“Notes and papers are in disarray,” noted the clerk of Dominica’s House of Assembly in January 1791, “making it difficult–if not impossible–to accurately manage the island’s business.” Heat and humidity had wreaked havoc on governmental paper trails, with “storms and hurricanes destroying whole sets of documents,” while “seasonal rains and insects eat away at what remains.” Complicating matters further, Dominica, a small eastern Caribbean island, had changed hands between Britain and France no fewer than four times before 1791. To combat these “erosions of important colony and government papers,” House committee members proposed that “a sum be immediately set aside to provide suitable archival accommodation.” In 2004, the National Archives of Dominica still waits for that recommendation to be implemented.

Most North American archives and libraries face problems of funding, conservation, and access, but–while not minimizing the obstacles U.S. institutions face–their problems pale in comparison to those of their West Indian counterparts. Small, often government-dependent organizations, many Caribbean archives remain unknown and unused by regional and overseas scholars. K. E. Ingram’s Manuscript Sources for the History of the West Indies provides the best overview of the region’s research resources, and is invaluable for scholars looking beyond the Public Records Office in their study of the British Caribbean, but his survey has limits. Ingram’s directorship of the West Indies Special Collections at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, enabled him to scour that island’s archives and records thoroughly, and subsequent editions have added important information about Barbadian and Trinidadian archives, as well as Caribbean research materials in North America, Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa. But Ingram’s compendium only scratches the surface of what survives elsewhere in the West Indies.

My dissertation uses the history of coffee–its cultivation, trade, and consumption–as a means for exploring the social, economic, and political relationships between North America and the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ingram’s volume was invaluable during my nine months of research in Jamaica two years ago, but of little use for planning my two weeks in Dominica this past April. Instead, I disembarked on the island a blank slate and spent my first day in Dominica getting the lay of the land, with periodic calls to one Lennox Honychurch, a man everyone in Dominica–from the guesthouse staff, to the local diner waitress, to the museum curator–said would be able to tell me everything I wanted to know about Dominica and the National Archives. Honychurch, who served in Dominica’s House of Assembly from 1975 to 1979 and assisted in negotiations for the island’s independence from Britain in 1978, was educated in Dominica, Barbados, and Oxford, and currently serves on the faculty of the University of the West Indies School for Continuing Studies in Dominica. When I finally tracked him down, my first question was, “Where in the world is Dominica’s National Archive?” This is a harder question than it might seem, for while most Dominicans knew of Honychurch, most scratched their heads when asked about the archive. Some were unaware they had an archive. I could not find it listed in the telephone directory, there is no sign above the door proclaiming “National Archives,” or even “archive,” or even a street number, for that matter. Honychurch told me to look for a small, white, one-room building on Independence Street, with an orange-tiled roof, across from the adult shoe store (as opposed to the children’s shoe store, which is one block west).

The archive does not have an online or printed catalogue, which is probably why its visitors’ sign-in book has so few entries. More the pity, since it is one of those rare places with a collection broad enough to cater to a wealth of interests, and yet manageable enough to really work through. Those interested in colonial governance might look at the Laws of Dominica (1775-1841), Minutes of the Privy Council (1775-1892), Minutes of the House of Assembly (1787-1892), as well as correspondence from past island governors and London agents. Scholars of plantation agriculture or land use could examine Grants, Conveyances, Leases, Mortgages (1763-1843) for all island parishes, and the Book of Wills (1774-97, partial). Information about enslaved laborers and manumissions is available in the Register of Slave Returns (1817-1831), triannual reports of all enslaved laborers by name, occupation, age, sale, relocation, births, or deaths, as well as the Register of Manumissions (1794-96). Finally, Dominica’s strategic position between two French islands, both as a military outpost and as a potential smuggling hub, is traceable in the records of the Court of Vice Admiralty (1792-1838). An in-house list of collections can get you started, but your best asset is archivist Renita Charles, who diligently wades through boxes of materials arranged on industrial steel shelves in the one-room building (unlike most archives, there are no mysterious trips to behind-the-scenes rooms of stored materials; Dominica’s historic documents collection is all there in the room with you, along with one desk occupied by Ms. Charles and a second for visiting scholars).

The archive, however, is just one of Dominica’s research opportunities. At the end of my first week, I offered Ms. Charles a ride home. She lives about six miles south of Roseau in Point Michel. The car ride not only let me repay the enormous debt I had been accruing by monopolizing her time each day, but gave her a chance to talk about her country, her job, and her hopes for future training (as I write, Ms. Charles is participating in an archival training and certification program for six weeks in Belize). As further proof of my thanks, I invited Ms. Charles to join me for a rum punch and we retired to the Clouds Bar where I met the owner, Ms. Melvina Boyer.

Ms. Boyer is not a historian, but she is an important member of her community and likes to make visitors feel welcome. After a bit of small talk, Ms. Boyer asked what I was studying. When I mentioned coffee, she turned to Ms. Charles and asked if I had met any of the older men in town. Coffee is a dying industry in Dominica; it has been in decline for some time, superseded by sugar and then limes by the mid-nineteenth century. But farmers continue to grow it even today, on the same plots of land, with the same estate names, as those found in eighteenth-century accounts. Most have shifted from arabica to robusta beans, but a few older trees can still be found scattered around. We finished our drink, said our thanks, and departed, but instead of walking back to the car, Ms. Charles continued two more blocks, explaining that Mr. Toussaint, who now specialized in root vegetables and donkey manure, used to plant coffee and might be willing to tell me what he knew. This was how, at eight o’clock at night, we were knocking unbidden on his door. Toussaint was happy to help, but since he did not have a car I would have to drive to his farm, five miles up the mountain road. He asked me to come back in the morning. “Be sure,” he admonished, “to bring transport with 4 x 4.”

True to his word, Mr. Toussaint was waiting when I arrived in a jeep the following morning. Dominica is only twenty-nine miles long and sixteen miles wide. What most guide books fail to tell you, however, is that Dominica, the most mountainous island in the Caribbean, is about fifty miles of vertically sheer cliffs high–or at least that is how it feels on the back roads of the island interior. As recently as five years ago, Mr. Toussaint, now eighty-six, grew coffee for profit, selling his beans to the Dominica-based Bellot P.W. & Co. Ltd. for roasting and grinding. But while some Caribbean countries’ specialty coffee markets have been revitalized–notably Jamaica’s and Puerto Rico’s, and on a much smaller scale Haiti’s–Dominica’s has continued to decline. The income from a pound of beans, Mr. Toussaint lamented, is no longer worth the labor he would employ to pick it. As a result, Toussaint has let his trees go feral. Instead of being topped at five or six feet–the comfortable height for picking coffee cherries–his now tower over ten feet high, and the air is sweet from the fermenting berries that litter the ground around them.

He showed me the outlines of the stone walls that formerly marked the entrance to this eighteenth-century estate, and the cisterns for catching rainwater. In addition to being the most mountainous, Dominica also boasts a higher rainfall and more rivers than any other Caribbean island. These precipitation levels, along with high elevations, made it ideal for coffee cultivation in the first place. Records of Toussaint’s farm, formerly part of Morne Rouge Estate, show it was a thriving coffee plantation in the early nineteenth century. The Register of Slave Returns list sixty-nine slaves, thirty-eight male and thirty-one female, working the property in 1817. Twenty-four laborers are listed as Africans, and forty-five as creole. At that time, Morne Rouge was owned by Jean Louis Bellot, ancestor of the founders of today’s Bellot Company, and was a sizable estate in a colony where most coffee farms averaged fewer than thirty slaves.

Thanking Mr. Toussaint for his time, and for the enormous bag of carrots, callaloo (similar to spinach), tania, and dasheen (both root vegetables like yams) that he had harvested and pressed into my hands, I took him back down the hill and headed off for Bois Cotlette Estate, another former coffee plantation located in St. Mark’s Parish. Bois Cotlette is the pride and joy of Mr. Michael Didier, who is painstakingly restoring the plantation. The house has been in the Didier family for generations, and was still used as the family home by his grandfather, pictured here with his wife and children in front of the house in 1905. Two generations of neglect, however, have given the surrounding rain forest more than enough time to reclaim the land. To date, Mr. Didier has restored the animal-powered pulping mill and stabilized the exterior of the main house. The remains of a small windmill still stand among the trees, as do the boiling pots and kettles that provide evidence of small-scale sugar production. 

Bois Cotlette also appears in the Register of Slave Returns in 1817 with seventy-eight slaves. In 1823, however, the owner, Charles Port, died, and Jean Baptiste Dupigney, manager of Bellot’s Morne Rouge Estate, purchased the property. Dupigney could afford the land, but not the maintenance of so large a labor force. To help finance the debt he acquired buying Bois Cotlette, he sold the majority of the estate’s slaves by 1826, reducing the number of enslaved laborers to twenty. He continued to grow limited amounts of coffee, however, and retained two skilled slaves–a carpenter and a cooper–to construct the hogsheads and barrels needed to ship his much diminished crop to port.

It is one thing to read about the place or track down published and manuscript sources of its history in metropolitan repositories. It is quite something else to see Dominica on the ground. On a map, the distance from Toussaint’s coffee farm or Bois Cotlette to Soufriere Bay, the nearest port town, is less than five miles. The journey–even by car–takes over an hour. Imagine the same distance on foot or by mule two hundred years ago.

This began as an essay on the riches of Dominica’s National Archives, but it is difficult to separate what survives on paper with what exists on the island. Dominica, like many Caribbean nations, bears the imprint of its plantation and slave-dependent past in ways that are difficult to fathom in North America. It is a place where history lives, not in reconstructed villages or museums, but in the names and places that still dot the landscape, and in crumbling coffee farm houses and outbuildings threatened more by the encroaching wilderness than by developmental sprawl. It is a place of pride and generosity, and it returns more than the cost of an airline ticket. I look forward to returning as soon and as often as I can.

The National Archive is part of Dominica’s National Documentation Center and Public Library, Victoria Street, Roseau, Dominica Commonwealth.
Telephone: (767) 448-2401 ext. 3093
Fax: (767) 448-7928
Email: publiclibrary@cwdom.dm; library@cwdom.dm 

Further Reading:

K. E. Ingram, Manuscript Sources for the History of the West Indies: With Special Reference to Jamaica in the National Library of Jamaica and Supplementary Sources in the West Indies, North America, and United Kingdom and Elsewhere (Barbados, 2000), and Sources of Jamaican History, 1655-1838: A Bibliographical Survey with Particular Reference to Manuscript Sources (Zug, 1976). For a less up-to-date volume that moves beyond Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad, see Edward Cecil Baker, A Guide to the Records of the Leeward Islands (Oxford, 1965), and A Guide to the Records of the Windward Islands (Oxford, 1968). For the history of Dominica, see Thomas Atwood, The History of the Island of Dominica: Containing a Description of its Situation, Extent, Climate, Rivers, Mountains, Natural Productions, & c. (London, 1791, reprinted, London, 1971); Lennox Honychurch, The Dominica Story: A History of the Island (Oxford, 1975, reprinted 1984); Michel-Rolph Troillot, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (Baltimore, 1988). For the history of coffee in Dominica and the Lesser Antilles, see Michel-Rolph Troillot, “Coffee Planters and Coffee Slaves in the Antilles: The Impact of a Secondary Commodity,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, 1993); B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore, 1984); and Simon Smith, “Accounting for Taste: British Coffee Consumption in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Autumn, 1996): 183-214. 

The author would like to thank Roderick McDonald, both for accompanying her on this research trip and for drawing her attention to the 1791 quotation about the disarray of Dominica’s state papers.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.1 (October, 2004).

Michelle L. Craig is a doctoral candidate in the department of history, University of Michigan where she is completing her dissertation entitled “From Cultivation to Cup: How Coffee Shaped the Atlantic World, 1765-1812.” She has conducted research in Jamaica, Dominica, the Bahamas, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and the United States.

A Mormon historian reflects on his biography of Joseph Smith

Most reviews of my recent biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, mention that I am a practicing Mormon. The Sunday New York Times titled its review, “Latter-Day Saint: A practicing Mormon delivers a balanced biography of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith.” Perhaps a little oversensitive, I wondered why this was news. Was a Mormon telling the story of the church’s founding prophet with a degree of objectivity something like man bites dog? Did the editor mean that a mind capable of embracing Mormonism would surely be incapable of a balanced portrayal? Or that Mormonism evokes loyalties so deep that a dispassionate approach to Joseph Smith would be impossible for a church member? One reviewer spoke of my walking a high wire between the demands of church conformity and the necessary openness of scholarly investigation. Another, surprised by the balance of the book but unwilling to trust me entirely, said it achieved a “veneer of credibility.”

The nearly universal notice of my religion got me thinking about passion, commitment, and balance. What is the place of personal values and beliefs in scholarship? Our personal commitments are certain to bias our work, and yet is that necessarily bad? Historians write with passion about slavery, race, women, war and peace, freedom, and injustice. Is their work marred by their belief? Beyond question, their values shape the work. After the civil rights movement, we write differently about women and race than we did a half century ago. Are the biases that play about our scholarship prejudices to be purged, or are they powerful and useful motivations?

An impassioned graduate student once announced in a seminar that she could find traces of gender on a blank wall. Her commitment had sharpened her eye for evidence that less engaged researchers missed. I can remember the time when historians sighed that since so little evidence about slaves survived slavery, slave lives, regrettably, could never be recovered. Nowadays one would pause before saying that about any subject. As the Gospels say, those who search, find. Passion may introduce bias but it also produces persistence—and data.

Okay, that may be true, we say, for gender studies or investigations of race, but does it work for Joseph Smith with his angelic visitors, gold plates, and a Urim and Thummim? Isn’t that a different kind of commitment that borders on the crazy? How can belief in such oddities be allowed any place in scholarship?

I would be the first to admit that my account of Joseph Smith shows greater tolerance for Smith’s remarkable stories than most historians would allow. I write about the visits of angels as if they might have happened. I do not assume, a priori, that Joseph Smith’s stories are fraudulent, any more than I would automatically write about Mohammad’s visions or the biblical miracles as obvious deceptions. But I hope that my readers see that my writing as a believer is not just a personal indulgence. I would like them to understand the benefit for historical inquiry as a whole in writing out of my convictions. The bizarre nature of Joseph Smith’s stories makes historical work by a believing historian all the more useful.

One reason is that skepticism about the gold plates and the visions can easily slip over into cynicism. The assumption that Smith concocted the stories of angels and plates casts a long shadow over his entire life. Everything he did is thrown into doubt. His exhortations to godly service, his self-sacrifice, his pious letters to his wife, his apparent love for his fellow workers all appear as manipulations to perpetuate a grand scheme. Cynicism has its advantages in smoking out hypocrisy, but it does not foster sympathetic understanding. Every act is prejudged from the beginning.

My advantage as a practicing Mormon is that I believe enough to take Joseph Smith seriously. If a writer begins with the idea that Smith was a fraud who perpetrated a hoax upon the gullible public with his story of gold plates and ancient Israelites in America, nothing he did can be trusted. Every act and every thought is undercut by his presumed fraudulent beginnings. That overhanging doubt makes it difficult for a skeptical biographer to find much of interest in Smith’s writings or to explain why thousands of people believed him. What of value is to be expected from the theological meanderings of a charlatan?

A few empathetic historians like Jan Shipps have written with great insight about early Mormonism, but more often than not, skeptical historians brush Joseph Smith’s writings aside as banal or vapid. Fawn Brodie, author of a widely accepted biography of Smith, found his religion faintly ridiculous. Her No Man Knows My History summarized his teachings only to dismiss them as derivative or strange. She could not explain why thousands of converts to Mormonism devoted their lives to building a Zion in the Great Basin, or what was so enthralling in Smith’s vision of a God who was once a man. A more recent biography, Dan Vogel’s skeptical The Making of a Prophet, intensely scrutinizes the Book of Mormon, but, not surprisingly, it finds nothing compelling or profound in it. On the whole, disbelief dampens this kind of inquiry and for good reason. People with little concern for the plight of slaves do not scour the sources for clues to slave lives; and skeptics about Mormonism do not work at penetrating the mind of a pretended prophet. It is less a question of intellectual perspicuity than of motivation.

Passion and belief are certainly not requirements for historical inquiry, but neither are they crippling handicaps. Once we relinquish, as we must, the “noble dream” of objective history, personal commitment becomes a valuable resource. We continually develop new readings of Reconstruction or Andrew Jackson because our personal viewpoints, based on our values, enable us to discover new perspectives. Contrary to the idea that belief closes the mind, our passions open our eyes and ears. Stifling my belief in Joseph Smith would extinguish one of my greatest assets.

Passion, of course, can blind as well as enliven us. There is a danger of descending into undisciplined subjectivity. My belief could yield a Joseph Smith that only the Mormons would recognize. Mormon writers have produced plenty of hagiographies. But there is a check on unbalanced writing—the audience. If I write for Mormons alone, I probably will create an idealized prophet worthy of founding a new religion, and many Mormon readers will raise no objections. By the same token, one who writes exclusively for a non-Mormon audience can turn Joseph Smith into a rogue without fear of contradiction. No one will say, “Not so fast.” The reason Mormons disliked Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith was that she had no regard for Mormon readers. Mormons thought she caricatured Smith, minimizing his religious feelings and downplaying his theological ingenuity. But she did not care; she had written the book for another audience.

As I set out to write Rough Stone Rolling, I tried to keep all kinds of readers with me. I vowed not to make Brodie’s mistake of writing solely for one part of the potential audience. She wrote for unbelievers; I did not want to err in the opposite direction. My historical instincts moved me to tell the whole story as truthfully as I could anyway, but I also knew that if I overly idealized Smith, I would lose credibility with non-Mormons. With a broad readership in mind, I could not conceal his flaws. Moreover, I tried to voice unbelieving readers’ likely reactions when Smith married additional wives or taught doctrines foreign to modern sensibilities. When he went beyond the pale, I acknowledged readers’ dismay.

Even though I wrote for a diverse audience, as the reviews came in I realized that I had not kept everyone with me. As probably was inevitable, readers who came to the book with their own strong notions of Smith found my account wanting. Those on the Mormon side thought I failed to describe his noble character and supernatural gifts; non-Mormons said I painted too rosy a picture and failed to acknowledge the obvious fraud. At both ends of the spectrum, I lost readers.

At times I thought there was no middle ground for my version of the Mormon Prophet. I came to envy historians who write about slavery or patriarchy; no one questions their basic beliefs. But on second thought, I realized that my book was better for being written for a divided audience. I cannot say that Rough Stone Rolling achieves a perfect balance, but it does offer an empathetic and, so I hope, a candid view of an extraordinary life.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Richard L. Bushman, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University, is working on a study of eighteenth-century American farmers.

Early in the afternoon of March 18, 1741, flames began to shoot through the shingled roof of Lieutenant Governor George Clarke’s home, a building safely nestled within the stone walls of New York’s Fort George. Ten more suspicious fires followed. Before the next snows fell, Manhattan magistrates had arrested 172 men and women, most of them black and enslaved. Eighty-four of the accused were expelled from the colony, with another four whites and seventeen blacks hanged. For the thirteen blacks judged to be the instigators of the plot to destroy New York, the court reserved the ultimate punishment of burning at the stake. Deconstructing and describing these ghastly events requires enormous skill. Historian Jill Lepore writes with unusual flair and enormous narrative power, and New York Burning succeeds admirably in drawing the reader into this world of intrigue. Whether she also succeeds at disentangling the complicated web of accusations is less certain.

Although historians prefer to reconstruct the past through a variety of sources, the chief document in this affair remains a single text: Judge Daniel Horsmanden’s 1744 Journal of the Proceedings. As would be the case with an account produced by any prosecutor, Horsmanden’s version elevates his role in the trials into that of savior of New York, while the accused are allowed to speak only through his pen. The judge’s determination to advance his career through this thick volume—the original version filled up 391 printed pages—does not, of course, render it fatally flawed, and so Lepore, like everybody else who has written of the fires, builds her story around this key piece of evidence. More than any other historian, Lepore reconstructs the details of the relatively unknown Horsmanden’s early life. Born in England in 1694, young Daniel followed his cousin, William Byrd II, to Virginia but failed to obtain entrance to the bar there. Relocating to New York City, he fared somewhat better, although he never regained the fortune lost in the South Sea Bubble. By 1741 he was one of the three justices on the colony’s Supreme Court, and from his position on the bench Horsmanden became the recorder of the trials, the central interrogator of those arrested, and finally, the affair’s first chronicler. (A second edition of the Journal appeared in 1810, unfortunately replete with printer’s errors, mistakes that also found their way into the 1969 Greenwood reprint, as well as into Thomas J. Davis’s 1971 edition.)

If Horsmanden has yet to find a modern author to tell his story, the same cannot be said of the alleged conspiracy described in his book. Early on, Lepore insists that the “episode is hardly known today,” but that is true only if students and scholars are far behind in their reading (xii). Davis followed his edition of the Journal with a full-length account of the plot in 1985, and only three years ago, legal historian Peter Charles Hoffer published the justly admired The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741 (2003). Serena Zabin edited an abridged version of the trial documents in 2004, and Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh devoted considerable attention to the plot in The Many-Headed Hydra (2001). Lepore, however, contextualizes her saga by recreating the cultural world of midcentury Manhattan. Whereas Rediker and Linebaugh situate the conspiracy within the waters of Atlantic radicalism, Lepore focuses instead on New York City’s particular legal and religious customs. By broadening her narrative to encompass the wider urban context in which the trials took place, Lepore brilliantly reveals what theatrical plays men like Horsmanden saw, what accounts of other slave conspiracies they read about in local newspapers (most especially the recent plots and rebellions in Antigua and South Carolina), and how they regarded other faiths. Lepore brings the city of the late 1730s to life as few writers have, although on occasion the connections she draws prove very little. Her attempt to link the court proceedings of 1741 with the earlier libel trial of the printer John Peter Zenger, for example, is unconvincing. As one would expect, given the limited number of attorneys in what remained a small city, a number of individuals had cameos in both events. But this is purely circumstantial; it demonstrates no substantive connection between these events. Similarly, it may be that the partisan animosity left by the divisive Zenger trial helped convince some bondmen that a divided white majority was easy prey for black rebels. But the theory that, in the aftermath of the Zenger affair, nervous whites feared that “real and imagined slave conspirators functioned as a phantom political party” is asserted rather than demonstrated (219).

By shifting the focus of her book away from the city’s back alleys and taverns into the corridors of power, Lepore ultimately reveals more about men like Horsmanden than she does about the lives of those who swung from the gibbet. For a book with the word slavery in the subtitle, New York Burning has surprisingly little to say about the enslaved men and women who may have conspired for their freedom. Lepore never once cites important modern studies of African Americans in colonial New York by Graham Russell Hodges and Leslie Harris. Giving voice to the so-called historically inarticulate is admittedly no easy task, but for a scholar rightly worried about the veracity of Horsmanden’s version of events, it is curious that the judge receives roughly three times the pages devoted to Caesar Vaarck, the possible mastermind of the plot.

For readers who prefer neat conclusions, the fact that Lepore never clearly states whether she believes the city’s slaves actually hatched the conspiracy for which they were accused will be perplexing. (For the record, Hodges, Harris, Rediker and Linebaugh, Davis, Hoffer, Donald R. Wright, and David Brion Davis all believe that the conspiracy was authentic.) Perhaps she regards the question as unanswerable, given the need to rely on Horsmanden’s biased, self-serving account of the proceedings. Nonetheless, Lepore offers several hints that when pushed, she comes down in opposition to the scholarly orthodoxy. By emphasizing Horsmanden’s hope to profit from the publication of his Journal, she seems to imply a certain lack of gravitasin what the judge wrote. She also twice suggests—as did one contemporary observer—that the 1741 trials and the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials “had much in common” (xvii, 203). The fact remains, however, that eleven mysterious fires did break out around the city, and they had little to do with the sort of hysteria caused by troubled Puritan girls. “Nothing ‘just happened’ in the early eighteenth century,” Lepore insists. “There was always a villain to be caught, a conspiracy to be detected” (51). Perhaps. Yet even in a time when educated people believed in spontaneous combustion, it was hardly irrational for slaveholding residents of a city constructed from wood to suspect that somebody was starting these fires. New York Burning is a pleasure to read, but for now, Hoffer’s carefully argued study will remain the standard account of the affair.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Douglas R. Egerton is professor of history at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. His latest publications include Death or Liberty: African Americans and the American Revolution (forthcoming from Oxford University Press) and, with Alison Games, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright, A History of the Atlantic World, 1400-1888 (forthcoming from Harlan Davidson).

Adam Hochschild knows how to tell a good story. And not just any story, but the one in which a network of British abolitionists successfully undermined the commercial regime that sustained the eighteenth-century British Empire: the African slave trade. Indeed, Hochschild demonstrates how a “small group of people . . . helped to end one of the worst injustices in the most powerful empire of its time” (6). Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award, examines how the profitable traffic in human flesh was transformed from the bulwark of Britain’s empire into its nemesis by 1807. Stretching from British ports such as Bristol and Liverpool to Cap Francois in St. Domingue and the slave factory at Bance Island off Africa’s West Coast, Hochschild’s narrative unfolds against a backdrop of putrefaction and violence in the Atlantic world.

Hochschild’s primary focus is not the formative events of British abolitionism’s early history such as the Haitian Revolution, the Somerset case, or the African settlement at Sierra Leone. Rather, he examines how Britons at home perceived such events. Hochschild argues that it was public perception of war, slave rebellions, and African slave trading in the far reaches of the British Atlantic that, when coupled with the tireless campaigning of zealous abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson, finally brought an end to the transatlantic slave trade. This feat, Hochschild reminds us, was neither easy nor inevitable, and it had a decisive impact on the history of Britain, the Atlantic, and the world.

Though Hochschild’s account begins in the marchlands of the British Empire—in Africa and the Caribbean—he is careful to note that anti-slave-trade sentiment first ignited in the British Isles. And the man who did more than any Briton to elicit that sentiment was a young Cambridge graduate “who wore black clerical garb” and was considered a “moral steam engine” by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (366). Thomas Clarkson is Hochschild’s central character, not least because of his “sixteen hour a day campaigning against slavery” on a crusade that crisscrossed England and Europe (4). Clarkson also established the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, which included nine Quakers and three Anglicans—Granville Sharp, the American-born William Dillwyn, and Clarkson himself. During the late 1780s and early 1790s, Clarkson and his associates traveled thousands of miles to circulate petitions among lower- and middle-class Britons; he also collected evidence from slave ships in Liverpool and Bristol to confirm the horrid cruelty of the Middle Passage. Armed with testimony from sailors who witnessed the maltreatment of Africans firsthand as well as thumbscrews and shackles used to confine and torture captured slaves, the society’s movement began to gain momentum and public attention.

The famous pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgewood designed small buttons—each emblazoned with the slogan “Am I not a Man and a Brother?”—for mass distribution to the British public. West Indian sugar planters and their allies, angered by the society’s agenda, began spying on meetings and publishing pro-slave-trade pamphlets. Yet the society found a strong political ally in William Wilberforce, the prominent York MP and evangelical Anglican. Hochschild argues that the initiative to end the slave trade had, by the early 1790s, assumed all the trappings of a successful, grass-roots reform movement.

But two revolutions—one in France and one in St. Domingue—nearly extinguished the movement altogether. Fearing “homegrown British radicalism and the prospect of French subversion” (241), the government restricted civil liberties throughout the 1790s. The harshest of these restrictions were the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act of 1795. Since these acts made most group meetings illegal, the society could neither organize debates nor circulate petitions. In short, the revolutionary spirit of the 1780s, of which anti-slave-trade sentiment was part and parcel, came to be viewed as dangerous and subversive by the mid-1790s. Many prominent politicians conflated abolition with rebellion, thus muffling the society’s voice. The abolitionists’ efforts were further eroded by a slave rebellion on the French sugar island of St. Domingue in 1791. Accounts of violent executions and torture during the insurrection convinced some Britons that abolition might yield similar bloodshed in British dominions. At the close of the eighteenth century, Clarkson and his allies had fallen all but silent; Wilberforce had stopped talking publicly of abolition; and a major surge in slave trading transported more African slaves than ever to New World plantations.

But what war could suppress, war could also resurrect. While British officials had worried throughout the 1790s that violent social upheaval akin to that of revolutionary France would break out at home, the first few years of the nineteenth century left Parliament fearing that Napoleon would soon dominate all of Europe. The France that Britain fought was labeled as popish, tyrannical, and “trying to restore” the same system of colonial slavery it had outlawed in 1794 (300). Thus, the “archenemy Napoleon had thereby opened up some political space” for British antislavery to forge a link between “abolition and British moral superiority” (301). To combat France successfully, Britain would have to fashion itself as liberal, Protestant, and antislavery; its Royal Navy would have to serve as a moral policeman throughout the Atlantic world, detaining foreign ships that carried cargoes of chained Africans. James Stephen, the former West Indian and “one of the empire’s leading maritime lawyers,” understood the potential imperial hegemony Britain might enjoy were the slave trade to be abolished (301). In 1806, Stephen helped Wilberforce draft a new bill for Parliament’s consideration. Christened the Foreign Slave Trade Act, the bill “banned British subjects, shipyards, outfitters, and insurers from participating in the slave trade to the colonies of France and its allies” (303). On the face of it, the act seemed like a curtailment of French commerce. Yet Stephen also knew that while Britain carried more Africans to the New World than any other empire, most British slave traders sold their chattel to American or French planters. Couched as anti-French legislation, however, the bill passed in both houses of Parliament. And just a year later, Wilberforce’s Abolition Bill received the approbation of both Parliament and George III; as of May 1, 1807, the slave trade ceased to be a legal form of commerce. In Hochschild’s estimation, this was a first critical victory on the path to emancipation.

What Hochschild does is not so much revise our understanding of the British abolition movement as humanize it. Indeed, Hochschild’s ability to weave together the lives of naval officers, former slaves, Quakers, and slave-trade captains demonstrates how complex and expansive the Atlantic slave trade really was. But here, Hochschild falters. To truly humanize the abolition movement should be to complicate the proslavery/antislavery binary, not merely to applaud those who later found themselves on the moral high ground. That is, Hochschild’s task should be to remind us that social progress is always rooted in a nexus of conflicting motives and agendas, many of which assume much darker shades than he has here been willing to admit. British abolition, for instance, was not the clear-cut social movement that Hochschild makes it out to be. Rather, British conceptions of evangelical religion, political economy, and race often blurred the boundaries between what was antislavery and what was not. Like their slaveholding opponents, most abolitionists, including Clarkson, had imperial aspirations of their own. Antislavery they were, but abolitionists were also global reformers who wanted Britain—and its empire—to expand under the aegis of Christian progress. Thus, in his chronicle of morality and improvement, Hochschild might do better to follow in the footsteps of Reinhold Niebuhr and C. Vann Woodward, both of whom understood that people are capable of self-awareness as well as self-deception and that moral struggles occur between individuals as well as within them.

Further Reading:

Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (London, 1975); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrown of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1776-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1987); Philip Gould, Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Antislavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester, UK, 1995); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Christa Dierksheide is a Ph.D. candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. She is currently finishing her dissertation, “The Amelioration of Slavery in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1770-1840,” and is also beginning a new project on the intellectual history of African colonization.

The Economy of Early America is a collection of essays derived from a conference of the Program on Early American Economy and Society. It presents “big tent” economic history, including the cliometric analyses familiar to economists, as well as more cultural-, intellectual-, and social-historical studies. In this, it represents the vanguard of an economic history resurgence. The essays within grapple with the struggle at the center of that resurgence—how economic history can learn from and inform other types of historical writing without losing its econometric core.

Foremost among these essays is Cathy Matson’s introductory essay on the historiography of the early American economy. Matson’s survey is ideal for graduate students preparing for exams or for more advanced scholars seeking to make a foray into the field; her footnotes provide entrée to various subspecialties and should go a long way to making a sometimes-daunting topic accessible to outsiders. Matson often strives to make sense of and link opposing views; she is commendably fair-minded in her handling of such views throughout. On the subject of early American capitalism, the views are particularly strongly held and particularly opposed; it would perhaps have been sufficient to characterize the various arguments and move on.

Yet such cursory treatment may not have been possible, given that so many of the other essays in this volume grapple with capitalism. For example, in his “Rethinking the Economy of British America,” David Hancock laments the ascendancy of cultural history and its emphasis on moral economy at economic history’s expense. He is certainly right that debates over the virtues of text-based versus econometric analysis detract from the actual writing of history—from “paying attention to colonists’ thinking,” as he puts it (106)—but one must take care in the debate over capitalism not to lance the other side too much.

Of those historical rather than historiographic essays, Christopher Tomlins’s “Indentured Servitude in Perspective” is one of the most striking. Tomlins contends that indentured servants constituted only a small part of the colonial labor force and that, though roughly half of “voluntary” migrants to the colonial United States might have come on indenture, the “declining demographic importance of migrant indentured servitude” reflected the growth of the native-born population among which servitude was uncommon (156). Tomlins even suggests that Creole population growth, rather than the rise of African slavery, ended indentured servitude. There is much to commend in this essay: it has the capacity at once to shatter previously held conventional wisdom and—except perhaps on this latter point—with a seductive logic to become conventional wisdom itself.

Other scholars make original contributions in this volume as well. John Majewski’s study of popular shareholding in early republican Pennsylvania and Donna Rilling’s study of craftsmen and small producers in early national Philadelphia are both commendable contributions to our understanding of how the early American economy worked. Russell Menard’s “Colonial America’s Mestizo Agriculture” is a useful corrective as well.

Lorena Walsh’s “Peopling, Producing, and Consuming in Early America” considers recent works in population, labor, and consumption studies and is a handy reference on these topics. Her conclusion that “scholars of early American economic history . . . have reserved much of the collecting and analyzing of additional economic data . . . for some future generation” (125) is sadly too true (with David Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade being the admirable exception). Walsh agrees with Hancock that, for a resurgence in economic history to work, economic historians must go back to the archives and pay more attention to colonists’ thoughts and actions.

Seth Rockman’s “Unfree Origins of American Capitalism” returns to the origins-of-capitalism debate. While there are points at which one might wish Rockman’s essay directly engaged Tomlins’s, it is on the whole a careful account of the intersection of capitalism and slavery in U.S. history—terms less frequently juxtaposed than Eric Williams might have liked. Few people, Rockman notes, agree on just what capitalism is—his summation of others’ shorthand is “intensification of economic development” (336). Rockman himself defines “capitalism through the power relations that channel the fruits of economic development toward those who coordinate capital to generate additional capital, who own property rather than rent it, and who compel labor rather than perform it. In a capitalist economy, the primary mechanism for meeting and surpassing a subsistence standard of living and gaining access to additional productive property is the control of other people’s labor power” (345). Rockman’s effect is to emphasize how employers could manipulate wage labor—what Rockman sees as merely soi-disant free labor—into a system very much like coercion.

Yet with this thesis, one wonders whether anything new is brought to economic history. If capitalism is merely economic development, or markets, or urbanization, or commercialization, or rich people having the power to control their poorer brethren, human societies have been capitalistic for a very long time. Capitalism has long been linked to other major topics: slavery, the Puritans, and the Revolution. Perhaps as a result, the debate on American capitalism has been less well linked to international history than American economic history generally. As a result, it has grown repetitive and stale.

Marx and Weber explained American capitalism in global terms. Too many modern scholars of American capitalism miss this. Weber’s Protestant Ethic was one in a series of studies on the societies of the world, and Marx thought just as globally as Weber did. Weber quoted Benjamin Franklin’s “Necessary Hints to Those That would Be Rich” (1736) to explain the capitalist spirit—which David Waldstreicher duly notes in his essay in this volume. Weber also examined the economies of China in the early 1800s. Such comparative breadth is now missed. China enjoyed commercialization, urbanization, an extensive transportation infrastructure, strong urban-rural trading links, a rich merchant class, and abundant capital and cash for exchange in 1800 but was not a capitalist society. Weber’s Religion of China is hardly up-to-date reading, but his underlying point—that the spirit of capitalism was not present in China in 1800—is taken as rudimentary by China scholars. Rockman wisely focuses on the legal and social strictures that promoted capitalism in the United States, rather than making a merely wealth-based argument for the origins of American capitalism. Too many other scholars take “intensification of economic development,” insufficient for capitalism in many parts of the world, as more than sufficient in the United States.

Capitalism is one of the most exciting topics in U.S. economic history; it, like few others, draws scholars of a literary-, cultural-, and social-research bent into our chart-and-table driven world. But we must take greater care with the term, and perhaps a more comparative approach, if we are to mean anything by “capitalism” at all.

This book is a clarion call for economic historians to go forth and proclaim the good news: economic history still has something to tell us. In its division between historiography and history, it suggests that we need as many evangelists as practitioners if we are to bring economics to history’s masses. The subject of capitalism, already appealing to many non-econometricians, may indeed be a good place to start.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

James Fichter is an assistant professor of U.S. and world economic history at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.

In his book, A Century of Captivity, Denis R. Caron relates the story of Prince Mortimer, a West African who lived an extraordinarily long life marked by bondage and imprisonment. Born in Guinea in the early eighteenth century, Mortimer was captured and sold into slavery as young boy. Transported to North America, Mortimer wound up in Middletown, Connecticut, a river port whose economic foundation rested on shipbuilding and maritime trade with England and the British West Indies.

Little is known about Mortimer’s first three decades in Middletown, but in the 1750s Mortimer was purchased by a wealthy Irish immigrant who had recently moved to the town to establish a rope-making business. Mortimer and several other male slaves were purchased and trained as spinners to work in their new owner’s shop. Mortimer became an expert at his trade, a trade he would practice for the next four decades. During the American War of Independence, Mortimer aided the patriot cause, though it is unclear exactly in what capacity he served. Unlike many slaves in the North, Mortimer did not receive his freedom at the end of the conflict. Instead he returned to his old job. Apparently his owner did have some misgivings about slavery because he included provisions in his will that called for the manumission of all of his slaves upon his death. When the owner did die, however, the will was contested and the emancipatory provisions nullified. Though an old man by that point, Mortimer’s life was still not finished nor was his journey. In 1811, under circumstances that remain unclear, Mortimer was convicted of trying to poison his subsequent owner and was sentenced to life in prison, where he remained until his death in 1834.

A book-length study of Prince Mortimer’s life would be fascinating reading. This book by Denis R. Caron, as encapsulated by the title, purports to be about “A Century of Captivity,” or more specifically “The Life and Trials of Prince Mortimer, a Connecticut Slave.” In actuality, however, much of the book is only peripherally related to Mortimer’s life. Trained as a lawyer, Caron focuses his attention on legal issues and the origins of Connecticut’s prison system. An illustration of Caron’s scanty coverage of Mortimer’s life is that, according to the index, Mortimer only appears on thirty of the book’s 160 pages. Caron relegates his examination of Mortimer’s first seventy years in bondage to three paragraphs spread over the course of the book’s second chapter, entitled “The Early Years.” Caron then devotes an inordinate number of chapters to the last thirty years of Mortimer’s life as an inmate in Connecticut’s infamous Newgate prison and its successor, though the sources for his time incarcerated are slim. The lack of detail on Mortimer’s life is unfortunate since he lived through a particularly tumultuous time in American history, one in which blacks in the North experienced profound changes.

The portions of the book that do deal with Mortimer’s life as a slave suffer from several problems. Caron states at the beginning of the book that there are few studies of slavery in Connecticut and cites as the most important a study from 1933. Because of the paucity of primary sources related to Mortimer and because of the paucity of sources related to slavery in Connecticut in general, Caron often resorts to speculative terms such as “probably” and “most likely” when describing not only Mortimer’s thoughts but his actions as well. In the process, Caron’s speculation and his reliance on outdated literature lead him to significant interpretive errors. “Slaves,” he maintains, “were generally considered members of the household. The relationship was similar to that of children whose care and protection was entrusted to the master” (15). In another instance, he asserts, “Documented histories of Connecticut slavery suggest that Prince and others like him were not made to work any harder than their masters’ families, who generally labored alongside their slaves in the fields. Prince would not have been denied the basic necessities of life—adequate food, appropriate clothing, and shelter from the elements” (13). Overall, Caron paints a portrait of slavery as a benign institution. Ample evidence in the secondary literature indicates that Caron’s portrait of slavery is erroneous. While there may be little written on slavery in Connecticut, there is a growing literature on slavery in the North that contradicts many of his unsubstantiated assertions. Slavery in the North was far more complex than suggested by Caron’s generalizations. Use of recent secondary literature on slavery in the North would have provided a fuller, more accurate, context for Mortimer’s early years in bondage. If he had made use of these sources, Caron would have obviated his need to rely upon speculation and would have cut down on his interpretive errors.

Despite its flaws, this book provides a solid overview of penal reform and the prison system in Connecticut in the early nineteenth century. Caron also offers an interesting glimpse into the complexity of property law in nineteenth-century Connecticut that would appeal to individuals interested in early American legal history.

For those interested in the history of blacks and slavery in the North, a number of fine state and regional studies have been published in the past few decades. Some of these include Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill, 1999); Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, 1987); Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, N. J., 1985); and Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York, 1971). For an excellent comparative study of slavery in early North America, readers should consult Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Watson Jennison is an assistant professor in the history department at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His research interests include slavery in the Atlantic world.

Unbecoming British offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary history of identity formation in the United States between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Yokota casts the young United States as a postcolonial nation, though one burdened by its citizens’ dual role as both “colonizer and colonized” (12). This is the story of a cultural separation that was ugly and awkward. The messiness of American identity formation is clear in the introductory consideration of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. In addition to describing Jefferson’s juxtaposition of Old World ideals and New World specimens in his house, Yokota highlights the irony that his visitors tasted “Old World refinement” in the food prepared by James Hemings, an African slave taught to cook in France (7-8). Her analysis recasts Jefferson and his peers as post-colonial figures seeking to establish their own cultural legitimacy. She further asserts that the post-colonial nature of society in the United States caused elite Americans, like Jefferson, to “place a premium” on European goods. However, this cultural dependence triggered insecurities. According to Yokota, “Americans feared being seen by the rest of the world, not least the British, as still mired in colonial dependence; they grappled over what constituted the proper balance between innovation and emulation for a free people” (8-9). Unbecoming British features historical figures who, like Jefferson, send conflicted messages about their own identities, fail in their attempts to establish cultural legitimacy, and maintain a world-view reinforced by the oppression of the non-Anglo populations of North America. What Yokota delivers is a complex, messy, and fascinating history of the early republic of the United States.

In order to overcome their uncertain position in a triangle with “‘civilized’ Europeans and ‘uncivilized’ Native Americans and blacks,” Americans of European descent turned to whiteness as a concept that could both unify citizens with one another, and connect Europeans to Americans.

Yokota examines how Americans created an “interstitial space between their former identity as British subjects and the new political and cultural context in which they now found themselves” (11). It is, thus, a story of nation building in which the nation remains inchoate. Similarly, through her proposed paradigm of “unbecoming,” Yokota seeks to create a methodology that inhabits the “interstitial spaces” of current scholarship. Throughout the text, she gathers a diverse range of evidence (from plants to school primers to historical documents) to consider each historical topic, object, or person introduced. She weaves her historical narrative through the accretion of these multilayered sources of evidence. By reading political history through the production of ceramic housewares, or considering scientific education as evidence of postcolonial power relationships, Yokota seeks out unexpected relationships that break down residual, secure notions of “Americanness” in the post-colonial world she explores. Likewise, she utilizes a range of historical paradigms, introducing whiteness theory alongside cultural, political, oceanic, and material culture history. This eclectic methodology allows Yokota to tease out the breadth and complexity of “unbecoming British” such that cultural identity is identified through these multilayered sources.

In the first chapter, “A New Nation on the Margins of the Global Map,” Yokota considers how Americans attempted to counteract the threat that uncharted areas on maps posed to their nation’s perceived civility. She proposes that individuals created a “subversive American geographical narrative” to undermine British intellectual dominance (61). American attempts to create their own geographical narratives often failed and, ultimately, British maps remained the authoritative source of geographic knowledge. Significantly, however, the American geographies, such as Jedidiah Morse’s Geography Made Easy (1784), on which Yokota concentrates, were often compilations of plagiarized material interspersed with inaccuracies and geographical hear-say. Yokota argues that these “sly and populist” texts were constructions of American identity, which functioned by slightly altering “what were essentially reprints of British works.” Further, they “replicated colonial hierarchies” by maintaining clear boundaries between civilized Anglo-American and “savage” American Indian (61).

Chapter two, “A Culture of Insecurity,” considers the familiar territory of the conjoined attraction and aversion to material goods in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America. This chapter presents a string of material objects and historical narratives with the self-professed intent of refocusing the lens of the political history of the early national period onto “the enduring aspects of America’s colonial culture” rather than on its “new political system of governance” (63). Because of its numerous examples, this chapter lacks cohesion, though it contains a wealth of interesting information. Yokota analyzes the negative impact-over-time that international politics had on the American manufacture of ceramics, textiles, and glasswares. Despite attempts to produce these luxury items in the United States, the young nation continued primarily to export raw goods and to import finished products from Britain. Furthermore, success in American manufacturing was measured by the ability to imitate British goods (94). Although clearly no longer a British colony, the United States acted like one with respect to its practices of material consumption, a phenomenon that “encouraged the development of a common transatlantic identity” (72). But the uneven exchange of goods also reinforced extant power relationships and exposed Americans to international mockery when they misused items (72) or eagerly purchased European products of inferior quality (102). In this chapter, elite Americans and, increasingly, their middle class counterparts, are represented as keen consumers of European luxury goods, avidly pursuing such products in order to maintain the appearance of cultural legitimacy and independence, while serving the purposes of astute British merchants who profited by adroitly manipulating American consumers.

In chapter three, “A Revolution Revived,” Yokota follows the attempts by American merchants to open trade with China. By tracing a series of cultural gaffs, confused identities, and missed opportunities in the U.S.-China relationship, she shows that independence from Britain left American merchants vulnerable in an international market. The ginseng trade is central to this chapter. As a rare plant native to North America, ginseng should have offered American merchants a valuable commodity in the Chinese marketplace. Yet, British merchants more successfully marketed North American ginseng. Yokota ends with a discussion of the success of American trade with China after the conclusion of the War of 1812 and the development of the trade in seal hides, which made the China trade “a new arena for the formation of national identity and for the negotiation of America’s place in the world” (152).

Chapter four, “Sowing the Seeds of Postcolonial Discontent,” continues to consider the “raw” commodities that Americans provided. Here Yokota primarily examines the fraught relationships between British and American scientists. American scientists felt they “toiled in obscurity” while contributing significantly to European scientific knowledge. Europeans decried the misinformation provided by their American colleagues (155) or lamented their general incompetence. For example, the naturalist William Bartram succeeded in sketching a rare Florida sandhill crane for his British patron from a bird that his traveling companions killed. However, the travelers ate the carcass and discarded its skin and feathers rather than preserving them as a specimen to accompany the drawing.

More troubling than the unfortunate fate of the crane is one of the chapter’s lengthiest examples, which considers the tensions between the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Missionary Society of Connecticut (CMS), both serving the Congregationalist Church. Here Yokota proposes that “the souls of Native Americans had a value similar to that of ‘natural’ objects,” a concept that allows her to introduce this story into the chapter’s focus on natural history, though a reader might well wonder if American Indian souls and botanical sketches truly belong in the scope of this single chapter as cognate commodities (159). Members of the CMS, we learn, resisted the urgings of the LMS to live and work as missionaries among the Native Americans, because “proximity to ‘savage’ populations disturbed Americans who were trying to demonstrate to the world that theirs was a civilized society” (159). Later, members of the CMS initiated the desired missionary contact with Native Americans, but further disappointed their British counterparts by failing in the attempted conversions. Yokota argues that these seeming failures by the CMS allowed its members to successfully keep American and indigenous cultures distinct. This chapter as a whole demonstrates that Americans used raw commodities (be they cranes or American Indians) to obtain access to the European scientific community, but that they found these products did not grant them “the status of civilized equals” (191). For Yokota these flawed exchanges of commodities become another lens through which to view the impact of the postcolonial situation of the United States.

The final chapter, “A Great Curiosity,” argues that a European education was one of the “commodities the American post-revolutionary cultural elite most coveted” (196). Yet higher education became another way through which European institutions “maintained their cultural hegemony over America” (196). The first part of the chapter describes the experiences of four physicians—Benjamin Rush, his son James Rush, Benjamin Smith Barton, and David Hosack—who sought intellectual polish in Scotland only to find themselves perceived as minority “others” in the British Isles. These and other American intellectuals realized their position in transatlantic markets for knowledge circulation could only be solidified by the creation of a precise socio-cultural identity. “The irreducible object to protecting elite Americans’ aspirations to civilization,” Yokota explains, “became whiteness—the foundational symbol of national belonging in postcolonial America” (225). This effort to sort out Americans’ racial identities explains the sensational effect of Henry Moss, an African American man who was said to have become completely white. In order to overcome their uncertain position in a triangle with “‘civilized’ Europeans and ‘uncivilized’ Native Americans and blacks,” Americans of European descent turned to whiteness as a concept that could both unify citizens with one another, and connect Europeans to Americans (219).

The ambition and breadth of Unbecoming British greatly contributes to the interest of the text, but also to its weaknesses. At moments its narrative seems too sweeping and fast-paced. In every chapter readers follow stories about multiple protagonists and encounter far-ranging discussions of politics, economics, and material culture. Closer attention to the material objects represented in the many illustrations—including a greater dose of formal analysis and comparison—could surely have sharpened several instances within Yokota’s text, though it would not necessarily have contradicted her conclusions. The treatment of multiple topics per chapter also prevents Yokota from subtly treating the racial questions that she introduces. Although she is concerned with postcolonial identity, oddly none of the minority figures introduced within the narrative have a voice. Hemings and Moss, for example, appear as silent figures within narratives about the identity struggles of their Anglo-American contemporaries. They function as token counter-points in the larger, Anglo-centered web of unbecoming British. The reader is left wondering what this history of the interstitial space of American identity might look like if the book were told from the perspective of Hemings or Moss rather than that of Rush and Jefferson. Finally, the book ends somewhat oddly by looking with a rapid eye toward the 1830s and 1840s. Quick allusions to the American Landscape Painting tradition and to transcendentalism do not produce a closure that does justice to the multifaceted analysis that the book practices in its other chapters. A more satisfying conclusion is contained within Yokota’s recounting of the dramatic interlude from the War of 1812 in which elite members of the invading British Navy evaluated the sumptuous décor of the White House and helped themselves to a lavish feast in its dining room before lighting fire to the Federal buildings later that day. This messy war narrative more aptly reflects the nuances, difficulties, and dynamics of “unbecoming British.”

Unbecoming British contributes significantly to the ongoing project of breaking down any belief that the nature of identity in the United States after the Revolution was monolithic, static, or inevitable. It will be an invaluable resource to scholars of both British and American history, as well as a model of interdisciplinary scholarship of interest to scholars throughout the humanities and allied fields.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4.5 (September, 2012).

Julia A. Sienkewicz is assistant professor of the Art and Architectural History of the United States at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

I received my review copy of Daniel K. Richter’s recent book, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, at that point late in the semester when textbook publishers had begun bombarding me with the latest editions of their books and other supplementary materials for the United States history survey course. Though the narratives included in these works remain quite traditional, and Indians remain bit players in what is still largely a story of the plantation and expansion of English societies in America, these texts are far superior to those I was assigned as an undergraduate in the mid-1980s. They include more illustrations. More attention is paid to the role played by Indians in the historical development of the American colonies and the early American republic. In the short bibliographies that accompany each chapter, the authors in general demonstrate their familiarity with the exciting scholarship that has been published over the course of the last two decades by historians working in the field of early Native American history.

Daniel Richter’s important synthesis of this scholarly output no doubt will be incorporated into the lists of suggested readings that these authors place at the end of their first few chapters. They will, I suspect, be unlikely to do much more than that, for to truly act on the insights of Richter’s book would require a revolutionary change in perspective, and an entire recasting of the story of early American history.

Richter confronts in Facing East the fundamental challenge every scholar writing the early history of Native Americans must face: how can we, with evidence that at best is incomplete and that often is tainted with the ignorance, hostility, bias, and prejudice of its creator, arrive at an understanding of early American history from the perspective of Indian peoples? How can we incorporate native views of the events that brought such dramatic change to Indian communities into the broader narrative of American history? Richter is honest. “Perhaps no historical subject requires more imagination,” he writes, than the reconstruction of the Indians’ understandings of the newcomers who rapidly began to reshape their world in the sixteenth century. “Documentary evidence,” he points out, “illuminates the European cast of characters, yet only imagination can put Indians in the foreground.” With imagination and, importantly, an ability to read with sensitivity and subtlety the surviving strands of evidence—archaeological, anthropological, and historical—Richter demonstrates just how much a skilled and careful scholar can do.

In Richter’s recasting of early American history, the familiar figures of Pocahontas and Kateri Tekakwitha, for instance, no longer are viewed as Indians who abandoned their native cultures and accepted, respectively, the benevolence of the Virginia Company of London and the teachings of Jesuit priests. Their apparent acceptance of European religious values, when viewed from Indian country, reveals that Indians acted on motivations that often entirely escaped or remained poorly understood by their would-be benefactors. Nor, Richter argues, can Metacom, the leader of the massive Algonquian uprising that set New England’s frontiers ablaze in 1675-76, be viewed as the desperate opponent of all things English, a “patriot chief” trying to protect his people and his culture from Puritan aggression. Metacom, Richter points out, willingly assumed an English name, Philip, and he and his Wampanoag followers raised hogs. He was thus “not a rebel against cultural change or against the English presence per se.” Indians responded to the European invaders in complex ways, based on systems of cultural values and beliefs that the newcomers treated with condescension, scorn, and contempt. Nonetheless, by reading and examining carefully the extant historical sources, and arriving as thoroughly as possible at an understanding of the cultures described and recorded imperfectly therein, Richter shows that the effort to transform the traditional narrative of American history from one of the westward expansion of white settlement to one that looks eastward from Indian country is not only possible, but essential for understanding this nation’s past in all its complexity.

Many of our undergraduate students, no doubt, relying on the coverage of early American history in their textbooks, will continue to view Native American history in a simplistic and dichotomous fashion: Indians either resist heroically until they are defeated, conquered, and disappear, or they assimilate entirely into the increasingly dominant European-American culture. Richter shows in this fine and thought-provoking book, one that is written gracefully enough so that beginning students in the survey will have no trouble reading and discussing the important issues it raises, that it is possible to free ourselves from the interpretive constraints that a European-dominated and westward looking narrative has imposed on our understanding of the history of this continent.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Michael Leroy Oberg is associate professor of history at SUNY-Geneseo, and the author of Uncas: First of the Mohegans (2003) and Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685 (1999), both published by the Cornell University Press.

The story most often told of African Americans in nineteenth-century American theater is of the appropriated black forms and caricatured black behaviors that fueled the rise of the blackface minstrel show in the 1830s and 40s. In recent decades, historians and cultural critics have mined minstrelsy to show, among other things, its reflection of Northern racism, its egalitarian undertones, its meanings within the white working class, its commercialization and co-optation by cultural entrepreneurs, its European origins, its African origins, its urban origins, its plantation origins, its complex musical structure, its status as “noise,” and its influence on everything from Mark Twain to vaudeville to Mickey Mouse and M.C. Hammer. Amidst all this argumentation and critical play, the one thing that has been taken for granted is that an Africanist presence on the stages of America emerged through the distortions of white actors in grease and burnt cork.

Now along comes Shane White to tell us that blackface minstrelsy actually supplanted a vital–if not fully realized–tradition of black actors seizing hold of the European theatrical tradition, mimicking and even one-upping the greatest white actors of the day. The focus of his elegant, beautifully researched, and compellingly sad (though misleadingly titled) new book is the African Company, a troupe of African New Yorkers who took to the stage before mixed-race audiences in the 1820s. In recounting their minor triumphs and especially their failures in the face of overwhelming obstacles, White provides a genuinely stirring counterpoint to all the mockery and exploitation of the minstrel acts that would follow.

The story begins not with the Company’s debut of Richard III on September 27, 1821, but in 1799, when the New York State Legislature passed an act that brought about the gradual emancipation of slaves. This “glacial” process, which initially only “liberated” slaves born after the passage of the law by placing them in a form of indentured servitude, was eventually revised in 1817 so that all slaves would be emancipated by 1827. The African Company’s career began, then, in a time of great hope for the city’s burgeoning black community. But as White sets the stage for their debut, he also shows that this transition to freedom had unstable and even dangerous meanings for blacks. As newly freed local blacks were joined by fugitive slaves from the South and by immigrant blacks from around the Atlantic rim, they competed for jobs previously held by whites and established an assertive, often defiant, culture that flourished in the streets. Black New Yorkers’ freedom and their attainment of a degree of cultural autonomy, however, brought a serious backlash from whites, who frequently mobbed black institutions and even took sporadic measures to rid the city of its perceived black menace. These included several apparently successful schemes to transfer blacks convicted of vagrancy and other minor offenses to virtual enslavement on plantations in the South and the West. Add to this the constant threat of kidnapping, the emerging Jim Crow laws, and the scant opportunities for blacks’ economic advancement, and it is difficult, as White remarks, “not to be impressed by the vitality of urban black life” (67).

The emergence of the African Company represents both the possibilities and the danger of this moment for African New Yorkers. It was founded by William Brown, a black former ship steward and tailor who was the proprietor of African Grove, a tea garden that catered to blacks who were excluded from elite white establishments and wanted a space to pursue the same cultural and gustatory delights as the whites had. African Grove, tellingly, was quickly shut down by the authorities, but Brown decided to turn the space into a theater. But apparently seeking more white clientele, he soon moved the performances to a rented hall in the Hampton Hotel, next to the successful Park Theater. The Park’s managers were not amused by these upstart competitors, and within six months, one riot temporarily shut them down, and another saw Brown and an actor in his company badly beaten in their new home on Mercer Street. Brown blamed the Park’s agents for this violence; but the case of the Park was taken up by the well-known newspaper editor and playwright Mordecai Noah, whose frequent sneering reviews of the African Company were perhaps the best publicity the troupe ever had. In apparent retaliation, the African Company chose for its next play a work by Noah himself, a disastrous early work called The Fortress of Sorrento that had never before been performed. White doesn’t say so, but it seems safe to assume that they deliberately butchered it.

Although the African Company lasted only through 1824 (with a brief revival in 1828-29), its principal actor, James Hewlett–a former servant of two English actors who had toured the U.S.–carried their torch through the rest of the decade. Without the structure of a theatrical company to support his enormous talent, and apparently barred by prejudice from working with white actors, Hewlett developed a one-man show that won him considerable fame, and also considerable mockery (especially from Noah). Incorporating popular songs, arias, Shakespearean monologues, and–most famously–impressions of famous actors into his routine, Hewlett became a genuine celebrity, one of the two most famous African New Yorkers of the time. (White also claims that he is an unacknowledged progenitor of the one-man show in America, ranging from Lenny Bruce through Anna Deavere Smith and Richard Pryor. This is something of a stretch; perhaps a more apt analogue would be the pre-political stage career of Paul Robeson, who, a century later, would make further inroads into elite European and musical spheres.) Along the way, Hewlett turned the tables on numerous detractors, including the famous English actor Charles Mathews, who spoofed Hewlett’s performances after seeing him perform in New York, and Mordecai Noah, who continued his perverse fascination with black theatricals. Somehow managing to convince Noah to publish his retort to Mathews, Hewlett quoted Shakespeare back at the renowned tragedian, offering Desdemona’s love for Othello as proof that Shakespeare would never ridicule blacks, and concluding poignantly that “he is our bard as well as yours” (133).

That Shakespeare was not his is cruelly reinforced by the story of Hewlett’s demise. As white fascination with black actors imitating white theatrical performances began to give way to the more racy thrills of minstrelsy, Hewlett found diminishing interest in his act as “Shakespeare’s proud representative.” He attempted to remain in the public eye by turning increasingly to music and dance, but eventually he was reduced to exhibiting himself under the effects of laughing gas in the New York Museum in 1830. From there, White is able to trace him only in the court records and crime news of New York papers, where he emerges as a pickpocket and confidence man–apparently teaming up with a white woman whom he married. In this final New York episode, White writes, Hewlett apparently made use of “his verbal dexterity, his actor’s poise and his mastery of mimicry” to fleece whites when the legitimate stage ceased to be an option (177).

The book’s final chapter is a somewhat out-of-focus account of cultural borrowing, racial passing, and mistaken racial identity in New York. The stories White tells here are meant to explore the issues of impersonation and cultural hybridization outside the doors of the theater, but the effect is nearly to lose the main thread altogether. In an epilogue, though, White returns us to Hewlett, who–faced with T.D. Rice’s meteoric blackface career as well as his own legal troubles and the notoriety surrounding his mixed marriage–opted for exile from New York. He put on a few shows in Trinidad, where he performed scenes from Othello and sang the “Banner of the Battle,” and the “Marseilles Hymn.” “What a spectacle,” White writes: “a black man, an African New Yorker” performing this range of material “on a stage in Port of Spain, before an audience of British colonial officials, French planters, and newly freed blacks. Indeed, this is a fine example of the cross-cultural possibilities attendant on slavery’s slow demise in the Atlantic World” (222).

And yet the story of Hewlett and his fellow players may seem to us less cross-cultural than assimilationist. There were a few instances in the African Company’s history in which the troupe daringly portrayed scenes of slave life; and the interludes of music and dance in their typical performances seem to have incorporated “dynamic, unruly music and dance forms that anachronistically we can label as ‘hot'” (98). But as Hewlett moved on to his solo career, there is almost nothing–other than his limited partnership with the pioneering black musician Frank Johnson–that suggests a conscious attempt to fuse European forms with either African ones or the uniquely hybridized accents of black culture in the Americas. And so this episode may come across as a kind of cultural dead end, in which a black man in a rabidly racist culture tries to assert that the culture that excludes him is his. But Stories of Freedom presents another way of looking at it. Whites were claiming, in the 1820s as now, that Shakespeare’s work was an exemplar of universal human values, and it seems that the black performers in White’s tale wanted to test them at this claim. African New Yorkers, after all, wanted not just freedom, but everything the whites had: their public spaces, their fine clothes, their tea gardens, their opportunities for fame and self-transformation, and their supposedly superior cultural treasures. More than anyone since the poet Phillis Wheatley, James Hewlett demonstrated to a white audience that African Americans could not only appreciate, but actually produce and reproduce such treasures. Wouldn’t it have been better, Shane White’s book prompts us to ask, if white Americans had taken more seriously the accomplishments of Hewlett than of T.D. Rice?

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Benjamin Reiss is assistant professor of English at Tulane University. He is the author of The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). He is currently at work on a cultural and literary history of nineteenth-century American insane asylums.

Much made of little. Little made of knowledge. Knowledge made of scholarship. Scholarship made of textbooks. Textbooks made of terms. Terms made of semesters. Semesters made of weeks. Weeks made of days. Days made of decisions. Decisions made of mistakes. Mistakes made of love. Love made of mistakes. Mistakes made of blindness. Blindness made of darkness. Darkness made of curtains. Curtains made of dresses. Dresses made of flags. Flags made of nations. Nations made of wars. Wars made of beliefs. Beliefs made of Bibles. Bibles made of envelopes. Envelopes made of dust jackets. Dust jackets made of manuscripts. Manuscripts made of skin. Skin made of genetics. Genetics made of chromosomes. Chromosomes made of DNA. DNA made of nucleotides. Nucleotides made of adenine. Adenine made of C5H5N5. C5H5N5 made of molecules. Molecules made of atoms. Atoms made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and neutrons made of quarks and gluons. Quarks and gluons made of guesses. Guesses made of uncertainty. Uncertainty made of humanity. Humanity made of God. God made of Bibles. Bibles made of paper. Paper made of trees. Trees made of wood. Wood made of rings. Rings made of silver. Silver made of moonlight. Moonlight made of fantasy. Fantasy made of cleverness. Cleverness made of ridicule. Ridicule made of Hondas. Hondas made of steel. Steel made of Superman. Superman made of Marvel. Marvel made of DC. DC made of politicians. Politicians made of turkey. Turkey made of banks. Banks made of efficacy. Efficacy made of ink. Ink made of blood. Blood made of candy. Candy made of chocolate. Chocolate made of God. God made of Bibles. Bibles made of laws. Laws made of men. Men made of women. Women made of women. Women made of women. Women made of women. Women made of women. Women made of women. Women made of women. Women made of women. 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3.5 (July, 2015).

A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Seth Abramson is the author of five collections of poetry, including DATA(BookThug, forthcoming 2016), Metamericana (2015), and Thievery (2013), winner of the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize. He is also series co-editor for Best American Experimental Writing (2015) and an assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.