New York City and its bodies politic, 1800-1860

On Sundays, the work of disinterring the many thousands of bodies from New York’s old Potter’s Field—or paupers’ burial ground—halted for the week, and the lot was unguarded, permitting a scene of macabre joviality. For most of the 1850s, in an open lot at Fourth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, crowds gathered to view hundreds of unearthed pine caskets, broken apart during the week by workers’ spades and picks, their contents spilling into public view. While the genteel gazed upon the remains, vagrant children played kickball with disembodied skulls, and dogs growled over the long bones of arms and legs.

Even in the chaotic bustle of antebellum New York, this desecration did not escape scrutiny. “Is our City always to be disgraced by some public exhibition?” asked a subscriber to the New York Times in 1858. “For the sake of decency, do call the attention of our City authorities to the exhibition of coffins, skulls and decayed bodies lying exposed.” But the city authorities were already well aware of this gruesome public nuisance. Indeed, the public-health controversy and moral outrage that accompanied the disinterment of the city’s old Potter’s Field and the removal of the bodies to the new locations on Randall’s and Ward’s Islands had been brewing since at least the first decade of the nineteenth century.

The phrase Potter’s Field was not specific to New York City’s paupers’ burial ground. It originated in Matthew 27:7: “And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.” “Potter’s field” referred to a place where potters dug for clay, and thus a place conveniently full of trenches and holes for the burial of strangers. For nineteenth-century New Yorkers, the biblical veneer of the term was perhaps an antidote to one of the distressing costs of life in the chaotic new democratic city. As some prospered, hundreds of others died, remembered by no one and memorialized by nothing. At least, in Potter’s Field, they lay under a vague biblical cope.

The first Potter’s Field burial ground in New York City was located at the site of what would become the militia parade ground and city park at Washington Square. On this nine-and-a-half-acre plot, at the city’s pastoral northern edge, lay the densely packed corpses of about 125,000 “strangers,” many of whom had died during two separate yellow-fever epidemics between 1795 and 1803. Not surprisingly, local residents who had fled crowded lower Manhattan for country estates in the region came to find in Potter’s Field an intense nuisance. Whatever sympathy anyone had for the anonymous dead did not supersede wealthy New Yorkers’ sense of entitlement when it came to their comfortable insulation from the city’s darker side. In a letter to the Common Council, they wrote, “From the rapid Increase of Building that is daily taking place both in the suburbs of the City and the Grounds surrounding the field alluded to, it is certain that in the course of a few years the aforementioned field will be drawn within a precinct of the City.” Within the first two decades of the nineteenth century, their prediction had been realized, and the Potter’s Field began a lengthy series of migrations in a vain effort to stay a step ahead of the city’s relentless growth.

In 1823, the city moved Potter’s Field to an empty lot at the corner of Forty-ninth Street and Fourth Avenue—what would then have been the far northern reaches of the metropolis. This place served as the Potter’s Field until the 1840s when, as the city grew northward, it was relocated once again to Randall’s Island in the East River. Cast off the Island of Manhattan like so many family farms, Potter’s Field would no longer clash with the New Yorkers’ Victorian sensibilities or inhibit the Manhattan real-estate boom.

Just south of Randall’s Island, separated by a treacherous, narrow channel known as Little Hell’s Gate, was Ward’s Island, the site of another Potter’s Field in the mid-1850s. Both Randall’s and Ward’s Islands already housed other city institutions for the indigent, including the Emigrant Refuge and Hospital, the State Inebriate Asylum, the juvenile branch of the Almshouse Department, and the headquarters for the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents. As one guide to New York and its benevolent institutions observed, “multitudes of persons went from the dram-shop to the police-station, and from the police courts to the Workhouse from whence, after a short stay, they returned to the dram shop . . . until they at length died on their hands as paupers or criminals, and were laid in the Potter’s Field.” For most of New York’s institutionalized underclass, there was literally a direct path from the door of the asylum or workhouse to the Potter’s Field.

Relocating the city’s cemetery from Manhattan’s urban grid to an island in the East River did not put an end to the city’s problem with the indigent dead. In 1849, the Daily Tribune reported on the political and legal wrangling between the governors of the Almshouse and the Common Council (the nineteenth-century name for the City Council), the former seeking to wrest authority over Potter’s Field from the latter. The governors cited the poor management of the paupers’ burial ground, which the Tribune referred to as “that den of abominations,” as evidence that the Common Council was unable to manage the Potter’s Field. “We do sincerely trust somebody will shoulder the responsibility of the Potter’s Field,” the Tribune pleaded, “and rid the Island of the abomination before the advent of another warm and perhaps an epidemic season.”

The Common Council and the Governors of the Almshouse traded letters, pleas, and vitriol for the better part of a decade. In May of 1851, the Governors warned the Common Council that, “the land now appropriated [for the Potter’s Field] is now nearly full, and the small space left for further interment (which now average upwards of one hundred per week), renders prompt action necessary.” Four years later, it was still unclear who had control over the Potter’s Field, and conditions were worsening. By this time, there were two burial grounds for paupers: the primary site on Randall’s Island and a smaller one on Ward’s Island to the south. The Board of Governors proposed to expand the Ward’s Island site in 1854, and the Times supported the proposition, suggesting that “it is time that the remains of paupers were interred in some quarter better fitted for their last resting-place than the one now used on Randall’s Island.” In their reports to the Board of Health and the Common Council, the Governors of the Almshouse urged that, “humanity, a due regard for the living, and a sense of proper respect for the dead” be part of any effort “to remedy the existing and impending evils.”

In the meantime, the disinterment of bodies at the old site on Fourth Avenue aroused its own controversy. In 1851, a plan was adopted by the Common Council to expand Forty-ninth Street through the old Potter’s Field, which required the disinterment of thousands of bodies. This project stretched on for nearly the entire decade, accompanied by foot-dragging and corrupt contractors. Commenting on the enormity of the project, the Times reported in the spring of 1853 that “the City Authorities are cutting a street through the old Potter’s Field . . . where so many victims of the Cholera were hurriedly interred in 1832. The coffins were then, in many instances, stacked one upon another; and now, in digging through the hill, the remains of twenty coffins may be seen thus piled together.”

As with the active Potter’s Field, the old paupers’ burial ground aroused no small amount of controversy. In the summer of 1858, the Times again reported on the work, claiming that “within three weeks past about 3,000 skeletons have been exhumed from the old Potter’s Field . . . and removed to Ward’s Island.” The winter of 1858-59 passed without any further exhumation, and “meantime the thin layer of earth which covered some hundred half-decayed coffins has fallen away, and . . . crowds of urchins assemble there daily and play with the bones of the dead; troops of hungry dogs prowl about the grounds and carry off skulls and detached parts of human bodies.”

Newspaper articles and editorials suggested that there was something morally improper about leaving so many thousands of bodies exposed for the amusement of urchins and stray dogs, or left to rot in packed trenches, awaiting medical-school body snatchers. When the Board of Aldermen considered purchasing new lands on Ward’s Islands for the expansion of the Potter’s Field in 1852, these scenes were not far from the minds of civic-minded newspaper editors. The Times urged the city “to arrange and adorn” the new Potter’s Field “with suitable shrubbery” so that “if the new grounds are properly laid out, they may be made not only useful but ornamental.” The Times reported that “the new place is to be called the ‘City Cemetery’—so farewell to the old Potter’s Field, a name that is never heard without a thrill of horror.” Frequently throughout the controversial disinterment and relocation of the Potter’s Field in the late 1840s and 1850s, the newspapers referred to the necessity of making both the old and new Potter’s Fields “more proper,” “suitable,” and “respectable,” according to the “dictates of propriety.” But what were these “dictates of propriety?”

The Grave Hath a Voice of Eloquence

In 1858, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine ran an article entitled “Civilization and Health,” which argued that sanitation and “high mental culture” were necessary components to a great democracy. As the individual citizens of the republic might be strengthened by intellectual achievement, so could the social body as a whole be strengthened by a refinement in public health because “the connection of cleanliness with civilization is every where manifest in direct ratio with mental culture.”

The problem of high mortality from disease in New York, however, seemed to indicate that inadequate public sanitation prevented the city from full participation in the progress and benefits of civilization. In 1859, the state of New York issued a special report on the health of New York City in which it acknowledged that mismanagement and lack of sophistication within the city’s sanitation infrastructure were to blame for high mortality. “Great cities are certainly the pride of nations,” reported the investigating committee, “but they require a paternal control, and all Christian and civilized communities recognize the duty of exercising it.” The article from Harper’s agreed that “wherever misery is manifest there always exists at man’s disposal means of mitigating or removing it,” and “to find out and apply these means is advancement in civilization.” Citing the benefits of “the science of public health,” Harper’s proposed that high urban mortality was primarily confined to the poor, but that poverty was not, in and of itself, the cause of death. Rather, “the worst effect of poverty is, that it leads to filth and neglect . . . which affects the whole of the inhabitants.” The civilized solution was “contact with well-cleaned streets and external purity,” which “begets a distaste for internal filth and degradation, and there are none so degraded nor impure as not to be benefited and elevated by association with cleanliness.” Few of Harper’s middle-class readers would disagree.

Of special concern to health reformers in antebellum New York were frequent and devastating epidemics of yellow fever and cholera. While large outbreaks of yellow fever were largely contained by the 1830s, lower class wards remained especially vulnerable to cholera epidemics. Public-health reformers cited numerous causes for these continued public health problems. Slaughterhouses, inadequate sanitation, and urban graveyards were among the most important. Simply put, health reformers assumed that carcasses and cadavers made more carcasses and cadavers.

For this reason, medical science was beginning to call for a new approach to interment. Bodies should lie away from cities, not so much for their own peaceful eternal rest, but for the safety of the living. An 1822 pamphlet entitled Documents and Facts Showing the Fatal Effects of Interment in Populous Cities argued that the pernicious yellow fever epidemics in the city were caused, in part, by the “putrid exhalations arising from grave-yards.” Nearly twenty years earlier in 1806, a committee of the Board of Health had reported that burial in urban churchyards was deleterious to the public health, stating that “interments of dead bodies within the city, ought to be prohibited. A vast mass of decaying animal matter, produced by the superstition of interring dead bodies near the churches . . . is now deposited in many of the most populous parts of the city.”

The committee’s report resulted in an 1813 law granting the corporation of the city the power of “regulating, or if they find necessary, preventing the interment of the dead within the city.” But this power was seldom exercised, and the sudden appearance of yellow-fever epidemics left little time for the healthful burial of the dead. According to Dr. Samuel Akerly of the New York Hospital, the Potter’s Field was already part of this public-health concern in the 1820s and was “known to be frequently offensive, and it sickened a detachment of militia stationed near it in 1814 . . . It becomes the corporation therefore, to prevent its becoming a nuisance, and this may be easily done with quick-lime or ashes of wood.”

Shortly after the publication of the 1822 pamphlet, the Potter’s Field was relocated to the lot at Forty-ninth Street and Fourth Avenue. For the site of the former graveyard, the city followed the suggestion of the 1806 report that “the present burial-grounds might serve extremely well for plantations of grove and forest trees.” The measure was as much about aesthetics as about health. Rather than emanate sickening vapors, a well-planted Potter’s Field would absorb and digest the remaining “putrefying matter and hot-beds of miasmata,” making it at once “useful and ornamental to the city.” From a useless no-man’s land, it would be transformed into a city park and military parade ground, renamed Washington Square.

The city, it turns out, was not opposed to open space—to the contrary, the same impulse behind the drive to push Potter’s Field from Manhattan Island lay behind the drive to create pockets of pastoral delight within the urban grid. Both were part of that antebellum struggle to sustain areas of genteel quietude amidst the city’s bustle and chaos. Among the most popular pastoral retreats for the antebellum middle- and upper-classes were the so-called rural cemeteries, which appeared on the suburban fringes of most American cities between 1830 and 1860. From the vantage of these wooded pleasure grounds, the foul stench of the urban Potter’s Field was particularly offensive.

In a lecture delivered in the 1830s before the Boston Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, Dr. Jacob Bigelow, head of American’s first rural cemetery at Boston’s Mount Auburn, reiterated concerns about the disposal of dead bodies when he observed that “within the bounds of populous and growing cities, interments cannot with propriety take place beyond a limited extent” and suggested that the burial of the dead might better occur “amidst the quiet verdure of the field, under the broad and cheerful light of heaven,—where here the harmonious and ever changing face of nature reminds us, by its resuscitating influences, that to die is but to live again.”

While meeting an urban public-health need, the primary purpose of these rural cemeteries was to contribute to an ongoing discussion about the identity and morality of the nation, quite literally embodied in the illustrious dead. Visitors to rural cemeteries were expected to lose themselves in the harmonies of creation as they contemplated the noble biographies of the departed. In their pastoral classrooms, the illustrious dead were teachers of history and morality, and their timeless presence in such institutional places of rest affirmed the permanence of not only the local community but the national community as well.

For the greater New York metropolitan area, the principal rural cemetery was Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, established in 1842. In advocating for its creation, newspapers, health reformers, and city-park enthusiasts reiterated many of the same assertions about public health and morality that had circulated in the city since the 1820s. Green-Wood quickly became famous, with its three hundred acres traversed with fifteen miles of garden pathways. Phelps’ New York City Guide for 1857 described Green-Wood as “one of the most interesting objects of public utility and beauty near New York” and “a favorite rural resort during the summer season” as well as “a holy spot [which] links itself to our being, with a cherished fondness and satisfaction.” Until the completion of Central Park in the 1860s, Green-Wood Cemetery was New York’s primary garden spot.

Having strolled through the rural cemeteries, we can better appreciate why the piles of moldering coffins exposed to the public in the 1850s caused New Yorkers to question their city’s claims to “civilization.” But the Potter’s Field was not only the antithesis of the rural-cemetery ideal (as well as a failure of municipal administration); it was also a site of spiritual death, obliterated social identity, and the graveyard of vice. If, as one proponent of rural cemeteries claimed in 1831, “the grave hath a voice of eloquence,” the Potter’s Field spoke in a dark chorus about the failures of democracy and civilization, the stark and messy exigencies of urban inequality, and thousands of individual lives wrecked on the shores of the great metropolis.

In The Common Dust

In May of 1858, a little-known author named Henry Herbert contemplated and ultimately committed suicide. Before his death, he pleaded to his friend Miles I’anson, “I must not be buried in the Potter’s field, or by charity.” Several days later, when John Aikins, second mate of the ship Mandarin, was killed by a sailor in a fight, Captain Dubois of the California clipper Queen of the Pacific (who only had a passing acquaintance with Aikins) personally took on the cost of a casket and a plot at Green-Wood Cemetery. He could not bear the thought of a fellow officer being taken to Potter’s Field. Similarly, when an elderly man was found “in a fit” on a dock near Washington Market and subsequently died at a police station house, preparations were made to inter the body in Potter’s Field. But at the last minute the body was recognized as a “man of some prominence” by a Brooklyn scientist, who “requested that the body might be given to him for decent burial” in his own plot at Green-Wood. In each of these cases, the deceased either expressed or was saved by a fervid desire to avoid the humiliation and anonymity of a pauper’s burial, which would have signified a fall from the bourgeois society of which they had once been a part. To bury these people in the Potter’s Field would have been an unconscionable breach of propriety.

The sorts of people for whom a Potter’s Field burial was considered acceptable by benevolent institutions and reformers ranged widely from newborn infants abandoned on street corners to inebriates and “fallen” women. These burials were reported with parsimony by New York’s newspapers:

“October 20, 1852: The body of an unknown lad was found yesterday floating in the East River off Burling-slip. The deceased was not recognized, and, upon the Coroner holding an inquest, the body was sent to Potter’s Field for interment.

February 04, 1858: Rosa was 19 years of age. She formerly boarded at a lager-bier saloon at No. 257 William-street, and has for nearly a year past borne a questionable character. No one has thus come forward to claim the body, and it is probable she will be buried in Potter’s Field.”

If it was true, as one reformer claimed in 1854, that “many a saddening pang afflic’s the last moments of the children of poverty, upon reflecting that their remains must moulder in the common dust of Potter’s Field,” tens of thousands of the city’s poor lived in fear of an eternity spent in anonymity. Likewise, middle-class New Yorkers used the possibility of a Potter’s Field burial as a kind of moral barometer. One can easily imagine parlor gatherings attended by much clucking of tongues over the most recent rumor that if Mr. So-and-so continued in his intemperate ways, a pauper’s grave would provide his final rest.

The moral horror of a pauper’s grave was not just an expression of simple Victorian propriety or Protestant death-ways. It also derived from the simple visibility of the Potter’s Field. There was no privacy in a pauper’s death; your bones, like so many family jewels, were exposed to all of the city’s most pernicious impulses. In imagining the horrors of a pauper’s burial, middle-class Americans drew a line between themselves and what Jacob Riis would later refer to as the “other half.” Rural cemeteries like Mount Auburn and Green-Wood were idealized by bourgeois urbanites as didactic landscapes, but the Potter’s Field as both a physical place and a cultural symbol was also imbued with instructional possibilities. It warned that the expected fate of the intemperate, the immoral, and the fallen was a gruesome eternal repose. Antebellum New Yorkers wanted to be frightened and disgusted by the Potter’s Field because it provided a startling moral corrective. Despite their cries for reform, they still expected to find the paupers’ burial ground disgusting and degrading and terrifying because they expected that its occupants, in life, had been the same. When this expectation abutted the very real public-health concern, linked as it was with the language of civilization, middle-class New Yorkers reacted within the expectations of their class: they were properly horrified but took only a limited interest in actual reform. As middle-class New Yorkers began leaving the city at midcentury, the need for such symbols of moral suasion diminished. Potter’s Field could now lie quietly isolated by the slow moving waters of the East River.

Further Reading:

For the role of dead bodies in nineteenth-century medical, anatomical, and cultural discourse, see Michael Sappol’s A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America(Princeton, 2002), which contains a brief section on the Potter’s Field and its obliteration of social identity; for the development of a health-based idea of propriety and nationalism, see Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, 1994); and for the didactic role of the city park and the rural cemetery in nineteenth-century urban planning, see David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, 1986).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

Thomas Bahde is a doctoral candidate in U.S. history at the University of Chicago. He is currently writing a dissertation using microhistorical and biographical methods to examine issues of race and justice in the nineteenth-century Midwest.

An interview with Henry Wiencek

Common-place: One of the striking revelations in Imperfect God is just how intertwined Washington’s life was with the institution of slavery. Everyone knows he owned slaves, but few recognize just how pervasive a part of his day-to-day existence slaves and slavery were. Was this a revelation to you as well? If so, how did it come about?

Henry Wiencek: Because Washington is chiefly known and studied as a political figure, historians have looked at Washington’s encounter with slavery through a political lens. Finding that Washington made no official statements about slavery during his presidency and that the issue did not arise in any dramatically significant way during his term, the political historians have relegated slavery to a footnote in studies of Washington. The story is almost the same for Washington as a military leader. General biographers of Washington have by and large been uninterested in slavery (Flexner is somewhat of an exception), except as a narrative device for making Washington look good; so they have tended to cherry pick anecdotes and statements that put Washington in a positive light, and they have tended to compartmentalize the discussion in a single, brief section or chapter. Reading these books would make one think that slavery was present in Washington’s life only as a kind of social/environmental wallpaper—African American figures hovering silently in the background in dining rooms and in fields—and that slavery never ruffled his Olympian conscience at all.

Because I came at Washington from the perspective of someone who studies plantation families, I knew before I had even begun that I would find slavery a pervasive presence in Washington’s life. How could it be otherwise? Before he was anything else he was a planter/farmer (two different things), and if you asked him while he was in office what his occupation was, he would have said “farmer.” He inherited slaves when he was still a child; he bought, sold, and rented slaves; he personally managed slaves, depended on slaves for his income for his entire life, negotiated with individual slaves, personally chose certain slaves for his household and for public appearances, and entered contracts regarding slaves; he married a woman whose wealth consisted very largely of slaves and who controlled more slaves than he did; he directly felt the effects of local and federal laws regarding slaves, etc., etc. Having slaves around all the time was part of his psychology—it was comforting; it validated his status as a person of substance and authority. There was no doubt at all that slavery pervaded his life, but the question was: ubiquitous or not, did slaves and slavery stand far in the background of his consciousness (as wallpaper), or did he have some direct, pressing awareness of moral and ethical issues regarding slavery? We look back and say slavery was evil by our standards; maybe he didn’t feel that way at all. I was acutely aware of the problem of “presentism”—judging a figure of the distant past by our standards. I wanted to discover what Washington’s own standards were, and my starting point was his last will and testament, in which he freed his slaves. In parsing the language of his will I found that, by the last year of his life, slavery had become a huge moral issue for him. Did this represent a change in his thinking? If so, what brought about that change? When? The will also suggested that Washington sharply disagreed with his wife and the rest of his extended family on the slavery issue.

CP: It seems clear from Imperfect God that you learned a great deal from genealogists. For historians working inside the academy, this might seem striking. How was it that you came to be interested in genealogy as a way of addressing larger historical questions about race and slavery?

HW: When I researched my previous book, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, I could not avoid genealogy and genealogists. That book focused on one extended family with a black side, a white side, and family genealogists on every side trying to reconstruct a lost/hidden past. In several instances I came across documents indicating hidden or forgotten blood ties between the whites and blacks. You can’t avoid finding that kind of information if you’re studying plantation families. It happened everywhere and the evidence is thick on the ground—wills, gifts of land, odd emancipations, payments for education, favored treatment for particular people. I had so many of these stories from Hairston documents and oral history that I couldn’t put them all into the book. And after the book came out more people called or wrote to me about other instances. The other part of this is you have to be careful in evaluating this information—not everything is at it seems.

When you encounter evidence of kinship between owners and slaves you have, first of all, learned something new about the complexity of their world, and next you are confronted with the question: did knowledge of his or her kinship to slaves influence the actions of an owner? Martha Washington’s first father-in-law, John Custis, all but acknowledged his mixed-race son, freed him, and gave him a very generous bequest. In contrast, Martha held her own half sister in slavery. The existence of this half sister, Ann Dandridge, was one of the great shocks of my research, and I discovered her only because genealogists had written to Mount Vernon about Dandridge and their letters were in the files. I pursued the leads in that correspondence and came up with additional evidence. So through the work of genealogists I came up with information that completely changed our view of what slavery was like at Mount Vernon.

Another case: The genealogist Anita Wills, who grew up in California, was told by her mother that the family originated in Virginia, and when Wills researched her past she found she was a descendant of mixed-race indentured servants held by Washington’s family. Her genealogical research opened a window on a facet of servitude I knew nothing about—the forced indenture of mixed-race children, a quasi-slavery fastened on people who fell afoul of the racial purity laws, which one might more accurately call the “how-to-get-free-servants-for-thirty-years statutes.” All of this told me a lot about the fabric of Washington’s world, and all of this came to light because a genealogist in California began tugging at a thread that led her all the way back to Westmoreland County, Virginia, and to George Washington.

Genealogy is much more than just birth certificates and gravestones. You are compelled to get deeply into wills, all manner of legal documents, county and state records, family letters and diaries. By chasing down every stray reference to a particular person, you find supremely important documents by accident, documents you certainly would not have found otherwise. By pursuing documents about one of Washington’s slaves you can encounter documents about Washington himself you might never have discovered through a strictly defined “George Washington” search.

Genealogy has special importance to the study of slavery because by studying the wills and inheritance practices of slave-owning families you begin to see that slave owning was often a collective enterprise. The simple declarative statement “George Washington owned slaves” is actually a vast oversimplification. Yes, he owned slaves, but some of his slaves intermarried with “Martha’s” slaves. I have to put Martha’sin quotation marks because she didn’t actually own them; they were owned by a legal entity—the estate of her deceased first husband—and they were earmarked for her son, Jacky, and after his death, for his heirs. You see how complicated it gets. The slaves were at Mount Vernon, under Washington’s control, but his ownership of his own slaves and his control of “Martha’s” were complicated by intermarriages among the slaves. Some of the offspring belonged to George; some, to the Custis heirs.

This phenomenon of collective family ownership of slaves turns out to be very important for understanding Washington. I was curious to find out if there was any direct connection between Washington’s private slaveholding and his public policy on slavery, and I found that there was such a connection. While he was in office, the revolting slave-trading practices of an in-law drove Washington to plan the emancipation of all the slaves at Mount Vernon—his own and “Martha’s”—an emancipation that Washington knew would have a strong political impact. I found unpublished letters from Washington’s negotiations with a Custis heir, in which a very detailed manumission plan is outlined. The Custis heir resisted Washington’s plan, thus preventing the president from taking a forceful stand on emancipation.

As to “genealogy as a way of addressing larger historical questions about race and slavery”—genealogy teaches us that many white colonial families had mixed-race kin. It would be fascinating to consult Virginia’s African American genealogists and see how many of them can trace their families back to leading white families such as the Carters, Lees, Byrds, Randolphs, et al. (Right now I can say “yes” to three of those names—I don’t know about the Byrds, but they’re related to the Custises, so I guess they’d be a “yes” too.) That would give us a sense of how closely entwined these leading families were with slaves. Reading the accounts of the very peculiar, very intense relationship between Landon Carter and his slave Nassau, I have wondered if they were half brothers. My point is that, in public statements, the white male leadership of colonial Virginia reviled miscegenation, and we have come to believe that they were genuinely revolted by race mixing. Then how could these same men so avidly practice it? If they were disgusted by mixed-race people, how could the masters and mistresses of the era staff their houses with mulattoes? Wouldn’t you expect mulattoes to be shunned, exiled? Jefferson is a prime example. He spoke forcefully against racial mixing, but his entire household staff consisted of mulatto and all-but-white slaves, many of whom were his relatives. My thinking is that, to some degree, this eighteenth-century racial-purity talk was smokescreen and rationalization for outsiders. It’s an extremely complex issue.

CP: To follow up, how do you think attention to genealogy might’ve altered the arguments of other books on similar topics? Ed Morgan’s classic American Slavery, American Freedom comes to mind here.

HW: Broad-scope books such as those of Edmund Morgan, Philip Morgan, David Davis, and the Genoveses really have little opportunity to take up genealogical issues, except in an anecdotal way. But if your anecdote is about Jefferson it packs a lot of wallop. Philip Morgan wrote a terrific article about shadow families, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World, c. 1700-1820” (in Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds, Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture [Charlottesville, 1999]), which delves into some specific genealogies. But I think you might be defining genealogy too narrowly—it can also mean the study of family histories, which is particularly revealing in looking at the South. To pick one example, the settlement of Mississippi was, to a great extent, a family enterprise—nuclear and extended families from Virginia and the Carolinas migrated as units to the new land, bringing with them enslaved African American families (sometimes intact, sometimes not). By studying the wills and other financial records of slave-owning families we see that the natural increase in a family’s slaves often provided the capital and the labor for the rising white generation to expand operations into new lands. At age eleven, Washington inherited 10 slaves; he died owning 123, an enormous “dividend” in humans that his heirs could have converted to cash—but Washington freed his people. When you look into the histories of other planter families you see parents doling out the African American “increase” to their children to finance the creation of new plantations. When you read the wills you find that dowries for the daughters often consisted of slaves or of cash raised from the sale of slaves. So studying genealogy reveals how deeply slavery was woven into the lives of families, one generation after another, and you see how unusual it was for George Washington to deny this bonanza to his heirs.

CP: As we conduct this interview, African American genealogy is in the national spotlight as it has never been, thanks to Henry Louis Gates’s PBS series, African American Lives. The series explores the family histories of a group of famous African Americans, and for most of them, that history was hitherto unknown. Much like your work, the program raises profound questions about exactly who Americans are. Can you say something about the importance of those questions? How, for example, might they reshape America’s sense of itself?

HW: First off, presentations such as Gates’s PBS series explode the idea of racial purity. Genealogy shows that there has been a tremendous amount of racial mixing in our past. A great many white people have mixed blood, and a great many more white people have African American blood relatives. What does this do to our definition of family? If you have black kin, doesn’t that mean you belong to a black family? Our definition of family has tended to be legalistic, document based, and oriented toward property rights—it’s the courtroom approach. Don’t forget that one prime purpose of genealogy has been to establish the legal inheritance of property. Some genealogists are quite rigid on this point and insist that a family consists only of a string of legally documented legal heirs. It’s very interesting that many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wills specified that property could be passed only to so-and-so and his or her “lawful issue.” They knew that there were many extra-legal children and grandchildren, and they wanted to exclude them from inheriting, but that didn’t make such “side families” less real. Many southern families, white and black, are going back into the records to find their blood kin because they want a truer picture of their families than the law has recognized. Jefferson descendants are wrestling with this right now. The Hemings descendants may not be legal heirs of any Jeffersons, but does that exclude them from the Jefferson family?

Another fascinating aspect of African American family history is that you encounter the tremendous achievements of the African American community under slavery and segregation—schools and churches built, businesses started, land bought and farmed, campaigns for civil rights waged. You see a whole hidden history emerge on a family, community, and regional scale. When I go to African American family reunions the people remember very well where they came from, and it serves as their bedrock today.

CP: Can you tell us about your current work? What will follow Imperfect God?

HW: I’m writing a book about Jefferson and his slaves. Hard going! I don’t have a title yet. When I was writing about Washington I wished I were writing about Jefferson because there’s so much more information about TJ and his slaves; now that I got my wish, I yearn for the old days working on GW. Watch what you wish for.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

Henry Wiencek is the author of the acclaimed An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history and the Best Book of 2003 award from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He has also written The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (1999), which received the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award. In the spirit of rereading, this issue’s Common Reading asks Wiencek to talk about his work on Washington and slavery and to reflect on some of the ways it revises received wisdom about the American past.

The lights go out a lot where I live. Whenever a storm blows through the woods of eastern Connecticut, falling trees knock down power lines—often including the line that reaches my end of a long, dead-end road. There’s a stunning moment of darkness and an abrupt halt to the evening routine. I’ve come to enjoy these little breaks from modern technology, the search for candles, the lighting of a fire in the fireplace. It’s like camping but with the pleasure of ice cream that might otherwise melt if the power failure lasted. A short power failure is, of course, the best. A full night without light and I begin to think about buying a generator.

What would it mean to live an entire life without electricity, in a world where eyesight faltered at each setting of the sun? A lot more than mere inconvenience, as Roger Ekirch reveals in his richly evocative history, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. Before the Industrial Revolution, Ekirch writes, the experience of darkness was so powerful that night can be said to have had its own “rich and vibrant culture very different from daily reality, an ‘alternate reign,’ as an English poet put it. More than that, darkness, for the greater part of humankind, afforded a sanctuary from ordinary existence, the chance, as shadows lengthened, for men and women to express inner impulses and realize repressed desires both in their waking hours and in their dreams, however innocent or sinister in nature” (xxvi).

This is an astonishingly ambitious work, based on two decades of research. Ekirch pays closest attention to early modern Britain, from about 1500 to 1750, but his study sprawls across the western world from Russia to the United States, and from antiquity to the nineteenth century. The experience of night, he suggests, has been shaped both by specific human cultures and by universal human physiology. “Such was the impact of this natural cycle that it frequently transcended differences in culture and time” (xxviii).

As differences in culture and time are the usual bread and butter of historians, Ekirch’s approach produces an unusual narrative. Sliding easily from country to country and from century to century, he organizes his twelve chapters around different aspects of the nocturnal experience. He illustrates his points with a wealth of evidence drawn from a wide range of diaries, letters, newspapers, memoirs, and other writings; occasionally he dips into the sciences to introduce modern knowledge of astronomy, eyesight, and circadian rhythms. Thus the study seems concerned not so much with a historically specific culture of night (say, seventeenth-century English night as opposed to night somewhere else or at an earlier time) as with how human beings have experienced the darkness. Historical change enters the story mainly at the very end when technology severs humans from the natural world.

But perhaps such comments should be left to the fluorescent glare of the seminar room. This book is best enjoyed under a warm reading lamp in the “dead of night” (midnight to 3:00 a.m., Ekirch explains), when the pleasures of its fascinating details and skillful writing are most seductive.

The opening chapters evoke a time when “night brutally robbed men and women of their vision, the most treasured of human senses” (8) and left them literally groping their way through a world thought to be rife with physical and supernatural menace. Strange noises, ominous lights in the sky, miasmatic vapors, and satanic spirits filled Europeans with terror. There were also many more prosaic dangers, such as stumbling over obstacles in the unlit streets or being doused by carelessly emptied chamber pots. Robbers, burglars, arsonists, and other nightwalkers were afoot in the dark of the moon, sometimes carrying human fingers as magic charms. It was, as a watchman would cry out, “time for all honest people to be in bed” (32).

Public authorities tried to control the night with curfews, night patrols, and half-hearted attempts at street lighting. Night watchmen patrolled the city, checking doors, looking for fire, and crying the hours (in part to keep people from sleeping too deeply to interrupt burglars). Watchmen were held in low esteem and were of little use against criminals. Families had to barricade themselves inside their homes with weapons in easy reach. Artificial lighting was woefully inadequate. Smoky flames “pulsed amid the shadows,” unable to illuminate corners or ceilings. People relied on memory and touch to help navigate their homes in the dark. Memory, hearing, touch, and even smell made it possible to travel in the countryside on moonless nights. City people would rely on a torch-bearing servant or would take their chances with a hired “linkboy” who might turn out to be in league with robbers.

For a surprising number of people, night was a time of continued work. Bakers, servants, midwives, scavengers, and iron workers were among those who continued to toil while others slept. Still, the work experience was quite different from the shift labor of the industrial age. Even when out of phase with the sun, preindustrial work continued to be shaped by natural rhythms of seasons and moonlight, particularly in the countryside or on the seacoast. Night work differed from day work in its lack of routine and its more playful spirit.

Ekirch’s chapters on the freedoms of night contain fewer surprises. People often had sex at night, it seems. Adolescents enjoyed getting away from parental supervision. Some people spent their evening hours reading, writing, or praying. The wealthy elite threw extravagant parties. Religious minorities, servants, and slaves grew bold and less inhibited in the night. This section of the book goes over some of the same ground previously explored by Bryan Palmer in Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression (2000).

The final section is a highly original study of preindustrial sleep, previously published in different form in the American Historical Review. In this brilliant piece of scholarship, Ekirch explores the rituals of bedtime, the meanings of communal beds, and most surprisingly, the very different rhythms of sleep. He shows that preindustrial Europeans “experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of wakefulness.” People rose in the middle of the night to take a drink, to talk, to do a little work, to contemplate their dreams, to steal firewood from their neighbors, to make love, pray, or urinate. Whatever they chose to do, they routinely experienced a break between “first sleep” and “second sleep,” which Ekirch believes to be biologically determined. “There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age” (303).

In a brief conclusion, Ekrich asserts that the eighteenth century began a “nocturnal revolution.” Men and women, influenced by the Enlightenment, discarded the supernatural beliefs that had made the night a time of terror. Night work increased with industrialization. Law enforcement improved. But the most important change seems to have been the dramatic improvement of artificial illumination in the nineteenth century: fueled first by oil and coal gas and then by electricity. Ancient patterns of work, leisure, and sleep were radically disrupted. “It is not difficult to imagine a time when night, for all practical purposes, will have become day—truly a twenty-four/seven society in which traditional phases of time, from morning to midnight, have lost their original identities” (339).

Ekirch thus implies that the history of night can be roughly divided into preindustrial and industrial eras, much as Wolfgang Schivelbusch did in Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (first published in German in 1983). It appears from reading At Day’s Close that modern technology has cut humans off from the natural world and disrupted behavioral rhythms rooted in part in physiology. The ending reinforces the suggestion throughout the book that people from different countries and different centuries experienced preindustrial night in similar ways. Such a suggestion could be accepted with more complete confidence if the author had not relied so heavily on British evidence, or if he had more explicitly compared the British experience with the nocturnal habits of other cultures. But the book is ambitious enough as it is. Ekirch has done a remarkable job of showing that night in times past was profoundly different from what it has become.

Most effectively, Ekirch has revealed the extent to which natural rhythms once controlled daily life. It’s an appealing theme—the human animal in the grip of nature—and one that seems increasingly exotic in the twenty-first century. This story of the forgotten terrors and pleasures of the night reminds us of how much daily life has been transformed by technology. It also helps us appreciate the lamplight on the page, even before the power goes out.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

Peter Baldwin, associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, is writing a social history of night in American cities.

By 2006, Virginia had not had an effective transportation plan for twenty years. Yet Norfolk and northern Virginia are among the fastest-growing regions in the nation. Everyday an avalanche of cars and trucks engulf its antiquated roadways. A new governor had called for an expansive program of transportation improvements to address the crisis. The legislature, however, was mired in a controversy between moderates and conservatives over funding the governor’s program with a permanent revenue stream from new, mostly indirect taxes. Conservatives refused to budge on raising taxes. What Sean Patrick Adams might call a political economy of state action—or inaction in this case—was crippling Virginia’s capacity to address one of the greatest threats to its economic growth and well-being.

In Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth, Adams demonstrates that the impasse of the current imbroglio has deep historical roots. Explaining the troubled present is not Adams’s objective, but his book provides a powerful tool for doing just that. His focus lies on coal, not transportation. Although the book’s subtitle limits its scope to antebellum America, its concerns encompass the entire nineteenth century. And they include not only Virginia but also Pennsylvania and that area of Virginia that became West Virginia. Key to Adams’s thesis is the nineteenth-century transition from localized economies, manageable by state governments, to an emerging national economic order in which huge and highly capitalized corporations overwhelmed the states and the limited public sphere they represented.

In the decades before the Civil War, contrasts between Pennsylvania and Virginia demonstrate Adams’s central idea: the political economy of state institutions shaped the course of economic development. Simply put, Pennsylvania emerged as one of the nation’s industrial powerhouses and Virginia did not because of different approaches to exercising the economic powers of the state in the interest of commercial development and the general good. The difference was not the fault of natural endowment. Virginia, like Pennsylvania, possessed important coal reserves in its piedmont region within the immediate market reach of Atlantic port cities. And each state harbored vast reserves of bituminous coal in its western mountains. What separated Virginia from Pennsylvania and condemned the Old Dominion to second-rank industrial status was quite simply slavery. Slavery dominated the concerns of tobacco planters east of the state’s Blue Ridge, and these men dominated the legislature.

At this point the past begins to resonate with the present. Fearful that the costs of economic development and industrial growth would be paid for by property taxes—and slaves, of course, were property—easterners crippled development projects like the James River and Kanawha Company’s efforts to connect tidewater markets to the Ohio River through a series of canals, turnpikes, and navigation improvements. Because transportation development in the west did little to benefit the agricultural economy of the east, planter elites refused to establish a permanent revenue stream for the improvement of the interior. Conservative, antitax principles also limited the economic impact of other endeavors such as a state geological survey or a general incorporation act—the latter would have eased the incorporation process by freeing it from the political machinations of the state legislature.

The legislative environment and political economy of Pennsylvania seemed a world away, separated by the gulf of modernization. Differences emerged from more than the absence of slavery. They also came from the presence of a diverse population and a political culture shaped by varied interests and a more inclusive conception of the public will. Thus when colliers and farmers in the state’s central region needed canals to get goods to market, the state itself built them. Pennsylvania’s geological survey—not only conducted simultaneously with its southern neighbor’s but also by the brother of the Old Dominion’s state geologist—was put to the service of developing the commonwealth’s mineral and agricultural resources. Although interest-based politics often confounded attempts to reform the process of corporate chartering, Pennsylvania eventually established an effective program of fostering corporations as the most powerful, albeit private, means of industrial development.

The clarity of the Pennsylvania-Virginia comparison dissolved in the postbellum economic world. Both states succumbed to the forces of economic nationalization as large corporations with national political clout gained control of the American economy. The contrast was further complicated by the emergence of West Virginia on that side of Virginia’s sectional faultline containing the old state’s vast store of bituminous coal. But with the demise of the Radical Republican political movement that created the state and with the emergence of conservative local politicians eager to reestablish a political culture of deference, the state withered while national energy and transportation corporations ransacked its mineral resources.

Meanwhile, the fact that Virginia had a coalfield just west of Richmond disappeared from public memory. The triumph of conservative Democrats by the end of the 1880s, for all practical purposes, put a political economy of state action in the deep freeze. Although Adams’s story stops at about this point, the extent of this chill in economic development was evident again in the 1950s when the Virginia legislature, faced with one of the worst, most poorly funded educational systems in the nation, adopted a requirement that all surplus tax revenues go back to taxpayers instead of toward improving public life. The deadening effects of massive resistance to school desegregation and civil rights—especially when programs for the social and economic betterment of the state’s poor population depended upon tax revenues—was only further evidence for the persistent power of a political economy and political culture born in slavery. And needless to say, many Virginians in the state’s transportation-starved population centers might feel enslaved today to a political culture deeply suspicious of the public sphere and resentful of any public spending to support it.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

Warren R. Hofstra is professor of history at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, and writes on landscape, regional history, and Virginia broadly construed.