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).

 When Charles Willson Peale painted a portrait for fellow Annapolis resident Anthony Stewart, he tailored it to his patron in ways besides including likenesses of Stewart’s son, John, and daughter, Isabella (fig. 1). Although the setting is not a cultivated part of a plantation like Mount Stewart–the elder Stewart’s property on Maryland’s Eastern Shore–the depiction of peaches on the ground near a body of water evokes that property and its bounty. The thistle at far right signifies the Scottish-born Stewart’s ancestry, that plant being Scotland’s national emblem. Yet of the aspects of the portrait fitted to its patron, the most remarkable is the way that its story invited him to contemplate an immoral orientation towards property acquisition. What are likely to have been Peale’s beliefs about Stewart’s character and deeds apparently inspired the painter to foster this experience, one with a foundation in a widely available, if rarely used idea about what portraits can do.

I.

Of the many figures in eighteenth-century British and colonial American double portraits pairing a brother and sister, John Stewart may be the only one who works. His characterization is ambivalent. From one vantage, he displays an admirable industriousness. He carries four peaches, as many as his diminutive arms can hold. With eight peaches already where Isabella has planted herself, this is apparently John’s third haul. (Isabella’s long, trailing drapery suggests her disengagement from labor.) From another vantage, however, John courts dishonor as he nears the point of gathering more than he and his sister can eat. According to a famous discussion in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, property came about by a man adding his labor to nature, but “if [nature’s products] perished in his possession without their due use . . . he offended against the common law of nature and was liable to be punished.” Locke added that such action on a man’s part “invaded his neighbor’s share, for he had no right [to products] further than his use called for any of them.” Connoting avarice, the depicted John’s actions are also vulnerable from Christian and secular vantages. His visible hand characterizes him as grasping. Yet the way that John turns his head to look at the peach Isabella holds opens the possibility that he might not overstock. (Aligned with her arm, dress contour, and shoe, his gaze is a prominent, integral part of the composition.) John’s interest in the fruit can be readily accounted for when considered from Isabella’s vantage. It is almost obvious what goes through the mind of a female, alone with a male in nature, who holds a fruit poised for the biting but not yet eaten.

II.

Peale planned this portrait to invoke the moment in sacred history just before Eve ate the forbidden fruit. That the Stewarts’ fruit is a peach would not have misled an eighteenth-century viewer; Genesis and Milton both describe the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil without mentioning apples. Not only did this event mark the origin of mankind as fallen, but Milton’s account of it fostered Peale’s origin as a painter since he based his first oil painting on a related engraving from an illustrated edition of Paradise Lost. The Fall humbles most everything John does. His working is a legacy of Adam, condemned to labor. His collecting food contrasts with how man and woman in Eden had no need to gather or store. Clothes, too, are badges of sin. John’s cape, breeches, bows, lace collar, and cuffs derive from portraits by Antony Van Dyke, painter to England’s royalty and aristocrats. Yet these fancy threads ill befit John’s activity. Adam was to labor by the sweat of his brow, and John has already removed his hat. How many more trips can he make before he spoils the splendid garments that are to promote him as a young gentleman? Peale structured The Stewart Children to foster the idea that John thinks about the past; he and his sister are Adam and Eve’s children as much as they are those first parents’ analogues. Yet the painting also promotes the idea that he contemplates various moments in the future: he can see that Isabella will eat presently; ruining his clothes looms ahead; and he has the opportunity to think about whether he will develop a moral relationship to property. Although looking at the peach just slows him down at present, the perpetual present of the scene encourages considering this change of pace as a principle. His attention to the peach, which ultimately fosters recognizing the link between his acquisitiveness and sin, thus implies a future characterized by restraint. With its exaggeration of the children’s heads, the painting offers a strong invitation to consider what they think. Moreover, it will be a rare viewer who can avoid considering his or her own attitudes while following this train of associations. The unique public profile of the children’s father helps to explain what motivated Peale to create such extraordinary characterizations of them, and to spur such a striking series of thoughts.

III.

Anthony Stewart was among the busiest merchants of Annapolis during the early 1770s. Times had been challenging for merchants, due in part to periods of nonimportation that pressured England while the Stamp, Townshend, and Tea Acts were in effect. Every step of the way, Stewart challenged the local moral economy, a force that historian E. P. Thompson has described as “a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community.” Nonimportation was a mass legitimated expression of colonial grievance, and to violate it was to invite reprisal. Stewart defied nonimportation in 1770, he lost an election bid in 1773 because “a strong suspicion was entertained of his political principles and court connexions,” and the arrival of his tea-laden ship in October 1774 violated a boycott. People wanted him to send the tea back; some threatened his family with harm. As if pressured by the mob, he set his laden ship ablaze. The year before, Boston rebels had also destroyed tea, but in 1774 Annapolis “out-Bostoned Boston.” Some even thought that Stewart was well pleased with the affair’s hardly necessary climax. He stood £12,000 in debt by mid-1774, and stood to rectify his affairs if, as victim of a Patriot mob, he could get the English government to reimburse him for his ship and cargo. Peale committed himself to nonimportation by 1768, and would have been among those who condemned the range of Stewart’s actions. The only evidence of contact between the men is the double portrait and its mention in a list of commissions. But Peale pondered Stewart’s misdeeds for decades to come: a painting of Stewart’s burning ship hung in his museum during the nineteenth century. To Annapolis’s Whigs, Stewart would be just the sort of person to benefit from a reoriented attitude towards property. His portrait of his children could promote that end. As a man who knew that others believed he harmed the common good with unprincipled strategies for profit, he could see an allegory of his relationship to property in this depiction of his son dangerously close to violating natural law and common beliefs about ownership. His religion supported this reception: the Anglican doctrine of Original Sin recognized divine laws that sought to restrain man from perpetrating the evil that his natural liberty freed him to do. For Peale’s vantage, the absence of evidence that his patron obeyed the social contract or the laws of nature about property accumulation gave him reason enough to paint a spur to principled behavior. He may have also thought Stewart likely be a bad example to his children, so the painting could do double duty filling a domestic moral vacuum. Depicted allusions to the family’s twin legacies–Original Sin, shared with all men, and a Scottish ancestry, by virtue of the depicted thistle–dovetailed with the painting’s lesson about attitudes towards property so as to enjoin right action. Both The Stewart Family’s allusion to the shame of the Stewarts’ first ancestors and its hint of pride in more recent ones could encourage behavior oriented toward a respectable familial future.

IV.

The sort of reception encouraged by Peale’s portrait had a precedent in Jonathan Richardson’s ideas about what portraits can do, first published in London in 1715. Discussing the ways that portraits affect viewers, that portrait painter and theorist speculated about sitters as viewers: “And why should we not also believe, that considering the violent thirst of praise which is natural, especially in the noblest minds, and the better sort of people, they that see their pictures are set up as monuments of good or evil fame, are often secretly admonished by the faithful friend in their own breasts, to add new graces to them by praise-worthy actions, and to avoid blemishes . . . as much as possible, by a future good conduct.” While positive exempla fill the history of portraiture, negative ones are few. Who would want one? By covering a canvas with readily noted signs of wealth, ancestry, and material splendor, Peale slipped one into his patron’s home. Moreover, Peale innovated beyond what Richardson described. He did not depict a static monument of “evil fame,” but a dynamic moment when a vicious trajectory may be coming to a halt. The principle underlying this lesson was well known from Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education of 1693. Locke emphasized withholding approval as a powerful tool for bringing young people in line with an elder’s expectations. In his late autobiography, Peale endorsed this method of child rearing: “Shame, if properly seasoned, is a greater scourge than the Birch.” A major model of human identity positioned between an older theory of innate, transmitted depravity (which endorsed corporeal punishment as a means of control), and Rousseau’s ideas about man freely expressing his natural inclinations, Locke’s understanding embraced the role of conscience in prompting good behavior. This is the faculty Richardson referred to as “the faithful friend in [the sitters’] own breasts” that would motivate them to “future good conduct” when viewing portraits that showed them in a bad light.

In the case of the depicted John Stewart, the sight of the fruit and its association with the Fall stop him short and cause him to reflect on what he has been doing. The Scottish common sense school had analyzed conscience, which they called “the moral sense,” into components of will and understanding, and this vocabulary offers a concise way to describe what John is doing: he seeks to reconcile the two. As much as the labor of the body, he pursues the labor of conscience. Whereas The Stewart Children had few pictorial precedents on the matter of negative exempla, a bounty of pictures represented choices being made. Most ubiquitously, engravings of The Judgment of Hercules represented an ancient story about Hercules deciding between Virtue and Vice (fig. 2). Whereas figures to either side of Hercules embody the alternatives he confronts, viewers of John Stewart must infer his less tangible alternatives. Crucially, no prior text scripts what he will decide. Nonetheless, his process offers the prospect of a choice to stem rapacity.

V.

The Stewart Children instances passionately held ideas about the common welfare structuring a painting that sought to have a moral and social impact on viewers. As an expression of the Annapolis moral economy, it positioned itself alongside the day’s verbal criticism of Stewart to resist the mounting forces of economic modernity. It is a rare and curious piece of property that pressures owners to exercise restraint with respect to accumulation. If the portrait did not work on the elder Stewart, then perhaps it would affect his son. Certainly many people in his family have thought it worth looking at. Anthony Stewart fled Annapolis in early 1775. When following him, first to Halifax and then to England, family members brought the portrait along. It descended through the Stewart line some two hundred years before entering the art market.

Further Reading:

Perhaps the most useful discussions of The Stewart Children to date are Elizabeth Garrity Ellis, “The Stewart Children (Isabella and John Stewart),” in Barbara Novak, ed., The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-century American Painting (London, 1986), 56-57; and Regine Kahl, “Charles Willson Peale, Isabella und John Stewart,” in Bilder aus der Neuen Welt: Amerikanische Malerei des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1988), cat. no. 5. John Locke’s discussion of private property was chapter 5 of the second of his Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (Cambridge, 1967), quote at 313. Peale recalled his early painting of Adam and Eve, and wrote about the power of shame in his late autobiography (1825-26); Lillian B. Miller, Sidney Hart, and David C. Ward, eds., The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, 5 vols. (New Haven, 2000), 5: 15, 10. The best discussion of Anthony Stewart and the Peggy Stewart affair is Ronald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore and London, 1973), 134-39; Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763-1776 (New York, 1918), 388-92, offers an alternative analysis, and is the source for the phrase comparing events in Annapolis and Boston. The Maryland Gazette, May 20, 1773, speculated why Stewart lost his election bid. Peale’s early list of commissions is reproduced in Charles Coleman Sellers, “Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale,”Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 42(1) (1952), 20.  Historical Catalogue of the Paintings in the Philadelphia Museum, consisting chiefly of Portraits of Revolutionary Patriots and other Distinguished Characters (Philadelphia, 1813), 54, describes the painting of the burning of the Peggy Stewart. E. P. Thompson introduced the concept of a moral economy in “The Moral Economy of the Crowd in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 50 (February 1971): 76-136, quoted at 79; Jane T. Merritt, “Tea Traders and the Ambivalent American Moral Economy,” (paper presented at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, April 25, 2003), has applied this concept with considerable subtlety to the colonial controversy over tea importation. Jonathan Richardson first published his thoughts on portrait functions in “A Theory of Painting” (1715), which subsequently appeared in The Works of Mr. Jonathan Richardson (1773; rpt. Hildesheim, 1969), 7-8. The key discussion of the significance of Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education for American readers is Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, 1984), which places Locke in the context of developing attitudes towards child rearing. James Christen Steward, The New Child: British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830 (Berkeley, 1995) surveys the relationships between portraits of, and changing ideas about, children. Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge and London, 1997) offers a very informed discussion of conscience in faculty psychology. My “The Work of Autobiography and the Workings of Conscience,” (review of Lillian B. Miller, ed., The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and his Family. Volume 4: Charles Willson Peale: His Last Years, 1821-1827; Lillian B. Miller and Sidney Hart, eds. Volume 5: The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, 2000) in William and Mary Quarterly (April 2001): 498-505, examines some of Peale’s discussions of conscience, and considers how that faculty shaped a part of his late autobiography.

This article originally appeared in issue 4.3 (April, 2004).

David Steinberg is a visiting scholar at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. He is co-author of Transformations in Cleveland Art, 1796-1946 (Cleveland, 1996), and author of the forthcoming Portrait as Instrument: Late Colonial Ends & Early Charles Willson Peale.

“Insanely tedious,” “boring as hell,” “stupid and worthless,” “the worst,” “watered down,” “too general.” What do all these descriptions have in common? They describe high-school history classes around the country. Perhaps such harsh words are hardly surprising, except that these come from kids who profess to like and enjoy studying history. For most high-school students, history is a lot like the multiplication tables: memorizing vast quantities of seemingly disconnected factoids—unrelieved drudgery except for the occasional, unpromised oasis of a dynamic teacher who asks for something more. As one of my friends from a New York private school put it, she would not have taken ninth-grade world history had it not been required because “it’s hard to keep track of all the events that happened worldwide over such a long period of time.”

When Common-place asked me to write for this column from the perspective of a high-school student, I started thinking about how my perception of history has been affected by how I’ve been taught. Since I’ve found the most satisfaction in doing primary research, I decided to begin there, with an informal survey. I emailed about thirty friends around the country: Alaska, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, and Virginia. They are all about seventeen to nineteen years old; from public and private high schools, urban, suburban, and small town; and headed for selective and very selective colleges. I asked them questions such as what they liked best and least about their history courses, what would have improved the courses, and what role writing and research had.

I should confess that only a few short years ago, I too hated history—it had even less appeal than learning the multiplication tables because there is more of it. My informal poll revealed that I was not alone; none of my friends entered high school thinking they would ever like, much less love, a history course. While only a few are still vehement about it (“I hate history and wouldn’t take an AP [course] in it if a gun was put to my head”), even the ones who say history is their favorite subject can only cite one or two examples of “awesome” courses, even when they’ve exhausted their schools’ offerings in the social sciences.

Fortunately, high-school students only need an excellent class or two to be seduced by a subject. Like most of my very limited sample set, I was lucky enough to have teachers who use primary sources to provoke intellectual debate, who require written work that has students actually “do” history, who act as role-model historians, and who insist that framing good questions and identifying inconsistencies are more important than regurgitating a predetermined set of answers. They let us see that history is not about learning the past; it’s about constructing understandings of the past and gaining skills useful in the present.

Virtually every one of my correspondents mentioned the value of primary sources. I remember my first few assignments analyzing journals written by conquistadors and sixteenth-century mariners involved in the African slave trade. They were difficult to read and even harder to understand. Yet, with time and effort, they became easier to decipher and intellectually exciting. As a Colorado friend put it, the two sourcebooks (in addition to a textbook) assigned in his class gave him a “real feel for what life was like.” A Vermont student loves reading novels and speeches for his courses, analyzing both what the authors were trying to say and their motives for saying it. A New Hampshire student describes her favorite history courses as using “every resource imaginable to learn about history: textbooks, the Internet, autobiographies, biographies, documents, articles, and people.”

Most students recognize the value of having a textbook to provide an overview but see textbooks as boring, predigested, and avoiding all controversy. A Long Island friend commented that he “would have enjoyed reading other materials, particularly primary sources” beyond the textbook, while a Massachusetts student suggests that if he were going to teach a course, “First, I would focus on primary sources. They are short, and they get the point across . . . I would include multimedia (Websites, movies, documentaries and even music) wherever I could to keep things interesting.”

Richard Light, author of Making the Most of College, writes that students value class discussion that has “structured disagreement.” Primary sources are a superb tool for provoking debate because they are open to interpretation. For example, after reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of my friends described a debate where half the class was assigned to argue that Joseph Conrad was a racist and the book projects his racism while the rest had to defend Conrad as exposing the glaring racism of his time. My friend “really enjoyed this exercise; it got everyone (passionately) involved, as well as brought in two perspectives for the novel.” As one New York City student notes, “[T]wenty people would read the same document and get twenty different interpretations . . . it was inevitable that this difference of opinion would actually teach you something.” Primary sources inspire discussion that increases understanding of the topic and gives practice building arguments, thereby helping participants grow as historians.

Teachers who require the use of primary sources to construct arguments are requiring their students to do what historians do. To those who object that holding students to such high standards for research papers will discourage students, my correspondents and Light’s research show that the more substantive writing one does for a course (with frequent feedback), the more interesting the subject becomes. As Light argues, “The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students’ level of engagement—whether engagement is measured by time spent on the course, or the intellectual challenge it presents, or students’ level of interest in it—is stronger than the relationship between students’ engagement and any other course characteristic.” Feedback does help. When Peter Sheehy, my sophomore-year American history teacher, gave me two pages of enthusiastic comments (typed, single-spaced) on a research paper, I couldn’t help but take his comments as seriously as he took my paper.

It also helps when serious research efforts can be celebrated, or even published. William Fitzhugh’s The Concord Review, a journal of high-school history writing,encourages students to be active historians the way science research allows them to be active scientists. Not only is it thrilling to be published; it’s thrilling to think that history is something even a “beginner” can do.

The very best teachers model for their students how historians think and how history is written. My freshman-year history teacher, Elisabeth Sperling, led us to wonder about such cosmic questions as, Was the Aztec civilization doomed to fail? Much to our frustration, she never answered these questions; rather, she asked us what we would need to know to find the answers ourselves. We spent many class discussions learning how to think historically by breaking these cosmic questions into sets of smaller, more easily answerable ones, the answers to which would eventually lead us to a larger perspective on the topic at hand.

The next year, Sheehy had a very different approach. Every day he climbed five flights of stairs to our classroom, carrying his new G4 laptop and at least five books we hadn’t seen before. In the fall he would sometimes open one or more of these books and discuss how the authors’ views differed from our textbook and handouts. These were books he found interesting and he selected fascinating excerpts for us. Or he might open his laptop and rapidly surf to a cool, new historical Website with tantalizing material. By the spring we were much better at taking positions that would trigger either his surfing or his reading passages in the books of the day. His excerpts were so well chosen that many students asked to borrow the books after he finished them. As more and more of these books were shared around the class and these Websites got bookmarked, our discussions became more intense and better supported, even continuing on the walk to our next classes. He taught us how to discern differences between historical arguments—and he made us care about how evidence is used.

Finally, during my senior year, my East Asian history teacher, Lawrence Weiss, told our class at the beginning of the year that we would not be learning even a small fraction of what there is to know about his enormous field. Instead, he wanted us to focus on causality and context, drawing parallels between historical social, political, and economic issues and modern ones that we might find interesting. He often came to class carrying that day’s New York Times, prepared to help us understand some article on China, made relevant to our current lesson by his erudition. We watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and learned about hiding political messages in artistic stories, in this case, the May Fourth Movement. He modeled, on a daily basis, that historians can use many different cultural products as primary sources.

Insanely tedious? Stupid and worthless? It doesn’t have to be. Those who say history is dull and useless either have not experienced history as an active endeavor or must not find any subject useful or interesting: anything interesting has a history. My friends who are aspiring engineers need to understand the history of technology because scientists constantly try to fix the irregularities of the past to edge progress forward. My friends who are artists cannot be original without having mastered their art’s origins. Even historians acknowledge their predecessors in order to fit newly constructed perspectives into recognizable contexts. History boring? Hardly. But it can be very hard work.

Further Reading: See Richard J. Light, Making the Most of College: Students Speak their Minds (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). I’d like to particularly thank the following people for their long and thoughtful responses, some of which ran five or more pages: Sarah Comeau, William Frank, Philip Johnson, Joanne King, Michael Pareles, William Ratkus, Thomas Rodrigues, David Rosenberg, Maxine Stachel, Adam Vidoni, and Shawna-Gay White.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

Rebecca Fleming graduated in June 2002 from the Horace Mann School in New York City and will be attending Harvard University. She received an Emerson Award in 2000 and a Gilder-Lehrman Prize in 2002, and two of her high-school term papers have been published in The Concord Review.

On July 13, 1863, a riot in New York City that had begun as opposition to the draft for the Union’s Civil War army morphed into a violent mob that targeted African Americans. That afternoon a large crowd attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum, looting it and then burning the building to the ground. This attack has been a focal point of discussions about the New York draft riots since the first newspaper accounts of the riots began appearing, but one element in the contemporary accounts stands out to me as a historian of childhood, an element that has generally escaped notice in the frequent recitations of this story: not only did all 233 African American children who lived in the institution escape unharmed, but according to some accounts they were allowed to “proceed unmolested” to safety through an otherwise riotous and bloodthirsty mob. A description of the children processing safely through the violent crowd appears in every version of the story recorded by the managers of the institution itself, with some of the most evocative language penned in an 1868 annual report, in which they wrote,

the long line of trembling, terrified little children filed quietly down stairs and through the halls into the very body of the mob, who literally filled the enclosure, and whose savage yells and inhuman threats thrilled like a death note on every heart . . . The human mass swayed back as though impelled by an unseen power—not a hand was raised to molest them, and without sustaining the slightest injury, children and care-takers reached the station house.

Surely the managers intended the “unseen power” here to refer to God, but there are other possible explanations for the behavior of the mob that managers recounted. One of these, I want to suggest, was New Yorkers’ own beliefs about childhood and the protections it afforded.

Age studies scholarship encourages us to interrogate understandings of age and stages of life as social constructs. As with other social constructs, scholars argue that things that seemed natural, inherent, and biological to members of that society were in fact—at least partially—constructed by the society of which they were a part. Beliefs about the traits, needs, and rights of people based on their age have therefore varied by time and place and so historians are well-placed to interrogate them. Scholars have worked to uncover how Americans in different time periods conceived of children and childhood, and a growing body of literature captures antebellum Americans’ emergent belief that children were naturally and rightly innocent, malleable, and dependent. These were the assumptions that drove the creation and operation of orphan asylums during this period, replacing indenture for young children with institutionalized care and education as labor increasingly came to be seen as outside the appropriate purview of childhood.

The Colored Orphan Asylum was one of many such orphan asylums in mid-nineteenth-century New York City, one which served African American children who had lost at least one parent. This begs the question: does the creation of this institution along lines similar to those of other orphan asylums suggest that race was irrelevant to nineteenth-century understandings of childhood? It is important to note that the question here is not whether nineteenth-century white New Yorkers saw African American and white children as equals. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that most did not. The question rather is whether white New Yorkers’ beliefs about the traits, needs, and rights inherent to children of a specific age extended to both black and white children in the designated age range. In other words, how universally did nineteenth-century Americans apply their professed ideas and assumptions about childhood? Examining the history of the Colored Orphan Asylum, and in particular looking at the episode of the destruction of this institution during the draft riots, suggests that in many respects white New Yorkers did apply their understanding of age-related traits to children regardless of race but that this did not always lead to the protection and treatment generally understood in the period as the proper purview of children. In nineteenth-century New York, African American children were regularly discussed as possessing the malleability, dependence, and helplessness attributed to children of all races, but despite this, these children were often placed in vulnerable situations. While there was significant variation in the ways white New Yorkers treated African American children—with the white women who founded the Colored Orphan Asylum and the white mob that destroyed it exemplifying the spectrum—as a whole white New Yorkers conceived of African American children as children, but their assumptions about the traits and needs inherent to age existed alongside their beliefs about race. Neither the children’s race nor their age trumped the other, but rather existed simultaneously in the minds of white New Yorkers.

That the children escaped the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum unharmed is agreed upon by every contemporary account of the event, even as the authors of these accounts disagreed about everything from the number of children (ranging from 200 to 1,000), whether or not the adults in the asylum had warning, and the method of the children’s escape. In addition to the assertion quoted above that the children walked through the crowd unharmed, some contemporary versions of the story claim the adults of the asylum snuck the children out a back door or that the children were saved from a violent demise by the actions of a heroic Irishman. And while the definitive means of their escape cannot be proven, it is no less fanciful to believe that a mob parted to allow the children to walk through untouched than to believe that 233 children—the number confirmed by institutional records—snuck out of the building without being noticed or that one individual was able to singlehandedly restrain a violent mob. Furthermore, upon closer examination, affording the children such an escape would actually be in keeping with other actions of white New Yorkers toward the children living at the Colored Orphan Asylum in the nineteenth century. In protecting the children’s bodies on July 13, 1863, even while terrorizing them and destroying their home, the mob repeated a pattern in which nineteenth-century white New Yorkers recognized, articulated, and to some extent supported African American children’s status as children but denied them the full protections and rights such status extended to white children.

New York City draft riots

The New York draft riots consumed New York City July 13-17, 1863, when a mob erupted over fears and frustrations about the initiation of a draft for a bloody war that was increasingly touted as a conflict to end slavery, their own precarious economic status, and their place relative to African Americans within the city. In the course of this riot over $1.5 million of property (at least $30 million in today’s dollars) was destroyed and more than 100 people—mostly African American men—were killed. Thousands more were injured, and the terror inflicted on the black community led to an exodus out of the city.

Scholars and contemporary accounts of the riots agree that after initially focusing on governmental, military, or elite targets, the mob then turned its sights on the Colored Orphan Asylum, a charitable institution that housed and educated orphaned African American children and was supported by a combination of donations and city funds. The building was looted and then burned, with complete physical destruction but—as established earlier—no loss of human life. This took place in the midst of a riot in which African Americans were targeted for violence. On a day in which the New York Times noted that the crowd spent a lot of the day “amusing themselves” by “chasing and beating every person of color who chanced to make his appearance” and when “It seemed to be an understood thing throughout the City that the negroes should be attacked wherever found, whether then [sic] offered any provocation or not,” it is noteworthy that none of the African American children from the Colored Orphan Asylum were harmed. That in the chaos and violence of the riots all 233 children, some of whom became separated from the group and were navigating the city on their own, were protected by adults and spared by the mob suggests that despite the attack on their home, the children did enjoy something of protected status.

Contemporaries certainly believed these children were entitled to such protected status. In the midst of days of violence and destruction, the attack on an orphan asylum—a monument to the traits of dependence and helplessness associated with childhood—provoked outrage in contemporaries, suggesting a widespread application of the rights of childhood to the African American children of the Colored Orphan Asylum. Newspaper accounts of the riots published throughout the country frequently emphasized the burning of the asylum as one of the worst offenses of the riots. Harper’s Weekly’s visual depiction of the burning of the asylum was the largest of their eleven images of the riots contained in the August 1, 1863, issue, filling an entire page of the three-page spread, leaving the other ten images to share the remaining two pages. This emphasis was paralleled in the text, which exclaimed, “The burning of an orphan asylum is infamous beyond parallel in the annals of mobs.” Given the notorious violence of many mob actions, and contemporary accounts’ gruesome depictions of the violence perpetrated on African American men by this very mob, Harper’s Weekly’s insistence that the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum was particularly heinous seems to rest on the assumption that children—and orphaned children in particular—were a separate and protected class. Many contemporaries, then, seemed to agree that all children—regardless of race—deserved special protection and that even among the many horrible actions of a mob, burning an orphan asylum was a particular low.

The juxtaposition between the perceived proper treatment of the children and their abuse at the hands of the mob was captured by a New York Times account four days after the attack on the asylum, which credited the escape of twenty of the children separated from the rest to interference by some in the crowd. It exclaimed, “It hardly seems credible, yet it is nevertheless true, that there were dozens of men, or rather fiends, among the crowd who gathered around the poor children and cried out, ‘murder the d — d monkeys,’ ‘Wring the necks of the d — d Lincolnites,’ &c. Had it not been for the courageous conduct of the parties mentioned, there is little doubt that many, and perhaps all of those helpless children, would have been murdered in cold blood.” The author of this piece expressed a belief in the universal applicability of the traits and protections of childhood and assumed his readers would agree that anyone who did not extend such characterizations and protections to all children was a “fiend” rather than a man.

The New York Times piece—and the version of the children’s escape it recounted—juxtaposed two groups of white New Yorkers—those who upheld the children’s status as children and those who denied it. In other accounts of the children’s escape, however, the two ideas were described as co-existing even within the mob itself. The accounts of the event penned by those running the institution each relate in quick succession the vicious violation of the rights of childhood represented by the destruction of the asylum and the simultaneous protected status of the children represented by their escape. In multiple accounts from the year immediately following the riot, the managers depicted the mob as unrestrained, threatening, and insensitive to the children’s protected status, but simultaneously noted that the children were “permitted” to escape “unmolested.” Managers initially offered no theories for this disjuncture, but in later accounts managers attributed the children’s escape to God’s intervention and, in one case, the mob’s own recognition of the rights due to the children as children. In a dramatic recounting of the event three decades after it occurred, in the institution’s 1896 annual report, managers described a mob “thirsting for their [the children’s] very lives,” who ransacked the house and “heap[ed] horrible abuse upon the helpless inmates.” Then, however, as the children processed out the door and into the mob, “the sight of a helplessness so absolute stirred in the hearts of the rioters a feeling akin to pity, cursing was turned to blessing. And then a hush fell over the crowd, the seething mass fell back upon itself, and a passage was opened for the children.” In this later account the children’s escape and the mob’s mercy were explicitly attributed to the orphans’ status as helpless and defenseless children, a fact recognized even by the least likely group of white New Yorkers.

Analyzing this event from the perspective of age studies suggests that African American children occupied something of a liminal status in white New Yorkers’ perceptions of them as children. The asylum residents’ status as orphaned children protected their bodies but not their home during the riots. The burning of the institution provoked national outrage and led to an influx of donations, but the asylum was not able to rebuild on its previous site and there was no consideration—at least that I have seen—of admitting these children who had lost their home into those institutions serving white children. It is also clear that while the children were safe and many adults worked to ensure this, they were not spared from taunts, threats, and physical intimidation during the riots, even after escaping to the station house. That these African American children naturally possessed the dependence and helplessness assumed to belong to children was not challenged during this episode, but while this prevented their physical harm, it did not insulate them from the racism and violence of the riots.

Institutions for children

The children’s escape through the mob is evocative, but it was clearly an atypical event and the mob cannot be taken as representative of white New Yorkers as a whole. When the status of the Colored Orphan Asylum and its residents are considered more broadly from the angle of perceptions of childhood, however, it becomes clear that the characterization of these children as existing in a liminal space regarding understandings of childhood was not limited to this one, clearly unusual, event, but rather part of a larger pattern regarding white New Yorkers’ conceptions of the rights, traits, and proper treatment of the children who came into the care of the Colored Orphan Asylum. As was seen during the riots itself, white New Yorkers were not a homogenous group but, taken as a whole, policies regarding African American children in nineteenth-century New York City suggest a widespread belief that these children possessed the traits of childhood and yet were not entitled to the full range of protections afforded to white children based on their age.

The perception that African American children both possessed the traits believed to be inherent to children and yet were not entitled to the same protected childhood as white children is apparent in the very founding of the Colored Orphan Asylum itself. The institution was founded in 1836 by a group of Quaker women who were disturbed by the fact that African American children who ended up in the city’s care were housed, not with other children in the institutions for children on Long Island Farms (or later Randall’s Island), but rather “retained with the adults in the crowded buildings at Bellevue” and “in care of a half-deranged man.” These women believed the city was not treating African American children in accordance with the rights and needs of childhood, rights and needs these founding women believed the children inherently possessed due to their age. Given that Long Island Farms housed white children who were poor and primarily the children of immigrants, it is clear that race rather than class or family background was the distinguishing factor between those children who were admitted and those who were excluded from the city’s institutions.

Throughout their annual reports, pleas for funds, and public presentation of their charges, managers consistently emphasized the residents’ status as children and highlighted the malleability, dependence, and helplessness commonly discussed in nineteenth-century culture as inherent traits of childhood. Managers of the Colored Orphan Asylum explained in their first annual report, which served as both justification for the institution’s founding and plea for financial support, “When it is remembered that three asylums for white children are liberally supported in this city and that there still remained a class excluded from a share in their benefits, with souls to be saved, minds to be improved, and characters to be trained to virtue and usefulness, can any for a moment doubt the necessity for establishing such an institution.”  The managers’ emphasis on the potential for training that all children were presumed to possess suggests that they assumed African American children possessed the same malleability or plasticity that was emphasized as an inherent trait of childhood more broadly in the period. The assumed malleability of childhood made it essential that children be placed in environments designed to educate them and shape their character. Managers similarly emphasized the children’s dependence at every turn, consistently evoking the children’s status as orphans and complete reliance on the aid of the institution and its benefactors. In these ways they highlighted the traits associated in nineteenth-century New York with childhood, seeking aid for their institution on the grounds that African American children’s status as children entitled them to the years of provision, education, and nurturing the institution aimed to provide, elements recognized in the period as inherent rights of childhood.

City leaders did not refute the Colored Orphan Asylum managers’ claims and in fact helped fund the institution and publicly endorsed the work the Colored Orphan Asylum did, but they were unwilling to take action themselves, exemplifying the uneven treatment of African American children in nineteenth-century New York City. The Commissioner of the Almshouse, for example, wrote in his 1849 annual report that the institution “cannot fall short of eliciting the unqualified approval of every friend to human sympathy.” While the city was unwilling to integrate the children’s branch of the almshouse to include African American children or to create a separate child-care facility for these children itself, it was supportive of the work the managers of the Colored Orphan Asylum did to serve the children in their own institution. In other words, while city leaders accepted African American children’s status as children, they were unwilling to do the work required to ensure that these children were the recipients of the care they articulated as appropriate for other children. Similarly, at a Board of Aldermen meeting held two weeks after the asylum was destroyed, Alderman Ottiwell moved for the city to allot $50,000 toward the reconstruction of the Colored Orphan Asylum by specifically evoking the dependence and innocence associated in nineteenth-century America with childhood. He argued that the burning of the asylum made the children dependent on the city, “a trust which, from the helplessness and utter destitution of these unfortunates thus suddenly deprived of shelter, food and raiment, should be at once accepted.” Their “total dependence” and the “undeserved, yet bitter and unrelenting persecution” they had experienced, he continued, entitled them to “the sympathies and commiseration” of the city as well as “of all right minded and enlightened men.” The city did eventually compensate the association $70,000—part of $1.5 million it paid in damage claims from the riot—although it prevented the institution from rebuilding on its prime location on Fifth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, pushing it to relocate farther up the island. City officials did not dispute—and at times articulated—the age-related needs and claims of African American children, but did not prioritize these claims, privileging the needs of white children and other financial concerns.

African American children’s liminal or provisional classification as children is also apparent in the city’s bifurcated approach to the question of whether to classify African American children as children within their own increasingly age-stratified institutional systems. While African American children were not permitted in the children’s branch of the Almshouse (Long Island Farms and Randall’s Island) through at least the 1870s, they were admitted during these years to the city’s institutions for children who had committed crimes or were believed to have delinquent tendencies (the House of Refuge and the Juvenile Asylum). In housing African American children in these institutions for delinquent children, city leaders revealed their assumption that children of all races were inherently malleable and so needed to be housed apart from adult criminals to foster rehabilitation. However, in only including African American children with white children in those city-run institutions that housed delinquent children rather than those admitted without such a designation, they categorized African American children as not entitled to the full protections of childhood offered to white children. City leaders did not explain their reasons for different policies regarding racial integration at the city institutions serving children, but one characteristic frequently attributed to children in this period that may have been a factor is the presumption of innocence. Children in delinquency institutions were presumed to be lacking this supposedly natural sense of childhood innocence (akin to what we might call naiveté). In addition to those children admitted as a consequence for committing a crime, many children found themselves in these institutions due to a label of being “incorrigible” or a presumed corruption due to time on the streets or in other environments thought corrosive to childhood innocence. Leaders did not articulate a connection between this loss of innocence and race, but as that was a major factor differentiating white children in the two institutions, this may be one characteristic of childhood that city officials did not assume occurred evenly across racial lines.

City policy and the actions of the mob that looted and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum do not align neatly or offer a consistent pattern, but they do reveal that white New Yorkers recognized African American children as possessing many of the traits and rights of white children due to their age, but that this fact did not serve to ensure the children’s protection or public support. Looking at this well-known event through the lens of age studies adds a layer of nuance to our discussion. Age studies asks us to consider the way a society’s understandings and assumptions about age and stages of life affected life for people within that society. An examination of the treatment of children who lived at the Colored Orphan Asylum in nineteenth-century New York City reminds us that the interplay between age and race (or other facets of identity) is complex. Not only have conceptions of age and the traits believed inherent to various stages of life varied by time and place, but even within a given time and place they have often not been evenly applied to all people of a designated age. This presents challenges for an academic working to uncover and articulate boundaries or definitions for age-related stages of life, but while they were not always consistent, historical actors’ understandings of age and its related traits and needs had real, tangible effects on the treatment and lived experience of children. In the case of the children living at the Colored Orphan Asylum on July 13, 1863, these ideas about age just may have saved their lives.

Further reading:

Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans Manuscript Collection at the New-York Historical Society. Many of these records have been digitized and are freely accessible online.

T[homas] H[enry] Barnes, “My Experience as an Inmate of the Colored Orphan Asylum.” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago, 2003).

William Seraile, Angels of Mercy: White Women and the History of New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum (New York, 2011).

Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (New York, 2005)

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

Sarah Mulhall Adelman is an assistant professor of history at Framingham State University. She has published on the political culture of American Catholic women religious and is currently working on a project about nineteenth-century orphan asylums and conceptions of childhood.