Recent issues of the Common School have spoken of the vibrancy of primary sources as a means of engaging students in the subject of history: making the student be a historian, not simply a hard drive. Their use teaches students to recognize authorship and point-of-view in interpretation, to understand that information about the past is fragmentary and sometimes contradictory, and to learn the steps of historical inquiry.

But there is something missing in the idea that primary sources alone are engaging, meaningful tools for learning. A short, true story:

The Minnesota Historical Society is home to thousands and thousands of documents, the State Archives, and tens of thousands of cubic feet of objects. These are all primary sources. Many (but by no means all) of these items are available online, which means that they are easily accessible without a trip to St. Paul and hours in the old card catalogs. These include a set of letters, scanned and also transcribed, from brothers fighting in the Civil War; and over 180,000 photographs in a searchable database. Still, the society received an exasperated e-mail from a parent trying to help their child with homework: “the Minnesota Historical Society [W]eb page . . . [has] nothing of substance to help with an assignment on the history of Minnesota.”

Why was this parent so frustrated when the site is full of primary sources? Because those sources too often had no context. I submit that primary sources are most valuable in learning if they have a personal meaning to the audience, either one they bring to the source or one that they gain through context and art, such as storytelling or interpretation. Hardly a radical concept, but when it comes to the Internet it seems to be all too much of a new idea.

Enter “Forests, Fields, and the Falls,” a primary-source-based story of Minnesota’s past that was created for school and informal audiences using the unique strengths of the Web. In it, the letters or reminiscences of four everyday people from the state’s earlier years are edited into sequential art (graphic-novel style) stories. In effect, each historic person is telling their own story to a modern audience; the four stories combined make a larger point about Minnesota, stated up front in an introductory movie.

In each story there are little icons indicating a second layer of information. If you are in the frame of the farming story showing the Carpenter family’s shack of a house with Mary Carpenter’s description of their “leaky ten foot shanty,” mouse over the boxy icon and see a caption indicating that if you click, you will be able to find more about the shanty. Click and you open a new window with a historic photo of just such a house plus a quotation from another settler describing his own shanty: two primary sources that reinforce the single idea from our main story. Click on the icons in other frames and you might get a document, a map, a recipe, an object, etc. In addition, you can access the complete transcripts of the sources from which each story is drawn.

Throughout the entire site there are probably less than five hundred words written by the curator (excepting photo credits and identifying captions). This is a story told by and through primary sources. And the collection of sources is put in context through the larger story. So the photo of a funny-looking machine makes more sense because we see it in the illustrated context of its use. In the mind of the visitor there is then a cubby hole created in which to place the information about the thresher, or the cork boot, or the log stamp; it is not just data from a collections database but detail for a factual narrative. And that makes it more intelligible, meaningful, and memorable.

At least that’s the theory.

This site is an experiment. We know that most people currently use the Internet for information gathering. They do not expect to spend time being engaged in a story (unless they are gaming). For the information gatherers, they may prefer something more database-like because they know what they are after and want to just get it as quickly as possible. There is some research to suggest that our collection of TimePieces is just as successful as “Forests, Fields, and the Falls.”

That said, we have received a laudatory e-mail about our online comic book from someone at a marketing firm (a marketing firm!) titled, “Bravo!” He applauds the use of Flash and the site structure, blah, blah, blah. Most significantly, he concludes “I’m not from Minnesota, and to be honest, never thought twice about Minnesota’s history. Thanks for the education and the great [W]eb experience!” Clearly, he had no intention of getting hooked, but he was. And he believes that he learned something.

That glowing e-mail aside, until computers reside in the living room and people think of the Web as a source of learning and entertainment, our primary audience is necessarily in the classroom. When teachers tell their classes to explore the site, or when they assign a task around the site, students will take the time to use it. And here we have little information, though what we know suggests some success.

A professor of American history intends to use the site with her students mostly because of its collection of sources (the hundred-plus pages of Mary Carpenter’s letters, for instance, are an especially rich source but were not previously well known because they had not been transcribed). As an added bonus, she believes that it is easy to navigate, easy to read, and that her students will appreciate the illustrations. She also states, “I plan to direct people–students, other teachers of Minnesota history, Minnesota history buffs, Minnesotans–to the site, knowing that they will leave the site with a fuller, deeper, and more complex understanding of the state’s past.”

I have also talked with a fourth-grade teacher who used the site in his classroom. He noted that the kids loved the site, but that they did not seem to read the illustrated story. Instead, they spent their time with the pages of primary sources. I have to admit that I am a little disappointed the students are not absorbed by the narrative, but I am happily surprised that they are interested in the real meat of the matter: historic photos, quotes, and documents. This does not mean, however, that the story is irrelevant. An advantage of the comic-book style is that even if one does not read it, just scanning the illustrations to find the icons gives the visitor a sense of context.

The launch page for the site also links to ideas for classroom activities. Some of these activities take advantage of the illustrated story (e.g., a scavenger hunt or looking for hints of connections between the stories), some work off the main message (e.g., mapping or making connections), but others go straight to the issue of primary sources and our use of them. I am particularly interested in what students will find when they “Identify Point of View” of the main narrative sources or when they take the suggestion to read some of Mary Carpenter’s letters and edit them differently. These are challenging concepts for any student and a particular advantage of primary sources and the Web’s ability to layer from the abridged story to the unedited original source.

The question of success raises one of the difficulties for a Web-based informal educator. We can visit a few schools to see how the site is being used and we can receive kudos or slaps in the face by e-mail, but unless we build quizzes into the site (and since this is a museum site, where informal is a key word, quizzes are pretty much antithetical) we do not really know how it is being used or the meaning people are making. To a large extent we have to rely on what exhibit staff have learned over many years of trial and error, observation, and audience research. In particular: museums are about real things, primary sources. As such, people have a higher level of trust in the authenticity of something in and from a museum. Additionally, exhibits comprised of primary sources in static cases (with labels like “Shirt, 1873–donated by the Brown Family”) hold very little meaning for most people. Either visitors bring a context themselves or they need a context of some sort in which to put the object or document. If they bring a context, they can be said to be piecing together an understandable narrative in their head. When educators (whether exhibit curators, live docents, or teachers) supply the context, they are interpreting–telling a story.

For the most part, the Web has not yet learned this lesson. Sites are too often just advertising brochures or databases; throwbacks to the old days of boring exhibits. But the value of an artfully presented story (not necessarily one as linear as “Forests, Fields, and the Falls”) is as universal as the value of primary sources. Apart from each other, story and sources are weakened; together, they make history an engaging, active, and mind-altering endeavor.

Further Reading:

See Adam Bickford, “This Isn’t History, This Is My Life: The Minnesota Historical Society Focus Groups,” Minnesota Historical Society, 1996; John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (Walnut Creek, Calif., 2000); and Roy Rozenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998). Special thanks to Maureen Otwell and Jennifer Lanning of the Minnesota Historical Society, who reviewed this article. If there is anything seriously wrong in it, it is their fault for not catching it. For everything that is correct, I accept full credit. “Forests, Fields, and the Falls” was developed by the Minnesota Historical Society with funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). All engineering, illustration, and navigation by Invioni.

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

Steve Boyd-Smith has developed interpretive exhibits for more than a decade and was project lead on “Forests, Fields, and the Falls” as curator of online interpretive projects at the Minnesota Historical Society. He encourages discussion on this topic at the Common-Place forum and welcomes e-mails at steve@itellstories.net.

Early American texts that become “classics” and make their way into our classrooms often serve to illustrate a thesis. Such was once the fate of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. In my debut as a teacher at Yale in the early 1960s, I was entrusted with a section of a junior-year introduction to American studies. All sections of this course had to read the same ten books, one of them Bradford’s history. It being chronologically the earliest, I gave it the same priority in my syllabus, a move justified by the paradigmatic situation the book described, the loss of community. My interpretive eye fixed on those passages in which Bradford laments the weakening of the “bonds of love” as the economy shifted to cattle raising and the colonists moved out from Plymouth to be closer to their farms. As Thomas Bender noted in Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1978), the decline of community, with its Tocquevilleian overtones of incipient individualism (Democracy in America was, not surprisingly, another of the mandated texts), had become a major theme of sociological and historical work in the postwar years, a framework so capacious and flexible–or perhaps utterly without critical definition–that its pertinence to several different periods of transition was taken for granted. For a course that was designed to demonstrate the organic continuities of American culture, Bradford’s history seemed an ideal witness to these continuities as they extended into the postwar years.

But what if Of Plymouth Plantation were approached as literature and not as social history? In the early 1970s the enthusiastic makers of “early American literature,” dissenters all from the proposition that “the plain style” sufficed as a description of Puritan aesthetics, offered a new reading of Bradford’s text as typological and therefore prophetic or eschatological. Or, attentive to Bradford’s evocations of God’s “providence,” they argued that instead of being a tale of the “decline of community” the book is marked by a refusal to fix the meaning of providence. Others pointed to the influence on Bradford of his literary models, including Eusebius and John Foxe.

A complicating circumstance in any appraisal of Bradford’s history is that most of us make do with versions of the text that differ from the seventeenth-century original. The principal villain of this story is Samuel Eliot Morison, who in 1952 re-edited the text from manuscript, but to make it more readable moved to appendices the substantial archive of letters and other documents that Bradford himself had included in his narrative. Another challenge for any editor is what to do with the interpolations Bradford made in the mid-1640s as he reviewed the first part of his manuscript (written c. 1630/31), interpolations Morison consigned to footnotes and appendices or ignored.

Out of such difficulties is good revisionism born. Douglas Anderson, a literary historian who has previously written on Franklin and domesticity, has employed three strategies in this sharply revisionist book. First, he has studied the original manuscript for evidence of Bradford’s intentions and practice as an author. The materiality of the manuscript, but especially the interpolations, looms large in Anderson’s analysis. Second, he has heeded the entire archive of documents in the manuscript (but not in Morison or any other recent edition) and has paid careful attention to other contemporary texts, like Mourts Relation (1622) and Edward Winslow’s Good Newes (1624). Third, he has read the handful of books that Bradford cited in Of Plymouth Plantation. To these he adds books that were either owned by or available to Bradford (e.g., in William Brewster’s personal library).

To materiality Anderson therefore joins intertextuality: every page of his analysis is marked by an acute sense of how Bradford as reader and writer draws on and responds to an extensive archive of printed books and manuscripts. This strategy drives two arguments that pervade William Bradford’s Book. First, Bradford the writer is Bradford the artist who has intentionally cited other authors, introduced retrospective comments, and (above all) juxtaposed certain documents in order to give his work a distinctive “complexity.” To what end, other than the pleasures of writing? For Anderson the answer to this question lies in Bradford’s “profound conviction of the ubiquity of human error.” No apocalyptic millenarian or lamenter of decline he; rather, Bradford practiced a “deliberate disengagement from the highly charged religious contests of his time,” exhibiting a “forbearance” (163) in situations where others in England or New England acted more like the Puritans we love to scorn. Some of the qualities Anderson detects in the man and his narrative are more subtle, like his “preoccupation with the recognition and the containment of human difference” (71). But the basic thesis is straightforward, that Bradford affirmed the limitations of human nature and urged caution on those around him who pursued rigorous or inflexible solutions to moral and political problems.

“Complexity” thus carries a double meaning: literary structure mirrors ethical practice, the key to their interconnection being how Bradford as reader/writer comments in his “carefully interwoven” pages (107) on his own text as well as on those written by others. Two examples of this analysis must suffice. First, when Plymouth was consulted about the proper punishment for a sexual crime, the three ministers in the colony each offered advice in letters that Bradford incorporated into the history. The longest of these letters by far, from Charles Chauncy, was also the most stringent in urging death as a legitimate penalty. Anderson argues that Bradford regarded Chauncy as too extreme, which is why he incorporated a text of such length. Second, the encomium to William Brewster, a moderate leader if ever there were one, is placed out of chronological sequence, juxtaposed with certain contemporary events in order to indicate Bradford’s uneasiness with them. The argument hinges on redating when Brewster died; if the date Bradford himself gives for Brewster’s passing is correct, then the encomium occurs not out of sequence.

How plausible is Anderson’s analysis? I am reminded as I ask this question of one of the late David Levin’s foibles, his insistence that Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana was a unified work of art when all the evidence of composition suggested otherwise. Common sense might suggest that Bradford included Chauncy’s letter for other reasons, one being that he was the most impressive minister in an underministered colony. I am uneasy about another of Anderson’s assumptions, that he can recreate Bradford’s manner of reading certain texts. What we have is Anderson’sreading in the service of an overall interpretation. Though I cannot share his confidence about Bradford’s intentionality as writer or reader, this book provides a model of close reading based on strategies that few if any early Americanists have employed.

Further Reading:

See Maurice Stein, The Eclipse of Community: An Interpretation of American Studies (New York, 1964); Jesper Rosenmeier, “‘With My Owne Eyes’: William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation,” in Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst, Mass., 1972): 69-105; and Edward G. Gallagher and Thomas Werge, Early Puritan Writers: A Reference Guide: William Bradford, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Edward Johnson, Richard Mather, Thomas Shepard (Boston, Mass., 1976).  

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

David D. Hall co-edited, with Hugh Amory, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (New York, 2000), where some of these same issues are touched on. He teaches American religious and cultural history at Harvard Divinity School.

Virginia has a peculiar hold on our national consciousness. The Old Dominion has never quite supplanted the Puritan colonies as the imagined wellspring of a distinctive American identity. It is too foreign, too different from how we imagine ourselves, to be moved to the center of our historical identity. Yet in the general population there is a continuing romanticization of early Virginia, really up until the American Civil War, despite the fact that this was the exact period in which chattel slavery lay at the core of Virginia’s social and economic order.

In recent decades, of course, a backlash has developed among academics anxious to portray colonial Virginia’s racist, patriarchal, and violent character. This backlash may be said to have begun with the publication of Edmund Morgan’s classic American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1975) and has developed along two chronological trajectories. Some, like Morgan, have focused on early Virginia’s chaotic formative period between Jamestown’s founding and the era around Bacon’s Rebellion. These studies have examined the bloody wars with the Native Americans, the establishment of the tobacco economy, the effect on gender roles of an overwhelmingly male population, and ultimately the growth of slavery. Others, most notably Rhys Isaac and T. H. Breen, have focused on the developments shaping the attitudes of planters in the period between 1720 and the Revolution’s outbreak in an effort to understand why a landed, slaveholding elite would turn to rebellion as readily as they did.

Anthony Parent Jr.’s Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 is a noteworthy addition to this literature. It focuses on a period that has received relatively little attention and yet seems to be a time of crucial transformation in the colony’s history. Before Bacon’s Rebellion the colony was dominated by a faction around Governor William Berkeley. Tobacco export made possible by a mix of bonded labor and slaves drove the economy. By 1720, the extended kinship network known traditionally as the FFVs (the First Families of Virginia–socially true if not chronologically) were firmly entrenched in power and the economy was based overwhelmingly on the labor of enslaved Africans and African-Americans. How had this change occurred and what does it mean historically?

Parent turns to Marxist theory to structure his answer to the question of the origins of the slave system with markedly mixed results. Eight chronologically organized chapters examine “what Antonio Gramsci calls the dialectics of events . . . during Virginia’s formative years, when it became a highly oppressive and antagonistic slave society. It employs a methodology of class.” “Class analysis,” he continues, “is a heuristic method that not only unearths the relationship between the slaveholders and the enslaved but also illuminates the totality of the colonized society”(2). In fact, though, his method is far more effective in looking at the former issue–the relationship between slaveholder and slaves–than the latter issue. The study does not address the society’s totality, but rather focuses on the apparatus of control developed to maintain the slaveholders’ property and power.

The sections that focus on the apparatus of oppression, from the planters’ struggles for landed property at the end of the seventeenth century to the legal efforts to keep white servants and African slaves apart politically, socially, and sexually are a very worthwhile addition to our understanding of Virginia at 1700. It is here that his use of Gramscian-influenced Marxism is the most useful as he shows how those with power used the law to keep their place and inhibit any development of a sustained interracial alliance of servants and slaves. He rightly understands these developments as “impressing a racial system of justice into the statute books,” that assured the planters’ continuing hegemony (133). This emphasis on the mechanics of control is understandable, but much is sacrificed to make it work.

Given the influence of Gramsci on Parent, a more nuanced discussion of other forms of cultural control would seem to have been in order. Parent probes along these lines, looking at gender relations and what he calls planter republicanism (perhaps more accurately described as a predilection for Country thought). But these too are ultimately reduced to an equation with slavery at its base. While he is aware of the issues of control created by slave conversions, they might have been examined more in depth, as might ethnic and regional differences among the slaves, among white servants, and among whites more generally. Parent recognizes these issues, particularly in regard to slave and servant rebellions, but he downplays them. That is a self-conscious decision, as Parent focuses on “the specter of class war with blacks and whites fighting side by side against the great planters,” an apparition that he feels is fundamental to understanding planter behavior in the period (141).

The society’s totality disappears from Foul Means despite Parent’s claim that a class-based examination will reveal it. Parent’s broader interpretive framework encourages him to telescope all the developments in the society down to control over slaves and servants. All significant changes in the society are portrayed as originating in the slave system and the restriction of slave freedom. It seems to me there was a great deal more to these planters than their desire to control slaves and servants, and that the labor system’s transformation impacted the entire society in ways beyond the creation of an apparatus of oppression. The planters succeeded in creating a race-based system of oppression, but they did not start out aiming at one. Indeed, I think Parent misses something about the period and slavery, mainly that elements within the First Families of Virginia must have used their contacts in the empire broadly and perhaps in the Royal Africa Company specifically to enhance their position at the expense of the seventeenth-century elite that had gathered around Governor William Berkeley. Those men who appeared in the Chesapeake after 1660 were people of ambition and their ambition took them ultimately to a place of authority in a society whose institutions and structure were, by modern standards, abhorrent. In their journey, they, like so many other people in the early modern world, violated modern standards of decency regularly and with callous disregard for those whom they affected. Yet to indict them in quite the manner Parent does makes us judge and jury over the past, a role scholars have become a tad too comfortable with in recent years.

These things said, Foul Means is a good book worth reading carefully. It is based on sound research in archival and secondary sources. Parent has focused on an understudied period that he rightly insists is crucial to understanding the development of Virginia’s slave system. That foul system is crucially important to our perception of the colonial period, and thus to our understanding of ourselves.  

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

Brendan McConville is an associate professor of history at SUNY-Binghamton. He is the author of These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey (Philadelphia, 2003), and the forthcoming The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America.

One of the most powerful effects of Judith Richardson’s Possessions, The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley is that it makes you notice the ghost stories in your own locale. In a graveyard on the northeast perimeter of my town, for example, a huge, black statue of an angel has fascinated and frightened generations of children. Strange events occur in her vicinity, and stories have grown up about what happens to people who encounter her alone after dark. Anyone who stays for long in this transient college town hears eventually of “the black angel” and makes a pilgrimage to the graveyard to encounter her face. There are many ways of accounting for the angel’s spookiness: her extravagant size; her evocation of wealth; her location in a graveyard in the older, formerly working-class and Catholic side of town; and the racial history her “spooky” face may or may not invoke in an upper-Midwestern community sixty miles from the Mississippi. What Richardson’s book teaches is that a local haunt like the black angel is alive, continually invested with narrative and visited regularly by children who dare each other to sit at her feet in the dead of night. Such “shimmering” sites are embedded deeply in time, layered with often-contradictory messages, and inseparable from place.  Possessions reveals how the warp and weave of continuous historical change, environment, social opportunity, and social constraint work to structure the meaning of such a haunt. Richardson would say that Iowa City’s black angel possesses and occupies us, while we possess her as a kind of inheritance from beyond the grave.

Ghosts have enjoyed a renaissance of sorts in literary and cultural criticism. Recent books by Kathleen Brogan and Renee Bergland confront the relationship between ghosts and the historical violence of slavery and colonialism, while studies of the gothic by Julia Sterne, Teresa Goddu, and John Carlos Rowe connect the theme of haunting in American literature to the repressed memory of war, the oppression of women, and the wider horizon of U.S. imperial expansion. Richardson obviously shares the concerns and, to some degree, the methods of these critics. What sets her history of Hudson Valley ghosts entirely apart from them is its respect for the materials of folklore and its nuanced insistence upon locale or “place.”  Possessions is not, however, a work of folklore. Instead, it teases out local voices from a comparatively cosmopolitan archive that includes the folklore records compiled in the 1940s at the State College of New York at Albany, as well as the tales of Washington Irving, and the abundant print literature produced by regional journalists, novelists, antiquarians, tour-book and travel writers.

Possessions’ four chapters narrate discrete episodes in the history of Hudson Valley haunts. Chapter 1 reviews the long career of Irving’s ghostly Dutchmen and headless horsemen in the valley. Literary scholars will find little new in Richardson’s readings of The Sketch Book or Tales of a Traveler. Her point is the historical one that Irving both predicted and prompted the development of ghost stories in the Hudson Valley until it was unclear who came first, Irving or his ghosts. In 1897, for example, one immigrant Irishwoman, living near a burned-out factory in Tarrytown, reported “a big, black, shadder-like” apparition, “widout any head, an’ him on horseback at that” (78). As this episode suggests, the region’s ghosts frequently register racial tensions, a fact that is closely pursued in chapter 2, in which Richardson recounts the colorful career of the ghost of Anna Swarts, an eighteenth-century servant girl killed mysteriously by her master. Between 1762 and 1940, Swarts’s ghost would assume shifting racial identities under changing historical and literary conditions. Chapter 3 goes on to enumerate the sheer ethnic variety of the valley’s ghosts in the only chapter that does not treat a single episode or author but surveys the Indian ghosts, Dutch-explorer ghosts, Revolutionary-War ghosts, and “worker-ghosts” that haunted the valley from colonization to the height of industrial development. Chapter 4 concludes the book with the New Deal politics of Maxwell Anderson’s 1937 play High Tor, in which the region’s ghosts assemble to fight the quarrying machines of the New York Trap Rock Company as they arrive to destroy High Tor, a landmark mountain inhabited by a real-life Dutchman named Elmer Van Orden.

Possessions is held together by a loose chronological development in which the growth of industry and tourism figures heavily. But it is more centrally unified by Richardson’s analysis of “the productive ambivalence” (83) or the political and ideological shiftiness of Hudson Valley ghosts. Ghosts, she argues, typically emerge from episodes of violence or oppression whose facts are historically hazy. In turn, the ghostly residues of these events are themselves unstable (or shifty) and can be easily made to serve a variety of political uses. The ghost of Anna Swarts is a case in point.

Swarts was tied to the tail of her master’s horse and dragged to her death. Further details of her murder or torture are lost to the record. Swarts’s master, a local landowner named Salisbury, was acquitted of murder in 1762. But his servant’s ghost went on to have a long career. In the 1820s, she appeared in tattered garments behind a spectral horse, as a howling skeleton, and as a female figure shrieking in the rocks “with a lighted candle upon each finger” (91). Years later in The Sutherlands, an antislavery novel of the 1860s, she is represented as a mixed-blood, Native- and African-American girl and given the combined Dutch (Annatje) and Cooperesque name of Nattee. Swarts’s ghost assumes other racial–and racist–permutations in the era of Jim Crow, until her career finally ends in the 1940s with the folklore records at Albany, where one local woman reports that “everyone” knew Anna Swarts was a Negro slave who had run away. The same woman testifies that a descendent of Salisbury (whose family still lived in the area) contended that Swarts was simply an indentured German girl who tried to run away, but was “quite naturally” led back “to the paths of industry.” Here, Richardson argues, Swarts’s racial assignment breaks down according to class. On one hand, her identity as a slave gives voice to the history of inequality and injustice in the valley by recalling its slave-owning past. (Slavery was legal in New York until 1827.) On the other hand, the man who protests that Swarts was a poor, German girl who did not know her “place” makes Salisbury’s servant complicit in her own death. Two centuries after her death, Swarts’s ghost continues to inhabit the shifting fissures of race, gender, and class division, and to serve the interests of others: “The main work of haunting is done by the living . . . Dorothea Swarts’ ghost is itself haunted” (123-4).

Readers who want to nail down the specters that have haunted the Hudson will find themselves frustrated by the sheer number of explanations Richardson offers for their vitality. Her ghosts are nurtured by the craggy mountains and mists of the Hudson River itself, along with such ideological and aesthetic matters as gothic and romantic taste in literature and landscape painting. But, Richardson insists, they are equally nourished by the waves of immigrants who accompanied the industrial development of the region, bringing layers of narrative and folk traditions of their own to bear on the scene. Richardson is careful to situate ghosts historically. She sets the shifty politics of worker-ghosts within the context of the valley’s industrial transformation (through turnpikes, factories, quarries, and reservoirs) in a discussion that is historically specific and nuanced. By contrast, her treatment of the region’s Indian ghosts elides their historicity. Native American groups of the early Hudson Valley are neither adequately named nor situated, with a few slight exceptions, such as “the last of the Tappans” (144).

Richardson is otherwise a sharp reader of the fluid interplay of history, legend, and literary culture. This is particularly evident in her analysis of High Tor, in which the ghosts of the valley are seen to produce real-world effects. Anderson’s play, with its battle between ghosts and a New York quarry company, eventually sparked a successful movement to preserve High Tor, and the mountain was integrated into the Palisades Interstate Park system. But in keeping with her focus on spectral “shiftiness,” Richardson is primarily interested in the ambivalent social and political outcomes of New Deal historical conservation movements. She argues that the museums and historical houses that linked historic sites to the new park systems of the 1940s were part of a cosmopolitan enterprise that, like the reservoirs built in the same period, involved a loss of place for individuals and whole towns, setting the vision and wealth of those who preserve and collect regional haunts against the lives of the region’s less cosmopolitan inhabitants.

Ultimately, for Richardson, it is the sheer pace of change in the Hudson Valley that explains its haunted history. From one point of view, the ghostly formations of the region are the residue of economic, colonial, and racial conflict from the 1670s through the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, however, they give voice (moans, groans, rattles) to events and lives that are irretrievably lost to the archive. Richardson refers to the persistent haze of historical elision as a “problem of historical memory amid progress,” “a sense of social and historical tenuousness,” and “a loss of essential information” (7, 27, 64). Yet it is precisely the wispy ambiguity of Hudson Valley ghosts that has made them so useful to divergent ideological interests over time, beginning with Irving, who “discovered a way to work not just the history but even more the elision of the past in the Hudson Valley” (51).

Possessions is not directly concerned with the psychological or political mechanisms of repression and displacement. Nor is it consistently concerned with the connection (promised by the title) between ghosts and property–the systematic quality of relations of ownership and exclusion that, given the long history of capitalist development in the valley, is perhaps more central to its archive than Richardson is willing to acknowledge. Straddling history, literature, and folklore, she excavates the layers, contradictions, and misty gaps in an archive of spectral traces where more is (hauntingly) lost than revealed.  Possessions is an unsentimental and moving book about loss. It is also implicitly a reflection upon the loss of “the local” itself under the pressures of economic development, even while it works against that story line, to reveal how past and present continue to meet (somewhere between memory and knowledge) in “place.” With a kind of hard-edged pathos then, Possessions opens a door not only onto a regional New York archive but also onto what it might mean to be somewhere, to situate and to find oneself in one’s own haunted place.

Further Reading:

Other recent work on ghosts and the gothic in American literature and culture include Renee Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, N.H., 2000); Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Charlottesville, 1998); Julia A. Sterne, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago,1997); Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York, 1997); John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York, 2000).

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

Laura Rigal teaches in the departments of English and American studies at the University of Iowa and is the author of The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, 1998). She is currently at work on History’s Fictions: Imperial Regions and the Emergence of American Literary Culture.

Is it possible to write an intellectual history of early American theology that keeps readers awake, and indeed eager to turn each page? E. Brooks Holifield has succeeded in doing just that with Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. Holifield, Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Church History at Emory University, has made a monumental contribution to our understanding of religion in America from 1636 to 1865, one that parallels his mentor Sydney E. Ahlstrom’s A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972). He advances the thesis that in the realm of theology, American intellectual development was more sophisticated than generally thought, and “that Christian theology in America was part of a community of discourse that stretched . . . across the Atlantic to Europe” (vii). Popular interest in theology, which has been the focus of the majority of works in American religious history, is not Holifield’s primary concern, as he confesses that the extent of such interest and its influence on religious practices are unknown. Citing Alexis de Tocqueville and Josiah Willard Gibbs, both of whom commented on the average antebellum American’s disinterest in philosophy and theology, Holifield notes that popular interest grew nevertheless, such that nineteenth-century public theological debates entertained “large audiences [in] contests that extended over days” (3). While class tension divided elite from populist theologians, they still shared “a preoccupation with the reasonableness of Christianity that predisposed [them] toward such an understanding of theology. The book interweaves this claim about the quest for reasonableness with five other themes that amplify and qualify it: the continued insistence on theology’s ‘practicality’ and its ethical functions, the importance of Calvinism, the interplay between Americans and Europeans, the denominational setting of theology, and the distinction between academic and populist strands of thought” (4).

Contending that seventeenth-century New England Calvinist theologians “set the agenda for a debate that continued more than three centuries” (25) and generally dominated it, Holifield authoritatively defines the various levels on which that debate took place. One concerned the rationality of Christianity and attempts by clergymen from the various denominations and sects of Christianity to reconcile reason with revelation; that which in the Bible can be evidentially proven, with the miraculous and the illogical. Another concerned Calvinism itself, particularly the thorny issues of predestination, election, and the freedom of the will, especially as interpreted by Jonathan Edwards’s theology, which redefined the terms of Calvinist debate for many decades after his death in 1758. Protestant theologians utilized Baconian logic and Lockean empiricism in a vast multilayered argument over such issues as science, virtue, sacramentalism, traditionalism, and ritualism, each school of thought seeking to reinforce their interpretations of Christianity as an innately rational religion grounded in provable historical and scientific facts. American theologians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Holifield conclusively shows, tended to follow paths blazed by their British forbears and contemporaries, with whom they were in frequent scholarly communication.

American Lutherans, Catholics, and Transcendentalists in the early nineteenth century gradually rejected Baconian reasoning in favor of more naturalistic interpretations of Christianity inspired by European romanticism, which forced Calvinists to continually reconsider their positions and refine their arguments. Others turned to biblical fundamentalism, and anti-intellectualist populism that bolstered the appeal of Baptists, Methodists, and Restorationists, particularly in the South and West. Facing attacks from Unitarians, Universalists, and Deists, the heirs to Edwardsean Calvinism in the nineteenth century differed over liberal and conservative forms of Calvinism, and despite Holifield’s Herculean effort to explain the differences in doctrinal opinion between the many varieties of Calvinist thought, one risks getting lost in a thicket of theological hair splitting. It is no wonder that the theologically populist denominations generated so much interest and attracted adherents frustrated by university-trained theologians’ academic gymnastics. Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century American political independence from Britain led to a process of rapid intellectual maturation, as what had formerly been largely a British-American exchange now incorporated and expanded upon continental European elements.

The scope of the book is impressive, and Holifield’s accomplishment is that he has synthesized such a wealth of information into a coherent narrative. He is careful not to sacrifice important details, and subtle nuances of theological disputation are well explained. There are, however, some problems regarding context. The greatest, in my opinion, concerns the lack of a sociopolitical context. Holifield establishes that for the most part theology in America was an intramural exercise, with clergymen and theologians communicating among themselves, and only occasionally to a wider audience. While the conversations and debates may have been confined to relatively small groups of people, they were not conducted in a temporal vacuum. Surrounding events inevitably exerted a variety of pressures that altered the terms of the discussion. Holifield barely mentions the democratization of colonial American society and politics, the libertarian and egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution, the politics of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras, antebellum regional sectionalism, and the Civil War. He devotes considerable space to eighteenth-century notions of virtue in chapters 4, 5, 6, and 9, but offers no comment on how the revolutionary experience–and political disconnection from Britain–informed the “purified [deist] theology” of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestly, and Ethan Allen (162), or mainstream Christianity in general. Concerning sectionalism and the Civil War, no attempt is made to show how the sharpening divide between North and South, and the bloody conflict itself, shaped Northern or Southern theological ideas apart from the argument over slavery. Similarly, he neglects to mention how popular anti-Catholicism may have influenced Orestes Brownson’s shaken “‘belief in the divinity of the people’” (483) after his conversion to Catholicism in 1844. On the one hand Holifield was wise to avoid such contextualization, but on the other he missed an opportunity to show how sociopolitical conditions unique to America had a more substantial impact on its intellectual development than is implied.

It is curious, given what Holifield sees as an American emphasis on Christianity’s practicality, that there is no chapter or section specifically covering antebellum social reform movements. The heavy emphases upon morality, the deliberate nature of sin, and perfectionist millennialism in the theology of Charles G. Finney and Lyman Beecher (365-68, 375-76), for instance, are not shown to have informed their reformist activities. However, Holifield is assuming that his readers are also familiar with this subject, as evidenced by his glancing references to the temperance and abolitionist movements, and voluntarism. African-American Christianity is covered in chapter 15, and while Holifield is correct to note that African-American preachers and theologians essentially followed in their white counterparts’ footsteps, he could have offered some deeper explication of their subversive liberation theology, particularly its inherent millennialism as expounded by Lemuel Haynes in the 1770s and Nat Turner in the 1830s. Chapter 25 very briefly examines the “dilemma” of slavery and the theological justifications put forward by the institution’s proponents and opponents, but no new light is shed upon the subject. Holifield devotes some space to women as theologians throughout the book, principally Catharine Beecher, Judith Sargent Murray, and Frances Wright, but they were greatly overshadowed by their male counterparts, and women did not more fully emerge as prominent theologians until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Theology in America is at its best when Holifield is explaining the points of contention between denominations and schools of thought, and this is, after all, a work of intellectual–not political or social–history. Readers will finish the book with a greater understanding of how the Calvinism of the founding generation diversified and evolved over two centuries, and with a deeper appreciation for the flow of ideas back and forth across the Atlantic. Despite my sense of its minor shortcomings, Theology in America is an indispensable resource for scholars of the field, and should be regarded as a standard work for this generation. I can only hope that a follow-up work is planned.

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

John Howard Smith is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University-Commerce. He is currently revising his doctoral dissertation on Sandemanian theology in the eighteenth-century British-American Atlantic world into a book manuscript.

With the publication of its initial volume, the University of Nebraska’s History of the American West series is off to a fantastic start. Series editor Richard Etulain promises several volumes that will offer fresh and comprehensive interpretations of the American West to general readers and specialists alike.  One Vast Winter Count is written by a scholar with years of experience teaching American Indian history and motivating others to join the endeavor. Behind the creation of this remarkable synthesis, I visualize Colin Calloway digesting volumes and volumes of literature in order to make it all meaningful and current for his students. And while pursuing his own original research and synthesizing the work of others, Calloway moreover knows from extensive personal experience what Native American people are doing and thinking today. He takes no shortcuts to this rich material and considers multiple points of views. Covering long periods and large spaces, Calloway wisely selects particular groups, regions, and events in order to illustrate important experiences and themes. He treats readers to scholarly debates over how to interpret evidence of American Indian life across the West, but weaves Native American traditions and meanings into the narrative wherever possible. Landscapes of ancient sites, natural features, and human memories are treated as historical texts, the winter count used by Plains peoples inspiring the book’s title. We are reminded that “knowledge of the West was already there,” before European explorers and colonizers entered the stories (11).

Calloway acknowledges that usage of “the West” is problematic, pointing out how it refers to different places according to one’s position on the continent. In order to encompass all relevant events and processes, he includes the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Most of this book’s attention, however, is directed to Native American peoples west of the Mississippi. Anticipating the impending relationship between western Indians and the United States, Calloway turns the table on common assumptions about the “American West.” “The West has always been a region of movement and migration, of peopling and repeopling; this was so in the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries as it still is in the twenty-first. For hundreds of years, Indian peoples explored, pioneered, settled, and shaped the West” (17). In other words, Indian country was not a dormant land waiting for Euro-Americans to set things in motion. Calloway asks us to begin rethinking recent centuries in the West as “part of an ongoing American saga rather than just the culmination of Europe’s westward adventure” (18). The exceptionalism of American history is thereby brought into question, with a somewhat ominous message. “Only by considering America as Indian country can we get a sufficiently long span of history to recognize that civilizations here have risen and fallen as they have elsewhere in the world” (20).

Part I, “The West before 1500,” contains two chapters that effectively summarize thousands of years. Calloway introduces the reader to the most up-to-date findings and interpretations in archaeology, but orients his own analysis around the theme of movement. While they migrated and adapted to new environments, as shown in chapter 1, hunting and gathering pioneers laid regional foundations for cultural traditions and social structures. Calloway characterizes the Native American West as a “kaleidoscope of population movements and interactions” (56). Such motion across fluid boundaries, he suggests, cannot be properly captured in words like “phases,” “traditions,” and “complexes” so commonly used by archaeologists.

Chapter 2 traces the spread of corn agriculture across the continent. Although Native Americans developed seven hundred species of corn and the plant played a key role in the expansion of European colonies, this history was later submerged by United States officials who ironically “insisted that Indian people give up their old ways of life and become farmers” (115). Calloway identifies both the advantages and disadvantages brought by some societies’ dependence upon domesticated plants. Environmental stress and population density posed new challenges, which American Indians faced with versatility. “The ruins preserved in the dry climate of the Southwest create an illusion of sudden and catastrophic abandonment,” but Calloway argues that this perception overlooks less dramatic, but successful strategies deployed by American Indians as they migrated from high-risk locations and reassembled in other areas. “People made choices based on the alternatives available; they knew where they were going and why, and their decisions to move involved both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors” (91). In explaining change and continuity among agrarian societies in the Southwest and the Eastern Woodland, he notes the importance of movement as an idea in the people’s own origin histories, “whether from lower to upper worlds or from place to place” (92).

Calloway pulls together the years from 1500 to 1730 into three chapters comprising the second part of this book, “Invaders South and North.” Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Southwestern Indians’ struggles against Spanish colonialism over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religions that sustained native societies fell under siege, and resistance to domination was widespread and influential. Calloway situates the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 within the larger framework of a “Great Northern Rebellion.” During the 1680s and 1690s, many wars of independence were being waged across the northern frontier of New Spain by Conchos, Tarahumaras, Mansos, Sanos, Pimas, Opatas, and Apaches. Thanks to Calloway’s attentiveness to new collections and interpretations of neglected documents, readers will also find here a compelling treatment of the protracted and tumultuous reconquest of New Mexico by Spanish forces. Calloway completes Part II with a chapter on Indian relations with the French Empire. While leaving us with the impression of how precarious, even perilous, the Spanish presence was in the Southwest, he portrays French interaction with Native Americans as ambiguous and complex. The Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley witnessed a great deal of cooperation and accommodation, but were not spared conflict and bloodshed.

The narrative force of Calloway’s synthesis escalates in the three chapters that comprise Part III, “Winning and Losing in the West, 1700-1800.” Chapter 6 explores the impact of the horse on the American West. In a process comparable to the spread of corn hundreds of years earlier, Indian people changed their worldview, organization, and daily life as “pedestrians became equestrians” (267). Calloway traces the routes of exchange and raiding by which horsemanship reached one nation after another, while also delving into how particular societies adapted to the opportunities and challenges posed by horses. With all of the changes chronicled thus far, nothing compares with those examined in chapters 7 and 8 of One Vast Winter Count. As the “tentacles of European empires began to reach deep into the Indian West,” homelands were transformed into borderlands. But Calloway argues in chapter 7 that Europeans were people “on the edge” of Indian territories as much as Native Americans were “in between” European empires (331). Indian peoples became involved in intense European rivalry, some faring better than others, yet many were still able to shape the terms of these imperial contests. Then, “world war” came to the Ohio Valley and was quickly followed by native and colonial wars against empire. The reverberations were even felt west of Mississippi.

Chapter 8 captures all of the revolutionary changes that made the American West in 1803 “a very different place from what it had been just a generation earlier” (426). Many Native American societies were terribly ravaged by the smallpox epidemic of 1779-83. Maritime trade on the Northwest Coast established a United States presence in the far West before the arrival of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Across widening areas, meanwhile, Spanish and American officials attempted to regulate relations with Indian nations and reduce conflict on volatile frontiers.

Colin Calloway delivers two timely messages in the epilogue. First of all, cultural mixings generated by earlier imperial efforts had shaped the West long before the United States claimed it. Secondly, the history of Native Americans in the West is not simply a prelude to American history. “Their stories are our story,” he declares, and “they made choices that made sense at the time they made them but with long-term consequences they could not foresee” (433). This much longer human history of the West informs more recent manifestations of power and prosperity on the land. “We are adding our symbols, but the spiraling calendar continues” (434).

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

Daniel Usner is Holland McTyeire Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, currently completing a book on frontier Mississippi at the Huntington Library.

Commerce, bills of exchange, and the morality of money

In 1637, a recent immigrant to Massachusetts Bay named Dennis Geere dictated his will in the presence of the colony’s governor John Winthrop. Geere apportioned most of his modest estate among his family and then launched into a remarkable act of contrition. “The Lord our God of his great goodness, since my coming into New England, hath discovered to me all usury to be unlawful,” he confessed. To make restitution, Geere charged his executors, who included Pastor John Wilson, to restore “all such moneys” that he had received in England “by way of usury, whether it were 6 or 8 per cent.” The details were important. English law allowed up to 8 percent interest on such loans, but the penitent Geere meant to do the law one better. He wished to “manifest” his “distaste against every evil way.” Geere had practiced usury without compunction in “old England,” as he put it. He had learned his “duty” in New England. Winthrop and Wilson had taught him that usury was sin, and he meant to repent of it as a testimony to his newfound life in Massachusetts.

In 1699, the third-generation Boston pastor Cotton Mather informed New Englanders that the Puritan ministers of the Boston area no longer regarded usury as sinful. Meeting as the Cambridge Synod, they had determined that usury, or “an Advance on any thing lent by contract” (the import of the reference to contract is explained below) was legitimated by the “Divine Law” of the Old Testament, given “countenance” in the New Testament, “Justified” by economic “Necessity and Utility,” mandated by the ethical principle of equity, required by the philosophical meaning of money itself, and congruent with the moral “Law of Charity.” Only Catholics soaked in canon law and papal superstition, Mather wrote for the other ministers, maintained the old prohibitions against usury. Mather and his colleagues, in contrast, imagined some forms of usury as means of sociability, prosperity, and promoting the common good.

Geere’s will and Mather’s account of the 1699 Cambridge Synod suggest three reflections on usury. First, the practice signified deep moral and spiritual dilemmas for early New Englanders—enough to occupy the devotional focus of a commoner making his will and of an assembly of divines addressing widespread social dilemmas some sixty years later. Usury, indeed, was one of the great moral subjects for early modern Englishmen (and for French and Dutch writers as well). From the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth century, few topics aroused such extensive debate. Economic counselors to the English crown, propagandists for overseas-trading companies, humanist essayists, municipal officials, writers of devotional tracts, preachers, authors of formal theologies: everyone wrote about usury.

In today’s economic conversation, the globalization of the market would be a similar sort of issue. The term globalization is everywhere (pun only slightly intended); few opinions on economic life, the market, or social relationships in general omit some account of it. The analogy, moreover, involves more than ubiquity. Globalization is so complex and involves so many different definitions that one cannot simply say that globalization as a whole is good or bad. Just as the issue of globalization defies summary judgments, so too did usury. Geere’s repentance and Mather’s legitimizations, then, should not be read as a straightforward and simple dichotomy. Seventeenth-century Americans confronted usury with different definitions, justified some forms of it while rejecting others, changed opinions, and expressed as much ambivalence, if not confusion, as they did moral certainty.

Second, American Protestants (in this case, New England Puritans) of Geere’s generation may have practiced usury, but they associated it with vice and iniquity. The common interpretation might take Mather’s defense of usury as the essential Protestant mentality. So, the story often goes, Catholics inhabited an Aristotelian moral universe where money functioned as a mere sign of value—a marker for worth that resided in tangible goods and estates. As a mere medium for exchange, it by necessity could not increase in value. (Just as a ruler measures things properly only if its units of length remain constant: an inch must always be—well, an inch long.) The use (Latin usura, from which we get “usury”) of money as a means of profit in and of itself—to make money merely from lending money—was a misuse because it changed what ought to have been a constant sign. Catholic teaching on usury, last encoded in a 1745 papal edict and never officially rescinded, therefore decreed usury to be unconditionally and universally wrong.

Early Protestants, especially John Calvin, according to this common interpretation, broke the Catholic framework. They observed that the value of money in fact changed through time, whatever the medieval schoolmen taught. In the expanding commercial milieu of Protestant urban centers, price inflation rendered a pound worth so much grain one year and less the next. The creditor who loaned one pound in 1555 and received a pound in return in 1557 might in fact lose value. Some increase on money merely kept pace with price inflation.

More importantly, the opportunity for long-distance exchange transformed money into a means of production. Merchants invested in trading ventures rather than in agriculture or manufactures and deserved a return on it. So, writers such as Calvin distinguished between a legitimate increase on credit and egregious or uncharitable returns on loans, especially to poor debtors. Internal moral motive, in this case, marked the line between good and bad loan practices. Calvinists called the latter usury in the sense of necessarily vicious (they referred to Old Testament prohibitions against nesek, translated as “biting usury”). The Reformers, by this reading, had deconstructed medieval objections to usury and opened the way for modern commercial uses of credit.

This Protestant-as-opposed-to-Catholic reading of usury misleads. Many Catholic moralists anticipated the supposedly Calvinist argument long before Calvin; the papacy validated Italian “charity banks” that charged interest on loans to Venetian merchants and used the profits for charitable purposes. Moreover, influential early modern Calvinists, including Calvin and many Puritans through the 1630s in England and New England, often viewed usury with suspicion. They urged severe restrictions on loan practices through the mid-seventeenth century and wielded church discipline against violators. True enough, they allowed small rates of interest that kept pace with inflation. They also permitted commercial investment for profit, as long as the creditor bore the risk of investment. That is, if a merchant paid for one-quarter of the costs of an overseas trading venture, then he deserved one-quarter of the profits as long as he also risked the possibility of loss through storm, accident, or piracy. This allowance, however, did not preclude prohibitions against contracts that guaranteed profits to creditors; such contracts, their critics argued, took unfair advantage of debtors who alone bore risks but shared rewards. Puritans such as William Perkins, William Ames, and John Cotton, along with lesser lights, would have taken Mather’s “an Advance on any thing lent by contract” as usurious and immoral.

Geere’s will reflects a widespread assumption among his generation that usury was nearly always wrong despite the fact that most European states, including England, legalized interest rates from 6 to 8 percent on domestic loans and 10 percent on overseas credit. Social commentators and moralists in London, such as the humanist jurist Thomas Wilson, the economic writer Gerard de Malynes, most Anglican theologians, and Puritan preachers decried the various schemes by which creditors made profits without active production and labor, as though the mere elapse of time enhanced the value of their money. They complained that usury (outside a proper recompense for inflation and the risks of investing in commercial ventures) appeared to corrupt nearly every economic transaction in the new economy.

Loan brokers charged the legal rate on interest and then piled on spurious fees such as insurance and the cost for scriveners (notaries). Grain merchants loaned money to cash-poor farmers for a specified amount of produce and deferred collection until a grain shortage raised prices far beyond their levels at the time of the original contract. Landlords raised rents for those taking room on credit. Shopkeepers inflated prices for goods sold on book credit. Financiers accepted mortgages for collateral and received rents from the mortgaged land on top of repayment for the original loan. Merchants devised especially crafty means to profit from credit: undervaluing the worth of foreign currency, charging fees for delayed payments, shifting the amount or valuation of goods and notes passing through their hands.

By the 1620s, usury had become, for its critics, a synecdoche for nearly every form of avaricious dealing, especially market-induced misbehavior. However much humanist and religious moralists accepted small amounts of interest and commercial investment as legitimate, they especially condemned the financier who made a living solely from lending money. The Dutch Reformed Church went so far as to mandate excommunication for the sin of being a banker, or Lombard. “Usurer!” was the worst of name-calling.

Finally, the difference between Geere and Mather indicates that New England Protestants changed their understanding of usury over the course of the seventeenth century. During the great expansion of overseas commerce from the 1650s through the 1680s, social commentators in England and America began to reconsider the boundaries between licit and improper loan practices. In effect, innovations in the use of credit outpaced the old moral reservations and mandated a more liberal attitude toward what the critics previously called usury.

The imperial market system depended on complicated—some economic historians employ the term “abstract”—instruments of credit at nearly every transfer in an ever-expanding series of exchanges. In the absence of a steady supply of specie, merchants in London and Boston wrote and received bills of exchange: signed notes (something like IOUs) that promised payment in goods or cash by a set date, included interest, and prescribed penalties for late payment. In 1678 a modest merchant from Braintree, Samuel Tompson, learned to use bills of exchange from one of the numerous secretary’s and merchant’s manuals circulating around Massachusetts at the time, Edward Cocker’s Magnum in Parvo, Or the Pen’s Perfection (London, 1675). Taking notes on Cocker, Tompson recorded the proper form for a bill and included an implicit fee for the credit as well as an explicit penalty for late payment.

“Be it known to all men by these presents that I ________ do owe and am indebted unto _______ the sum of ________ currant money of England to be paid unto the said ________ [or] his Heirs . . . to the which payment will and truely to be made I do bind my self . . . in the penalty or sum of ________ of like money, firmly by these presents. In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal [dated and signed].”

Recipients of bills of exchange often transferred them to other creditors, indebting its original signer to someone whom he had never known. In such cases, it was practically impossible to follow the customary religious mandate to refrain from taking interest from a poor debtor or to monitor one’s motives so that debtors were not used as means of profit. One may have never met one’s debtor. Bills of exchange in effect made usury a commonplace without an explicit reference to high interest rates on personal loans.

Shopkeepers, farmers, fishermen, peddlers, and artisans all used bills of exchange in this manner. When they did so, they engaged in a practice that previously had been called usury but that passed in their day as a necessary means of business. In the complex nexus of the expanding market, effective exchange required rapid, impersonal, and legally accountable measures to transfer credit and assure some penalty for delayed payment. In the economic environment of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, with its erratic supply of money and the ease with which currency moved to England, commerce depended on the value of bills of exchange and other paper instruments such as mortgages and bonds.

This system placed immense pressure on creditors, usually merchants, to bring debtors into court. The number of debt cases in the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, which often involved unpaid bills, soared during the 1670s and 1680s, and the number of debt cases also rose markedly in the county courts. The Suffolk County Court became the most frequently used forum for economic adjudication in the Boston area, spending most of its docket on contested bills of exchange and disagreements over contracts, bonds, and rents. Comparable figures emerge from the records of the Essex and Middlesex County courts in a slightly later period.

The widespread circulation of bills of exchange eroded many previously held rationales for anti-usury sentiment. Many moralists in New England nonetheless protested the spread of usury throughout the 1670s. Increase Mather (Cotton Mather’s father) of Boston’s Second Church and Urian Oakes of Cambridge portrayed the toleration of usury as communal calamity. Magistrates may have accepted the practice and even enforced it by their judgments in civil courts, but it was sin nonetheless. Mather and Oakes counted usury among the several causes for the relentless judgments of God against New England: bad weather, Indian wars, intrusive royal agents, and depressed trade. Yet, as much as these traditionalists knew that usury was wrong, they increasingly found themselves at a loss to analyze the specific meaning of usury amidst multilayered and indirect exchanges, the unavoidable treatment of credit as a commodity, new accounting measures, fiscal rationalizations for interest, and complex debt litigation.

While critics of usury found it increasingly difficult to specify the proper use of credit, a new genre of social commentary published in London from the 1660s through the 1690s legitimated free-floating interest rates and rising loan fees as an economic necessity and national mandate. Advisors to Parliament and advocates for England’s overseas-trading companies gradually assembled a body of literature that derived economic principles from technical analyses of market exchange and the overall, long-term production of wealth. Sometimes misclassified under the rubric “mercantilist,” these economic writers included Sir Josiah Child, Thomas Mun, Edward Misselden, and Sir William Petty. They addressed the nation’s economic problems—shortage of coin, depression in the cloth trade, scarcity of goods, unemployment, and rising poverty—with proposals to enhance exports and the overall exchange of goods. They sometimes offered contradictory advice on interest rates, but they all rested their arguments on fiscal analyses, trade statistics and other empirical data, mathematical reasoning, and comparisons with Dutch and French competitors.

In their advice to the English government, these proto-economists excluded customary moral and religious objections to usury. They rejected earlier commentators who assumed that prices should be stable, that specie had an unchanging value, and that usury corrupted credit transactions. Money, they argued, had no absolute intrinsic value; it only had exchange value, its worth on the market in terms of consumable goods. The practical effect of monetary policy and innovative credit schemes eclipsed abstract arguments about the nature of money. Higher interest rates in fact encouraged investment in overseas ventures and speeded commerce. Analysts such as Petty suggested that the sooner English policy makers learned that lesson, the sooner they would encourage English merchants to adapt to rather than resist currency fluctuations, compete in the exchange of credit, and allow their prices in commodities (including money) to rise to the greatest profit level. The payoff enhanced England’s balance of trade. The merchant and financier who understood the market and maximized returns from it served the public good. Here was England’s first thoroughgoing legitimization of usury, appearing in a flood of economic pamphlets at the close of the seventeenth century. Popular Anglican theologians and devotional writers from the period, such as Richard Allestree, submitted to such logic: if usury was good for England, then they would be the last to condemn it.

By the time that Cotton Mather’s report from the Cambridge Synod appeared, the technicalities of credit exchange and the cost of deferred payments on bills had rendered anachronistic the customary arguments against usury. After 1690, colonial governments began to issue paper money, called bills of credit, backed by tax revenues; but overseas merchants, inland traders, and urban consumers continued to use bills of exchange. Cotton Mather and his colleagues understood bills of exchange to function like money and argued, with England’s economists, that money ought to produce a profit in itself because it was not a mere instrument of exchange. As Mather put it, it was a commodity: “Money is as really Improvable a thing as any other; and it rather more than, less productive [sic]” so that “there can be no reasonable pretence that should bind me to lend my Money for nothing, rather than any other Commodity whatsoever: nor can a Contract in this case be more blameable, than in any other.”

This is not to say that the merchants, magistrates, and ministers of Massachusetts (and Massachusetts took the lead for the other New England colonies in such measures) had thrown open the doors to any and all credit practices. English law and widespread social consensus decreed some limits (just as the colonies continued to legislate occasional wage and price ceilings on essential goods through the eighteenth century). In the 1660s, the General Court of Massachusetts rescinded colony-wide regulations on credit and empowered county courts to proceed against what they determined were egregious interest rates or fees. It appears, however, that judgments on such matters varied between regions. Boston merchants and financiers, who issued most of the bills of exchange circulating in New England, charged up to 25 percent interest when London credit brokers gave them unfavorable exchange rates (that is, deflated the worth of New England bills relative to the London pound). Rural debtors often complained, to little effect.

Yet deep sensibilities about the commonweal, care for the poor, and the moral purpose of credit remained in place in New England, even after the anti-usury arguments disintegrated. Colonial governments, in some cases, still legislated upper limits on usury, and county courts made judgments in favor of plaintiffs who charged their creditors with avaricious practices. Most of these cases, however, involved personal loans between neighbors or acquaintances and particularly loans given to those in dire and immediate need. They did not address the impersonal transactions represented in bills of exchange, banking contracts, or commercial ventures. This should not surprise us. Even today, over half the state governments in the United States have statutory maximums on interest: 7 percent in Michigan, 20 percent in Massachusetts, and 45 percent in Colorado. These statutes are chiefly symbolic (except for loan-sharking). Current lending laws provide exceptions for banks, small lending companies, and loans for real estate and automobiles. Several states also release credit-card companies from statutory limits. (This, I suspect, explains why so many credit cards are issued in South Dakota.) In any case, our remaining anti-usury laws memorialize ancient sentiments about usury, long since deconstructed.

Further Reading:

Dennis Geere’s will can be found in “Genealogical Gleanings in New England,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 37 (1883); Cotton Mather’s work was published as [Cotton Mather,] Thirty Important Cases Resolved with Evidence of Scripture and Reason (Boston, 1699); Tompson’s notes on Cocker are in his notebook at the American Antiquarian Society. For the standard argument about usury and Calvinism, see Benjamin N. Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Princeton, 1949). For the importance of credit and the decline of anti-usury sentiment throughout the Anglo-American commercial world in the seventeenth century, see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York, 1998) and Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1989). For the economic thinkers, see Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Mark Valeri, the E. T. Thompson Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, is currently writing a book on religious thought, merchants, and the rise of market exchange in early Massachusetts.

A truth known to every European peasant for a thousand years: the root supplies the food that enables survival through the winter. When reformed agriculture gradually supplanted traditional farming in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a new truth emerged—various roots nourish the soil, livestock, and humanity. Cultivating the most suitable tubers and roots for one’s locale enabled farm self-sufficiency. Here I want to recall the heady heyday of the roots and tubers, when experimentalists made a rich variety of cultivars common on American farms and created a diversity of new varieties to better suit the human palate, the diet of livestock, and the replenishment of the soil.

Replenishment of the soil became the prime directive in revitalizing American agriculture by 1830. Erosion and soil exhaustion had deviled farmers in long-settled areas of the United States by the first decade of the nineteenth century. John Taylor’s Arator (1817) prophesied agricultural apocalypse if farmers did not abandon their old ways. By 1820, enterprising cultivators were turning from traditional practices to “book farming” and experimentalism. The agricultural periodical press came into being in 1819 and would begin a growth so virulent that by the Civil War the number of pages and authors published in farming magazines exceeded that of evangelical Christianity and rivaled that of politics. In the farm journals a conviction emerged among the experimentalists: to renovate soil the farmer needed to diversify the farm biologically, by raising livestock as well as growing crops. As John Skinner, the editor of American Farmer, asked, “Without live stock how can farmers at a distance from towns raise manure?—how can land be improved without manure?—how can stock be passed through the winter, in good heart; so as to fatten well early in the next year without the nutriment and medicine of root crops?”

Most experimentalists embraced the ideal of the diversified farm, and so, studied the nourishment of animals—their tastes, nutrition, growth, digestion, and excretion. Their interest in alimentation turned into a complex inquiry into how chemicals and organic matter fed the soil, how soil nourished plants, how plants conveyed nutriments to animals, and how animals (human and non-human) used food to grow and thrive. Exactly how chemicals worked to activate these cycles evaded understanding until Justus Liebig published his analysis of the mineral sustenance of plants in the 1840s. Nevertheless, nearly every experimentalist from 1800 to 1850 grasped the connections between replenishing the soil, growing plants, and feeding animals. Jesse Buel, New York State’s most vocal agricultural reformer, devoted chapters six and seven of his classic Farmer’s Companion (1839) to “Improvement of the Soil” and the “Analogy between Animal and Vegetable Nutrition.”

Root vegetables—those compact repositories of plant sugars, fibers, minerals, and fat—became the subject of intensive study, cultivation, and management because they seemed to concentrate the nutritive substances of their surrounding soil. In northern portions of the United States, where climate and rocky terrain made animal husbandry more profitable than cultivating field crops, root vegetables, because of their cold tolerance, availability, and storability in winter months, became crucial for the success of cattle raising, dairying, and herding. Root crops and grass covers became the signature features of “meat farming.” In the south where grasslands were often poor, feeding swine, poultry, and cows on roots—particularly sweet potatoes—became the mainstay of feed regimens in animal husbandry.

During the experimental age, American farmers embraced all of the European root crops, amalgamating the various national farming traditions: the carrot culture of Flanders, the beet (and particularly the sugar beet) farming of France, the turnip culture of Germany, the rutabaga farming of Sweden, the potato culture of Ireland. Americans took particular interest in the two largest roots in European cultivation—the rutabaga (Swedish turnip) and the mangel wurtzel (cattle beet). Both produced enormous yields per acre. When taking the place of grains cultivated for feed, “it trebles the amount of cattle-feed, and doubles the quantity of manure” (Jesse Buel). The taste and texture of the rutabaga made it palatable for human consumption. The mangel wurtzel, though edible, never earned an open invitation to grace the farmer’s dinner plate.

When horticulturists began developing varieties of the European roots, their delectability for animals mattered as much as their taste as human food. Perhaps the readiest way to achieve a sense of the proximity of animal and human nourishment in the agricultural work of the experimental age is to review the early literature about carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, beets, mangel wurtzels, and the other imported roots that proved significant in American farming. We will see the pattern of usage in the array of root vegetables in planting, feeding, and culinary schemes. One thing becomes clear in this literature: the shared taste for roots by humans and beasts suggested a biological cousinage that began to inflect empirical investigations into the physiology of taste and the mechanics of animal tongues. Seedsmen in their breeding kept a mental picture of the operation of tongues in mind to guide their sense of tastiness of food—for livestock as well as human diners. We’ll review their findings about the physiology of taste after surveying the roots being tasted.

The carrot

No widely cultivated vegetable inspired less regard as an ingredient of cuisine in nineteenth-century America than the carrot. The American Matron (a “practical and scientific cook”) observed in 1851, “carrots are not a very favorite vegetable for the table. They are used in broths and soups, but chiefly sent to table as a garnish, or an accompaniment to salt fish.” Even the carrot’s defenders were compelled to notice that “[t]his vegetable is but little used, except in soups; yet they are very palatable and healthy, containing a great amount of nutriment.” The distaste was for carrots themselves, not their mode of preparation, for the commonest way of cooking them—what some cookbooks designated “American style Carrots”—was to boil them soft and serve them with butter, as simple a rendering as might be conceived, aside from chewing them raw. No cookbook before 1900 recommended consuming uncooked carrots. Recipes for carrot soup, carrot pudding, mashed carrots, fried carrots and carrot fritters appear in antebellum cookery books, but culinary commentators make clear that whatever form the carrot took, it was plebeian fare.

Why, then, did most gardens contain carrots? Because since time immemorial they stood foremost among the vegetables that livestock savored. Both tops and roots appealed. In New England, in early November, the farmer “cut off the tops, near, but not quite to the crown of the plant, with sharp hoes; they are greedily eaten by oxen, cows, sheep, and swine—then run a plough deep” to unearth the roots for use through the winter. Many concurred with the opinion of John Prince that carrots were the most nutritious field crop for animals. “One bushel of carrots will yield more nourishment than two bushels of oats, or potatoes, and it is a remarkable fact, that horses will frequently leave oats to feed on carrots.” Because of the cost of growing grains, claims such as these found a wide welcome in the second quarter of the century. Experimentalists noted that it thrived when intercropped with flax seed, so that a field could yield two products simultaneously; furthermore, the vegetable did not leech the soil of nutriments as most grains did.

In the colonial period and early republic the long orange carrot, a Dutch invention and England’s standard root in the late eighteenth century, grew universally in American fields. The French white and purple carrots were specimen plants cultivated by experimental gardeners exclusively. In the 1850s the White Belgian and Scarlet varieties enjoyed a vogue among hotel cooks. After the Civil War, the Danvers, the Altringham, and the Early French Forcing Carrot came into wide cultivation. All of these favored varieties eliminated the bane of carrot roots, a woody core. If fed to animals, the root was chopped and served raw.

The parsnip

Sweet, distinctive tasting, and nutritious, the parsnip had been standard garden fare in Europe since antiquity. When cows consumed parsnips, as in the English channel islands, they gave richer milk in greater quantity and butter noted for its piquant sweetness. When farmers fattened pigs or beeves for slaughter, they often fed the creatures on barrows of parsnips. In the United States, apples supplanted parsnips as a “flesh sweetner” for hogs and cattle, but the parsnip served its traditional function in areas where apples did not flourish. For the table, the parsnip evolved a variety of uses over the centuries. It was roasted, fried, stewed, pureed, mashed, and fermented into beer and wine. In the Catholic countries of southern Europe, the vegetable’s original home, it traditionally paired with salt fish. In England it gave rise to a lustrous winter soup. Three botanical varieties were generally known to early Americans: Pastinaca lucida, the shiny leafed parsnip; Pastinaca sativa, the common parsnip; and the Pastinanca opoponax, the rough parsnip. The last had a root widely thought poisonous, but the sap had been rendered into a medicinal gum by medieval apothecaries. The Irish used the seeds of the common parsnip as a curative for stomach disorders. During the colonial period settlers made no differentiation of the root into garden varieties. When experimental agriculture and gastronomy both took off in the 1820s, horticulturists recognized three culinary types: the common, the Guernsey, and the hollow-crowned. These parsnip varieties produced roots of great length—delving into the soil as much as a yard—and boasted greater sweetness than twenty-first century market parsnips, roots that average under a foot in length. The current style of parsnip—modeled on the modestly sweet and compact “Tender and True” variety introduced early in the twentieth century—lacks the robust flavor of the earlier sorts. But it has eliminated the primary fault of the earlier varieties, the hard core that made portions of the root tough chewing for livestock.

Parsnips required rich soil that has been trenched at least 20 inches in depth. Clods had to been up and stones removed, or else the roots grew crooked. This would prove to be a concern in New England. In the south, seed is broadcast or planted in shallow drills on the first warmish day in March. Harvest takes place in October or November, when the leaves yellow on the stalk. Hardier than carrots, parsnips can stand up to extremes of weather. The farmers in the nineteenth century believed the roots tasted better if left in the ground until after the first substantial frost.

From the earliest period of European colonization of North America, the parsnip proved an essential vegetable. Indeed, “New England’s Annoyances” (1643), America’s first folk song, complains that “Instead of pottage and puddings, custards and pies,/ Our pumpkins and parsnips are common supplies.” In the absence of barley and beer, the poet observes “we can make liquor to sweeten our lips/ Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut tree chips.” This last was no far-fetched claim, for parsnip beer and parsnip wine (including a sparkling versions) graced the table of American homesteads well into the nineteenth century.

The turnip

When North America was first settled by the English at the end of the sixteenth century, the turnip had not become a mainstay of the home table in England. While present throughout the country, particularly in conjunction with hop fields, it was a crop for stock feed rather than human food. A vegetable mentioned by Roman agriculturalists Cato and Columella, it may have been introduced by Roman colonists to England and naturalized into the local herbage after the Roman evacuation. The herbalist Gerard at the end of the sixteenth century noted that its cultivation as a food centered in Hackney outside of London, and appeared in the city only at the Cheapside cross when women of that village carted it in after harvest. Its insinuation into the English diet may be due to the tastes of Dutch expatriates in England. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth century it grew in regard as animal feed and human food. The county of Norfolk made it the basis of its highly reputable dairy and stock system. The poor of Wales made it a staple of home cookery. Arthur Young, the greatest English agronomist of the last half of the eighteenth century, campaigned tirelessly for its incorporation into the diet of sheep. At the time of the potato famine in Ireland, David F. Jones published Turnip Husbandry (1847) in Dublin, hoping to move the nation to its adoption as the basis of feed and diet. In the United States it enjoyed popularity in every region among every class of people throughout the nineteenth century.

Growing turnips required some craft then, particularly to avoid devastations of “the fly.” The turnip fly (Haltica nemorum), a small jumping beetle, devoured the seedling sprouts of the turnip, killing plants before they became established. As a countermeasure to its depredations, experienced planters sped the process of vegetation. For quick germination of seed, the farmer soaked it in rain water for a day. Daring farmers warmed the water and then doused it in lamp oil or lime to impart a flavor offensive to the fly. To quick-dry the seed, the farmer rolled it in ashes or plaster. In the 1830s, traditional farmers sowed the seed broadcast, while experimentalists used a planting device, such as a dibble or a Bennett’s drill, to set the seed in regular rows; orderly arrangement made hoeing a much easier task. At the time of the first hoeing, plants were thinned to a spacing ranging from 14 inches to 2 feet depending upon the size of root desired. Crowding stunted growth in the roots. Turnips favored well-plowed soil that had been manured with rotted (old) dung and/or lime. Because turnips were usually intended as a fall-winter vegetable, the crop was sown in July in northern states, August in the middle Atlantic, and September in parts farther south. A maxim directed that “the later turnips are grown the better they are for table.” Because of the late date for sowing, turnips usually were a second crop in a field during a season, following a grain or peas. Early on, the power of the turnip to fix nutrients in the soil as well as extract them made them valuable in rotations. Arthur Young advised that turnips be planted before crops of wheat and rye in a season on the field. In the United States, the favorite rotations placed it as a second crop, following field peas or wheat, and preceding buckwheat, rye, or wheat.

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the White Norfolk and the Yellow Bullock (or Scotch Yellow) were the favored varieties in cultivation, the former coming to maturity earlier than the latter. The White Norfolk possessed several distinctive virtues: it grew productively; its greens and root appealed greatly to sheep and cattle; and it could over-winter in the ground, while the common turnip would spoil in frozen fields. Common turnips came in two basic types: the flat turnip and the globe. The flat turnips were further distinguished into green top and red top varieties. The white globe enjoyed increasing popularity during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as did the Hanover variety. During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when epicurean interest in the vegetable grew, the varieties began to be distinguished in the market and cookbooks by the color of their flesh rather than their configuration. Among the kitchen varieties of white fleshed turnips to emerge, the most reputable proved to be the White Egg, a quick-growing, smooth ellipsoid root with a sweet mild flavor, the Jersey Turnip, a parsnip-shaped root with a clean nutty taste, and the Pomeranian White Globe, cherished by cooks for the eye appeal of its perfectly round roots. The Norfolk remained in favor because of the succulence of its greens, rivaled only by the Seven Top in the south. Regional preferences found expression in New England’s fondness for the Sweet German turnip, a hard-fleshed sweet root known for its tolerance for cold weather. Southerners seeking an early crop turnip planted the Early White Flat Dutch Strap-Leaved variety throughout the Reconstruction period.

While turnip roots could be consumed raw by livestock, progressive farmers chopped and steamed them when using them as feed to aid digestion. Among traditional and experimental farmers a consensus reigned that turnips were fine food for horses, hogs, and sheep. Debate raged, however, over whether turnips imparted an odd taste to butter and milk when fed to dairy cows.

The rutabaga

The rutabaga, or Swedish turnip, became an object of intense experimentation because of the favorable report of William Cobbett, the English-born agriculturalist and political writer, in one of the first issues of the American Farmer. Throughout the early 1820s, the magazine distributed rutabaga seeds to interested farmers in every region of the United States.

The root had two advantages over common turnips: the rutabaga was more productive, capable of yielding as many as 600 bushels per acre, and more nourishing. In the 1820s, husbandmen adopted the root widely, and by the 1830s its virtues were generally recognized. A Genesee farmer enthused, “This turnip is far more nutricious than the common turnep, keeps much longer, and is greadily devoured, cooked or raw, by horses, cows, sheep and hogs; and is withal a very excellent vegetable for the table … Of all root crops, if we except the common turnep, this is the least exhausting, occupies the ground the shortest time, is cultivated with the least expense, is saved with the least care, and we think makes the greatest return in food for animals.” The yield of the rutabaga won general appreciation, but the root had its liabilities in certain eyes. Among dairy farmers, particularly in New England, it fell out of favor because it “communicates an unpleasant flavour in milk when fed to cows.” It was also said to taint the flavor of meat if cattle were fattened on the root in the weeks before slaughter. Yet if sheep and swine populated your farm, rutabaga proved beneficial. Levi Lincoln, the head of the Massachusetts Agricultural Society, reported that swine “became fond of the Roots, and will continue to eat them greedily through the winter.”

Because the vegetable is a cross between a wild cabbage and a wild turnip, the leaf and stalk are also edible to humans and livestock. In the south there existed a sect of farmers who granted that swine loved the root, but would not grow them because they made horses “windy.” One experimentalist, “Darien,” argued in the pages of the Southern Agriculturist that any problem that horses had digesting rutabaga could be countered by salting and steaming the root. He closed his argument by noting it was as good a horse food as corn, that an acre of rutabaga produced much more food that an acre of corn, and for half of the labor and expense. “Darien” conservatively calculated that an acre of rutabaga yielded 300 bushels of roots; that same acre in corn generated 20 bushels. When faced with these sorts of yield numbers, the calculating farmer had to decide whether sweet potato or rutabaga was more productive; in the north, whether rutabaga or mangel wurtzel was the more economical pick. Because yields of these rival crops were roughly comparable, the decision turned on other matters: human taste preferences, and marketability in the neighborhood.

Mangel wurtzel

The mangel wurtzel is unusual among root vegetables in that much of the bulb grows above ground, exposed to the elements. Consequently it had to be harvested before frosts could damage the plant, weeks before rutabagas or carrots. It possessed a number of solid virtues: it did not taint milk with any pronounced flavor; it lacked insect predators; it tolerated drought; it fattened cattle more efficiently than grains; and it kept well, provided the stalk was trimmed an inch off the root rather than flush. Indeed, its durability became legendary among farmers on both sides of the Atlantic. Of winter feed roots, “the white turnip is in March entirely divested of its fattening power; the Swede [rutabaga] in May becomes shriveled, and is almost refused by cattle; the potatoe after this time entirely sprouts away all its vigour, diminished in bulk and dries up; but not so the mangel wurtzel.” Its powers remained undiminished the year round.

Because the cultivar was a novelty, it became the subject of a multitude of comparative experiments. The Albemarle Agricultural Society in Virginia tried it against rutabaga and found the advantage all to the mangel wurtzel. Col. John Hare Powel, corresponding secretary of the Pennsylvania Agricultural Society, undertook in the early 1820s a widely publicized trial of the root as feed, comparing it with corn: “my neat cattle prefer mangel wurtzel to any root which I have offered them. I have found its effects in producing large secretions of good milk very great. I selected in November, two heifers of the same breed, and very nearly of the same age, and in similar condition; they were tied in adjoining stalls, and have been fed regularly three times a day by the same. One of these had four and a half pecks of mangel wurtzel and four quarts of corn meal daily. The first, which has had mangel wurtzel alone, is in the condition of good beef; the other is not more than what graziers call half fat.”

Abbe Rosier, the French agricultural encyclopedist, observed that the French used the leaves of the plant as well as the roots for feed, stripping stalks of the largest leaves as many as six times in a growing season. The roots, when prepared as feed, were chopped to the size of nut meats, mixed with a measure of cut hay or clover, or sometimes, for hogs, served in a trough of milk. Animals devoured them raw, so the time and expense of cooking the roots, as in the case of potatoes, was avoided. The Abbe anticipated a twenty-first century practice in which pellets processed from root vegetables are mingled with silage to aide in their consumption by livestock.

Because a mangel wurtzel could grow to ten pounds, it required chopping. It also required space in the garden or the field, so it tended to be intercropped with vegetables that grew vertically, particularly English peas, or compactly, such as cabbages.

Though both stalks and root can be eaten by humans, the former boiled like chard, the latter boiled and mashed, it never found a place on the American table. Some made beer of the root. Some added the leaves to pot liquor. But every other root vegetable here discussed has a more pronounced flavor. If one’s horse relishes what one considers mediocre fare, then give the root to the horse.

The beet

William Cobbett noted in 1820 that the beet, a root that had never enjoyed great popularity in England, had been embraced by American farmers. Eighteenth-century farmers tended to categorize beets by color—yellow, white, and red (blood), with the last receiving most favor. Nineteenth-century farmers made further discriminations on the basis of root shape, with tap-rooted beets vying with round-rooted (or turnip-rooted) beets for attention. Both sorts required a deeply dug, loose soil to prevent clods from causing roots to fork or deform. By the 1830s, a number of named varieties appeared regularly in nursery seed stocks: Early White Scarcity, Early Dwarf Blood, Early Blood Turnip-Rooted, Yellow Turnip-Rooted, Long Blood Red, Green, and the French Sugar. The early beets were sown in spring, preferably during a rainy spell since dry seed had a penchant for not sprouting. Soaking seeds several days before planting was a general practice in drier regions of the country. Once sprouted, the leaves were stripped for cattle feed every fifteen days. “Oxen, cows and sheep devour them greedily, and fatten readily upon them. All domestic poultry eat them readily, when chopped fine and mixed with grain.”

Of all the beet varieties, the French sugar beet most fascinated the experimenters. Jesse Buel observed in the 1830s that “The beet culture in France now furnishes annually a hundred millions of pounds of sugar, for human consumption; while the refuse of the crop enables the French to enjoy the luxury of good beef and good mutton, which were scarce commodities with them before the beet culture was introduced.” The French sugar beet had an amber-red skin, with white body. It was not a good table beet. While Germans had derived sugar from beets as early as 1447, France became the center of sugar experimentation during the Napoleonic era when the Milan Decree of 1809 forbade the importation of British West Indian sugar.

Throughout the 1830s, when southern planters attempted sugar cane culture as part of agricultural diversification, they discovered that the plant’s sensitivity to cold made it nearly impossible to thrive to the north and west of the Carolina Lowcountry. The sugar beet and sorghum, however, were substantially more cold tolerant. New Yorkers experimented with beet sugar with success, enabling the manufacture of sweeteners locally. The grip of the West Indian cane planters on the sugar bowl was broken by the French beet.

While humans preferred to consume the granulated expression of the beet’s natural sugar and not the root itself, cattle enjoyed and greatly benefited from both the greens and the pressed pulp of the beet. By the 1830s it had established itself as a primary form of winter feed for herds. For the remainder of the century, a debate raged among the partisans of sugar beets and those of mangel wurtzel over which better served herds as feed. By the 1870s the economics of the sugar beet—the ability to secure two products, cattle feed and granulated sugar—made northern farmers begin to regard mangel wurtzels as “great pulpy sacks of water.” The advantages of the beet remain unchanged in the twenty-first century, when Canadian herdsmen and beef producers in the Upper Midwest have embraced the root for feed and for sugar production. The cattle can eat the beets unprocessed, mixed with straw. The beets overwinter well in cold regions, though the return of spring and heat can cause insect problems. Pulp left over from beets that have gone through the sugar extraction procedures, converted to pellet form, make up an important component of animal diet in those northern zones where corn does not grow well.

The delectation of beasts

Farmers distinguished livestock into creatures that devoured plants exclusively, the herbivores, and those like human beings that ate anything, the omnivores. Some herbivores—cattle, sheep, goats—had stomach adaptations (a bacteria-filled compartment) that assisted them digesting plant matters; others—horses and rabbits—had an enlarged large intestine and caecum filled with microorganisms that dissolved cellulose. Omnivores—pigs and fowl—consumed a vast range of flesh, fruit, milk, and plants. Because mammalian omnivores, from human perspectives, bore a great resemblance to Homo sapiens in their structures of digestion, livestock farmers presumed that cooking animal food would be the best way to secure its nutritive benefits. Whether this also proved true for herbivores was hotly debated, with proponents of raw feed predominating.

Observers of animals’ feeding habits had discovered certain limits and proclivities of taste. Foremost, they saw that omnivores’ taste was more sensitive than herbivores’, or even the carnivorous pets kept in the buildings and yards. Cats lacked sensitivity to sweetness. Dogs showed indifference to salt. Pigs, however, smelled and sampled much, loving sweet and bitter things particularly.

At first, questions of taste were governed by a notion of communicability. Things that tasted sweet to humans when fed to livestock would be imparted to the flesh of the creature, so that when slaughtered and consumed by humans it would taste sweet. This theory depended upon a rather unreflective belief that what tasted sweet to humans would taste sweet to creatures, and furthermore that one became what one ate. Eat sweet, become sweet. While there was some empirical grounds for this theory when omnivores such as hogs or goats were involved (sweet sapped apples fed to fatten hogs in the weeks before slaughter did improve the taste of flesh measurably, except on dung hill hogs), the farmer was nonplussed when discovering some animals indifferent to foods that he or she savored. Cattle, for instance, preferred sweet potato greens chopped as silage to the chopped roots. The farmers loved the roots but tended not to include potato vines in the family’s pot liquor. So the question arose, what do cows really like, and why?

Animal physiologists in the later half of the century found a register of mammalian savor for different foods in the amount of saliva generated by the submaxillary glands (in cattle a range of 110 grams in 15 minutes for hay to 20 grams in 15 minutes for juniper berries). Early in the century, when comparative anatomy was relatively undeveloped, attention centered upon the mechanics of the tongue. Two beliefs undergirded the interpretation of experimental findings about the mechanics of taste: that analogous structures in the mouth (a glossopharyngeal nerve, papillae on the tongue) produced similar effects in humans and “higher animals”; and that the sensate experiences of humans could model that of most animals. Regarding the former belief, the similarity of papillae between species seemed more significant than structural differences, such as the sheathing of the conical papilla in ruminants in a long, slender, flexible, horny filament that curved backward, or the spiny sheathing of the papilla in cats that gave the tongue a rasplike texture. Regarding the latter belief, the human educability of taste—the capacity to savor items such as putrid eggs—suggested disgusting tastes or smells could be overridden, particularly if hunger, habit, or reflection guided consumption (consider the durian fruit.) This last conviction led farmers to believe that livestock could be taught to consume things for which they had a natural distaste, so economical foods might by substituted for naturally sought after food. Yet when livestock were being fattened for market, reversion to savored foods, particularly those with high sugar or fat content, promised best results in terms of speed and effectiveness of weight-gain.

For cattle the substitution of roots for grasses and grains as feed reflected current understanding of the educative character of taste. Attention to the predilections of cattle when consuming roots instructed farmers to develop qualities in root vegetables that caused them to be eaten in greater quantity and with greater avidity. Two brute observations made during the experimental age guided both the breeding and processing of root vegetables: the first, that cattle had a liking for sweet things, and the second, that the odor of sweet roots did not immediately set cattle feeding, even in the stall. The consequence was a mixed feeding regimen, at first with roots being boiled with grain, and later with the roughage that cattle naturally consumed intermingled with shredded, cured roots. Swine were found to prefer cooked roots. Certain vegetables—the turnip and sweet potato particularly—had greens that livestock savored as much as hay and more than the roots. These were harvested, made into silage, and served mingled with the root. This is not greatly different from twenty-first-century feeding schemes, mixing roughage with pellet-formed feed derived from root vegetables or grains.

Potatoes, because of their high starch content, became a favored fattening root in the north. A writer in the 1835 Genesee Farmer reported, ” Potatoes are principally used for the fattening of swine and stall feeding of beef. In the former case they are always cooked, in the latter they are given in the raw state … Cattle fed in this way will not require a great amount of hay … Beef made from potatoes has a peculiar sweetness and … juiceness, but it is thought the animals fall away more in driving to market than those which are fattened on Indian meal [i.e. corn meal]. Of their relative value compared with ruta bega, mangel wurtzel, carrots, parsnips and beets, I shall reserve an opinion until some future occasion.” Henry William Ellsworth summarized a decade of experiments about feeding pigs—a daunting task given the omnivorous tastes of swine. He noted the western predilection for feeding pigs corn, and organized his observations in terms of other food’s greater or lesser economy and efficiency in fattening animals, registered in dollars and cents and pounds and ounces. Popular feeds such as Arthur Young’s oats and pea soup for young hogs are assayed, as well as novelties such as corn cob mash. Among the telling experimental results: it took 140 pounds of turnips to fatten swine to the level achieved by 84 pounds of potatoes; that hogs have a decided preference for sugar beets over rutabagas and carrots; that cooking and mashing beets and letting them sit for two days makes the avidity of hogs for beets strikingly more pronounced; and that Jerusalem artichokes vie with other roots, including potatoes, in terms of their efficacy as a fattening agent. Ellsworth’s account is particularly noteworthy because it captures the contest between theoreticians’ assessments of the chemistry of nutrition and the practical experimentalists. Chemical theories of nutrition and growth—such as those propounded by Sinclair in the mid-1830s—predicted weight gains that did not pan out when field tested. Even Justus Liebig’s elemental scheme—popularized in the 1850s, finding nutritive potentials in potassium, magnesium, nitrogen, and iron—only suggested general tendencies in nourishment and growth because it did not take into account the complications of compound whole foods.

Experimentalists, while paying lip service to new scientific accounts of nutrition, bred vegetable varieties with an eye firmly fixed on the most measurable pragmatic ends: the visible savor of animals, the vendibility of cultivars at market, and the capacity of foods to improve health and girth in creatures great and small. The breeding of mangel wurtzel, rutabaga, and turnips in particular, and sweet potatoes to a lesser extent, were driven by these concerns in the 1830s to 1860s. While the savor of new varieties of roots to humans suggested possible directions, particularly in turnip culture, the hybridizing of mangel wurtzel was conducted primarily with experimentation in feed trials with animals exclusively. These experiments, and the investigations of the edibility of the greens of these vegetables as silage, gradually generated a literature, and, one might say, an elaborated empirical understanding of certain differences of taste between humankind and ruminants. In the twentieth century this knowledge would drive the creation of flavoring agents that would make cheap feed palatable.

Further reading

For the place of root vegetables in a farm’s production system, see Jesse Buel, The Farmer’s Companion (Boston, 1839); also, Timothy Pickering, “On Root Crops,” Address to the Essex Agricultural Society (Salem, 1818).

Instructions on growing root vegetables can be found in any of the following volumes, which constitute the American canon of vegetable gardening during the experimental age: Thomas Green Fessenden’s The New American Gardener (Boston, 1828), Thomas Bridgeman’s The Young Gardeners Assistant (New York, 1837), Francis S. Holmes’s The Southern Farmer and Market Gardener (Charleston, 1842), Loring D. Chapin’s Handbook of Plants & Fruits or The Vegetable Kingdom (New York, 1843), Robert Buist’s The Family Kitchen Gardener (New York, 1847), William N. White’s Gardening for the South (New York, 1857), Alexander Watson’s The American Home Garden (New York, 1859), Fearing Burr, Jr., Field and Garden Vegetables of America (Boston, 1863).

For empirical experiments treating livestock taste see T. G. Fessenden, “On Making Cattle Very Fat,” New England Farmer 1, 40 (May 3, 1823), and Henry William Ellsworth, The American Swine Breeder (Boston, 1840). For a summation of nineteenth-century discussions of the physiology of taste in farm animals, see Robert Meade Smith, The Physiology of Domestic Animals (Philadelphia, 1890).

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

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

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What did President Abraham Lincoln and dairy farmer Reuben Miller have in common? Both appeared in an 1891 “mug book” for Lake County, Illinois.

Reuben Miller’s family had been in Lake County since 1852. Because “the family was quite large, and his father’s means very limited, he had to begin the battle of life when quite young.” Miller was “bound out” to an area farmer until at age eighteen he served in the Civil War. After the war he returned to farming, married, and started a family. “He has made a specialty of the raising of Ayrshire cattle,” the mug book noted. “With the help of his wife he has made and marketed immense quantities of butter of a very fine grade, for which he has received the highest market price. For some time past however, he has sold milk, and finds it a paying business.”

Abraham Lincoln’s two-page biography tells his familiar tale. Like Miller, Lincoln started life with limited means. His father was “among the poorest of the poor.” “As the years rolled on, the lot of this lowly family was the usual lot of humanity.” After recounting Lincoln’s well-known history, the sketch ends by asserting that “his was a life which will fitly become a model. His name as the savior of his country will live with that of Washington’s, its father; his countrymen being unable to decide which is greater.” Lincoln’s rise from poverty was obviously more dramatic than Reuben’s, but both stories focus on improving one’s life and being a model citizen.

Late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mug books are collections of biographical sketches, a curiously rich source for geneologists and historians alike. Typically these books were published only by advance subscription. If a person had the funds to subscribe, he or she (more often he) would have a biographical sketch in the book. For an extra fee, a photograph or sketch would be included. The publishers also might, as in the case of the Lake County mug book, include sketches of presidents and governors. These biographies of the rich and famous helped publishers sell books to buyers who hadn’t subscribed—and who weren’t included among the sketches. The cost of a subscription varied by location and publisher. A subscription, biographical sketch, and portrait could have cost up to sixty or seventy dollars.

Mug books are unique in their detailed portrayal of the lives of ordinary men and women. However tasty his butter, Reuben Miller of Lake County, Illinois, was neither among the county’s earliest settlers, nor a landowner, nor a politician or local leader. He didn’t even own his own farm; instead, he worked the land of a local judge. “The fact of his having been on Judge Blodgett’s farm for twenty-two years in succession,” the mug book observed, “is the highest evidence of his honesty and uprightness, and also of his success as a dairy farmer. He has found his wife an efficient assistant, and the dairy has a neat and most inviting appearance.”

The moral tone of Miller’s sketch, with its testaments to his “honesty and uprightness,” is common to the genre. Of Charles End, a Dodge County, Wisconsin mug book claims, “Naught has ever been said derogatory to his character, but on the contrary all has been said to his credit.” These sketches followed that same pattern of offering nothing but praise. In that sense, they read somewhat like obituaries. After all, these people were paying to be included and the publishers did want them to buy at least one copy of the book.

One frequent mug book publisher attested to the accuracy of its work in the preface by stating, “Every opportunity was given to those represented to insure correctness in the biographies.” Therefore, “the publishers believe that they are giving to their readers a volume containing few errors of consequence.” In other words, the subject of the sketch could edit out anything unflattering and add in whatever they wanted. Errors of omission are likely and factual errors are not uncommon.

While a subscriber need not have achieved fame to be included in a mug book, it did help to be a man and white. Not surprisingly given the time of publication for most of these works, minorities and women rarely appeared. In an 1894 mug book for LaPorte County Indiana, Mrs. Julia E. Work had her own entry of over two pages long. As the superintendent of the Northern Indiana Orphan Home, she was described as “a worthy example of this progressive age and of what can be accomplished by the ‘weaker sex’ when opportunity is afforded.” Julia was one of only eight women featured in this 569-page mug book. She was commended as being “naturally kind hearted and sympathetic” and praised for “her native intelligence and enterprise.” While sketches featuring women were rare, it was not uncommon for them to be mentioned within the sketch of their father, husband, brother, or son. Not only did Reuben Miller’s entry credit his wife with being an “efficient assistant,” but it also listed her parents and where her siblings were living.

As the example of Reuben Miller’s wife’s parents and siblings suggests, mug book entries included the names of more people than simply those to whom a whole sketch was devoted. The table of contents or index usually only listed the names of people featured and rarely included every-name indexes. In some cases, local historical or genealogical societies have created every-name indexes that were published more recently.

To find mug books, you can contact or visit libraries with national collections such as the Newberry Library (Chicago) and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison) or you can contact the public libraries and historical societies in the area you are researching. Mug books often have titles that start with “Portrait and Biographical Album,” “Genealogy and Biography,” or “Memorial and Genealogical Record.” Some libraries have created indexes to these works. The Newberry Library’s Cook County and Chicago Biography and Industry file is currently a card file that indexes about thirty volumes that have biographical sketches, including some mug books. Ask the librarian about specialized local sources such as that one.

According to the preface for a Will County Illinois mug book, “the value of the data herein presented will grow with the passing years. Posterity will preserve the work with care, from the fact that it perpetuates biographical history that would otherwise be wholly lost.” For all their gaps and transparent biases, these mug books did accomplish what the preface promised. They preserved the life stories of individuals and offered Reuben Miller a place alongside Abraham Lincoln.

Further Reading: The biographical sketch on Reuben Miller can be found in Portrait and Biographical Album of Lake County, Illinois (Chicago, 1891). For information on the price of mug book subscriptions, sketches, and portraits, see Peggy Tuck Sinko, “‘Mug Books’ at the Newberry Library.” Origins 8.1 (1992): 3-5. The sketch of Charles End is found in Memorial and Genealogical Record of Dodge and Jefferson Counties, Wisconsin (Chicago, 1894). The publisher’s statement on accuracy is found in the preface of many mug books. The one quoted here is in Genealogical and Biographical Record of Will County Illinois Containing Biographies of Well Known Citizens of the Past and Present (Chicago, 1900). Julia Work’s biographical sketch is in Portrait and Biographical Record of La Porte, Porter, Lake and Starke Counties, Indiana (Chicago, 1894). The Will County Illinois mug book quoted here is Genealogical and Biographical Record of Will County Illinois (Chicago, 1900).

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

Former curator of local and family history at the Newberry Library, Rhonda Frevert recently became reference services librarian at the Burlington (Iowa) Public Library.