In the summer of 1953, Richard Wright left Paris for West Africa’s Gold Coast, where Kwame Nkrumah, that country’s first black prime minister, was about to make a historic bid for independence from British colonial rule. The purpose of Wright’s trip–his first to Africa–was to document Nkrumah’s political moment and to dispel stereotypical myths about the continent in the process. Yet as Wright’s reflections in the now-classic Black Power make clear, his six-month sojourn became, as well, a personal pilgrimage to an ancestral homeland. “I wanted to see the crumbling slave castles where my ancestors had lain panting in hot despair,” he wrote (6). He chose to travel to the Gold Coast by ship, then a twelve-day voyage, re-charting the course taken previously by slave ship captains and colonial officials from Liverpool in England to Takoradi in the Gold Coast.

Two summers ago, I traveled to Ghana to conduct research in the historic castles and dungeons of Cape Coast and Elmina. Since Wright’s trip forty years ago, these sites have become hugely popular with tourists. I went there to study how the curators of these sites reconstructed the history of the slave trade, and how visitors interacted with the history exhibitions and the physical environment. Specifically, I wanted to understand how visitors formulated ideas about remembrance, cultural identity, and heritage in the space of the monuments.

Like Wright’s, my trip to Ghana marked my first time in Africa and combined research with a spiritual homecoming. Prior to going, I had traveled from New York to England, where I spent several weeks examining archives and exhibitions in London, Bristol, and Liverpool, ports notorious for their connection to the slave trade. Consequently, not unlike Wright’s, my trip to Ghana originated on the shores of its former colonial ruler. Instead of traveling by ship, however, I flew from London to Accra. From there, I took a State Transportation Corporation bus, crowded with Ghanaian travelers and tourists from around the world, along the rugged, hilly coast, and saw for the first time the crumbling forts and the angry waters that still churn around them. It was a view that I imagined to be not too dissimilar to the one that my ancestors in the coffle might have witnessed centuries ago on their defiant and painful march to the coast (fig. 1).

 

 

Such journeys, unusual in Wright’s day, are quite common in ours. In recent years, increasing numbers of people of African descent, particularly African Americans, have engaged in what I call cultural heritage tourism, a type of travel-related identity seeking, where they visit monuments, historic sites, and other places of interest in an effort to get a glimpse of where they came from and an understanding of how they define themselves. The cultural heritage tourist in this case is typically middle or working class and travels as part of a group, usually a church group or an organized tour, with “roots seeking” in mind. Indeed, this type of leisure travel is also called roots tourism, in part after Alex Haley’s popular novel and later television miniseries, Roots, which spurred the first big wave of African American heritage tourism in the late 1970s, together with the designation of both Cape Coast and Elmina as World Heritage Monuments by UNESCO in 1972 (fig. 2). But while cultural heritage tourism seems to be booming, it is not for everyone. When my sister, Lisa, asked about joining me in Ghana, I mentioned my research plans at Cape Coast and Elmina. Her response was, “Cheryl, that’s depressing! Why would I want to go there and revisit that horror? That’s not my idea of a vacation.” I suggested that she could also check out a local village, the nearby nature reserve, rainforest, or beach, but being familiar with the history of coastal Ghana, she could not begin to imagine treading in waters that at one time had been so bloodied. Clearly, for some, the pain of visiting sites of such human devastation is simply too unbearable.

 

 

The attention directed towards Cape Coast and Elmina by tourists from around the globe, then, is not part of an isolated trend. Nor are members of the African Diaspora the only ones going to visit. Rather, Cape Coast and Elmina are frequented by Ghanaians, different groups of people from the African continent, and others still from around the world. This makes for an interesting mix of descendants of slave traders, both African and white European, and descendants of slaves at these popular yet controversial sites. Converging in the space of the monuments then are the contested memories of the significance of the place, different perspectives on which histories should be most emphasized, and which cultural group lays claim to them.

In other words, such sites become important battlegrounds for what I call symbolic possession of the past, that is, claiming the memory of a historic event by one social group or another. Symbolic possession of the past concerns a group’s willingness to take responsibility for its past, to (re)claim a particular slice of history that defines who they are. As victims of traumatic histories struggle to possess the sites and symbols of the past, they begin to acquire the sense of agency to shape dominant narratives and to police their history, making sure that its significance is never forgotten. Because exercising symbolic possession of the past repeatedly affirms the existence of the group, this action constantly validates the identity of the members of the group. Understanding contests for symbolic possession of the past, then, can help us understand our attachment to (or disavowal of) lost or painful histories.

At the historic castle/dungeons of Cape Coast and Elmina, the struggle for symbolic possession of the past unfolds among visitors, who draw battle lines along ethnic, racial, national, gender, and class divides. Furthermore, the battle for symbolic possession of the past involves government officials and museum professionals, for it is at the center of the controversy over how these sites are treated as memorials (or not) and whose and what memories are represented there for tourist consumption. As I learned on my journey, no one group controls the symbolic possession of these monuments. Rather there exists an often contentious joint partnership, one that is fluid, shifting between many different interests, different features of the sites, different pasts. Wright’s questions to himself before embarking on his trip to the Gold Coast laid out the complexity of the dilemma at hand: “Perhaps some Englishman, Scotsman, Frenchman, Swede, or Dutchman had chained my great-great-great-great-grandfather in the hold of a slave ship; and perhaps that remote grandfather had been sold on an auction block in New Orleans, Richmond, or Atlanta . . . My emotions seemed to be touching a dark and dank wall . . . But, am I African? Had some of my ancestors sold their relatives to white men? What would my feelings be when I looked into the black face of an African, feeling that maybe his great-great-great-great grandfather had sold my great-great great grandfather into slavery?” (4). Such questions still haunt today’s African Diaspora tourists, nearly four decades later.

The Price of the Ticket
Upon entering the monuments of Cape Coast or Elmina, visitors first become aware of themselves as a particular type of tourist–Ghanaian national or non-Ghanaian national–based on the price of the admission ticket. Non-Ghanaian nationals pay ten times more than Ghanaian nationals: ten thousand cedis (approximately four dollars) instead of one thousand cedis (approximately forty cents). Officials of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) defend this pricing structure, which discriminates based on class and national belonging, as necessary to support the maintenance and upkeep of the monuments, a strategy not uncommon to nascent tourist economies in other developing countries. At one thousand cedis, a visit to Cape Coast or Elmina is within reach of many Ghanaians, enabling them to participate in the development of the tourist economy, while lending support to the monuments’national importance. The GMMB spokesmen assert that tourists coming from as far away as New York City or Auckland can afford to pay ten times more than the admission price paid by Ghanaians.

Many non-Ghanaian nationals, especially those from the African Diaspora, expressed great dissatisfaction with the admissions fees at Cape Coast and Elmina. Simply put, they felt that it was unfair that they should have to pay more. Indeed, many African Americans and blacks from the diaspora assert that their historical relationship to the monuments in Ghana is the overriding difference. For them, the monuments are distinctive sites that they journey to in search of some aspect of their identity, a clue that will unlock the mystery of their past, something that will connect them to their ancestors. Many African Americans claim that it is hard enough for them make the pilgrimage to redeem this part of their history, to “come home” and to pay homage to their ancestors, without feeling doubly wounded by the unequal admission prices. During her visit to Cape Coast Castle in 1998, Farah Jasmine Griffin, who teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, asked, “Why do Africans in the diaspora have to pay so much more when our ancestors were held captive here?” As descendants of enslaved Africans then, coming (home) to reconnect with their lost ancestors, many members of the African Diaspora claim a privileged status. Moreover, some reason that if they are making such a homecoming, why should they have to pay anything whatsoever to enter? Why aren’t they welcomed home with open arms and regarded, as Richard Wright wondered, as “lost brother[s] who had returned?” (4).

This question illuminates the very problem. African Americans have certain expectations when they go “back” to visit a place that has come to stand for the homeland of their ancestors. In Ghana, they feel a definite connection not only to the people and the land, but to the dungeons, those bold, physical markers of the past. Ghanaians, on the other hand, do not necessarily appreciate African Americans’ symbolic relationship to the castle/dungeons, their need to cling to something there that may explain their African heritage and anchor their sense of belonging in the world. Some Ghanaians point to a certain lack of specificity when blacks from the diaspora claim Ghana as their ancestral home. They wonder, why Ghana, and not another West African country? Why not Nigeria, Gambia, Angola, or Senegal, for example?

As such questions remind us, Ghanaians and African Americans have understood the histories of slavery and the slave trade in very distinct ways, from opposite sides of the Atlantic. And, perhaps, from opposite sides of the coin of memory. If African Americans long to remember, many Ghanians need to forget. Perhaps one of the few ways that the people who remained in present-day Ghana managed to survive the trauma of the slave trade was to suppress the memory of how it forever transformed their culture, society, land, and people. They had to forget in order to survive, to move on, and to build a new identity. They had to forget the wrongs that were perpetrated against them by white Europeans and Americans, as well as their own forefathers. Many Ghanaians I asked about this responded, “Four hundred years is enough”–enough talking about it, enough shame, enough painful memories. In contrast, most African American visitors to Ghana believe that the very act of visiting the castle/dungeons demonstrates a certain responsibility for their history, a reclaiming of the past. While many remain perplexed by the cost of admission at Cape Coast and Elmina, others see this relatively nominal fee as the small price they have to pay in order to help preserve the monuments for generations to come. Seen as a charitable donation, their contributions play the double role of honoring the memory of their ancestors while supporting the livelihood of their Ghanaian brothers and sisters. This ongoing debate is an example of how symbolic possession of the past shapes the present with such a seemingly petty thing as the price of a ticket, even when the top price is only four dollars.

What’s in a Name, I
African Americans and black people from the diaspora often have great expectations for their first visit to Africa. Whether the destination is Ghana, Kenya, or Nigeria, visitors’ hopes are connected to their desire to answer questions about their ancestry. Wright, when reflecting upon the prospect of going to Africa for the first time, gave the question of homecoming serious thought: “Africa! Being of African descent, would I be able to feel and know something about Africa on the basis of a common ‘racial’ heritage? . . . Or had three hundred years imposed a psychological distance between me and the ‘racial stock’ from which I had sprung? . . . Was there something in Africa that my feelings could latch onto to make all of this dark past clear and meaningful? Would the Africans regard me as a lost brother who had returned?” (4). Unfortunately for Wright, the answer to his last question would be no. Dressed neatly in a khaki safari outfit, sun hat, sunglasses, and camera, Wright was regarded as Western and wholly foreign by most of the people that he met in the Gold Coast.

Today, the same holds true for many African Americans and black people from the diaspora who travel to Ghana in search of their roots. What these twenty-first century pilgrims believe to be a return “home” is exposed as a mere tourist excursion upon their arrival. Regardless of skin color or manner of dress, black people from the diaspora are considered just as foreign as the average tourist from Asia, Europe, or the Americas. To Ghanaians, the tourists–black and white alike–are obruni, a term that carries the double-edged meaning of both “white man” and “foreigner.” Whether they hear the term when they go to purchase a bottle of water from a street vendor, or as they are confronted by the sea of small children who huddle outside of the monuments at Cape Coast and Elmina asking for American money and addresses, diaspora blacks can’t help being unnerved by the irony of this innocent name.

What’s in a Name, II
The original name for Elmina, Saõ Jorge da Mina, pays tribute to the patron saint of Portugal, St. George, and harks back to its initial function as a fortified trading post within close proximity of the gold mines near the Prah River in present-day Ghana. Built in 1482 by Portuguese soldiers, masons, and carpenters, it remains the oldest and largest colonial structure in sub-Saharan Africa, and one of the world’s important medieval castles. Even Richard Wright was seduced by its mere presence: “I reached Elmina just as the sun was setting and its long red rays lit the awe-inspiring battlements of the castle with a somber but resplendent majesty. It is by far the most impressive castle or fort on the Atlantic shore of the Gold Coast” (383). Elmina had to be both immense and imposing. Impenetrable even (fig. 3).

 

 

With the reluctant permission of the local village chief, Elmina was built into the rocky coastline on a narrow peninsula where the Benya River meets the Gulf of Guinea. Underground storerooms and dungeons were carved out of the stone. These were used for Portuguese trade goods, such as linen, brass manilas, and earthenware, and for the local resources received in exchange: first gold, salt, and ivory, and then human beings.

Elmina’s strategic location was a reminder for rival European nations, who were vying to break the Portuguese monopoly over the vast new supplies of gold, and for the local inhabitants, who weren’t altogether happy with the presence of a foreign stronghold in their midst. The site long since had been the center of commerce for a small fishing village, split geographically by the Benya Lagoon and politically between the Eguafo and Efutu States. By sea, Elmina was sheltered by the treacherous, rocky coastline. By land, approximately three hundred feet away as the crow flies, a steep hill, perfect for keeping watch, provided additional protection. On top of this hill, the Portuguese built a church in 1503, from which missionaries converted and baptized the local villagers, including the paramount chief (fig. 4).

 

 

Destroyed in battles with the Dutch by the end of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese church was later rebuilt in a courtyard within the fortified walls of Elmina Castle, where it was surrounded on three sides by cavernous dungeons that held African men bound for slave ships (fig. 5).

 

 

After the Dutch finally seized Elmina in 1637, it was expanded to include a Dutch chapel. The Portuguese church became an auction gallery and later, an officer’s mess hall. After nearly 150 years of maintaining colonial headquarters at Elmina, the Dutch relinquished the castle to the British in 1872, who turned it over to the newly independent Ghanaian government of Kwame Nkrumah in 1957.

On a clear day, it is possible to see Elmina from Cape Coast Castle, located just a few miles to the east. Cape Coast began as a Portuguese trading lodge in 1555. Strategically situated on a rocky promontory with an adjacent natural harbor, it was called Cabo Corso, or short cape, by the Portuguese. For nearly one hundred years, rival European nations fought for control of Cape Coast until 1653, when the Swedish signed a treaty with the Efutu paramount chief to build a permanent structure named after King Charles X of Sweden. Over the next decade, more skirmishes ensued between the Dutch, the Efutu chief, and the Danish. But the final European power to take the fort would be the British, who captured it in 1665 and named it Cape Coast (fig. 6).

 

 

The British were quick to make significant reinforcements to Cape Coast, increasing both its size and strength to compete with the headquarters of the Dutch West India Company just a few miles away at Elmina Castle. The architectural improvements greatly enhanced the total surface area of the castle to include additional officers’ barracks, trading rooms, underground cisterns, more cannon, and taller battlements. Not only did the British hope to remain in control of this strategically positioned fort, they also aimed to establish a dominant presence on the West African coast. By enclosing virtually all the necessities of a small city within the walls of the expanded Cape Coast Castle, the British protected themselves against attacks from local and European enemies, and efficiently refined the business of the slave trade through what an economist might call vertical integration. Cape Coast remained a central conduit for the extremely high volume of British slave trafficking until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Beginning in the mid-1820s, Cape Coast served primarily as an administrative headquarters, first over British forts in West Africa and then as the initial seat of government for the British Gold Coast Colony in 1872. Cape Coast Castle remained under British colonial rule until Ghanaian independence in 1957.

According to the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, there are only three structures designated as castles among the sixty colonial forts that remain on Ghana’s coast: Elmina, Cape Coast, and Christianborg. Of the three, Cape Coast and Elmina are the most popular with present-day tourists. By default, Christianborg is virtually off limits to tourists and photography because it houses the Ghanaian head of state. Of Danish origin, Christianborg was built in 1661 at Osu in the capital city of Accra. As a fortified structure that once held African captives in a complex matrix of dungeons, it might seem a bit odd that Christianborg Castle is now home to the president of Ghana. But equally perplexing for today’s roots tourist is the very term “castle.”

The word castle dates from before the twelfth century. From the Latin castellum or fortress, a diminutive of castrum, meaning fortified place, the word castle signifies “a large fortified building or set of buildings.” Over the past three hundred years, Christianborg, Elmina, and Cape Coast have been classified as castles for their style of architecture, their sheer size, and their function. Distinguished from the more numerous but smaller forts, the castles have a larger surface area, a more intricate complex of connecting structures, and the ability to house a large number of people. Yet the word rings oddly in many visitors’ ears. African Americans and many blacks from the diaspora feel that calling Cape Coast and Elmina by the name “castle” elides the history of the dungeons beneath these places and with it, their ancestors’ experiences. With such a name, they say the stories of their forebears get lost. In their place, fairytale notions of European architectural grandeur associated with a popular understanding of the term “castle,” sugarcoat the fact that enslaved Africans, possibly their ancestors, were held captive there.

Just as they reject the label “castle” to describe sites like Elmina and Cape Coast, some members of the African Diaspora also disagree with the renovation efforts being made in the name of historic preservation. They feel that the renovations privilege high architecture and transform the castles into “make believe” places. One visitor plainly stated, “It is horrible to watch this dungeon being turned into a Walt Disney castle!” referring to coats of fresh white paint on the bastions, the addition of potted plants and flowers at the entrance, and the effort to clean and paint the inside of the dungeons. The double-edged phrase, “Stop white washing our history!” appears frequently in the visitor comment books at Cape Coast and Elmina. Instead of the regular program of painting, upkeep, and renovation, some feel that these monuments should be left alone to crumble and fall into the sea (fig. 7).

 

 

Other African Americans have recommended that the word “dungeons” be added to the official name of Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle. Their suggestion seeks to recognize the memory of the millions who were held captive there. But considering the GMMB’s marketing efforts aimed at international tourism, a name like Cape Coast Castle and Dungeons might not be so good for business.

Performing Memory, Performing Race, Performing Identity
Upon entering Cape Coast or Elmina, visitors are invited to see and participate in layered and nuanced performances of remembrance. First, they become aware of themselves as a particular type of tourist–as Ghanaian nationals or non-Ghanaian nationals–based on the price of the admission ticket. Then, as if to prepare visitors for the horror of the dungeons, to soften the emotional blow that they are about to experience, they are directed to visit a museum before going on a guided tour of the castle.

In order to reach the museum at Cape Coast Castle, visitors must walk across an expansive, cobblestone courtyard that opens out to the sea. The museum is located on the second floor in cool, darkened rooms that formerly engaged the business of the slave trade and the administration of the British Gold Coast Colony. Upon entering the museum, most visitors experience momentary blindness as their eyes become accustomed to the sharp transition from brightness to darkness. Outside, pure, equatorial sunlight reflects off the whitewashed exterior of the castle and the crashing sea, providing a high contrast with the simulated museum environment lit in deliberately low lumens in order to protect the artifacts on display. Other contrasts of light and dark are found throughout the tour of the castle, most obviously between the gloom of the dungeons and the intensity of the sun in exterior spaces–or metaphorically, between blacks and whites (fig. 8).

 

 

According to the curators, the museum’s exhibition, Crossroads of a People, Crossroads of Trade, “examines more than 500 years of Ghana’s history, placing the castle within its broad economic, political, and historical contexts, including the legacy of the slave trade. It also offers a glimpse into the life today and the rich cultural heritage of the Central Region.” The exhibition was developed in 1994 in close consultation with North American advisors, designers, curators, and historians, as well as local and national scholars, chiefs, and archeologists. Crossroads begins with the pre-colonial history of the Central Region of Ghana, using artifacts, such as gold weights and measuring scales, stone implements for hunting, and terracotta figurines. The coming of the Europeans is represented by large blowups of European engravings that depict West African scenes or West African/European contact. The development of the slave trade is told through maps of the trade routes, engravings of the coffle marching through the hinterlands, and examples of the artifacts of barter and exchange–glass beads, pottery, whiskey bottles, and firearms. Midway through the exhibition, visitors pass through a dark, wood-paneled space meant to represent the hold of the slave ships in which captive Africans were forcibly transported to the New World. Walking through this cramped, minimally designed space, visitors are confronted with a heap of heavy rope from a ship, a pair of shackles connected to chains, and other iron restraint devices, which are fastened to the raw hewn wooden walls. One section of the wall has rough, wooden planks meant to resemble the narrow decks on which enslaved men, women, and children were closely confined. There is also a large black-and-white print of the slave ship icon and two popular nineteenth-century engravings of captives onboard a slave ship. Overhead, a wooden grate simulates the hatch that would have brought in fresh air from the ship’s upper deck (fig. 9).

 

 

Equipped with artifacts, illustrations, and a faint musty smell, this fabricated, transitional space is obviously meant to impress upon the visitor’s imagination the horror of the Middle Passage. Similar installations replicating the hold of a slave ship have been utilized by museum professionals in England and the United States, often to great effect. But here, ironically, such an installation fails to have the same impact because the main attractions–the physical edifice of the castle and slave dungeons–are themselves so real and tangible that they need no theatrical accompaniments. They provide the “authentic” experience.

Upon exiting the “hold,” the visitor is thrust immediately upon a simulated auction block in the Southern United States. The transition is abrupt, and not without impact. The next room summarizes the trials and achievements of New World blacks, using black-and-white photographs or engravings of notable people. These images visualize moments of African Diaspora history in the Caribbean and North America, from the Haitian Revolution to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. There are familiar portraits of people like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis, and Bob Marley. Although many of these people are well known in Ghana and around the world today, this part of the exhibition has a distinctly American and mostly masculine feeling. The last part of the exhibit describes the contemporary cultural history of Ghana and the Central Region using examples of local crafts, including brightly colored cloths and carved wooden utensils and musical instruments. With a mood that is upbeat and exuding vitality, this closing section ends with explanations of local and national traditions, economy, politics, and agriculture.

The museum at Elmina is much smaller and less sophisticated, and its focus on local history instead of larger history of the slave trade gives it special charm for many tourists. It is located on the first floor of the former Portuguese church, a squat red-brick building that dominates the central courtyard. The exhibit, Images of Elmina across the Centuries, charts the history of the village of Elmina from pre-colonial times to the present. Opened in 1996, the exhibition was organized by the GMMB in conjunction with the same group of American consultants that advised the Cape Coast design team. Using little in the way of complex design or theatrical installations, the Elmina exhibit effectively employs two-dimensional illustrative materials–mostly prints, photographs, and text–on large folding panels to relate an intimate local history. At the museums at Cape Coast and Elmina, the influence of Western consultants is notable in the design, layout, and type of art and artifacts selected to relate the histories.

After visitors take in the exhibitions at either Cape Coast or Elmina, they go to meet a tour guide in the courtyard. Each tour guide leads a group of about twenty people, which usually ends up being racially and ethnically diverse as well as international in character. Diversity doesn’t mean harmony, however. Indeed, some members of such mixed tour groups complain of being singled out by other visitors in their groups for derogatory comments. An American tourist from Connecticut briefly described his experience during an Elmina Castle tour in the site’s logbook: “Very impressive castle. Tour was very good. Great views toward the city, beach and ocean. One concern–a man during the tour was distracting an[d] I felt offended by his anti-white sentiments, as he kept saying, ‘white people this . . .’ I couldn’t understand exactly, but he should respect other people more who are trying to follow the tour guide. Overall, I enjoyed my visit here.” A Ghanaian member of the same tour group added, “[I]t should be strictly forbidden for visitors in the group to keep making offensive comments which directly or indirectly concern individuals in the group.”

Organized tour groups often request to have their own guide. These groups are usually more homogeneous, either racially, or by their affiliation with schools, churches, or missionary organizations. Often, organized groups of African American tourists ask that no white people accompany their tour. One African American visitor to Cape Coast suggested, “White visitors should come on different days than the black visitors.” In addition, some African American groups request that no white people be present when they go to the dungeons for the first time, explaining that they don’t want to experience the pain of their ancestors with a descendant of the oppressor present. One African American visitor to Cape Coast expressed his feelings of “rage and hostility towards the Dutch and Portuguese”–past and present–after going on the tour.

The guided tours at both Cape Coast and Elmina focus on the points of pain and suffering, and of strength and resistance, to lend a sense of authenticity to the historical and contemporary significance of the sites. Indeed, the notion of authenticity is central to the allure of cultural heritage tourism as an industry. In their efforts to show “how it really was,” the principal highlights of the castle tours dramatize key features that offer up a notion of life as it was once experienced there. Thus, visitors learn about how enslaved women were raped by European traders, governors, and officers and about the types of torture inflicted upon defiant captives. They also sense the ironic presence of the church inside the castle, and the dramatic contrast between the spacious governors’ and officers’ quarters on the upper levels and the stench and horror of the underground dungeons. Perhaps most disturbing, and in this sense most authentic, is the visitor’s final glimpse of the “Door of No Return,” from which enslaved Africans were led to awaiting ships, never to come back.

Most, if not all of the rooms that tourists pass through are empty. The churches have no pews. Nor are the governors’ or officers’ quarters decorated with period furniture. This means that visitors have to imagine what it might have been like to live in these spaces. One visitor at Cape Coast demanded: “Please authenticate the Governor’s residence to look exactly the way it was then. I think that will make the necessary contrast with the dungeons.” When I visited Cape Coast Castle, restorations to the governor’s quarters, which were scheduled to include arrangements of furniture and decorations from the colonial period, had begun. At Elmina, there was talk of restoring the two tower prisons on top of the seaward bastions in which the Asantehene or king of Ashanti, Prempeh I, and his royal family were held by the British for four years at the end of the nineteenth century. These restorations would likely aim to give a sense of Ashanti culture, in particular of the way in which a turn-of-the-century royal Asantehene lived. Such a restoration, focusing on the history of a known national figure, would provide a powerful contrast to the better-known stories of the colonial officials who occupied the second-story living quarters. It’s relatively easy to imagine how to restore the quarters of the colonial and local elites.

But how might the dungeons be “authenticated”? A visitor to Elmina had one possible solution: “Renovate with models of slaves, sound effects, [and] smells to give authenticity and real feel for what it was like for our ancestors.” But might such a renovation go too far? How would the curators and designers choose the models to represent the slaves? Would they opt for wax figures of the type seen at natural history museums or at the popular international tourist attraction, Madame Tussaud’s? Or might they use actual people to make the body casts? This was the case at the Museum of African American History in Detroit, where city residents were used as models for the life-sized figures of fifty shackled youths, cast in bronze. Until recently, these figures were part of a central exhibit about the Middle Passage, now being demolished due to its lack of popularity with visitors. Some of the restorative changes to the female dungeons at Elmina aim at the kind of authentication the visitors’ logbooks call for, especially the new metal bars that were placed in the arched window openings (fig. 10).

 

 

But the fresh coats of white paint inside of some of the male dungeons have left many visitors in a state of outrage. As one person commented, “The Jews would not paint the ovens in Germany!” What is more, when one of the male dungeons at Elmina was remodeled into a gift shop, so many visitors complained about it that it was eventually dismantled and moved to an outer service area across from the castle restaurant. They felt that the presence of a gift shop in a former dungeon not only trivialized, but also erased the memory of those who were once held prisoner there. Moreover the bitter irony of a dungeon-cum-gift shop drew attention to the consumer side of the monuments as tourist attractions.

But the deepest sense of irony becomes clear when we consider the way in which the monuments are packaged and marketed for global tourism, especially for cultural heritage tourism. Here, the thing that is being sold (back) to the tourist is the memory of their ancestors: the now-absent black bodies that become part of the allure of these monuments. It is an irony some visitors to the castles have complained about. As one person put it, “Don’t turn our memories into a tourist attraction.” In the current age of global tourism, memory itself becomes a commodity–a thing to be bought, sold, and traded.

At Cape Coast Castle, a different type of authentication takes place inside the male dungeons. A large altar to the local god, Nana Tabir, has been erected in front of the blocked entranceway to an old tunnel leading to the Door of No Return. One of the oldest gods of Cape Coast, Nana Tabir was known to protect the local fishermen as well as the traders who met in Cape Coast Castle. The god took the form of a sacred rock, the very rock from which the dungeons were carved during the late seventeenth century. The present shrine to Nana Tabir was erected by the chief of Cape Coast, Nana Kwesi Atta, to replace the one that was there prior to the construction of the dungeons and castle. The altar is decorated with candles, flowers, fruits, notes, and monetary offerings from visitors. It is attended by a local priest, who will say a prayer to Nana Tabir in exchange for a donation.

There have been mixed reactions to the presence of the altar deep within the cavernous male dungeon. Some feel that the monetary donations, often urged by the tour guide, have made the dungeon commercial. Others, including local Christians, dismiss it as simple idolatry, while local believers in the panoply of household and state gods feel their beliefs are given notice at Cape Coast Castle. Yet many black people from the diaspora find the presence of the altar comforting. It is a place where they can bring offerings to their lost ancestors. For them, it takes on a different, double meaning, serving as an altar to Nan Tabir as well as a shrine to the people once enslaved there.

Elsewhere, the dungeons are left hauntingly bare, with the exception of the wreaths, flowers, notes, and burning candles left on a daily basis by visitors. And most people seem to prefer the dungeons that way. They feel that the emptiness best signifies the absence of the many millions gone. For them, empty is the only authentic way for the dungeons to be represented. Visitors regularly choose the emptiness of the dungeons to perform rituals of tribute and commemoration. Some burn incense there. Others weep, almost incessantly. Some groups recite poetry, sing songs, or pray together. What sound effects could compete with the cries, shrieks, chants, prayers, and songs of today’s visitors? What could be more “authentic”?

Photographic Memories
At the castles, visitors are permitted to take photographs free of charge. Throughout the tour, guests are constantly seen taking pictures of the historical points of interest, members of their group, or details of architectural or aesthetic import. Often, they choose the most picturesque vistas to make their photographs. At Elmina, the most popular places for taking pictures include the courtyard with the view of the Portuguese church, the northeast bastion with views of Fort St. Jago and the fishing village of Elmina, and the front entrance with the medieval drawbridge (fig. 11).

 

 

At Cape Coast, the most photographed spot is the balustrade walkway lined with cannon, which boasts a dramatic view of the ocean. The irony of the visitors’ fascination with taking photographs at these monuments is echoed in the sentiment of one tourist who noted, “The disparity between the horrific history of the castle and the natural and physical beauty of the seashore is a difficult mix for the present day visitor.” Seemingly attracted by the “physical beauty” alone, some visitors come with sophisticated view cameras, tripods, and black-and-white film to make “art” photographs of the castles and the surrounding environment. In fact, many fashion photographers have chosen the castles as stylish backdrops for their glossy magazine work (fig. 12).

 

 

In a strange way, then, the horror of these monuments becomes aestheticized in the act of making photographs. Even Richard Wright was taken by the hypnotizing beauty of Elmina: “Towers rise two hundred feet in the air. What spacious dreams! What august faith! How elegantly laid-out the castle is! What bold plunging lines! What, yes, taste” (384). Wright’s own photographs of Elmina emphasized the symmetry of the walls. It is significant that most people do not return to the dungeons to make photographs, nor do they take many pictures there at all. Perhaps this is in reverence to “the ancestors,” or for more practical reasons, such as the lack of sufficient light. The bright flashes needed to get a decent photograph in the darkness of the dungeons would not only disturb the somber mood for other visitors, but would surely ruin the “authentic” gloom cast by the deep shadows (fig. 13).

 

 

Without a doubt, snapping photographs has become a required part of the tourist experience. But, in the case of roots tourism, it has a special commemorative function, a different familial appeal. As roots tourists gather in front of the cannon at Cape Coast Castle or the Portuguese Church at Elmina, they are consciously participating in an act of remembrance–symbolically taking possession of the past. Their photographs are evidence of a return to the ancestral homeland, of the buildings that still stand as a reminder of the birth of the African Diaspora in the transatlantic slave trade. Back home, they share their snapshots with family and friends as proof of having been there, of having walked through the Door of No Return. Of having “returned home,” and then returned home.

In fact, the Door of No Return is one of the popular–almost required–sites that roots tourists choose to record on film (fig. 14).

 

 

At Cape Coast Castle, the Door of No Return is located at the base of the central courtyard, just beyond the female dungeons. The enormous arched doorway encloses two impressive black doors. At the top of the doorframe, a standard GMMB sign labels the door in neat white letters, “DOOR OF NO RETURN,” marking it as a site of special interest. At Cape Coast Castle, the Door of No Return is often the last stop on the guided tour, a climactic moment where visitors watch in quiet anticipation as the guide opens the door to reveal the expanse of angry sea where enslaved Africans would have been led to awaiting ships. After the group walks across the threshold to the beach, the guide points out other places of interest that lie outside the castle walls. Meanwhile, local children, who know to wait for the opening of the door, try to engage tourists in conversation or ask for money. Some groups of cultural heritage tourists choose this spot for pouring libations to ancestors.

Finally, as the guide motions to the group that it is time to go back inside, he points out a relatively new sign above the door, visible from the outside upon reentry. In the now-recognizable neat white lettering, it reads, “DOOR OF RETURN” (fig. 15).

 

 

Placed there as a gesture of reconciliation, the guide explains that is meant to welcome back the thousands of African Diaspora tourists who flock to the monuments each year.

But is such a return really possible? Think about it. What does it mean to rename the infamous DOOR OF NO RETURN, the DOOR OF RETURN? Is the sign simply a marketing tool aimed at the African Diaspora segment of the tourist industry? Does such an act signify an attempt to erase the brutal history of the castles and the dungeons beneath them? Does it mean that time–four hundred years–has healed the wounds? Is it asking us to forget and move on?

Choosing the Perfect Souvenir
Before leaving, most visitors stop by the gift shop to purchase post cards, tourist art, textiles, jewelry, carved wooden sculpture and T-shirts. Some of the T-shirts bear slogans echoing pressing issues of debate for black Americans, such as reparations for slavery. One T-shirt for sale read: front, “Back to our heritage, Elmina Castle, 1482,” with an illustration of the castle; and back, “Damn right! Our people worked for 400 years without a paycheck. Reparations are due!” One of the popular books sold in the gift shop is Castles & Forts of Ghana, written by prominent Ghanaian archeologist, Kwesi J. Anquandah and illustrated with seductive color photographs by Thierry Secretan. Published by the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, the book has the strange feeling of being part colonial/architectural history, part travel brochure. With photographs of whitewashed forts drenched in the pink light of sunset, it succeeds in glamorizing the forts, making them a desirable tourist destination. Moreover, like the renamed Door of Return at Cape Coast Castle, this book seems to be targeted towards the returning African Diaspora. Even the souvenirs that visitors choose to purchase are telling indicators of their own need to symbolically possess the past.

Upon leaving, visitors are invited to list their nationalities, names, and addresses and to write their impressions of the tour and the castle in comment books placed on the podium just by the entrance. The comment books serve as a census of visitors and their impressions. They help site administrators, curators, and the GMMB gauge visitors’ approval of the job they are doing. At the same time, the comment books often satisfy visitors’ needs to express their feelings after cathartic experiences in the dungeons. Writing about their experiences helps them to begin the process of making sense of their visit. The comments left in these books form a continuing dialogue, one that is often played out over days, weeks, and months as successive visitors respond to the comments of those that came before them. While seemingly an innocent gesture on the part of the GMMB to document its visitors, the comment books are the place of many discussions about race, history, politics, and commemoration. It is here that the visitors’ final performances of remembrance, race, and identity are recorded.

No Place Like Home
The castles and forts of Ghana always have been sites of African/European contact and centers of cultural exchange. While their fundamental role in facilitating the slave trade is undeniable, it is important to bear in mind that they also served many different purposes, often simultaneously. During the period of the slave trade, Cape Coast Castle served as defense against rival competitors, a prison for the enslaved, a residence for foreign workers and visitors, a trading hall, a warehouse, a court of mediation, a dining hall, a place of worship, a missionary school, and a meeting place for local and foreign dignitaries. Thus, in one way or another, priests, slaves, doctors, carpenters, servants, traders, cooks, kings, and schoolchildren might have interacted with each other and occupied the same space.

The castles and forts developed a symbiotic relationship with the towns that grew around them, relying upon them for their work forces, housing stock, food production, and natural resources. Moreover, in response to the needs of local, national, or international interests, these buildings were continually adapted and converted to different uses. Likewise, the local economy shifted and changed. Today, the castles and the cities that surround them remain almost inseparable–spiritually, economically, and intrinsically. In the case of Cape Coast and Elmina, they share the same name; they thrive off of one another and it has long been that way. For nearly thirty years, the castles have been steadily renovated to prepare for their latest incarnation, as World Heritage Monuments. Following suit, the towns around them have shifted their economies towards tourism, with the construction of world class hotels and resorts, the preservation and restoration of historic architecture, the opening of new restaurants, the development of walking tours, a new international performing arts festival–Panafest–in 1992, and the improvement of roads and infrastructure. The castles indeed forge a sense of community, albeit one filled with contradictions.

Until recently, local inhabitants understood the historical function of these buildings to be fluid and constantly changing. But since the forts and castles were designated as World Heritage Monuments–a term that requires that they be preserved and conserved for the understanding of future generations of the international community–the multiplicity of meanings and uses that they once shared has dwindled. Designated as World Heritage Monuments, the forts and castles are marketed to tourists as memorials to the victims of the slave trade.

Many African American visitors to the Cape Coast and Elmina see these sites as tangible and necessary memorials, some of the very few places where physical evidence of their heritage can be seen, touched, walked through, and experienced with all of their physical senses. For them, having a physical place to link to their bodies–to the way they imagine the past–is the primary reason for their visit. There is something about the significance of a place for people who cannot trace their ancestry specifically, but know that their people at one time came from that place, passed through its doors, suffocated in the stench of its dungeons, were raped in the governors’ quarters, and carried across the still-turbulent sea just outside the Door of (No) Return. These pilgrims, by “returning” to, or making recuperative homages to the dungeons, are staking a claim for their history, symbolically taking possession of their past. Their individual acts of performing memory–walking through the dungeons, leaving memorials, lighting candles, saying prayers, taking photographs, and writing about their experiences in the visitor comment books–leave physical evidence of their visits to these monumental memorials (fig. 16).

 

 

Their individual acts of remembrance and interaction with others like or unlike them speak to the power that physical places have for the articulation of memory and identity.

Further Reading:

The remarks by Richard Wright can be found in his Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954; reprint, New York, 1995); the comment by my sister, Lisa Lennon, was made in a personal communication, May 1999; opinions of the GMMB regarding the development of tourism at the forts and castles, the attitudes of Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian visitors, and the various restoration and renovation projects were obtained in interviews with Nana Ocran, director of education, Cape Coast Castle; Stephen Korsah, tour guide, Elmina Castle; and Gina Haney, US/ICOMOS, August 1999. Opinions of tourists were obtained in interviews conducted in August 1999 or from the visitor comment books. The viewpoints of people living in Cape Coast, Elmina, and other neighboring villages regarding the castles, forts, and tourism were obtained in interviews in August 1999. The comment by Farah Jasmine Griffin was obtained from the visitor comment book and in a personal communication, April 21, 2001. For aspects of architectural and cultural history of the forts and castles see, for example, Kwesi J. Anquandah, Castles & Forts of Ghana (Accra, 1999); Albert van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana (1980; reprint, Accra, 1998); and J. Erskine Graham Jr., Cape Coast In History (Cape Coast, 1994). For a general history of Ghana, see for example, F. Buah, A History of Ghana (New York, 1980) and F. Agbodeka, An Economic History of Ghana (Accra, 1992). For a general history of the slave trade see, for example, James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York, 1981); Philip D. Curtin Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisc., 1969); Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760-1810. For Dolores Hayden’s comment regarding place memory, see her Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). For more on cultural heritage tourism, see James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Edward M. Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Maasi on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa,” Cultural Anthropology 9:435-70; Chris Rojek and John Urry, Touring Cultures: Transformation of Travel and Theory (London, 1997); and Edward M. Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 2 (1996): 290-304.

Acknowledgements:

For generously funding the field research for this project, I would like to acknowledge the following entities at Yale University: the History of Art Department (Lehman Traveling Fellowship), the John F. Enders Research Fellowship, the Pew Program in Religion and American History, and the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics. For contributing their hospitality, wisdom, and helpful comments, I would like to thank the following individuals: Professor Kellie Jones, Professor Laura Wexler, Kofi Blankson, Paa Kwesi Ocancey, Rosamund H. Arkorful, Grace Amonoo, Sara Asafu Adjaye, Zelda Cheatle, Michael Birt, Nana Ocran, Stephen Korsah, Gina Haney, and Mwenda, Japhiyah and Menefese Kudumu-Clavell. Finally, I would like to offer my deepest appreciation to Robert Forbes, executive coordinator of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, for recommending me to Common-place.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

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Cheryl Finley writes about photography and African American Art. She is completing her dissertation, entitled “Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination,” in the departments of African American studies and history of art at Yale University. She is co-author of From Swing to Soul: An Illustrated History of African American Popular Music from 1930 to 1960 (Washington, D.C., 1994) and author of Berenice Abbott (East Rutherford, N.J. 1988). In January 2002, she will join the faculty of Wellesley College.

Hillary Clinton’s opponents really need to hold her to her claims about her experience, and make sure she owns up to the Clinton administration policies, and other stuff, that she really was instrumental in putting forward. For instance, we have some new evidence for what I said earlier about NAFTA:

First lady records show Clinton promoted NAFTA

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton now argues that the North American Free Trade Agreement needs to be renegotiated, but newly released records showed Wednesday she promoted its passage.

The National Archives and the Clinton presidential library jointly released more than 11,000 pages of Clinton’s daily schedule as first lady from 1993 to 2001.

The release came in response to charges that she is overly secretive, and also allowed her campaign to promote her argument that she gained valuable White House experience during her years as first lady.

Clinton and Obama are battling to win Pennsylvania on April 22, the next contest in a closely fought campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to face Republican John McCain in the November election.

The documents clearly indicated that Clinton had a powerful role at the White House, frequently meeting foreign leaders and presiding over meetings. . . .

Read the rest here.

 

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

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Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.

Part I

On August 3, 1692, Elizur Keysar of Salem Town testified before the grand jury considering possible indictments of the Reverend George Burroughs of Wells, Maine, for witchcraft. Keysar, who believed that Burroughs was “the Cheife of all the persons accused for witchcraft, or the Ring Leader of them all,” described a “diabolicall apperition” he and his maidservant had seen on the evening of May 5, after he had conversed uneasily with Burroughs in a tavern then serving as the clergyman’s makeshift prison. Back in an unlighted room in his own house, Keysar told the grand jury, “I did see very strange things appeare in the Chimney, I suppose a dozen of them, which seemed to mee to be something like Jelly that used to be in the water, and quaver with a strainge Motion, and then quickly disappeared.” Next he saw a light up the chimney “aboute the bigness of my hand . . . which quivered & shaked.” As Keysar completed his statement to the jurors, another witness offered an unusual interjection. In the words of a court clerk, “Mercy Lewis also said that Mr Borroughs told her that he made lights in Mr Keyzers chimny.” (The crucial words “told her that” exist in a manuscript copy of the deposition only; they were omitted when the witchcraft documents were transcribed for publication.)

Mercy Lewis’s own sworn testimony to the grand jury that day disclosed that she “very well knew” George Burroughs; indeed, she indicated that she had lived with Burroughs and his family, surely as a maidservant, at some point in the past. Burroughs’s specter, she declared, had appeared to her twice in early May, torturing her and insisting that she sign a “new fashon book,” which he claimed she must have previously seen in his study. Mercy, though, refused the request, recognizing the volume as the devil’s book. She also reported that the malefic cleric had confessed bewitching other people and recruiting a Topsfield teenager, Abigail Hobbs, into the ranks of the witches.

 

In the oft-told tale of the Salem witchcraft trials, neither the nineteen-year-old maidservant Mercy Lewis nor her former master usually receives much attention. Abigail Williams, the eleven-year-old niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris (the Village pastor), and Ann Putnam Jr., the twelve-year-old daughter of a prominent Village family, have seemed to scholars and popularizers alike the most important of the afflicted accusers. Likewise, historians have concentrated on the large number of women charged with witchcraft, rather than the smaller though still substantial number of men so accused. Yet Elizur Keysar was just one of many contemporaries who thought that George Burroughs was the “Ring Leader” of the witches. So vast a conspiracy, many New Englanders concluded, could not be led by women. The witches’ most likely master was, instead, a minister, a well-educated man who could subvert God’s church from within.

And one of those best situated to uncover that man’s alliance with the devil was someone who “very well knew” him and had once lived with his family, maidservant though she was. Mercy Lewis’s addition to Elizar Keysar’s grand-jury testimony revealed her extraordinary eagerness to support the charges against her former master. In only a bare handful of other instances are similar unsolicited interjections preserved in the Salem records.

Who was Mercy Lewis, and why did she hate George Burroughs? And who, for that matter, was Burroughs? Both have primarily been known as residents of Salem Village–Lewis as the servant of Thomas and Ann Carr Putnam, parents of the afflicted Ann Jr., and Burroughs as a one-time and angrily dismissed pastor of the Village church. But in fact, Lewis and Burroughs knew each other so well not in the Village but in another time and place: in the 1670s and 1680s in the little town of Falmouth (now Portland), located on Casco Bay, Maine.

 

Mercy was born there about 1673. Her grandfather George Lewis had brought his wife and three children to Maine from England in the mid-1640s; four more children–including her father Philip–were born in America. For a time in the 1660s Philip Lewis lived on Hog Island in the bay, superintending the livestock herds of the Falmouth community, but whether his daughter Mercy was born on that island is unknown. In the mid-1670s, all Philip’s siblings and his parents owned farms in the Casco region.

George Burroughs, who was born in Virginia but raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts, attended Harvard as a member of the class of 1670. In 1674, when Mercy was still an infant, he moved his new wife and young child from Roxbury to Casco, where he began to minister to the small congregation of settlers, including the many members of the extended Lewis clan. Neither then nor later did Burroughs achieve ordination as the leader of a formally organized Puritan congregation. Consequently, at no time during his pastoral career could he baptize babies or administer the sacraments, although he could both preach and instruct children in religious precepts. In fact, he probably taught Mercy Lewis, who knew her Bible well.

Suspicions of Burroughs first surfaced in mid-April 1692, after Abigail Hobbs confessed that the devil had recruited her as a witch about four years earlier while her family, too, was living in Falmouth. Abigail did not initially name the minister as Satan’s agent, but about thirty-six hours after her confession, Ann Putnam Jr. did.

Thomas Putnam reported to the Salem magistrates, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, that on the evening of April 20 his daughter “was greviously [sic] affrighted and cried out oh dreadfull: dreadfull here is a minister com[e]: what are Ministers witches to[o]”? The specter tortured Ann while she carried on a dialogue with him. “It was a dreadfull thing,” she told the apparition, “that he which was a Minister that should teach children to feare God should com[e] to persuad[e] poor creatures to give their souls to the divill.” After repeatedly refusing to tell her who he was, the specter finally revealed his identity: “[H]e tould me that his name was George Burroughs and that he had had three wives: and that he had bewitched the Two first of them to death: and that he kiled . . . Mr Lawsons child because he went to the eastward with Sir Edmon and preached soe: to the souldiers and that he had bewitched a grate many souldiers to death at the eastward, when Sir Edmon was their [sic]. and that he had made Abigail Hobbs a witch and: severall witches more.” During the day on April 21, Abigail Williams also saw the specter of George Burroughs and conversed with it, but her vision lacked those elements of Ann’s that referred to “the eastward,” or Maine, nor did she mention Burroughs’s role as a teacher of children. Those omissions suggest that Ann Jr., but not Parris’s niece, had been talking to someone who knew the clergyman as a religious instructor, and who also knew a great deal about recent events in Maine–talking, in short, to the Putnams’ servant, Mercy Lewis.

What had happened “at the eastward,” and what valence did those events retain in Salem? The references in Ann Jr.’s vision cannot be understood without a brief discussion of happenings on the Maine frontier during the preceding four years. “Sir Edmon” was Sir Edmund Andros, the governor of the Dominion of New England from 1686 until he was ousted in the Massachusetts phase of the Glorious Revolution in April 1689. During the winter of 1688-89, Andros led a large militia force to Pemaquid, northeast of Casco Bay, in an attempt to quash a burgeoning conflict between the Wabanaki Indians and English settlers that had begun the previous August. Andros failed; and by 1692 Wabanaki victories in the struggle that has become known as King William’s War (called the Second Indian War in Maine) had led to the abandonment of Falmouth and all the other Anglo-American settlements north of Wells.

The “Mr. Lawson” whose child Burroughs had reputedly killed was the Reverend Deodat Lawson, Burroughs’s immediate successor as minister in Salem Village. Lawson had served as the chaplain to Andros’s troops at Pemaquid; his first wife and child both died at about that time (evidently during his absence). Others too later repeated Ann’s charge that Burroughs had bewitched them.

But why were these matters relevant to the charge that George Burroughs was a witch, and what, other than the fact that she had once been his servant, caused Mercy Lewis’s animus against George Burroughs?

To answer those questions it is necessary to go back nearly two decades, to the moment when the lives of a little girl and a young minister first began to intertwine.

In August 1676, the three-year-old Mercy Lewis and the twenty-three-year-old George Burroughs were both living in Falmouth, when their world suddenly collapsed around them. The previous fall, violent clashes had erupted between English settlers and the Wabanakis, all of whom had until that time lived in relative peace, engaging in trade that benefited everyone. (In southern New England, related hostilities were known as King Philip’s War; Maine residents eventually called it the First Indian War.)

On Wednesday, August 9, some Wabanakis killed a cow belonging to Captain Anthony Brackett. An Indian named Simon, who had been hanging around Brackett’s farm for several weeks, said he would find the culprits. Early on Friday morning the eleventh, Simon returned with the men responsible for the killing. They invaded Brackett’s house, took his weapons, and asked him “whether he had rather serve the Indians, or be slain by them.” Faced with that choice, Brackett surrendered, along with his wife and children. But his brother-in-law tried to resist and was killed.

The Indians moved through the area called Back Cove, striking one farm after another on the mainland north of the peninsula on which the town of Falmouth was situated. At Robert Corbin’s, they surprised him and his brother-in-law Benjamin Atwell while they were haying in the fields, killing both men and capturing their wives and several children. They next slew James Ross and his wife, taking some of their children captive. Two men traveling by canoe managed to warn the town, but the numbers killed and captured mounted as the day wore on. Mercy’s parents escaped with her to an island in the bay, along with George Burroughs and others, but her father’s extended family was hard hit. The dead men Benjamin Atwell and James Ross were her uncles by marriage, the captured Alice Atwell and the dead Ann Ross her father’s sisters. Her paternal grandparents numbered among those slain. Many of her young cousins were killed or captured, including all but one of the children of another of her father’s sisters, Mary Lewis Skilling. One more uncle and his wife died later in the war.

Altogether, wrote a survivor five days later, eleven men died and twenty-three women and children were killed or captured at Casco on August 11. “We that are alive are forced upon Mr. Andrews his Island to secure our own and the lives of our families[.] we have but little provision and are so few in number that we are not able to bury the dead till more strength come to us,” he told his mother-in-law in Boston, pleading for assistance of any sort. The help the refugees received permitted them to leave. Mercy and her parents probably moved temporarily to Salem Town, where her uncle by marriage Thomas Skilling died a few months later, possibly from a wound suffered in the attack. A treaty ended the war in 1678, and former residents thereafter slowly filtered back to Falmouth and the other towns abandoned in 1676. By 1683, the Lewises had returned to rebuild their lives in Casco Bay. Mercy was then ten years old.

Part II

That same year, George Burroughs, too, returned to Falmouth. While the Lewises had been sheltered in Salem Town, he had lived first in Salisbury (then the home of Ann Carr, prior to her marriage to Thomas Putnam) and later, from late 1680 to the spring of 1683, in Salem Village. In Salisbury, Burroughs witnessed, and almost certainly took sides in, an acrimonious dispute that divided the town’s minister, the elderly John Wheelwright, and Major Robert Pike, its magistrate and militia leader. The town split into two factions; Ann Carr’s family sided with Pike, whereas Burroughs, who served briefly as Wheelwright’s assistant and occupied the town pulpit for a time after the minister’s death in November 1679, in all likelihood supported the aged clergyman.

If Burroughs ever had thoughts of succeeding Wheelwright as the leader of the Salisbury congregation, the affray (and perhaps his role in it) would have rendered that unlikely, if not altogether impossible. Accordingly, George Burroughs had to look elsewhere; and so too at the same time did Salem Village, following the less-than-amicable departure of Lawson, its first minister. The Village hired Burroughs in late 1680, but his tenure there was both brief and unpleasant. By the summer of 1682, dissatisfied Villagers were refusing to pay his salary. In early March 1683, Burroughs moved his family back to the recently reoccupied Falmouth, which was protected by Fort Loyal, newly constructed to help defend the region.

 

To advance the resettlement efforts, Falmouth took possession of 170 of 200 acres previously granted to Burroughs, for his property was close to the new town center. The remaining thirty acres of his original holding, which lay approximately half a mile west of the new fort, were confirmed to him. Later that year, he exchanged seven acres of his land for John Skilling’s house and lot, conveniently located near the meetinghouse, which was sited to the east of the fort. John Skilling’s dead brother Thomas had been Mercy Lewis’s uncle by marriage. Philip Lewis’s own house lot in the resettled community, where Mercy lived, lay approximately a quarter mile west of the fort and thus less than half a mile from Burroughs’s new dwelling.

Philip Lewis’s town lot lay near Joseph Ingersoll’s. And here Abigail Hobbs reenters my narrative. In her 1692 confession, Abigail indicated that she knew Joseph Ingersoll’s maidservant “very well” during her residence in Falmouth. Accordingly, the Hobbs family (which seems to have rented property there between 1683 and 1689), probably lived in close proximity to Ingersoll and thus to the Lewis household, which was situated on a neighboring lot. Mercy Lewis and Abigail Hobbs (who was five years younger) would have seen each other regularly in Falmouth village. Another quarter-mile west of their homes lay Burroughs’s remaining twenty-three acres. Since he undoubtedly farmed or cut wood on that land, the clergyman would have passed the Lewis and Hobbs households as he moved between his house (to the east of Fort Loyal) and his land on the west side of town. Thus in Falmouth George Burroughs, Mercy Lewis, and Abigail Hobbs must have seen each other frequently in the mid-1680’s, perhaps even daily.

The lives of all three people changed dramatically after a second Wabanaki attack on Falmouth, which occurred on September 21, 1689, during the Second Indian War. This time the English settlers received a timely warning of the impending assault, and Boston authorities reinforced Fort Loyal with a sizable contingent of militiamen under the command of the elderly, experienced Benjamin Church, who had achieved fame during King Philip’s War. Sylvanus Davis, the fort’s commander, later reported “a fierce fight” lasting about six hours, in which the New Englanders “forced them to Retreate & Judge many of them to bee slaine . . . there was Grate firings on Both sides.” The English lost eleven soldiers killed and ten wounded, some of whom died later. How many townspeople were among the casualties went unrecorded; they might have included Mercy Lewis’s parents (her father is last known to have been alive in April 1689). But the Reverend George Burroughs again survived the attack; on September 22 Church declared himself “well Satisfied with” Burroughs, who had been “present with us yesterday in the fight.”

In the aftermath of the battle, the Hobbs family returned to Topsfield, whence they had come, and the by-then orphaned Mercy Lewis moved in with George Burroughs, almost certainly as his servant. Since her father and his extended family had owned a great deal of land prior to August 1676, her new dependent status must have been a shock. How long she lived with his family is unknown, but it was probably no more than a few months. When Burroughs, seeking a safer place to live, moved south to Wells some time during the winter of 1689-90, Mercy seems to have gone to Beverly, again as a servant. After about nine months there, she moved on to Salem Village, where her recently married sister lived, and where she was yet again hired out, this time to the Putnams.

Consequently, none of these former residents of Falmouth–neither Burroughs, Hobbs, nor Lewis–was present when the Wabanakis launched their third, and most devastating, attack on the little settlement in mid-May 1690. After a siege of five days, during which almost all of its male defenders were killed or wounded, Fort Loyal surrendered to a combined force of French and Indians. Promises of quarter were not fulfilled, and most of the two hundred or so survivors were slaughtered on the spot, with a few carried off into captivity by the Wabanakis. Among the dead and captured were three more of Mercy Lewis’s relatives.

Now it is possible to return to Ann Putnam Jr.’s vision of April 20, 1692. Ann Jr.–whose source of information, recall, was Mercy Lewis–charged Burroughs with killing his successor’s child because Deodat Lawson had been hired as chaplain to Andros’s men. But why would Burroughs care? In September 1689 Benjamin Church alluded to a possible reason for the purported malefic act. In his remarks on the minister, he commented that Burroughs “had thoughts of removing” from Falmouth because “his present maintenance from this Town by reason of their poverty, is not enough for his livelihood.” So, Church declared, “I shall Encourage him to Stay promising him an allowance from the publique Treasury for what Service he shall do for the Army.”

That observation suggests a motive for Burroughs’s possible anger about Lawson’s employment with Andros: perhaps he had wanted the job himself. Did Burroughs express jealousy or frustration about Lawson’s chaplaincy in the hearing of Mercy Lewis when she lived in his household? She could later have passed that on to Ann Putnam, who incorporated the information into her spectral vision of the minister.

Burroughs’s specter also told Ann Jr. that “he had bewitched a grate many souldiers to death at the eastward, when Sir Edmon was their [sic].” The malevolent killing of soldiers in Maine during Andros’s campaign could have had only one purpose: assisting the Wabanakis in their war against God’s people. But why would Burroughs do such a thing? And why would that treachery help to reveal his identity as a witch?

New Englanders had long thought of Native Americans as devil worshippers. North America had been “the Devil’s territories,” Cotton Mather later wrote, before the Christian English settlers arrived. That George Burroughs had indeed spectrally allied himself to Satan and the Wabanakis could well have appeared likely to anyone who contemplated his uncanny ability to survive the attacks on Casco in August 1676 and September 1689, followed by his remarkably prescient decision to leave Falmouth sometime in the winter of 1689-90, mere months before the town fell to the Wabanakis in May 1690. And the “anyone” in that sentence was not, of course, just anyone–it was a very specific someone, Mercy Lewis, whose large extended family had essentially been wiped out in the same devastating attacks from which Burroughs had so stunningly and completely escaped.

He was, therefore, a witch. Mercy Lewis knew it because of her experiences on the northeastern frontier, and she, Ann Putnam, Abigail Hobbs, and others said it. They accused Burroughs at his formal examination on May 9, 1692, and they repeated their charges at the grand-jury proceedings on August 3 and at the clergyman’s trial two days later. Much of the testimony offered on August 5 pertained to Maine, and to Burroughs’s role as the witches’ leader. Deodat Lawson, who attended the trial, later recalled that the eight unnamed confessors who testified (almost certainly including Abigail Hobbs) described “some hundreds of the society of witches, considerable companies of whom were affirmed to muster in arms by beat of drum.” Burroughs summoned them to the meetings “from all quarters . . . with the sound of a diabolical trumpet,” and “did administer the sacrament of Satan to them, encouraging them to go on in their way, and they should certainly prevail.”

The confessors’ use of military imagery was not coincidental. People, especially refugees from the Maine frontier, were all too well accustomed to the sounds of trumpets summoning militiamen to battle, and to the sight of forces mustering to oppose the enemy. The wars that had begun in the visible world in 1675 were continuing in 1692 in the form of struggles in the invisible world as well.

The hanging of the Reverend George Burroughs on August 19, 1692, can best be seen, therefore, as the wartime execution of a traitor. Mercy Lewis, the refugee who had lost everything but her life in the war, thereby exacted her revenge.

Months earlier, in mid-April, Ann Putnam Jr. had turned Abigail Hobbs’s confession, which generally described deviltry on the Maine frontier, into a specific accusation of George Burroughs, whom she was too young to have known personally. But Mercy, the family’s maidservant, had undoubtedly filled Ann’s head with tales of the mysterious clergyman she had previously served. The link between the Maine frontier and Salem Village, first identified by Abigail Hobbs and then forged firmly by Mercy Lewis, altered the course of the burgeoning crisis, causing an explosion of accusations outside the confines of Salem Village and spreading witchcraft charges throughout all of Essex County. The event known today simply as “Salem” in reality, then, involved much of northern New England.

Further Reading: The records of the Salem witchcraft trials were transcribed by the WPA in the 1930s and can be found in Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds., The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692, 3 vols. (New York, 1977), available on the Internet at the Website “Witchcraft in Salem Village“. Information on the family of Mercy Lewis comes primarily from Sybil Noyes, Charles Thornton Libby, and Walter Goodwin Davis, Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (1928-33; reprint, Baltimore, Md., 1996). There is no detailed published account of the Indian wars on the Maine frontier, but much of the relevant evidence is included in James Phinney Baxter, ed., Documentary History of the State of Maine, in Collections of the Maine Historical Society, 2d ser., vols. 4 (1889), 5 (1897), 6 (1900), 9 (1907). Information about Falmouth in the seventeenth century is contained in William Willis, The History of Portland, from 1632 to 1864 (Portland, 1865).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

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Mary Beth Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American history at Cornell University. Interested in the relationship of gender and politics in early America, she has just completed a book on the Salem witchcraft crisis, In the Devil’s Snare (New York, forthcoming in October 2002), from which this article is drawn.

Part I

The relationship between historians and genealogists has long been a troubled one. Each tends to regard the other with bemused contempt. To historians, genealogists are obsessive collectors of meaningless minutiae, enthusiastic but woefully untrained, churning out dubious family trees studded with even more dubious famous names. To genealogists, historians are utterly out-of-touch academics, obliviously offering one jargon-dripping tome after another to an uncaring and uncomprehending world.

But while historians and genealogists might scowl at one another across reading tables in archives, they have begun to reach some common ground on the Internet. A look at genealogy and history Websites demonstrates the efforts of each group to adopt what is best about the other, if for no other reason than that the Web’s accessibility to the public means that the intended audience for the material is, de facto, much broader than either group has ever before considered.

Unfortunately, this convergence seems more unconscious than planned; history and genealogy still seem unwilling to speak directly to one another or to acknowledge common goals and interests. But, almost in spite of this mutual disregard–and in some cases outright disdain–the Web is beginning to open up new lines of communication. As the Internet continues to enable and encourage possibilities for professional-nonprofessional collaboration, the historian and genealogist may find that the gulf between them has been bridged–almost in spite of themselves.

Genealogy and History: From 1890s to 1990s

The first surge of interest in genealogy can be traced to the 1890s, when the U.S. experienced a burgeoning of historical societies, pioneer associations, family reunions, and hereditary organizations (the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of Mayflower descendants were founded in that decade). Since then, interest in genealogy–or at least in genealogical publishing–has experienced occasional spikes: in the early twentieth century, in the 1930s, and in the 1970s, a thirty- to forty-year cycle that might be attributed to heritage as sustenance in times of change, generational curiosity, or periods of public concern about the function and future of the family as an institution.

 

Around the same time, history as a discipline assumed a more overtly “professional” character. The American Historical Association was founded in 1884, and the influence of German historical scholarship and “scientific method” encouraged professional historians to distance themselves from amateurs. The change was one of style, from literary, adjectival, anecdotal narrative to austere, “objective,” and scientific discourse. It was also one of substance: history became a full-time occupation rather than an avocation, and with professionalization came the use of standardized techniques, emphasis on authoritative voice, and the production of work directed to colleagues rather than to the reading public. As historians defined their corporate identity, they also distanced themselves from nonhistorians. Journalists, genealogists, and other nonhistorians might try to write history, but professional historians considered their attempts fatally flawed as these amateurs lacked the training, analytical skills, and grounding in theory to produce valuable work.

Genealogists came in for the lion’s share of professional historians’ abuse and condescension. In 1942, a peculiar article in the William & Mary Quarterly set out a case for genealogy as valuable source material for geneticists (to assess the correlations between cultural and psychological character and physical type, no less!), but still opened with the observation that, “[a]s a pleasant and harmless form of antiquarianism, the study of family history, biography, and the tracing of genealogy are tolerantly humored but certainly not seriously honored by historians and scientists.” By the 1940s, genealogy had settled into a fringe niche as innately trivial and unreliable, if not amusingly pathological (consider historian Lawrence Stone’s 1971 characterization of genealogy’s “anal-erotic” psychological motivation and David Lowenthal’s 1989 reference to the “nostalgic compulsion and self-protective amnesia” of nonhistorians).

During the 1960s and 1970s, however, the “new social history” refocused the attention of some historians on the uses of genealogical and local history materials. In women’s history, family history, urban history, and ethnic history, sources previously viewed as primarily genealogical assumed a greater importance. For the first time in decades, historians became interested in mining the same sources that had long occupied genealogists: census data, shipping lists, and parish records provided valuable information for the study of social mobility, migration, mortality, marriage, occupational studies, and a variety of other topics of new interest to scholars interested in reconstructing the lives of ordinary people.

In 1969, historian Edward Saveth addressed the need for research in the “neglected field of American Family History,” in part by referencing the work of genealogists and local (amateur) historians:

Genealogy, as Henry Adams said, has a strong element of personal interest lacking in History. The shelves of genealogical and local historical societies are filled with histories of families whose prominence is generally confined to the locality, written by people still less well known. Most of these are not much more than padded genealogies and are not likely to be useful to the historian. However, the bare genealogical record–births, deaths, lines of descent–can be helpful in the study of family mobility and “in the technique of family reconstruction,” which is one of the aims of historical demography in studying the early American family . . . Occasional papers urging cooperation by genealogists, historians and social scientists have gone for the most part unheeded.

Saveth recommended that historians consider the occasionally valuable documents genealogists might contribute to archives but stopped short of suggesting more than this kind of “haphazard” historical-genealogical collaboration, even though the value of genealogists as collectors, compilers, and preservers of historical data was evident.

Meanwhile, in the public arena, the immense popularity of the book and television miniseries Roots in the early 1970s led to a wave of interest in genealogy and family history. In fact, a 1978 American Quarterly review essay noted the post-Roots popularity of factual and fictional family sagas, genealogical how-to books, and ethnic community studies, and posited that the rising interest in family history, genealogy, and memoir represented a cultural shift from the ethos of the self-made man to the individual as product of family and ethnic group. The resonance of Roots, as David Chioni Moore reasoned, lay in the appeal of a recovered “rooted identity,” especially “when a major chunk of the tangle of one’s identity has been either erased or systematically denigrated, or, in the case of Haley and his primary intended readers, both.” As such, the tracing of that narrative root (or route), even if it was a narrow genealogical one, provided a historical bridge for the wider public.

Subsequently, an academic backlash in the 1980s and 1990s–first against quantitative history as banal number crunching, then against social history subdisciplines as “particularist” threats to synthesis–made further contact between historians and genealogists unlikely. Most famously, Gertrude Himmelfarb used an unidentified graduate student’s claim that his small community study was “cutting edge” research as an example of misplaced academic energy: “Surely it is the grossest kind of hubris for the historian to be dismissive of great books and great thinkers, to think that reality is better reflected in second-rate and third-rate thinkers than in first-rate ones. And it is surely a peculiar sense of historical relevance to think that everything about a book is worth studying–the technology of printing, the economics of publishing, the means of distribution, the composition of the reading public–everything, that is, except the ideas in the book itself.” Coupled with William Bennett’s call for a return to “traditional history” and a reduction in funding for regional history projects, the motivation for historians to explicitly promote closer ties with genealogists was greatly diminished.

Nonetheless, the turbulent years of the culture wars did produce a wider acceptance of nontraditional historical subject matter and source material. Moreover, the bare suggestion that previously underrepresented groups were worthy of historical study stimulated the interest and energies of nonprofessional researchers; so did methods closely associated with the new social history, like oral history and the study of ephemera. From the point of view of the genealogist, the tracing of lineage could be augmented by diaries, letters, photographs, memoirs, etc.–items that were now objects of legitimate interest, even if the subjects were not famous or influential.

 

On the other hand, two themes are present in much of the current writing on history as a profession and as a discipline: the fragmentation of the discipline, both in terms of self-contained areas of study (e.g., women’s history, African American history) and philosophical relativism; and the failure of professional historians to interest the nonacademic public in their work. Historians, then, are struggling with the purpose of history, and the nature of history in the public sphere. The Internet, as a sort of public sphere in miniature, is one place where the latter question is being worked out, and the results are surprising.

Part II History, Genealogy, and the Web

Social history’s influence is readily apparent in the new Web versions of traditional print titles. American National Biography (ANB), a print and online successor to the print-only Dictionary of American Biography (DAB, last supplemented in 1985), takes particular notice of the shift to social history and its sources in its Website preface:

[W]hile the value of a national biographical reference work has endured, the character of such an undertaking has changed considerably since the DAB was published . . . Virtually all aspects of the past are now seen from a different perspective. Today, historians do not regard the slave-plantation South with nostalgia or dismiss women’s participation in politics as quaint or deride the doctrinal views of small religious sects or deny the cultural importance of dolls or pop music. Nor do most historians assume a proprietary omniscience in regard to their subjects or believe that History is merely a collection of facts. Nearly all acknowledge that History consists of many different stories and interpretations.

And, of course, many of these stories have made their way to the Internet. Both genealogists and historians have brought a wealth of primary source data to the Web. In fact, the Web may serve its most significant role in providing a gateway to local and geographically isolated historical collections, many of which may not be in institutional hands at all and hence difficult to access and largely unprotected. As Patterson Toby Graham points out in a recent article in the Journal of the Association for History and Computing, few researchers, relative to the number who visit it electronically, will visit his institution’s archives on race relations in Hattiesburg, Mississippi (the University of Southern Mississippi’s Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive. “Fifteen to thirty researchers visit the Special Collections reading room each day, a few hundred a month. In the same month, however, there are easily eight thousand hits on just one of the Special Collections Department’s three Web sites. That tells me that my job and my audience are changing.”

So what kinds of issues still remain for historians and genealogists? Roy Rosenzweig has examined the state of American history on the Web in two articles for the Journal of American History (1997 and 2001). In the 1997 article, Rosenzweig and co-author Michael O’Malley depicted the dichotomy posed by the Web’s failure to “privilege” certain sources: conservative critics (including Himmelfarb) viewing “Web” and “scholarship” as a contradiction in terms, and “techno-enthusiasts” embracing the possibilities of a hierarchy-free democratized information forum. While noting the possibilities and limitations for American history in the realm of the Web, the authors were nonetheless “impressed–even astonished–by what already exists there for historians.”

Four years later, Rosenzweig again referred to the proliferation of primary and secondary sources on the Internet, including grassroots projects by academics, teachers, Civil War enthusiasts, and, yes, genealogists. While he acknowledged that the amateur sites might perpetuate debunked theories or editing and transcription errors, his overall view of the “free and public” character of history on the Web was markedly positive. However, his approbation was tempered by the potential for the loss of this free and public character as more and more of the richest historical material was being co-opted by the “Private History Web”: high-priced library-based subscriptions and/or advertising-based commercial sites. Rosenzweig concluded with a call to action: “we [historians] need to put our energies into maintaining and enlarging the astonishingly rich public historical web that has emerged in the last five years . . . Academics and enthusiasts created the Web; we should not quickly or quietly cede it to giant corporations.”

The Web-related issues facing genealogists and historians are both procedural (access-driven) and methodological. From a procedural standpoint, there is a good deal of uniformity–both groups want free public access to as wide a range of hard-to-obtain primary documents as possible. The methodological issue is a thornier one in theory, but the Websites in practice illustrate a growing uniformity of purpose and presentation–and possibilities for developing a true “public history” with roles for genealogist and historian alike.

Part III The Websites: Joint Projects, Data Archives, and Paid Subscriptions

Some of the best historical sites on the Web are the result of the direct collaboration of professional historians and local historical organizations (a traditional bastion of genealogy). The Ohio, New York, and Eastern Washington State Historical Societies, for example, are contributors to The American Memory project from the Library of Congress and its over one hundred thematic historical collections. Other sites like Historic Pittsburgh are university-historical society joint projects. Still others make extensive use of sources collected or compiled by local historians. What these sites acknowledge, openly or tacitly, is that the primary sources they present will be used for multiple purposes by historians and nonhistorians (particularly teachers and students). As a result, these Websites minimize the role of scholarly interpretation, choosing in some cases to present an assortment of documents–an evidence file or dossier, so to speak–to encourage the user to follow his own path through the material. The result is somewhat analogous to documentary films that eschew the “voice-of-God” narration,” and it presents some of the same issues and opportunities (see Jay Ruby’s article in Visual Anthropology Review). Three highly acclaimed Websites in the academic or professional history category illustrate the history-as-dossier model–the phrase is a useful oversimplification–to different degrees.

Do History (“[a] site that shows you how to piece together the past from the fragments that have survived”) is an interactive case study based on eighteenth-century midwife Martha Ballard’s diary and the research that went into Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s book, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990) and the film based upon it. The site was developed by Harvard University’s Film Study Center, with an advisory board of historians. According to the site’s authors, “Although Do History is centered on the life of Martha Ballard, you can learn basic skills and techniques for interpreting fragments that survive from any period in History. We hope that many people will be inspired by Martha Ballard’s story to do original research on other ‘ordinary’ people from the past.” In keeping with this philosophy, the site includes a how-to section on transcription and a “History Toolkit” of research tips and forms–familiar items on genealogy pages, but something rarely seen on a history site. All of Ballard’s diary entries are included on the site, both in transcribed and image file formats; the reader has the choice of browsing the journal or of selecting one of a number of stories and themes to follow. (Ballard’s daily diary entries were brief and mundane enough for previous historians to dismiss them as inconsequential, but as Ulrich noted, “the trivia that so annoyed earlier readers provide a consistent, daily record of the operation of a female-managed economy.”)

The award-winning Dramas of Haymarket, created by the Chicago Historical Society and the trustees of Northwestern University, has been recognized for its accessibility, excellent content, well-written text and engaging arrangement. Moreover, the Haymarket site actually serves a twofold purpose. The Dramas of Haymarket is linked with The Haymarket Digital Collection, a collection of key documents and artifacts. The Dramas of Haymarket presents primary sources, but they are accompanied by an interpretive text designed to explain the sources from the viewpoint of scholarship. The Digital Collection, on the other hand, explicitly disavows an interpretive purpose: “The digital collection presents images of key documents and artifacts in their historical context with a minimum of interpretive information. Much like the witness testimony and exhibits introduced during the Haymarket trial, these primary sources are pieces of evidence which enable the user to reconstruct and interpret the historical events to which they relate.” The documents are posted as transcribed and as image files, allowing the reader to assess the accuracy of the transcription.

Lastly, The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, co-authored by Edward L. Ayers and Anne S. Rubin, is an “invented archive” or cross-repository collection drawn together specifically to create an online resource. Valley of the Shadow takes two communities, one Northern and one Southern, through the American Civil War via an archive of sources: newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, maps, church records, population census, agricultural census, and military records. As the site’s introductory text states, “Students can explore every dimension of the conflict and write their own histories, reconstructing the life stories of women, African Americans, farmers, politicians, soldiers, and families.” The prize-winning site was the focus of a New York Times article entitled “An Historian presents the Civil War, Online and Unfiltered by Historians” (June 29, 2000), and it is designed to operate as a do-it-yourself history kit, allowing users to track ordinary individuals from diary entries to newspaper articles to census records, without the mediation or structure imposed by an historian. The process encourages amateur research, and it creates the same sense of uneasiness in academicians (per Gary J. Kornblith’s review of the site in the Journal of American History): “in practice there is a thin line between destabilizing received narratives and promoting a nihilistic view that the historical record is so fragmented and complex that it makes no sense at all.”

Thus the method of presentation of primary source material on the Web gives rise to some of the old history-genealogy issues. Should the historian’s role as scholarly interpreter be altered to take advantage of the Web’s possibilities for hands-on, user-driven research? If the Web is best suited to serve as an historical archive, should the historian’s role be that of the less obtrusive presenter or facilitator instead?

Indeed, the characterization of Websites as “genealogist-sponsored” or “historian-sponsored” falls apart entirely when the user encounters some collaborative sites. One such example is The Canadian Letters & Images Project. Canadian Letters, run under the auspices of the history department at Malaspina University College, is an online archive of the wartime experiences of “ordinary” Canadians. On the site’s “About the Project” page, the authors (who appear to be members of the history faculty) note that “[w]e do not edit correspondence or select portions of collections, but include if at all possible all materials submitted to us.  Our place is not to judge the historic merit of one person’s experiences over those of another; we instead let those voices and images from the past tell their own story . . . We believe it is important to collect and recreate the personal side of the wartime experience as soon as possible, before such materials are forever lost or destroyed.” Thus the site includes both pages on “How to Contribute” to the site and “Saving Family Heirlooms,” a set of links to preservation and conservation tips.

Though less explicitly, other digital historical collections partner with individuals as well as institutions (one example is the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections). Other sites are less openly enthusiastic about outside contributions; as stated on its FAQ Web page, the Library of Congress’s National Digital Library Program does not solicit scanned material from individuals, though potential donors are referred to the library’s acquisitions department.

On the genealogy side, the trend is in the other direction: from the stand-alone family tree to the rest of the world. Genealogy Websites have also created cross-repository collections of difficult-to-obtain primary sources: census data, manuscript census images, pension records, out-of-print biographical and local history material, and source materials in private hands, via images or transcriptions. These sources have always provided important corroborating evidence of historical accuracy, and this role continues in the electronic environment. Mary Beth Norton provided a good recent example (1998) in her study of a fraudulent seventeenth-century diary purportedly authored by “Hetty Shepard” in 1675-77. As Norton notes, “[I]n the last few years, excerpts from three nineteenth-century fakes have been reprinted as genuine, even though two of them already have been exposed as fraudulent.” Genealogical sources either contradicted or failed to confirm the Shepard account (which also contains multiple anachronisms). Norton concludes that reputable scholars placing credence in the Shepard diary have been misled by bibliographic guides to published women’s writings, which tend to be picked up, errors and all, by later compilers. Norton’s point is well made: currently, Shepard’s diary is reproduced in the academic database North American Women’s Letters and Diaries (offered by Accessible Archives/Alexander Street Press), with absolutely no mention of its questionable authenticity.

So what do genealogy Websites offer? Genealogists, because of their strong volunteer ethos, were among the first Internet users to make public data available free of charge on the Web. One example is the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), a searchable database of over fifty million records created from SSA payment records, provided free of charge by two genealogy Websites, Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. The database contains names, social security numbers, dates of birth, dates of death, and last residences when available; in late 2001, the database included information through the end of September of that year. The SSDI has also been available via the Web in the 1990s on various private investigative or public records sites, but only on a paid subscription basis; the genealogy sites have long been the only free online source for the database.

FamilySearch.org, authored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (AKA the Mormon Church), is an especially valuable tool for biographers and historians as well as genealogists. It provides free access to the church-compiled International Genealogical Index (IGI), an index by surname of births, baptisms and marriages from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. The online version includes source information (batch and serial sheet number for microfilm or fiche) for most records, thus providing a means of verification. (The site also makes available two other databases, Ancestral File and Pedigree Resource File, which display lineage-linked records with submitter information when available.) The Mormon Church has made other historical data available via CD-ROM, including records from the post-Civil War era Freedman’s Bank. The records include detailed biographical information about the account holder, including names of family members, the birthplace of parents, military history, employment, the names of plantations and former slave owners, and, in some cases, even brief oral histories. The records represent 484,083 people from three to four generations of African Americans. The church obviously recognized that interest in the product extended beyond the genealogy community, and in fact the low-priced CD is widely held by academic libraries.

The USGenWeb Project is a volunteer-run, noncommercial operation designed to provide Websites for genealogical research for every county of every state of the United States. The GenWeb state and county sites vary in quality, but most contain transcribed records and documents, scanned out-of-print books, digital maps, and photographic archives. They are often good sources for information about industries, occupations, or activity patterns. The project also includes a national-level Archives Project, which was developed to present transcriptions of public domain records on the Internet; the Website states that file submitters (all volunteers) encompass genealogical societies, departments of the United States government, and local and county offices, as well as individuals.

Even as some genealogy sites build free online archives, the “Private Web” noted by Rosenzweig in the history context is part of the genealogy realm as well. Ancestry.com is a commercial site owned by MyFamily.com, Inc. Ancestry.com delivers an impressive amount of information, but access to most of it requires a paid subscription ($69.95 per year without census images, $99.90 with census images, and $129.95 with census images and the UK/Ireland collection). These charges are admittedly small when compared to the several-thousand-dollar price tag for a comparable academic database; nonetheless, the genealogy community has been somewhat nonplussed by MyFamily.com, Inc.’s unabashed commercialism. In a controversial move, MyFamily.com acquired the RootsWeb site, one of the earliest and most extensive of the Web’s free genealogy sites; the RootsWeb data was incorporated into the Ancestry.com collection–to the horror of some of the genealogists who had researched and assembled the information at their own expense and were now unwitting contributors to a paid-subscription database.

A subscription to Ancestry.com includes access to many bibliographic sources held by academic libraries in CD-ROM format: most notably, the Periodicals Source Index (PERSI), a comprehensive subject index to genealogy and local history periodical articles since 1800; the Genealogical Library Master Catalog (GLMC), a sort of WorldCat equivalent for genealogists, with bibliographic references to over two hundred thousand family histories, genealogies, town and county histories; and the Biography & Genealogy Master Index (BGMI), a Gale Research Company product, which indexes numerous collective biographical sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries including the ubiquitous Who’s Who series. The Website’s Census Collection includes complete image files for the 1790 through 1920 manuscript federal censuses, viewable county by county, accompanied by searchable indexes of the heads of household (a project still in progress). Two other databases, Newspaper Obituaries, provided by Bell and Howell, and the Civil War Research Database, compiled by Historic Data Systems, are also excellent resources for historian and genealogist alike.

Today Genealogy sites are filled with bibliographic, public record, and private material; they are no longer solely family-tree driven. In fact, one of the foundations of traditional genealogy, the Genealogical Date Communication (GEDCOM) used in lineage-linked databases, may be on its way out (see an article in Genealogical Computing, an Ancestry.com publication, entitled “Is GEDCOM Dead?”). The reason for GEDCOM’s rumored demise? Many genealogists want to use image, audio, and video files in the Web environment, and GEDCOM’s name/date/place tags are simply too limited.

Part IV The Websites: Joint Projects, Data Archives, and Paid Subscriptions

Issues and Prospects

Where does the history-genealogy relationship stand today? Both historians and genealogists see the uses of the Web as a repository in its own right, at least for preliminary research. Indications of acceptance and collaboration are usually found in the fine print at the foot of a Web page. Some academic Websites contain links to Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org or included components thereof (examples I located in a quick search included University of Pennsylvania, University of Buffalo, Marquette University, and Wellcome Library’s History of Medicine Internet Sites page). Many USGenWeb sites link to American Memory; Valley of the Shadow shows up on Rootsweb and other genealogy pages. There is, however, little or no discussion of the value of collaborative efforts and the rewards to both groups.

 

The Web both reflects areas of convergence and presents possibilities for the engagement of large numbers of nonacademic parties in the preserving, creating, and presenting of historical material. Some of the best historical Websites are the results of those collaborations. However, even as historians and genealogists find common ground, the traditionally dismissive attitudes die hard. Thus while historians are highly motivated to engage K-12 and college students in the practice of history–in working with documents and engaging in interpretation–their level of interest in building ties with genealogists, local historians, and other nonprofessional groups is difficult to discern. It is almost as if there were a tacit assumption that well-instructed college students will either move on to graduate programs in history or simply become a discerning audience for the professional historian. However, the non- or postcollegiate individual with a keen interest in historical research does not appear to be content with mere spectatorship; that is why genealogical research is thriving and “amateur” historical Websites continue to flourish. Similarly, genealogists have been happy to ignore developments in the history camp, though the Web seems to have partially bridged the gap (e.g., the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society’s training classes in the use of American Memory, the University of Michigan and Cornell University’s Making of America site, and other large historical sites, accompanied by criteria for judging the credibility and completeness of information on the Web).

The true potential for history-genealogy (or professional-nonprofessional) collaboration, with the common goal of a wider audience and new ways of presenting research, is already emerging on the Web. If the end result is that exciting new source materials can be combined with contextual analysis and shared with a wider audience, all students of history will be grateful to both groups.

Further reading: On history and the Web, see Roy Rosenzweig, “The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web,” Journal of American History (September 2001): 548-79; Michael O’Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, “Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web,” Journal of American History (June 1997): 132-55; Patterson Toby Graham, “Researching American History Primary Sources Online: A Librarian’s Perspective,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing 3 (2) (August 2000); Gary J. Kornblith, “Venturing into the Civil War, Virtually,” Journal of American History (June 2001): 145-51. On genealogy and its uses, see Robert M. Taylor, “Summoning the Wandering Tribes: Genealogy and Family Reunions in American History,” Journal of Social History 16(2) (1982): 21-37; Mary Beth Norton, “Getting to the Source–Hetty Shepard, Dorothy Dudley, and Other Fictional Colonial Women I Have Come to Know Altogether Too Well,” Journal of Women’s History 10 (3) (Autumn 1998): 141-54. On the new social history and historiography: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); Edward N. Saveth, “The Problem of American Family History,” American Quarterly 21(2), (Supplement, Summer 1969): 311-29. On public interest in history and genealogy, see David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past: Anglo-American Historical Preconceptions,” Journal of American History 75 (4) (March 1989), 1263-280; John R. Gillis, “Heritage and History: Twins Separated at Birth,” Reviews in American History 25 (3) (1997), 375-78; David Chioni Moore, “Routes: Alex Haley’s Roots and the Rhetoric of Genealogy,” Transition 64 (1994), 4-21; James A. Hijiya, “Roots: Family and Ethnicity in the 1970s,” American Quarterly 30 (4) (Autumn 1978), 548-56. On comparative methodology, particularly the use of an authoritative voice in presentation, see Jay Ruby, “Speaking For, Speaking About, Speaking With, or Speaking Alongside–An Anthropological and Documentary Dilemma,” Visual Anthropology Review 7 (2) (Fall 1991), 50-67.  

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

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Sheila O’Hare is social sciences bibliographer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds advanced degrees in history, law, and library and information science.

Author’s Note:
As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters and incidents are pulled from the historical record–most particularly, the dueling “special artists” Peleg Padlin and Little Waddley. Their misadventures while touring New York’s netherworld originally appeared in an 1857-58 series of articles in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper written by New York Tribune reporter Mortimer Neal Thompson. That the pseudonymous pictorial reporters stood in for Leslie’s staff artists Sol Eytinge Jr. and a very young Thomas Nast should not be of concern to the present-day reader. Moreover, the mystery at the heart of The Hungry Eye, which entangles these and other characters and the constellation of their relationships, is my own invention. Much of what transpires here (and in the ensuing installments, which will appear in Common-place monthly between January and April) is utterly fantastic–and yet it also, I believe, remains true to the history of a specific time and place.

While I originally conceived of The Hungry Eye as a conventional novel (at least in the sense that it would end up as a tactile book printed on paper with a spine available for cracking) the chance to emulate the once ubiquitous format of serialization was hard to pass up. And wedding an older episodic approach to the still inchoate medium of the World Wide Web offered an intriguing narrative challenge. Aside from requiring some reconfiguring of the story’s structure to accommodate the start-and-stop pacing of extended and intermittent reading, I’ve tried to work with the Web to intermingle the visualization of the past–which plays a prominent role in the plot–with the telling of the story. That said, you won’t come across any state of the art programming here: what I’ve tried to do is enhance the reading experience on the Web, not replace it.

All original artwork © 2001 Joshua Brown.

 

Episodes 1 – 3 of The Hungry Eye first appeared in Vol. 2 No. 2.

Kit Burns (known to his long-dead mother and father, his as-good-as-dead wife, and the Fourth Precinct’s deadly Captain Thorne as Christopher Kilbourn) cherished constancy. Born in the windowless back of two rooms on South Street, his travels over thirty-six years had taken him no further north than Jones Wood and no further west than Hoboken. Instead of regret, Kit considered his circumscribed mobility as a noteworthy achievement: acquaintances, friends, and relatives came and went in peripatetic panic, leaving the city in search of the main chance only to return months, years later, sometimes shamefaced, sometimes pugnacious, always penurious. In contrast, Kit had hunkered down on the waterfront. And there he had prospered. Not that Kit’s static success set an example for his fellow citizens. Absence, it seemed, generated the adulation of the docks. Those who left and didn’t return, most particularly the lot of Kit’s peers who’d been drawn west by gold fever in ’48, fed the fantasies of those who remained. Sailors were always reappearing, randy and ready to lose their earnings, so the local optimists had turned to speculating about the likes of O’Leary, Hennessey, and Curtis, the most vocal of the b’hoys who’d preached the road to Californ-eye-ay. When years had passed without the trio’s reappearance, the stories began to circulate. They’d found the mother lode and were now leaders of the raw aristocracy of the West Coast; alternatively, they’d deferred that privilege for a purchased enthronement in some Edenic (when you discounted the malaria) Central American backwater. Whatever the story, it seemed to bear an equal portion of pessimism. At least that was the way Kit saw it. The local fantasists constructed fates for the b’hoys that permitted them, once they were deep in their cups, to wallow in the realization that refugees from the Frog ‘n Toe who gained success easily forgot those they left behind. However, when Kit was deep into his whiskey (the result of considerable effort, since Kit insisted on only imbibing the fare he served in Sportsmen’s Hall and that was well mixed with the waters of the River East), he was sure that O’Leary, Hennessey, and Curtis lay buried somewhere among the forests, plains, deserts, and savages he’d seen in the illustrated newspapers. His estimation of their fates back when they’d habituated the Fourth Ward docks had been low enough. In sum, Kit was a firm believer in planning and stasis, and he felt that he didn’t need public admiration to legitimate his dedication to this little spot in the universe that had served him so well. Kit was proud of his three-story kingdom on Water Street, viewing it as a landmark equal to the likes of John Allen’s dancehall just a few blocks away. On a good night, weren’t both establishments bursting with dockhands, sailors, river pirates, and errant swells? True, the penny press tended to dwell on the Bandbox’s badger baiting (and when the badgers gave out, rat baiting), while John Allen’s emporia came across as higher toned if more salacious, its buxom doxies being the staple of the newspapers’ descriptions. But if Kit’s place was deprived of the flash accorded to Allen’s dive, both men contended for the appellation of the Most Wicked Man in New York, a mark of notoriety among a select group of the city’s residents that made Kit’s barrel chest swell with pride. Nevertheless, Kit’s prosperity was burdened with the freight of vigilance. Having leased Sportsmen’s Hall a decade earlier, he maintained his position as a local entrepreneur through the careful marshaling of his resources. Indeed, Kit maintained a clutch of doxies on the second and third floors of his own establishment. The brothel drew a consistent clientele who, aroused by the pit’s blood and bar’s liquor, eagerly climbed into the girls’ open arms and legs, aware that Kit’s whores might not be as well groomed as his curs, but they put up less of a fight. The girls, however, bore a good dose of belligerence (among other things) and they seemed to reserve much of it for Kit, forever grumbling about the scarcity of meat and surfeit of water in their fare. Not to his face, of course: he received these reports from the dutiful Mrs. McMahon (better known as Mayhem), who responded to such criticisms with only a slightly lighter hand than Kit would have wielded. So, relieved from administering discipline, Kit was free to grumble himself, usually from within the formidable embrace of Mrs. Mayhem who reserved her own arms and legs for him in her ornate, if close, chamber on the top floor of the Bandbox. The damned whores, he’d groan into her cleavage, listing the costs of running Sportsmen’s Hall. What did they know about the pain of running the Bandbox? For example, had they any idea of the significant proportion of his earnings Kit was forced to invest in the ward’s constabulary? The cost of preserving his wary truce with Captain Thorne’s Metropolitans was a favorite gripe of Kit’s. It was a gripe, however, reserved for the Mayhem bed; general knowledge of his transactions with the police would only make many extremely untrusting and untrustworthy citizens nervous. The Slaughter House Boys, among other river-pirate gangs, might look unkindly upon news that Kit transferred a steady stream of cash and discrete amounts of information to Captain Thorne in exchange for the courtesy of running the Bandbox without the interference of the occasional raid. But Kit found his arrangement with the Fourth Precinct increasingly burdensome and nerve-racking, complicated as it was by recent reform efforts that had reshaped the police department. Captain Thorne was now answerable to the state, and Kit suspected that the Bandbox could easily become a negotiable item in one of Thorne’s transactions should the Fourth Precinct fall under the scrutiny of the Albany masters of the Metropolitan Police. Kit had other burdens to enumerate. When he wasn’t ensuring that the police were on his side, Kit had to guard his flanks from the covetous nipping and sucking of challengers to his realm. It was fear that he needed to cultivate, a necessary ingredient that had to be constantly attended to, like the feeding and grooming of the beauteous beasts in his kennel. To that end, Kit had surrounded himself with a small but dedicated squad of dock-rats who knew how to bloody a lip or break an arm or, when such measures proved to be inadequate, deposit a corpse in the East River. Among the nastiest of his crew was his very own son-in-law, whose disrespect for Kit’s daughter–the spitting image of her mother in both girth and temper–was outweighed by his peculiar talent with a razor, not to mention the entertainment he furnished the Bandbox clientele. Known locally as Jack the Rat, the boy often served as an opening act for the dogfights. For ten cents, the lad got the crowd’s blood flowing by biting off the head of a mouse. For two bits, he’d accept a mouthful of rat. The thrills and disgust generated by Jack’s act redounded, as it were, to Kit’s credit, contributing to his reputation as a man whom only the foolhardy or addled crossed. Surely, Kit thought as he now returned to the pit, surely the bearded cove who had tried to turn the fight, the one who was now harassing his bruised but victorious champion, surely he knew the terrible retribution he risked. Surely, Kit surmised, his pockets filled with Butts’s winnings, surely the beard had the backing of additional brawn and sinew if he’d come to smash the Bandbox or steal his dog. Always vigilant, Kit had already instructed Jingles and Brooklyn Johnny to take their usual positions in preparation for a muss. Part XII

 

“Now, my boys, what have we here?” Padlin had not noticed Kit Burns’s approach. He seemed to materialize behind the dog, arms characteristically akimbo. Padlin glanced to his left. A rather large and long-armed man stood on the other side of Waddley. One broad and horny hand rested in a less than comradely manner on Waddley’s rigid shoulder. Padlin noticed the nails on the hand were bitten to the quick. The view in the other direction was equally, if differently, uninviting. Another associate of Kit Burns leaned against the pit wall, hands plunged in loose trouser pockets. Slovenly as his dress was, this man was in fact rather delicately made–which was probably why he removed one hand from its pocket to display a closed straight razor. He then took out his other hand so that he could more easily open that implement. A shout–no, a bark–brought Padlin’s attention back to the pit. Moving with admirable dexterity and speed, Burns had strapped a leather muzzle over Jakesy’s mouth. He held its short leash taut, forcing back the dog’s struggling head. Burns patted Jakesy’s jerking side, murmuring, “There, there, my beauty,” but to no avail. He stood up, holding the protesting Jakesy away from him. The dog skittered in a circle, making Burns’s stiffened arm dip and bounce. “What’s your game, mate?” Burns eyed Padlin from under the brim of his fine hat. When Padlin didn’t answer, Waddley cleared his throat: “We are merely Special Artists for Leslie’s Illustrated, sir.” His attempt to rise was intercepted by his captor’s heavy hand. “If you would care to examine my sketches . . . ” “Dry up,” Burns ordered, not bothering to look in Waddley’s direction. “What I care about, see, is some cove trying to dust my champion.” Waddley shook his head despairingly. “We had no intention of disrupting your sport.” Burns jutted his bristled jaw at Padlin. “What does hehave to say about that?” Waddley turned to his mum partner. “Padlin?” his intonation rising fearfully over the one word. Padlin’s repertoire was limited. “Jakesy,” he said. Burns merely squinted quizzically, but the dog suddenly interrupted his agitated dance and lunged toward Padlin. The master of Sportsmen’s Hall lurched forward. He threw out one leg to brace himself, his boot socking the dirt. Cursing, Burns yanked hard on the leash. He looped the lead around one fist and pulled the dog’s muzzled and bloodied snout up toward the rafters. Jakesy’s front paws clawed the air, his back legs prancing in place on the ground. “Johnny!” Burns shouted. Padlin considered how Burns’s anger seemed to coalesce around his wide, flapping mouth, like the limited passion expressed in the snapping jaw of a marionette. Something struck Padlin’s right sleeve. He looked down. The razor was sliding across his jacket arm. The lining winked out in the wake of the slice. The delicate razorman snickered in his ear. And Padlin said, “Mollie Maloney.” This time, Kit Burns visibly startled. His shoulders flinched, his trapdoor jaw gaped. Jakesy, on the other hand, ceased struggling. He sagged from Burns’s hovering fist, twisting slightly. Above the dark leather muzzle, the sky-blue eyes gleamed at Padlin. The reprieve was brief. Burns’s free hand balled into a fist. He stepped forward, dropping his leash-laden arm as he moved. The becalmed dog sank to the ground. Burns advanced to the plank wall, his head tilted back. Padlin watched his puppet mouth, heard “Johnny!” rattle out like a cough. But this time the blade never reached Padlin. Somewhere in its descent, Burns slammed against the planks. His eyes rolling, his hands tearing at the wall, he collapsed. Straddling Burns’s back, Jakesy fell with him and then on top of him. The dog’s paws clawed at Burns’s exposed neck. He pummeled Burns’s head with his muzzled snout. Burns was shouting, trying to turn over, the leash twisting about him like a writhing serpent. Johnny the razorman quit Padlin’s arm and vaulted the wall. The noise rising from Jakesy cut through the curses, a muffled, high-pitched sound that could be nothing else but a scream. It pierced to Padlin’s core and ricocheted up and down his spine. He covered his ears as the deceptively delicate Johnny fell to the pit floor and grappled for Jakesy’s spiraling leash. He barely heard the police whistle. The falsetto wail merged with the dog’s savage cry, only its trill denoting a new presence. A blow against Padlin’s shoulder sent him reeling. He fell between the bleacher seats. His hat struck the wall, driving the brim partly over his eyes. Boots and blue trouser legs trampled about his head, sprinkling the smell of the street’s shit and muck into his nostrils. He heard the familiar hollow thuds of wood against bone and the earthly howls of human pain. He was wrenched upright, shoved, slapped, and punched forward, out of the bleachers, up the aisle. Padlin felt cool, wet air against his cheeks and he caught the rankness of the East River. He managed to wrench one arm free and lifted his hat. A short, mutton-chopped cop grabbed his sleeve and pushed Padlin toward the open doors of a Black Maria. Waddley was already sprawled inside, his pants twisted up, exposing skinny, muscleless calves. Padlin wondered how such sticks could support the heft of Waddley’s torso. “You two,” the cop said, “wait in the wagon.” Padlin tried to twist out of the cop’s grasp. “Find the dog,” he shouted into the florid face. Dwarfed as he was by Padlin, the cop had a murderous grip. “Just get the hell in there!” He kicked out his leg, tripping Padlin who tumbled into the paddy wagon. Padlin pushed himself off the floor, away from Waddley. He leaned his back against the unpainted side of the wagon’s interior. Sensation was rapidly returning to him, an unpleasant trickle that augured a panicky flood. Padlin glanced out the door. Another black wagon was parked a few yards away. Two policemen dragged a man to its doors. One had him by the seat of his pants, the other by his collar. They released their hold and, like a well-trained circus act, the former collar-grabber swung one of the doors into the man’s face and his partner clubbed him into the wagon. “I lost my pad.” Waddley had worked himself up against the opposite side. “I can’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head. He began to straighten out his trousers, emitting little grunts as his stomach bounced against his knees. Padlin could feel the stream of dread growing inside him. “Did you see what happened to the dog?” Waddley looked up. A rueful smile twisted his little mouth. “He speaks! My esteemed colleague, the son of a bitch, speaks!” Before even Padlin, himself, was aware of it, he’d lurched across the wagon, grasped Waddley’s lapels, and thumped him against the wall. “Tell me!” Padlin shouted. “Damn you!” Waddley hollered into Padlin’s beard, his hands around Padlin’s wrists. “Damn you to hell! Leave me be!” Padlin fell back to his side of the wagon. Waddley ran his fingers over his crumpled lapels. “What right do you have to demand anything?” Contorting, he pulled a large plaid cloth from his trouser pocket and wiped his face. Waddley detached his spectacles and began polishing them. “You threatened me with bodily harm this morning. When that attempt failed, you disrupted the dog match to get me hurt. And when that effort failed, you went to the unbelievable extremity of attempting to destroy yourself to destroy me.” Waddley rearranged the wires around his ears and settled his head against the wall. He had regained his composure and his nasty smile. “The irony is that you have me to thank for your rescue. I doubt Quidroon would have called the police to save you.” Outside, in the street, as if cued by Waddley, the fine-boned razorman and his thicker accomplice came into view. His body sagging between two policemen, Johnny’s head lolled forward and the tips of his boots skittered behind. His friend was the greater burden, requiring the rough administration of four officers. He’d lost his derby, but he had a brilliant red stain covering the crown of his head as a replacement. The adjoining black wagon bounced as the two men were thrown inside. Padlin was through with talking. He climbed out of the wagon and watched the police push, pull, and pummel the few other Bandbox patrons who had had the misfortune to linger after the dogfight. Moans and protests emanated from the other Black Maria, momentarily rising with each new deposit, the cops making sure to also apply a few dubs of the club to the already incarcerated clientele.

 

Padlin slouched against the wagon and conjured his editor’s face in his mind, the expression of surprise and hurt that Quidroon would manufacture if Padlin confronted him, a variation on Waddley’s performance: That’s the thanks I get for rescuing you, Padlin? Yet, as Quidroon feigned distress, his eyes would retain the cold color of triumph, knowing that he had insured his control over the plot of the evening: no matter what Padlin did, it was Quidroon’s story and he had concocted its inevitable conclusion. And what a story it was! The readers of Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper would consume it with decorous glee: blood sport illustrated and avenged: evil and corruption brought to justice: morality preserved. Padlin watched the villain of the piece emerge from the storefront entrance of Sportsmen’s Hall, spread-eagled and struggling, a cop harboring each limb. Once, twice, thrice, the cops swung Kit Burns, a bellowing sack of potatoes, before the entrance of the Black Maria. He disappeared within, his howl trailing behind. Yes, the readers would love the story, duly illustrated by the observant and inventive Little Waddley. The doors of the wagon were slammed shut and the denizens of the Bandbox were carted off. The rattling of the horses’ hooves had diminished when the mutton-chopped cop returned. “Well, that takes care of that,” he said. He contentedly shaved his hands as if he was clearing the grime of crime from his incorruptible person. “We’ll be off now. You’ll inform Mr. Leslie that we performed admirably.” He wasn’t asking a question; he was reiterating the agreed rules of the game. Waddley jumped down and the cop began to walk around to the front of the wagon. Just as he rounded the corner, he turned back and faced Padlin. “You was asking about the dogs before, right?” he said. “You can report that the ones in the Bandbox’s kennel, and a mean bunch they was, are on their way to the pound.” He saluted, as if putting the seal to the bargain, and left. Waddley stood in the center of the street, forlornly looking after the second departing wagon. He scanned the dark fronts of the low buildings. The gaslights were few and far between on Water Street. The shadows of a hundred silent observers filled the windows above them. “I think it would be wise if we departed as well,” he said. Padlin started to walk away. Waddley quickly joined him, his head swiveling at each doorway and alley they passed. They turned off Water Street, moving away from the rough haunts of the seamen and stevedores around Peck’s Slip, toward the lights and traffic of Pearl Street. The prospect ahead seemed to relieve Waddley. He began to whistle. Waddley’s energetic, if off-key, fluting curled around Padlin’s thoughts, which were very much preoccupied with the whereabouts of Jakesy. Padlin knew where the Bandbox’s dogs had been taken, and he knew just as surely that there was no point in his visiting the pound. Among the brawny and battered curs, snapping and mewling as they awaited execution or Burns’s return–their fates teetering on how well he was immersed in the payoffs and favors of Democratic politics–one dog would be missing. Jakesy had escaped. Padlin was sure of it . . . and somehow that realization brought him close enough to the comfort he had been seeking. Jakesy was gone. Padlin embraced that certainty and the vague feeling of release it elicited. Jakesy was gone, taking Mollie Maloney’s unlearnable end and unattainable face with him. Padlin’s exhaustion rushed over him, stemming any further reflection. All he could picture now was the salvation of his unkempt room, littered by the remnants of his unsuccessful efforts of the night before. Tomorrow he would condemn them to the trash. Tonight, though, he would sleep. He was sure of that.

 

Two toughs were holding up the lamppost on the corner of Pearl and Dover. As Padlin and Waddley approached, they maladroitly detached themselves from their prop and stepped out onto the sidewalk. They were fairly large specimens, dressed for the evening in the beaver hats and red flannel shirts favored by rough sporting men. Their backs were to the gaslight, turning their faces into amorphous masks, featureless in the murk. To Padlin, his mind apparently not yet completely devoid of canine imagery, they suggested Cerebus, the two-headed sentinel of Hades, guarding entrance and egress to the underworld. Waddley bumped up against Padlin, trying to lose himself in the larger man’s shadow. Padlin picked up his pace, not to get by the toughs but to permit them to better spy Waddley’s diminutive aspect. “You,” one of the ruffians shouted, placing himself in Waddley’s path. Waddley hesitated. Padlin brushed by. “You want to fight me, do you?” The tough played with the greasy soaplocks that cascaded from under his hat, corkscrewing the long sideburns. “No,” Waddley said. The wrong answer in an old street ploy. Any answer was the wrong answer. The best response was silence. Walking into Pearl Street, Padlin pictured the bullboy behind him squaring his shoulders, cracking his knuckles in anticipation. “So,” he heard the tough say, “I’m a liar, am I?” Later, Padlin wasn’t sure if he’d actually heard the fist collide with Waddley’s jaw. Part XIII

Kit was a cruel master. His tongue could wag with the most gorgeous phrases–Yes, my beauty–Come to me, my champion–There’s a good boy–but the kind words were belied by sudden, savage blows. Kindness was only delivered after immediate and unequivocal obedience, a kindness limited to lavish meals, slabs of meat, hard and flesh-caked bones. He wasn’t the type to supply a soothing caress, a reticence reinforced by the wounds I applied to his hands and legs when he lowered his guard. After he muzzled me, though, he still kept his distance. The deal probably seemed fair and aboveboard to Master Kit. My pen was vast compared to the birdcages of his other curs; my neck was encased in a leather collar, its inner side padded with cotton, compared to the other curs’ ripping chains; my beatings were short and strategically placed compared to the maulings given the other brutes. On those occasions when Master Kit lost his senses and delivered me a manic onslaught, the stick coming down again and again, the pain reverberating up my spine, down into my testicles, rattling my teeth, on those occasions, invariably, a wave of fear suddenly wafted over his face, a washing of cold sweat that delineated the pits and holes in his face, and my torture suddenly seemed such sweet revenge. I hurt, but Master Kit was tormented, gripped in the terror that he’d done permanent damage to my fighting skills.  Cruel masters have been my lot in life, short as that life has been. Before Master Kit, Master Bell exhibited an equally malign character–albeit manifested in a more devious manner. Their contrast, I’m sure, could only be appreciated by a singular creature like myself, one who has experienced the extremities of existence and, thus, knows all too well the spectrum of human cruelties. From nuances of abuse to gross applications of ill will. Master Kit beat me. Master Bell did not. But, whereas Master Kit imprisoned me in a cage and secured my loyalty by leash and muzzle and the occasional lash, Master Bell subjected me to a more terrible fate: he set me free. He set me free to roam the muddy thoroughfares of Gotham. Free to choose my company, free to cavort and consort. Free to achieve the horrible state I find myself in today. I won’t deceive you. I relished the freedom Master Bell permitted me–No. Let me amend that: the freedom Master Bell discarded and which, like any mischievous pup, I eagerly pounced upon. My tasks done, I’d lunge out the door, fleeing his shop. My exit might rouse an oath from his lips, but his rasping remarks were only occasioned by the unseemly tumult of my hasty departure. I couldn’t help but make noise; the anticipation of my nightly reunion with the other pups had mounted over the course of the workday like an irritating itch, blossoming into a maddening rash by evening, and I had to run full tilt like any flea-crazed dog in search of respite. Heedlessly, mindlessly, I swiped past pedestrians, challenging fate as I skittered around horse hooves and wagon wheels. I ran and ran, rapture engulfing me when that blessed street corner came into view.  It was merely an angle of sidewalk, bracketed by a streetlamp and the whitewashed window of a policy shop, but it belonged to us. It was headquarters and home, even in the foulest weather, to our mangy squad, all refugees from workshops and stalls. We thought ourselves a remarkable pack. We battled and shoved and challenged each other, testing our mettle night after night against the surrounding traffic. When we weren’t batting one another, we slouched against the hissing streetlight, barking at dandies, howling at damsels, begging for favors from the immigrants and bullyboys emerging from the policy shop. When the numbers were kind, those bettors were an easy touch, throwing us cigar butts and coins along with their usual threats. We only relinquished our spot on special occasions. The clanging bell and clattering approach of the fireladdies sent us into a frenzy and we’d reconnoiter their steam engine as it rounded our corner, its belching smokestack our beacon, leading us to a fantastic conflagration and, if we were lucky, a marvelous battle. Allying ourselves with one company, we’d nip at the opposing fireladdies’ heels, dodging their boots and fists, not to mention brickbats and clubs. And then there were the forays into enemy territory, expeditions to raid another pack’s street corner–or, as often, to defend our own. Oh, those fights were the best, musses that raged for brief moments, a flurry of roaring, yowling, and biting. Victorious or vanquished, almost always dispersed by a cop, we’d return to our haunt, nursing and proudly displaying our rends, bruises, and shallow lacerations. Yes, I relished my freedom and Master Bell said nary a word. Many a morning I appeared in a sorry state, torn and scraped and sore from the previous night’s combat, but all he did was nod in the direction of my breakfast bowl. Only once did he comment and that was early in my wanderings, the one time I whimpered (having loosened a tooth in the evening’s muss). “Fool” is what he said, leaving his wife, my mistress, to crouch down, grasp my nose and extract the worrisome and dying object from my trembling jaw. What did Master Bell care, as long as I observed my duties in the shop, as long as I obediently harkened to his and his jours’ commands, dumbly following the repetitious tasks, as long as I limited my savagery to the after-hours. Only later would I understand the extent of his betrayal and the ignorance to which he had happily consigned me. But the bifurcation of my sunlight and shadow could not be maintained. Let loose and, through my master’s neglect, permitted cultivation, my wildness slowly gained precedence over the rest of my immature being. Slowly, and then with increasing rapidity, the savagery invaded my daylight hours.  I barely noticed the change at first. All I knew was that, inexplicably, I’d grow tense, fearful. Soon, I located my unease in the increasing clarity of two of my senses. Smells and sounds would suddenly assault me in the shop, and I’d become confused, my eyesight contradicting the powerful messages entering through my ears and nose. Master Bell gave me an order, nothing unusual, calling me to his side, instructing me to assist him at some task. But his mundane words now sent me into a trembling fit and I stared aghast at his placid, pallid face from which a flood of ire and hate had been disgorged. Somehow, the timbre of his voice, the emphasis of his tongue, had taken on new meaning, and it was as if I looked into his exposed brain, pulsating with wrath, spewing his hatred of me. Smells were even worse. The usual stink of midday sweat coming off the jours cursing at their work became overpowering, rancid with frustration and, at my approach, malevolence. I’d never been popular among the journeymen; I reserved my obedience for my master alone and never displayed the kind of deference the jours felt due them. As far as I was concerned, they were a sorry lot, appearing and departing at a dizzying rate, inevitably dismissed by Master Bell after ruining some piece of work. But, increasingly, the smell of their anger unsettled me, imparting a blunt odor of meanness that enunciated the fate they would’ve given me if they had the chance. It rose off of them and slapped me, a physical blow of a smell, an undiluted odor of murder. I’d freeze before one of them, sure he’d hit me, sure he’d bellowed my doom. But nothing had been done, nothing said. And I took to sniffing, trying to ward off the assaults by catching the first traces of the smells. I’d sit up straight, trying to catch the preceding notes before the awful sounds appeared, my muzzle and ears twitching.  It was Mistress Bell who first saw the signs of my increasing savagery. One morning I smelled the suspicion coming off of her and looked up from my bowl to see her standing vigilant beside the stove, her features set in their usual grimace. When she approached to take away my empty bowl, I suddenly felt an urge to nip her, to take advantage of the caution and dread coming off of her dry, cracked hands. Somehow, she must have sensed my purpose for, soon after, I heard her arguing with Master Bell and I was consigned that afternoon to sleep in the shed situated in the dirt yard behind the house.  The end came shortly after that incident. I awoke one morning in the shed, startled awake. It was as if all the odors and sounds of the past weeks had coalesced in my head to form a dark warning that urged me, ordered me, to flee.  The impulse was overpowering. On all fours, I scurried out of the yard and into the shop. The only way to the street was through the shop’s front entrance, but my escape was blocked by Master Bell, who’d risen early to finish some work for a demanding customer. I tried to control my breathing, to suppress the pants emerging from my throat. My mouth was thick with spittle, unable to contain it so that it speckled upon the wood floor. Master Bell heard me, whipping around from his work. The fear that crossed his face was nothing to the stench. He grabbed a hammer, brandishing it high over his sweating head. I growled. Master Bell yelled. I bared my teeth. He threw the hammer at me. Unthinkingly, I dodged it, the tool bounding off the floor and denting the plaster wall. I leapt for my master. I didn’t hurt him much. He was scrambling up onto the table when I reached him. I got hold of more fabric than flesh, but the taste of the meat of his buttocks was wonderful. My goal, however, was escape, so as quickly as I struck I released him. To the sound of Master Bell’s terrified bleats, I left his workshop forever. The first few weeks I did well enough for myself. The streets of the city being what they are, there was more than enough pickings to keep my hunger in check. All in all, the fare was less fresh but of greater variety than what Mistress Bell had served me in her kitchen. Amidst the garbage lining the curbs and cluttering alleys I found luscious bones, maggoty meat and, when all else failed, rotting vegetables. I quickly mastered the art of intimidation, honing the skills I’d learned in my former street corner pack. A brazen snarl usually did the trick when I found an attractive item already claimed by another cur. Before long I was forced to take more cunning measures; it was easy to fool my challengers–be they dog, pig, or goat–striking suddenly after feigning retreat. The other marauders grew to fear me. If I had wanted to I’m certain that I could’ve gathered my own following of scrawny, scurrying brutes. But the few occasions I permitted some sore-ridden mutt to dog my tracks proved hazardous: invariably, the stupid thing would make a racket, knocking over the barrel I’d led him to, attracting an outraged and armed groceryman. Numbers were a liability in the craft of scavenging. The sounds and smells of the streets augured a universe of opportunities. My senses were sharpened to perfection, directing me to my wants; I need only apply a measure of craft to win, to allow my wits to dissolve in delicious, thoughtless abandonment: the ravening hunger in my belly quenched as I burrowed into a mound of garbage, the pulsing ache in my loins quelled by a moment’s coupling in a vacant field.  When the cold weather came, however, my prospects began to deteriorate. My short coat proved inadequate. I came to dread night, lying curled and shivering in doorways, finding meager shelter behind a pile of trash against the freezing wind and rain. As I began to hanker for more substantial fare, rats became my favored meal. Their oily and reeking skins opened to hot, pulsating joy as I broke and swallowed their brittle bones and pulpy organs. Yet, the reward was momentary, incapable of staving off my constant shivering and increasing sleeplessness. I seemed to be slowly shaking off my flesh, my ribs growing more pronounced, my skin tormented alternately by the cold air and the hot ferocity of the burrowing fleas. If I wasn’t scratching, I was gnawing at myself, incessantly pursuing the torturous raging in my filthy, pest-ridden coat. After the first snowfall, my circumstances grew worse. Until then I’d easily dodged and, where I could, menaced the hectoring boys who found sport in running down wizened strays. But that had been when I was in the full flush of my freedom, when I felt my coat was a shining suit of armor, my jaws powerful weapons, my limbs dependable. Now the enemy had an arsenal of ice and snow and a store of energy in direct proportion to my exhaustion. Day after day, hour after hour, tottering on my frostbitten paws, I nervously peered into every alley I passed, checked every stoop, dreading the ambuscades. Finally, one cold afternoon, the sky as gray as the soot-laden mounds of snow blocking the curbs, a squad of boys cornered me. I’d sniffed out a barrel filled with newly discarded refuse, redolent of bones and week-old meat, a delectable, glowing prize perched deep in a blind alley near the docks. How desperate I’d become, how foolish in my pursuit of food. Hesitating at the alley entrance, I raised my nose to the air, cocked my ears, seeking any sign of danger. I thought I caught the tinkle of evil laughter, the conspiratorial snuffling of hunters, the scent of treachery . . . but the cold played tricks on the senses, made the smells and sounds deceptive, near becoming far, far near. The barrel’s sweet stench was stronger than my caution and, impetuously, I darted into the alley. Before I was halfway to the barrel, the shadows of my enemies filled the narrow passageway, blocking any retreat. Screaming and hooting, the boys were upon me. In their ecstatic frenzy, their ice and stones mostly missed their mark. But I had nowhere to go and, as their range shortened, their aim grew truer. A stone knocked the wind out of me, another hit me square on the jaw, sending out a woeful yelp, the kind of sound I’d only heard other curs emit before. I turned, snarling, snapping my teeth, my vision blurred, pain rattling through me.  If the girl had not appeared, I’m sure it would’ve been the end of me. In truth, I really don’t know what happened. All I was able to perceive was the sudden swirl of gingham skirts and her high-pitched, rankling voice somehow cowing the hunters, breaking them apart, sending them fleeing. She seemed to know my tormentors, knew their weaknesses and where to strike, not physically but vocally, her slight presence like a hot iron melting away their ice, returning their taunts with threats that forced them back, back, and away. Weak and confused, I cowered from her, snarling pitifully at her approach. Crouching at a safe distance, she met my low growls with fine phrases. She smelled of coal dust and woven rugs, and the gorgeous odor of warm meals came off her hands. Then she stood up, advanced to the barrel, and began to pick out the bits of food that had nearly caused my demise. Cradling the bones and meat in her hands, she built a pile before me and stepped back. She waited there until I relented and crawled over to her offering. In another time I would’ve snubbed her kindness (in another time I would’ve done worse than that), but I was in no condition to disdain her friendship. Once she left the alley I tracked her steps, cautiously following her through the dark, wet streets, halting when she turned to observe my pursuit. She shook her head, but I had learned long ago that appearances meant nothing. The sound of her voice beckoned me. In the following weeks, Mollie Maloney saved me. I insisted on staying in the streets, following her up to but not into the boardinghouse where she lived, going no further than the stoop of the mansion in which she disappeared every morning. Every evening, though, stiff and sighing from her domestic duties, her body thick with the scent of dirt, soap, and food, she graced me with the hearty remains of her employers’ meals. When I wanted it, there was a soft bed of straw in a sheltered corner of the yard behind the boardinghouse. After I allowed her to approach me, she scrubbed me with wet rags, sprinkled my hide with sharp powder, and then set to work with a hard brush. She engulfed me with her caresses, stroking my back until my haunches quivered and my tail ached with its rapturous wagging. And yet, as she stroked me and I gazed up at the flat planes of her broad, freckled face, my eyes inevitably moved to the pulse at the base of her neck. I think now I can say that I felt affection for her . . . an attraction, however, not that different from the impulse I felt when close to the lifeblood of any vulnerable creature. Not unlike what I felt before a kill. It was a confusion I cherished, the tension proclaiming our relationship as unique. Dependent as I might seem in Mollie Maloney’s embrace, I was, in fact, still free. My strength returned, my coat prospered and thickened, my belly no longer mewled. My idyll, such as it was, couldn’t last. I’d learned to avoid the brutal boys, but there were worse predators afoot in the city. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had gained an admirer, an observer who bided his time, lulled me into trust, and then took me as his prisoner. Worse still, my imprisonment would spell the end of the one human who had never betrayed me. At some point during the weeks I was, at least in appearance, Mollie Maloney’s ward, I came to the attention of Master Kit. I first spied him on one of my rat-catching forays on the waterfront. Despite Mollie’s meals, I had not surrendered my taste for rodents and the river’s edge was alive with them. They were particularly succulent along the docks, plump from the raided stores of the ships and warehouses. And easy to catch, their waddling flight no match for my newfound agility. One day I looked up from a catch, my mouth gory with rat remains, and espied a blocky figure on the pier above me. Standing arms akimbo, his legs spread wide against the pestering waterfront wind, he silently observed me. Taking no chances, I ran off, scrambling away from the river and back into the crowded streets.  Within days I saw the man again. There was no doubt about it, he was looking for me and, in time, I was fool enough to let him come near. He was patient, an attribute he would relinquish once our association became more intimate. He didn’t try to catch me, always staying a respectful distance, after a while shouting kudos when I performed a particularly noble feat. Of course, Master Kit’s notion of nobility had its peculiar edge and I think it was that strange quality that lured me to him. You see, he seemed most admiring when I displayed my more bestial traits. I think it was on the occasion when I was attacked by one especially stupid boy that I finally came under his influence. Master Kit had shown up as usual, watching me from across a narrow, shadowy street, propped against the bins outside a shabby grocery. I wasn’t doing anything purposeful, I was just sniffing the air for possible diversions when a boy came lurching out of a doorway. He clearly thought he had me as he advanced, making no mystery of his purpose, snorting in anticipation, his upraised arms pressing back his ears, at their apex a large paving stone. I didn’t run; I waited. When he was almost on top of me, reeking with the utter joy of impending murder, I deftly slid between the little lout’s legs. Top-heavy already, my maneuver cracked whatever equilibrium he still maintained. The boy went over backwards, emitting a satisfying screech. Then, unable to deny myself complete triumph, I neatly turned and nipped his collar. I dragged him a few howling feet through the mud before I let him go. As I scampered away, I glanced toward Master Kit. He was laughing with such exuberance that he was bent double. “That’s showing him, Butts,” he shouted when he could control his mirth, “that’s my champion!”  “Butts.” I’d heard him use that word before. Its intonation suggested that it could be another name for food, for fondling. Mollie Maloney used the word “Jakesy” in a similar manner. The distinction was arbitrary, at least that’s what I thought then. What was important was that here was a new ally, one who appreciated the subtler arts of my canine existence. Mollie Maloney gave me sustenance and the pleasure of a graceful touch, but I could never show her the gaslight side of my nature. Here was a human, I thought as I sauntered round the corner, who knew my essence and it gave him cheer. The art of Master Kit’s deceit was all in the preparation. Suffice it to say that his patience and distant praise succeeded in casting me in a trance. A few days later, he finally offered me a more material reward and, throwing all caution to the wind, I accepted the dripping slab of meat.  I awoke to find myself in a dark stall, my head too heavy to raise from the layer of straw that covered cold, hard-packed dirt. The constriction of the collar around my neck should’ve sent me into a paroxysm of rage and panic, but the pain in my head took precedence. After a while, I worked myself to my feet and wobbled toward the faint smell of the river that wafted through the stall’s open front. It was only after I suddenly gagged, my neck snapped and I flopped back onto the ground that I discovered that the collar around my neck was secured to the far wall by a chain. Collapsed, muddled, miserable, spears of straw stabbing my lolling tongue, my drugged senses eventually discerned the sounds surrounding me in the dark, an uneven song composed of chanting barks and protesting yodels, a captives’ chorus. I was just another dog now, one of many in Master Kit’s basement kennel. In time I learned that, in truth, I was not just one of the mutts Master Kit lured to his prison. He’d marked my craft and agility, he had special plans for his “Butts.” I learned that each dog had his purpose in the Bandbox. The more docile ones, deluded by a regular supply of food and a bed of straw into believing imprisonment was no more than the domestication for which they had always hankered, those gentle and pathetically grateful mutts served as Master Kit’s decoy dogs. They were the only ones who saw daylight unhampered by collar and chain, let out to gather even more gullible strays and errant pets into a pack to be corralled, sacked, and dumped into the kennel. Out of this ever-gushing stream, Master Kit selected worthy candidates for the fighting pit, sending the scrawny and diseased to the pound to meet their deaths (collecting a bounty for each prospective carcass). As for the other dogs, they were divided into two categories, each destined for the amphitheater on the ground floor. The small and fleet ones were dispatched as rat-killers, the laborers of the pit, the clowns in the show. Those of us with brawn were reserved for the service of dog fighting. Of these dogs, the more brutish merely served their time as jours for the few of us who tempered strength with an equal measure of wits. My ears clipped, my hide marked by the slice of teeth and claws, I learned to kill. I learned that what I’d thought were heroic musses, my former street corner battles, were nothing more than a valueless apprenticeship. Once it became clear that any dog I faced in the pit meant me harm–and there was no mistaking that, no subtlety, just a riotous approach and snapping jaws–once it became clear that the kennel and the ring were my home, like it or not, I took to my studies. Master Kit trained me to kill precisely. Placed in the ring, my muzzle removed, I vaulted from his hands like lead shot fired from a musket: that was the sum total of what Master Kit wanted. But I brought something special to the craft, a bravado and daring that amazed Master Kit and made him, in his own way, appreciative. Reducing my talent to its simplest aspect, I brought a sense of time to the pit. It was a skill no one could’ve taught me; it was, I came to believe, my calling, the purpose for which the Almighty had created me as a singular creature. I, and I alone, could parry and thrust, could nibble and bite at the physique and the mind of my opponents, could draw out a fight like a blood-‘n-thunder performance until the surrounding faces were lusting for death. When I finally struck the fatal blow the chamber shook with the crowd’s cry, a rolling thunder of rapture, relief, and repugnance. To use Master Kit’s argot, I gave the crowd its money’s worth.  I became the champion of champions, a legend. And now I am nothing. The riverfront is my haunt, at least for the present. I live, caked in the river’s slime, emerging only at night, like the other animals and men who emerge from their holes, from underneath the docks, out of the clay and muck once the sun sets. I can’t catch the rats any more, but it’s not due to any lack of strength. Maybe it’s because I lack the determination . . . because I’ve changed again.  For now, I live off of the worst refuse provided by the city. It seems an appropriate reward for one who cannot find a place in the natural order of things. Keenly watching the offal ship moving out of the harbor in the low evening sunlight, the heavy air carries the hysterical flutter of the gulls’ wings and the promise of sustenance. Soon I hear the splash far off in the bay of horses, cows, pigs, and, yes, dogs, the sounds that promise to still the coiling emptiness of my own pit. I force myself to be patient, knowing that the cargo of corpses will return with the tide. My eyes scan the sparkling current of the river, searching for the glint of the bloated rafts in the moonlight, the slithering movement of floating entrails released from bellies burst by the hulls of riverboats. Soon they will drift to the shore.  With eager anticipation, I await their arrival.

Go to The Hungry Eye, Episode 3

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

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For more than a decade, historians from many fields and nations have been studying the past through the lens of “memory.” Some say we have veered from our training and subject matter (“gone over to the enemy” of post-structuralism, as one questioner put it to me). But many others–and I include myself–have felt the pull to investigate how societies remember, to research the “myths” that define cultures, to cross over into the realm of public, collective historical consciousness in all its manifestations.

The concepts of history and memory can be conflated or discretely preserved in use and meaning; it is important to establish their differences. Historians are custodians of the past; we are preservers and discoverers of the facts and stories out of which people imagine their civic lives. But we need a sense of both humility and engagement in the face of public memory. “The remembered past,” warned John Lukacs in 1968, “is a much larger category than the recorded past.”

History is what trained historians do, a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research; it tends to be critical and skeptical of human motive and action, and therefore more secular than what people commonly call memory. History can be read by or belong to everyone; it is more relative, and contingent on place, chronology, and scale.

If history is shared and secular, memory is often treated as a sacred set of absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community. Memory is often owned, history interpreted. Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised. Memory often coalesces in objects, sites, and monuments; history seeks to understand contexts in all their complexity. History asserts the authority of academic training and canons of evidence; memory carries the often more immediate authority of community membership and experience. Bernard Bailyn has aptly stated memory’s appeal: “its relation to the past is an embrace . . . ultimately emotional, not intellectual.”

Scholars working on memory are no less devoted to traditional sources than those on any other subject. We assess all manner of individual memories (actual remembered experience) in letters, memoirs, speeches, debates, and autobiography. But our primary concern is with the illusive problem of collective memory–the ways in which groups, peoples, or nations construct versions of the past and employ them for self-understanding and to win power in an ever-changing present. The fierce debate over National History Standards during the early 1990s was not only a clinic about the stakes in America’s “culture wars,” but a culture-wide lesson in the politics of history’s relationship to collective memory.

In short, historians study memory because it has been such an important modern instrument of power. And what historians studying memory have come to understand is simply that the process by which societies or nations remember collectively itself has a history.

There are risks, of course, as historians shift their gaze to matters of social and public memory. We could become servants of the very culture wars that have given rise to so many struggles over memory in our own time. Memory is usually invoked in the name of nation, ethnicity, race, religion, or on behalf of a felt need for peoplehood or victimhood. It often thrives on grievance and its lifeblood is mythos and telos. Like our subjects, we can risk thinking with memory rather than about it. Indeed, the study of memory is fueled in part by the world’s post-Holocaust and post-Cold War need to assess the stories of survivors of genocide, trauma, or totalitarian control over historical consciousness. While I agree that the world is riven with too much memory, and that its obsessions can stifle democratizing and universalizing principles, it is precisely because of this dilemma that we must study historical memory. We should know its uses and perils, its values and dark tendencies.

People will develop a sense of the past by one means or another–from schooling, religion, family, popular culture, or demagoguery. Historical consciousness can result from indoctrination or a free market of a hundred blooming interpretations. But the greatest risk, writes Cynthia Ozick, is a tendency of people to derive their sense of the past only from the “fresh-hatched inspiration” of their “Delphic priests.” History is often weak in the face of the mythic power of memory and its oracles. But we run the greatest risk in ignoring that weakness, wishing the public would adopt a more critical, interpretive sense of the past. “Cut off from the uses of history, experience, and memory,” cautions Ozick, the “inspirations” alone of any culture’s Delphic priests “are helpless to make a future.” As historians, we are bound by our craft and by our humanity to study the problem of memory and thereby help make a future. We should respect the poets and priests; we should study the defining myths at play in any memory controversy. But then, standing at the confluence of the two streams of history and memory, we should write the history of memory, observing and explaining the turbulence we find.

The most turbulent problem in American historical memory has long been our Civil War. As I tried to show in my recent book, Race and Reunion, Americans have over the years drummed the deep divisiveness of 1861-65 into a national epic of unity, of mutual glory and sacrifice. But the politics of reconciliation came at tremendous costs in American race relations; they required a blurring and near erasure of the story of black emancipation at the heart of the war. During the first half century after Appomattox, and for most of the twentieth century as well, Americans preferred a story of reconciled conflict to the reality of unresolved racial and legal legacies.

The modern civil rights movement, occurring at the same time as the Civil War centennial, made new memories and narratives possible as never before. But any cursory look at the industry of Civil War publishing, nostalgia, and tourism will demonstrate that the story of the war as a sad but heroic episode on the journey to greater harmony and progress is alive and well in our popular memory. Widely divergent views of the war’s meaning have surfaced in recent years over Confederate symbols and over the National Park Service’s effort to broaden interpretations at battlefield sites. Moreover, the Sons of Confederate Veterans have become politicized as never before, portraying themselves and other advocates of Confederate tradition as victims of “cultural ethnic cleansing” and “wholesale persecution” by the “political correctness” of academic historians and their lackeys in government.

On the broadest level, most Americans love a good story of reunion, as evidenced in the popularity of Jay Winik’s recent book, April 1865: The Month that Saved America. According to Winik, America was “saved” in one packed month of reconciliationist drama and spirit, from the fall of Richmond to the burial of Lincoln. A long view, at least glimpsing the beginning days of Reconstruction, seems to vast numbers of enthusiastic readers unnecessary in order to understand the place of the war in American memory.

How touching the healing can seem when viewed only from the poignancy of the war’s immediate aftermath. What a rousing good story the Grant and Lee of April 1865 make as peacemakers rather than warmakers. Why take stock of lasting political and racial consequences of the war, or the bitterness of Reconstruction, or slavery’s legacies when what we really need today is a good story of national harmony and American problem solving? American tragedies, after all, demand happy endings. Americans may not have remembered the Civil War quite like the Serbs did the battle of Kosovo from the fourteenth century. But our “great war” of the nineteenth century haunts our collective memory to this day. History and memory are both about the stories we tell, but those stories carry a rich politics born of the streets, of our classrooms, our elections, and the process by which books make it to the front tables at Barnes and Noble.

Collective memory should be seen as a set of practices and ideas embedded in a culture, which people learn to decode and convert into their identities. Jay Winter warns that “nations do not remember, groups of people do.” Indeed, but nations are the evolving creations of high-stakes contests between groups contending to define the past, present, and future of national cultures. Is the United States the nation that preserved itself in the “War Between the States,” or the republic that reinvented itself in a civil war that destroyed racial slavery and expanded freedom? Was the war a bloodletting on the way to a better, more unified nation ready to play its appointed role in world affairs? Or, was the war a deep national tragedy, the meaning of which is embedded in many conflicted group memories–those of defeated white Southerners, victorious white Northerners, black former slaves, the descendents of free blacks, or European immigrant groups who made up significant percentages of the Union armies?

Indeed, who owns the memory of the Civil War? Is it those who wish to preserve the sacred ground of battlefield parks for the telling of an epic narrative of shared military glory? Or, is it professional historians with academic training, determined to broaden the public interpretation of Civil War sites to include slavery, social history, women, and home fronts? Should the master narrative of the Civil War be an essentially reconciliationist story of mutual sacrifice by noble men and women who believed in their equal versions of the right? Or, should that narrative be a complex, pluralistic story of sections and races deeply divided over the future of slavery, free labor, and the character and breadth of American liberty? If everyone fought for “liberty” in the Civil War, as is often said, then whose collective memory of the struggle should have a privileged place in textbooks, films, and on our memorial landscape? Indeed, whose claims to liberty prevailed?

Just by asking these questions we can see how contested Civil War memory can be. The war is not an event we have transformed entirely into the realm of pleasing myth, although it remains very difficult to penetrate its veneer of sentimentalism in the popular mind. Like all other modern nations, America’s historical memory can never be fixed in a static structure or a single master narrative. Our multicultural national identity will continue to evolve, and new history wars will break out among historians and school boards. Politicians will continue to claim a useable past for their ends, as will a hundred local Delphic priests. But nations still have histories colliding and forming in tandem and conflict with many group memories. As historians we have to keep contending to define the whole formed from all of our parts.

 

Further Reading: See Bernard Bailyn, “Considering the Slave trade: History and Memory,” William and Mary Quarterly, LVIII (January 2001); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory(Cambridge, Mass., 2001); David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge, La., 2002); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991); John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness or the Remembered Past (reprint New York, 1985); Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn,History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 2000); Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire, Representations, 26 (Spring 1989): 7-25; Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999); Cynthia Ozick, “Metaphor and Memory,” in Ozick, Metaphor and Memory: Essays (New York, 1991), 265-83; “Position Statement: National Park Service Interpretive Programs,” Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Department of Heritage Defense, January 19, 2001, copy provided by Dwight Pitcaithly, Chief Historian, National Park Service; Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial(New York, 1961); Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month that Saved America (New York, 2001); Jay Winter, “Film and the Matrix of Memory,” American Historical Review, 106 (June 2001): 857-64.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

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Common-place asks David W. Blight, Class of 1959 Professor of history and black studies at Amherst College, and the author most recently of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) about the differences between remembering and analyzing the past.

 

The title of this collection of essays is taken from Benjamin Rush, prominent physician in post-Revolutionary Philadelphia. His words represent the long tendency among Europeans and Euro-Americans to regard the body as a microcosmic reflection of the entire universe or macrocosm. Each of the volume’s essays assumes that the human body was an important measure of cultural suppositions about the world and examines a different aspect of the body’s meaning in early America.

The book is divided into four thematic sections, each indicating an aspect of the body and its qualities. In the first section, on the body’s permeability, Robert Blair St. George examines parallel ideas of witchcraft’s damage to bodies and houses; Trudy Eden looks at apprehensions over consumption of new world foods in early Virginia; Martha L. Finch assesses the idea that civilized bodies could reduce the savage environment of Plymouth to civility; and Jacquelyn C. Miller analyzes Benjamin Rush’s political assumptions about balance and how they affected his medical practices. The book’s second section focuses on the body’s demarcations (often in relation to perceived threats to these boundaries). Kathleen M. Brown examines a case of infanticide in Massachusetts, noting Puritan obsessions with physical cleanliness and uncleanness; Jennifer M. Spear analyzes purity of blood concerns in Spanish Louisiana; and Susan M. Stabile examines Esther Burr’s interrelated and religiously inflected concerns with her body and her writing.

In the third section, on “bodies in performance,” Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michele Lise Tarter reinforce the religious significance of the body by examining, respectively, images of the religious sanctity of the female body and of the dangerously “quaking” bodies of the Society of Friends. Alice Nash looks at English descriptions of native Americans’ “antic” dance; Janet Moore Lindman returns to the theme of religion by looking at the body in Baptist belief and worship. The last section, “bodies in discourse,” includes Teresa A. Toulouse’s essay on Hannah Duston’s captivity among and murder of Indians as a statement of anxiety over English male power in New England; Nancy Shoemaker on ways in which Indians and Europeans had similar ideas about bodies but agreed that skin color made all the difference; Joanne Pope Melish on how cases of “white negroes” and of white captives in Algiers raised particular anxiety during the “first emancipation” in the early republic; and Todd D. Smith interrogates the puzzling absence of imagery of martial male bodies during the War of 1812.

The result is that often promised but rarely achieved object: an interdisciplinary project with contributions from scholars of history, art history, the history of science, and literature. And the range of topics considered is remarkable, demonstrating that concern over the body is not imposed by current scholars on the past but deeply embedded within the past.

So, who should read this book? I suspect that it will mostly appeal to scholars who work on early America and who are already interested in the history of the body. Two potential audiences–scholars of early modern Europe and historians of early America who are suspicious about “theory-led” inquiry into the past–will probably find less of interest.

The former group will be disappointed that there is so little that is identifiably American about the volume. Many of its themes, particularly the assessments of the religious and gender implications of the body, seem typical of all early modern societies, with their widespread concerns over witchcraft, gender roles, dangerous physical environments, and social disorder. We of course need to look at these topics in their American contexts, but they should be identified as typical of the early modern era rather than as characteristically American.

The essays that make the strongest original contributions to our understanding of early America focus on phenomena distinctive to the Western Hemisphere and its colonial history. These essays examine questions about race and cultural encounters, or about the political anxieties of the Revolution and early republic. These are, however, among the minority. More attention to clearly American discourses on the body–like the material presented by Spear, Nash, Shoemaker, Miller, Melish, and Smith–would have been welcome.

Further, many of the authors are selective about the secondary literature they use; the volume will look outdated to non-Americanists and predictable to historians who think that study of the body is part of the lunatic fringe. The volume is deeply influenced by Michel Foucault’s discourse on the body, especially his emphases on power and transgression. The scholars seem not to realize that study of the body has earlier and non-Foucauldian antecedents. (Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology [Princeton, 1957], for example, had tremendous impact among medievalists and scholars of political thought.) Discussion of this broader historiography would have better translated this subfield to outsiders.

Another example of this selectivity occurs in many of the authors’ dependence on Thomas Laqueur’s argument, from his Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), that until the late eighteenth century, Europeans accepted a “one sex” model of gendered physiology. None of these authors has assessed the substantial scholarly criticism of Laqueur, who overstated the Aristotelian idea that men and women had similar physiologies while understating Aristotle’s contention that the sexes had significantly different temperaments. Nor do the Laqueur-citers seem familiar with competing interpretations of premodern views on sex and gender, especially Joan Cadden’s Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, 1993).

It is perhaps telling that the authors of these essays are mostly junior and mostly female. None of them is above the level of associate professor; only two of the fifteen essays are by men. This probably indicates the kinds of scholars of early America who are interested in the (Foucauldian) history of the body and is in sharp contrast to another recent collection of essays on the body, David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1997). In this volume, six of the fourteen essayists are full professors and seven are men; this indicates a more mature field whose more senior practitioners are as interested in the body as its junior ones. Further, that book’s organization, from head to foot, an essay for each important body part, shows the greater sophistication among scholars who focus on Europe and who are expected to come to terms with a larger, older, and more comprehensive literature. I hope this set of essays on the early American body will begin to lead us in this more sophisticated direction.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

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Joyce E. Chaplin is professor of history at Harvard University. She is the author of An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Chapel Hill, 1993) and Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

 

Every year when I teach my course on early American literature, filled with salty travelers, solemn Puritans, nefarious tobacconists, and fiery Revolutionaries, I can count on at least one student asking, “But what did the Indians think?” Why, such students invariably go on to ask, aren’t the voices of the inhabitants who were all but eradicated by the colonists more fully represented on the syllabus? I imagine teachers of the very first course on early American literature faced the same questions, for it’s a problem that has dogged scholars in the field since the field began. We have usually answered by pointing out that almost no Native American cultures had writing, so, as much as we would like to include work by Indian authors in our reading lists and literary analyses, the written material does not exist. While this answer has the virtue of providing a response that satisfies most students, its accuracy depends on how we define a “real” Indian. For, as more and more scholars of early American studies are teaching us, there were, in fact, many writers of Native American descent before 1800, we have just generally chosen to ignore them. In Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America, Hilary E. Wyss aims to show us why we do so at the expense of our understanding of both Native American and European American cultures.

To make her case, Wyss integrates insights gained from various fields of study, including anthropology, history, and literature, and she incorporates these insights into her story while at the same time producing a work that is accessible to any thoughtful reader, including those outside the comfy confines of the ivy tower. While wonderfully eclectic in its cannibalizing of various disciplines, literary studies serves as her specific scholarly target. Wyss contends that scholars of early American literature have let their notions of what constitutes an “‘authentic’ Native voice” (9) deafen them to the many writings by Christian Indians before William Apess’s work of the early nineteenth century. Wyss argues that a treasure trove of literary material will magically become available for our analyses once literary scholars stop insisting that only Natives untainted by the alien influences of colonial culture count as Native writers. These writers, she insists, can teach us a great deal about the various Native worldviews literary scholars have tended to mystify rather than analyze.

In order to prove her point as well as establish that “a tradition of Native American life writing . . . precedes Apess by almost 150 years” (4), Wyss analyzes writings from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries related to “five specific situations” involving Christianized Indians in the northeastern United States (14). First, she looks at documents by and about Christianized Indians in King Philip’s War in the late seventeenth century. From there, she considers the writings of and about Christianized Indians on Martha’s Vineyard in the early eighteenth century, concentrating on Experience Mayhew’s 1727 work Indian Converts. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the writings produced out of communities specifically formed with Native converts in mind, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Brotherton, New York, respectively. Her final chapter looks at how our understanding of Apess’s work would change if we considered his writings in the context of the larger tradition which she has just outlined.

Wyss proves her point to my satisfaction about the existence of a Native tradition of life writing before Apess. Each of her chapters taught me something about the need to pay closer attention to writings that remain relatively unexamined by scholars in my field–and, I dare say, by most people interested in early American literature and culture–as well as about what I might learn if I did, indeed, pay greater heed to these writings. Her discussion of the conversion narratives recorded by Experience Mayhew was extraordinarily provocative, for instance, and her analysis of the writings of the late-eighteenth century Native diplomat Hendrick Aupaumut exposes us to a relatively unknown figure while providing insightful readings of his work. Sometimes her analysis even touches directly on the reigning giants of colonial American literary study. So, for instance, her readings of the writings of Christianized Indians negotiating the exchange of Mary Rowlandson provide insights into Rowlandson’s captivity narrative like few others that have examined that work–and there have been many scholars, indeed, who have examined it.

Where many of Wyss’s readings are intriguing and she has brought to light many interesting issues and writers, her unwillingness to think more thoroughly about the implications of her own insights renders what she has taught us less persuasive and powerful than it might have been. So, for instance, in what I believe to be an extraordinarily astute move, Wyss cautions us against taking Native-ness, or, she says, Christian-ness, as having some essential purity (11). Instead of looking for writings that will speak from a position of pure identity, Wyss says she will examine how a piece of writing “help[s] define the cultural position of the Christian Indian” (11). In other words, writing rather than experience produces identity here. With this single gesture, Wyss calls into question the very foundation of literary studies as a record of the lived experience of particular individuals. In so doing, her project asks us to stop imagining literary works primarily as the records of different categories of people. Instead, the project she proposes would have us look at writing as part of the process that gives us the very categories we use to experience reality–categories like “Native” and “English” and “Protestant” and “Civilized.” Unfortunately, Wyss herself falls back on the very language of those critics who got us into the intellectual conundrum that blinded us to the value of Native writing in the first place. Namely, she casts her work as unearthing what can only be called the “authentic” “lived experience” (3) of her Native subjects. It seems to me that we cannot have it both ways–we cannot give up the notion of pure, essential identities at the same time we speak of writings that embody the “authentic lived experiences” of what amounts to some other allegedly “pure” category of identity.

The attempt to have it both ways with identity rears its ugly head again in the realm of history. For in spite of her largely laudatory efforts to be sensitive to the historical forces acting on the works she analyzes, the very concepts at issue here are themselves historical products, rather than essential categories that exist outside of time and place. Notions of race, nation, self, liberty, to name only a few of the abstract concepts Wyss uses to describe issues that motivate her subjects, are in flux during the period, and the writing Wyss points us toward may very well have been influential in producing the way we unthinkingly understand these concepts now. By using modernized notions of these concepts to analyze literary texts from before the nineteenth century, Wyss misses some of what these terms would have meant for their authors and, as a result, misleads her readers about the very terms of the debates she’s investigating.

I found the problems with Writing Indians particularly troubling, I suppose, because I learned so much from the book. I think Wyss has done an admirable job of providing an intriguing and readable introduction to an important subject, one which, she has convinced me, we will be hearing much more of in the future.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

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Jim Egan teaches colonial British American literature at Brown University.

 

Following his defeat in the presidential election of 1800-01, John Adams was nothing if not energetically bitter. In 1809, his enthusiastic resentment found a new outlet. Beginning in the spring of that year, the cantankerous octogenarian wrote an extended series of letters–over three hundred in all–that appeared biweekly in a local newspaper, the Boston Patriot. The object of the letters was threefold. Responding to the pleas of two young politicians, Adams hoped to shed light on the current diplomatic crisis between the United States, Britain, and France by reviewing various events from his term as president. He also sought to discredit Alexander Hamilton and his attacks against Adams during the election of 1800-01. Perhaps most importantly, the former president desired to redeem his reputation and character. Having suffered abuse from both sides of the political divide–Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans–Adams believed a newspaper defense would turn public opinion in his favor by revealing the nobility of his intentions and the merit of his deeds.

Unfortunately for Adams, he miscalculated. Because Hamilton had been dead for five years, the newspaper blitz was deemed petty and inappropriate. Instead of creating a groundswell of popular political support, the Patriot epistles seemed to generate more criticism. The paper campaign to vindicate Adams added yet another black mark to the former president’s somewhat dubious legacy.

The great virtue of Joanne B. Freeman’s Affairs of Honor is the way in which it contextualizes apparently isolated episodes like Adams’s letter campaign. The author creatively shows that while the Patriot writings reflected Adams’s peculiarly sensitive emotions, they also demonstrated the particular historical problems faced by American elites in the early United States. More specifically, Freeman brings into relief the cultural work of honor among a people struggling to resolve the tensions between notions of republicanism and those of democracy, between aristocratic assumptions and plebeian pressures, and between organizational partisanship and personal politics.

In that regard, it is to Freeman’s great credit that students of American history must henceforth come to terms with honor culture as part and parcel of late eighteenth-century enlightened gentility, and not simply as the peculiar progeny of antebellum Southern life. As in most other societies of the early modern Western world, elites in the first decades of the United States viewed themselves through the lens of traditional manners and ethical codes. Sympathetic as they were to notions of popular sovereignty and representative government, those considered to be among the “better sort” maintained neo-aristocratic assumptions about social hierarchy and personal morality. Foreshadowing Alexis de Tocqueville’s anxiety about democracy more than Andrew Jackson’s advocacy of it, leading politicians repeatedly betrayed the struggle to adapt to the demands of post-Revolutionary America. In short, Freeman convincingly demonstrates that the Founding Fathers of the United States not only hearkened to Old World notions like “rank,” “character,” and “fame”; they daily lived them.

The depth and sophistication of honor culture comes through quite clearly in Freeman’s insightful chapter on the “weapons of paper warfare.” Framed by a useful discussion of Adams’s Patriot letters, the analysis focuses on print culture and how it served (or failed to serve) the interests of politicians hoping to preserve their reputations and promote their political principles. Carefully dissecting the particular benefits and risks associated with each type of “paper war,” Freeman illuminates the intersection of private and public. “Public-minded private letters” facilitated partisan gossip by covering the political intentions of an author with the blanket of supposedly impromptu correspondence between intimates. Pamphlets were more serious forays in that they gave elites the chance to present an extended, legal justification of their actions before a rather exclusive audience of their peers. Broadsides and handbills were emotionally strident appeals to a mass public. Newspapers were a compendium of political reports, accounts of foreign news, and local miscellany through which elites could reach the widest possible audience.

Honor thus accentuated the growing importance of print in the new United States. Desperately hoping to uphold the integrity of their public images, elites resorted to different forms of print communication because they offered the opportunity to effectively communicate with various constituencies. Printed mediums, in turn, reinforced rituals of honor by making leading figures in the American polity acutely aware of the force of public opinion; since honor was “other-directed,” it had to be vindicated in public forums. Men like John Adams exposed themselves to public criticism because they believed it was far more dangerous leaving their reputations undefended. The depth of feeling regarding personal honor pushed elites to submit themselves to the unnerving and unpredictable forces of popular democratic approval.

In fact, so embedded were notions of honor among the American genteel that they seemed to transcend the political divisions of the day. As Freeman emphasizes, a resilient bond of shared cultural assumptions often united elite Jeffersonians and Federalists as a social class and generation. “Disagree as men might on the purpose, structure, or tenor of national governance–argue as they did about the meaning of concepts like federalism and republicanism–clash as they must about the future of the nation–they expected their opponents to behave like gentlemen” (xvii). Political parties in the early republic, as a result, were ill formed and highly contingent. They frequently formed around the personality and social force of particular individuals rather than inchoate institutional imperatives. Reminiscent of Joseph Ellis’s vivid depiction of the “Founding Brothers,” Freeman’s book conveys the historical framework through which the earliest American leaders expressed the most deeply human qualities. Simultaneously loyal and disloyal, spiteful and honorable, easily offended and capable of making great sacrifices, American politicians invested their very sense of self-worth in the future of the United States. As Affairs of Honor eloquently shows, these were guys (virtually all of the book’s characters are male) who took politics personally.

And yet, Freeman’s depiction of the personal nature of politics in the early national period is not without flaws. To begin with, while she is correct to reiterate the somewhat informal ties underlying the earliest American parties, she overstates her case. It is highly debatable whether “[p]arty bonds,” as Freeman asserts, “were personal above all else” (259). Equally questionable is the claim that politicians in the early nineteenth century “imposed much of the structure and order now taken for granted” (xix). Nor is it entirely clear that it was “almost impossible to distinguish friends from foes” (xviii). For despite the predisposition to form partisan alliances along personal lines, as well as the bias against factions, politicians voluntarily formed national parties and made sure they exerted real force. What is more, people living in the 1790s did not usually have trouble recognizing their opponents. In fact, political divisions of that era could be so stark and so severe that some people would cross the street in an effort to avoid encountering a partisan enemy.

Real issues and real politics, therefore, mustnecessarily be taken into account. The last decade of the eighteenth century was a period of intense political strife in the United States in large part because the stakes were so high. People were fighting to shape the nature of the newly formed national government. They were struggling to define the place of the United States in a world of international revolutionary upheaval. And they were seeking to preserve and extend their particular version of the American Revolution. For all the fluidity and unevenness of parties, the substantive polarity of the political realm cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, it is the very stuff of political dissension that is generally absent in Freeman’s book.

In addition, it is unclear whether personal politics in the new republic differed in degree or kind from that taking place in the colonial and Revolutionary periods. Numerous scholars have shown that political authority in the eighteenth century derived from the power of particular persons. They have also convincingly emphasized the importance of familial links, patronage, personal loyalties, and shifting alliances. But whether or not the disputes of the 1790s were a continuation, intensification, modification, or repudiation of previous trends cannot be determined from Freeman’s book because she does not set her account of early national politics against that which preceded it.

Moreover, Freeman describes the code of honor as a “source of stability” (xv) without ever considering that the exact opposite might also have been true in some cases. In other words, was it possible for honor to exacerbate political disputes rather than alleviate them? Did not the need to view partisan attacks in such a personal way create the possibility for greater violence? Intent on downplaying the gravity of conflict and the depth of political divisions in the 1790s, Freeman channels the cultural work of honor into an unnecessarily narrow outlet and misses an opportunity to convey more fully the double-edged nature of honor culture.

These criticisms notwithstanding, individuals interested in early national politics will learn much from Freeman’s work.  Affairs of Honor provides a useful analysis of the anxiety surrounding the formation of American political culture. It offers yet another perspective from which to view the shapers of national governance in the United States. And it fruitfully reminds us that taking politics personally has a long and somewhat tortured history.

Further Reading: Joseph Ellis shares Freeman’s emphasis on personal politics in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2001). Important descriptions of the personal nature of politics in the colonial and Revolutionary era can be found in Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 11-92, and Michael Wallace, “Changing Concepts of Party in the United States: New York, 1815-1828,” American Historical Review 74 (1968) 453-91. Ronald P. Formisano provides an intelligent interpretation of political parties in the early republic in “Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic’s Political Culture, 1789-1840,” American Political Science Review 68 (1974) 473-87. The severity of elite political strife and divisions in the 1790s can be sensed in John R. Howe, Jr., “Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s,” American Quarterly19 (1967) 147-65; Marshall Smelser, “The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” Review of Politics 13 (1951) 457-82; Marshall Smelser, “The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion,” American Quarterly 10 (1958) 391-419; and Marshall Smelser, “The Jacobin Phrenzy: The Menace of Monarchy, Plutocracy, and Anglophilia, 1789-1798,” Review of Politics 21 (1959) 239-58. Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, (New York, 1982) is the definitive treatment of its subject.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

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Matthew Rainbow Hale is completing his dissertation at Brandeis University. His work explores the impact of transnational revolutionary upheaval on the early United States.

 

From the Black Death in medieval Europe to the AIDS crisis in twenty-first-century Africa, disease has been such a major factor in human history that, paradoxically, historians have seldom bothered to trace its precise impact on military and political events. They simply know that medical catastrophes were earthshaking and thus–in works such as William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976), Alfred W. Crosby’s Columbian Exchange (Westport, Conn., 1972) and Ecological Imperialism (New York, 1986), or Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York, 1997)–tend to place them in the huge sweep of global experience without spending much time on particulars.

Students of disease in colonial North America are no exception. For a quarter century, thanks largely to McNeill and Crosby, they have understood the horrific impact of European viral diseases such as smallpox on Native Americans after 1492; East of the Mississippi, Indian numbers declined by seventy-five to ninety-five percent by 1800. They assume that medical carnage on such a scale shaped the struggle between Europeans and Natives for control of the continent, but with rare exceptions convey only the haziest sense of how disease shaped specific episodes in the continent’s history. Against this background of vague generalities, Elizabeth Fenn’s exhaustive study of the smallpox epidemics that raged throughout North America between 1775 and 1782 is particularly welcome. Far more than a chronicle of when and where disease struck, Pox Americana demonstrates why it mattered and how it influenced great events.

Fenn begins with perhaps the best explanation a layperson will ever see of how smallpox attacks the human body and why it was such a particular threat to anyone, of any ethnicity, born in eighteenth-century North America. Once the smallpox virus, Variola major, infected a human being, its host either died or became immune for life. To survive, therefore, Variola needed a constant pool of new victims. In the urban centers of Europe, Africa, and Asia where smallpox evolved, those victims were usually children, who, if they endured the ordeal, acquired the lifetime immunity most adults enjoyed.

The situation in North America was profoundly different. In the period of initial contacts with Europeans, Native Americans lacked any exposure at all to Variola; when it arrived in a given locality, virtually the entire population was likely to be infected, with a mortality rate usually estimated at about fifty percent, but revised downward by Fenn to a still-frightening thirty to forty percent. By the eighteenth century, few populations in North America, except perhaps the Northwest Coast and Alaska, could still be described as “virgin soil” for Variola. Yet nowhere on the continent was the virus able to establish equilibrium with human beings and become endemic. As a result, it tended to attack in periodic waves, each time encountering vast numbers of susceptible bodies, old and young, Indian, European, and African alike.

Before Edward Jenner’s 1796 discovery that vaccination with the virtually harmless cowpox virus conferred immunity to smallpox, the only known preventative was “variolation,” the deliberate introduction of material from smallpox pustules into a cut in the patient’s skin. For reasons still unknown, this usually led to a relatively–but only relatively–mild version of the disease, followed by lifetime immunity. Yet patients still faced days of debilitating illness and a substantial risk of mortality, all sometimes made worse by physicians who insisted on a preparatory diet limited to milk, water, and mercury. Moreover, those with whom the patient came into contact could contract a full-fledged case. No wonder variolation was so controversial and frequently declared illegal by local authorities. And, as Fenn explains, the high monetary cost of variolation–two to five pounds–added an element of class conflict to the opposition. Treatment was not only confined to the elite who could afford it but put the rest of the population at greater risk.

Most of this, specialists already know–although Fenn adds many nuances to the story and opens it to a wide audience. Her real contributions come as she traces the chain of smallpox outbreaks that coincided with the American Revolution, how those outbreaks affected the military struggle between the rebels and the empire, and why it was no coincidence that the two events occurred at the same time. “Armies were formed. Meetings were held. People gathered and dispersed repeatedly,” she observes. “For a virus that needs a constant supply of new, unexposed human beings to thrive, conditions were perfect” (45-46).

During the British occupation of Boston in 1775-76, smallpox repeatedly flared up in the city and, Fenn argues, in different ways became a military preoccupation of both sides. The vast majority of British troops had been exposed to smallpox as children; the city’s occupiers need only identify and variolate the susceptible minority. By contrast, the bulk of Continentals were vulnerable; a variolation campaign would not only place lives at risk but leave the troops virtually defenseless during the course of treatment. General Washington subsequently attempted to avoid such dangers by quarantining new recruits for variolation before they joined the main body of his army. But before that system was in place, smallpox profoundly influenced the 1775-76 invasion of Canada. A growing number of sick and dying soldiers explained both the precipitous attack on Quebec that cost the life of General Richard Montgomery and the inability of the forces that Benedict Arnold subsequently commanded to maintain their siege of the city.

Meanwhile, far to the south, the threat smallpox posed to American-born troops had an equally devastating impact on the loyalist side. Hundreds of African Americans who joined Virginia governor Lord Dunmore’s “Ethiopian Regiment” in hopes of securing their freedom instead succumbed to the disease, and, as word of the carnage spread, hundreds, if not thousands, of other enslaved people were dissuaded from enlisting in the loyalist cause.

Farther west, in Indian country, the military impact of Variola is more difficult to measure. But it is clear that the Six Nations Iroquois in 1777 and the Creeks and Cherokees in 1779 suffered enormously from the virus. Their ability to conduct military operations during the war–and to defend their lands diplomatically from aggressive state and federal governments after the peace–were severely compromised.

In many ways, the first half of Fenn’s book is the more fascinating, for its clear explication of epidemiology, for its novel look at the War for Independence through viral eyes, and for its engaging prose. The second half, which traces the spread of what may or may not have been the same pandemic through New Spain, the Great Plains, Hudson’s Bay, and the Pacific Coast between 1779 and 1782, sometimes descends to a numbing chronicle of misery, broken only by occasional digressions into military affairs and discussions of the routes of Native and Euro-American traders and explorers who may have carried, or witnessed the effects of, the virus. In part this problem stems from the sketchiness of the evidence and the consequent lack of a clear story line, in part from the vast geographic scope and diversity of the peoples involved, and in part, paradoxically, from the same vivid writing style that is so engaging in the first half; Fenn sometimes tries too breathlessly to show how “Variola found a steady supply of victims,” “Variola maximized its opportunities,” or “Variola trailed them everywhere” (122,123,128).

Still, for those who persevere (and appreciate the brilliance of Fenn’s detective work), it becomes clear that, for all the gaps in our knowledge about what precisely happened west of the Missisippi and north of the Rio Grande, the impact of the virus there may have been, in the long run, much greater than its more finely tuned effect on the outcome of the U.S. War for Independence. In the wake of smallpox, control over the northern fur trade passed from the severely weakened Crees and Assiniboines to the Hudson’s Bay Company; dominance in the Missouri watershed shifted from the densely settled agricultural Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras to the relatively unscathed nomadic Sioux (who nonetheless noted the epidemics in their winter counts); and at least twenty-five thousand Native people died on the Pacific Coast. In such ways, long before Lewis and Clark made their storied trek, the face of the continent had been reshaped more profoundly than the pockmarked faces of the Natives who survived.

Further Reading: The only general survey of disease outbreaks before 1800 remains John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge, 1953). For seminal works on the impact of smallpox and other viral diseases on Native Americans during the era of European contact, see, in addition to the works of McNeill, Crosby, and Diamond cited above, Sherburne F. Cook, “The Significance of Disease in the Extinction of the New England Indians,” Human Biology 44 (1973): 485-508; and Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 30 (1976): 176-207. Debates over the implications of epidemics for historical estimates of the size of Native American population may be followed in Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology 7 (1966): 395-415; Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville, 1983); Ann F. Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque, 1987); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman, 1987); Dean R. Snow and Kim M. Lanphear, “European Contact and Indian Depopulation in the Northeast: The Timing of the First Epidemics,” Ethnohistory 35 (1988):15-33; Francis J. Brooks, “Revising the Conquest of Mexico: Smallpox, Sources, and Populations,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (1993): 1-29; and David P. Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: the American Indian Contact Population Debate (Norman, 1998).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

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Daniel K. Richter, professor of history and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, 1992) and Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).