remarkable voyage of discovery and settlement in all human history. My story, with all the clumsiness with which I enter somebody else’s metaphor, is how a Sea People made a Sea of Islands out of a sea of islands

A Most Remarkable Voyage

The Pleiades have risen. The Mataiki, Little Eyes, are into the second of their four-month stay in the sky. The season of plenty is in harvest. The west winds are reaching further into the east against the prevailing north- and south-easterlies. The voyaging time has begun. They are well ready.

One hundred and fifty generations ready. Three millennia ready. The millennia have given this sea people an artefact of cultural genius, their va’a, their canoe. (Canoe is a word that comes to us from Christopher Columbus and the Caribbean.  Va’a is our Sea of Islands word.) Their va’a is a thing imprinted with millennia of experience as generations find the woods, the fibers, the resins that pull and strain, resist work fatigue and rotting, seal. Their va’a is a thing of very precise design, of curves that give strength, of asymmetric shapes that play wind and water against one another, of structured balances that avoid congestion of strain, of aerodynamics that free it to fly along the wind.

It is the way of such artifacts that the real genius lies in simplicity. For the va’a three things made it unique in the inventiveness of humankind in mastering the sea environment. A lug. A triangular sail. An outrigger. The lug, a projection on the inside of the hull, perforated so that cordage could be pulled through, makes it possible to compress all parts of the va’a together. The triangular sail, without masts or stay, pivoting on its head, held high by a prop, creates a self-steering vessel without need of rudder or pulleys. These days we see the windsurfers exploit its simplicity and speed. The outrigger on the windward side, fitted to the hull by means of the lug, gives stability and maneuverability. The double va’a, va’a tauna, removed the need of the outrigger and by means of a platform over the two hulls, perhaps four meters wide and thirteen meters long, allows the vessel to carry fifty to eighty people, a shelter, a sand fire-pit, and cargo of up to thirty thousand kilograms.

With Mataiki’s rising come also Na Kao, Orion’s brightest star, and Muri, the Follower of Pleiades. All these stars beckon to the northeast. In the west on the opposite horizon Metau-o Maui, Scorpius, and Maitiki, Sagittarius, are setting. So there is an arc of light over the corridor of warm waters to the northeast. The sea experts among them know every step and stage of that arc, especially the stars that stand in zenith over their homeland. The zenith stars would be like beacons beckoning them back.

Let us say that there are four families and two male servants on the va’a tauna—ten adults and three or four children. One of the males is a tuhuna pu’e, a sea expert. One is a toa, warrior. One or more is a fisherman. They know that they will only survive in their new land on fish till their crops take hold. On a trip so dangerous, all the males have the skills and capacity to work the va’a in company—steering, paddling, sailing, repairing, and bailing. The women bring their craft skills with them—bark-cloth making, weaving, food gathering, and producing.

They must cater for a voyage of three or four weeks. They must have food and water for these weeks, some extra materials—lashing, matting, stays for replacement—and the tools to manage breakages. They must have bailers and paddles. They must have their domestic utensils of wood, stone, and shell for the trip itself and then for their settlement. They will want to bring what is precious for them: their ornaments, their sacred things, their tiki, maybe even their house posts. They will need all the roots, seeds, cuttings for their new island home: tiare slips, gourd seeds, bamboo shoots, aue roots, autetwigs, temanu nuts, and many other green shoots and tubers.

My story takes this settlement voyage on a northern loop around the great island screen of the Tuamotu, and the central Tahitian islands that they screen. The northerly voyage is seven thousand kilometers. A southerly loop would be just as dramatic and just as long.

As they set out, the crew must provide for the possibility that they will be thirty, maybe forty, nights at sea. Experience would have told them that the west winds are not constant. Wind direction will fluctuate in a day’s sailing. Inevitably for most of the time they will be sailing into or across the wind. They will be wet nearly all the time. They would have known that survival would mean maintaining their body heat, especially the women. Their body size will be their living capital. They will need daily to consume 1/50th of their weight to maintain their body heat.

If they set their course on the rising of Na Kao, ‘Ana-Muri (Aldebran), and Mataiki, they move to the northeast. These will be the star settings for travel from Samoa to Pukapuka for the next two millennia. As they tack across the northeasterly trade wind that constantly returns, they inevitably move east-northeast. They are on a course that curves them to islands they will come to call Fenua’enata, the Land of the People. Since 1595 Euro-American strangers have called these islands the Marquesas.

They land on the lee side of an island they will come to call Ua Huka. No doubt the myriad of sea birds on the islet near their landing finally attracts them there. It is a dry landscape that they see, but there is a stream and a beach to land on behind the rocky headlands. There is no reef. That will be their first surprise. They must become fishermen in ways they had never been before.

The narrow valley behind the beach leads back to the heights of the island. In time they will fill the valley with their houses. But not now. Now they must stay near the beaches and the sea. Shellfish and sea greens are there in abundance. They can wade the waters of the bay and cast their nets. They have lines and hooks for fishing off the rocks. In these first days—months? years?—they are a gathering people over again. They will have disassembled their va’a tauna. It is their lifeline, in their minds a means of escape, if their island proves more dangerous than it seems on their arrival. The island must have seemed barren. The basic foliage and undergrowth would have been familiar. Sea, wind, and birds had brought most of it from further west than they had come. Already through the millennia these plant and insect voyagers had begun to fill all the niches in the environment in new ways and to make new island species. The settlers must have looked closely at it to make their old life out of new things. Women looked for their oils and seeds and resins and barks that would heal, comfort, ornament, and clothe themselves and their children. The tuhuna, the experts, among them would have scavenged the vegetation for the materials of their crafts. No doubt, in the way of every migrant that ever was, their images of Hava’iki, their homeland, grew greener and richer.

These Sea People are not in their land more than two or three hundred years when they are restless for discovery. They follow the Golden Plover into the Northern Hemisphere and on to Hawai’i. We do not know what takes them on to the loneliest island in the Great Ocean, Rapanui. They are there a thousand years before the Dutch give it the name of Easter Island. The spill of the wind takes their va’a to Tahiti. The annual procession of millions of yolla—the shearwater, the mutton-birds—takes them even further, to Aotearoa (New Zealand).

The most momentous discovery in my personal intellectual life has been the discovery that the past belongs not so much to us who spend our lives trying to uncover it as to those on whom it impinges. The past impinges on the modern descendants of the Sea People by inspiring them to re-enact the voyaging triumphs of their ancestors.

Way-finding is the word that modern islanders use to describe their craft and the craft of their ancestors in piloting their voyaging canoes around the Great Ocean, the Pacific. They prefer to call themselves way-finders rather than navigators. Navigation is a more universal science of instruments and the application of systems of time and space as broad as the cosmos itself. Way-finding is an interpretive craft closer to the signs the systems of the cosmos imprint on the environment. No navigator, certainly none of the preeminence of a James Cook let us say, would distance himself from the myriad of signs in sea and sky, in wind and water, that tell him where he is. But a navigator has the security that the system he applies in his voyaging has a life outside him, in a book, an instrument, and a map. For a way-finder no knowledge, no image is stilled either in time or in space. The temperature of the water, the movement of the waves, the seasons of the stars, the patterns of the winds, the habits of the birds are all in his head. And it is a knowledge that comes to him not through his own experience alone. It comes to him down through the ages of his line of masters and apprentices. A way-finder finds his way with style, as a surfboarder rides his wave with style. No voyage is ever the same. His way is always different, but always ruled by his confidence that he will find it.

I prefer, I must confess, to be a way-finder than a navigator in all my voyaging through learning and knowledge in all my storytelling. Metaphors are the trade winds of my mind. Models are the doldrums.

For thirty years now the Sea People have pulled on their Deep Time consciousness and have been voyaging the Sea of Islands in re-enactment of the voyages of the People of Old. They have sailed from Hawai’i to Tahiti and back, from Tahiti to Samoa, Tonga, Aotearoa. Their most recent triumphs have been their voyages from Fenua’enata to Hawai’i. There are now six voyaging canoes in the Sea of Islands.

These thirty years of this odyssey have had their pain and conflict, their tragedies and failures, their political machinations, their greed and their absurdities. But they also have been courageous overall triumphs, tapping a wellspring of cultural pride in a sense of a continuing voyaging tradition. These voyages have been the theater of the Sea of Islands these Sea People have encompassed.

Further Reading:

Epeli Hau’ofa inspired the name Sea of Islands for the Pacific in A New Oceania: Rediscovery of our Sea of Islands (Suva, 1993). Those who write of the Sea of Islands from outside are happy to use the name. It gives a sense of identity to those who are the descendants of the great voyages that peopled this vast ocean space.

The scholars of archaeological, anthropological, historical, and cultural studies, Patrick Kirch and Roger Green have led us all in their studies of ancestral Polynesia. Their most recent contribution is Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia (Cambridge, 2001). Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Roads of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands (Berkeley, 2000) offers a comprehensive study of the issues advanced here. The studies of Andrew Pawley, Malcolm Ross, and Darrell Tryon on comparative linguistics and of Adrian Horridge on the Sea People’s va’a in Peter Bellwood, James J. Fox, and Darrell Tryon, eds., The Austronesians (Canberra, 1995) make the foundations for the story of the most remarkable voyage from Hava’iki to Fenua’enata. Geoffrey Irwin, The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific (Cambridge, 1992) outlines the debate on all issues concerning voyaging in the Pacific.

Ben Finney tells the story of the intellectual debate and cultural achievements of the voyaging canoes’ re-enactment in Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey Through Polynesia (Berkeley, 1994) and Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors: Reviving Polynesian Voyaging (Honolulu, 2003).

All students of Sea-of-Islands voyaging are in debt to the brilliant studies of Thomas Gladwin, East is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Pulawal Atoll (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) and David Lewis, We the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfalling in the Pacific (Canberra, 1972).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

Greg Dening is adjunct professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia. Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self (Melbourne and Philadelphia, 2004) is his latest book.

James Mario Matra was born James, the son of James and Elizabeth Magra, in New York in 1746. His father was a member of the prominent Corsican Matra family, which was much involved in the conflict that wracked that island in the eighteenth century. The elder James Matra went to Ireland, seemingly in the early 1730s, where he changed his name, and where he presumably acquired his medical knowledge. 

In company with the fellow doctors John Brett and Thomas Rodman, James Magra migrated to New York sometime towards the end of the 1730s. At first, he “kept school”; but about 1740 he was licensed to practice medicine. According to contemporary accounts, he was a person of “austere manners and original views,” and in time he gained a very considerable reputation, becoming a doctor preferred by prominent citizens. With the income from his practice and by astute investments, Matra acquired considerable wealth. In reporting his death on April 13, 1774, the New York Gazetteer described him as “a gentleman of great learning and a physician of the most exalted eminence, which has been experienced by many thousands upon the American Continent.”

The Magras had three sons: Redmond, born about 1738; James; and Perkins, born a year or two after James. Redmond seems to have been an unprincipled adventurer who traded illegally with Native Americans, was cashiered from his regiment, and served at least one period in jail. Perkins too joined the British army, in which he had a long, if not particularly distinguished, career. Between 1791 and 1804, he was consul at Tunis.

The details of the early life of James Magra the Younger are obscure. One of his friends recorded that he was educated in England, but where and when remain unknown. He first appears in history on May 1, 1761, towards the end of the Seven Years’ War, when he joined the Fowey (24 guns and 160 men) at New York, in the capacity of captain’s servant. Under the command of Captain George Tonyn, this ship escorted a convoy to England in May and June.

Magra then followed Tonyn into the Brune (32 guns and 220 men). For the next two years, he saw service in the English Channel, off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and in the Mediterranean.

On the concluding of peace, Magra returned to New York, where in July 1764 he joined the Hawke sloop (10 guns and 80 men) as a midshipman. For the next twenty-four months, he saw mundane service off the east coast. In September 1766 he joined the Coventry as an able-bodied seaman (AB), sailing to Spithead at the end of 1767. After being paid off in February 1768, he went to Dublin, where he joined the Rose, from which he was discharged at his own request in London on July 17. One week later (July 25, 1768), Magra signed as AB on the Endeavour, then about to depart under the command of Lieutenant James Cook on a voyage to the Pacific Ocean. On board also were the botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, who were to influence significantly the course of European science; and the astronomer Charles Green, whom Cook was to assist in observing the transit of Venus due to occur on June 3, 1769, from the newly discovered island of Tahiti.

Endeavour left Portsmouth on August 26, 1768. After refreshing at Rio de Janeiro, Cook took it south about Cape Horn, west into the Pacific, then northwest through the Tuamotu Archipelago to Tahiti, which he reached in mid-April. For the next twelve weeks, the Europeans familiarized themselves with the island, being greatly stuck by its fertility and the inhabitants’ overt sexuality. Cook and Charles Green duly observed the transit of Venus across the face of the sun; and Banks and Solander botanized enthusiastically. 

On July 13, Cook took the Endeavour out to sea again. Pursuing his additional secret instructions, he searched for the supposed Terra Australis Incognita in the southern Pacific Ocean without success. He reached New Zealand at the beginning of October. For the next six months, he circumnavigated the two large islands, charting their coasts diligently. Then, deciding that the ship was too worn to withstand a winter passage east past Cape Horn, he struck northwest for the unknown eastern coast of New Holland, which he reached on April 19. Proceeding north, Cook spent a week in Botany Bay (about twelve miles to the south of the present Sydney), where Banks and Solander began to understand the uniqueness of Australian biota. 

After the ship had run upon a coral reef, Cook spent some weeks repairing it (at the present Cooktown, in Far North Queensland). On August 23, 1770, he took possession for Britain of all the coast, which he named New South Wales. Passing west through Torres Strait, he reached Batavia at the beginning of October, where many of his crew sickened and died. Crossing the Indian Ocean and going up the Atlantic Ocean, the Endeavour reached England again in mid-July 1771.

The records of the voyage are mostly silent about Matra. Years later, in the aftermath of the Bounty mutiny, he claimed that at Tahiti he had both dissuaded some of the crew from a similar rebellion, and hatched such a scheme himself: “Something like what Bligh’s People did, was designed by most of the People of the Endeavour . . . They were for remaining—which in truth prevented 2 or 3 gentlemen from doing so. When the Scheme was discovered, the only successful Argument against it was the Pox—the disease being there, their getting it certain & dying rotten most probable, was what I insisted on, & it turned the Scale, otherwise Cook with the two superior Messes, must have found his way home, had the Ship been spared. Had the Men not formed such a Scheme, I was ringleader among a few who had prepared for remaining.” However, Matra was prone to self-aggrandizement, and we have only his word that these plots were laid.

The only moment when Matra figures in Cook’s journal concerns a strange happening off the eastern coast of New South Wales. Cook recorded for May 23, 1770:

Last Night some time in the Middle watch a very extraordinary affair happend to Mr Orton my Clerk, he having been drinking in the Evening, some Malicious person or persons in the Ship took the advantage of his being drunk and cut off all the cloaths from off his back, not being satisfied with this they some time after went into his Cabbin and cut off a part of both his Ears as he lay asleep in his bed. The person whome he suspected to have done this was Mr Magra one of the Midshipmen, but this did not appear to me upon inquirey. However as I know’d Magra had once or twice before this in their drunken frolicks cut of his Cloaths and had been heard to say (as I was told) that if it was not for the Law he would Murder him, these things consider’d induc’d me to think that Magra was not altogether innocent. I therefore, for the present dismiss’d him the quarter deck and susspended him for doing any duty in the Ship, he being one of those gentlemen, frequently found on board Kings Ships, that can very well be spared, or to speake more planer good for nothing.

Cook was unable to discover who the true culprit was, however, and on June 14, not finding Magra “guilty of the crimes laid to his Charge,” returned him to duty.

Historians have long suspected Magra as being the author of the first extended account of the Endeavour’s voyage, published anonymously at the end of September 1771 in contravention of the Admiralty’s ban. With more information now available about the New Yorker, it is safe to conclude that this was so. 

A Journal of a Voyage round the World shows that the author had developed interests in languages and non-European cultures and in medical and scientific matters, and was able to write both fluently and vividly. The narrative was clearly put together hastily, and its coverage of the voyage is uneven. (For example, it offers very little details of the ship’s progress north from Botany Bay to the near-fatal accident on the reef, or for the rest of the voyage.) However, it is one of the very few accounts to show any animus towards Cook; and it also offers some information not present in the more substantial records—of a quarrel between officers at Tahiti; of encounters with the Australian Aborigines; and of a dangerous moment off the coast of New Zealand:

The next morning we made sail, but the tide soon after carried us rapidly towards a cluster of rocks, projecting from an island at a small distance, and the wind failing, our situation became justly alarming. At this time one of the principal officers proposed endeavouring to cross the tide, and gain a passage between two islands; and this gentleman’s station made his proposal, though impracticable, of so much importance at this critical season, that the captain, who was about to give orders of a different kind, became irresolute; and during the dispute which this contrariety of opinion occasioned, we were carried so near the rocks that our preservation appeared almost impossible.

On his return to England, Magra passed his examination for lieutenant, but he saw no further service in the Royal Navy. Rather, in 1772 he commenced what was to become his mature career as a minor diplomat when he took up the post of British consul in the Canary Islands. At the end of 1775, he petitioned to revert to the family’s Corsican name, saying that he was “the Son of the late James Mario Matra, who afterwards assumed the name of Magra, and . . . the Heir to certain Estates of the Family of Matra.”

Seeking to rescue something of his father’s wealth from the throes of the revolution, Matra returned to New York in 1777, but this attempt failed, and thereafter the family’s fate was that common to large numbers of American loyalists, of displacement, impoverishment, and a desperate struggle to make another way in life. Between 1778 and 1780, he served as secretary to the British embassy in Constantinople, during which he pursued an interest in old coins and manuscripts, and commenced a decades-long correspondence with Sir Joseph Banks about geographical and cultural matters. 

In 1783, Matra proposed that loyalists be used to colonize New South Wales. In 1785, together with Banks, he appeared before the parliamentary committee inquiring into the idea of using convicts to do so. By then, Matra was one of the very few Europeans alive who had actually seen the region; and his views were clearly influential, for when in August 1786 the ministers of William Pitt the Younger’s first administration decided to send convicts to New South Wales, they knew they were adopting “Matra’s Plan.”

Matra hoped to be appointed governor of the new colony, but was passed over. Banks then obtained for him the consulship at Tangier. From 1787, Matra lived there or (in times of plague in Africa) at Gibraltar. During the long war with France, his principal task was to see that the Rock received regular supplies of food, without which British squadrons would not have been able to operate in the Mediterranean or off the southern coasts of Spain and Portugal. Just before his victory at Trafalgar, for example, Nelson asked Matra for all his “influence and exertion, that the Fleet may receive in every Port, Bullocks, Sheep, Poultry and every refreshment, and that they must be permitted to be embarked alive.” Because of his good success at this work, his political masters in England considered Matra too valuable a servant to lose, so that he never saw again either New York or England. The letters in which he described Morocco give a very vivid picture of the country before the European colonization of North Africa.

Matra died in Tangier on March 29, 1806. For much of his life, he had aspired to play a significant role on the great stage of the world, but he had neither the talents nor the influence to do so. In some of his more self-aware, if melodramatically expressed moments, he realized how futile it was for a “solitary fugitive” to hope “to regulate the Globe.” Nonetheless, he was involved in some momentous historical events. He enjoyed a long friendship with Banks; he dealt with St. Vincent, Nelson, and Collingwood; he circumnavigated the globe with Cook; and he was instrumental in the beginning of modern Australia. 

In proposing the colonization of New South Wales, Matra offered grand perspectives, beginning: “I am going to offer an Object, to the consideration of our Government, which may in time, atone for the loss of our American Colonies.” After briefly describing Cook’s exploration of the coast, he asserted that “the Climate, & Soil, are so happily adapted to produce every various, & valuable Production of Europe, & of both the Indias, that with good management, & a few settlers, in 20 or 30 Years they might cause a Revolution, in the whole system of European Commerce, & secure to England a monopoly of some part of it, & a very large share in the whole.” 

He continued that the region might produce spices, sugar cane, tea, coffee, silk, cotton, indigo, and tobacco. There was the New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax), the benefits of which might be considerable; and New Zealand timber might be shipped home “for the use of the King’s yards.” The country might afford an “Asylum to those unfortunate American Loyalists, to whom Great Britain is bound by every tie of honour and gratitude, to protect & support.” Settlement might lead to the development of the China trade, of the fur trade between northwestern America and Asia, and of the British trade in wool, by opening markets in Japan and Korea. As well, it would enable Britain to exercise the right it had recently obtained, to “a free Navigation in the Molucca Seas”; and it might have a distinct strategic significance.

In making these points, Matra in effect constructed a map of the world that had not been possible before Cook’s voyages: 

The place which New South Wales holds on our Globe, might give it a very commanding Influence in the policy of Europe. If a Colony from Britain, was established in that large Tract of Country, & if we were at War with Holland or Spain, we might very powerfully annoy either State from our new Settlement. We might with a safe, & expeditious Voyage, make Naval Incursions on Java, & the other Dutch Settlements, & we might with equal facility, invade the Coasts of Spanish America, & intercept the Manilla Ships, laden with the Treasures of the West. This check which New South Wales would be in time of War, on both those Powers, makes it a very important Object, when we view it in the Chart of the World, with a Political Eye.

This mental map is evidence of how, even then, the European exploration of the Pacific Ocean was giving rise to a global consciousness.

When James Boswell was leaving Corsica in 1765, General Paoli said to him, “Tell them what you have seen here. They will be curious to ask you. A man come from Corsica will be like a man come from the Antipodes.” James Matra’s life was a most curious one, during which his horizons extended from Europe and the Americas to Africa and the southern Pacific Ocean; and he helped bring the great ocean and its islands and peoples to European consciousness.

Further Reading:

J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, I: The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768-1771 (Cambridge, 1968). [Anonymous], A Journal of a Voyage round the World, in His Majesty’s Ship Endeavour, in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771 (London, 1771); Alan Frost, The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra: Voyager with Cook, American Loyalist, Servant of Empire (Melbourne, 1995).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

Alan Frost is professor of history at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His works include Arthur Phillip, 1738-1814: His Voyaging (Melbourne, 1987); Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s Convict Beginnings (Melbourne, 1994); East Coast Country: A North Queensland Dreaming (Melbourne, 1996); The Voyage of the Endeavour (Sydney, 1998); and The Global Reach of Empire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 1764-1811 (Melbourne, 2003).

Russian Alaska offers an unusual perspective from which to explore the nature of colonial relations in early North America. In the eighteenth century, when Russia drove outward from Kiev, its empire moved from west to east, first through Siberia, and eventually crossing the Pacific to Alaska. During the 1720s, Tsar Peter the Great enthusiastically initiated and sponsored Vitus Bering’s expeditions into the North Pacific Ocean. The Russian ruler wanted Bering to find out whether the Russian far eastern shore somehow connected to North America and then to forge a path for Russian expansion into that remote region, which held the interest of so many European leaders. On his first voyage, Bering sailed through the strait that now bears his name, thus showing that the Asian and American continents did not connect. During his second voyage, the explorer reached Alaska in 1741, but he died on the way home. The survivors of his second expedition returned to Siberia bringing with them news of “a great land” beyond the eastern ocean. They also brought samples of exquisite sea-otter furs that were much softer than the pelts of any other fur-bearing animal. The interest in these small marine mammals eventually became so intense that it drove Russians across an ocean all the way to Alaska. Kodiak Island became the nexus of Russian activity in America, and the trade in sea-otter pelts would shape colonial relations in the North Pacific during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

I.

When Russians first introduced sea-otter furs into their trade with China, they discovered that these pelts could reap profits well beyond those gained from any other type of fur including the fast diminishing Siberian sable. In Russia, news of the profits to be made soon sparked a rush of fur traders across the Kurile and Commander Islands directly off the coast of Kamchatka, the southern peninsula that hangs down from Siberia. Once Russian fur traders had depleted the resources in these islands near the coast, they extended the hunt further east to the Aleutian Islands, and finally, by the 1760s, to Kodiak Island, Alaska. Russians had a head start over other European colonial powers in this part of the world: in 1783, when the Connecticut Yankee John Ledyard published his accounts of the luxuriant sea-otter skins and the tremendous profits to be made from them in his accounts of Captain Cook’s third voyage, Russians had already been acquainted with the sea otters of the North Pacific for half a century.

Still, Russian fur gathering expeditions faced numerous obstacles. Vessels that carried these expeditions commonly went down in the high seas and on average approximately one-quarter to one-third of each venture’s crew perished through disease, warfare, or accident. One of the greatest challenges for the new Russian fur trade, however, was the shift from land-based to sea-based hunting. Promyshlenniki (Russian fur hunters) were adept at the land-based hunting techniques required to catch the Siberian sable, but sea otters had to be hunted in the water. This type of hunting had long been an integral element of Aleutian and Kodiak Alutiiq culture; fathers trained boys to spear animals and to balance small and efficient kayaks in chilly waters, beginning at a young age. The Russians soon recognized that they would gain greater profits if they could convince skilled native men to do the work for them. Russians took native women and children as hostages and forced fathers, brothers, and husbands to bring them valuable sea-otter pelts to assure their families’ safety. They were following a precedent for such forced “collection” of furs as tribute that the Russian Crown had formalized in its administration of Siberia.

As with so many other early European enterprises in the Americas, Russian imperial leaders watched from a distance (in this case, halfway around the world in St. Petersburg) as merchants and hopeful but destitute young men contributed the initial financial and physical investments of imperial expansion. Initially, small companies competed to collect the greatest number of furs in the shortest amount of time. But as the fur supply diminished in one area, fewer companies could afford the far-reaching range of the hunt. By the 1780s, only a few companies remained in the competition. Grigorii Shelikhov, a director of one of these companies, set sail for Kodiak Island, Alaska, where he hoped to establish a permanent settlement that would be more than a mere fur-trading post; he wanted to establish the first overseas colony of the Russian Empire. 

II.

In August 1783, three ships departed from Okhotsk carrying 192 men along with Shelikhov, his wife, and two children. One ship was lost at sea, and the two other vessels sailed south out of the Sea of Okhotsk and then north along the Kurile Islands until they reached Bering Island in the Bering Sea. The expedition rested there for the winter. Finally, the two ships arrived at Kodiak Island in August of 1784.

During the first few days of the Russian presence in the bay off Kodiak, two Alutiiq men approached Shelikhov’s ship. He wrote that he and his men welcomed them “with signs of friendship” and, as a sign of good faith, offered them items such as glass beads, tobacco, and, perhaps, needles, with which the people of Kodiak would have been familiar either from earlier Russian arrivals, or through trade with their neighbors. 

Despite initial “friendly” advances, Russians eventually pressed the men of Kodiak into work for Shelikhov’s company, after a protracted battle lasting over a month. Russians took women and children hostage, holding them captive in a long cabin along the shore. As the Russians demanded greater numbers of pelts, the sea-otter population around Kodiak soon diminished. Many Alutiiq men drowned as the Russian promyshlenniki forced them to travel further and further away from the island for progressively longer periods of time in perilous weather conditions. 

For almost every Alutiiq man who was away on these hunting expeditions, there was a woman who now continued her traditional duties but received no replacement help for male-specific tasks. Russian presence on the island severely disrupted both Alutiiq men’s and women’s daily lives, but in different ways. Alutiiq people had been accustomed to working together in partnerships; now the demands imposed on them by the Russians tore those partnerships apart. Not only were women left at home, often they were taken as hostages for weeks at a time and had to scramble in order to gather enough food for their families to eat. Many Alutiiq people almost starved during the first winters of Russian presence, as neither men nor women had time to provision their own families properly.

From the Russian imperial perspective, the 1790s proved to be a period of great growth for the little colony at Kodiak while the Alutiiq people suffered hardships. The program of expansion under the new company manager Aleksander Baranov, who arrived at Kodiak in 1791, was undoubtedly inspired by Shelikhov’s grandiose plans for an imperial colony. It included not only a new settlement at Kodiak, but also the founding of a settlement at Sitka (later the capital of Russian America) in 1801, the establishment of Fort Ross in northern California (1812) and even efforts to establish Russian outposts in the Hawaiian Islands (1815-17). 

In 1792, Baranov moved the fur-trade company headquarters from the southern bay of Kodiak, where the 1784 expedition had first approached the island, to a spot that could provide a deep harbor for trade, timber for building both houses and ships, and land for farming crops that would be pleasing to the Russian palate. The village of Pavlovskaia Gavan, or St. Paul’s Harbor (the present-day city of Kodiak on the northeast side of Kodiak Island) was named for the crown prince of Russia. The new town and initial colonial capital became one of the largest settlements in Russian America, and remained so throughout the Russian era. 

III.

At Kodiak, some Alutiiq people likely lived in fear of the Russians, but at the same time the Russians depended on the local knowledge of Alutiiq people for both economic profit and survival. While the Russians relied on native men to supply them with goods for financial profit, the remoteness of the location and lack of familiarity with the local flora and fauna made them rely almost entirely on Alutiiq women for food and daily survival. They also looked to these women for companionship and sex.

Soon after the Russians had arrived on their island, Alutiiq women had also begun working for the company. While men were out on the hunt, women prepared food for the company by drying fish on long poles and collecting berries, as well as making birdskin parkas that the company gave to the Alutiiq people to wear in exchange for their work. Russian Orthodox missionaries, who arrived on Kodiak in 1794, were shocked to find that even women nursing infants were given little leeway, and struggled to satisfy the demands of the company and perform the work that their own survival required.

If Russian men could provide access to food and clothing, and sometimes gifts, it seems likely that at least some native women would have chosen to enter into intimate relationships with them, even though their lives had become more difficult with the arrival of the Russians. Alutiiq women and Russian men had different reasons to form unions with each other. It is most likely that some women were torn from their Alutiiq partners and were sexually abused, others formed “tender” relations with Russian men, and still others chose to enter the relations out of convenience. Some Alutiiq leaders may have encouraged their daughters to form unions with Russian men, hoping to gain allies among the promyshlenniki, and perhaps better treatment of their families and village members, for whose security they were responsible. As for Russian men on Kodiak, in 1790 a leading hunter reported that some who had married native women and had children with them might wish to remain on the island permanently. Some Russian imperial officials were keenly interested in the matter of marriage between promyshlenniki and Alutiiq women. In 1794, with direct authorization from Catherine II, the Siberian governor Ivan Pil sent instructions that company managers at Kodiak should “encourage” single Russian men to marry native women. Clearly some Russian leaders earmarked intermarriage as a way to ensure the survival and success of the new colony at many different levels.

At Kodiak, St. Paul’s Harbor, or Pavlovsk, became a nativized Russian as much as it was a Russianized native settlement. In 1794, George Vancouver observed that Russian promyshlenniki “appeared to be perfectly content to live after the manner of the Native indians of the country; partaking with equal relish and appetite their . . . food, adopting the same fashion, and using the same materials for their apparel.” 

Numerous sources describe promyshlenniki “living like the natives.” But they were not only living like Alutiiq people on Kodiak, they were living together with Alutiiq women and having children. Promyshlenniki and native women lived with their children in Alutiiq style dwellings that some Russian men altered by widening the front door because they did not like the traditional narrow entrance. Inside their semisubterranean homes, these couples ate local fare: a combination of edible roots, berries, fish, and whale fat that, according to the stunned English scientist Archibald Menzies, “they devoured with uncommon relish.”

In addition to local food, Russian men adopted some Alutiiq clothing styles that their wives sewed from the furs and animal remains that the promyshlenniki received as pay from the fur-trade company. While Russian peasant men adapted their dress and diet to native styles, the home was altered in small ways to suit the needs of Russians. And beyond that, when the missionaries arrived on the island, many Alutiiq women who formed unions with Russian men converted to Russian orthodoxy so that their marriages, and therefore, their children, would be recognized as legitimate in the eyes of the Russian state. Such alterations and conversions serve as a good example of accommodations that people from divergent cultures made in colonial American contact zones. Because the Russian government had so much trouble getting Russian settlers to move permanently to Alaska, the children of Alutiiq women and Russian men would become important to the very survival of the colony. Indeed, imperial leaders came to see these children as a critical link between the state and the growing Russian colony in Alaska. In 1825, Kirill T. Khlebnikov, the governmental official and administrator in Alaska, wrote that these children “constitute a link between the Russians and the islanders, between people and savages, and between education and ignorance.” 

By the 1820s, the capital of Russian America had moved to Sitka, closer to the southeastern mainland, and into the homelands of the Tlingit people. The Russian government became increasingly interested in the daily operations of Russian America and from this time forward sent naval officers to govern the colony in a formalized manner. Russian imperial leaders laid claim to Alaska for almost a century. In the mid-nineteenth century, the colony was too costly to maintain. Before the news of Klondike gold, and long before the discovery of rich oil reserves, the Russian government surrendered lands that they had never gained permission to take in the first place. In 1867, Russian imperial leaders sold Alaska to the United States for seven million dollars.

Today, the southern coasts of Alaska remain dotted with the blue onion domes of Russian Orthodox churches, and many Alutiiq people on Kodiak Island, the first place of Russian settlement, acknowledge some Russian lineage. Indeed, the congregation of the Russian Orthodox Church comprises many Alutiiq people, some with Russian last names, and the majority of whom claim Russian ancestry. 

The experience of Alutiiq women, Russian men, and their children on Kodiak Island points to the difficulty of attempting to characterize colonial contacts as either tender or violent. In early Russian America, fur traders drove Alutiiq men to hunt in unstable boats, exposing them to the dangers of the sea, where they often perished. At the same time, many of these men formed permanent relations with Alutiiq women. 

Cultural fusions, material deprivations and dependencies, and emotional ambiguities converged in Russia’s Alaskan empire in particular, but not exceptional, ways. Colonialism is all about the kind of economic, environmental, and intimate relations that emerged from the Russian brand of fur trade. In colonial contexts the simple acts of everyday life—of working, and finding and providing food, clothing, and shelter for families—involve both violence and dependence, both coercion and compassion. As Russians and Alutiiqs discovered, the tension between these seemingly opposing forces was, and remains, the very essence of colonial ties. 

Further Reading:

George Vancouver’s remarks can be found in his A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 6 vols. (London, 1801); Menzies’s in The Alaska Travel Journal of Archibald Menzies, 1793-1794, ed. by Wallace M. Olson (Fairbanks, 1993); and Kiril T. Khlebnikhov’s in Russkaia Amerika v neopublikovannykh zapiskakh K.T. Khlebnikova, eds. R.G. Liapunova and S.G. Federova [Leningrad, 1979 (1825)]. For a comprehensive history of Russian America see, for example, Lydia Black, Russians in Alaska, 1732-1867 (Fairbanks, 2004); S. Frederick Starr ed., Russia’s American Colony (Durham, 1987); and the Library of Congress Website: Meeting of Frontiers. For information on Alutiiq peoples see, Aron L. Crowell, Amy F. Steffian, and Gordon L Pullar, eds., Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the Alutiiq People (Anchorage, 2001). For translated primary documents related to Russian America see, Basil Dmytryshyn, E.A.P. Crownhart-Vaughn and Thomas Vaughn, eds. and trans., The Russian American Colonies: 1798-1867: A Documentary Record (Portland, 1989); and their Russian Penetration of the Northern Pacific Ocean 1700-1797: A Documentary Record (Portland, 1988).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

Gwenn A. Miller is assistant professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches both early American and American Indian history from a global perspective. She completed a Ph.D. in history at Duke University in 2004 and is the author of an essay entitled “‘The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy’: Sighting the Intimate on a Colonial Alaskan Terrain, 1784-1821” in Tense and Tender Ties, ed. by Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, forthcoming 2005).

Le musée du quai Branly

Inside every French statesman there’s an intellectual fighting—or, more likely, arguing—his way out. Should you have the time and disregard for global warming, buy a plane ticket and fly away to see a new museum in Paris that proves my point. The musée du quai Branly is dedicated to non-Western art. Every outgoing French leader has to have a monumental project and Quai Branly was Jacques Chirac’s—the French call it “le musée Chirac.” Yet the first thing you see upon entering the museum is the Theatre Claude Lévi-Strauss, named for the late patriarch of French structuralist anthropology. Imagine a little, theatrical Lévi-Strauss within a big, sprawling Chirac—two big egos managing somehow to coexist. The egos are, here, in the humble service of the people whom Lévi-Strauss claimed had a “savage mind,” one neither simpler nor lesser than the mind of civilized people, just different.

In fact, it would be fitting if the entire museum of Quai Branly were named after Lévi-Strauss. The place is a monument to French intellectual culture, that glittering amalgam of brilliance and belligerence, which may be why so many people react so strongly to it. You either submit to its grandly analytic vision of things or else you get all huffily empirical—who says this vision makes sense of everything? The Quai Branly’s grand vision is simply that non-Western artifacts must be treated as art, different from Western art but equal to it. Indeed, many of the new museum’s objects were once in the musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie and in the musée de l’Homme, the latter of which had an exclusively ethnographic rationale, something the new museum shuns. The huffy empirics have duly responded: If all these things are art in the same way the stuff in the Louvre is art, why aren’t they in the Louvre, as Chirac had originally suggested they might be? Isn’t putting them in a separate museum slightly demeaning or even racist, in the manner of the old ethnographic museums that had assumed so-called primitive peoples were best explained by schemas specific to their lower level of social organization?

Strangely, the musée du quai Branly has been little discussed in the United States—I first heard about it from an Australian. (Members of Australia’s chattering classes love Quai Branly, imagining it as the equivalent of the museum of aboriginal art their country ought to have.) Yet Quai Branly’s collections of American Indian items are said to be superb, including even some items that Lévi-Strauss himself acquired. So while in Paris this October, I found the new building, wove my way through its lower gardens, queued up to buy a ticket, and then surrendered my ticket and submitted my bag for inspection at the inevitable security checkpoint. The ground floor beyond the security guards holds a temporary exhibition space, the theater, and the start of a broad spiral staircase. You make your way up the spiral slowly, as at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, though here you see only incidental placards and exhibits along the way.

The real exhibits are at the top. There, the museum’s collection of thirty-five hundred objects is grouped into areas designated for the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Each zone is separated from the next by irregularly shaped walls made of some kind of composite that looks like dried mud covered with pale, polished animal skins. The earthy partitions give the impression that each exhibit section is like the part of the earth whose peoples generated the art within.

I headed up to the American zone, which represents all parts of the Western Hemisphere, from the Arctic through the Amazon. In the hushed murmur that is the acceptable soundscape of the modern art museum, my fellow visitors and I admired paintings on animal hide, headdresses made of brilliantly colored feathers, figurative pottery, moccasins, Kachina dolls, and wampum belts. It’s quite a collection and well worth visiting, though more for the items themselves than for the way in which they are presented.

In the art museums after which the creators of the museé du quai Branley have modeled their exhibition space, each painting or sculpture has a terse item label: artist’s name (with birth and death dates), title of work (and the date of its creation or exhibition), media used in the work, inventory number that identifies the piece of art. If you want more information, you’re welcome to consult the chattier labels on the walls (which often introduce an exhibit or section) or on the cases—where groups of similar items might be interpreted at greater length than an item label allows. That’s essentially what you see here: the item labels are terse (name of artist’s ethnic group, time when item was created, inventory number), and the wall or case labels offer an idea or two for the visitor to consider.

I could see the point, yet wished there were also a button on each case, helpfully labeled “pour l’académician ennuyeux,” which would light up some hidden text that offered more information on individual items for us tedious pedants. When, exactly, had that Great Lakes wampum belt made its way into French hands? Was it presented as a gift by some Native sachem back when the French were still in North America? Or was it collected much later? When and why? I had the same questions about many items, and I didn’t see why answers to such questions would undermine the emphasis on these objects as art. Museum labels sometimes do indicate the person who originally commissioned or bought a work of art, as well as information about the object’s subsequent peregrinations. Given recent controversies over the shady provenance of many works of art, from classical antiquities to Nazi loot, publishing such details might not be a bad idea. (But given UNESCO uncertainty over the issue of repatriation of non-Western objects from Western museums, perhaps members of Quai Branly’s staff have chosen a discreet silence.)

If the case and wall labels at art museums might include some straightforward historical or aesthetic information (such as the sorts of materials or techniques used in making the art), those in Quai Branly’s American zone favored anthropological discussion. Here again, it is evident that the museum’s intellectual patron saint is Lévi-Strauss and that at least some of its curators wish to display, alongside the native artifacts, French erudition, particularly of the structuralist variety.

The structuralists in anthropology took their name from linguists who had argued that the meanings of individual words mattered less than the overall patterns or structures they formed. Hand, God, and eye are not terms that simply designate obvious objects or concepts; these words have significance only in the context of their actual use—”the hand of God,” for instance, or “the eye of the beholder.” Ethnographers similarly sought the deeper structures within which everyday cultural acts existed. Lévi-Strauss interpreted kinship in this way: mother and grandnephew are meaningful terms only because they exist within a broader web of significant social connections.

Lévi-Strauss used his fieldwork in the Americas, principally Brazil, to offer a structuralist analysis of Native Americans, specifically, and of so-called savage people generally. He concluded that ceremonies, objects, and social roles throughout the Americas were fundamentally similar. What underlay such similarities, he believed, were distant, primordial patterns of cultural formation. Quai Branly follows his example by showing American Indian axes or clubs as physically and functionally related, wherever they came from. The old stereotype of all American peoples attired in feathers is also on vivid display at Quai Branly. Rather than question this Eurocentric belief, the curators show featherwork to be a fundamental and essential fact about Native American culture, whatever in the world that is.

Labels at museums for modern European art, however, make no such claims. If someone interpreted that art as manifesting an underlying structure that connects Fra Angelico to Picasso (or Rembrandt to Kiki Smith), art historians would surely protest that this cultural analysis oversimplifies things considerably—it could be a starting point but not the only point that museum visitors should take away.

Another case label at Quai Branly announced important similarities among gender roles throughout the Americas. Because Indian women gave birth to human beings, I read, they were more likely than Indian men to create objects that represented the human form—figurative art was innately female. I can’t argue with the premise, but the conclusion is arguable. In fact, feminists who do not agree with the theories of innate différence between men and women, as articulated by French intellectuals, argue against such conclusions all the time. It’s a bit much that Quai Branly’s curators present this interpretation as information, something that French schoolchildren who visit the museum, for instance, should accept without question.

I was finally reaching the end of the museum’s section on the Americas. O brave new world that has such people in it. The final cases contained items that looked African. They were. They were examples of art that people of African descent had created in the Americas. Placing them in the Americas section was an interesting idea—migration and creolization were, after all, highly significant to the history of the post-Columbian new world. But Africans weren’t the only migrants and creoles. Why not include some examples of objects that people of European descent had created in the Americas? If such items were instead kept in museums devoted to the art of Europe, why not put the African American items in Quai Branly’s section devoted to the art of Africa?

Every museum has—must have—some unstated rules of inclusion, organization, and interpretation. But the musée du quai Branly’s rules seemed designed to undermine its own premises. Why use ethnographic theories rarely if ever found in art museums? Why not instead deploy the kind of aesthetic criticism found in art museums? And why segregate non-Western and Western forms of art? Some of the museum’s other sections don’t have the strongly structuralist interpretation that I found in the Americas section—Asia is more complicated, it seems (too civilized to have a savage mind?), though Africa is not.

The museum is nevertheless difficult to summarize because it is so vast. The American section is in fact one of the smallest. And Quai Branly has enviable storehouses of artifacts. Behind the permanent collection are four scholarly collections: a textiles collection (over twenty-five thousand items), an enormous photographic collection (seven hundred thousand items), a musicology collection (ninety-five hundred items, some of which are displayed in a central glass tower), and a historical heritage unit (ten thousand items, including dioramas, travelers’ journals, and some of Paul Gauguin’s drawings from his Pacific sojourns). Multimedia displays integrate some of the photographs with artifacts and others play recordings of the musical instruments.

From the fourth scholarly collection, the historical unit, some of the museum’s curators have organized a temporary exhibit, “D’un Regard l’Autre,” or “Regarding the Other.” It asks visitors to consider how Europeans have considered the peoples of Africa, America, and Oceania (though not Asia), and it does so by itself regarding that process as historical. The exhibit begins in a darkened room with an illuminated central case that contains a small, elaborate ship. Made in the sixteenth century, the ship contains a clock, the gears of which play music and make the ship and its parts move (tiny trumpeters lift their instruments to their lips as the music plays). The whole thing is gilded and glows in its case. Its presence at the start of the exhibit brilliantly summarizes the historical processes by which Europeans developed the technical expertise (and lust for gold) that would carry them outward to the wider world.

The rest of the exhibition traces the subsequent history of European exploration and shows that European theories about other peoples have never been impartial.. It begins with the prehistory, the medieval European ways of representing “wild” peoples (as naked, hairy, club-wielding, animal-charming, and so on). Then it moves on to European representations of non-European peoples. The exhibit’s stunning centerpiece is formed by Albert Eckhout’s tall oil paintings of the different peoples of Brazil, done in the early part of the seventeenth century. (The most famous is probably the painting of the native woman, with her child, whose basket contains human body parts.) From there, the exhibit analyzes European engagement with worlds so new to them, from Bougainville’s historic exploration of the Pacific to modern travel and ethnography. Interesting motifs are European attitudes toward the natural world and Europeans’ tendency to classify non-Europeans as yet other parts of nature.

In short, the temporary exhibition does what the permanent exhibits upstairs do not: it shows that Europeans and non-Europeans have a common history, as well as distinctive cultures, and emphasizes that European attempts to classify non-Europeans are part of the story. The shared history makes the continued creation of separate museums for separate peoples questionable. Some of the things in the Louvre share a history with some of the things in Quai Branly. In the seventeenth century, Iroquois artists made wampum belts near or within New France (one result is at Quai Branly). One hundred years later, during a subsequent moment of French engagement in North America, eighteenth-century French sculptor Houdon made images of George Washington (one result is in the Louvre). These were not identical creations but they share a history, and it would be interesting to put them together in the same museum.

The musée du quai Branly had itself made this point, and made it at the Louvre, but had done so in yet another temporary exhibit—not as part of its permanent installation. And that exhibit’s emphasis seems to have been on similar forms or functions for Western and non-Western objects, not the shared history those objects might have had. But everything has a history, after all, even structuralist theory. When the musée du quai Branly’s exhibit labels for its American art begin to look dated, I wonder what will replace them?

This article originally appeared in issue 7.2 (January, 2007).

Joyce Chaplin is James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University and author, most recently, of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. She is currently working on a history of circumnavigation.

Or, small beer?

Her first book Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government won a prize for the best first book from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She has recently published A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (New York, 2006). Common-place asks Catherine Allgor about the subject of this book, a First Lady remembered, if at all, as a charming wife and perfect hostess. Is there more to her story than that?

When I first began this project, I would have answered with a resounding, “Yes!” I wanted to make a case for Dolley Payne Todd Madison’s historical significance and fame. I felt that the usual labels for her—”wife and hostess”—trivialized her accomplishments. Dolley is one of the few women of the period who comes into the conventional historical narratives, and she does so by the most conventional criterion—a single act of bravery. She risked her life to prevent a copy of the Stuart portrait of George Washington from falling into the hands of the invading British when they burned the White House in 1814. But I felt that even her most obvious, historically significant act was not fully understood. In fact, this deed demonstrates only one instance of Dolley’s keen grasp of the importance of psychological politics in a career full of such demonstrations. Her famous flight from the White House, portrait secured—making her a heroine and contributing largely to the “good feelings” of nationalism infusing the nation at the end of the feckless War of 1812—represents the culmination of a personifying process that Dolley began upon her husband’s election to the presidency. The most famous American woman in the nation and the world, Dolley became the heart and face of the Madison administration and a symbol of disinterested patriotism for a country riven first by the decision whether or not to wage war with Great Britain and then by the war itself.

History would continue to be good to Dolley. Already a subject of plays, novels, and poems during her Washington years, she was also acknowledged as a person of historical significance as she aged. Matthew Brady photographed her several times, and Dolley enjoyed her own entry in Longacre and Herring’s The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, the only woman in that volume. Dolley left a significant correspondence, and only a few years after her death, her niece, Mary Estelle Elizabeth Cutts, tried to publish a “memoir” of her aunt, partly based on those letters. Mary’s own death in 1856 left that project unfinished in the form of two rather different drafts. It was up to Mary’s niece, Lucia B. Cutts, to pen the definitive account of her famous kinswoman using Mary’s drafts, along with selected and bowdlerized letters. Memoirs and Letters of Dolly Madison, Wife of James Madison, President of the United States, Edited by her Grand-Niece, published in 1886, became a source for the floods of Dolley Madison biographies, novels, children’s books, cookbooks, and other creative productions, continuing into the twenty-first century.

But Dolley’s legacy was preserved on more than just paper; throughout the 1800s and 1900s, businesses and organizations co-opted her name and image to sell ice cream, cakes and pies, cigars, face powder, and dishes, among many other “feminine” products. In her strange career, she also became a symbol for the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Republican Party. Though it was her political work that gave Dolley the name recognition that made her so desirable to advertisers and institutions, they transmuted her fame to make “Dolly Madison” the very embodiment of Americanness, domesticity, and sociability.

All of these accomplishments, along with her considerable record of patronage and “meat-and-potatoes” politicking on behalf of her husband, seemed far beyond the “fluffy” category of “hostess.” But as I delved more deeply into her papers, I realized my error. I had fallen into the trap of trivializing the feminine (and feminizing the trivial). In her study of Maine midwife Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich insisted that power lies in the quotidian—that it is through the numbers of knots of wool spun and babies delivered that the larger story of life emerges. “Wife,” “hostess,” and “lady” were not just roles that defined Dolley in a patriarchal culture; they were the basis of her historical significance. What Ulrich called “dailiness” was as key to understanding a First Lady as it was to telling a midwife’s tale.

Indeed, Dolley Madison, “the Queen of Washington City,” had much in common with Martha Ballard and countless “ordinary” women. She was excluded from the realm of official action; the visible accomplishments of the battlefield, the courtroom, and the public press were denied Dolley, as they were all women. But, like ladies in small towns and big cities all through the new United States of America, Dolley in her unofficial sphere participated extensively in the economics and politics of her world. Moreover, she used a particular language when discussing (and indeed, understanding) her efforts, a language of domesticity and femininity, which both expressed and obscured female work. By no means a language universal to women, this feminine vernacular was specific to Dolley’s historical context and to her social location as an elite white woman.

Only recently have historians learned to “read” the sources left by women such as Martha Ballard and Dolley Madison. Though Dolley led a seemingly more public life than most women and left a large correspondence, when it comes to the historical record, she shares a paradoxical commonality with her more obscure sisters. Because the language of women’s work is steeped in “dailiness,” ordinary women’s papers have been dismissed as petty and without historical significance, and Dolley’s corpus has received the same verdict, albeit more publicly. If Martha Ballard’s diary suffered from obscurity, lying dusty and for the most part unexamined in the Maine State Library, Dolley’s papers suffered from overexposure. In 1896, Maud Wilder Goodwin published her Dolly Madison, based on the letters, a work that would remain the standard for decades. The American Historical Review concluded that “[t]he life of Mrs. Madison cannot easily be made anything else than a chronicle of small beer. She was good, genial, tactful, affectionate and vivacious, but she was neither clever nor connected in any important sense with great events.” The inability of historians and biographers (as well as businesses) to understand how she understood her work allowed them to craft Dolley Madison in their own image. Learning the language of women, however, tells us more than what life was like for some eighteenth-century white women, it also reflects important truths about the worldview and the texture of life for both men and women on the cusp of modernity.

As Martha had her savior in the person of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, so Dolley’s legacy has been rescued and redeemed by her own team of historical guardian angels, beginning with Ralph Ketcham, who started collecting Dolley’s letters as he assembled his definitive biography of James Madison. More recently, Madison Papers editor David B. Mattern and research associate professor in women and gender Holly C. Shulman searched down and copied every extant Dolley Madison letter, some of which were held privately and most of which had never been published. After the long work of transcribing and annotating, the result is a beautiful book, The Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison (Charlottesville, 2003). Dolley’s historical record keeps growing; Shulman also founded and runs the Dolley Madison Digital Edition (DMDE), sponsored by Rotunda, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press, which catalogs all of Dolley’s letters, transcribed and extensively annotated. As more of Dolley’s letters are found, they can be added to the DMDE.

Whether read in bowdlerized editions or on the computer screen, however, Dolley’s letters seem to suffer the same flaw as Martha’s diary. They are filled with “small beer”—gossip, shopping lists, travel schedules, and family news of health and happiness. But Dolley’s letters, read using the woman’s language of the “everyday,” have much to tell us about the life of a woman in her particular family business.

Like women who ran shops and made butter, Dolley’s political talk was largely practical. No high-flown discussions for her—there is a reason that her requests for (and dissemination of) information was larded among the “trivia.” For her, such transactions were part and parcel of everyday life. She and James did not indulge in lofty discussions of republican theory or the roles of women in the polity. Rather, she tells him she has learned from a female friend that the rumors that Spain has declared war on the United States are not true. Even when she seems to inquire on the general state of affairs—”I wish you would indulge me with some information respecting the war with Spain and the disagreement with England, as it is so generally expected here that I am at a loss what to surmise . . . what is going forward in the Cabinet?”—James understood exactly what she needed. Knowing she would be a source of information, he did not hesitate to supply her with “our answer” to “newsmongers.”

Dolley’s political work had two dimensions: the practical and the political/psychological. She was so good a practical political wife that it is sometimes hard to remember that her greatest gifts lay in the latter realm. Patronage—the rewarding of political supporters with money, land, titles, and other goods—was proving problematic for the new government. The ruling ideology of republicanism forbade such a corrupt, court-like practice. But the lack of bureaucratic structure in the government and the lack of unity in the nation required the connection-making capacity of patronage. Though the generation after the founders only barely knew it, they were creating a two-party system, and in that endeavor, again, patronage proved crucial. Like his presidential predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, James was troubled by the abstraction of patronage; unlike Jefferson, James had a wife who could carry out political tasks he could not touch. Dolley Madison proved a premier influence peddler, though she would have never seen her work that way nor would her contemporaries. People turned to her not as an influential politician but as an “angel,” appealing to her “benevolen[ce]” and her “benignity,” and she responded in kind. She did not give away jobs; she helped out families in need, she bestowed “honor,” and she granted favors of “love” and “friendship.” Cold calculation seemed to have no part in this language; instead, “hearts” and “bosoms” “swell[ed]” and pulsed with the lifeblood of politics—patronage.

This is not to say that the love and affection Dolley expressed to people was not genuine. In the same way that Dolley’s public image drew on authentic parts of herself, this was a case when real regard was put to political use. When James had to rebuke wandering diplomat Joel Granger, he did it through Dolley’s correspondence with Joel’s wife, her good friend Ruth Baldwin Barlow. Merely having Dolley administer the correction went a long way to softening the blow (for it was not even clear that Joel had erred), but Dolley went further, with her invocation of family, assuring Ruth—”you know that I love you as my sister.” A smart man knew when to adopt the language of ladies, and when Joel felt the need to excuse himself, explaining in ways that he could not do in his official letters to secretary of state James Monroe and president James Madison, he did so to Dolley. A canny diplomat, Joel could not resist a flourish or two. When asking to be remembered to James, he declared, “I will not say [‘]president,[‘] for that name has not so much to do with the heart.”

As we learn to read the language of women, it becomes evident that this interweaving of public concerns with everyday concerns and the vernacular of sentiment and domesticity is a clearer reflection of the larger picture of early republican politics, including the workings of the male official sphere. In an era with little divide between public and private and with the government’s deliberate lack of bureaucratic structure, politics flourished in unofficial places and spaces and during activities far from the official spotlight. “Parlor politicking” may have happened in parlors, but it was not the sole province of women.

In her biography of Josephine Herbst, Elinor Langer reflected that the past was like a song—but all that we had left were the words. We historians had to try to recover the melody. Through the language of their letters and diaries, women of the early republic—the famous and the “obscure”—help us by providing not only the words of the past but also its cadence. For the men and women of political families, politics was so woven into the rhythm of work, love, home, and family that these familiar (and familial) rubrics supplied them with a way to conceptualize their political work. Dolley’s work may fall within “big idea” categories such as “nation building,” “the formation of the federal government,” and “the role of the capital city,” but she toiled one teacup, one connection, one political favor at a time. The rhythm of the quotidian reminds us that all big ideas—whether of the “good life” or “democracy”—are realized in the arena of everyday life.

Further Reading:

The Papers of James Madison can be found online. Rotunda provides a free trial of The Dolley Madison Digital Edition.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.2 (January, 2007).

Catherine Allgor is associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches courses on women and gender, early American history and politics, and public history.

Kathleen DuVal’s The Native Ground shows how powerfully a change in perspective can alter our perception of history. Her focus on the shifting human relationships in the Arkansas River Valley will require readers to shift their geographic outlook from European outposts on North America’s coasts to “the heart of the continent.” Although DuVal’s title and introduction make her geographic focus clear from the outset, I only realized how thoroughly this book had shaken my own geographic orientation as I reached the final chapters that introduced events I thought I understood. When viewed from the Arkansas Valley, the origins and significance of seemingly familiar events (such as nineteenth-century westward migration) appeared so new that I repeatedly found myself surprised.

Most histories of colonial North America continue to frame the continent from the perspective of one European empire or another, albeit often very subtly, even when the historian writes from Indian perspectives or studies inter-imperial relations. But no one representing any European empires had any control over the Arkansas Valley, and thus any remnants of an imperial geographical perspective break down completely. DuVal points out that her work bridges a gap between southeastern and southwestern history, which it does, but the geographical implications of her study are more profound, demanding a true recentering. Her work complements Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (2001), but her more focused geographic scope immerses the reader in one place, allowing a level of specificity that makes especially vivid how important Indian viewpoints are if we hope to understand the power relations in the colonial period.

Because the eastern Arkansas Valley enters the Mississippi River Valley, it saw a great diversity of traders, explorers, and immigrants, both Indian and European. Because of the importance of the region for so many diverse polities, DuVal is able to make her case more strongly that the Arkansas Valley was itself the center of North America for its Indian and European actors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was, indeed, “the heart of the continent” and not some European empire’s periphery. She does not face east or north or south or west to look at Europe or its colonists because the people she studies did not.

In identifying the Arkansas Valley as a “native ground,” DuVal argues that unlike the peoples of the Great Lakes region Richard White studies in The Middle Ground(1991), Arkansas Indians dominated their region well into the nineteenth century. They were able to maintain their power through the colonial period because they were not a population of refugees as were the Indians in the Great Lakes. Rather, the Indians in the Arkansas Valley, though many of them seventeenth-century immigrants, maintained their sovereign identities and very quickly developed systems for incorporating newcomers, systems that they applied to Europeans as well as to Indians. DuVal emphasizes that the Indians in the Arkansas Valley placed high value on connectedness. The sixteenth-century Spanish explorers in the area failed because they appeared unconnected and seemed unwilling to become incorporated into existing relations. The situation in the seventeenth century was very different. Quapaws, newcomers in Arkansas who left the Ohio Valley in response to Iroquois incursions, faced opposition from existing populations. They therefore recognized an opportunity to strengthen their position when French explorers arrived in the 1670s. The French recognized their own need for contacts and accepted incorporation into the Quapaw world. The Quapaws used their French connection and their extraordinary diplomatic skill to secure their place in the local political order as valued negotiators, despite their modest numbers and inability to exercise military dominance.

The Osage emerged as a regional power during the early eighteenth century. They (who, like the Quapaws, had migrated from the Ohio Valley) exerted their influence very differently. Their numbers were greater and they countered threats from Indians or Europeans with violence. Through these strategies, according to DuVal, they established an empire by the late eighteenth century. The accumulation of evidence from historians like DuVal (and Pekka Hamalainen, who argues that Europeans and Indians alike understood Comanches to constitute an empire during the same time period) who identify Indian empires in central North America, suggests that historians need to rethink the political geography of colonial North America. DuVal insists that no contemporaries familiar with the region took seriously the imperial boundaries European mapmakers imposed on the continent, understanding that Indians held power. Despite their attempts, neither the French nor Spaniards proved able to break Quapaw or Osage political and military hold over the region. During the colonial period, other Indians did not try.

Neither the British triumph over France, the U.S. triumph over Great Britain, nor the U.S. purchase of Louisiana directly challenged Indian control over the Arkansas Valley. Indirectly, however, the U.S. acquisition of the region put into motion a series of events that did change the power relations dramatically. Jefferson’s vision of the Arkansas Valley as a receptacle for eastern Indians provided the first wave of eastern immigration that would shift the power away from Indians. This first wave, however, consisted not of whites but of Cherokees. Like the white immigrants who followed them from the east, Cherokee power came in part from their continual migration and resulting demographic power. Their influence in the region, however, was short-lived, as the whites who followed in their wake insisted that the United States recognize their legitimacy, based on their claims to be the true “native” Americans in the region, despite sophisticated Quapaw and Cherokee legal and cultural arguments to the contrary.

DuVal ends with the argument that her story does not finish with U.S. domination. But it seems to me that underlying the story of persistent Indian power that DuVal tells is another story that is less new and that highlights the ultimate significance of “facing east” toward the Atlantic. The two Indian powers of the colonial period—the Quapaws and the Osages—came to the Arkansas Valley in response to pressures exerted on them by Iroquois pursuing (with the aid of Dutch weapons) beaver to supply European markets. The two subsequent nineteenth-century immigrations—Cherokee and white—which ultimately broke Quapaw and Osage power in the region, resulted from the demographic success, via migration and reproduction, of the political entity that had grown out of the British Atlantic seaboard colonies. The one point in her story when DuVal notes the possibility for another outcome involved a European (Spanish) choice, not an Indian one (58).

DuVal’s great contribution is that she makes so incontrovertibly clear two truths that we may all know in theory but that are difficult to understand concretely: 1) no one knew in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries that this was what was going to occur, and 2), we risk gravely misunderstanding everything about those centuries if we read their histories backwards from the nineteenth.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.2 (January, 2007).

April Lee Hatfield is a member of the history department at Texas A&M University. She is working on a project examining Anglo-Spanish relations in southeastern North America and the Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.