Seth Rockman’s Scraping By sets out to tell “the story of the chronically impoverished, often unfree, and generally unequal Americans whose work made the United States arguably the most wealthy, free, and egalitarian society in the Western world” (3). The scene is the scrappy, fast-growing, border city of Baltimore between the 1790s and the 1840s. Rockman’s subjects are those workers—male and female, black and white—who labored outside of the formal structures of early capitalist development that have been so thoroughly documented elsewhere. But Rockman does more than simply tell the story of those left out of the period’s rapidly expanding industries and economic success stories. Rather, he shows that these men and women were “the very foundation of capitalism in the early republic” (8). Their work—dredging Baltimore’s harbor on the ingenious mudmachine, scraping muck from the streets, building bridges—was the indispensable foundation (sometimes literally, in the case of bridge-building, for example) for the economic development of Baltimore specifically and the republic generally.

Departing from earlier scholars’ emphasis on artisans and the decline of craft labor, Rockman turns his attention to Baltimore’s unskilled laborers, those men and women who never achieved economic success and never climbed from manual labor to landed prosperity. But Rockman convincingly argues that these laborers formed the backbone of the early republic’s economic advances; they did not benefit from Baltimore’s boom, but it could not have happened without them.

Scraping By begins with demography. Who worked in Baltimore? “Those who [had] no choice” (12), Rockman tells us. Baltimore grew into America’s third-largest city in these years, and that growth was fueled by runaway slaves and white men driven to the city by changes in rural agriculture as much as by immigration from abroad. Once such men and women arrived, getting a job required parsing local mores about job advertisements, hiring, and racial and ethnic codes around labor. Rockman picks apart those unwritten codes in a chapter focused on five men: a white workingman, a slave, his owner, a free African American, and the man who hired their labor for work at a construction site. The intersections of their lives at Jones Falls illustrates the possible paths to job procurement, as well as the motives of the bridge contractor who chose this mix of free and unfree labor.

Rockman next turns to the men who worked dredging Baltimore’s harbor, making possible the commerce that was the city’s lifeblood. Analysis of payrolls for the mudmachine that kept the channel clear gives a window into men’s movement onto and off of the digging crew. These records suggest that for most mudmachinists, “manual labor was not a life stage to be outgrown, but a career” (99).

A career in manual labor, however, was likely to be made up of numerous short-term jobs, for women as well as for men. Rockman takes up women’s stories in two additional chapters, treating laundresses, domestic workers, and seamstresses in turn. Here, too, slavery and free labor were intertwined. There were few jobs available for women, but the bigger problem for most was that “custom placed other impediments in the way of women’s economic self-sufficiency” (131). The persistence of slavery meant that “purchasers of female labor were frequently the purchasers of female bodies” (131). The assumption that free women resided in male-headed households meant that they were never paid wages sufficient for self-support. Women’s presumed dependence on men led, when male aid was absent or insufficient, to dependence on the state. The idea that much of women’s domestic work was invisible and poorly or unremunerated is not new, but Rockman shows that the assumption of female dependence made women illegitimate as economic actors, and that carefully constructed gendered scripts characterized both their appeals for aid and the responses of wealthier Baltimoreans. In these chapters, too, Rockman teases out the ways that gender both intersected with race and independently shaped the lives of the working poor. A later chapter extends this analysis by examining families, and the internal economies of various sorts of family and non-family households.

When Baltimore’s working men and women failed to find work, they drew on (or were thrust into) various charitable enterprises, and the Baltimore almshouse serves as Rockman’s case study. Built in the early 1820s, the almshouse served a variety of purposes. For the elites who funded it, it was both a “performance of Christian duty” (198) and, through stringent regulations applied to both inmates and applicants, a way of “maintaining the social stability that facilitated their prosperity” (218). Yet, Rockman claims, “the almshouse belonged … to Baltimore’s poor” (198), who used it for their own ends. Some spent winters there; others institutionalized their children. Still others used the institution’s hospital, finding refuge in the almshouse long enough to recover from injury or an alcoholic bender.

Perhaps Rockman’s most surprising finding is that Baltimore’s work sites were not strictly segregated by race, or even marked by stringent separation of slave from free laborers. Instead, he shows, employers often hired both free men, white and black, and slaves for the same projects. Yet, these same employers were not blind to race and status, sometimes specifying racial preferences clearly in their advertisements. Even at mixed-race job sites, employers had specific reasons for each hire, balancing, for instance, the capital investment in a slave with the risk of a free white man’s walking off the job. The intersections of race, gender, and labor were, Rockman shows, “unpredictable and inconsistent,” but not random (68).

A similar balancing act, between capital investments and the desire to get as much work as possible out of an individual at every moment, led to the development of prospective manumission, in which owners promised to free a slave at some future date if certain conditions—an agreed purchase price, faithful labor in the interim—were met. Rockman finds that “an entire secondary market appeared” in Baltimore for these term-slaves (60). A buyer of a female term-slave could look forward to not only her labor during the remainder of her term, but also the labor of any children she bore, since they would remain slaves for life.

While the development of such prospective manumission arrangements contributed to the growth of Baltimore’s free African American population (Rockman reminds us that 60 percent of the city’s black population was free in 1820), such schemes also kept African Americans in poverty. When the price of a family member’s freedom was added to the household expenses of a family already barely eking out a living on Baltimore’s margins, it was no wonder that black Baltimoreans failed to acquire capital or join the ranks of skilled artisan labor. By promising freedom at some specified, but distant, date, owners shifted the incentives that shaped the work of their enslaved laborers, and further immiserated their free relatives.

The book relies on exceptional work with a variety of primary sources. Since washerwomen and mudmachine workers left no letters or diaries and formed few records-producing organizations, Rockman has instead painstakingly pieced together clues from state and municipal records, particularly those of the Baltimore almshouse and the courts, and from newspapers. Although the limitations of this source base mean thatScraping By can tell only fragments of any individual’s story, Rockman weaves these bits and pieces together, if not into narrative—there is little change over time here—then into a cogent whole. The writing is clear and the argument compelling throughout.

Rockman began work on Scraping By well before the current economic downturn, yet the recent record-breaking rates of un- and under-employment make this analysis of American capitalism’s development all the more timely. Rockman’s skillful work, however, seems likely to long outlast this stage of the business cycle; indeed, by showing the deeply interconnected nature of free and slave labor for both men and women, Scraping By establishes a new starting point for further work on the labor history of the early republic. All historians of the era, as well as economic historians of every era, will want to read this fine book.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3 (April, 2010).

Lynda Yankaskas is a Collateral Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her book manuscript in progress is entitled “Borrowing Culture: Social Libraries and American Civic Life, 1731-1854.”

On March 1, 1852, a man signing himself “Alice’s Admirer” wrote a fan letter to Susan Warner about her novel The Wide, Wide World, published a little over a year earlier in December 1850. His written reactions to Warner’s novel cover some fourteen pages and are as wide-ranging as they are long-winded. He took exception to Warner’s unfavorable descriptions of the heroine Ellen Montgomery’s Scottish relatives, for he himself was a “Scotchman”; referred by page and volume to one of his favorite scenes; confessed that he could not read the words describing the death of the beloved character Alice Humphreys for the tears that interrupted his sight; and jokingly described his frustrated matrimonial intentions for Alice, who is not only dead, but also, alas, fictional. Before making these observations, Alice’s Admirer introduced himself and his letter as follows: “I have just finished the perusal of the ‘Wide, Wide World’, and feel, as if already, its author is a friend. At any rate I cannot help expressing to you the great pleasure I have experienced in its perusal. After having received, as this work has, the approbation of critics & competent judges it is of little consequence what the views of a more ordinary reader may be—& yet— (I don’t know that I can give you a very good reason why)—but I must ask you to hear them.”

Today, the novel that prompted this fan letter is primarily remembered as a bestseller of its time, a paradigmatic example of how astonishingly well sentimental novels sold and how fiercely the reading public embraced them in the nineteenth century. The evidence for this claim is largely twofold. “[C]ritics & competent judges,” as this fan called them, recorded their approval of Warner’s first novel in a number of favorable notices and reviews in publications like the Christian Review, Godey’s Lady’s Book, and the North American Review. The larger public voted with their pocketbooks and turned The Wide, Wide World into a runaway bestseller. In fact, at the time of its publication, its sales were unprecedented (though they would be topped by Uncle Tom’s Cabin just a couple of years later): in less than a year, Warner’s novel sold more than 40,000 copies, and that figure would grow to over 225,000 copies by the end of the decade.

Published reviews and sales figures certainly have their uses in outlining and starting to color in a picture of The Wide, Wide World‘s pervasive popularity in the nineteenth century, but completing that picture requires paying attention to “more ordinary reader[s]” like Alice’s Admirer, whom today we would simply call fans. Thankfully, some of those fans wrote letters to Warner, and some of those letters survive. Their exhilarating combination of compulsion, passion, earnestness, and idiosyncrasy makes them not only wholly entertaining, but also quite useful. Warner’s fan letters can tell us why readers like (and unlike) Alice’s Admirer devoured The Wide, Wide World, why they formed deep emotional bonds with characters whom they knew to be fictional, and why they chose to bare their souls in letters to a writer whom they would never meet. They can tell us why particular readers felt so strongly about this novel and why, for some, their attachment to it endured over decades. These letters can give us fresh perspective, then, on sentimental novels, ordinary readers, and fandom in the nineteenth century—and they do so by recording the varied ways that some ordinary readers and a sentimental author were brought together by loving The Wide, Wide World.

At the center of many of these letters is a novel that was quite well known in the nineteenth century but has dropped off the radar of ordinary readers today—I imagine that few of Common-place‘s readers have heard of, much less read The Wide, Wide World. By way of introduction, then, Warner’s first novel is a hefty two-volume work that chronicles the tears, travails, and occasional triumphs of the girl heroine Ellen Montgomery. It tells what was a conventional story for that time—a young girl faces a number of hardships, sometimes big but often woefully small, and learns slowly but surely to submit her will to that of God and his male representatives here on earth. Like the heroines of so many other sentimental novels, Ellen Montgomery is a prolific crier—on average, her tears flow about once every two-and-a-half pages all the way through a 570-page novel—and her readers were expected to cry along with her.

Some of them did. The more than sixty surviving fan letters written to Susan Warner and her younger sister Anna, who was also a writer, are quite soggy, rife with descriptions of tears, whimpers, and weeping. (Anna, though never as popular or as skilled as Susan, authored many novels and hymns, including the still well-known hymn “Jesus Loves Me.”) Over the course of long careers, Susan and Anna Warner would produce over seventy titles, sometimes individually and sometimes together, but none of them met with the popularity, acclaim, or, I’d imagine, the number of tears that The Wide, Wide World did.

The Warner fan letters are now held by the Constitution Island Association and housed at the United States Military Academy, which is right across the Hudson River from the Warners’ home. They span the second half of the nineteenth century, dating from 1851 to 1904. More than half of the dated letters were written in the 1850s and 1860s, with ten letters sent to Susan Warner in 1852 alone. The Warner letters came from places far and near—from Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco, from Wisconsin, Utah, and South Carolina. About a quarter of the letters were posted from outside the United States, including a few each from England and Ireland and single letters from Germany and Austria. The writers were mostly women of varying ages, although one-third of them were men. More specifically, these writers were teenage girls, sea-faring men, recently converted Christians, aspiring writers, and older women who read The Wide, Wide World in their youths, passed it on to their daughters, and were still hoping for a sequel decades later. Of all the letters, the book discussed most often was Susan Warner’s first novel: more than half of the Warner fan letters mentioned it.

Though The Wide, Wide World is probably not familiar to many people today, the concerns and claims of these fan letters, rather remarkably, may be. While fans today are more likely to approach and engage authors through more twenty-first-century means than the now old-fashioned letter, the queries, preoccupations, and often unbridled enthusiasm of fans then and now share certain qualities. Warner’s readers in the 1800s wanted to know whether and when a sequel to a favorite book was forthcoming, whether a particular novel was founded on facts, how to succeed in writing a novel, and if Warner would be so kind as to respond, preferably with an autograph or photograph. Some readers quoted favorite lines back to Warner, with one reader going so far as to compose a full-length poem around a refrain in Warner’s second novel, Queechy (1852). Many readers described how Warner’s books kept a hold on them long after they put them down: readers wrote anywhere from a few minutes to twenty-four years after reading The Wide, Wide World and often described multiple re-readings, with one reader writing that she’d read it three times alone and three times aloud in less than a year. For other readers, writing to Warner was an exercise in nostalgia, an opportunity to remember old times: one reader wrote, “I well remember my first introduction to you, some ten years ago, as gathering round a bright fireside in our old ivy covered home, an elder sister read aloud to ‘the children’—the ‘Wide Wide World.’ Those happy, happy hours!— “

The scene drawn by this reader of a family gathered around the fire reading Warner’s novel points to one of the most important and fascinating threads that runs through these letters—their emphasis on connection and even community among readers and an accompanying desire to include Warner in that community. However, the communities described (or sometimes just posited) in the letters are not always as tangible or straightforward as this one. For instance, for every fireside scene of collective reading, there is a contrasting scene of a reader alone and absorbed entirely in his or her book: one reader remembered when she “was a very little girl and stole off to read without interruption ‘The Wide Wide World.'”

However, even this reader, who described herself as stealing away to read in solitude, did eventually seek out Warner. This fannish impulse to write to Warner derived, in part, from how readers imagined her. Her fans saw her as a confidant, a mother, a mentor, a minister, or some combination thereof; more basically, they imagined her as approachable and receptive. That expectation differed sharply from the attitude toward earlier American authors—mostly genteel, anonymous, and male. Whether because sentimental novels prompted unique responses in readers or readers felt differently about women authors than about men, these fans clearly believed that a relationship with the author of their favorite novel was a possibility.

Susan Warner’s fan mail demonstrates that, for these readers, the experience of reading sentimental fiction—alone or otherwise—helped to build connections, however much those connections remained in readers’ imaginations. Their letters are the product of that sense of connection and a lasting testament to its existence and even its value. They therefore run counter to an enduring criticism of sentimental literature—that crying over the plight of fictional characters was inherently isolating, indulgent, and escapist, and that any sense of connection conjured from reading a sentimental novel was inauthentic and not to be believed or credited.

To be sure, there are reasons we might be skeptical of these letters and the particularly connective experience of reading they are so invested in. The grounds of connection here were largely imagined, and the reader-author bond was composed of an odd mix of anonymity and intimacy—a writer calling himself Alice’s Admirer and withholding his real name even as he poured out his heart to a woman he’d never met, for instance. There were also many readers not represented in this archive for whom the point of reading novels like The Wide, Wide World was surely escape and not connection.

For readers like Alice’s Admirer who wanted the latter, though, Warner’s novels and their own imaginations combined to provide it. These fans did not want to escape the wide, wide world but to connect to others in it, to feel like a part of something larger—and reading sentimental fiction allowed them to do that. Whether or not we credit that feeling or that sense of imagined connection, these fans did, and it changed or helped or pleased them in significant ways. Their letters tell Warner, and us, how. This fan mail therefore not only gives us a glimpse into what reading The Wide, Wide World was like for a handful of readers in the nineteenth century, but also provides some highly specific, individualized answers to enduring questions—what do people read fiction for? What can reading novels do to and for us?

So far, I have been painting the Warner fan letters in broad strokes—by talking about their shared qualities and concerns, about readers’ often anxious desire to get to know Warner on a more personal level, and about how they used her novels to connect to their own pasts. In many ways, though, it’s difficult to step back and generalize about these letters or the readers who wrote them, as almost any generalization can be contradicted by another letter in the archive—indeed, the idiosyncrasies of these letters account for a great deal of the fun of reading them. Another wrinkle comes in the archive itself: the Warner sisters must have received many more letters than those that remain for us to read, but why they chose to save these letters in particular—or even if they chose to save these letters—is an important question without a definitive answer. The readers who didn’t write must also be considered: sixty or so fans represent only an infinitesimal slice of the Warners’ readership. Because of the limitations of this sample, these letters can’t convincingly support generalizations about the experience of reading sentimental novels like The Wide, Wide World in the nineteenth century. What they can do, though, is deepen our understanding of some of this novel’s fans and their responses, not by telling us how everyone felt when reading The Wide, Wide World, but how particular individuals did. To understand what these readers gained from reading The Wide, Wide World—and what they hoped to gain by writing fan letters—I’ll turn to a few letters that offer particular insight into the passion and connective power associated with reading it in the nineteenth century.

For many of Warner’s fans, that passion and power were built on their belief in a form of personal connection to Warner herself and on the interest they took in the characters who came alive in her novel’s pages. While half-in-earnest requests to marry one of those characters were not the norm, many fans believed Warner’s characters to be more than fictional and used their love for certain characters to bridge the gap that separated them from Warner herself. Two letters from Cordelia Darrach written in April and June of 1852 make this clear.

Darrach began her letter, as many fans do, with a somewhat stilted apology for her intrusion on Warner’s time, identifying herself as a “humble and unknown stranger” and hoping that Warner wouldn’t find her letter either “presumptuous or offensive.” She quickly became chattier. Darrach went on to offer intimate details of her life: by her description, she was a sufferer from spine disease and an invalid; she was evidently well read, quoting poetry and frequently alluding to other authors; she was also the mother of several children and helped to shepherd her family through financial troubles and their relocation from high life in Philadelphia to a harder life in a “rude farm house” in New Jersey. She also took time to heap praise on The Wide, Wide World. After describing at length how her entire family loves reading it—from Darrach’s husband, “a grave man of fifty seven,” to a twenty-year-old daughter normally “not very fond of reading”—Darrach got to the heart of the matter: “But what has most touched the hearts of my household, and more especially my own, (the mother’s heart) has been your beautiful and life-like delineation of the character of your noble Alice,—which we ourselves (and several of our friends) think bears a strong resemblance to our dearly beloved daughter who ‘died in the Lord’ at the age of twenty two. The closing scene was very like that of Alice; and she too, died at midsummer, and at midnight! Ah, dear lady, I have wept many, very many tears over your truthful delineations in that part of your work.” For Darrach, this “strong resemblance” was the primary reason why she read The Wide, Wide World “with the most heart-felt sympathy and the most intense delight” and then chose to write her fan letter. Those “truthful delineations” made Warner “dear” to Darrach. The shared knowledge of death—one fictional, one real—fostered Darrach’s strong sense of connection to this unknown author.

Darrach did test this connection: she closed her letter by asking Warner “for the very great favour … of a few, even two lines of your handwriting, to add to my treasures of Irving and Cooper and Longfellow and Halleck and Gould and Sigourney”—very nice company indeed for Warner to keep. Warner must have complied with this request, as Darrach’s second letter, dated June 16, 1852, offered profuse thanks for Warner’s “very welcome and highly prized letter.” This second letter also gave Darrach the opportunity to write at more length of her deceased daughter Caroline, whom she now compares to Fleda Ringgan, the heroine of Warner’s second novel, which she has just read—seemingly at Warner’s suggestion. For Darrach, the similarities between Warner’s fictional characters and Darrach’s real-life experiences proved a heady mix: she confessed, “I have more than once wept myself into a hysterical state of nervousness over your closing scenes …” of dying characters, and wrote, “Now you will readily comprehend why.” Darrach’s desire for Warner to “comprehend” her loss and her suffering was a desire for recognition, for understanding, and even for a kind of intimacy. This desire took a different form in the final paragraph of her letter where Darrach switched from the sacred to the profane. While making clear that Warner, busy as she must be, was under no obligation to reply to her letter, Darrach also indicated her eagerness for “any crumbs of information you may vouchsafe to drop,” including the very important detail of Warner’s “being Mrs. or Miss.”

Darrach’s missive throws many of the conundrums of these fan letters into sharp relief: readers bared their souls to a writer whom they’d only encountered through the medium of a mass-produced book. These letters nonetheless emerged from the paradoxical intimacy of that reading experience, and they showcase the conviction that Warner must be a kindred spirit, someone who fundamentally understood her readers. There was a form of trust extended in these letters, a trust that Warner would take such letters seriously and in the heartfelt spirit in which they were offered. Of course, that trust was not without its anxieties: it was one thing for Darrach to sit in her New Jersey farmhouse and imagine a kindred spirit as she read The Wide, Wide World and quite another to address that kindred spirit in the flesh by sending off a fan letter. In this case at least, Warner made good on that trust and sense of connection by writing back.

For many of these fans, the grounds of this trust and the community of readers and author it sustained were undoubtedly religious. Darrach, for instance, called The Wide, Wide World an “excellent publication which will, I trust, by the blessing of my Heavenly Father, help my children to conquer and subdue many of their evil tempers and infirmities, and may be the blessed instrument of bringing them to Christ …” Many other readers shared her conviction that The Wide, Wide World could help them do right: a young girl writing in 1881 compared Warner’s novel to the Bible and then talked about her everyday use of it: “When I feel angry or out of temper I read in the book and find out how Ellen fought against temptations, and I am instantly put right in tune again and feel good desires …”

Warner’s novel helped other readers in more dramatic fashion. Joseph Molyneux Hunter, an Irish man, composed his fan letter to Warner over the summer of 1862 on sea voyages between Ireland and Canada. He wrote nine years after he first read The Wide, Wide Worldto recount the lasting change that the novel worked in him. He stated, “In the summer of 1853 I was brought to the Saviour by reading a very few lines of the ‘Wide Wide World.'” He continued:

One evening I was going out to take a walk and while overhauling a drawer for something I wanted, I came upon a story book, as I supposed, and being very fond of novel reading I thought I had got a prize and forgetting my intended walk, shut myself up, and sat down to enjoy the book, but thanks be to God, the time was come when my poor mother’s heart was to be gladdened and her prayers answered for one in whom her life, almost, was and is bound up. The book was the ‘Wide Wide World.’ By what the world would call chance I opened at that part when the death bed scene of the Irish boy—my little countryman—is described. I read to that line where he lifts his poor little arm and says ‘Jesus.’ Words cannot describe the instantaneous effect produced on me. I fell on my knees and tears and prayers and strong crying to God for pardon and salvation testified of the nature of the effect produced; it was the being born again, the beginning of life everlasting.

The scene Hunter described is “a very few lines” indeed; it occupies less than a full page in the most recent edition of The Wide, Wide World. This “instantaneous” change prompted Hunter to both acknowledge the distance that separated him from Warner—”you know me not and I have never seen you”—and confess his feelings—”I love you very dearly and for years have been anxious to communicate with you.” That paradox was—and is—part of the pleasure, part of the thrill of the connection felt by fans.

That connection may have been felt by Warner, too. Though little evidence exists of Warner’s reactions to her fan letters, in a journal entry dated October 17, 1862, Warner described Hunter’s missive as “a very remarkable letter—and one to give me great pleasure… . Blessed be the name of the Lord!” Given Warner’s own religious faith, which was considerably deepened by an often difficult, scraping life on Constitution Island, her gratified response to this letter—and, we might imagine, others like it—is not surprising. Susan and Anna became members of the Mercer Street Presbyterian Church in New York in the early 1840s, several years before Susan began writing The Wide, Wide World. Their religious faith was a defining feature of their lives and work: Susan’s journals abound with religious references, the novels and Sunday-school books she wrote are consumed with the question of what it means to be a Christian, and alongside the Warner fan letters are grateful letters from West Point graduates who as cadets came to the Bible classes that the Warners led on Constitution Island. In Anna Warner’s 1909 biography of Susan, which relies heavily on Susan’s journals, she wrote that The Wide, Wide World “was written in closest reliance upon God: for thoughts, for power, and for words. Not the mere vague wish to write a book that should do service to her Master: but a vivid, constant, looking to him for guidance and help … In that sense, the book was written upon her knees …” That posture of prayer was communicated through the medium of The Wide, Wide World from Warner to Hunter, who “fell on [his] knees” after reading those few lines and then wrote to Warner about it. Warner’s short comment on this letter shows that she believed—along with at least some of her readers—that she could serve as part of a circuit that connected readers of The Wide, Wide World to Christ. Of all the forms of connection Warner experienced through writing her novel and reading her fan letters, it is this one, that of her readers to God, rather than between herself and individual readers, that appears to have given Warner the greatest satisfaction.

Not all of Warner’s fans were as fraught as Darrach or as earnest as Hunter, nor are all of them so complimentary or adulatory. Even less friendly fans, though, didn’t hesitate to claim connection with Warner. The letter from Alice’s Admirer discussed earlier was accompanied by a letter from a friend of his who, as he preferred Ellen to Alice, styled himself “Ellen’s Ardent Admirer.” He began by stating that he had just finished reading The Wide, Wide World and then asserted, “There is a sympathy between us.” He continued, “Ellen, I know would not upon such a basis be so bold as you see I am, but then Ellen is a girl. I am not.” Capitalizing on the license that his “sympathy” and his gender afford him, Ellen’s Admirer went on to criticize Warner’s novel on several counts. He called Warner’s decision late in the novel to relocate Ellen to Scotland “a bad move.” “Still,” he hoped, “it may turn out for the best,” and added that “The first volume is generally the best but then you became a little tired at last, and we cant work well without the heart is in it … ” After offering this appraisal, Ellen’s Admirer voiced his suspicion that Warner herself was Ellen; confessed, “I cannot get Ellen out of my mind, I don’t try very hard”; and then declared—surely to Warner’s excitement—that Ellen was precisely the kind of girl he would like for a wife. In a postscript dated several months after composing the body of his letter, Ellen’s Admirer made a qualified apology for his generally obnoxious, if amusing, letter, calling it “the spontaneous effusions of my heart” and claiming that “such are removed above the fear or the reach of criticism.” He assured Warner in closing “that if my love be not so extravagant as at first, ’tis none the less real, and I remain now as before, [signed] Ellen’s Ardent Admirer.”

While this “real” love, or this ardent admiration, assumed a unique form in his letter, Ellen’s Admirer also broached a common topic—a sequel to The Wide, Wide World. He assumed that a sequel would be forthcoming—”of course we are to have a sequel” —and requested that Warner not use such locutions as “‘the far corner'” and “‘the far end'” in it, adding a willingness to correct Warner’s grammar to his already considerable charms. Writing to Warner’s publishers from Detroit in 1852, Sara Bingham couched her request for information about a sequel in less presumptuous language. Bingham began her letter by asking Mr. Putnam if there was “a sequel to that most interesting and affecting book, The Wide, Wide World” either already published or forthcoming. For Bingham, a sequel would allow Warner to “complete the good work she has commenced and raise the morals of the light reading of the day” and to give her readers even more “hours of pure and delightful entertainment.” Despite this request and many others like it found in the Warner letters, Warner never wrote a sequel to The Wide, Wide World, leaving her fans ungratified on this particular point. As Bingham made clear, though, she was grateful for the hours of entertainment Warner had already provided, and therefore charged Putnam with communicating to Warner her congratulations and thanks, “humble as those thanks may be.” Bingham made sure to drive home that sense of humility, explicitly asking Putnam (and Warner) to pardon her letter by stating, “I feel tis entirely unnecessary for so young a person to say anything, commendation not being needed, when so many older and wiser have testified to their value.”

Contrary to Bingham’s seeming dismissal of her own letter, and to the similar assertion of Alice’s Admirer that the acclaim of critics made it “of little consequence what the views of a more ordinary reader may be,” the fan letter gained its value precisely because it was an amateur’s genre, a mode aside from professional, more public commendation. The fan letter instead served as a place for making personal confessions, for adding more capital to an already significant emotional investment, for claiming and trying to prolong connection, for taking liberties.

Many of these letters spoke less of liberty than of constraint when readers addressed the question of why they were writing to Warner. Alice’s Admirer, by way of introduction, said he just couldn’t help expressing the great pleasure he felt in reading The Wide, Wide World. Other readers began their fan letters by arguing that they couldn’t help but write: one simply could not refrain from offering her thanks, another wrote that “impulse has overcome all prudence,” still another called “the desire to write … too strong to be resisted.” Why, though, should that desire to write be resisted? What was illicit about composing a fan letter?

A possible answer to that question is tied to another vaguely disreputable act to which the Warner fan letters were necessarily linked—novel reading. Opponents of the novel in the 1800s worried that novels activated a kind of “can’t put it down,” addictive reading, an idea that existed somewhat uneasily alongside these fans’ compulsive reading and re-reading of The Wide, Wide World—a novel in which the heroine herself is warned, unironically, not to read novels. The idea that readers simply couldn’t put novels down implied that they should, or at least that they should be able to—and the fear that they could not accounted for some of the suspicion felt toward this relatively new literary genre. For many novel readers, their scruples about reading were swept away on a tide of emotion. For many of Warner’s fans, their scruples, and even perhaps the nagging sense that Warner didn’t really know her readers, that the praise of a young fan was unnecessary, that there was no good reason to write, were all swept away by what the sentimental novel and the fan letter offered—that powerful sense of connection and what it made possible. While these fans do speak of trepidation and boldness, impertinence and love, they most often speak of themselves. If writing a fan letter was itself a kind of compulsion for these readers, it was one that arose from the desire to be heard, to reveal oneself through talking about love for a fictional heroine, a deceased daughter, a loving god, or a tear-jerking novel.

Though readers made such personal confessions, they were still unknown readers writing to an unknown author, with little chance of ever meeting that author face-to-face. Warner’s distance from them—geographical and otherwise—paradoxically made possible the intimacy of their fan letters and the connections they imagined: these letters could cross distances in ways that their writers most likely could not. The impersonality of this situation lent safety to readers’ self-exposure, making heartfelt confessions about their personal lives less daunting. The Wide, Wide World is therefore just one kind of sentimental fiction that Warner’s fans embraced; another is that the author of a sentimental novel, who told familiar stories and knew so well what would bring her readers to tears, understood her readers—that a strong and even life-changing connection was formed between author and reader through the medium of a bestselling novel. The Warner fan letters helped to write that fiction then and help us to recover it today.

Further reading

Should anyone like to read the novel that prompted so many of these fan letters, the most recent modern edition of The Wide, Wide World is available from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York and is edited by Jane Tompkins. For another consideration of the fan letters to Warner and their ramifications for Warner’s authorship, see Susan Williams’s “Widening the World: Susan Warner, Her Readers, and the Assumption of Authorship” (American Quarterly, 1990). More information on the Warners’ lives can be found in Anna’s biography of Susan, Susan Warner (“Elizabeth Wetherell”) (New York, 1909). Corresponding readers were also represented within novels contemporary to The Wide, Wide World, including Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852) and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), while Barbara Sicherman writes about another famous sentimental novel and its readers in “Reading Little Women,” the first chapter of Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill, 2010). For a list of other bestsellers in the 1850s as well as a larger discussion of the bestseller itself, see Frank Luther Mott’s Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York, 1947).

Those new to the study of sentimentality may wish to begin with two foundational texts that have defined the field. Ann Douglas’s opening sally, which bemoaned the bad art and bad politics of sentimental literature, is The Feminization of American Culture (Knopf, 1977), and Jane Tompkins’s classic work on how sentimental literature fell from grace and why we should read it now is Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York, 1985). For an overview of where the study of sentimentality has gone since then, see Hildegard Hoeller’s helpful review essay, “From Agony to Ecstasy: The New Studies of American Sentimentality” (ESQ, 2006). Recent works that have brought new life to the study of sentimentality are many and include Glenn Hendler’s Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill, 2001), June Howard’s “What Is Sentimentality?” (American Literary History, 1999), and Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago, 2005), especially the third chapter.

Constitution Island is open to the public on specified days during the summer, and the Warner House itself, while closed for repair, can be viewed from the outside. More information about the Warner sisters and Constitution Island can be found on the Constitution Island Association’s Website, www.constitutionisland.org/. In addition to the Warner fan letters, the Association holds a wealth of Warner family materials at their archive in Highland Falls, New York, which scholarly researchers are welcome to use by appointment.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.1 (October, 2011).

The case for brushing up your Shakespeare

History has a kind of conscious life in the institutions, ideologies, movements, and forces that seem to constitute the daylight workings of society; but it has a kind of nocturnal life as well—a dream world ruled by the various alchemies of metaphor and symbol, where the boundaries between one institution and another with which it is constantly at war, between an idea and its contrary, swim about in a kind of cultural ectoplasm where forms change places with one another, sending the spirit of one into the body of its sworn antagonist, bringing the dead back to life in new incarnations.

—Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, Mass., 1996)

Last year, over spring break, I attended the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), which happened to be held in Bermuda. For a historian accustomed to events like the AHA, OAH, or the Omohundro Institute’s annual conferences, let me tell you, SAA in Bermuda was an eye-opener. First of all, the Shakespeareans know how to party. Their receptions were lavish—one night, it was a buffet dinner with open bar in a swank Bermuda hotel, with a steel drum band and dancing. Why can’t we historians live like this?

But the conference was revealing in another way, or at least it confirmed a suspicion that had been growing on me for some time. As I listened with interest to the remarkable range of panels and papers devoted to Shakespeare and his world, it seemed ever clearer to me that Shakespeare is the major figure in the “nocturnal life,” the “dream world,” of early American history, if I may borrow Robert Cantwell’s compelling image. For a variety of somewhat surprising reasons, I have been exposed to more Shakespeare over the past dozen years than I might have anticipated. In addition to the Bermuda meeting, during which I forced myself to pay close attention to The Merchant of Venice in order to think about the problem of money in the Atlantic economy, I have also had the pleasure of watching my children, ages twelve and ten, appear in productions of The Tempest and Hamlet, and these experiences have fed a minor Shakespeare obsession on their part. Abetted by the theater opportunities of a smallish college town, they have attended at least a dozen full-scale productions of various Shakespeare plays—comedy, history, and tragedy—and seen versions of many others on video and DVD. For a historian of early America, especially one who has so far specialized in Puritan New England, all this Shakespeare has had a salutary effect.

The process of getting up to speed on the Puritans, to the point of feeling even vaguely comfortable writing about them, can be overwhelming. It requires a deep and painful immersion experience. The primary sources are voluminous, dense, and sometimes impenetrable. Consider, for example, what Thomas Shepard once wrote to John Cotton:

I doe also grant that many professors do cozen themselves with inward legall righteousness, either wrought in them by vertue of the spirit of bondage or fetcht from Christ himself, & take legall acts & dispositions as sure signes and markes of being in Christ; but yet I still desire to know of yow whether this is the same righteousnes that Adam had for essence, differing from it only in degree, & whether tis the same holines & righteousnes that true beleeuers haue differing one from another only in the efficient, faith working the one, the law and the spirit of bondage woorking the other.

My point exactly. I’ve been cozening myself that way for years.

The modern scholarship is pretty voluminous and dense as well, and although few contemporary scholars can match Shepard and his pals for opacity, it’s not for lack of effort. This instance falls readily to hand:

While the preparationists rarely described consummated union, the Cambridge Brethren frequently expressed confidence in adoption as a past event. It is not the stages before adoption, but the life of the regenerate Christian afterwards, that they preach. But precisely how this application of mercy, by which sinners are made children, is accomplished must be understood within the framework of covenantal doctrine. If theologians must calculate the equation of sin and love, God’s covenantal promise is the term that mediates between them.

Indeed. So, as I was saying, the long hard road to understanding the Puritans can have an unintended effect on one’s literary world and mental universe. It can leave one knowing little else or at least knowing little else with anything like the mastery required to know the Puritans.

The cost of our narrow studies is not just one of literary breadth. It is also one of understanding. We who continue to ignore the wider world of which the Puritans were a part and for which Shakespeare stands as a colossal exemplar, do so at our own peril. Of course, many of us use snatches of The Tempest in the opening weeks of our survey courses—its island setting, shipwreck, and utopian dreams all appropriately reminiscent of the ill-fated Somers expedition to Bermuda. But then Shakespeare, like the island paradise dreamed up by the courtier Gonzago, fades away from our syllabi in the harsh reality of New World colonies, to be seen or heard again no more. We turn our attention instead to servants and slaves, the symbolic descendants of the brutalized Caliban, left behind in island exile when Prospero and his courtly attendants have returned to their civilized European abode.

Shakespeare’s absence from our syllabi seems appropriate, if we’re only examining the “daylight workings of society,” because the Bard was missing from the colonial scene. Theater was banned in Boston, the only place with the cultural wherewithal to have staged a play in the seventeenth century. For people to stand on a stage and pretend that false was true was to give public lessons in lying. It undermined the sacred word, the foundation of human salvation and moral order, and Puritans would have none of it. When a proposal was made that a play be performed in Boston’s Town House, recently rebuilt at public expense to house the colony’s government and superior court as well as its merchants’ shops, Samuel Sewall objected, “Our Town House was built at great Cost and charge for the sake of very serious and important Business. Let it not be abused with Dances or other Scenical divertisements. Let not Christian Boston goe beyond Heathen Rome in the practice of shamefull Vanities.” The ban was not lifted until the 1790s.

But Shakespeare and the world he represents—the color, sound, and movement of theater; the churning and vibrant life of London’s streets, taverns, and shops; the splendor of the court; the rich variety of literary genres and subjects that flourished in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; the continental, Mediterranean, and classical settings in so many of the plays; perhaps even Shakespeare’s purported recusant Roman Catholicism; the longing for a lost world of ritual, religious mystery, and pan-European unity—all these linger in the background of early America. They constitute a cultural shadow, the phantom missing limb from the body of experience that shaped England’s colonies, even, or especially, New England’s Puritan settlements.

In the simplest terms, without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, beadles, and gravediggers or the hovering evil of murderous kings, corrupt priests, scheming witches, and ungrateful daughters there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from. The godly needed the rude, the venal, the vulgar, ignorant, and irreverent and framed their own identity against them. “Puritan” is the word with which the profane mocked the godly, a fact that emerges most clearly in Twelfth Night, where the Bard’s only ostensibly Puritan character takes the stage in the person of Malvolio.

Mal Volio=Bad Will. The play on words is no coincidence, for Malvolio is not only full of ill will toward all humanity but also stands as Will Shakespeare’s alter ego and distorted mirror image—he is Bad Will (and the play’s subtitle, after all, is “What You Will”). Malvolio has nothing but contempt for men and women of all classes, from the drunken and lecherous Sir Toby Belch to the witty and world-wise fool, Feste. But when it comes to the Countess Olivia, for whom he works as steward and whose title, estate, power, and personal charms he covets, Malvolio plays the sycophantic schemer, longing to get his hands on what he wants: to wed Olivia and become Count Malvolio. His desires are his downfall. Maria, the Countess’s maid, schemes with Sir Toby and the fool to drive Malvolio to distraction and ruin, undermining him with his own ambitions and conceits. They forge a false letter from the Countess, dropping it in Malvolio’s path, which leads him to believe the Countess loves him and encourages him to abandon his sober Puritan’s garb and mien for an outlandish costume of “yellow stockings, cross-gartered,” and incessant, excessive smiling. A smiling Puritan in yellow stockings? Madness.

As Stephen Greenblatt’s recent Will in the World points out, when Shakespeare mocks Malvolio, or Bad Will, he mocks his own pretensions, his personal desire for nobility, flattery, and worldly recognition. In his spare hours, the Bard pursued a legend that the Shakespeares were an armigerous family, deserving of a coat of arms, and in the end he got one. But in the character of Malvolio, Shakespeare also mocks Puritans in general and, incidentally, nails an often forgotten quality about New England’s, and America’s, founding settlers: Malvolio, as a Puritan, is prone to make too much of words, to take them too literally. And in a jab at the Puritan opposition to theater, he also puts on a mask, the false face of grave sobriety, to disguise the true intent of his heart. But more specifically, like Malvolio, the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts were ambitious men who found their way in the world by fawning upon sympathetic aristocrats.

Consider Thomas Dudley, the sometime governor of first-generation Massachusetts, father of Anne Bradstreet, founder of Cambridge, early supporter of Harvard College, and rival of John Winthrop. Dudley, like Malvolio, was the steward to a great household, the Earl of Lincoln’s. One of our best sources for the early years of Massachusetts settlement is a letter Dudley wrote to the Countess of Lincoln. Other leading lights of the Massachusetts Bay Company, like Isaac Johnson and John Humfrey, gained prominence through fortunate marriages to the Earl of Lincoln’s daughters. The Arbella, the famous flagship of the first fleet, was named for the Lady Arbella, the earl’s daughter who married Isaac Johnson.

Needless to say, in the harsh days of religious persecution that engulfed England in the decades before the Civil War, many Puritans needed the protection offered by powerful noblemen and women. As they left England for New World exile, the middling, quasi-republican form of self-government that Winthrop and company created in Massachusetts deterred Puritan nobility like the Earl of Warwick and Lord Saye and Sele from joining the New England venture. Nevertheless, the relative absence of true aristocrats from the New England scene in the seventeenth century should not overshadow the importance of their patronage in the colony’s founding. Without the aristocrats’ funding, their political machinations and protection, and their ability to foster and encourage the clergymen and educated lay people who sustained the enterprise, Massachusetts would have remained a vaporous dream.

Although often obscured, the presence of Shakespeare and the world he represents as the lurking alter ego of Puritan New England has never been entirely forgotten. To the extent that Shakespeare’s England had a presence in early New England, it was represented by Thomas Morton, who started a renegade settlement between Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay and named it Merrymount, complete with maypole dances, drunken debauchery, and risky arms trading. Falstaff and Toby Belch would have been right at home. Despite his suppression and deportation by Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay authorities, Morton managed to publish the wildly satirical, though scarcely coherent, New English Canaan, which described his picaresque New England adventures and his suffering at the hands of these American Malvolios.

In the early nineteenth century, at a time when many New Englanders were leaving their Calvinist religious heritage behind, Morton’s legacy was resurrected by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his story “The Maypole of Merrymount” (1836) and by John Lothrop Motley’s novel Merry Mount (1849). These works were part of a growing tendency for American authors to demonize their Puritan ancestors, a trend that became stronger over time and reached its height at the turn of the twentieth century.

By then, Harvard College, founded as a center of Puritan learning, was attempting to transform itself from a provincial college to a world-renowned university, with Ph.D. programs, professional schools, scientific laboratories, and an open curriculum receptive to the latest and best from the globe’s scholars. Given these grand and cosmopolitan ambitions, many Harvard leaders and alumni were more than a little embarrassed by the origins of their alma mater. This was perhaps the historical low point in the Puritans’ public reputation, several decades before the heroic efforts of the scholars Morison, Miller, and Murdock to resuscitate the New England mind in all its vanished glory.

Ambition, envy, dismay at one’s origins, and the potential for embarrassment—these are fertile ground for fantasy and self-delusion. Witness Malvolio. And on this ground there grew a rich fantasy indeed, a persistent effort to link John Harvard, the college’s early benefactor, with none other than the Puritans’ sworn antagonist, William Shakespeare. To be fair, a slim reed of evidence exists for a speculative link between John Harvard and the Bard. Shakespeare was considerably older than John Harvard, who was born in 1607 when Shakespeare was fully at the height of his powers and producing masterful plays like Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. But the future college benefactor was in fact born in Southwark, just across the Thames from the City of London, at the home of his father, Robert Harvard, who owned a butcher shop not far from Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. And what’s more, John Harvard’s mother, Katherine Rogers, was born and raised in Shakespeare’s own birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Slim evidence and completely circumstantial, but for those eager and willing to believe, like Malvolio reading the forged love letter, this was evidence enough to concoct a story that John Harvard’s parents must have been introduced to each other by the Bard himself, making Shakespeare, in effect, the godfather of Harvard. Never mind the much more plausible explanation that since Katherine Rogers was the daughter of a cattle dealer and Robert Harvard was a butcher, the cause of their meeting was probably meat. In 1907, Henry C. Shelley produced a book-length biography, John Harvard and His Times(necessarily heavy on the “and his times” because the sum of all known information on John Harvard fits easily on a note card), which argued conclusively for Shakespeare’s matchmaking role in the history of Harvard.

Five years later, a still more enterprising scholar named Alfred Rodway drew upon deep and profound research in ancient English heraldry (those coats of arms again!) and etymology to demonstrate that William Shakespeare and John Harvard were both descendants of the same sixth-century Danish invader of the East Anglian coast. The results were published in a book called The Sword of Harvaard (1912). At a time when most Ph.D. dissertations in early American history still supported Herbert Baxter Adams’s “germ theory” of history (i.e., that English colonists carried the genetic “seed” of republican self-government to America, originally cultivated by the Angles and Saxons in the forests of northern Europe), Rodway’s conclusions were not all that far fetched. Through breeding and through marriage, it was now obvious that Harvard’s ostensibly Puritan roots were but an aberration—the institution had been Shakespearean and Shakespeare’s doing, all along.

Perhaps this collective fantasy explains the curious appearance of the famous statue of John Harvard, produced by the sculptor Daniel Chester French, dedicated in 1884 and still standing in front of University Hall at the center of the Harvard campus. It is commonly called the “Statue of the Three Lies” because inscribed on its base are a trio of falsehoods. It claims that the statue is of John Harvard, when there are no known images of what the benefactor looked like—a contemporary student sat as French’s model. It claims that John Harvard was the founder, when the college was actually founded by an act of the Massachusetts government and named for John Harvard only after his posthumous gift. And it gives the founding year as 1638, which was actually the year John Harvard died and left his estate to the college, founded two years earlier in 1636.

But in choosing the features with which to adorn his student model, Daniel Chester French added an additional, seldom noticed falsehood, prompted, I suggest, by the power of the Shakespeare fantasy. For if there is one visible feature that the Puritans of John Harvard’s day were known for, it was their close-cropped haircut (the distinctive do is why the Puritans gained the nickname of “Roundheads” during the English Civil Wars). But French’s John Harvard, with his long flowing locks and pencil-thin, delicate mustache, is no Roundhead—he’s a Cavalier, through and through. Despite their best efforts, the Puritan founders of Harvard College could not wholly suppress their alter ego, the part of their culture they hoped to leave behind, and the spirit of Shakespeare reappeared in the bronze body of one of his sworn antagonists. We might do well to attend to this sort of alchemy, the nocturnal workings of history, and see what we get by restoring more of Shakespeare and his world to our understanding of early America.

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

Mark Peterson teaches in the history department at the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, 1997) and is at work on a book on Boston in the Atlantic World.

I.

A Native American melodrama and a new American religion

On a warm April evening in 1844, in the social hall of Nauvoo, Illinois, Latter-Day Saint Brigham Young strode onto the stage in costume and makeup. In Nauvoo, the Mormons’ utopian city on the Mississippi, Young was one of the most trusted lieutenants of Joseph Smith Jr., the Mormons’ founder and prophet. No one in the theater could have known that within a few months Smith would lie dead at the hands of an anti-Mormon lynch mob; or that Young would take command of the community and lead it to a new home in the far west, by the Great Salt Lake. This April night, with the first play ever to be staged in a Mormon theater, was a night for escape for the embattled community. Yet there was something curious about the role in which Brigham Young was cast.

Brigham Young took the stage as a high priest, but not a Mormon or other Christian high priest: he played, rather, the pagan high priest of Peru’s prehispanic Inca Empire. He led a solemn procession of priests and virgins to the sacred altar of the sun. Singing a hymn that began, “O Pow’r supreme!” he called fire down from the heavens to set alight his offering at the altar—a trick that the amateur stagehands successfully managed at this maiden performance in Nauvoo. At a moment when Protestant America looked upon Mormons as an alien body in the heart of the republic, one of their highest priests indulged in an extraordinary act of cross-dressing, flaunting the Mormons’ affinities to a barbaric empire and a pagan faith.

The play was Richard Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799), a melodrama about the Spanish conquest of Peru, and a popular stock play in England and America. It was not an unusual selection for Nauvoo’s first play; but Young’s cameo appearance suggested a special self-consciousness in this particular staging. Pizarro, in fact, went on to become something like the Mormons’ national play, a reliable favorite over the decades. When the first theater opened in Utah in 1852, its maiden performance was again Pizarro, and another rising elder in the church played the high priest. Why Pizarro, why the high priest?

I first learned of the Mormons’ love of Pizarro while working as a research assistant for a distinguished historian of the American West. I had a longtime fascination with both the Latter-Day Saints and the Inca Empire. To find this point of contact across centuries and hemispheres gave me something of the confused pleasure one feels on learning that two good friends know each other independently from oneself. What had brought the Incas and Mormons together?

As I pursued this question, I followed a trail that led from the theatrical fads and racial prejudices of Jacksonian America, past fraternal clubs such as the Masons and the Improved Order of Red Men, past the Enlightenment revival of Hispanic scholarship and the anthropology of the nineteenth century, to the synthesis of all of these in the extraordinary cultural creativity of the early Mormon Church. This odd footnote to theatrical history, the striding on stage of one high priest to play the role of another, in fact holds within it a miniature panorama of the fantasies and enthusiasms of the early United States.

II.

Sheridan’s Pizarro opens in 1534, with the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro waging a war of conquest against the Inca Empire of Peru. Alonzo, a young comrade of Pizarro, has become disgusted with Spanish barbarity, has crossed over to become the leader of the Inca army, and has married the Inca emperor’s daughter Cora. Both as general and as lover, Alonzo has displaced the dashing Inca hero Rolla, who nevertheless remains his loyal friend. In a climactic battle, Rolla, Pizarro, and the Inca emperor are all killed. The Spaniard Alonzo and his Inca wife survive, along with their infant son, whom the Inca Rolla has died protecting. They will mourn the dead and found a new society on the ruins of the Inca Empire.

In real life, there was no Rolla, Alonzo, or Cora; no side-changing general; no climactic battle. Pizarro took the Inca emperor captive through an act of treachery, obtained from him an immense ransom, then had him killed. Controlling an empire that included modern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and parts of Chile and Argentina, the conquistadores fell to fighting among themselves. Several years after murdering the Inca emperor, Pizarro himself fell victim to Spanish assassins. 

What drew nineteenth-century audiences to a play that chronicled a remote chapter of history, and did so completely inaccurately? Whatever it was about the Incas that attracted the English playwright (and the German author from whom he adapted the play), American audiences saw Pizarro primarily as an allegory about Native Americans and European settlers, and thus an interpretation of their own national situation. Pizarro fit squarely within the popular Anglo-American literary tradition of the vanishing Indian.

During the antebellum years when Pizarro was most popular, the campaign to remove southeastern native peoples to the far side of the Mississippi elevated ethnic cleansing to national policy. Yet books that celebrated Native Americans, such as Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” were bestsellers. The impulses to deport and to celebrate Indians were closely linked: Edwin Forrest, the nation’s foremost actor, advocated Indian removal while at the same time commissioning plays in which he starred as a noble Indian who died tragically. The result of the hero’s death, in such plays, is that Indians melt away and are replaced by whites who mourn their passing, even while they benefit from it. One of Forrest’s favorite roles was Pizarro’s Rolla.

Historian Philip Deloria has argued that a fundamental theme of American culture is a simultaneous effort to displace Native Americans and to inherit, borrow, or perform Native American identity—a practice that he calls “playing Indian.” Pizarro’s elegiac mood—glamorizing the Inca Empire as it went down to defeat—spoke to this ambivalent engagement with Native Americans.

If this ambivalence was a prominent theme in antebellum America, it was even more central to the brand-new Mormon religion. The Book of Mormon, said to have been revealed by an angel in 1827, is in fact a history of ancient Native Americans. Its protagonists are Israelites who came to America by sea in 600 B.C. before splitting into two groups, the good Nephites and the evil Lamanites. Eventually the Lamanites—the ancestors of modern Indians—exterminated their Nephite cousins. The Nephites’ last act was to leave the Book of Mormon to be discovered by Joseph Smith, their latter-day heir. 

Just as their contemporaries wept for dying Indian heroes while voting to deport living Indians to the Great Plains, Mormons extolled the lost Nephites but had more troubled relations with the modern-day “Lamanites,” who they believed had received dark skin as a curse for their wickedness. In this context Pizarro—in which ancient Indians die tragically and bequeath their empire to a virtuous European—seems a natural choice for the Mormons’ first theatrical production. Rolla’s noble resignation distantly echoed the Nephite Moroni’s long before (dated at 480 A.D.), which closed the Book of Mormon.

III.

One point, however, remains mysterious. Brigham Young—a dominating figure and the main promoter of the 1844 performance—did not play either the tragic Rolla or the victorious Alonzo. He played the Inca high priest. This character had few lines and no role in the plot, yet was considered one of the most important in the play. The leader of a theatrical troupe typically cast himself either as Rolla or as the high priest. What was it about this incidental character that attracted Brigham Young and his contemporaries?

One possible clue, unlikely as it seems: in 1842, two years before Pizarro reached Nauvoo, the leaders of the Mormon church became Masons. The ritual world of secret fraternal clubs may have had more to do with Pizarro’s success—and Brigham Young’s performance—than meets the eye.

Reading Pizarro’s stiff and bombastic lines today, I had some trouble understanding its popularity, and some contemporaries had the same reaction. Even the editor of one 1846 edition suggested that the play’s appeal lay less in its writing than in its “scenery, music, and processions.” This aspect of pure, exotic spectacle was centered in the high priest’s procession, which formed an interlude in the play. It also connected the play to Masonic performance.

Men’s fraternal clubs, such as the Masons, Odd Fellows, and Knights of Pythias, were theaters of ritual, allegorical performance, as formal and complex as anything on the public stage. But the mode of performance was distinct from stage acting: it was slow, solemn, and gestural, much like the high priest’s interlude in Pizarro. Furthermore, fraternal rituals had a religiosity resembling that of the Incas in Pizarro. More deist than Christian, they often involved pagan and exotic figures. The prayer in Pizarro to the “pow’r Supreme” could have come from a Masonic initiation. Even the title “high priest” was Masonic.

There were even clubs that specialized in “Indian” performances. Their imagined Indians were much like the characters in Masonic dramas: ancient, departed, and deist. (Some groups sought more authenticity: Lewis Henry Morgan, the father of American anthropology, actually began studying Iroquois ethnography as material for his own club’s rituals.) One group, the Improved Order of Red Men, adopted a ritual that was strikingly similar to the high priest’s in Pizarro: during a new member’s initiation, a “prophet” stands before an extinguished council fire and calls, “Oh let thy sacred fire descend,” and the fire is mystically lit from above. The Red Men, in fact, may have borrowed their ritual from the often-staged Pizarro. 

Joseph Smith’s adoption of Masonry was no mere whim. He immersed himself in the study of Masonic ritual in order to reform what he considered a sacred but corrupted tradition. The new body of ritual he created for the Mormons included initiation rites for a new priesthood with mysterious signs and secret, allegorical dramas—the latter with roles such as Adam and Eve, Solomon, and Satan. Brigham Young was an important participant in this process of innovation. Elements of ritual theater, indeed, pervaded Mormon religion. As the Inca high priest in Pizarro, Young gave a ritual performance neither more nor less exotic and theatrical than in his day job as a Mormon high priest.

IV.

Jacksonian Indian melodrama and Masonic ritual are two contexts for understanding Brigham Young’s performance in Pizarro. But what of the Incas themselves? An Enlightenment revival of Hispanic scholarship had made English-speaking readers familiar with the Inca Empire as a profoundly alien society, yet one that was in many ways admirable. The Inca, according to much of this literature, were authoritarian in their politics but that authoritarianism produced admirable order and happiness. The success of Sheridan’s Pizarro in 1799 created a new wave of interest in the Incas among English speakers. The next year saw the publication of a children’s dialogue about the Incas, with lines such as: “Excellent people! Who can avoid respecting them?” But the most influential Enlightenment account of the Incas was contained in William Robertson’s History of America (1777), reprinted many times over the following decades in England and America.

If he read this account, Brigham Young might have recognized similarities to his own Mormon people. Robertson’s History portrayed the Inca Empire as a uniquely authoritarian, communitarian, and yet well-ordered society. “In Peru,” he wrote, “the whole system of policy was founded on religion. The Inca appeared not only as a legislator, but as the messenger of Heaven.” The divine commands channeled by the Inca emperor extended to practical as well as spiritual matters, and the management of land was “regulated by public authority in proportion to the exigencies of the community.” 

Robertson might have been describing the Mormon Church. The Bostonian Josiah Quincy, visiting Nauvoo in 1844, had this to say of Joseph Smith’s theocracy: “No association with the sacred phrases of Scripture could keep the inspirations of this man from getting down upon the hard pan of practical affairs. ‘Verily I say unto you, let my servant, Sidney Gilbert, plant himself in this place and establish a store.’ So had run one of [Smith’s] revelations.”

Aspects of Mormon religion were mirrored in accounts of the Incas. Writers had long celebrated the Incas’ dignified and rational cult of the sun, enacted by the high priest in Sheridan’s play. An American edition of the play shows Edwin Forrest as Rolla wearing an image of the sun on his chest. The enigmatically smiling face of the sun was likewise visible on the capstone of Nauvoo’s Mormon temple, reflecting the same Enlightenment (and Masonic) traditions of esotericism and natural religion that made the Incas so attractive. In addition to worshiping the sun, the Incas believed that their emperors were gods as well as men. And as scholar Nola Diane Smith has pointed out, it was just a few weeks before the staging of Pizarro that Joseph Smith, in Nauvoo, preached his famous doctrine that our God was once a man, and that we may one day be gods of our own worlds.

While this notion struck most American Christians as heretical, the most infamous Mormon doctrine promoted polygamy. Outrage against polygamy was soon to lead to Joseph Smith’s murder, and would cause half a century of conflict between the Mormons and the society around them. Their enemies referred to it as a “relic of barbarism.” This was one more practice the Mormons shared with the barbaric Inca Empire, where the emperor (like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young) married dozens of wives.

Enlightenment histories of the Incas portrayed a society that was fundamentally alien to Anglo-American norms but was nevertheless happy and well ruled. When Brigham Young took the stage in the role of the Inca priest, he made a statement that he could not have made by playing one of the other Native American dramatic heroes. His casting created an inevitable association between the hated Mormons and the admired Incas. It invoked a literary tradition that praised precisely those deviations from Anglo-American norms for which the Mormons themselves were most reviled.

It is far from certain that any such calculation was in Brigham Young’s mind when he mounted the stage as the Inca high priest. But there is evidence that Mormons, like other North Americans, were aware of the Incas’ claims to sympathy. In 1850, the Mormon newspaper printed a letter ostensibly from a descendent of the last Inca emperor, calling upon the president of the United States to invade Peru and reinstate the Incas “in their ancient splendor.”

The selection of Pizarro to open up the Mormons’ very first theater, in Nauvoo in 1842, was not an anomaly; as we have seen, the play became a Mormon tradition. Years later, the man who had directed the play boasted that he had been the first to cast Brigham Young as the high priest, adding, “[H]e’s been playing the character with great success ever since!”

Further Reading:

A wonderful introduction to the history of Mormon theater is Howard R. Lamar, The Theater in Mormon Life and Culture, Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series 4 (Logan, Ut., 1999); this essay began in conversations with Professor Lamar and is dedicated to him. I am also very much indebted to Nola Diane Smith’s “Reading across the Lines: Mormon Theatrical Formations in Nineteenth Century Nauvoo, Illinois” (Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 2001), although our interpretations are different.

On the play Pizarro, see Myron Matlaw, “‘This is Tragedy!!!’ The History of Pizarro,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 43 (1957): 288-94. On the tragic Indian theme in American theater, see B. Donald Grose, “Edwin Forrest, Metamora, and the Indian Removal Act of 1830,” Transcendental Journal (May 1985). On “playing Indian,” see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, 1998). On Mormon religious ritual, see David John Buerger, The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship (San Francisco, 1994). On fraternal ritualism, see Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, 1989). On Enlightenment images of the Incas, see Fernanda Macchi, “Imágenes delos Incas en el Siglo XVIII” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2003).

Primary source quotations not fully identified in the text are drawn from: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Pizarro: A Play in Five Acts, ed. Epes Sargent (New York, 1846), v.; Joachim Heinrich Campe, Pizarro; or, The conquest of Peru, trans. Elizabeth Helme (Boston, n.d.), 92; William Robertson, The History of America, 14th ed., 3 vols. (London, 1821), 3: 49, 57; William Mulder and A. Russell Mortensen, eds., Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers (New York, 1958), 135, 137; Salt Lake City Deseret News, June 22, 1850; John S. Lindsay, The Mormons and the Theatre; or The History of Theatricals in Utah (Salt Lake City, 1905), 7.

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

Jeremy Ravi Mumford received his Ph.D. in history this year from Yale University, and is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of the Atlantic World at Brandeis University. His current research is on Native Americans, in both Americas, who filed lawsuits in colonial courts.

When I picture Edwin Booth I see those American actors, most of them born in his century, who were destined to wander. I see Joseph Jefferson, condemned to tour the country as Rip Van Winkle for forty years until death freed them both; I see James O’Neill, trapped in the role of the Count of Monte Cristo, a part he and his son Eugene both came to despise; I see Minnie Madden Fiske, doomed from the age of eight to a life in transit. I imagine the minstrel singers and vaudevillians who plied their tricks from one town to the next and the “Tommers” who spent whole careers on the road acting out Harriet Beecher Stowe’s tale of life among the lowly. The actress Fanny Kemble, writing in 1847 of her woes on the American road, complained of being made sick by auditoriums with walls as “thin as my stockings” and of her “wandering and homeless life.” Moths drawn to a fickle light, these men and women moved from theater to theater along a route hewn by fellow players who couldn’t afford to go home, or didn’t know how, or had no home.

Eugene O’Neill, born in a hotel room while his father was on tour, captured the roaming predicament. The actor on the road, he said, “doesn’t understand a home. He doesn’t feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home.” Even a fan as avid as Walt Whitman had his beef with a system in which stars flitted about the country, “playing a week here and a week there, bringing as his or her greatest recommendation, that of novelty.” Yet this drafty system brought thrills to people across the country who were starved for entertainment and supplied a new nation with the mythic figures it needed: Buffalo Bill, Jim Crow, Little Eva, the Headless Horseman, Evangeline.

Edwin Booth, like his brothers Junius Brutus Jr. and John Wilkes, was born into the trade. The boys’ mad, alcoholic father, Junius Brutus Sr., spent most of his life on the road and died there while en route to a gig in Cincinnati. “There are no more actors!” cried orator Rufus Choate on hearing of the elder Booth’s death. But Choate was wrong. Booth’s third son, Edwin, a gentle child who seldom smiled and rarely spoke, had taken up his father’s mantle, even though Junius Sr. had sworn he wanted this beautiful boy to have nothing to do with the stage.

Whatever chance young Edwin had at an ordinary life vanished in his teens, when he became his father’s de facto guardian. Left to himself, Junius Sr. wrought havoc offstage and on. As Hamlet he was capable, when drunk, of abandoning Ophelia and climbing a ladder where he’d sit howling until a stage manager hauled him down. Managers learned to lock Booth up ahead of time to keep him sober for his performances. Absent liquor he was a master, funny and feral at the same time, so intense that actresses sometimes shrank from him in fear. Whitman said of Junius Sr., “The words fire, energy, abandon found in him unprecedented meanings.”

Edwin, small, frail, melancholic, was no match. He shared his father’s heart-shaped face and radiant eyes but lacked his wildness, the abandon that beguiled Whitman. Edwin’s passion was tempered by intellect. “I am conscious of an interior personality standing back of my own, watching and guiding me,” he told a friend. His father may have felt that way about Edwin. On tour the teenager did his best to rein in Junius Sr., tracking his movements, keeping him out of bars, sitting backstage night after night waiting for his father to exit the stage. Perhaps inevitably, Edwin learned all of Booth’s plays, and when the time came, he easily stepped into one. It was the fall of 1849, and he was nearly sixteen. A stage manager in Boston asked if he would play Tressel to his father’s Richard III, and Edwin agreed. He’d long since memorized the part, listening through the dressing-room keyhole “to the garbled text of the mighty dramatists” whose works filled his father’s repertoire. That night in Boston, Junius Sr. gave his own spurs to Edwin to wear onstage, and afterward the older Booth “coddled me,” Edwin remembered, “gave me gruel . . . and made me don his worsted night-cap”—rare gestures of fatherly love.

On the night of Edwin’s birth, meteors had tumbled from the sky above Junius Sr.’s Maryland farm, and people thought the heavens were bursting. The infant arrived with a caul, and the slaves who worked the Booth farm predicted he would one day see ghosts. They also believed Edwin would be guided by a lucky star. Locked as well in that strange prognostication, it seems, was a fated sadness, a sense Edwin himself had, for most of his life, that nothing would turn out right.

Within five years of Edwin’s stage debut Junius Sr. was dead, and Edwin was a star on the stock circuit. He played snowbound mining camps, lived briefly in a hut outside San Francisco, toured the Pacific islands, and eventually made his way back east where he took on his father’s most famous role, the deranged charmer Richard III. Brother Junius Jr., meanwhile, became a theater manager, sister Asia married an actor, and in 1855 seventeen-year-old John Wilkes Booth made his first stage appearance. Before long, both John and Edwin were living on the road. “Starring around the country is sad work,” Edwin wrote an acquaintance, adding that John was “sick of it.” So, for that matter, was Edwin. He urged his daughter and only child to learn to ice-skate, because in his own childhood he’d had no chance to enjoy sports. “For I was traveling most of the time,” he told the girl.

Edwin was nearly thirty when Edwina Booth was born, in England. Like Eugene O’Neill, she arrived on the road while her father was touring. Her birth came one month after the start of the American Civil War, and lest anyone mistake her—or her father’s—allegiance, Edwin hung a Union flag over the infant’s bed.

Her mother, Mary Devlin, had been an actress before marrying Booth. They’d met on the road, in Richmond, Virginia, when she played Juliet to his Romeo, but she’d given up the stage to be Edwin’s wife. He worshipped her. “My youth began with my marriage,” he once said, tellingly. When they returned to the United States after their British tour, they split their time between a rented house in Boston and a hotel in Manhattan.

In early 1863, when Edwina was not yet two, Mary Booth contracted pneumonia. Edwin was performing in New York at the time; Mary remained at home in Boston. Like his father, Edwin had begun drinking, and on the evening of February 20th he was too drunk to open the telegram urging him to come home. By the time he gathered his senses and boarded a train for Boston, it was too late. He arrived to find Mary dead, at twenty-three, a white cloth tied around her neck and chin. Booth never forgave himself. His mother and brother John Wilkes stood beside him at Mary’s funeral; afterward, Edwin renounced liquor for good.

“I wish to God I was not an actor,” he told a friend in the first raw months after Mary’s death. “I despise and dread the d–d occupation; all its charms are gone and the stupid reality stands naked before me. I am a monkey, nothing more.” But there was no other way to support Edwina, and so seven months later Edwin returned to the stage, as Hamlet, another wanderer haunted by family ghosts.

There is a kind of actor who inhabits his role rather than himself. His true life takes place onstage. Only by occupying someone else’s drama do such men and women gain the extra layer of skin needed to express themselves. (Hence the derivation of the word “personality” from the Latin persona, or mask.) When an actor becomes identified with one particular role, the phenomenon is both magnified and debased. If he plays the part for years, his comfort with the character may give way to fatigue and contempt.

I imagine this is how Booth experienced Hamlet. It became his signature role. “You see . . . he is Hamlet—melancholy and all,” John Wilkes Booth said of his older brother. When Edwina Booth heard the word “omelet” for the first time, she cried, “That’s Papa!”

Surely Booth saw the parallels with his own life, and although he insisted it was his father, Junius, who most resembled the doomed prince (“great minds to madness closely are allied”), it was in fact Edwin who best embodied the part. Despite his talent for expressing the emotions of others onstage—people thought him the greatest tragedian of the nineteenth-century American theater—Edwin Booth was somehow marooned from his own feelings. When he tried to thank audiences publicly for their applause, he shrank back and could only mutter inarticulate sounds. He undoubtedly had, as Hamlet has, “that within which passeth show,” but something, some ghost or fear or remembered trauma, prevented Booth from ever revealing what lurked within. Like Hamlet, he needed the artifice of theater; he needed disguise to be himself.

In late 1864, Edwin Booth embarked on a one-hundred-night run of Hamlet that captivated the American press. Harper’s wrote, “His small, lithe form, with the mobility and intelligent sadness of his face and his large, melancholy eyes, satisfy the most fastidious imagination that this is Hamlet as he lived in Shakespeare’s world.” Booth’s performance became the benchmark for a half-century of American Hamlets.

Any pleasure Edwin might have taken in this achievement vanished on April 14, 1865, when his brother shot Abraham Lincoln in a theater in Washington, D.C. Edwin heard the news in Boston, where he’d been performing, and immediately went into hiding, afraid for his life. (Some reports erroneously pegged him, not John, as Lincoln’s assassin.) Disguised in a cloak and low-slung hat, Edwin snuck down to New York to be with his bereaved mother, all the while believing his acting career finished. “For the future—alas,” he informed the public in a nationwide advertisement, drafted by an acquaintance and published a week after Lincoln’s death, “I shall struggle on in my retirement bearing a heavy heart, an oppressed memory and a wounded name—dreadful burdens—to my too welcome grave.”

U.S. Marshalls searched his trunks and placed Edwin under house arrest; hate mail streamed in. Typical was a letter signed “Outraged Humanity”: “You are advised to leave this city and this country forthwith. Your life will be the penalty if you tarry 48 hours longer . . . We hate the name of Booth.”

He was doubly exiled now: banished to the road and banished from it, a pariah ashamed to bear his own name. “Who has not deep in his heart/ A dark castle of Elsinore,” the French poet Vincent Monteiro asks. “In the manner of men of the past/ We build within ourselves stone/ On stone a vast haunted castle.”

Edwin remained in seclusion for the better part of a year—through his brother’s capture and death, through the trial and execution of John’s co-conspirators, through Lincoln’s long funeral procession, along a route countless American actors had plied. “I have lost the level run of time and events, and am living in a mist,” Edwin wrote to a friend. The actor rarely went out except under cover of darkness. Physically drained, grief-stricken, shamed, he burrowed into himself. For the first time since his teens, Booth stayed home.

And then, eight months after the assassination, the mist lifted, or more accurately financial desperation set in, and Edwin announced his intention to return to the stage. Without the theater, he seemed to realize, he did not exist. He told an acquaintance, “I have huge debts to pay, a family to care for, a love for the grand and beautiful in art, to boot, to gratify, and hence my sudden resolve to abandon the heavy, aching gloom of my little red room, where I have sat so long chewing my heart in solitude, for the excitement of the only trade for which God has fitted me.”

Police stood guard outside New York’s Winter Garden Theater on the evening of January 3, 1866. Rumors had circulated that Booth would be shot the minute he walked onstage that night. Earlier in the week the New York Herald had denounced the actor’s “shocking bad taste” in choosing to resume his career and had suggested the most appropriate role Booth might play was that of Caesar’s assassin. But Edwin chose to appear in Hamlet, a play that begins with a political assassination, and when the curtain rose that night on the second scene and the audience spotted him onstage, his head bowed, they stood and cheered and tossed bouquets of flowers at his feet. For a long time Edwin said nothing; then he began to act. From this performance he went on to present dozens more; he resumed touring and spent the next twenty years traveling around the country. The South, especially, loved him, and Booth’s managers sometimes had to lock his private rail car to keep fans at bay. There was only one place where Booth refused to perform: Washington, D.C. His brother’s deed had effectively banished him from that city.

Central to the Japanese Noh theater, according to theater historian Marvin Carlson, “is the image of the play as a story of the past recounted by a ghost.” Although few would have admitted it, most people who went to see Edwin Booth perform went to see his brother, too, to see the specter of Lincoln’s killer. For the rest of his career this was part of Edwin’s mystique, and he knew it. Each time a newspaper article announced a forthcoming appearance by the brother of Lincoln’s assassin, it meant a “most brutal ghoul-feast,” Edwin confessed to a colleague, “flaunting in my face buried cerements raked up by these hyenas. Each little piddling village has stabbed me through and through.”

Edwin never spoke to anyone of his brother John, avoided all talk of Lincoln. Late one night he dragged John’s trunk to the basement of a theater and ordered a servant to burn everything in it, costume by costume, prop by prop, pictures, letters, silk stockings. Friends worried about depression, and even Edwin alluded to it. Photographs indicate the depth of his gloom: narrow lips, hawk nose, brooding eyes. Actors who played opposite his Hamlet grew fearful when he feigned seeing the ghost of his father.

Seeking, perhaps, to redeem his name, Edwin sank millions into a theater of his own, The Booth. But the enterprise was a failure. His second marriage—to another actress named Mary who had also played Juliet to his Romeo—collapsed after the death of the couple’s infant son and Mary’s subsequent descent into madness. The one constant in Booth’s life was his daughter, Edwina, and in time the sons she bore, whose buoyant presence lightened his old age.

In the last years of his life Edwin built a home for actors, The Players, on Gramercy Park in New York City. He wanted performers to have a place to convene and be treated with respect. “I do not want my club to be a gathering place of freaks who come to look upon another sort of freak,” he declared, and promptly sought—and got—memberships from the likes of Samuel Clemens, Pierpont Morgan, and William Tecumseh Sherman, along with scores of players. Booth was the club’s first president; Timothy Hutton holds that post today. Peruse the ranks of members whose names hang inside the club’s main door and you’ll see some of the many wanderers who found a home inside this building: Joseph Jefferson, George M. Cohan, Clark Gable, Eugene O’Neill.

Here, in a suite of upstairs rooms inside this beautiful brownstone, Edwin Booth died on June 7, 1893, at the age of sixty, his daughter at his side. Moments before his death a thunderstorm struck—as at birth, a celestial omen—and the lights went out. “Don’t let father die in the dark!” Edwina screamed, but when the lights came back he was gone. The mass of reporters who’d gathered outside on the sidewalk, waiting for word of the actor’s condition, filed their sad stories. Not long before, Booth had told friends he was “tired of traveling,” that he was waiting for his “cue to quit.”

The actor who’d passed his life in dressing rooms and hotels had found a home at last, and it remains his home today, the rooms where Booth lived and died eerily preserved just as they were more than a hundred years ago. I visited them a couple of years ago with my husband. We saw Booth’s bed and desk and tobacco pipes, photographs of his first wife, his daughter, his mother and father. And above the bedside table, two additional—and for me unexpected—photographs: one of his second wife and one of his brother John. “A monument to madness?” I asked curator Raymond Wemmlinger, and he said he’d often thought so.

Edwin Booth reminds us that to live is to wander, to etch a spot in the world and then to move on. “Life is itself exile,” writes the novelist William Gass, “and its inevitability does not lessen our grief or alter the fact.” Hamlet, who flares and then fades, much like the stars at Edwin’s birth, tries to prove otherwise by mocking death, but in the end it traps him, has trapped him all along. Booth grasped this instinctively, and it helps explain his magnetism in the role. One of his contemporaries said, “He made us believe in the spirituality of Hamlet, in his kinship with the beyond.” Booth’s ultimate allegiance was to the dead, to the ghosts he was destined to encounter, and in Hamlet he found a means of expressing that allegiance. All along he understood—better than most—that he was just passing through.

A statue of Booth as Hamlet stands in the middle of Gramercy Park. It was unveiled in 1919 by Booth’s grandson, as some five hundred New Yorkers looked on. The bronze is imposing, a fitting nod to an actor who dominated the American stage—many American stages—for half a century. But the gates to the park are locked, and only residents of the immediate neighborhood have keys. I could do nothing but stand outside and pay my respects from a distance. Even in death, Booth’s exiles endure.

Further Reading:

For an overview of the nineteenth-century American theater, see both volumes of The Cambridge History of the American Theatre (Cambridge and New York, 1999) and in particular, Thomas Postlewait’s essay, “The Heiroglyphic Stage: American Theatre and Society, Post-Civil War to 1945,” in volume 2. I’ve drawn cultural and historical details from both David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York, 1996) and Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month that Saved America (New York, 2001).

In American Gothic: The Story of America’s Legendary Theatrical Family—Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth (New York, 1992), Gene Smith tells the story of the star-crossed Booth family with high drama. On his own, Edwin Booth has drawn biographical scrutiny since before his death. Among such accounts, his sister Asia Booth Clarke’s The Elder and the Younger Booth (New York, 1882) is notable—and heartbreaking—for what it leaves out; for the story behind her story, see Terry Alford’s introduction to Asia Booth Clarke, John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir (Jackson, Miss., 1999). Booth’s friend William Winter offers eloquent testament to the actor’s gifts and to his suffering in Other Days. Being Chronicles and Memories of the Stage (New York, 1908) and Life and Art of Edwin Booth (New York, 1894). Other biographies include Charles Townsend Copeland’s Edwin Booth (Boston, 1901); Richard Lockridge’s Darling of Misfortune: Edwin Booth (New York, 1932); and Eleanor Ruggles, The Prince of Players (New York, 1953), which inspired a 1955 movie starring Richard Burton as Edwin.

Readers interested in the actor’s art and its powers should consult Michael Goldman’s superb The Actor’s Freedom (New York, 1975). The periodical sources on Edwin Booth are vast and rich; to gain the fullest possible knowledge of the man, however, one must visit The Players in Gramercy Park, where archivist Raymond Wemmlinger maintains an up-to-date library and can unlock the room where Booth breathed his last.

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

Leslie Stainton is the author of Lorca: A Dream of Life (1999) and numerous essays and articles. She is at work on a history-memoir of the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Edwin Booth performed in 1886.

Even in its bicentennial year, the War of 1812 remains an enigma to most Americans. When thought of at all, “Mr. Madison’s War” is probably best remembered as the war that gave the country its (unsurprisingly) violent national anthem before the memory trails off into vaguely recalled descriptions from old history classes of a “second Revolution” or a war that confirmed the United States’ independence. (Woe to the parent or to the teacher who is asked about the importance of this war without prior warning!) Even in the teaching profession, I suspect most of us would prefer to focus on the surprising naval victories and the successful resistance of Fort McHenry, quietly ignore the burning of Washington, and get on to the westward expansion, thank you very much. In Canada, meanwhile, the War of 1812 is a major part of the social studies curriculum as early as elementary school and has been the subject of considerable public observance this year, including revivals of playwright Michael Hollingsworth’s 1987 The War of 1812, part of his play cycle chronicling Canada’s national history. In the United States, however, even the anniversary-oriented uptick in scholarship on the war has left our national perceptions in a muddle. Recent histories of the war have presented fresh nationalist (1812 as second Revolution) and Atlanticist (war with sweeping effects on relations among the United States, Britain, and Canada) narratives, and also accounts tied to the development of the United States Navy and even the war’s relationship to the evolving marriage of James and Dolly Madison. Nonetheless, as the title of Donald Hickey’s recently reissued classic history suggests, the War of 1812 remains, insofar as it is understood, A Forgotten Conflict. As a nation, we just don’t know what exactly to make of our second war with the British.

For the most part, the 1812 conflict has been erased from the physical landscape of the country. A visitor to the District of Columbia would have precious little reason to think the British had once burned the upstart capital. A short drive away in Maryland, a few more concrete reminders exist. Listening to “The Star Spangled Banner” at a Baltimore Orioles game, Fort McHenry’s presence a few miles to the east becomes somehow more historically immediate. In 2010 the state adopted a blatantly patriotic new red, white, and blue license plate depicting the bombardment of Fort McHenry to commemorate the war. A few miles to the south in the state capital, Annapolis, visitors to the United States Naval Academy who enter Memorial Hall, the school’s central commemorative space, will see a banner emblazoned with the Navy rallying cry, “Don’t Give Up The Ship.” The slogan predates the Academy’s 1845 founding by several decades. These were the last words of Captain James Lawrence aboard the USS Chesapeake as the HMS Shannon raked his ship with cannon fire in 1813; the motto was later stitched into the battle flag flown aboard the USS Lawrence under then-Captain Oliver Hazard Perry at the Battle of Lake Erie. The War of 1812 does not lack for moments of high drama.

Despite its dramatic potential, however, the War of 1812 has suffered from a relative paucity of narrative attention. Trapped in between massive multi-part documentaries about the Revolution and the Civil War, it must be content with a two-hour special. With the pop-history craze once known as “Founder-mania” on one side and our seemingly insatiable appetite for stories of the “War Between the States” on the other, the most prominent reference to the War of 1812 that I can recall in pop culture is a stray moment in Martin Scorcese’s 2002 epic, Gangs of New York. Daniel Day Lewis’s character, the fictional nativist gang leader Bill Cutting, is approached by Tammany Hall leader Boss Tweed on the docks of New York City, where Cutting is throwing rocks at disembarking Irish immigrants. As Tweed tries to convince “Bill the Butcher” of the political utility of immigrants to the Tammany machine, Cutting asserts the right to “protect” the United States from immigrants because his “father gave his life making this country what it is, murdered by the British, with all of his men, July 23, 1814.” Cutting’s father, then, died during an American offensive in lower Canada at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, the bloodiest battle of the war, in which American troops failed to take an entrenched British position in a battle so intense that it reportedly almost drowned out the sound of Niagara Falls, and General Winfield Scott, the man who would one day be nicknamed “The Grand Old Man of the Army,” was injured so badly that he was out of action for the rest of the war.

If contemporary popular culture has ignored this conflict, however, what about the popular culture of its own day? In particular, what about the theater, which owing to the frequency of its productions was the most politically flexible of early American art forms? As Alexis de Tocqueville would later note of the American theater and theaters in democratic societies more generally, the theater offered a unique insight into the minds of the people since theatergoers in those countries went to plays in order to see people like themselves who shared their own concerns, and to hear their own opinions represented. Patriotic sentiments were, at the very least, good marketing. Such sentiments had been, moreover, commonplace in the first theaters established in the American colonies between the late 1740s and the early 1770s. Beginning with a few scrappy colonials and one or two companies of hardy touring players from the British metropole, over the course of two decades a few acting companies built a touring circuit extending from Charleston to New York where theater enthusiasts could go to see old warhorses like Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) and newer works such as Richard Cumberland’s romantic comedy The West Indian (1771). Effusions of British patriotism were commonplace on the colonial stage both in the plays and in the prologues and epilogues that framed them, fitting for a medium that was championed by its eighteenth-century fans as a vehicle for moral and civic education. The very act of playgoing, to its champions, was a way of asserting one’s own Britishness, especially when one might never set foot in Great Britain itself. Touring companies, most notably the London Company of Comedians, who arrived at Williamsburg in 1752 and came to hold an effective monopoly on the theater business, tweaked their offerings to suit contemporary tastes in patriotic entertainment, even when those tastes underwent major shifts. In the wake of the Stamp Act Crisis of the mid-1760s, for instance, the London Company of Comedians changed its name to the American Company of Comedians. The nascent theater industry held a privileged position in colonial culture and was almost uniquely positioned to track the shifts in the national self-image of Americans throughout the mid- and late eighteenth century.

As in the eighteenth century, so in the nineteenth. In the preface to his 1819 play She Would Be a Soldier, which centers on the 1814 battle of Chippewa, the American playwright, newspaperman, and diplomat Mordecai Noah declared that plays on patriotic topics “ought to be encouraged” because “they keep alive the recollection of important events, by representing them in a manner both natural and alluring.” Noah, however, wrote from a peacetime, commemorative perspective. What of the war years themselves? During the American Revolution, professional theaters were shuttered by a 1774 congressional ban on public frivolities, but amateur playwrights representing a variety of political perspectives converted current events into a number of stirring propaganda plays based on major battles. In the mid-1780’s actors from the American Company, who had weathered the war in Jamaica, began returning to their old haunts and applying for permission to set up shop in new theaters, which in most cases was granted, albeit grudgingly at times. With the young republic’s theaters generally open for business during the War of 1812, were American audiences likewise treated to theatrical news from the front?

The answer is both yes and no. The incentives for such “ripped from the headlines” productions were limited, not only because of the strictures of a wartime economy but also because of the structure of the budding American theater business. In the colonial period, traveling companies had worked their way up and down the coast, playing “seasons” that could range from a night to several months in a given city before moving on. The earliest post-independence theater troupes tended to split up the territory of the United States by forming residential companies in major cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, playing long seasons in residence supported by modest regional tours. (Boston, long a bastion of Puritan hostility to professional theater, finally licensed a theater in 1794.) Initially these regional monopolies focused on the task of cultivating a renewed public appetite for theatrical entertainment, a task that frequently involved brief nods to American patriotism in the form of occasional prologues or songs. As the public’s appetite grew, new theaters opened up in Providence and Richmond, and competing companies sprang up in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Yet while American playwrights and some early theater critics in the newspapers advocated a more distinctly “American” theater, relatively few plays on national topics emerged.

In part, this was so because managers rarely wanted to invest the limited time (and memory) of their performers learning unproven new roles. Also, the United States afforded little to no copyright protection to foreign authors, so those in this already high-risk business had little reason to pay for new plays by Americans when new British plays and old standbys could be had for the price of a script. The American theater, moreover, remained heavily dependent on the country’s relationship with Britain since almost all of the actors in the early United States had been born in Britain or Ireland. Well into the nineteenth century, American audiences still clamored to see new plays from London and their old favorites, so the theatrical repertoire remained centered on British imports such as Shakespeare (whom many Americans thought of almost as one of their own), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s late-eighteenth-century comedies of manners, and potboilers like Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, a Restoration drama brimming with political and sexual conspiracies. Adding to the difficulty of producing new plays, in the 1790s American theaters began making a transition from residential companies that featured their own leading actors to the “star system,” where the most profitable seasons were built around touring star actors who moved between companies, generally playing leading roles from repertory plays.

Fortunately, a night at the theater during the War of 1812 did have other attractions besides the main piece, and those other features offered better opportunities for topical entertainment. Indeed, if the American theater’s repertoire of full-length plays remained rather unaffected by current events, the catalog of peripheral performances that surrounded them appear to have shifted with every prevailing wind of public sentiment. Theaters generally performed a “farce,” a short one-act comedy that often featured songs and dancing, after the conclusion of the main piece. And faced with growing competition from circuses and other diversions, theaters began experimenting with additional songs and entertainments, as well as illuminations (light displays) and displays of paintings or panoramas of contemporary subjects. The market for afterpieces and short entertainments allowed the news of the day to penetrate the walls of the theater and mount the stage as theaters enticed their patrons with not only their old favorites, but also with lively celebrations of American victories. While relatively few of these pieces were eventually collected and issued in print, the newspapers of the period are full of theatrical advertisements and occasional commentary on recent developments in the theater, providing us with an invaluable archive of performance schedules, occasional reviews, and gossip about the performers of the day, especially the stars or those actors who hoped to become stars. In 1787, for instance, fans of the three leading ladies of New York’s Old American Company engaged in a paper war over the relative merits of their favorite actresses. The preferred weapons of these partisans, letters to the editor of the Daily Advertiser, convey such a sense of urgency and personal animosity that one might be tempted to overlook the reports from the Constitutional Convention running in the same newspaper and assume that this theatrical judgment of Paris was the most pressing matter in the nation.

In the decades leading up to the United States’ declaration of war on Great Britain in June of 1812, then, the American theater was not as a rule obsessed with current events, but this is not to say that the stage was entirely devoid of topical, patriotic entertainment. (For those interested in topical goings-on north of the border, sadly, scholarship on the early Canadian theater is still somewhat lacking.) In 1807 the Philadelphia dramatist James Nelson Barker (who would go on to serve as an artillery officer in the War of 1812) produced a satire on the United States’ embargo against British and French trade, The Embargo; or, What News?, although the play met with limited commercial success and was never printed. (Barker himself described it as a very derivative piece and seemed to be relieved that it was never printed.) In 1811 the Boston theater produced James Ellison’s The American Captive; or, the Siege of Tripoli. Some British-born actors had become American citizens and joined in the nation’s occasional outbursts of cultural boosterism. Among these was the first genuine star on the American stage, Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, who was the foster son of the radical British novelist and journalist William Godwin. In both general terms and also specifically in the context of the War of 1812, historian William Clapp says, Cooper “rejoiced in the success of his adopted country.” Nonetheless, during the first decade of the nineteenth century, the single greatest development in the American theater was the widespread popularity of European melodrama, especially translations of the German playwright August von Kotzebue made by the theater manager, playwright, and theater historian William Dunlap. Dunlap would also go on to write the definitive memoir of the most prominent star of the 1812 era, the British actor George Frederick Cooke (fig. 1), whose own sympathies were decidedly not pro-American.

Cooke’s history as a performer in the United States at a time of heightened international tensions reminds us not only that the early American theater was heavily dependent on British talent, but also that in many cases early American audiences were less concerned with the patriotic appeal of a performance than its artistic quality. Cooke, a leading man in the British theater who had a reputation for dipsomania equivalent to his talent and had thus earned a reputation for unreliability, was signed in 1810 by Cooper during one of the latter’s periodic recruiting forays back to his birth country. Making the transatlantic journey without alcohol at his disposal, Cooke landed in New York on November 16, 1810. Despite the heightened international tensions prevailing between the United States and both Britain and France, Dunlap recounts that Cooke’s arrival “caused a greater sensation, than the arrival of any individual not connected with the political welfare of the country.” Cooke, whose performances during his tour of the United States between 1810 and early 1812 most notably featured his performances of Richard III (the role for which he was most famous), Shylock, and Iago, received, effectively, a royal welcome. Dunlap describes his entrance to the stage in his inaugural New York performance as Richard III in tones that suggest not only the actor’s transformation into his role but also the audience’s transformation into the performer’s subjects:

He returned the salutes of the audience, not as a player to the public upon whom he depended, but as a victorious prince, acknowledging the acclamations of the populace upon his return from a successful campaign—as Richard Duke of Gloucester, the most valiant branch of the triumphant house of York.

Cooke quickly became a sensation. One spectator of his Richard called all previous theatrical exhibitions in the United States “boy’s play to this night’s exhibition.”

Not all of his performances in the United States would go so smoothly. On December 19, 1810, for his New York benefit night, in which the house’s profits went directly to the star, Cooke chose Joseph Addison’s 1713 neoclassical tragedy Cato. The most popular play in the colonial era, Cato was approved of and quoted even by people who viewed the theater as immoral. Although he had played the role before, Cooke spent the day drinking rather than rehearsing, and as a result, according to the New York Journal‘s review on December 22, he “hesitated, repeated, substituted speeches from other plays, or endeavored to substitute incoherencies of his own.” Receipts dropped off for the rest of his New York engagement. When Cooke moved on to Boston in January 1811, his welcome was somewhat soured by the attacks of a local newspaper, the Independent Chronicle, which decried the city’s disregarding important national and international affairs while lavishing so much attention on the theater that Cooke could “get five or six hundred dollars an evening for repeating over the unnatural phrenzies of Shakespear[e] in his character of Richard IIId.” Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Cooke’s performance, however, was that he gained such popularity during a period of such great diplomatic tension given his tendency to revisit the topic of American independence in unsparing terms.

William Dunlap, in his memoir of Cooke, records a series of outrageous anecdotes involving Cooke’s relationship with his American hosts. The most famous one involves an 1811 performance in Baltimore, before which Cooke was informed that President Madison intended to travel from Washington to see him act. Dunlap reports that Cooke burst out “What! I! George Frederick Cooke! who have acted before the majesty of Britain, play before your yankee president!” and threatened to cancel the performance by informing the audience that “it is degradation enough to play before rebels; but I’ll not go on for the amusement of a king of rebels, the contemptible king of the yankee doodles!” Equally outrageous to his companions was Cooke’s tendency to portray himself as a veteran British campaigner who had served during the Revolution. Dunlap recalls one episode in New York where Cooke claimed he had led the British advance in the Battle of Brooklyn, and that if Lord Howe had not called off the advance “I should have taken Washington, and there would have been an end to the rebellion!” Likewise, during a sojourn in Boston, he provided a vivid (and false) account of his participation in the Battle of Breed’s (Bunker) Hill. Ironically, as the United States drifted toward a second war with Great Britain, the biggest sensation on its stages was a British actor with an unfortunate offstage habit of reliving the previous one.

The United States officially declared war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812. By this time President James Madison’s would-be theatrical rival Cooke had already booked passage back to London to begin an engagement at the Covent Garden Theatre. Years of alcoholism had taken their toll on his health, however, and he played his last ever performance in Providence on July 7, as the scheming Sir Giles Overreach in Philip Massinger’s Jacobean tragedy A New Way to Pay Old Debts. He died on September 26 in New York and was buried in St. Paul’s churchyard (now opposite Ground Zero), where in 1821 the British actor Edmund Kean erected a memorial to him (fig. 2). As Cooke sickened and died, the tenor of the theaters (and nation) whose attention he had drawn since 1810 changed markedly.

In order to see the potential effect that the War of 1812 could at times have on the American theater, one need only look at the program for July 4, 1812, at the Park Theatre in New York, where Cooke had debuted as Richard III. American theaters normally recognized July 4 with brief patriotic songs or speeches in the early nineteenth century, but in 1812 the holiday produced an extravaganza. According to an advertisement in the July 3, 1812, edition of the New York newspaper The Columbian, the Park resurrected a patriotic tragedy of strongly Democratic-Republican leanings, John Daly Burk’s 1797 Bunker Hill, Or the Death of General Warren. The ad promises a transparent painting of the allegorical figure of Liberty holding an olive branch and the American flag while three young boys stand to one side reading the Declaration of Independence. During the play (acted “for the first time these seven years”), the ad describes in detail, audiences will see in the fifth act the funeral of General Joseph Warren, featuring banners declaring “The Rights of Man,” “Liberty or Death,” and other patriotic slogans, and a grand fantasia involving a statue of George Washington and allegorical representations of the Genius of Liberty and the Genius of America. Following the main play, the ad promises two patriotic songs, including a description of the 1811 pre-war skirmish between the USS President and the HMS Little Belt, and a farce resurrected from war with the Barbary Pirates to be followed by more patriotic songs and a finale featuring (again) the Genius of America and a display of the names of American naval heroes on two giant columns. While no other night of theater during the war quite equaled this smorgasbord of patriotic entertainment, each form of entertainment caught on with wartime theatergoers.

Naval victories produced a particular thrill in the theater, one no doubt enhanced by the improving quality of theatrical scene-painting. After the USS Constitution defeated the HMS Guerrière on August 19, 1812, the Constitution, indeed, became something of a theatrical craze. When news of the victory reached Cooper in Boston, he announced it to the audience. By October 2, the theater in Boston had pulled together a short play titled “The Constitution and Guerrière,” which included a scene of the British warship’s surrender and concluded with a presentation of the colors. A few days earlier in Philadelphia, on September 28, the Olympic Theatre had presented, according to an ad in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, a short opera called “The Constitution, or American Tars Triumphant” that had included “a Grand Naval Column” and a transparency of Captain Isaac Hull, commander of the Constitution. (The show the following night closed with a sailor’s hornpipe.) On April 9, 1813, the ship’s crew themselves became part of the spectacle when they attended the theater in Boston, in honor of which the theater was illuminated.

The most successful theatrical text of the war’s first year, however, was the work of William Dunlap, the former manager of the Park Theatre, for his old institution. On the opening evening of the 1812 season, September 7, the Park followed the romantic tragedy of Abaellino with a musical sketch by Dunlap, “Yankee Chronology.” (One of Dunlap’s earlier works, a patriotic mélange of songs and speeches called The Glory of Columbia! Her Yeomanry, had been played earlier in the year at both New York and Providence.) The short sketch revolved around the return home to New York of a young sailor, Ben Bundle, who recounts for his father and their Irish neighbor, O’Blunder, the story of his adventures at sea. A former merchant sailor who was impressed by the British, escaped, and upon landing at Boston immediately signed on with the Constitution, Ben unfolds his heroic journey and the Constitution‘s victory to his father. Ben concludes the piece with a song that constructs a genealogy of American liberty running from colonial settlement through the Revolution and concluding with the defeat of the Guerrière, each verse offering the audience the chance to belt out “Huzzah!” before Ben continues to the next historical episode. Dunlap’s sketch was acted throughout the fall and early winter in New York, including on Evacuation Day (for which Dunlap wrote a new verse), and the play was printed and widely advertised—a rarity for such occasional texts during the war.

While few victories got their own sketches by perhaps the most prolific playwright of the early United States, such celebrations became a commonplace for the duration of the war. After Perry’s victory at the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813, the Park illuminated its house to honor the victory. On October 6 audiences were treated to a song in honor of Perry. In the ensuing months the house was illuminated again as the theater was patronized by General William Henry Harrison, commander of American land forces in the west, and Commodore Stephen Bainbridge, Hull’s successor as commander of the Constitution. In Philadelphia on October 9, the Olympic Theatre hosted a circus in honor of Perry’s victory, including a display of the battle setting and a recitation by the actor James Fennell of his poem dedicated to Perry, “The Hero of the Lake.” (Fennell repeated the performance in December when Harrison attended the Olympic.) In Boston, the theater produced a short play on October 9, “Heroes of the Lake; or, The Glorious Tenth of September,” and when Perry visited Boston on May 9, 1814, the theater staged not only the popular British comedy The Sailor’s Daughter but also a “Naval Fete” and a series of patriotic songs to celebrate Perry’s heroism.

Not everyone appreciated these spectacles. The Stranger, a small literary gazette in Albany, New York, reviewed a farce celebrating the victory at Lake Erie on February 26, 1814, and found it composed of “barbarous rhymes, unconnected circumstances, partial dialogue from various sources and unfinished allegory tacked together.” Indeed, with events such as a crisis in public credit and the British campaign in the Chesapeake that culminated in the burning of Washington on August 29, the year offered little enough by way of celebration for the American public, even with major American victories at Baltimore and Lake Champlain. As George C.D. Odell, the great historian of the New York theater, observes, “the public wound was too deep” to be salved with entertainment. In New York the mixed mood of the theatrical public is evident in the season’s offerings. On August 29, the day the British were burning Washington, a new theater company in New York housed in Anthony Street put on Bunker Hill; the Park resurrected Dunlap’s farrago The Glory of Columbia. The remainder of the season featured the classic mix of reportorial British main pieces with what Odell calls “hasty patriotic ebullitions” to celebrate moments like the American naval victory at Lake Champlain on September 11, 1814. At such moments, however, the irony seems heightened. When Winfield Scott arrived in New York in September 1814, the Park illuminated the house and hauled up a transparency “in honor of The Hero of Chippewa,” but the night’s main entertainment was Sheridan’s The Rivals, not a celebration of American heroism. Small wonder, perhaps, that theater managers were so grateful for the arrival of news of the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, which was widely greeted with theatrical displays of song and dance, as in Boston, and of good old reliable allegory, as in a “Festival of Peace, or Commerce Restored” featuring the Genius of Columbia at the Park in New York. With peace, the theater business could get back to normal.

The War of 1812 did not end on the battlefield with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814. Hostilities continued into the new year, most notably with Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans on January 8, 1815. New Orleans became the most celebrated event of the war, one that made Jackson not only a military (and later political) hero but in some measure also a theatrical celebrity. The years from the conclusion of the war to the beginning of Jackson’s presidency in 1829 saw a number of new plays by American authors celebrating American achievements from the War of 1812. Some, such as Noah’s She Would Be a Soldier, were only nominally about the battles; Noah’s main plot follows a young woman who dresses as a man and enlists to follow her lover to the battle at Chippewa, while the battle occurs offstage. Even in plays such as 1830’s Triumph at Plattsburg, a heroic play about the Battle of Lake Champlain written by the Philadelphia attorney and playwright Richard Penn Smith, the audiences saw most of the battle through dioramic naval scenes depicted in a large window in the set. In the case of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, however, Jackson himself was often the center of the spectacle.

The figure of Jackson enlivened the postwar theater, which in the wake of the war did occasionally seem to be running out of ideas. On July 4, 1816, the Park Theatre dusted off the same transparency of Liberty and the three reading boys that they had first displayed on July 4, 1812, shortly after the declaration of war. The theater’s ad in the New York Courier described a very different main piece, however. Rather than exhuming a depiction of revolutionary heroics, the Park offered C.E. Grice’s The Battle of New Orleans, a romantic drama in which Jackson himself is a character. This onstage Jackson acts as not only a military commander but also the arbiter of justice in the romantic entanglements of his young subordinate officers and closes the show by declaring that “Duty and beauty are Columbia’s shield.” (As if in fairness to the Navy, the show in New York closed with a sailor’s hornpipe as an afterpiece.) Jackson’s electoral (rather than military) campaigns in 1824 and 1828 led to further such productions, including Old Hickory; or, A Day in New Orleans (1825) and Andrew Jackson (1828). The latter featured Jackson receiving, but not donning, a crown of laurels, a la Julius Caesar. Jackson’s career as a theatrical spectacle culminated in 1829 with Smith’s The Eighth of January, a play mounted hurriedly, according to its author, in order to be staged on January 8 of that year as a celebration of Jackson’s election.

Smith’s Jackson portrays the sort of neoclassical image of American martial heroism popular at the time, but he also flashes a distinct flair for romantic derring-do by venturing behind enemy lines in disguise before being wounded and captured. Smith (whose grandfather William Smith was stripped of his title as chaplain to the Continental Congress on suspicion of Toryism) scatters a series of honorable British characters throughout the play, including the British-born miller John Bull (whose son is an officer under Jackson) and the Scottish Captain M’Fuse. Many of these Britons find a way to make peace with Jackson at the play’s end when he shows mercy and generosity toward them, bonding over a shared belief in honor and liberty. Jackson serves as an onstage emblem of both martial civility and respect for the common man. He earns the respect of his British enemies for his noble bearing while also delivering a victory speech saluting the “freemen and fathers of families” of the mixed American forces at New Orleans, “the brave yeomen who comprise my army.” While Smith’s Jackson clearly toes a Jacksonian line on domestic politics, Jackson’s forbearance to the British in Smith’s script also ironically prefigures the relatively conciliatory foreign policy that Jackson, as president, would pursue with Great Britain despite his military record and the lingering policy disputes under previous administrations such as the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine and the tariff of 1828. At least in the theater, the War of 1812 officially ended in 1829 with a restoration of comity between the United States and Britain in the form of the new king of the yankee doodles, Andrew Jackson.

Further Reading

For more on the War of 1812, see Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition (Urbana, Ill., 2012); Hugh Howard, Mr. And Mrs. Madison’s War: America’s First Couple and the Second War of Independence (New York, 2012); Mark Collins Jenkins, The War of 1812 and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (Washington, D.C., 2012); Alan R. Taylor, The War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels & Indian Allies (New York, 2012).

For the history of the American theater before and during the War of 1812, see William W. Clapp, A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston, 1853); William Dunlap, History of the American Theatre (1832; Urbana and Chicago, 2005); Walter J. Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828 (Bloomington, 1977); George C.D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1927); Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia, 2007).

For the history of George Frederick Cooke, see William Dunlap, Memoirs of George Frederick Cooke, Esq. 2 vols. (London, 1813); Donald B. Wilmeth, George Frederick Cooke: Machiavel of the American Stage (Westport, Conn., 1980).

This article originally appeared in issue 13.1 (October, 2012).

Douglas A. Jones Jr.’s The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North foregrounds a dialectic of black captivity and black autonomy observable in the theatrical enactments and everyday embodiments of various constituencies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century North. Jones focuses on how a proslavery “common sense” was the dominant ideological platform upon which the region’s politicized antebellum performance culture played out and against which black people sought to exercise self-determination. According to the logic of this ideology, the North faced the vexing problem of unenslaved black people produced by gradual emancipation; its solution was to dictate continued and unrelenting black subjugation to white governance. Thus, “to live a decidedly captive life” was to occupy a post-manumission social position of blackness that was ensnared by an ensemble of subjecting forces, including social estrangement, electoral deprivation, terror, relegation to noncitizenship and subhumanity, and economic predation, among others (1). As Jones argues, this proslavery “common sense” proliferated through popular pastimes such as theatergoing, speechmaking, lecturing, and parading. Together these avenues for dominance worked in concert with the more programmatic methods of black subjection upon which scholars generally concentrate, including disenfranchisement and the withholding of legal protections. Performance culture produced these subjections as common sense, Jones asserts, because it ostensibly permitted the active and spectatorial participation of everyone, which, in turn, imbued both mundane and momentous happenings with proslavery meaning; that far-reaching potential made performance one of the most expansive arenas for gauging the North’s proslavery imagination (7, 9). Jones also unveils how that same ubiquity inculcated proslavery’s commonplaceness among individuals and publics as diverse as playwrights, orators, former slaves, politicians, bourgeois social reformers, theatre patrons, and blackface minstrels, notwithstanding their ostensibly incongruent political stances, even stances in seeming opposition to each other, such as antislavery and antiabolitionist.

How does black women’s conspicuous exclusion from the stage of theatricalized black nationalism disrupt or even undermine the author’s emphasis on performance culture’s all-inclusiveness?

While Jones demonstrates the relentless nature of proslavery ideology in the North, he also spotlights activism against it. Jones accentuates such activism in his fresh reading of the rites and locutions of black male commemorators for abolitionist anniversaries such as the United States’s outlawing of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. In that early black performance culture, Jones also traces a genealogy of black nationalism that stressed participants’ African lineages and specific racial designation. This version of black nationalism was also patently American, drawing on established national rhetorics and practices such as parading and speechifying to instantiate black citizenship and inclusion within America’s proclaimed democratic mores. This performative drive for self-determined black citizenship radicalized significantly in the 1840s, as illustrated by the proceedings of the National Negro Convention movement. Jones pinpoints Henry Highland Garnet’s rousing 1843 black convention address calling for forceful resistance to slavery as illustrative of performance’s inception of militancy and affective nationalist bonds (118-23). Given the predominantly elite black male participation in such events, one of the questions provoked but underexplored by Jones is that of gender. How does black women’s conspicuous exclusion from the stage of theatricalized black nationalism disrupt or even undermine the author’s emphasis on performance culture’s all-inclusiveness? Did black women embody the general limits of performance culture’s putative “democracy,” as palpably evinced, for example, by Bostonian Maria Stewart’s pressured exit from the public stage (9)? Arguably, the widespread absence of black women in The Captive Stage marks them as the epitome of what Jones terms the “state of black exception” that yielded black life in America as expendable (22).

Jones’s genealogy of early black nationalist praxis also cites its twin-birth with the unabashedly proslavery print and performance genre “bobalition” (a malapropism of “abolition”) that white northerners created to oppose directly black embodiments of autonomy. “Bobalition’s” caricatures set the stage for other conduits for black captivity, especially blackface minstrelsy (40-9). This attention to “bobalition” allows for one of Jones’ most adroit interventions: rethinking the normative scholarly claim advanced by scholars such as Dale Cockrell and Eric Lott that early blackface minstrelsy radically enacted solidarity with the black people burlesqued in white entertainers’ burnt-corked mimeses. Jones underscores the proslavery antics of Jacksonian-era minstrelsy by focusing on its northern production conditions and extra-theatricality, specifically the barring of black people from the performance stage and theatrical pit. He also underscores how that extra-theatricality complemented blackface minstrelsy’s onstage choreographing of blackness as inherently inferior to whiteness. Jones casts acclaimed performer Thomas D. Rice as the avatar of this particular brand of proslavery ideology, enacted through blackface minstrelsy, which Rice most succinctly articulated in his 1837 curtain speech asserting that the medium allowed him to “effectually prove” that “negroes are essentially an inferior species of the human family, and they ought to remain slaves” (68).

In concert with Rice’s patent endorsement of black bondage, white minstrels’ simultaneous appropriation of black political aesthetics and repudiation of black people as fellow citizens portrayed working-class whiteness as a merited signifier of citizenship rights in contradistinction to a “grotesque blackness” (65). Jones keenly highlights how minstrelsy’s white working-class publics and performers used the phrase “white slavery” to reject their fettering to exploitative economic relations with southern slaveholders and northern capitalists, not to condemn the thralldom of black people whom they rendered as innately enslaveable (60-1). The fact that minstrelsy was both the nation’s first popular entertainment form and the practice that most undercut black people’s autonomy in its endorsements of the logic for their enslavement further supports Jones’ argument that proslavery thought was quotidian in the North (56). Relatedly, Jones’s attention to the minstrelization of black characters—exemplified by Harry Seymour’s temperance drama Aunt Dinah’s Pledge—and his analysis of how white reformers (like Garrisonian abolitionists) drew upon such theatrical tropes encourages readers to see how reform and minstrelsy could constitute two sides of the same coin. While white laborers appropriated black performance as they rebuffed black people as inherently inferior and thus fit for slavery, white reformers extolled black moral value as they sketched black people as naturally pious, pliant, and puerile and thereby in need of white paternal authority; in this way, both groups’ claims about black people’s innate constitution implicitly endorsed the logic behind black captivity, even if reformers expressed antislavery aims (109). White Garrisonians’ paternalistic reaction to Frederick Douglass’s break with them epitomizes both white reformers’ renouncement of black autonomy and black people’s attempts to escape white oversight.  

In his reading of both familiar and underexamined cultural materials, Jones sketches “a uniquely northern strand of proslavery thought: namely, black people as slaves were pivotal to the nation’s founding and are therefore most useful to the nation as slaves” (77). His most vivid example of this comes from P.T. Barnum. In Barnum’s staged mastery over Joice Heth, alleged wet-nurse to George Washington, Jones illustrates how the logic of black captivity enthralled northern audiences and crystallized, through repeated performance, a proslavery common sense. Barnum’s auction-block-like exhibition and his narration of Heth’s biography as the founding patriarch’s enslaved “mammy” before a range of audiences and settings enabled his ascent as the most famous showman of the nineteenth century. Moreover, Heth spectacularly “signified as the nation’s mammy because she was the national Father’s mammy” (89). That northern audiences flocked to Barnum’s spectacle of Heth and failed to question either her status as enslaved or the legality of Barnum’s control over her body in allegedly “free” territory supports Jones’s central argument that proslavery thought was customary in the North (91-2). As with his focus on antebellum abolitionist anniversaries and black conventions, however, Jones does not specify how the gendered and sexualized aspects of Barnum’s exposition of Heth shaped the northern proslavery imagination. Because gender and sex were foundational to racial slavery, as manifested, for example, in the principle partus sequitur ventrem, which accorded slave status through the mother’s line, and in black bondwomen’s consignation to the labor of suckling white infants, were they not central to antebellum northern proslavery logic? Was Barnum’s exhibition of Heth as national mammy emblematic of the kinds of confining roles to which northern proslavery thought conscripted black women, particularly in the post-gradual emancipation era?     

Overall, Jones’s major contribution is in delineating the antebellum North as an incubator of a pervasive proslavery ideology and in uncovering performance culture’s scaffolding and, occasionally, dismantling of that thought. With conceptual rigor and empirical precision, Jones accomplishes that work by drawing upon a breadth of cultural artifacts, including joke books and songsters, dramaturgy, blackface minstrelsy, oratory, newspapers, portraiture, and slave narratives. Given the history that Jones dramatizes, we must view the captive stage as a complex and often contradictory site through which seemingly discrepant repertoires of performances and casts of actors enacted black subjection to white mastery in a way that captured the northern imagination. In this way, northern proslavery ideology was rendered omnipresent and thus seemingly inescapable.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Patricia Ann Lott is assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Literatures in Africana Studies and English at the College of William and Mary.    

Jacob Abbott was the Mister Rogers of the mid-nineteenth century. An icon of children’s education and entertainment, he wrote and edited over 200 books that, according to an anonymous 1843 review in the Salem Register, taught children “lessons of wisdom, goodness, and truth.” Like Mister Rogers, Abbott was an ordained minister who was warm and gentle in his approach. And, living in Vermont, Abbott likely wore a lot of sweaters, too.

Despite being one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century, Jacob Abbott is largely forgotten today. Compounding the fact that he wrote for children, his books gather dust because they are seen as racially and politically conservative, betraying what Donnarae MacCann identifies as a pervasive “ambivalence toward Blacks” throughout his oeuvre. This assessment, however, may be too dismissive. While Abbott’s books are not explicitly political, they did, at times, sensitively respond to racial injustices particular to the middle decades of the nineteenth century. One series of Abbott’s books in particular, The Stories of Rainbow and Lucky, offers a vision of a more just world, free of slavery and institutional racism.

Published between 1860 and 1861, The Stories of Rainbow and Lucky is a five-volume series of children’s novels that chronicle the adventures of Rainbow, a fourteen-year-old African American boy and his roguish horse Lucky (fig. 1). Rainbow is independent, hardworking, trustworthy, and intelligent—a characterization that prompted literary critic Robin Bernstein to identify Rainbow as one of the few “fictional black child characters that were complex and mostly or fully realized” in the nineteenth century.

The Stories of Rainbow and Lucky: Up the River, the final volume of the series, begins with Rainbow’s appointment as a post rider on a frontier postal route. Beyond delivering the mail, Rainbow finds time to help his neighbors build a house and to win over once-racists as friends. To be sure, this is an overtly moralistic tale; like Abbott’s other protagonists, Rainbow models the value of hard work and positive thinking. And yet, within the parameters of morally appropriate children’s literature, Up the River subtly engages with a contemporary debate about race, mobility, and black citizenship. By recontextualizing Up the River alongside contemporary postal policy, this essay uncovers the ways the novel artfully advances an ethos of racial equality on the eve of the Civil War.

Race and the Post Office

While the antebellum post office might not be the first place one would imagine to be a racially contentious institution, in Rainbow and Lucky’s nineteenth-century world, it was precisely that. After the Haitian Revolution, Postmaster General Gideon Granger forbade people of color from postal work, decreeing that “no other than a free white person shall be employed in carrying the mail of the United States.” Granger’s correspondence on the edict explains that “After the scenes which St. Domingo has exhibited to the world, we cannot be too cautious in attempting to prevent similar evils.” This letter, like the restriction itself, betrays a fear of a mobile, literate, and well-connected black community. Granger continues:

The most active and intelligent [black men] are employed as post riders. These are the most ready to learn, and the most able to execute. By traveling from day to day, and hourly mixing with people, they must, they will acquire information. They will learn that a man’s rights do not depend on his color. They will, in time, become teachers to their brethren. They become acquainted with each other on the line. Whenever the body, or a portion of them, wish to act, they are an organized corps, circulating our intelligence openly, their own privately.

Their traveling creates no suspicion, excites no alarm. One able man among them, perceiving the value of this machine, might lay a plan which would be communicated by your post riders from town to town and produce a general and united operation against you.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the post office was the fastest way to spread information over long distances. Government officials saw it as a powerful “machine” that could be harmful in the wrong hands. The Postmaster General reasserted race-based restrictions on personnel in 1810 and again in 1825—it wasn’t until 1869 that the U.S. Post Office Department lifted the restriction and began to hire people of color to carry the mail.

Accordingly, Jacob Abbott’s casting of Rainbow as a post rider in the early 1860s when the restriction was still in place was likely to raise an eyebrow or two. Suited with his mailbag and ready with the phrase “I bring the mail,” Rainbow travels freely through the woods on his frontier route (fig. 2). Like the insurrectionary black post rider the Postmaster General feared, Rainbow’s mobility is unremarkable and his integration within the community is routine. In the world of the novel, however, Rainbow does not use his position to incite rebellion. Instead, as a post rider, he is a trustworthy and important member of both the local and national community. People rely on Rainbow for their communication and welfare—and, for his efforts, he secures a generous government paycheck.

The novel’s acute awareness of postal policy makes Rainbow’s representation all the more subversive. In fact, Up the River is a veritable guide for rural mail delivery in the nineteenth century. For one, Rainbow signs a contract to carry the mail that follows the conventions of contemporary carrier contracts (fig. 3). Among other minutiae, Rainbow’s contract includes precise delivery and departure times that follow different schedules in the winter and summer. And, as the local postmaster warns Rainbow, “every time you fail of getting [the mail] here … there will be five dollars to pay,” which was precisely the fine for each lapse in mail delivery levied by the U.S. Post Office Department. Moreover, the process of mail-sorting is detailed over several pages: in both the novel and historical practice, after the specified mail was removed and the outgoing letters were put in their place, the local postmaster “would pass the chain through the staples and lock the padlock” of the mail bag for the carrier to bring to the next office down the road (fig. 4). The only departure from standard postal procedure is Rainbow’s appointment as a young black post rider.

Throughout the novel, Rainbow’s mail-bag invests him with the full confidence of the federal government. This confidence reaches its peak when, despite her surprise, a local teacher asks no questions when Rainbow and Lucky, strangers to her, bring a white princess-like child to school, even though “Rainbow saw by the expression in the teacher’s face, and also in those of the scholars, that they were curious to know who he was, and yet that they did not think it proper to ask.” Here and elsewhere the novel recognizes the subtle racism of community members who question Rainbow’s authority as a mail-carrier. In an encounter with a stranger on the road, for example, a woman greets him and curtsies—a “mark of respect” she would not have given “a colored boy under ordinary circumstances, but the fact that he was a mail-carrier invested him with great dignity in her eyes.” In both instances, readers are made aware of the double standard to which Rainbow would have been held as a mobile black youth. But equipped with the authority of his mailbag, Rainbow carries on free from racist constraints. Accordingly, unlike other African American child characters in sentimental fiction, Rainbow faces discrimination but is not defined by it.

Beyond staging these fleeting encounters with racism, The Stories of Rainbow and Lucky dwells on race-based structural inequality and how it affects Rainbow in “Rainbow’s Journey,” the series’ second volume. The day after leaving his mother’s home, for example, Rainbow reflects on “the strangeness of the situation he was in” as a young black man away from home for the first time. He considers:

A white boy, if he is of an amiable disposition and behaves well, even if he goes among entire strangers, soon makes plenty of friends. The world is prepared every where to welcome him, and to receive him kindly. But a boy like Rainbow feels that his fate is to be every where disliked and shunned … He expects, wherever he goes, and however bright and beautiful may be the outward aspects of the novel scenes through which he may pass that every thing human will look dark and scowling upon him.

In this meditation, Rainbow articulates an almost impossibly clear formulation of the structural inequality that shaped his social world. For a prospective young African American reader, such a representation would have been an invaluable validation of their experience. Further, the novel challenges white children to face the realities of racism and to empathize with “[boys] like Rainbow.” Arriving late in the second book of the series, this passage would have been especially poignant for readers who had come to care deeply for Rainbow.

But Rainbow is not the only character who faces racism in the idyllic world of the book series. Toward the end of the novel, Lucky, a young and handsome black horse, is captured by white thieves and forced into labor for them. To take Lucky without alerting the neighbors, the thieves paint him with “a broad white stripe down the middle of his face.” In doing so, the novel casts slavery’s racial power structures—where the difference between liberty and slavery is dependent upon color—onto an animal character. While enslaved, Lucky “bore … indignities patiently, secretly resolving, all the time, that the worse his captors treated him, the more watchful he would be for a chance to make his escape.”

Lucky plans and executes an escape that closely follows the conventions of contemporary slave narratives. While on the road, for example, “whenever he saw any body coming, he looked attentively at them to see if they were colored. When he found that they were white, he dodged off into the woods and hid there until they had gone by.” In the end, Lucky makes his way back home where Rainbow washes “his face with spirits of turpentine, and then Lucky was himself again.” Taken together, Rainbow’s postal authority and Lucky’s zoomorphic slave narrative mediate contemporary politics through the generic conventions of morally appropriate children’s literature.

Representations Fit for Children

The Stories of Rainbow and Lucky: Up the River demonstrates that young black men could occupy trusted positions of authority. And, by extension, the book contends that African Americans like Rainbow really were reliable, capable, and trustworthy members of local and national communities. In this respect, the comparison between Jacob Abbott and Mister Rogers bears still more fruit. Like Abbott, Fred Rogers fought for positive representations of African Americans at a pivotal moment in U.S. history. Weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and amid scenes of police brutality in black communities, Rogers introduced Officer Clemmons, a black police officer, to his neighborhood. Of course, neither Rainbow nor Officer Clemmons are radical figures, and, in many respects, these characters are politically conservative idealizations that suggest centuries of racism can be smoothed over by present goodwill.

And yet, these representations do matter. Rainbow and Officer Clemmons are part of a utopian vision that at once suspends and transcends racial inequality in the United States. Even as they evoke the often troubling politics of respectability, these characters encourage a pattern of feeling in which racism and white supremacy are recognized as great wrongs—an affect that children could transpose on their own worlds. A child in the nineteenth century could likely detect that Rainbow’s experience as a post rider was exceptional. White society treats Rainbow with dignity and respect, which was not always the case in the world outside of the novel. This kind of representation, at its best, challenges young readers to think critically and creatively about the world in which they live.

When read in the context of the nineteenth-century post office, however, The Stories of Rainbow and Lucky’s politics are revelatory: the story takes radical sentiments of racial equality and reframes them as non-controversial truths. By simply representing the existence of a black post rider doing his job, the novel refutes claims that mobile black men were threatening. The novel does not have to make big claims, because within this context, the existence of a black postal rider is itself one big claim.

Further Reading

For more on the history of the U.S. Postal Service in the nineteenth century, see Richard John’s Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995); and David Henkin’s The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (2006). For literary studies that more directly attend to the effects of the postal system’s race-based exclusions, see Hollis Robbins’s “Fugitive Mail: The Deliverance of Henry Box Brown and Antebellum Postal Politics”; Susan L. Roberson’s “Circulations of Body and Word: Women’s Slave Narratives” in Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities (2011); and Elizabeth Hewitt’s “Jacob’s Letters from Nowhere” in Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (2004). To consider the legacy of these nineteenth-century race-based exclusions as it manifests in the twentieth-century, see Philip F. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office (2011), which uncovers the post office as a crucial part of African American history.

On the racial politics of children’s literature, see Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011); and Donnarae MacCann’s White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900 (1998). For a broader understanding of how politics manifest in children’s literature, see Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel (2010). For more on how Fred Rogers’s politics influenced the casting and content of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, read Michael Long’s Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers (2015).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

Christy L. Pottroff is an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellow in Early Material Texts at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD candidate in English at Fordham University. Her dissertation examines the surprising extent to which the U.S. Post Office Department influenced early American literature.

In the texts of African American women writers, children learn lessons in survival, self-reliance, fortitude, and determination. In contrast, in literature written by white authors, black girls suffer and/or die. In these white-authored narratives, white women characters clothe, educate, and reform black girls by exposing them to teachings from the Bible, all acts that reinforced the image of the benevolent white female. This stereotype is presented in the most popular white-authored black girl figure, the enslaved black girl Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In the novel, when the white mistress, Miss Ophelia, asks the enslaved Topsy where she originated from, Topsy replies that she “jes’ growed,” making no mention of parents. Miss Ophelia becomes the white surrogate mother figure who reforms Topsy. Through tutelage in religion and manners, Topsy matures from an untutored girl to a missionary who eventually leaves the United States to teach abroad in Africa. The writings of black women revised this mid-nineteenth-century narrative and created representations of black girls who learned to acquire an education through alternative means, sought reform movements that they chose on their own, found ways to become self-sufficient, and used their achievements to strengthen their own homes, attain freedom from danger, and ensure their survival.

The formula of white benevolence toward black girls exists in an earlier, lesser-known text, The Tawny Girl; or the History of Margaret Russel, Illustrating the Benefits of Education on the Most Degraded Classes of Society (1823), by an anonymous author. Textual details point to white authorship: the book was published at a Quaker press that often published abolitionist literature. The use of the word “degraded” in the title is another clue. It would be hard to imagine a black writer using this word to describe his or her protagonist. But if we imagine a white writer, the word signals an idealized trajectory from poverty to a better state (whether the improvement is moral or economic is left ambiguous in this title). The title also suggests that behind the scenes is a white benefactor who will help the “degraded” black girl improve herself.

Although The Tawny Girl was first published in England by W. Alexander & Son in 1822, Samuel Wood, a Quaker teacher-turned-publisher and children’s book author, reprinted The Tawny Girl in New York the next year at his publishing firm, Samuel Wood and Sons. His company published children’s books that were “seemingly devised to be instructive and moral.” Nearly all of them had a strong Christian message. The American primers and books Wood chose to reprint offered suitable reading for black children without traits of racial bias. Wood, who was greatly influenced by the children’s books that were popular in England, decided that many children’s books published in the United States were unsuitable for young readers. He installed a small printing press in the rear of his store and printed children’s books of his own compilation and authorship. His first title, published in 1806, was The Young Child’s ABC, or, First Book, which sold for three cents. By 1813, he had written and published over fifty books. Wood said that in making his selections, “he tried to avoid anything that would tend to corrupt the innocence of the youthful mind, and care was taken to void selections that would lead to a taste for the exhibitions of the stage.”

To our eyes today, the books Wood published might seem dull and didactic, but they were in high demand in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Wood believed in moral suasion, the idea that children could be influenced by moral arguments and good examples to do right, in contrast to a reliance on punishment and threats of punishment that had characterized child-rearing in the eighteenth century. Wood’s books taught children that they should always make the good and useful choice. They also presented the uncomfortable issues of the times to youthful readers, including racial inequality and economic injustice. The portrayal of a mixed-raced girl in The Tawny Girl (1823) is an example of Wood’s interest in publishing books with themes of social issues.

The Tawny Girl is a short novel that tells the story of an eight-year-old mulatto girl named Margaret Russel who is born in Ireland. Margaret eventually is forced to sell matches to care for her sickly white mother after her father, an African, dies and leaves his family impoverished. The Tawny Girl opens when Margaret, her mother (an Irish servant), and her father (a servant to an Irish man) move from Ireland to Liverpool, England, to escape poverty. When the father falls ill and dies, Margaret’s mother takes up residence in Warrington, England, where she obtains a basket and becomes a “tradeswoman” selling matches and “vending wares of small value, such as pins, tape, &C.” Margaret and her mother move again, this time to York, where “as is customary with such wanderers, they put up at one of those places of wretchedness, a common lodging-house.” Living in near poverty, the mother continues to sell matches while Margaret tries to sell her mother’s goods from door to door. In her efforts to escape poverty, Margaret “range[s] the streets, only one step removed from a common beggar.”

 Through the benevolence of a group of neighbors, Margaret is given a chance to enter school. She is at first rejected for fear that due to “her wandering life and probably dissolute habits, she might bring discredit on the school,” but Margaret finally is admitted and is soon accepted by her classmates. Despite her hardships Margaret learns her lessons and commits passages from the Bible to memory, which pleases her teacher. Mother and daughter eventually move to a crowded almshouse. However, concerned that her daughter’s mind and body “might . . . be contaminated by the conversations and habits of the lodging-houses,” Margaret’s mother obtains “a wretched garret.” Margaret tries to make friends but is ostracized when she must sell matches and obtain food to care for her sickly mother, who eventually dies. The daughter “bitterly lamented her destitute and forlorn situation;—she was left to struggle with the world, without any natural protector, at a dangerous age, being in her fourteenth year.” Margaret is relieved when benevolent neighbors in the community intervene to assist by housing her, clothing her, teaching her the Bible, and becoming surrogate parents. However, at the age of sixteen Margaret dies after lengthy illness and much suffering. Margaret’s suffering—the loss of both parents, extreme poverty, labor in the streets at fourteen, and death at sixteen—vividly describes for young readers about the hardships of abject poverty, loneliness, and illness as a means of encouraging empathy for others. In the hands of an abolitionist publisher, those others included blacks.

The wood-engraved frontispiece of The Tawny Girl features a black girl (Margaret) reading to a white woman (her mother), who is lying on a bed in a shabby garret. The artist, Dr. Alexander Anderson, was a white man who began his career as a doctor but left the field of medicine to become a wood engraver. The technique of wood engraving revolutionized book illustration. One of Anderson’s contributions to American art was his illustrations of American scenes and people in the children’s primers and tracts that were distributed across the nation. Unlike expensive metal engraving, images created from wood engravings could be reproduced cheaply and made accessible to children. Through his wood engravings, Anderson captured intricate details of the lives of the working poor, drawing on observations from his medical career to relay the depth of poverty many early American families suffered. The shading his wood engravings produced presented a nuanced depiction of subjects who lacked elegant dress or surroundings.

The frontispiece showcases sentimental props that heighten the appeal presented in the text. It depicts the domestic space of an impoverished family. The tiny garret’s slanted roof, dim lighting, cracked window, and sparse furniture visually depict the family’s poverty. A window with a missing pane is stuffed with rags to keep out the cold and clothes hang from a post to dry. Opposite the dying mother, Margaret sits on a box with a slumped posture, holding a book and reading to her mother. The mother’s face is turned toward the black girl.  An excerpt from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard” is reprinted on the title page, a poem designed to persuade readers to acknowledge the desires of the poor for education instead of regarding their ambitions with “disdain.” In the novel, although benevolent white members of Margaret’s community step in to give her access to education, their assistance is futile. Although Margaret evolves from an uneducated beggar to a good, literate, Christian girl, this is not enough to save her. Despite her courage and determination to acquire an education, Margaret dies. Her efforts to become educated and adopt Christian moral values do not lead to resilience. Instead, as the frontispiece captures vividly, Margaret’s fortitude serves primarily to point to the need for white benevolence and the good works of the white community. Her suffering and premature death are designed to elicit in white readers a desire to aid the poor and the “degraded.”

 The publication of The Tawny Girl in 1823 anticipated a cluster of antebellum children’s literature by antislavery white authors in which black girl characters functioned as protagonists who addressed slavery and racial inequality. The suffering, alienation, loneliness, and premature death of black girls in this literature are designed to evoke empathy in young readers and deliver an antislavery message. Widely circulated early American children’s texts that feature black girls include Poems: Moral and Religious, for Children and Youth (1821); and Blessings in Disguise; or, Pictures of Some of Miss Haydon’s Girls, by Caroline Chesebro. The Little Keepsake; or Easy Lessons in Words of One Syllable (1825) contains four brief chapters that teach lessons to children using racial themes. “The Swing” illustrates the separation of the races when a group of white children who “have just come out of school” are playing on a swing while a group of black children, two boys and a black girl, lurk behind a tree and “wait for their turn to swing.” The author tells readers: “Soon our white young friends will go home, and then these will take their turn.” The isolation of black children at school and at play is illustrated further by their labeling as “these” in this text, perhaps teaching young white readers less about tolerance and more about the hierarchical systems in place that separated the races.

A signature feature in early American children’s literature that features black girls is what I call interracial “play dates” in which a black girl and a white girl play together as an illustration of racial harmony. The term “play date” is intentionally unsettling because it is anachronistic. A “play date” is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century activity commonly associated with innocence, yet these scenes of play in the nineteenth century evoke inequality, racial disharmony, danger, and conflict. The frontispiece image of an early issue of Slave’s Friend (1837), an abolitionist periodical for children, features an illustration titled “Emma” that shows a white girl teaching a black girl how to read as a dog sits nearby. The characters’ hierarchical arrangement in the picture suggests imbalance. Emma, the white girl, is the tallest, most visible figure and is fully clothed. Grace sits in a crouching position under Emma’s arm and has bare feet. The triangulation of a black girl, a white girl, and a dog might reinforce a sentimental scene of goodwill, togetherness, and acceptance, yet Grace’s visually unequal position under Emma’s arm conveys how her presence serves simply to support white benevolence.

The story “Emma,” published in The Slave’s Friend, features “a neat little colored girl who used to come to the house of Emma’s father every Saturday afternoon to see her mother[,] who lived with the family. Her name was Grace.” Grace and Emma “used to play together; and sometimes they would work in the garden or sit down to read. Grace could tell her all the letters, A, B, C, and so on, but Emma wanted her to read without spelling, and so she would teach her, as you can see in the picture.” The author encourages its young readers to look carefully at the picture: “Just look at them. Isn’t it a pretty sight? How attentive Grace is. I dare say she loves to learn to read. Now do we see Emma, how animated and joyful she looks. She loves to be a little teacher, I guess. And how carefully they hold the book.” In this story, Grace is socialized through reading and learning with the aid of a white girl. The author’s repeated request that readers “look carefully” at the “pretty sight” of Emma and Grace reading together suggests that the interracial pairing is instructive. In a similar way, The Tawny Girl’s frontispiece sought to attract early American readers with a rare display of a black girl reading to a white woman. In both of these illustrations, the pairing of literate black girls with white female figures supports the values of racial harmony, gratitude, and ideal households that all whites should aspire to.

Specific publishing houses were invested in publishing children’s literature texts that featured black children. The American Tract Society, located in Boston, Massachusetts, published many antislavery titles and had an active publication program for children that competed with the literature of secular publishers. Songs for My Children: With Memoirs with Numerous Illustrations (1861), a popular publication by a white author, contained songs, rhymes and miscellany for child readers such as “An Example to Children,” “Aspirations,” “Haste to School,” “Calling Names,” Deeds of Kindness,” and “Don’t Fret.” “The Little Black Girl” features a black girl named Susie who laments her loneliness when her mother, Chloe, must leave home daily to work as a domestic. Susie looks in a mirror and connects her loneliness with the color of her skin: “Susie to their tiny mirror, / Climbing, saw her ebon face; / But she hid it with her fingers, / As if ’t were some deep disgrace.”

“Oh why was it,” sadly murmuring,
Susie asked herself aloud,
“When God made white children’s faces,
Over mine he spread a cloud?”
“No one loves me; naughty children
Laugh when e’er I go along;
And rude boys are always singing
In my ear some negro song.
I don’t love to sit at school,
With the children white and fair;
For it makes my face look blacker,
And more crisp my woolly hair.
Scrub and comb! And comb and scrub! I’ve
Tried to grow white many a day,
But my poor face still is colored,
And my hair will knot this way!

The lines suggest that black skin is shameful and that black children understand that they are inferior because of it, a sentiment that conveys the racism of supposedly benevolent whites. This poem was designed to elicit sympathy in white children for black children. However, young black readers might have read it as a message to wait for salvation through divine intervention instead of relying on themselves or hoping for changes in the nation’s legal system. When Chloe hears her daughter’s cries, she urges Susie to rely on God’s love to calm her worries: “Soon, my child, if we obey him, / We shall go to dwell above, / Where his own of every color/ Share alike a father’s love.” The image of Susie’s forlorn face captures the loss and loneliness of racial isolation. Similar to the frontispiece in The Tawny Girl, the portrayal of the young girl Susie looking in the mirror depicts the intersection of race, poverty, and sorrow.

In Lucy; or The Slave Girl of Kentucky, published by the American Reform Tract and Book Society (1858), an enslaved black girl argues vehemently against the horrors of slavery. The story opens with a white boy named Arthur who receives “no black marks” on his reports in school. As a reward, his aunt tells him a story. She tells him about a black girl named Lucy who she met during her travels to New Orleans as a young girl. The aunt traveled on a steamer headed to a slave market. The steamer stopped in Paducah, on the northwestern boundary of Kentucky, where she met a little slave girl named Lucy who was “about a dozen years old.” In dialect, Lucy explains to the aunt how she cried and screamed when she was sold and separated from her mother and grandmother: “You see dey wouldn’t nudder let me come wid mammy, nor take me back to granny, and so I couldn’t do nothin’ but scream.” Young Arthur learns about the plight of slaves, but he is relieved that he does not share their actual suffering: “I’ll pray that I may continue to hate the whole thing with all my might, and I’ll give thanks too, every day, that I was not born a colored child, to be sold away from all I love and to be taken down the Mississippi river.” The juxtaposition of the two sentimental scenes, in which an aunt tells a story to her nephew and an enslaved girl is separated from her family, serves to highlight the processes that contribute to a strong white family structure lest it be threatened by the influences of slavery.

Deborah C. De Rosa argues that white writers who delivered an antislavery message included representations of enslaved children primarily as a way to illustrate the impact of slavery’s atrocities on the innocence of white children: “Ironically, while these works oppose the slave child’s lost innocence and depict individuals interceding to prevent the child’s suffering, the domestic abolitionists nevertheless inflict lost innocence (through forced consciousness) onto the white child,” writes De Rosa. “While these white children do not literally free the slave children, their promises of prayers set the groundwork for change.” In Lucy; or The Slave Girl of Kentucky, the fact that a white child becomes aware of Lucy’s suffering seems to be more about his lost innocence than it is about that child cultivating empathy for Lucy. In the hands of white writers, black girls were as flat and two-dimensional as they were in the hands of black newspaper editors. Their function was to support a didactic lesson, and the focus was on the moral value of their external actions. White writers were not concerned with the inner lives of the black children they wrote about; the main concern of these writers was to persuade white children that slavery was evil so they could adopt the proper moral attitude in childhood and (it was to be hoped) take proper action against slavery in adulthood. In other words, the children white writers were concerned about were their own.

Further Reading

Caroline Chesebro, Blessings in Disguise; or, Pictures of Some of Miss Haydon’s Girls (New York, 1863).

Deborah DeRosa, Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830–1865 (Albany, N.Y., 2003).

John R. Edson, “Slave’s Friend,” in Children’s Periodicals of the United States: Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers, Ed. R. Gordon Kelly, 408–411 (Westport, Conn., 1984).

“Emma,” Slave’s Friend 2:1 (1837): 2–4.

Jemmy and His Mother: A Tale for Children: and Lucy: or, The Slave Girl of Kentucky (Cincinnati, 1858).

Little Miss Consequence (Boston, 1880).

Little Rhymes for Little Readers (Boston, 1832).

Lynde Palmer, Helps over Hard Places: Stories for Girls (Boston, 1862).

Poems: Moral and Religious, for Children and Youth (Greenfield, Mass, 1821).

Jane R. Pomeroy, “Anderson’s Life and Introduction to His Work,” in Jane R. Pomeroy, Alexander Anderson: Wood Engraver & Illustrator: An Annotated Bibliography, vol. 1 (New Castle, Del., and Worcester, Mass., 2005).

“The Little Black Girl,” Songs for my Children: with numerous illustrations (Boston, 1861?).

The Little Keepsake; or Easy Lessons in Words of One Syllable (New Haven, Conn., 1825).

The Tawny Girl; or The History of Margaret Russel, Illustrating the Benefits of Education on the Most Degraded Classes of Society (New York, 1823).

Harry B. Weiss, Samuel Wood & Sons: Early New York Publisher of Children’s Books (New York, 1942).

William Sanders; or, Blessings in Disguise (Concord, Mass., 1848).

Nazera Sadiq Wright, “’Our Hope is in the Rising Generation’: Locating African American Children’s Literature in the “Children’s Department” of the Colored American” in Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature before 1900.  Eds. Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane (Minneapolis, 2017).

Nazera Sadiq Wright, “Maria W. Stewart’s ‘The First Stage of Life’: Black Girlhood in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art (1858-1861) in MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. 40:3 (Fall 2015): 150-175 Eds. Joycelyn Moody and Howard Rambsy. 

Nazera Sadiq Wright, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana,  Ill., 2016).

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).