Part I

It’s embarrassing to remember now. We were in the library and I was trying to find The Little House in the Big Woods for my six-year-old daughter. I was looking for the famous series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder in juvenile nonfiction. My husband looked at me, bemused. “But they’re novels,” he said. The voice that squeaked out of my mouth and the tears that sprang to my eyes as I vehemently disagreed came not from my adult self but from the little girl still deep inside me. Complicated emotions welled up as I started to laugh at my own reaction. In a single instant I saw myself passionately defending an assumption that I was simultaneously letting go: my previously unchallenged childhood belief that the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories were really, truly true. A panicky feeling swept over me as visions of Laura and her sister Mary, and Ma and Pa and baby Carrie raced through my mind.

If these stories were made up, it was not only my child-self who would feel betrayed; my job was on the line as well. I have long held that Laura Ingalls Wilder was one of the reasons I became a historian. My intense reading and rereading of her books was a central pleasure of my girlhood. I stored away tidbits of information about “the pioneer days”—like how Ma used carrots to color winter butter—that stayed in my mental treasure box for years. Despite being a relatively docile, blonde older sibling, I deeply identified with the headstrong, brown-haired, younger sister Laura. The act of projecting myself back into her world, of imagining another time, of absorbing the details of daily life, now seems like a direct precursor of my vocation as a women’s historian. The mere suggestion that the source of all that early “research” was unreliable struck me as deeply unsettling.

I’m not sure how I made it this far without realizing that I would find Wilder’s books on the fiction shelf. Partly, I guess, I really didn’t want to know. But after my forced epiphany in the public library, that changed. Now, indeed, I did want to know. Flooded with memories of the Ingalls family pioneer trek across the Midwest, I wanted to know how much was true, and how much was not. I felt ready, even eager, to read biographies of Wilder and scholarly analysis of her work. I was nervous, certainly; afraid I might lose something dear to me. But I set out with a sense of excitement, too, newly willing to see Laura through grown-up eyes.

Now, having researched “the truth” about the Little House books, I find I can live with my new knowledge. In fact, the process of learning about the stories has been quite bittersweet, in a way akin to growing up. I have had to let go of my fond, naïve trust in the narrator and learn to accept new realities, including the impossibility of knowing certain things for sure. My relationship to Laura Ingalls Wilder has been changed, but not destroyed.

What I learned can, I think, be divided into two categories. First is a set of simple facts that conflict with the books. For those of you who did not thrill to these books as children, let me remind you of the basics. There are eight in the series, written by Wilder in the 1930s, when she was in her sixties. The books follow the late-nineteenth-century Ingalls family from their home in the “Big Woods” of western Wisconsin, to Kansas, Minnesota, and finally South Dakota. Written in a straightforward, realistic style, the books have seduced generations of readers with their apparently true rendition of the Ingalls’s pioneering life.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. For instance, Laura’s sister Carrie was born on the Kansas prairie in 1870; she wasn’t alive yet when the family lived in the Big Woods although she is present in the story. A baby brother, Freddie, who died at nine months old, never appears in the books. Ok, I could handle those. But the fact that Laura Ingalls left the woods of Wisconsin for the open prairie when she was only three years old suddenly reconfigured my whole relationship to the stories. It surprised me because in the Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in the series, she is five. How could Wilder remember all those things from when she was three years old? I immediately recognized, of course, that she couldn’t. Suddenly the foundation of the little house seemed much shakier.

The second category of my discoveries revolves around this new perspective; I came to think of the little house as a stage set, rather than an actual home. It seems basic, but for me it was a completely different approach to these works, as I began to invoke the tools one uses to read fiction, not autobiography. Anne Romines’s excellent book, Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (Amherst, 1997) confirmed what I was beginning to sense: the intricacy and depth of these books as novels. I grew to treasure not only Wilder’s recollections, but her invented world. While I mourned the loss of my belief in these books as what really happened, I gained a new appreciation for the work of a mature artist. I found it exciting to follow through on themes embedded in the text. I began to look for the implicit, rather than only the explicit, messages. I was newly fascinated by the nature of Wilder’s portrayal of the frontier and the “others” she encountered there. My adult reading of her books and of the scholarly comments on them amplified and made clear whispers I had heard from the text as a child but had never been able to fully understand.

Part II

Coming to accept Wilder as a novelist was only the first step, and it was not painless. It didn’t answer my biggest question, which was still, “How much of this is true?” Even though, as a historian, I know that one’s memory is not always a reliable source, still I hoped to find reassurance that what she described was true to memory, at the very least.

I didn’t always get what I wanted. As soon became clear, the earlier books deal with a period that predated Wilder’s own memories. Laura Ingalls Wilder was sixty-five in 1932, when she published Little House in the Big Woods. She had started her writing life two decades earlier, in 1911, when she began publishing advice on a variety of farm topics in the local periodical, the Missouri Ruralist, and later became their home editor.

But Wilder’s transition from farm wife to full-fledged author and novelist was drawn out. By 1915 her only child, Rose, was a successful newspaper reporter in San Francisco, where Wilder visited her and began to think about writing more herself. In the late 1920s she finished an autobiographical story called “Pioneer Girl,” but could not find a publisher. She rewrote it, changed the narrator from first person to third person, broadened the story to include more about her whole family, and aimed it specifically at children. Thus the Little House series was born with the publication of Little House in the Big Woods in 1932.

By the time Wilder was writing about her family’s life on the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, then, more than a generation had passed, and America was struggling through the Great Depression of the mid-twentieth. For the depiction of her family’s life in the Big Woods and on the prairie, (actually the Osage Indian Reserve in southeastern Kansas), Wilder relied less on history, or even on memory, than on memories of memories: the stories her parents had told her of those years.

While Wilder was concerned in many cases with accuracy—for information about the Osage Indians, for instance, she returned to the area to conduct research and corresponded with historians—she did not hesitate to shift reality to suit the needs of fiction, or her pride. Referring to On the Banks of Plum Creek, she corresponded with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was helping edit the manuscript: “I have an awful suspicion that we drank plain creek water, in the raw, without boiling it or whatever. But that would make the reader think we were dirty, which we were not. So I said a spring. There could have been a spring near where Pa watered the oxen or there could be one near the plank footbridge. As it is located in my imagination, you may put it where it is most convenient.”

How many other pieces of the story were added, or deleted, to avoid the charge of being “dirty” and why? The first part of the question probably can’t be answered. Hints for the second may be located in the story of Wilder’s adult life. Perhaps her concern with cleanliness grew out of her participation in the Progressive Era’s home economics movement. She was an officer in the Missouri Home Development Association, which sought to bring a degree of scientific and professional expertise to farm women’s work. As a child, I was not much interested in the grown-up Laura. Now, perhaps not surprisingly, the story of her life as an adult is a central piece of the puzzle for me.

And I’m not the only one; Wilder has puzzled many scholars. Her instruction to her daughter to locate the spring “where it is most convenient” raises a significant controversy in the world of Wilder experts. What exactly was the role played by Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was a professional writer? Early profiles of Wilder written after the initial success of the Little House books in the 1930s presented her as an untutored, natural writer with an amazing memory channeling and then jotting down her childhood experiences. The polished nature of the works suggested to some, therefore, that Lane must have been mainly responsible for their success as literature. But other scholars disagree. Recently Wilder’s earlier writing, including her decade as a columnist for the Missouri Ruralist, and the travel diary she published of her own trip with her husband from Minnesota to Missouri, has been the focus of more attention. Clearly she had honed her craft before publishing the books that made her famous. With this background in mind, it becomes less surprising that Wilder could create her memorable books. Nevertheless, scholars agree that collaboration between mother and daughter was central to the process that gave birth to the series.

It doesn’t much bother me to think of Rose having a hand in the stories. Maybe it’s because I “knew” her as a baby in the last book, The First Four Years (found among Wilder’s papers after her death and published in 1971). Or maybe it’s because I think many authors get help, even if our literary culture doesn’t like to admit it. Manuscript pages housed in the Herbert Hoover Library show how Wilder handwrote the stories and passed them to her daughter, who typed them up, making changes here and there. Their surviving correspondence reveals that they often discussed plot and details at length. To me, seeing this collaborative creative process come to light was only reassuring. I think students of writing are often shielded from the fact that most writers get help not only from editors, but from friends, writing groups, spouses, or partners. With Wilder and Lane, what in many other cases remains unseen has simply become more visible.

Part III

Sitting in a coffee shop a few months ago I had another experience similar to my first jolt in the library. While the first one led me to question these stories’ veracity, the second made me consider their politics. After I described my project to an acquaintance, she replied that she believed much of Wilder’s emphasis on self-sufficiency and independence was a rebuttal to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. My heart sank as I recognized the plausibility of that claim. Despite my years of training as a historian, it had never occurred to me to think of the Little House books in the context of the Depression during which they were written. Indeed, according to Wilder’s biographers, FDR’s New Deal did not sit well with Laura, her husband Almanzo, or their daughter Rose. Although Democrats by dint of their longstanding familial affiliation, they referred to FDR as “a dictator” and disliked his programs as “far too powerful and meddlesome.” Surely these feelings undergirded Wilder’s attempts to show how her family survived without “hand-outs.”

I don’t like thinking of Wilder as an anti-New Dealer, but I find other charges still harder to stomach. That she was a racist, for one. While I accept that she shared in her culture’s racist failings, I maintain that her views are complicated rather than simplistic. I disagree with those who, based on the claim that her works are harmful, call for censorship. In 1998 the Saint Paul Pioneer Press printed an editorial by Deborah Locke entitled “Cleaning ‘House'” that claimed, “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s children’s books about a ‘heroic’ white settler family are filled with patently racist and absurd portrayals of Indians. Her series is utterly inappropriate for third-graders.” The Osage writer Dennis McAuliffe Jr., in a book about his family’s history, wrote “I would not want my child to read Little House on the Prairie. I would shield him from the slights [it] slings upon his ancestors.”

I understand these charges. In Little House on the Prairie the Ingalls’s neighbor, Mrs. Scott, voices the views of many settlers when she says that the land should belong to whites rather than Indians. “Land knows, they’d never do anything with this country themselves. All they do is roam around over it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that’ll farm it. That’s only common sense and justice.” Mrs. Scott, if not her creator, believed the old adage that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. There are several passages in the books where Indians are described as barbarous or animalistic. When Laura sees two Indians coming toward her and Mary as they play on the prairie, Wilder describes them as “naked, wild men,” whose eyes were “black and still and glittering, like snake’s eyes.” Laura and Mary are terrified when they see the men enter the house and wonder, “Oh, what are they doing to Ma!”

But Wilder’s attitude toward Indians is not one dimensional. In the scene above, Laura finally slips into the house to protect Ma and watches the two Indians from behind a slab of wood leaning against a wall. When one of the men spots her and their eyes meet, the description changes tone: his eyes “shone and sparkled at her.” Shining and sparkling eyes are a familiar trope in the book, and usually describe those nearest and dearest to Laura, especially Pa. After the men leave, Laura remarks to her mother that they “smell awful.” But Ma replies, “[T]hat was the skunk skins they wore.” There is a recognition, at least, that the smell is not inherent in the people but comes from the clothing they wear.

Despite this one instance of clear-sightedness, Ma is indeed deeply frightened of Indians, and that fear leads her to dislike them. Implicit in Laura’s description of Ma, I believe, is a critique. Clearly Ma, who scolds Laura for forgetting her sunbonnet because the girls are “getting to look like Indians,” is afraid of what scholars today would call “otherness.” But Laura also reveals how that fear depletes her and her family. In On the Banks of Plum Creek, the family buys a little spotted cow from a Norwegian couple who have named her “Reet.” Laura gleefully figures out that the name means Wreath, for the rosy circles on her hide. Ma firmly and unimaginatively insists, “Her name is Spot.” In describing this scene, Wilder lays bare her mother’s ethnocentrism and shows how it blinds her to the poetry of life on the frontier.

Not only does Wilder implicitly criticize Ma’s fear of Indians, she makes Pa speak up on their behalf, and describes Laura as fascinated by and attracted to them. Pa defends the Indians to Ma and their neighbors. When other whites accuse the local tribe of setting the prairie on fire to burn the settlers out, he reminds them that it is a traditional farming technique. He declares that Indians “would be as peaceable as anybody else if they were let alone. On the other hand, they had been moved west so many times that naturally they hated white folks.” One of the most powerful moments in the Little House on the Prairie is near the end, as the Indians are leaving the area, and Laura for the first time sees a papoose. As her eyes lock with the child’s, she cries, “Pa, get me that little Indian baby!” She is absolutely certain about her desire although she can’t explain it except to sob, “Its eyes are so black.” When Ma reminds her that they already have a baby Laura declares loudly, “I want the other one too!” Some will argue that this moment represents a romantic white appropriation of the Indian child. This may be so, but there is also a clear yearning for a crossing of boundaries, a desire to somehow connect with this other child, which compels the reader to recognize a message far more complicated than one of hatred. Wilder is constrained, yes, by her own inability to truly know the Indian child, but she fights against those constraints. Her story reflects a wide variety of white views on race and in that way offers a compelling portrait of both the richness and the tragedy of life on the frontier.

Part IV

Rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder has been a challenge. Once I accepted that Wilder made up a lot, I had to embark upon a more adult and thus complex relationship to the author. I can no longer see her as a completely trustworthy guide to her own past, let alone the nation’s. Nor do I need to. Seeing her as a novelist, I can live with her desire to shield some parts of her history, and to celebrate others. As an historian, I can understand her relationship to the time in which she wrote as well as to the time that she describes. I can see the limits in her world view and understand the constraints against which she was pushing. All of this takes work, but in the end I find myself enriched and my belief in the importance of these books affirmed.

But what about my six-year-old daughter? What still troubles me is how, and indeed whether, to pass along my newly complex perspective to her. I want Eliza to understand the limitations of the American past on matters of social justice, gender, and race. Yet I also want her to be able to experience that intense relationship with Laura. How can she if she doesn’t trust her? I was so eager to share the Little House with Eliza that I introduced that world to her at a much earlier age than I was at my first meeting, reading aloud the books I had devoured on my own. I wasn’t sure she’d appreciate the stories, but she loved them. In fact, she once told me with great feeling that she wished Laura was still alive so that she could watch her actually writing. “I’ve never seen anybody really writing a book,” she said. (I tried not to take this personally, even though Eliza had in fact been around while both her father and I had done exactly that.) It was Laura the adult, the writer, who seemed to fascinate Eliza most.

In a sense, Eliza’s approach is lucky for me. If already she is thinking about Wilder as an author, then to think about the decisions a writer makes might not be as startling as they would have been to me at her age, when I focused solely on Laura the subject, running and playing on the prairie. But I hesitate to assume a readiness that is not really there. I don’t want to ruin a connection that is based, at least in part, on the belief that what Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote was real. So how much of my newfound knowledge do I pass along? I think my dilemma raises some questions about the problem of genre and children’s literature. We can’t assume that young children can tell the difference between history, historical fiction, and auto/biography. The question is, do they need to? What role should parents and teachers play? Does too much intervention spoil the magic? Is too little information irresponsible?

Regardless of how I would answer them for my daughter, these questions sufficiently complicated my own perspective that reading the books with Eliza was not an unmitigated pleasure. Used to my own, private relationship with Laura, I found myself in the awkward position of mediator between author and audience. I had to explain that parts of the books make me uncomfortable, and discuss why.

I found it particularly difficult when I recognized pieces of context that Wilder only hinted at. For instance, in 1862, Dakota Indians in Minnesota attacked and killed white settlers who were encroaching on their ancestral lands, and whites retaliated, with devastating results. Mrs. Scott refers to the incident, but Ma won’t explain it to Laura. Clearly this pivotal event informed the terror that the parents felt when they listened for days to beating drums and singing that signified a war council among the tribes near them. The adult author Wilder controls the story, but the parents in the book held a knowledge they did not share with the children. Should I let Eliza’s perspective remain close to that of the child, Laura, or should I explain what Wilder knew and I later learned?

How much should I tell my own daughter about these different levels of meaning and reality? I’m not sure yet, but I think the answer for me lies in treating this as I do other aspects of parenting. The Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Elijah drinking the wine at the Passover table: sometimes we enable stories that aren’t quite true in order to preserve our children’s sense of wonder. I also shield my children from some of the more difficult realities in the world because I feel there are certain things they don’t need to know, at least not yet. But, when my kids ask for the truth, I don’t lie. And when truths demand to be told, I don’t silence them.

As part of my research on Wilder, I visited the Children’s Literature Resource Center at the University of Minnesota’s Elmer Anderson Library. They have a collection of newsletters from the various Laura Ingalls Wilder historical sites that dot the Midwest. Sitting in that library, the little girl in me gasped again, this time with delight at a photograph of Pa’s fiddle, now on display in Mansfield, Missouri. There was something thrilling about seeing an object that really truly belonged to the Ingalls family. Even with my new critical distance, there is a core humanity to these stories that still resonates with me. Maybe I’ll take Eliza on a trip to Mansfield to see some of the Ingalls relics, and maybe we’ll talk about which parts of the story are true and which parts aren’t. Or maybe we won’t, at least not yet. There’s plenty of time for her to grow up.

Further Reading:

For information on the relationship between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, the role Lane played in crafting the Little House books, and Wilder’s political ideas, see John E. Miller, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend (New York, 1998), and Anne Romines, Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (Amherst, 1997). William Holtz, in The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (New York, 1993), has argued that Lane was mainly responsible for the literary merit of the Little House books. For charges of racism in Wilder’s work, see Deborah Locke, editorial, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, December 17, 1998, and Dennis McCauliff Jr., The Deaths of Sibyl Bolton (New York, 1994).

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Rachel F. Seidman, a freelance writer and independent historian living near the prairie in St. Paul, Minnesota, is the author of The Civil War: a History in Documents (New York, 2001).

Francis Hopkinson was puzzled. On a summer evening in 1784, Hopkinson, a noted Philadelphia writer and statesman, seated himself before his front door and stared at a street lamp one hundred yards away. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a silk handkerchief, stretched it gently between his hands, and raised it to his face. The light from the distant lamp shined through the material, magnifying the threads. Hopkinson smiled with satisfaction, for he had anticipated this effect. Casually, he then began shifting the handkerchief from right to left and back again—and his expression instantly soured. Dark bars had unexpectedly appeared before his eyes and remained immobile despite the movement of the material. Perplexed by this illusion, Hopkinson sought an explanation from the astronomer David Rittenhouse, a fellow Philadelphian. “To account for this phenomenon exceeds my skill in optics,” Hopkinson admitted. “I shall be much obliged by a solution on philosophical principles.”

Rittenhouse acknowledged that his friend was onto something interesting. “The experiment,” he responded, “is much more curious than one would at first imagine. For the object we see is not the web of the handkerchief magnified, but something very different . . .” Indeed, he continued, the answer resided in Newtonian physics: when Hopkinson held the textile up to the street lamp, the material inflected the light rays in a manner that made the threads appear thicker and the dark bars immobile. That, anyway, was the explanation in a nutshell; Rittenhouse’s full analysis spanned eight pages of optical theory. Lest his friend be put off by the scientific verbosity, Rittenhouse concluded by encouraging Hopkinson’s curiosity. By conducting everyday research into the nature of optics, he wrote, “new and interesting discoveries” could be made “respecting the properties of this wonderful substance, light, which animates all nature in the eyes of man, and perhaps, above all things, disposes him to acknowledge the Creator’s bounty.” One small step for science; one giant step for the hankie.

The experiment performed by Hopkinson and Rittenhouse was unique, but their interest in fooling the eye was widely shared in 1784. Visual illusions were the stuff of scientific inquiry, philosophical speculation, and popular intrigue in late-eighteenth-century America, particularly within Philadelphia’s thriving intellectual communities. And encounters with objects far stranger than silk handkerchiefs were par for the course. Camera obscuras, magic lanterns, telescopic tubes, magnifiers, zograscopes, magic mirrors, penetrating perspectives, divination boxes, and optical philosophical machines: collectively known as “pleasing deceptions,” these oddly-named instruments contributed to a culture of optical illusionism that interested a broad range of viewers in the United States as well as Europe. Stepping behind the doors of early national parlors, bookstores, optical shops, taverns, theaters, and museum galleries, we find a society captivated by optical instruments, virtual images, and phantasmatic projections.

Vision and visual deception were among the great preoccupations of eighteenth-century philosophy. Enlightenment models of learning held that knowledge was received through the senses. The mind was a tabula rasa, asserted the British writer John Locke, a clean slate awaiting the imprint of sensory data. And therein resided a problem: the senses were not always trustworthy informants. The ears and nose occasionally misinterpreted sounds and smells; the hands and tongue sometimes erred in judging sensation and taste. But the eyes, as thinkers from Descartes to Kant emphasized, were the most suspect of all. On the frontlines of perception, vision was susceptible to deceptions of light, color, shadow, magnitude, atmosphere, and distance. An “Anecdote of a Remarkable Deceptio Visus,” published in the Columbian Magazine in 1786, presented a case in point: traveling through the Sahara desert, an explorer was confounded by the apparent proximity of the pyramids, which appeared to loom within reach despite being miles away. Similarly, when Charles Willson Peale, a renowned Philadelphia portraitist and museum proprietor, sailed aboard a sloop from Manhattan to West Point in 1801, he was puzzled by the “stupendious [sic] mountains” rising above the Hudson River: “the blue cast shewed [sic] their distance, yet their magnitude always deceived the eye and we always thought them much nearer to us than they really were.”

The problem of deception was social as well as epistemological. Shell games and card tricks, curative potions, and alchemical transformations: the specter of dissimulation, of the senses intentionally fooled, deeply troubled a world in which knowledge was meant to be acquired through observation. The cast of types suspected of employing deceptive strategies for personal gain was diverse. Confidence men, forgers, counterfeiters, magicians, artists, demagogues—even jugglers, ventriloquists, and dancing masters—were often named as agents of social disorder. Catholics and Jesuits came under attack as purveyors of “priestcraft” and smoke-and-mirrors ritual. (Indeed, the most enduring emblem of deceit was religious in nature: the devil himself in the disguise of the serpent.) Gamesters were also easy targets. Card sharps and gamblers were associated with the egregious greed of financial speculation and the suspect value of paper currency, which Thomas Jefferson once called “legerdemain tricks upon paper.”

Incidents of deception, whether actual or imagined, naturally aroused anxiety. But deception, as the art historian Barbara Maria Stafford has emphasized, was also an inevitable aspect of the Age of Reason. Like yin and yang, philosophes and magicians formed two sides of the same coin. The social threat of charlatanism even gave rise to a new breed of scientists—”natural philosophers”—who sought to combat the world of sneaks and shams by exposing the secrets of visual illusion in the pages of optical treatises. William Hooper epitomized the type. In 1774, Hooper published Rational Recreations, a four-volume compendium of scientific experiments for the layperson that would undergo numerous reprintings. Hooper declared at the outset of his book that optical toys could hone visual perception and, consequently, prime social vigilance. Delivering a backhanded compliment to his audience, he predicted that the reader would “unavoidably acquire a knowledge of his own ignorance; and by finding the fallacy of what he thought most certain, the evidence of his senses, he will learn to determine with caution on the seeming convictions of the mind, and divest himself of those prepossessions from whence so many of the evils of life proceed.” At the same time, however, Hooper ably stoked the very intrigue with magic and invisibility that probably led many readers to pick up his book in the first place:  Rational Recreations featured dozens of experiments that promised ocular enigma, such as “The Enchanted Palace,” “The Penetrating Perspectives,” and “The Boundless Gallery.”

Hooper’s twofold appeal to rationality and fantasy underscores a central paradox of his occupation: the line separating dishonest swindlers from scientific demonstrators was far from absolute, and the latter, like the tricksters against whom they operated, were often motivated by commercial interests. In addition to revealing the hidden workings of illusionistic devices and instructing readers in do-it-yourself gadgetry, optical treatises were occasionally bound together with catalogues selling optical, mathematical, and “philosophical” instruments—shorthand descriptions for a variety of devices enlisted in the service of scientific experimentalism. Benjamin Martin, an inventor and prolific writer who ran a shop at “the sign of Hadley’s Quadrant and Visual Glasses” in London’s bustling Fleet Street, was among the first to issue a lengthy catalogue of the objects in his stockroom. Martin’s wares included ordinary telescopes and microscopes plus objects prized for their illusionistic properties. The camera obscura, or “dark chamber,” was a staple of Martin’s business (fig. 1). Fitted with lenses that projected rays of light into box-like spaces, wherein images of the external world materialized, such cameras were employed by both artists and amateur spectators for drawing and viewing natural landscapes. Martin also sold magic lanterns, which projected ghostly figures onto walls or clouds of smoke, as well as convex and concave glasses, mirrors that curved and distended proportions. By 1800, cameras, lanterns, and glasses were routine fare in optical catalogues. More exotic were the “instruments of recreation or amusement” that W. and S. Jones marketed in 1801. In addition to “magic painters” and “communicative mirrors,” boxes that distorted parts of pictures inserted within, customers were enticed by a “diagonal opera glass,” which enabled spectators to spy on their neighbors while appearing to stare directly forward.

Among the many kinds of pleasing deceptions listed within optical catalogues, few enjoyed the popularity of the “optical diagonal machine,” also known as a “zograscope” or “perspective glass” (fig. 2). Zograscopes usually featured a large, round magnifying glass set within a vertical, wooden frame. A rectangular mirror was hinged from the upper rear edge of the device. The instruments were used to study “perspective views”: mass-produced, colored prints that depicted cityscapes, seaports, monuments, festivals, or architectural interiors (fig. 3). When the perspective view was placed backwards on a table behind the base of the frame, the image was duplicated in the mirror positioned at an angle above. The mirror reversed the image and reflected it through the magnifying glass, which enlarged and exaggerated the print’s perspectival lines. Peering through the glass, then, the spectator witnessed a most remarkable illusion: the flat print upon the table was transformed into a three-dimensional space that seemed to project and recede before one’s eyes. Two hundred years before the advent of computer technologies, Americans were already escaping into virtual reality.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Americans in metropolitan centers could purchase zograscopes and other optical devices directly from local retailers. Indeed, as early as 1758, Hannah Breintwell was importing and selling “perspectives with multiplying glasses” in her shop “at the sign of the spectacles” in Philadelphia, and John Sparhawk stocked camera obscuras and convex mirrors at his Second Street bookstore in 1773. In the decades to come, Philadelphia booksellers and instrument makers regularly advertised a variety of illusionistic images and devices. John McAllister cornered the market in the early 1800s when he expanded his business in whips and canes to include “prospects” (perspective views), “spy glasses” (small telescopes), and microscopes. Sales of just a few magic lanterns and camera obscuras earned McAllister a gross profit of twenty-two dollars in the summer of 1804.

Those without the means or inclination to purchase optical devices could attend public exhibitions and performances of visual deception. Benjamin Franklin printed a broadside in 1744 to advertise a solar “or camera obscura” microscope which had “just arrived from London, for the entertainment of the curious and others, and is now to be seen, by six or more, in a large commodious room, at the house of Mr. Vidal, in Second-Street.” In later years, itinerant lecturers in natural philosophy often featured demonstrations of optical illusion: Signor Falconi, an Italian impresario who entertained Philadelphians with a course on “perpetual electricity” in 1796, made a point of including a lesson about the “pleasing deceptions” that could be “invented by the power of lights, and how far the Catroptricks [sic] can deceive the sight.” Other enterprising showmen worked the length of the eastern seaboard, staging presentations of “philosophical optical machines” in taverns and theaters from Boston to Charleston. In 1791, for instance, Philadelphia hosted “a curious Transparent Optical representation of most of the remarkable cities and principal public buildings of Europe”; in 1797, the city was treated to “a curious optical machine representing the scenes which took place in the dungeons of the Bastille.”

“Optical machines” were perspective boxes—also known as “peepshows”—and they were closely related to the zograscopes and perspective views that were privately enjoyed within parlors. One or more tubular lenses usually punctuated the near end of the box, and the far end contained a concave mirror. Most perspective boxes were made to exhibit perspective views, which were illuminated by transparent panels or candles inserted within. Some views of cityscapes were even pierced and backed by colored paper, so that street lamps and windows would appear to glow when backlit. Other perspective boxes were designed to produce illusions of a different sort. Joseph Harris instructed readers of his Treatise of Optics (1775) in the construction of a box that resembled a theatrical stage set: one long image extended across the back of the box, and sections of painted images (“a camp, a colonade [sic], or rows of trees &c.”) were arrayed like wings along the sides. “Things being properly disposed, if the pictures are good and the subject well chose, the phenomena will be surprizing [sic] enough,” Harris promised. William Hooper suggested further modifications, including a square of “Four Magical Mirrors” that multiplied images of the pictures inserted within, and a box of “Enchanted Mirrors” (illustrated in the upper right corner of fig. 4) that enabled four individuals to peer through ovals at reflections of adjacent spectators.

Itinerant entertainers and street magicians were not the only ones who dazzled the public with feats of visual deception. Museum proprietors also capitalized upon the fascination with optics. In 1782, the French immigrant Pierre Eugene du Simitière, who operated a vast curiosity cabinet in Philadelphia named the American Museum, issued a broadside advertising one “curious deception of perspective” among his collection of natural and human-made wonders. This was probably the anamorphic print that now forms part of the du Simitière Papers at the Library Company of Philadelphia (fig. 5). Unlike perspective views and perspective boxes, which generated illusions of spatial depth, anamorphoses deceived through a radical distortion of linear perspective. To make sense of du Simitière’s image, spectators had to assume an oblique angle in relation to the picture plane or insert the image within an optical device. Only then could they comprehend what the image represented: a view of a horse in profile.

New York City’s Gardiner Baker also understood the popular appeal of optical illusions. In 1797, “an obtical [sic] glass to shew [sic] prints” was among the highlights of his institution, which, like du Simitière’s, was also called the American Museum. When Charles Willson Peale made his third trip to this museum in 1817 (by which time it was under the stewardship of John Scudder), his attention immediately seized upon a large perspective box that had been configured for simultaneous use by several people. “[There were] a number of perspective Views,” he observed, “shewn [sic] through lens[es] of long focus placed in a [partition] convenient distances from each other, so that a number of Persons might view them at the same time—the prints being placed behind the [partition] & lighted by a side window.” Peale returned to the museum a few days later to inspect the device again:

[Scudder’s] prospective [sic] views are so complete that they must attract considerable attention. A Dwarf who attends the Roon [sic] told me that the Prints were about 4 feet square though not all of the same size, Mr. Scudder informed me that the focus of his lens is 2 feet each—that very few persons could know how to fix them so well as he had done, which I believe is correct—in his [partition] he has 3 lens to each picture, the diameter of each len[s] is about 7 Inches. He says that by Lamp light they are beauteful [sic]. I found that he has a change of Prints, for I seem [sic] some different Views from those I saw the other day.

In 1805, inspired by Scudder’s perspective box—or perhaps spurred by the competition posed by Christopher Winckelback, a visiting Swissman who staged exhibitions of an “optic glass”—Peale installed the first of many future optical devices in his Philadelphia Museum. (Optical metaphors had already informed Peale’s mission for years, as when he challenged skeptics who doubted the museum’s civic worth to see the place for themselves: “let occular [sic] demonstrations prove the extent of his merit,” he stated in a newspaper address.) Peale’s description of the instrument, which he also sketched in a letter to his son Raphaelle, indicates that it closely resembled Hooper’s “Penetrating Perspectives” (illustrated in the upper left corner of fig. 4). “We have added to the Museum a Tube to speak from one end to the other, also an optical delusion,” Peale explained to Raphaelle. “The bottom part being hid in the table, the communication by the reflecting Glasses is completely disguised, and it appears wonderful to the most of our visitors that a hat or any thick substance put between the tubes should not obstruct the sight of objects put at the opposite end.” A museum broadside of 1813 cited “various optical amusements,” and in 1818, Peale added a “contrivance of mirrors” designed by his son Rembrandt.

By 1822, the Philadelphia Museum also boasted a device that Peale called simply “the magnifiers.” This was probably a pair of convex lenses set within a tabletop zograscope or freestanding perspective box. Peale decided to test the instrument’s illusionistic capabilities; aided by his son Titian Ramsay Peale II, Peale used a drawing machine to sketch the dimensions of the “Long Room,” the museum’s main gallery on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House. The sketch was a preparatory study for The Artist in his Museum (1822), a large self-portrait commissioned by the museum’s trustees, but Peale found an additional application for it. “It looks beautiful through the magnifiers,” Peale enthused to his son Rubens (yet another member of the Peale family named for a famous painter). “Coleman [Sellers, Peale’s son-in-law], seeing it yesterday, says that it deceived him, he thought he was viewing the Museum in the looking glasses at the end of the Museum. He thinks it might be a good deception, to see it in another room and wood [sic] have a good effect on Visitors.” Rubens Peale shared his father’s enthusiasm, and in December he exhibited the “Long Room” drawing in a perspective box at the family’s Baltimore Museum. “On receipt of the drawing by Titian, I placed it in the optic case instead of the Tyger Hunt, and it gives very great satisfaction,” he reported.

Why did the Peales, together with so many of their contemporaries, find optical illusions so enticing? There are several possible explanations. By instructing individuals in the laws of optics and inviting them to explore the bounds of art and science, visual deceptions satisfied the contemporary yen for “useful knowledge”—a republican ethos of pragmatic learning that was widely advocated in the decades following the Revolutionary War. Another part of the answer resides in the anxious curiosity about all modes of illusion that characterized Anglo-American culture during these years. While novelists and playwrights spun tales of malicious ventriloquists and dissimulating politicians, ordinary spectators tried to unravel the concealed mechanics of mirrored boxes and magic lanterns. The phrase “pleasing deceptions” perfectly conveys the sense of amusement and gratification they must have experienced. Potential agents of mischief, illusions of light and reflection also inspired delight. And, like Francis Hopkinson, few people were immune to the enticement of unknown optical wonders. On a Philadelphia stoop or in a New York museum, pleasing deceptions opened eyes and minds to the marvels of the visual world.

Further reading: Primary accounts of optical illusions in early national America include “Anecdote of a Remarkable Deceptio Visus, as related by Baron de Tot,” Columbian Magazine (October 1787): 718; Francis Hopkinson, “An Optical Problem, Proposed to Mr. Rittenhouse, and Solved by Him,” in The Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings of Francis Hopkinson, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1792), 1:375-84; and David Rittenhouse, “Explanation of an Optical Deception,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 2 (1786), 37-42. Charles Willson Peale’s many comments on optical devices and incidents of visual deception, together with observations made by members of his extended family, are reproduced on microfiche in Lillian B. Miller, ed., Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and his Family, 1735-1885 (Millwood, N.Y., 1980), and reprinted in Miller, Sidney Hart, Toby A. Appel, and David C. Ward, eds., The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and his Family, 5 vols. (New Haven and London, 1983-2000). Thomas Jefferson is quoted in Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), 318. Peale’s watercolor drawing of the “Long Room” is in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts; for a reproduction, see Miller, E.P. Richardson, and Brooke Hindle, Charles Willson Peale and his World (New York, 1983). Dozens of optical treatises and catalogues were printed in Europe and North America during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This essay draws mainly upon the following sources: George Adams, Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy, considered in its present state of improvement, ed. William Jones, 4 vols. (Whitehall, Penn., 1806-7); Joseph Harris, A Treatise of Optics (London, 1775); William Hooper, Rational Recreations, in which the principles of numbers and natural philosophy are clearly and copiously elucidated, by a series of easy, entertaining, interesting experiments, 4 vols. (London, 1774); Jeremiah Joyce, Scientific Dialogues (Philadelphia, 1817); A Catalogue of Philosophical, Optical, and Mathematical Instruments Made and Sold by Benjamin Martin, ([London], n.d.); [W. and S. Jones], A Catalogue of Optical Instruments (London, 1801); A Catalogue of Mathematical, Optical, and Philosophical Instruments, made and sold by Gilbert, Wright, and Hooke, no. 148, Leadenhall-Street, London (London, c. 1800); and A Catalogue of Optical, Mathematical, and Philosophical Instruments, Made and Sold by John Bleuler, No. 27, Ludgate Street, London (London, before 1824). The McAllister Family Papers, which includes a daybook listing sales of camera obscuras and related devices for 1803-05, is housed in the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Museum, Library, and Gardens. Winterthur’s museum collection also includes several zograscopes and an extensive collection of perspective views. Numerous advertisements for optical devices and illusionistic spectacles—including those of Hannah Breintwell and John Sparhawk—are collected at Winterthur in the Alfred Cox Prime Files, Decorative Arts Photographic Collection. For additional primary and secondary accounts, see David Brigham, “‘A World in Miniature’: Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum and its audience, 1786-1827” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992), “Appendix I: Notices of Public Leisure Alternatives in Philadelphia”; [Benjamin Franklin], “Just arrived from London…” (Philadelphia, 1744), broadsheet; Rita S. Gottesman, ed., The Arts and Crafts in New York, 1726-1776; Advertisements and News Items from New York City Newspapers (New York, 1938, reprint 1970); Alfred Coxe Prime, compiler and ed., The Arts & Crafts in Philadelphia, Maryland, and South Carolina, 1788-1800, Gleanings from Newspapers, 2 vols. (1929, facsimile reprint 1969); and J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1884), esp. vol. 2. Barbara Maria Stafford has extensively explored the problem of visual deception in its scientific, cultural, and philosophical aspects. See especially Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1994), in which Stafford analyzes the emergence and discourse of popular scientific manuals published in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe; and Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: The World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles, 2001), the catalogue of a recent exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Recent studies of deception in early America include James F. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2001); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2000); Gordon Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth-Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 39 (1982): 401-41, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution. For specialized studies relevant to this essay, see Brooke Hindle and Helen M. Hindle, “David Rittenhouse and the Illusion of Reversible Relief,” in Early American Science (New York, 1976): 145-50; and Deborah Warner, “Optics in Philadelphia during the Nineteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 129:3 (1985), 291-99. Among the many optical devices manufactured and used during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, three types of instruments have attracted the greatest scholarly interest: camera obscuras, zograscopes, and perspective boxes. On camera obscuras, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990); Mary Hammond, “The Camera Obscura” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1986); David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York, 2001); and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London, 1990). On zograscopes and perspective boxes, see Richard Balzer, Peepshows: A Visual History (New York,1998); Erin Blake, “Zograscopes, Perspective Prints, and the Mapping of Polite Space in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2000); Dennis Carr, “Optical Machines, Prints, and Gentility in Early America” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware-Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, 1999); J.A. Chaldecott, “The Zograscope or Optical Diagonal Machine,” Annals of Science 9:6 (December 1953): 315-22; E. McSherry Fowble, To Please Every Taste: Eighteenth-Century Prints from the Winterthur Museum (Alexandria, Va., 1991), 192-5, and, Two Centuries of Prints in America, 1680-1880 (Charlottesville, Va., 1987), 249-51; R.F. Johnson, “A Machine for Viewing Prints,” Country Life 125 (February 5, 1959): 252; and C.J. Kaldenbach, “Perspective Views,” Print Quarterly 2:1 (March 1985): 87-105.

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

Wendy Bellion is an assistant professor of art history at Rutgers University. In 2003, she will begin an NEH fellowship at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, where she will be writing a book about trompe l’oeil illusionism in the early republic.

For me, it was the eyes. With her hand resting easily on the piano, the girl gives the camera a piercing look of pride and self-possession, with just a hint of defiance. That look stirred up deep feelings in me–about music, about daughters (especially prideful, self-possessed, occasionally defiant daughters), about reaching back for the past. I admit–and it became even more plain later, when I knew more–that I brought personal feelings to bear on the image. But this wasn’t a time to be an “objective historian.” This was a time to indulge, for a moment, the warm, vaguely melancholy feeling that comes from connecting to the past and to remember why I became an historian in the first place. And it was time to learn more.

All that was written on the back of the photograph was “Florence Blood seated at piano, Feb. 25, 1912,” plus the call number assigned by the Minnesota Historical Society’s library. The photo was one of hundreds that a team of us flipped through on an early winter afternoon in 1998. The group was assigned to develop a new exhibit for the Society, Sounds Good to Me: Music in Minnesota. Two years before the opening date, we were starting to work in earnest. Until that point, Sounds Good to Me had been more a felicitous phrase than a meaningful title. Seeing Florence, though, brought it into focus for me. The exhibit should be about the feelings this girl had for music and the feelings I was having about the girl. It should be about how we all–in different ways, in different times, and in different places–weave music into our lives: sounds good to me.

Without telling the rest of the team, I order a print of the photograph, slide it into a frame, and put it on my piano at home. For several months, it sits there largely unexamined. Occasionally my four-year-old daughter, Eliza, notices it and asks if it is a picture of her. “No,” I say, “it’s someone who lived a long, long time ago.” “You mean before I was born?” “Yes, before you were born.” Is that all? Can the photograph become more than just a reservoir for the vaguely nostalgic feelings I’d imposed on it? Can Florence be found? One day, I begin the hunt.

The most obvious route dead-ends. Most objects in MHS’s collections have donor files that tell how they came to the Society. But our photography curator, Bonnie Wilson, turns up no file on this image, just a record showing that the actual donation had been a 4″ x 5″ glass-plate negative, not a print. In the 1950s and 1960s, shortly after the Society established its audio-visual library, it was not uncommon for people to donate a stack of glass negatives. The understaffed department might not have had time to develop the images for a while, and donor records either were not created or did not itemize all of the images. The surprisingly precise name and date on Florence’s photo likely were handwritten on the paper wrapper that held the negative when it was dropped off. Bonnie speculates that since the identification includes Florence’s last name, the photograph was probably snapped by someone other than a family member (who would have written just “Florence”)–perhaps an itinerant photographer or an amateur who owned a camera and took pictures for everyone on the block.

Regardless of the exact scenario, I can’t call Florence’s descendants and say, “Tell me about your grandmother.” I turn back to the photo itself. Again I am struck by the clarity of the image. You can tell Florence dressed up for it–hair in a braid and a corkscrew curl with ribbons in the back, bracelets and a bead necklace, rings on fingers, shiny boots laced up tightly, cotton dress with nary a wrinkle. The room that holds the piano is not as fancy as some of the other turn-of-the-century parlors I’ve seen in photos. Sometimes you can hardly spot the instrument beneath the doilies, plants, statues, and bevy of family photographs. Florence’s instrument looks to be covered with a tasseled cloth. There’s a metronome on top in the center, a fern arrangement and vase on a table nearby, a framed painting (spaniels!) on the wall behind, and a flowered flue cover on an adjacent wall. It’s not a lavish setup, I think, but certainly comfortable. I realize that the idea of a not-wealthy person dressing up to pose with a piano is part of what I find moving. With an air of idealism and hope, the photo places music in the center of Florence’s life–as an avenue for personal and public expression, for feelings of self-worth and hopes for self-advancement.

Tantalizingly, you can read the titles of the music on Florence’s piano: “Meet Me To-night in Dreamland” and “Moon Wind.” Sheet music, I know from our exhibit research, was all the rage in this period. Pianos had become more affordable in the late 1800s, and their new owners wanted easy-to-play music for parlor sing-alongs. Colorful, single-sheet copies of popular songs became the stock in trade of a booming industry. Although the player piano and then the phonograph began appearing in middle-class homes in the 1890s, the sheet-music trade flourished until the 1930s, when it went into steep decline.

What would it have been like to sit in the parlor and hear Florence play? The question calls to mind an institution I’d read about, the Chatfield Brass Band Music Lending Library in southeastern Minnesota. Jim Perkins, a lawyer in Chatfield, had started a community brass band in 1969 and needed repertoire. He wrote to schools and bands, asking for old sheet music that wasn’t being used. At first Perkins filed the donations in his attic in wooden cabinets he bought from the Mayo Clinic for five dollars. As more and more music came pouring in, he moved the collection to City Hall and then, in 1981, opened a three-thousand-square-foot library. Today the collection has more than one hundred thousand songs, with another five hundred boxes of music waiting to be catalogued.

I ask Ayesha Shariff, the researcher working on the music exhibit, to call Chatfield. “Moon Wind” doesn’t ring a bell, but, yes, “Meet Me To-night in Dreamland” is in their collection. [The author has since learned that the “Moon” song, partially obscured in the photograph, is actually titled “Moon Winks.”] Ayesha orders a photocopy of the music and, with an eye toward reproducing it in the exhibit, asks about the color of the original sheet. A week later the copy comes–clearly legible, showing the same dramatically bonneted woman on the cover as appears on Florence’s music. There is also a typewritten note: “I have cut off a corner of the cover of the sheet music we have so you can get an idea of the color.” Egad! To the conservation-minded, this is akin to getting a thumb in the mail. But it does show clearly that the cover is pink with a yellow border and red script.

At home I put the music on my piano, a 1908 upright, not too different, probably, from Florence’s. The music has a 1909 copyright along with a warning at the top of the inside page: “PLEASE NOTE:–Owing to the phenomenal and unprecedented success and sale of this beautiful song, there have been placed on the market, imitation “Dreamland” songs with very similar titles. This song written and composed by LEO FRIEDMAN and BETH SLATER WHITSON is THE ORIGINAL song of this title AND WE CAN PROVE IT.” 

I start to play the song and immediately run into trouble. It’s a waltz-time piece meant to be played “dreamily,” according to the notation. But as the music moves along, with three-note chords in each hand, my rendition brings to mind a three-legged cow. I haven’t taken a formal piano lesson in twenty years, but I do play for pleasure pretty regularly. Is this the “easy-to-play” music that historians have told me about? Could a young girl in 1912 really play this piece? Did someone else play it for her? Regardless, I’m impressed. Struggling along, I gain a new appreciation for the piano’s place in people’s lives a century ago. If songs like this were considered a dilution of the repertoire, then people must have had quite a degree of facility, and that, I know, requires many hours of practice. 

After a second and third try, “Meet Me To-night” starts to come through a little more clearly for me, although still at a ridiculously slow tempo for a waltz. The tune is just as schmaltzy as the title would lead you to expect, and the lyrics follow suit: “Dreaming of you / that’s all I do– / Night and day for you I’m pining, / And in your eyes, / blue as the skies / I can see the love-light softly shining.” And the chorus: “Meet me to-night in Dreamland / Under the silv’ry moon / Meet me to-night in Dreamland / Where love’s sweet roses bloom.” I imagine young Florence singing these words. Could she deliver them without the edge of a smirk that we would feel obligated to add now? Probably. At her age, she was likely just starting to become preoccupied with this sort of sentiment.

But what age was Florence in the photo? I still know so little. I go down to the MHS library and begin looking at the 1912 city directories, alphabetical listings of people, their addresses, and occupations. Florence could have lived anywhere, but I start with Minneapolis and St. Paul. In those two directories alone, I count eleven Bloods, none of them Florences. As today, the directory doesn’t list children. The census does, but the 1910 census has no index. You have to know the name and address of the person you’re searching for; and, again, entries appear under the name of the head of the household. The 1920 census does have an index, but it seems unlikely that Florence would show up in it, eight years after she posed by her piano.

With the feeling of turning over the last stone, I listen as a reference librarian explains how the 1920 index works. Called Soundex, it’s an arcane but, in its own way, beautifully simple system. The first step is to convert the last name you’re searching for into a code. The first letter of the last name stays as is, but the remaining ones are assigned numbers from zero to six, except for vowels, which are ignored. If you run out of consonants, you add zeroes. (Today, driver’s-license numbers start with Soundexes.) B-L-O-O-D becomes B430. This bureaucratic finagling has a practical, even noble, purpose. B430 leads to Blood, but it would also lead to Bloud or Blaud or Blode. Spelling variations introduced by a time-pressed or tin-eared census-taker or Ellis Island clerk cannot wash out the trail.

“Dreaming of you / that’s all I do– / Night and day for you I’m pining, / And in your eyes, / blue as the skies / I can see the love-light softly shining.”

On microfilm, I flip through the pages of the Soundex, four handwritten 3″ x 5″ cards per screen. And there she is. Florence E. Blood. She appears under the entry for Hulda (yes, Hulda) Blood, whom I remember as one of the names in the St. Paul city directory. I had been searching for drops of information; suddenly I have a flood. Florence was twenty-one in 1920, so she was thirteen when my photo was taken. She was born in Minnesota. Her mother, Hulda, was born in Sweden. Hulda, forty-two in 1920, emigrated in 1888 (at age ten) and become an American citizen in 1893. Florence had a brother, Wallace, three years younger than she. The family of three lived at 666 Ottawa Avenue, just across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Paul.

I can’t believe my good fortune. If Florence had married and changed her name before 1920, I wouldn’t have found any of these morsels. From the Soundex card, I go to the census enumeration sheet itself. Following the handwritten list, I feel as if I’m walking down the street with the census-taker as he visits the Clarks at 660 Ottawa, the Silvers at 662, the McCarthys at 664, the Bloods at 666. The enumeration sheet tells me that the Bloods rent their home; that all three can read and write; that Hulda does not have a job; and that Florence does, as a clerk for the railroad. (Florence is all grown up!) Wallace is an electrician apprentice with the telephone company. Interestingly, Hulda appears as the head of the household, and she is listed as divorced, quite unusual for the early decades of the century.

With my new information, I can look for the Bloods in the 1910 census. I find them renting at 695 Ottawa. Hilda (yes, Hilda) is again identified as the head of household (again without a profession), but she is listed as married (for thirteen years), not divorced. Her husband was apparently born in New York. Returning to the city directories, I find Hulda (yes, Hulda again) at 695 Ottawa from 1911 to 1914, around the corner at 322 West Page Street between 1915 and 1917, and then at 666 Ottawa from 1918 to 1921. I’m startled in the 1917 directory, for there Florence appears, clear as day, sharing the Page Street house with her mother. She was there all along; I just hadn’t thought to check so far beyond the date of the photo. The listing identifies her as “clk G N Ry.” I talk to two reference librarians before we figure it out: clerk, Great Northern Railway.

The 1917 directory also is the only one that lists Hulda as the “widow of Geo W.” Widow? George W.? I backtrack and, yes, George W. appears, living in various addresses (but never with Hulda) and working for Blood and Thomas, which, according to the directory, is a downtown St. Paul firm that handles real estate loans and building contracts. George is listed in 1917, disappears in 1918, the year after Hulda is listed as a widow, but then resurfaces in 1919 and on into the 1920s, still in the real estate business! So was Hulda widowed or not? There was significant stigma attached to divorce in this period. Had Hulda told the city directory surveyor that she had been widowed to avoid uncomfortable questions? Had George moved out of town in 1917-18, prompting Hulda to imagine being rid of him once and for all? Or could she have lost touch with him for a while and presumed him dead? Once again, the historical record is as fallible as it is revealing–and revealing in its fallibility.

As for Florence, the trail abruptly dries up in the 1922 directory. Her mother has moved again, this time to South Smith Street, where, for the first time, she is listed with an occupation: seamstress. But Florence Blood appears nowhere in the 1922 volume, nor in directories for the rest of the decade. No doubt she got married, I figure. I learn that St. Paul’s marriage records, wonderfully indexed, are housed in the Ramsey County courthouse, just down the hill from the Minnesota History Center. I’m buoyant as I walk through the doors of the Art Deco building, past the gigantic white onyx statue of the “Indian God of Peace,” and into the marriage-record office. After I find Florence’s married name, I’ll use the directories to trace her and her family down to the present, interview her children, hear stories about how much music meant to their mother, maybe even see the family piano itself!

But Florence doesn’t appear in the marriage index–not in 1921 or ’22, or ’23, or even up to 1930. I almost wish the indexes were less neat so that there would be room to consider other options. I trudge back to the History Center, sit in the microfilm room, and ponder my possibilities. There are few. Florence could have moved out of town or gotten married somewhere else entirely; if so, I will never find her. Or, gulp, she could have died.

The reference librarian tells me that, yes, the historical society has death records on microfilm. In contrast to the marriage records, they are organized chronologically with no index at all. Mainly to avoid admitting that my search is over, I begin paging through the death certificates for January 1922. Almost immediately, they make me feel even more down in the dumps than before. Baby Boy Brown–stillborn. Baby Girl Robbins–mycosarcoma of neck (urgent). Julia French Metcalf–cerebral softening. Fanny Claus–ruptured liver due to auto accident. Florence Grant–diabetes mellitus. Albert H. Neuenfeldt–organic heart. As I turn to each new record, I feel a queasy tension, hoping to find Florence but just as much hoping not to. I want to imagine her as the flashing-eyed girl in the photo, not reduced to an anatomical malfunction.

After three hundred deaths in January 1922, I give up and, for the first time in this process, start to wonder about myself. What is going on here? Earlier, I had joked with a colleague that my search for the Bloods was a quest for a surrogate Minnesota family (Blood-lines, so to speak). Lacking local roots of my own (I grew up in North Carolina), I was adopting some. Now I wonder if there might be some truth to this theory. My wife and I moved to Minnesota in 1997 and have loved it from the start. We know, though, that we will always be easterners in a midwestern culture that accepts outsiders but does not exactly embrace them.

If the Bloods are supposed to be surrogate family members, though, they’re proving to be more than standoffish. Have I reached the end of the line? Lacking documentary clues, I decide to return to physical evidence. I hop into my Chevy Nova and head for Ottawa Avenue. 

All of the homes that Hulda, Florence, and Wallace lived in were within a few blocks of each other in a neighborhood called Cherokee Heights. Some of the houses of their era no longer exist, but as I drive slowly down the street, I see the one I had been hoping for: 695 Ottawa, where Florence lived in 1912 when her photograph was taken. No doubt the house looks different today than it did on that February day eighty-eight years ago. The one-story place has green siding, a “Collie on Guard” sign, and, indeed, a collie looking at me amiably from behind a wire fence. In my mind, I subtract the front porch and side additions, and I’m struck by how small the house must have been when Hulda and her children rented it. What an act of optimism and determination it was for a divorced mother of two to bring a piano into this home! After briefly considering a knock on the door (“Hi, I have this photograph”), I drive home.

Cherokee Heights is in Ramsey County, but it’s near the border of Dakota County. Somewhat dispiritedly, I decide to follow up on a long shot suggested by the Ramsey County marriage-license office. I drive twenty-five miles to Hastings to check if Florence by chance filed her marriage paperwork in the Dakota County courthouse. With the streamlined index system, it takes all of five minutes to bring Florence back to life once again. On March 11, 1921, in St. Paul, a Presbyterian minister married Florence Blood and Arnold S. Jensen. On the printed form, “Dakota” County is crossed out and “Ramsey” is handwritten above it. I walk out of the office with a secret smile.

“‘Know her?! I hated her guts!’ The name Florence Blood certainly rings a bell with the woman who answered the phone.”

Arnold S. Jensen, the 1921-22 St. Paul directories say, was a student in the Nichols Expert Business Office Training and Secretarial School. After that, neither he nor Florence are listed until 1930, when Arnold shows up as a clerk at the Great Northern Railway, the same position Florence had held a decade before. Florence herself has no job listing after 1921. In the 1940s, Arnold appears as supervisor at the State Railroad and Warehouse Commission. Arnold and Florence Jensen live on Margaret Street on St. Paul’s east side, six or seven miles from where Florence grew up. By 1950 Florence is a widow. In 1956 she herself disappears from the directory.

Searching for further signs of Florence, I notice that Hulda Blood, at age 78, appears in the 1956 directory, living with her son Wallace at 305 West Annapolis, still in the same neighborhood where she had raised her children. Wallace is listed as a pressman at Brown and Bigelow, a printing factory, with a wife named Evelyn. Hulda no longer shows up in the directory after 1960. Evelyn is a widow by 1962 and last appears in 1978.

From the directories, I can’t tell which Bloods or, certainly, Jensens, might be children of Wallace and Evelyn or Florence and Arnold, so I’m left with the last resort of the desperate genealogist, the cold phone call. It’s going to be “Hi, I have this photograph” after all. Early on, I had looked at the list of fifteen Bloods in the St. Paul phone book with a feeling of helplessness, but now one name stands out, an E. C. Blood at 330 W. Annapolis–intriguingly close to where Hulda lived with Wallace and Evelyn. With a deep breath, I dial the number and prepare to try to explain my pursuit of Florence Blood without frightening the person on the other end of the line.

“Know her?! I hated her guts!” The name Florence Blood certainly rings a bell with the woman who answered the phone. “You, you did?” I stammer. “Wh–Why?” “I kept her mother for twenty-eight years. When I asked Florence to take her in, she threw me out of the house! When my husband died, she had to take her, but she put her in a nursing home the next year.” Reeling, I grasp for the only solid information at hand: “Your husband? Could that be Wallace?” “Yes. Wallace.”

Twenty years after the city directories had stopped listing her, ninety-year-old Evelyn Blood–Florence’s sister-in-law, Wallace’s widow–is living on Annapolis Avenue. Talking with her, I begin to piece together the story of a family feud. “It was like the Martins and the Coys,” says Evelyn, referring to a 1940s ballad opera based on the feuding Hatfields and McCoys. Some of the tension had to do with caring for Hulda who, Evelyn tells me, lived to be 102. Whatever the cause, Evelyn says, “Nobody liked each other.” For their part, Wallace and Evelyn saw the Jensens as “a real odd outfit.” Relations deteriorated to such an extent that Florence didn’t attend her brother’s funeral. And, yes, Florence had died in about 1986, thirty years after I’d lost track of her.

Despite her bitterness toward her sister-in-law, Evelyn is being open and generous with me. I venture that the historical society has a wonderful photograph of Florence as a girl. Could I show it to her sometime? “I don’t want to see her if she is eight years old.” “Well, it shows her sitting by a piano,” I say. “She didn’t know how play the piano. She wasn’t that smart!”

I end the conversation by asking whether Florence had children. She had three, I learn: Delores, Richard, and Carol. Evelyn recalls that the daughters moved away but thinks Richard still lives in town, although she hasn’t said a word to him in more than a decade.

I thank Evelyn profusely, hang up, and try to get my bearings. In some ways, my search has succeeded: I have spoken to someone who actually knew Florence and, in fact, had strong feelings about her! Plainly, though, there must be another side to this story. One doesn’t interview the Martins but not the Coys. In the Twin Cities phone books, I count twenty-five Richard Jensens. (Why couldn’t Florence have married into the Jabberwocky family?!) Over the next two days, I call them all. In itself, the process turns out to be a heartening gauge of the civic fabric. Twenty-five times I tell my tale, and each time the person on the other end listens and responds politely, sympathetically, encouragingly. “No, that’s not my mother. But best of luck!” “Sorry, that’s not us. We’re from Iowa.” After leaving messages on several answering machines, I start getting calls back. “Hello, this is Richard Jensen.” My heart leaps. “I’m calling to let you know that my mother was not named Florence. She was Alice”–or Gladys, or Doris. “Yes, my mother was named Florence,” says Richard Jensen #14–but not, it turns out, the right Florence.

What more could I do to bring to life Florence Blood and that moment on February 25, 1912? Quite a lot, I suppose: mount a day-by-day newspaper microfilm search for Florence’s obituary; enlist a piano expert to identify the model of Florence’s instrument; search for the Presbyterian church that married Florence and Arnold; contact a genealogical society and enlist the aid of other Jensen buffs; consult the city’s building records for 695 Ottawa Avenue; knock on doors in the Jensens’ east side neighborhood; place an ad in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

But no, it seems time to call it quits. Somehow, having a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end is satisfying, even if the story follows a very different arc than I had expected. In itself, the unpredictability has been instructive. An image is not always what it seems. Your daughters don’t always turn out as adorable as they start out–at least in the eyes of their sisters-in-law. Evidence is not always evidence. History is an improvised tune that deviates willy-nilly from the printed score.

These pointed reminders, though, have done nothing to dissipate the spark of feeling that Florence Blood first elicited in me. If anything, the search for Florence has deepened my sense of her as a living presence. In its own way, this sense of humanity offers the most valuable lesson of all. History isn’t about building airtight narratives. It’s about searching for human connection. And when you find it, you know it.

Listen to a recording of “Meet Me To-night in Dreamland”

http://commonplacenew.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/files/dreamland.mp3

Reprinted with permission from the Fall 2000 issue of Minnesota History, vol. 57, no. 3.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.3 (March, 2001).

Benjamin Filene is an exhibit curator at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul; he is the author of Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill, 2000). He was the lead curator on the History Center’s new exhibit, Sounds Good to Me: Music in Minnesota.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

About 1710, J. D. Herlein, a Dutch visitor to Paramaribo, reported that a runaway slave from the town had been recaptured by the authorities. His sentence, which the court intended “to serve as an example to others,” was “to be quartered alive, and the pieces thrown in the River.”

Herlein witnessed the execution: “He was lain on the ground, his head on a long beam. The first blow he was given, on the abdomen, burst his bladder open, yet he uttered not the least sound; the second blow with the axe he tried to deflect with his hand, but it gashed the hand and upper belly, again without his uttering a sound. The slave men and women laughed at this, saying to one another, ‘That is a man!’ Finally, the third blow, on the chest, killed him. His head was cut off and the body cut in four pieces and dumped in the river.” Herlein made clear that the harshness of this sentence was no anomaly, explaining to his European audience that “if a slave runs away into the forest to evade work for a few weeks, upon his being captured his Achilles tendon is removed for the first offence, while for the second offence, if they wish to increase the punishment, his right leg is amputated in order to stop him from running away; I myself was a witness to slaves being punished thus.”

As in other capitals of New World plantation colonies, maintaining order among the mass of enslaved laborers was a central concern. In the idealized slaveocracy, planter hegemony would leave little room for slave response or maneuver and dramatic public executions, a veritable theatre of terror, played a central role toward this end. But the victims in the colonies, unlike those who suffered judicial penalties in the metropoles, generally refused to play their designated roles and mocked the system until their dying breaths, flaunting their individuality and resistance.

In the exercise of totalizing power, capital punishment constitutes a limiting case–yet for this very reason, it may be a good place to plumb the ultimate capacities of the oppressed to respond, resist, and create. An examination of the ways that condemned slaves went to their deaths reveals much about the limits of planter power and about the spirit that allowed slaves to create, within the limited spaces available to them, a world of their own, one that influenced not only every aspect of their own descendants’ lives but also that of the descendants of their oppressors.

By the time of Herlein’s visit, Paramaribo was a small, bustling town that served as the administrative and commercial hub of a fast-growing sugar plantation colony in northeastern South America. Named after the Amerindian village that had occupied the site, ten kilometers up the Suriname River from the Atlantic, it was dominated by the wooden fort (Zeelandia) that gave the town its name in the creole language created by the slaves: Foto. The first fort, and the town itself, were founded soon after 1650, when Frances Lord Willoughby of Parham sent out an expedition from Barbados to establish the English colony that lasted until the Treaty of Breda (1667), in which the English traded Suriname for New York with the Dutch.

The town had grown from fewer than thirty houses in 1678–the homes of officials, inns, and public houses–to a couple of hundred structures with some five hundred people, only 3 percent of the colony’s population but one-third of its Europeans (who included Dutch, French, Portuguese, Jews, Germans, Scandinavians, and others). The remaining whites lived either in and around the town of Jews Savanna fifty kilometers upstream, which had its own synagogue and where half the colony’s slaves were owned, or on the plantations themselves. Paramaribo was the port where planters and their delegates did their shopping for slaves as well as other goods, all of which moved between town and plantations in boats rowed by slaves, and where they carried out their administrative affairs. In the early eighteenth century, over 95 percent of the colony’s eighteen thousand slaves–almost all of whom had been born in Africa and two-thirds of whom had arrived during the previous decade–worked and lived on plantations.

By 1710, neither Paramaribo nor the colony had reached the heights of wealth and depravity they were to achieve in the second half of the eighteenth-century, when, as John Gabriel Stedman described, planters were routinely served at table by nearly nude house slaves, who also fanned them during their naps (and sometimes all night long), put on and took off all of their clothes each morning and evening, bathed their children in imported wine, and performed other similar tasks, and when wealthy planters in Paramaribo often had forty or fifty such handpicked domestic slaves. Nevertheless, even by 1710, the local plantocracy was, to borrow Gordon K. Lewis’s phrase about the Caribbean more generally, “crassly materialist and spiritually empty . . . the most crudely philistine of all dominant classes in the history of Western slavery.” And Stedman’s description of the town would already hold as well: “Paramaribo is a verry lively place, the Streets being crowded with Planters, Sailors, Soldiers, Jews, Indians, and Negroes, while the river Swarms with Canoes, barges, yoals, Ships boats &c constantly going and coming from the different Estates and crossing and passing each other like the wheries on the Thames . . . while continually some Guns are firing in the roads from the Shipping, and whole Groops of naked Girls are playing in the water like so many mermaids, can not but have a truly enchanting appearance from the beach, and in some Measure Compensates for the many Curses that one is here dayly exposed to.” As would his recounting of a Paramaribo experience that could have happened as easily at the beginning of the century as later: “A general hub bub took place [and] . . . A Mob now gathered and a riot ensued, before Mr. Hardegens Tavern at the Waterside while hats wigs[,] bottles and Glasses flew out at his Window[.] [T]he Magistrates were next sent for to no purpose and the fighting continued in the Street till 10 OClock at night, when I with my friends fairly keep’d the field, having knocked down several Sailors, planters, Jews, and Overseers and lost one of my Pistoles which I threw after the rabble in my Passion . . . after which we all sat down and drank away the night till the Sun rose the next morning.”

Paramaribo in 1710, like the rest of Suriname, was divided by race, and hence status. Whites were free, blacks were slaves. Yet there was constant interaction. Interracial sex–white men with slave or Amerindian women–was an everyday occurrence (though laws were passed against it, the penalty was a fine of a mere two pounds of sugar), and during Herlein’s visit there even were two scandals involving white women and slave men, prompting the governor to issue an edict stipulating flogging and expulsion from the colony for a woman if she was single, with branding added if she was married, and with the African man to be executed in either case. Edicts were repeatedly issued to keep whites and blacks apart (suggesting that everyday practice often trumped the law)–and also to preserve status differences: in 1698, it was decreed that “all slaves, both male and female, will be obliged to stand aside and make way for any European who may cross their path, day or night,” and further that Europeans and slaves were not permitted to gamble together, nor could slaves carry sticks or cudgels. With a ratio of whites to blacks of one to twenty overall, and one to forty in the plantation districts, the master class lived with ever present fear of slave rebellion. The plantocracy, who controlled the judiciary, had since the founding of the colony mandated the cruelest punishments for resistance.

Theatrical public executions were reported during the earliest years of settlement–always accompanied by wonderment at the stoicism and resistance manifested by the African victims. In the initial English period (1650-67), George Warren observed of runaways that “[i]f the hope of Pardon bring them again alive into their Masters power, they’l manifest their fortitude, or rather obstinancy in suffering the most exquisite tortures can be inflicted upon them, for a terrour and example to others without shrinking.” And the indomitable Aphra Behn–another visitor to the English colony–wrote her fictional account of the death of the slave-prince Oroonoko: “He [Oroonoko-Caesar] had learned to take Tobacco; and when he was assur’d he should die, he desir’d they would give him a Pipe in his Mouth, ready lighted; which they did: And the Executioner came, and first cut off his Members, and threw them into the Fire; after that, with an ill-favour’d Knife, they cut off his Ears and his Nose, and burned them; he still smoak’d on, as if nothing had touched him; then they hack’d off one of his Arms, and still he bore up, and held his Pipe; but at the cutting off the other Arm, his head sunk, and his Pipe dropt, and he gave up the Ghost, without a Groan, or a Reproach . . . They cut Caesar [Oroonoko] into Quarters, and sent them to several of the chief Plantations.”

During Herlein’s visit, some of the enslaved African ancestors of today’s Langu clan of Saramaka Maroons managed to make their escape from Paramaribo, where they had been working under military surveillance on the outskirts of the city. As Saramakas recounted it in the late twentieth century, “The whites had moved the slaves to a new barracks called Lúósu, a great long house right where the gas company is today. In those days, the whole city was right around the governor’s house . . . At Lúósu our ancestors used to sleep on banana leaves. That was our hammock! . . . There they decided to escape.” A large expedition–forty-eight slaves, sixty-two Amerindians, and seventeen whites–was sent after these runaways, based on intelligence from two recaptured runaways, Bassot and Diamant, who were later burned at the stake “as an example to others,” but the Maroons had been warned by their scouts and escaped further into the forest. (By this date, something like two thousand slaves had already become successful Maroons, living in organized groups, farming together, and conducting their lives under wartime discipline.) A few years later, two large military expeditions captured a number of Maroon villagers, and the criminal court in Paramaribo meted out the following sentences: “The Negro Joosie shall be hanged from the gibbet by an Iron Hook through his ribs, until dead; his head shall then be severed and displayed on a stake by the riverbank, remaining to be picked over by birds of prey. As for the Negroes Wierrie and Manbote, they shall be bound to a stake and roasted alive over a slow fire, while being tortured with glowing Tongs. The Negro girls, Lucretia, Ambira, Aga, Gomba, Marie, and Victoria will be tied to a Cross, to be broken alive, and then their heads severed, to be exposed by the riverbank on stakes. The Negro girls Diana and Christina shall be beheaded with an axe, and their heads exposed on poles by the riverbank.”

In 1750, the slaves of a planter named Amand Thomas murdered him and his bookkeeper but were soon recaptured in the forest. Governor Mauricius described how “[t]he execution of Thomas’ slaves took place in the afternoon; three, including Gallien, who murdered the bookkeeper, and a Negro of Thumelaar’s, have been hanged by suspending them from an iron hook twisted through their sides; three, including one of Lespinasse’s, have been broken on the wheel; two have been burnt at the stake, two hanged and twenty quartered, two of whom were beheaded.”

By far the best-known account of a Paramaribo execution dates from 1776–John Gabriel Stedman’s dramatic description of the torture of Neptune and his breaking on the rack, illustrated for all time on the basis of Stedman’s drawing by William Blake.

As Stedman wrote, Neptune was “a Carpenter by Trade, he was Young and handsome–But . . . he having Stole a Sheep to Entertain some Favourite Women, the Overseer had Determined to See him Hang’d, Which to Prevent he Shot him dead Amongst the Sugar Canes–this man being Sentenced to be brook Alive upon the Rack, without the benefit of the Coup de Grace, or mercy Stroke, laid himself down Deliberately on his Back upon a Strong Cross, on which with Arms & Legs Expanded he was Fastned by Ropes–The Executioner / also a Black / having now with a Hatchet Chop’d off his Left hand, next took up a heavy Iron Crow or Bar, with Which Blow After Blow he Broke to Shivers every Bone in his Body till the Splinters Blood and Marrow Flew About the Field, but the Prisoner never Uttered a Groan, or a Sigh.”

In 1710 Paramaribo was the capital of a plantation colony firmly set in the American space of death (which was also of course a space of enormous cultural creation). In this particular space, within the totalizing world of the plantation system, theatrical public executions constituted central rituals of colonial control. But from Oroonoko to Neptune, it is the spirit of those whom the planters tried to crush that continues to inspire, that continues to give hope.

Further Reading:

J. D. Herlein’s remarks can be found in his Beschryvinge van de Volk-plantinge Zuriname (Leeuwarden, 1718), 112, 117; John Gabriel Stedman’s in his Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, transcribed from the original 1790 manuscript, edited, and with an introduction and notes, by Richard and Sally Price (Baltimore, 1988), 181-82, 236; Neptune’s execution is discussed in that same text, 546-50; George Warren’s quotation may be found in his An impartial description of Surinam (London, 1667), 19; Aphra Behn’s in her Oroonoko or The Royal Slave: A True History (London, 1688). Saramaka accounts of their early history, and reports of the expeditions against them, can be found in Richard Price, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People, 2d edition (Chicago, 2002); Governor Mauricius is quoted in R. A. J. van Lier, Frontier Society (The Hague, 1971), 139. For an extended argument about public executions and slave resistance, see Richard Price, “Dialogical Encounters in a Space of Death,” in John Smolenski, ed., New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Early Modern Americas, c. 1500-1825 (Philadelphia, in press).

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Richard Price, who divides his time between Martinique and the College of William and Mary, has recently published The Convict and the Colonel (Boston, 1998) and, with Sally Price, Les Marrons (Châteauneuf-le-Rouge, 2003) and The Root of Roots: Or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got Its Start (Chicago, 2003). Further information on his publications can be found at www.richandsally.net.

The morning after the conflagration only one of the building’s faces remained standing, “tottering over our heads,” one reporter wrote, “and threatening in its fall to overwhelm” the fire fighters toiling below. Such a fate, however horrifying, might have seemed all too fitting to the crowd of onlookers. For the “stupendous edifice” had, symbolically at least, collapsed as soon as it was built, taking the fortunes of many locals down with it. In time, the building–along with the city and its people–recovered some of the pride that had nourished the dream of erecting the nation’s largest and finest architectural monument. But doubts persisted. Tongues clucked. “This lofty and huge building,” one editorialist intoned in the wake of the collapse, “has been a terror to the considerate citizens ever since its first erection.” Its like, he argued, ought not to be seen again.

No, not the World Trade Center, but the Boston Exchange Coffee House (or BECH), a grand tableau in bricks, marble, and mortar that spread out over an acre and soared some eight (eight!) stories high, casting an unaccustomed shadow over the tiny, crooked lanes of early national Boston in the 1810s.

Perhaps because this vignette comes not from twenty-first-century New York but from Federalist New England, it has a far less tragic ending than the human and architectural devastation so wantonly visited on lower Manhattan last September. After working for only a couple of days, “two ingenious and active mechanics” succeeded in dismantling the teetering wall “without the least damage to the neighborhood, or to the thousands of spectators, who were witnesses of this sublime ‘wreck of matter.'” Not a single life had been lost in the blaze, and only one in its aftermath. Even the pile of smoldering rubble–however vast it appeared in the eyes of long-ago Bostonians–would seem positively quaint in comparison to Ground Zero.

But however different the scale of the WTC’s times and the BECH’s, the comparison between these two fantastical structures and their violent demises remains instructive. Taken together they remind us that Americans have long forged deep, intimate, and enduring links with their public buildings. A direct ancestor, in this sense, of the WTC, the BECH was less a workplace than a canvas on which people of many stripes projected their sense of themselves, their city, their nation, and its future between 1808 and 1818.

That future, the BECH’s builders believed, was bright. And in the emerging architectural parlance of the United States, bright meant BIG. More than anything else, size was the story of the BECH. A full (and, as it turned out, fateful) two stories taller than the largest fire equipment in the city, the building positively dwarfed its surroundings. Indeed, it must have been hard to see the top of it, for the dome’s apex stood about one hundred feet above a thirty-foot-wide street, a neck straining combination. No wonder writers of the day exhausted their store of adjectives–it was “enormous,” “grand,” a “mammoth affair,” an “immense pile of building”–in their attempts to convey something of the building’s magnitude. The cost of the BECH, as was often noted, was outsized too; the building’s construction consumed upwards of half a million dollars–an amount roughly equal to the total value of the 146 school buildings that served Boston, money the BECH’s backers would never come close to recovering.

In terms of sheer scale, the BECH positively screamed “America”: a land of increasingly expansive spaces, peoples, fortunes, and even failures. How fitting, in this sense, that the BECH was financed by a chain of banks reaching into the vast forests of the Old Northwest, all the way to Detroit. Worthless paper, it would turn out. But fitting, in its Great West-ness, nonetheless.

Yet if the BECH’s scale and financial undergirding looked to the nation’s interior, its stylistic sensibility looked toward London, which remained in the 1810s the metropolitan center in American minds. Literally as well as metaphorically, the BECH faced East. Its privileged view of Boston Harbor was one of the building’s prime stocks-in-trade. Just under the crowning dome perched a special “seat and box, containing a perspective glass” through which enterprising merchants could view the progress of their–and their competitors’–cargoes from across the Atlantic. The building’s interiors, too, offered an arriviste’s grand tour of the finest in European décor. The odd bricolage of homegrown American and imagined European styles became clear in the grand ballroom, where elaborate draperies made of fine imported satins and moreens hung “suspended from a bow and arrows, highly gilt.” Surely this was “one of the most tasteful splendid rooms on the continent.” (And perhaps the envy of another continent as well?) Touring the elegant Coffee Room for which the BECH was named, one hopeful critic opined that “very few European Coffee Rooms are equal to this.”

An American-sized building yearning for European refinement, the BECH was also a sort of temple: a New England cathedral for those who worshipped a commercial future. Much as the World Trade Center would later cast a permanent shadow over Trinity Church, the BECH’s vision of a public life centered on commerce and civic assembly would attempt to overshadow other, competing versions of public life. Scale is important here, too. It cannot have escaped notice that many of the finest local houses of worship, along with Boston’s Old and New State Houses and Faneuil Hall, could all have nestled comfortably within the BECH’s 102,000 square feet. The building’s very name–Exchange Coffee House–declared that commerce, information, and internationalism were the ways of the future, the dreams of Americans.

How many of these dreams-in-architecture still animated the United States in the age of the World Trade Center? Surprisingly many, I think. The WTC, like the BECH, combined European sensibilities–the austerity of high modernism, the naked power of function over the beauty of form–with a purely American scale. For the WTC, too, scale was not just a story, but the story (a tale of both success and failure, it turned out, as the buildings were almost immediately outclassed by a bigger Midwestern dream). Again like the BECH, the WTC spoke to a future where America meant commerce–and vice versa. And in all these ways, as one letter to the New York Times Magazine recently put it, “the towers of the World Trade Center were as representative of fundamental American values as the Capitol and the White House.” His words would have held nicely for the BECH, as well, for better or worse.

If architecture embodied those values before the catastrophe of 9/11, can architecture help to heal the nation’s wounds now? On its face, the idea seems absurd, trivializing. Writing last November in the New Republic, critic Leon Wieseltier deplored the very notion. “There was something grotesque,” he argues, “about the alacrity with which architects leaped into the Times with exciting plans for [rebuilding] the scene of the slaughter. It was as if history itself had announced a competition.”

But when the dust, spiritually and physically, has settled, something will rise, Phoenix-like, from Ground Zero. And whatever it is will reflect not just design sensibilities but dreams of America–dreams of the city, the nation, the hopeful and terrifying future.

Or so, at least, it went in Boston. After much debate about the combination of fate and arrogance that contributed to the rise and fall of “this modern Babel,” the BECH was rebuilt, partly at public expense. The second BECH was an unassuming affair, four-and-a-half stories high, covered in clapboard with few ornaments beyond simple wooden shutters. Designed as a meeting space and restaurant, the new BECH served “unexceptionable” wines and other humble fare to a devoted local clientele. No longer a destination for out-of-towners or the object of comment in the national press, the BECH nonetheless eked out a modest success commensurate with its modest goals. It stood till 1853, when bankers with bigger dreams demolished it, this time without fire or fanfare.

In the second BECH Bostonians traded ambition for endurance, the colossal scale of commercial might for the human scale of a neighborhood watering hole. Architects and speculators may have felt betrayed by the choice. But neighbors, I imagine, were delighted. Nearly two centuries later, I wonder: will New Yorkers have the courage to make a similar decision? Can American dreams raise soul over size?

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

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.

Chapter VIII After the terrier cornered the rat, all Padlin saw was a commotion of claws, paws, and teeth. The dog’s rear tensed, muscles sheening through the short hair, and his head scooped up the rat, a sooty, glittering, legs-skittering sandbag in his mouth. The dog’s lower jaw snapped up, a hard click, and the rat’s head separated. Hitting the ground nose-first, it bounced and then rolled erratically across the floor until it glanced off of Waddley’s shoe. “Blast!” Waddley shouted. He bent down, gathered a handful of straw from the floor and wiped off the bloody smear. Still in a crouch, he eyed the rat’s head. He pulled out a small pad from his jacket pocket and began quickly working out a sketch. A black egg shape in the foreground, the terrier behind with the dangling carcass between its jaws. “Get beside your dog, please,” Waddley said, and the trainer obediently ambled up to his beast. He struck an awkward pose, bent over the animal, one arm extending his battered top hat in a Bowery-show stance. The terrier growled. “The dog’s name?” Waddley asked, his pencil forming the trainer, expanding his nose, shortening his arms, clipping his waist. “Deadeye,” the trainer answered. “He hates rats. Sees one, won’t stop till he knows it’s dead. Never misses.” “Deadeye,” Waddley repeated, scrawling the name under the scene. Padlin stood by, hands in his pockets, bone weary and amazed at his colleague’s single-mindedness. Waddley. His partner. His nemesis. It had been bad enough when Quidroon had allowed the little bacon-faced runt to steal his sketch. It was now so much worse, Waddley forced upon him, his own personal leech. No, vampire. A much more appropriate image. “What the hell are you doing?” Quidroon had demanded, interceding, while Waddley gazed anxiously at the block wavering over his head. With Quidroon’s shout, the murderous vision dissipated in Padlin’s head. Lowering the block, he said: “Her face.” “Goddamn it, man, whose face?” “The girl. The one in the morgue.” In the space of that brief, bloody reverie, as Padlin contemplated the impact of woodblock on skull, he had come to a realization. If he couldn’t master the girl’s face, if there was no hope, he had to bring the story to a close in another fashion. The East River morgue, the Points dog hunt, the dead girl’s mad quest and demise–they all led to Sportsmen’s Hall. Kit Burns’s dog pit was the only place to go. So, heart pounding, Padlin reached down into the limited resources of his invention and began to talk. It was a creative loquacity born of desperation and, most probably, sleeplessness. He told a story about a dead, cholera-ravaged girl, a girl he’d glimpsed in the Points, a notorious aficionado of the dogfights, surely struck down by her vices and the corruption issuing from the pits. Quidroon heard “dogfights,” he heard “epidemic,” and, undoubtedly, an attractively grotesque tableau floated into his mind, suitable for a double-page engraving in the heart of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. He dispatched Padlin to Kit Burns’s waterfront dive. But Padlin’s insubordination could not go unanswered: “Yes,” Quidroon smirked, “go to Sportsmen’s Hall. Go tonight. But go with Mr. Waddley by your side.” Sportsmen’s Hall, it turned out, was much less grand than its name implied: all makeshifts and mazes, narrow passages harbored by rude planks leading into large and small cubicles, straw strewn all over the floorboards. The foulness of the air was a palpable thing, a reek that stunned and then settled upon the senses, a weapon and then a shroud. The itchy sting of the straw couldn’t hide the smell of breath wretched with alcohol’s ravages, breath clotted with blood and meat. Smells of shadows, gaslight, and night. Padlin much preferred the morgue. “Padlin.” Waddley was grimacing up at him from his crouch. He adjusted his spectacles, a fidget to cover what Padlin was sure was a sneer. “I, of course, bow to your long experience in the field.” Waddley’s small, pearly teeth momentarily glistened. “But, Padlin, don’t you think it would be wise to sketch as much as possible before someone here takes exception to our presence?” They exchanged stares, Waddley’s glasses upturned to hat-hooded Padlin. “I’m not here to sketch,” Padlin said and turned away toward the rumble and clout of the dogfight. He would draw nothing tonight. He would exert not one smidgeon of pain or skill upon recording the scene or its actors. There was no point. Quidroon would never accept any of Padlin’s sketches. Waddley had been dispatched as the instrument of his punishment, but Quidroon would reserve the final, fatal stroke for himself: the denial of the one desire he was certain Padlin cherished. Except, Padlin thought as he walked through the passageway, rounding the jagged turns that moved from gaslight to shadow, gaslight to shadow, except Quidroon was on the wrong track. Padlin no longer pined for the morgue sketch–or any sketch, for that matter. He had a different plan. In Padlin’s exhausted mind, it bore no name but possessed a form–but not even that exactly. It was a sensation, one composed of relief and a light feathery brightness, a vision that grew in breadth and somehow became a landscape of deliverance over which Padlin could soar. He could do nothing about his mother’s pinched deathmask, but Padlin was determined that the girl would not haunt him as well. Padlin would leave Sportsmen’s Hall only when he knew he would never, never think about her again. Driven forward by this inexact ambition, Padlin stepped into the heart of Kit Burns’s Dog-paradise, the packed and heaving fighting amphitheater. Seventy-five, one hundred, a horde of men (peppered with a selection of the establishment’s whores) squatted on tiered bleachers, bodies cascading down to a low plank fence. Padlin was greeted by their vocal flatulence, full-throated and unreserved, bellowing bets and threats into the pit. He stopped in the narrow passageway between the bleachers, his head even with the top seats, arses squirming to his right and left. Listening to the encouragement impossibly mixed with abuse, he watched the two creatures wriggling in the dirt. The dogs tore at each other, wrapped in a tight ball. They rolled, legs occasionally flailing, slashes of movement starkly outlined in the glare of a four-headed gas jet perched over the pit. Just beyond their embrace, their handlers pawed the ground, growling and barking on their hands and knees, held at bay by double semicircles etched in the dirt that demarcated their sides. In the pumping noise, Padlin suddenly realized one sound was missing. The room was filled with human rants. The handlers yelped in their corners. But the dogs kneaded and tore one another in absolute silence.

Suddenly, the animals broke apart, a bloody latticework stretching from their mauled heads until it snapped in a splutter of gore. The bleachers shuddered with the crowd’s stamping feet. Swinging cracked top hats and crushed caps, spurting shrill whistles, the spectators hollered encouragement. Get ’em, Daisy! Anodyne the bastard now, god damn it! Rabbit! Her leg, crack her leg! Rabbit! Rabbit, go for her throat! Her throat, y’fucking brute! But Daisy and Rabbit were having none of it; they wobbled at either end of the pit, snuffling at the dirt, wearily eyeing one another and ignoring their handlers who frantically gesticulated and screeched behind them. Both dogs’ muzzles were ripped and bleeding, the smaller one with no ears–Daisy, Padlin guessed–exhibiting a nasty gash across her rippled back. “No heart. They don’t have no heart.” A boy peeked up from under the bleachers. A boy with a caked head of hair and crusty upper lip who Padlin, amazingly, at first could not place. “The fight’s over. You’ll see.” Padlin recognized the kid and a cold flash ran through him, a piercing sense of panic. He didn’t move, he just gazed down at the boy. Padlin’s petrification seemed to reassure the boy. He didn’t work his way into the aisle, he didn’t want to get too close to Padlin just yet. But his eyes were fixed on the pad protruding from Padlin’s jacket pocket. Daisy and Rabbit hadn’t moved either. The room was rocking with miserable explications and enraged curses. “Time, gentlemen!” A stone–no, it was some fruit–arced into the pit and scattered the dirt between the dogs. Each startled backwards into the arms of its handler. The men immediately set to blowing on the dogs’ trembling hides, administering frenetic slaps alternated by caresses. They nuzzled the bloody bodies, pressed their faces against the curs’ shorthaired skulls, exhaling remonstrances and reassurances into the ruined ears. “Ready!” shouted a man dressed like a Broadway swell. A jewel twinkled from the scarlet cravat puckering up out of his vest. His bearing, though, was all waterfront: his short-waisted slab of a torso designed to absorb bare-knuckle assaults. He bent over the pit wall, cupped his hands around his mouth. “Go!” The handlers threw the dogs in the turf, walloping their hindquarters. Daisy and Rabbit didn’t move. Groans and oaths poured down but the two curs just wobbled in place. The referee dramatically pulled a watch from his vest pocket. Disgust crumpled his long mouth, an upside-down “u” exaggerated by a goatee that covered his jaw like black ink. He turned to his right, he turned to his left, he turned about, eyes squinting in the kind of gestural dare usually displayed by villains on the blood-and-thunder stage. “Stalemate!” the referee pronounced. He turned back to the pit and adamantly folded his arms against his chest as the abuse fell. The handlers hurriedly retrieved their exhausted beasts and trotted out of the ring, shielding the shamed contenders from the crowd’s wrath. “What did I tell you?” The boy slowly straightened up, sidling his way out of the bleachers, his back grazing the rough wood construction. He continued to stare at Padlin’s pocket. Then he looked up under the rim of Padlin’s hat, into his eyes, and a canny expression jittered the boy’s cheeks. He looked like an apprentice sharper, trying to perfect a three-card monte smile. “If you draw me a picture,” he said–nervousness suddenly undermining his brashness, one dirty hand picking at the tatters of a shirtsleeve–“if you draw me a picture, then I won’t have to tell Kit about you.” He was already retreating back under the bleachers, head collapsed into the bony shelter of his collarbone, when Padlin answered, calmly, barely audible in the hubbub: “Go ahead. Tell him about me.” A moment’s hesitation, a smudge of confusion spreading across the boy’s blunt features. He quickly recovered himself, though, forever adaptable thanks to the slipperiness and serendipity of the Points. “I will.” Padlin turned away to gaze down at the empty pit. “I’ll tell Kit about how you sent Mollie Maloney looking for him. Oh,” the boy’s canny smile shivered with effort, “he ain’t going to take kindly to that.” The mention of the name, the long-unknown caption to place under the terrible engraving, the title that would complete the coroner’s report, the enunciation of Mollie Maloney burst something in Padlin’s head: a calcium-white cough of light that sapped his will and determination. Padlin’s mind became cluttered with Mollie Maloney’s uncaptured features, static sketches fluttering across his gaze, obscuring his vision, making everything before him unfocused, without depth. Suddenly weary, Padlin barely noted the increased uproar of the crowd. Then the referee vaulted over the fence and landed heavily in the center of the pit. The referee paused to return his shining top hat to its previously jaunty angle, he tugged at the tails of his jacket. He raised his arm, the hand dipping from the weight of the rings adorning every finger. Padlin heard but did not follow the referee’s words, his shout-shocked voice rasping: “Gentlemen! The main contest is at hand!” The raucousness answering this pronouncement drowned out whatever the kid said next. Padlin caught the high-pitched timbre, a sharp point piercing here and there through the crowd noise, pinpricks that admitted leaky chirps. “The contenders,” the referee bellowed, pressing down the hubbub, “the two opposing champions, have been properly prepared for their match. This will be a clean, fair fight, gentlemen. Kit Burns guarantees that.” His chest puffed balloon-like out of his jacket, the referee paused to allow the thunderous response (which included a fair share of derision). “All the rules have been observed,” he continued. “The contenders are equally matched. Weighed in one hour before this match at twenty-eight pounds each, ears cut, tails on. In the last half-hour, corners was determined by the toss of a coin and the champions then was bathed according to Bandbox rules. One,” the referee popped a finger out at the crowd, “washed in hot water with soda and Castille soap. Two,” he enthusiastically forked the fingers, “washed in fresh cow’s milk. And three, the all-important test. The red-pepper test, gentlemen! Each trainer was permitted a taste of the opposing champion. And, as a final, incontestable test, I, Kit Burns, licked each dog myself!” Cheers and oaths tumbled from the bleachers. Padlin stared at the blocky figure in the fighting ring. Recording the thick torso and foreshortened legs upon a mind’s-eye sketchpad, Padlin worked the shapes and relationships into cartoon exaggerations: Kit Burns. Padlin felt none of the dread the name had previously evoked; the amorphousness of his fearful imaginings, a vaguely formed yet threatening ogre, had gained flesh and lost its menace. “And, gentlemen, gentlemen.” Burns’s hands tamped down the racket. “Let me just say, each of them, oh, gentlemen, each of those two marvelous beasts tasted soooo good!” The place clamored in appreciation, the bleachers palpitating as boots beat a myriad of tempos upon the planks and arses bounced up and down on the rough seats. “I’ll tell him. I will!” The kid’s words abruptly emerged. Padlin peered around, catching the boy crouched farther back underneath the bleachers. He was barely visible in the gloom. “I will,” he repeated and, still receiving no response, he said: “I’ll tell Kit you was the one sent her. I’ll tell him you was the one that tried to steal Butts.” Burns whistled, thumb and forefinger poked in the corners of his long mouth. “Place your bets, now’s the time!” He composed his stance, squaring his bulky shoulders, hands propped against his crotch like a preacher ready to receive the converted. “Gentlemen,” he intoned, “I give you, hailing from Philadelphia, Moyamensing’s own magnificent,” (Burns dramatically swept his top hat from his head right toward Padlin), “Crib!” As the room resounded with cheers and hisses, a man brushed past Padlin, heading for the pit. He had the rolling gait of a sailor, one arm levered out to counterbalance the weight of the blanketed bundle burdening the other. “Crib’s opponent,” Burns shouted, “is the Bandbox’s pride. I give you, gentlemen, the amazing, never-beaten and forever unbeatable–Butts!” An approving roar overawed the smattering of hoots and hisses, and Padlin found himself hurtling down toward the fighting ring. Butts. Padlin stumbled into the pack of bettors clustered at the waist-high fence. The dog sketches flapped within his head, canine cartoon after canine cartoon, types of dogs but no dog in particular. Padlin shoved through the packed bodies, his hat smacked right, left by the tangled foliage of outstretched arms and the thrusts of fists clenching cash. Butts, a belligerent fart of a name, repeatedly popping in Padlin’s ears. She had called him Jakesy.

Chapter IX Butts was borne into the ring by a skinny man–barely that, actually: a spindly sketch of a man, his legs seeking purchase under the weight of the heavy package in his embrace. Swathed in a blanket, snout bound in a leather muzzle, only the gleaming tip of Butts’s nose was visible. The dogs were placed in the powdered semicircles demarcating their sides. The trainers–the sailor and Kit Burns–removed the blankets and muzzles. Each knelt behind his dog, enveloping the beast in a tight embrace, murmuring words at the quivering back. The skinny man-boy, freed from his burden, stepped back over the fence and assumed the stance and attitude of the proprietor of Sportsmen’s Hall. His imitation was a poor caricature of his boss’s brawny presence, his hands lost in the cuffs of a shirt meant for someone broader. Nevertheless, the din in the room quickly petered down to a convulsive mutter. The boy maintained his pose, relishing the moment of command. Flapping his hands out of the capacious shirtsleeves, he brought them to his mouth, paused another instant, and then piped out: “Release!” The dogs seemed to explode out of their restraints, two projectiles flying into the air toward the center of the pit. They met under the gas jets and, leaving a trail of spittle and hair, collapsed in an entangled, heaving heap onto the dirt. Padlin gripped the upright boards. He tried to catch the slashing motion, to make out Butts amid the flying dirt and kicking limbs. The dogs broke apart. They snorted and snuffled, hackles raised, dancing sideways, eyeing each other. Butts, Padlin guessed, was the one with the peculiar brindled hide. Pale streaks disrupted his deep-brown hair in a manner that reminded him of welts left by a lashing. Otherwise, Padlin could only distinguish general movement and fractured details: the dog’s mouth contorted in a snarl, his sideways shuffling, his earless head skulking below his shoulders. The other dog, Crib, had the flat, exaggerated features of a harlequin. Long, puffy eyes hunkered on either side of a mashed muzzle, flews intersecting at a dry freckled nose. Crib stopped, impressive in his stiff stance, muscles roped under the speckled hide, hindquarters and testicles trembling. His snout wrinkled revealing ivory fangs, the long canines jabbing into the soft skin of the lower lip. Crib growled, a low scraping sound that filled out the crowd’s hoots and calls. Padlin thought of a piece of slate drawn across cobblestones. Butts halted. He was a finer specimen than Crib, sinewy like him but more subtly formed, a delicate watercolor to Crib’s rough pencilwork. His skull was long, with deep brows over a short, triangular muzzle that truly suggested the bridge of a nose. Butts’s face made Padlin suddenly doubt the rules of physiognomy he shared with his peers. The artist was taught to locate the animal traits beneath human countenances, creating a sketch that teetered on the cusp between Homo sapiens and the lower creatures: truer to life than the mundane appearance of the subject himself. But if Padlin ever tried to draw Butts, he would have to reverse the process, chiseling God’s greatest work out of the irrational and savage. Butts’s pelvis rose, his tail arched downward. Crib seemed to check his opponent’s move, the growl rising slightly in pitch. Butts snarled and a rumbling undertow emerged from him, tugging at Crib’s higher rasp. “There goes the bastard again,” someone said in the crush of men about Padlin. “Watch him, now. Watch what he does.” A chorus of affirmations followed, bereft of the usual salty skepticism and insult. And when the responses diminished, there was nothing more: the room fell silent, but for Crib’s keening and Butts’s basso retort. Two dogs were in the pit, but every gaze seemed to be fixed on Butts. And then Butts’s growl changed. The rumble constricted and became throatier, a tenor. It began to warble. The warbling quickly became a vibrato–but a vibrato cut unevenly–like, Padlin grasped at the sound’s effect, like the bobbing current of words in a mellifluous voice. Padlin glanced over at Crib, whose grimacing clown face was cocked in puzzlement. Crib maintained his snarl, but his heavy brow was furling, nervous waves beating at his eyes, as if he was furiously exercising the slim resources of his wit to deal with this unpredictability. Butts’s voice seemed to grow more focused, the vibrato now regular, like a phrase repeated, sing-song, over and over again. His muzzle twitched to the enunciations, his face relaxing, losing all signs of wildness or wrath. Crib visibly relented. Careful to keep his canines exposed, he nevertheless was sufficiently confused to lower his hindquarters to the ground. He cocked his head quizzically and his tongue nervously lapped at his flews. Suddenly, shockingly, soundlessly, Butts sprang. He landed on Crib. His jaws snapped around the startled dog’s nose. Crib frantically pawed backwards, trapped under the brindled dog. Blood spurted from around Butts’s mouth. “Devil dog!” The exclamation was nearly lost in the pandemonium. The crowd hollered ecstatically, emitting looping whoops as the blood splattered onto the dirt. Padlin was no innocent. As an artist-reporter he had delved into the wretched underlife of the city. He had inspected the dark labyrinth of the Old Brewery (albeit in the company of a well-compensated constable), tripping over the inert, inebriated bodies, peeking into miserable closets housing filthy mothers and cankerous children. He’d witnessed the arbitrary violence of the streets, seen the lacerations and mutilations left by Points gang fights. He’d, of course, viewed many a corpse, carted out of fever nests, displayed on the slabs of the morgue, dumped into the broad pits on Randall’s Island. But this dogfight was a new phenomenon. The sporting reports in the Police Gazette could not do the spectacle justice. Words on paper isolated movement, made the convulsing and slashing charges discernible, knowable, coherent. What was occurring before him, however, bore no meaning because Padlin couldn’t really see what was happening. He saw Butts and Crib tear at one another, but it was like trying to freeze a waterfall, to make out the constituent drops in the avalanche of water. He saw Butts thrown this way and that as Crib tried to break his opponent’s grasp–but to Padlin it was just streaks of hide and gore. He saw Butts release Crib’s bloody stump of a nose, saw Butts twist about and dive for Crib’s front legs, snapping onto the right paw–but it took several minutes for Padlin to fracture the battle into momentary images. The fight was brutal, the attacks quick and surprising, and he grew exhausted in his vain efforts to just observe. The dogs tumbled on their sides and Crib broke free. He dove back onto Butts, catching the back of the brindled dog’s head. Butts shook and jiggered, arched his back, tried to loosen Crib, the fine hair of his skull blushing gruesomely. Crib threw his head back, yanking Butts up. He whipped his head down. Butts hit the ground hard, his legs splaying like the splatter of an overturned pie. But Crib had lost his grip. Butts twisted his trunk around, swiveled onto his back, front paws revolving, back legs churning in the air. Crib leapt toward his exposed throat. The crowd bellowed, prepared for, anticipating, the blood. Incredibly, Padlin felt a sound coming from his lips, not a yell, not a scream exactly. Something searing and anguished. The dogs were struggling, plowing the dirt, and Padlin saw Butts’s head buried in Crib’s forechest. He had a terrible hold, his teeth clamped low on Crib’s front, just above his legs. The crowd pressed down around Padlin, roaring at the pit with renewed fervor. Padlin was shouting, too. Crib jerked about, snapped his jaws just short of Butts’s burrowing head. Butts suddenly let go and, just as quickly, leapt and bit down on the stub of Crib’s left ear. He flicked his head and slammed Crib into the dirt. Padlin heard his voice yelling encouragement, yelling for Butts. The brindled dog gave Crib no time to recover. His head snapped, thrusting Crib onto the pit floor again. Padlin felt his throat grow raw, shouting for Jakesy. Butts released Crib’s head. He flew on top of his opponent. His jaws closed on Crib’s left front leg. He had it lodged in the back of his mouth, clamped between his broad molars, stretching his mouth into a foamy leer. Butts ground down, his jaw muscles bulged. Padlin heard the bone crack, and he shouted. His throat hurt with the tearing words. Padlin shouted, the name tumbling from his mouth through the din: “Mollie Maloney!” What remained of Butts’s ears twitched. His jaws shuddered open. His head whipped around. The words choked in Padlin’s throat, but Butts had spotted him. Two eyes, glinting sky-blue in the gaslight. Blood and mucous dripped from his mouth, yet his brutish face had gone slack–no, not slack: it was subtler, more horrifyingly human: startled. And, in that moment, as man and dog exchanged stares, Crib rose up from beneath his tormentor, and his teeth sank into the side of Butts’s head. Crib’s momentum threw Butts backward, his head thudding against the ground. The brindled dog was helpless, on his back, feet clawing in the air. Crib drove his opponent into the dirt, scraping him along the pit floor. The betting was fierce around Padlin, voices howling new odds. Padlin watched Crib fling the helpless Butts head over heels. The flesh tore in his clenched teeth, flapped away from his deadly grasp. Crib bore down, his fangs sinking deeper into the tissue and muscle. “Are you mad?” Waddley’s face pressed up against the side of Padlin’s head. Sweat covered his forehead. His spectacles were smeared, the frames digging into the soft skin of his cheeks. The lovers rejoined: Frank Leslie’s Orpheus and Eurydice reunited in hell. Kit Burns crawled along the inner circumference of his semicircle in the pit, desperately motioning, hollering at his felled champion. The dirt was turning to syrup around the dogs’ tethered heads. The bloody skulls thrashed in a terrible unison, Butts’s muzzle gaping helplessly up at the gaslights, Crib grinding downward. Crib’s back legs plowed, his right front paw slapping on the ground with each thrust. His maimed left leg flapped over Butts’s panting chest. Padlin saw the useless limb graze Butts’s nose. He saw Butts’s body stiffen. He saw Butts’s head lurch and his teeth mesh over the leg. Crib’s yodeling scream coursed through the room. Butts scrambled up and struck again, mercifully cutting short Crib’s cries. Butts had Crib by the ear now, pounding his head in the dirt. Bets and odds catapulted over the pit. Butts couldn’t maintain his hold, Crib’s earlier assault had seen to that. He was fighting with half of his mouth, gnawing shallowly at Crib’s ear. Crib wrenched free. Butts went for the mangled ear stub again. Crib ducked and, as Butts vaulted into him, he caught hold of the brindled dog’s throat. It wasn’t a deep bite. But Crib had a secure hold on the loose hide and, braced on his three good legs, he threw Butts. Butts managed to scurry up and Crib threw him again. Once more, Butts gained his footing and, once more, Crib sent him sprawling, his jaws still clamped on the flabby skin at Butts’s throat. They froze in place: Butts on his side, speared into the dirt by Crib’s muzzle. Burns and the sailor called and gesticulated from their semicircles. The betting numbers pulsed and spat around Padlin. Blood flecked Butts’s rising and falling ribs. Crib seemed to nuzzle into the folds at Butts’s throat, judging, considering the short trip to the jugular throbbing against his nose. He held his destroyed leg off the ground, well away from his opponent’s mouth. Padlin felt the sound beginning to rise from his throat. He felt the impulse to shout. His lips began to form the words. “Keep quiet, you fool!” Waddley gripped Padlin’s upper arm, his pudgy fingers clawing at the fabric. But another voice had risen within the pit. It was commanding, irritated, yet inchoate. Wordlessly, it demanded obedience. “Devil dog!” The sailor was shaking his fist at Burns. He called to Crib, waved his hands, trying to divert his dog’s attention. His head pressed against the dirt, only Butts’s mouth showed animation. His jaws opened and closed methodically, modulating the sound into a recognizable chant: Erro!  Padlin couldn’t see Crib’s face, but his stance seemed to lose precision. Erro! Erro!  A precise sound, it gained coherence and Padlin realized he was not hearing a whine or a howl or a growl but a phrase. Let go! Let go! LET GO!  Crib released Butts. He gazed down at him, bewildered. He looked around at the frenzied crowd surrounding him. He turned back to Butts, still prone, now silent. “Attack!” the sailor screamed. “Kill him, you son of a bitch!” Butts struck. Crib jolted back, but Butts caught him under the jaw. Crib backed up, pulling Butts to his feet. Now the brindled dog was in control, his four legs to Crib’s three, his mouth encasing Crib’s throat like a constricting collar. Now the crowd got what it came for. The blood cascaded down Crib’s breast. Butts worked his jaws, deepening and widening the wound, aided by Crib’s jerks and jumps. They lurched together across the pit to the atonal music of the surrounding chorus, Crib’s muzzle propped on Butts’s probing skull. Butts began to whip his head from side to side. Crib’s resistance ebbed, his legs gave out. Butts picked up speed. As Crib flew to one side, Butts’s jaws sprang open and Crib toppled to the pit wall. Stamping, applauding, whistling, yelling, the men demanded their due. Winners or losers, they hungered now for a glorious, fatal finish–a magnificent kill was imminent! But Mollie Maloney’s dog merely shook his head and sashayed his rear, dirt sprinkling from his hide. He yawned, and calmly watched Crib gain his footing. Blood coated Crib’s throat and breast. From across the pit, Padlin studied his clown face, now slack, now painted in darkening hues of red, the bloated tongue lolling over his incisors. Ignoring the imprecations of the crowd, Butts ambled toward the teetering dog. Crib tensed. He awkwardly swiveled to the side of the pit and leapt. His jaw banged against the edge of the wall, and he fell back. Before he hit the ground, Butts was on top of him. Clinging to Crib’s throat, Butts shook the life out of him. The sailor fell onto his stomach and, stretching out his arms, vigorously fanned his failing dog. Crib’s head flopped from right to left, drool looping around him like a crimson lariat. Kit Burns rose in his semicircle. He flicked the back brim of his top hat, knocking it jauntily over his brow. He nodded to his baggy-clothed assistant positioned along the pit wall. The boy nodded back and shouted: “Game!”

Chapter X As soon as he had some elbowroom, Waddley pulled his tattered pad from the relative protection of his armpit and propped it against the pit wall. Despite his trepidation, betrayed by occasional furtive glances to the right and left, Waddley was the quintessence of efficiency. He quickly defined Butts astride Crib’s corpse, merely suggesting the terrain of the fighting pit and the surrounding bleachers (now quickly emptying) before he impetuously turned to another page.

Padlin slouched beside Waddley, arms dangling between his knees. The portly youth’s energetic pencil work was barely tolerable to him. Padlin was completely spent and yet the fight was still churning through him, making all the images and activity about him too brilliant, too vibrant–like an overvarnished canvas. Abruptly, Waddley dropped his pencil and slammed his pad down against the upright planks. “Damn you, Padlin! Why don’t you draw?” Padlin was too overwhelmed and too tired to respond. Waddley angrily turned back to the pad and made a few vicious swipes with his pencil. He stopped, staring at the paper. He let out a long breath. “All right, Padlin.” Waddley flipped the pad closed, laid it on his lap and awkwardly crossed his short legs. “Let’s be frank with one another.” He placed his hands on the pad, entwining his fingers. “What are you scheming?” Waddley looked up, searching for Padlin’s eyes. “For God’s sake,” he suddenly snapped, “take off that damned hat!” Padlin didn’t move or speak “I admit, I underestimated you,” Waddley continued. “I admit, sir”–the last said with an emphasis that pronounced disingenuousness–“that I find your tactics unfathomable.” Waddley set his pad on the bench between them. With a grunt, he twisted to better confront his colleague. He briefly gazed over Padlin’s shoulder, his lips forming silent words, his hands bobbing in the air, the entwined fingers pressing tighter. Padlin watched the flesh bulge around the ring that adorned Waddley’s left hand. Waddley nodded in recognition of some resolution: “Am I not correct in believing, Padlin, that you were prepared to kill me this morning?” He waited a moment, his expression quickly sinking in tandem with his expectation of an answer. “Yes,” he finally said, Padlin’s surrogate. “And, am I not also correct in believing that your attempt on my person was your own peculiar way of achieving this assignment?” Again, a pause before Waddley accepted defeat. “Yes,” he exhaled. His clasped hands began to jitter up and down. “Then, please, explain this to me. Explain to me why you conceded the contest even as we entered this wretched place. Explain why you won’t even try to set your meager hand to paper.” Waddley’s clasped hands thumped the bench. “All right. Then tell me this.” He squirmed, cocking his head in a manner that was meant to suggest intimacy but only reminded Padlin of the late Crib. “Tell me what possessed you to bellow during the fight?” Another moment passed before Waddley, still speaking as if on Padlin’s behalf, said, “Yes.” His expression suddenly dilated, like the victim of an electric shock. His spectacles slid forward on his sweat-slick nose. “Now I see it,” he stammered. He fearfully peered up at Padlin, the apex of his still-clasped hands shaving his nose. “You didn’t shout to bring calamity down upon yourself,” Waddley whispered. “It was to bring calamity down upon me.” Padlin looked at Waddley, amazed at the infantile terror palsying his features. “You don’t understand,” Padlin finally said, shaking his head. “You can’t understand.” Padlin glanced toward the pit. “I thought I understood. But I don’t–” Butts stood in the dirt below, no more than four feet away, his mauled face turned up toward the two Special Artists. His muzzle was swollen, one side thick with clotted gore. His brindled hide had lost its luster, the short hair mottled by patches of dried blood. Butts’s stance, though, was steady and his eyes alert. Those eyes, Padlin thought, what had Mollie Maloney said about them? Padlin couldn’t remember, but their concentration was remarkable. Disconcerting. Padlin tentatively leaned forward. Maybe it was the effect of their color. The eyes were flawlessly blue; looking into the pupils was like gazing into depthless sky. Butts’s clipped ears twitched, his eyes narrowed and his flews curled into a snarl. The wounded skin crackled as the fangs and black gums appeared. A long growl rose from his throat, a clearly pronounced rolling “r.” A tumbling, menacing canine letter. Waddley scuttled back on his seat. Padlin remained crouched over the pit wall. He carefully raised his hands. “Jakesy,” Padlin said. The dog blinked. The ear stubs shivered. “Jakesy.” The growl died. The dog’s expression faltered. The change was eerie, its flexibility too extreme. The dog grimaced harshly, a cringe that did not suggest primitive fear as much as painful recollection. Padlin’s stomach scraped against the pit wall. “Jakesy,” he said, “I knew Mollie.” The eyes fluttered open. Padlin now remembered what Mollie Maloney had said about the eyes, how they conveyed a tortured life and a terrible knowledge of mankind. But she had been wrong. The eyes did not alone transmit such . . . such consciousness: it was his whole countenance doing that, the workings of the tiny muscles and nerves rendering a contorted map of character and conscience. What Padlin saw was a being trapped in a living hell.

Go to The Hungry Eye, Episode 2

Go to The Hungry Eye, Episode 4

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002). 

Writing a work of political history has taught me unexpected lessons. Of course, there are the lessons of revising and resubmitting and shaping and editing that confront any scholar–particularly one in the process of completing a first book. But my focus on politics has given an unexpected power and life to a host of questions touching on the very definition of political history. In essence, writing Affairs of Honor has forced me to reckon with the politics of writing about politics.

The project first emerged out of a mound of evidence. Judging by their letters and writings, national politicians in the early republic seemed to be playing the political game according to a heretofore undetected set of rules. For example, note James Monroe’s response to a public character attack by President John Adams in 1798. Writing to his friend James Madison, Monroe considered his options. Ignoring the offense was impossible, he wrote, for “not to notice it may with many leave an unfavorable impression agnst me.” Responding to Adams “personally” with a challenge to a duel was also impossible: “I cannot I presume, as he is an old man & the Presidt.” A pamphlet might serve, but Monroe had tried that once before, and Adams continued to insult him. Here we see Monroe surveying a range of political weapons in search of the proper response. In 1793, Virginian John Taylor of Caroline followed the same pattern when debating the publication of a manuscript attacking the national bank. “Ought it to appear in a pamp[h]let or in the newspapers?” he asked. “The latter are meer ephemere, and tho’ containing merit, read & forgotten. The best political essays being often supposed to proceed from the printers in a course of trade.” Clearly, Monroe and Taylor perceived a spectrum of political weapons, each with a different power and reach. The abundance of such letters sifting through the same arsenal suggests a shared logic of attack and counterattack–what I term a “grammar of political combat.”

This unwritten rulebook was grounded on the culture of honor. For the political elite, the ethic of honor set standards of conduct and provided a controlled means of handling their violation; the rituals of honor displayed superiority of character through time-honored rites recognized the world over. On the unstructured national political stage, this code of conduct assumed extreme importance. In the absence of organized parties and institutionalized rules and standards, the code of honor channeled and monitored political conflict, and provided weapons of war.

To be sure, earlier historical studies have touched on pieces of this puzzle: the conflicted and anxiety-ridden atmosphere of national politics; the mechanics of politicking, particularly among the elite; the southern culture of honor; and the antiparty mentality of the period, including the resulting violence and anxiety. But no work pulled these strands together. And no work acknowledged, let alone reconstructed, the distinctive set of rules and assumptions that governed politics among the national elite, the cultural lens that shaped their decisions, political and otherwise. In short, no work made sense of the importance of honor in structuring national political combat.

Such was my task as I began Affairs of Honor. And, much to my delight, examining evidence through this new mental framework revealed an abundance of unexpected and consistent insights. For example, the 1798 Sedition Act became more complicated when examined in the light of personal honor and reputation; however repressive its impact and partisan its motives, its logic was bound up with the importance of reputation among political leaders. Similarly, the period’s prevailing republican obsession with public opinion suddenly had powerful, personal implications when viewed in that same light, for what is public opinion but a public determination of the reputations of men and measures? Historical evidence itself took on new meaning. Personal diaries and private memoranda became deliberate political diatribes, like Thomas Jefferson’s accusatory political memoranda, later titled the “Anas,” which he carefully arranged and deposited among his papers, in the hope of revealing the historical “truth” to posterity. Emotion-filled correspondence that previously had been dismissed as having little more significance than human interest became vividly political;emotion itself became a vital source of political evidence. What better way to track a population’s “shoulds” and “should nots” than to follow the trails of outrage, anger, shock, and shame? Even familiar writings took on a new logic. For example, Alexander Hamilton’s 1800 “Letter . . . Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams” has been long dismissed as near insanity; how else to explain this flamingly personal assault on the presidential candidate of Hamilton’s own party? Framed in the early national culture of combat, however, it reveals itself to be part of a genre of pamphlet that has gone long unnoticed in the scholarly literature–the defense pamphlet. Hamilton was defending himself and attacking Adams according to the conventions of the time; however unwise his actions, they had an underlying logic that deserves study. In their diaries, letters, and pamphlets, my historical subjects were offering personal testimony of their sense of the structure and logic of their political world.

This cultural dimension of early national politics was a missing strand of the prevailing narrative; restored, it could add something to the study of early national politics, and suggest something about the role of culture in the study of politics more broadly. In fact, this sort of inquiry has revealed more about politics than I first imagined, eliciting comments and suggestions that raise questions about the nature of political history itself.

A few comments from readers and colleagues concern the role of partisan ideology and policy in my narrative–or rather, their lack of a role. Can early national political history exist without a focus on republicanism, or liberalism, or Federalists, or Republicans, above all else? And by extension, can political history exist without a focus on ideology? My response to these questions is no–and yes. No, political history as a whole cannot exist without the study of ideological differences and their implications. Such is the stuff of politics. As any political scientist will proclaim, partisan alliances wage war on the basis of their differences. Even alliances that are little more than personality cults carry ideological differences, subtle as they may be. Surely the story of early national politics is not complete without its central ideological clash of Federalism versus Republicanism.

But must every work of political history focus on this clash? Can there not be studies that explore, complicate, flesh out, or contextualize this central narrative with new insights and evidence? For example, is there no value in understanding the motives and logic behind the publication of political writings–the intended impact and audiences of newspaper essays, pamphlets, and broadsides? Is not their medium a part of their message? Is there no value in understanding the nature of congressional debate–its rules and conventions? Did these shared limits and boundaries not affect the content and impact of legislative discussions and their outcomes? Is there no value in understanding the precise methods used to build political alliances? Or must we simply assume their inevitability and overlook their logic in the eyes of their creators? In essence, were there not shared understandings and assumptions that shaped political decisions as profoundly as did conflicting partisan ideologies–on occasion, even more profoundly? And, by implication, must every political study stress differences instead of similarities? Is it not a blend of the two that gives the politics of a given people, place, and time its distinctive character and logic? No, early national political history cannot exist without the underlying importance of the battle between Federalists and Republicans. But neither can it exist–and grow–without acknowledging other central influences on political behavior, cultural and otherwise. The study of political culture, as a whole, relies upon such an understanding.

On the other side of the spectrum, a few readers have suggested just the opposite, questioning whether a work centering on the political elite can even pretend to shed light on the full political narrative in all its complexity–on such important issues as gender, racial, and class politics, for example. Can such a book be anything other than an old-fashioned study of the Founders to the exclusion of all else? Once again, the answer is no–and yes. There are decades of scholarship behind such questions, decades of scholars who did allege that elite politics was the only politics worth knowing. Only relatively recently have other populations taken their place on the political stage. The historiography of the early republic has seen a particularly rich infusion of peoples into the political narrative, adding a host of new voices to the political dialogue of a time past. Particularly in the study of America, a nation so grounded on popular rule, these voices play enormous, essential, and central roles.

But they do not exist in isolation. The political dialogue is far more complex. The few and the many, the elite and the masses, artisans and laborers and editors and lawyers, white and black, male and female, the empowered and the voiceless all push and pull and give and take in the ongoing story of politics. For any of these populations, politics is a combination of action and reaction. And a study that acknowledges this dialogue and its implications can usefully examine individual strands of this complex debate without warping the whole. No work centered on the political elite can reflect the full political narrative. But properly contextualized, it can offer insight into one set of voices in an ongoing dialogue–a set of voices that must be included to get a full sense of the politics of a given place and time.

In the end, such questions boil down to issues of inclusion and exclusion. Who and what should be included in the political narrative, and how should their stories be told? What role for the elite in our telling of political history? Should they be cast to the sidelines, or recast as ideologues waging primitive warfare according to rules and conventions much like our own? These are questions with oddly personal repercussions, implying the inclusion and exclusion of scholars as well as their subjects, for in declaring one group of historical subjects or another out of bounds, are we not limiting the scholarly discourse as well? And equally important, are we not flattening and simplifying a complex story of human interaction among competing groups? Ironically, such questions about the nature of political history are perhaps the best political evidence of all. For in arguing about the nature of politics, are we not reproducing the ongoing dialogue of politics ourselves?

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

Common-place asks Joanne B. Freeman, assistant professor of history at Yale University and author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, 2001) and Alexander Hamilton: Writings (New York, 2001), what’s political about the “new political history”?

Larzer Ziff’s new book surveys the travel writing of five men: John Ledyard, John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Although this sequence represents well the changing styles of travel books across the nineteenth century, the contrast between Ledyard and James is so great that the term “travel writing” seems insufficient. Indeed, in my estimation it doesn’t really define a coherent genre. The field perhaps ought to be broken up into three genres: exploration narrative, travel writing, and touristic writing. And to put these three in perspective one needs to recognize two additional modes: ethnography and guidebook. Exploration narrative is about travel by one who doesn’t know precisely where he is, where to find the place he is looking for, or who the local inhabitants are. The encounters with natives portrayed in these texts are, if not actual “first contact,” nonetheless startling confrontations between peoples who know little of one another, least of all their respective languages.

Exploration narratives are not really defined by geography, they do not always push beyond the existing maps, but they do convey the fear and fascination of the unknown, and the European colonial fantasy which inspired Conrad’s Marlowe in Heart of Darkness to dream of the “blank spaces on the earth” and how he might go there.

In travel narratives, on the other hand, the places visited are already known to the writer and to the reader, and the author therefore must balance between preconceptions and experience, between previous accounts and his own. “The more such sites had been described by previous travelers the more, it seems, succeeding travelers were obligated to visit and again describe them” (137) Ziff writes, referring to the religious landmarks of Palestine which had been literary set pieces since the Middle Ages. This dynamic operated even in early colonial works we don’t usually think of as travel writing: “In 17th and 18th c. America . . . the original settlers had arrived with expectations formed from their reading of the accounts of earlier travelers to North America” (7).

Touristic writing evolved once transportation and services had sprung up to serve travelers, making the previous style of “travel” scarcely possible. Ziff distinguishes between Taylor and Stephens as travelers, and Twain as a tourist. Whereas Taylor’s first book, Views A-Foot (1846), tells of his low-budget walking tour of Europe, Twain’s 1869 Innocents Abroad recounts a voyage on a steamship chartered by wealthy Americans. A self-conscious and ironic tourist, Twain avoided the hackneyed Grand Tour by satirizing it: “the originality of his work compared with other books of travel would reside in his paying closer attention to the tourist experience and to tourists themselves than to the places visited” (185).

The progression across these three genres manifests an increasingly self-conscious narrative persona, and hence it is fitting that Ziff’s book should conclude with James, who “unerringly moved in his travel writing toward a reliance upon his sensibility, upon the representation of the impression a site made upon him” (229). It would be interesting to read an analysis of how James’s touristic sensibility reflected the techniques he employed upon the characters in his novels, but instead the passages Ziff quotes mostly reveal James’s anti-Semitism and snobbish contempt for popular culture and the lower classes. I was not for a moment inspired to head for the library to check out Italian Hours (1909) or The American Scene (1907).

Ziff links together the five authors not with analysis of the rhetorical and generic qualities of travel writing (which is why I feel compelled to offer my own), but with a history of the genre as publishing niche and career path. Travel books sold better than novels did in the nineteenth century, and Twain was forced to return to touristic writing and lecture tours to stay solvent at a time when Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer sold poorly. Ledyard’s book was “the first travel account by an American to be published in the new nation” (5) and a petition that he made to the Connecticut assembly to support it resulted in the first copyright legislation in the United States. Stephens was the first who “could finance future travel on the proceeds from the books about his previous travels” (83). Taylor’s “Views A-Foot originated the genre of ‘Europe on a Shoestring'” (127), and some readers used it, and/or James’s works, as guides for their own tours of Europe, even as Karl Baedeker began publishing his successful series of guidebooks in the 1860s. In touristic writing like Twain’s and James’s, authorial sensibility often overwhelms the place itself, and the modern era has therefore developed a separate genre, the guidebook, that effaces the narrative persona while providing the preconceptions that tourists still so badly want to have when they confront a site.

Ziff’s book disappoints because although it acknowledges what we might call the solipsism of travel writing–the fact that it assumes a cultural affinity between author and reader–it rarely analyzes the racist and imperialist expressions of the five authors. Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (New York, 1992) examined the rhetoric of travel writing alongside that of imperialism, but although Ziff acknowledges that Taylor’s works “provide a fascinating (albeit disturbing) account of the rise in America of the twinned ideologies of the culture of travel . . . and that of imperialism” (120), he too often simply laments or excuses the racism of Stephens, Twain, and James. For example, Pratt’s concept of the rhetoric of the “anti-conquest” applies to Ledyard, who as a member of James Cook’s third expedition, and later in his attempted transit across czarist Russia, claimed to “travel under the common flag of humanity” (46) free from imperial political motives. Perhaps the best such analysis in Return Passages is of Taylor’s dressing as a Muslim to enter a mosque: “Even as he indulges himself in different practices he conveys an awareness of himself as a participant in a performance that can end whenever he wishes although the other actors cannot” (139). The book would be stronger if it explicitly theorized these effects and compared them across the five authors.

One can learn far more about European encounters with the cultural “other” from the Journal of Henri Joutel. This is of course an exploration narrative, and, I would argue, one of the finest in the genre. The epic story of René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, has been told many times, most notably by Francis Parkman, but is not prominent in popular history today. La Salle’s expedition of 1680-82 was the first to descend the Mississippi River all the way to the sea, but since he then returned upstream to New France, the exact location of the river’s mouth remained uncertain. In 1684 he led four ships with nearly three hundred people into the Gulf of Mexico to find the river, but ended up much too far west, in Matagorda Bay, Texas. Two of the ships wrecked there, and after two years in a makeshift settlement, La Salle, Joutel, and a small party set out overland, northeastward toward the Mississippi. La Salle was murdered by his men, and only Joutel and five others finally reached a French post at the mouth of the Arkansas river. Those who remained at the settlement were nearly all killed.

La Salle himself never wrote a comprehensive narrative of his first expedition (and of course couldn’t write about his second). It is this text by the modest Joutel, not those by self-aggrandizing Louis Hennepin or the brave but reticent Henri de Tonti, that offers the best account of La Salle’s explorations. Yet it has been largely ignored. A French text, it doesn’t fit into Anglo-American heroic origins, like Lewis and Clark’s journals, and it hasn’t enjoyed a revival as Chicano literature the way Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios has. Yet as exploration narrative it’s much better than the former and every bit as good as the latter.

Joutel’s narrative persona won my sympathy the way Taylor, Twain, and James could not. As the party pushes on for days through knee-deep water during winter floods in east Texas, as they put their lives into the hands of native guides, Joutel’s quiet courage is astounding. In criticizing La Salle’s imperious leadership, and then in dealing with his assassins, he conveys great tact and judgment. He also excels in his descriptions of daily life around the Matagorda Bay settlement, quasi-sentimental stories of seductions and marriages, of the distribution of food and efforts at gardening.

Best of all, Joutel’s exploration narrative is one of very few that powerfully conveys the anxiety and difficulties of communication between Europeans and American Indians in early encounters. In Columbus’s journals and many other texts one reads accounts of apparent conversations, “they said” and “we said,” in spite of the fact that no interpreter was available and direct oral exchanges were impossible. But Joutel is more circumspect: “When we told them we were going to visit the Cenis, they informed us that to the northeast we would find plains and to the north, on the other hand, we would experience great hardships because of the forest that was very difficult. This was all in signs, however, and one is often mistaken in the interpretations one makes from these signs, taking things in one way when they mean another” (164). At another point he reproves friar Anastase Douay, author of a competing account of the expedition, for claiming to have preached the gospel to the natives, when they could not possibly have understood him.

Moreover, Joutel’s text thematizes these problems of communication in complex, literary ways, in scenes that show how misunderstanding and prevarication were inescapable among the Frenchmen, not just between them and the natives. After La Salle is killed, Joutel must continue to travel with his killers. He opposes their plan to return to the settlement, but he dares not declare his intention to find a French post on the Mississippi, for fear that he might be killed as a potential witness. When he finally reaches the post, he does not reveal the facts of the assassination, but implies that La Salle is still alive at the settlement, because he hopes to be able to mount an expedition to save the others.

For its suspenseful portrayal of adventure, survival, and cross-cultural contact, Joutel’s exploration narrative deserves to be a bestseller as much as Into Thin Air (New York, 1997) or Undaunted Courage (New York, 1996). But ironically, the broad appeal of this exploration narrative is undercut by the parochialism of its editorial apparatus. William C. Foster’s introduction emphasizes his identification of the three major rivers Joutel called the Maligne, the Canoe, and the Cenis, as the modern Colorado, Brazos, and Trinity. This enabled Foster to trace the path of the climactic journey, which readers can follow in several handy maps. The route is documented by numerous footnotes to geographical, botanical, and ethnographic references, including many narratives of Spanish colonial explorations of the area. A few historians and some Texans may find this material important, but most readers will regard it as a distraction from Joutel’s narrative.

Nonetheless, this edition is an important achievement, for it represents the first time the entire text is available in English.  Journal historique du dernier voyage qui fut M. de la Sale was published in Paris in 1713, and in English translation the following year, but the French editor abridged the text of Joutel’s manuscript. Foster and translator Joanna Warren worked from the edition by nineteenth-century French historian Pierre Margry, and checked it against surviving manuscript copies. That this book should appear from the Texas Historical Society revives a noble tradition in American public history, and recalls a history of travel writing that was ignored by Ziff. The period of the colonial revival in architecture (roughly 1870-1910) was also the period in which many state historical societies were founded and published editions of colonial narratives and documents which are invaluable for academic historians and the general public today. Reuben Gold Thwaites’s Early Western Travels and Jesuit Relations, Hubert Howe Bancroft’s histories and collections on California and the Western states, Charles Hackett’s translations of documents on New Mexico, and publications by the Michigan, Illinois, New York, and other state historical societies cultivated a regional memory of colonial America that has been too often overlooked even as scholars work to recover the nation’s multilingual colonial past. The Joutel volume shares the virtues and the shortcomings of these editions of nearly a century earlier. It is thorough, handsome, and built to last, but also expensive, poorly marketed, and occasionally pedantic. It deserves a much wider readership than it is likely to find.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

Gordon Sayre is associate professor of English at the University of Oregon, and the author of Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill, 1997).

A generation ago, it appeared that the formal analysis of empires and imperialism, though it was a venerable avenue of historical inquiry and analysis, was all but played out. Scholars of early America turned toward community studies–the forerunners of today’s microhistories–to explore social, cultural, and psychological phenomena in more depth, while those working in other fields similarly turned away from “high” political and intellectual histories to examine local settings. But the past twenty years has brought several strands of inquiry to the fore that raise new questions about empire, or allow us to approach old questions with new angles of vision. Subaltern and postcolonial studies, and their partly analogous counterpart in early American historiography, ethnohistory, have cast the dynamics and legacies of colonialism in an entirely new light. Recent scholarship on early modern European state formation has similarly prompted inquiry into the connections between state building and empire building. In the case of early modern England, the rise of a “new British history” that explores the relationships among English, Scottish, and Irish histories and polities raises, by extension, questions about the nature of the first British Empire, which emerged just as these relations were being hammered out. Finally, a new–or renewed–interest in comparative, transnational, and global histories has brought scholars back to old comparative issues, seen again in a new light. For historians of Anglo-America, this means confronting the deeply engrained tradition of American exceptionalism in its colonial variant, a tradition that has emphasized the distinctive characteristics of Anglo-American rule to help explain the emergence of colonies that were poised for independence by 1775.

These developments have prompted a flourishing revival in imperial studies. Oxford University Press has just released a timely and expansive five-volume history of the British Empire, and it is once again fashionable for job candidates to tell prospective employers that they are interested in empires and imperialism. This essay will examine three books that are quite different from one another, but that, taken together, permit a nested and telescoping exploration of certain fundamental questions about the evolving nature of empires, the particular importance of early modern theories of rule to the creation of Europe’s overseas empires after 1492, and the specific configuration of ideas that may have helped to make England’s experience seem distinctive or even unique.

Anthony Pagden’s Peoples and Empires is an elegant and deceptively compact meditation on the nature of imperial enterprise from a scholar deeply rooted in the European contexts for such an inquiry. Here he presents a sweeping analytical narrative that suggests some of the central themes in empire building from the age of Alexander until the present day. At the center of this book lies a fundamental tension between the claims of most imperial powers to universality and the challenge to those claims that originated both from outside and from within their spheres of authority. These claims to universality have been of two types: on the one hand, great world empires since Alexander have steadily sought expansion, pressing their claims to territory, in the case of both Macedonia and Rome, to the limits of the known world. They become universal in the sense that there is almost literally no end to their pursuit of power and domination. On the other hand, such empires also typically propagate another kind of universality as well: the universalist claims of an ideology that would draw alien peoples into the sphere of imperial power and transform them in the empire’s own image. In the case of Rome, those claims rested on the elaboration of Roman law, whose provisions were extended throughout the empire in 212 A.D. when the emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all its free inhabitants. It was the rule of law that saved Rome, at least in theory, from being merely an expression of the emperors’ personal will to power. “Ultimately,” Pagden writes, “Roman law was intended to create not merely political and social order; it was also intended to confer an ethical purpose upon the entire community” (29).

With the division and dissolution of Roman power in the fourth century, those universal claims lost some of their force. They were revived when Pope Leo III conferred the title of emperor upon Charlemagne in 800 and thus inaugurated the Holy Roman Empire, whose claim to universal dominion rested not on the authority of Roman law but on that of the pope and the church. Yet, as James Muldoon notes in a book that focuses especially on the enduring significance of medieval legal theory to the formulation of early modern empires, the power of the Holy Roman Empire was more symbolic than real. Though the Pope confirmed the authority of successive kings as emperors, he did not have the power to make them kings in the first place, nor did the Holy Roman Empire have the governmental or administrative infrastructure necessary to give the empire an independent existence. As a practical matter, a universal empire even ruling over all of Christendom was beyond the reach of any monarch. Even as the church established a theoretically universal dominion, medieval kings cobbled together territories spanning various regions and principalities, governed according to a variety of laws, customs, and principles, and united often by nothing other than allegiance to a common sovereign. The result was a complex patchwork of political units that evolved toward the “composite monarchies” of early modern Europe. Dante Alighieri explained the disjunction between papal and monarchical power by arguing that God designed man for a dual end, and therefore created distinct realms of spiritual and political authority. Hugo Grotius concluded more grudgingly that, however desirable a universal Christian kingdom might be in principle, it was unattainable in practice because its scale would make it ungovernable.

But if a universal Christian empire in Europe seemed to be beyond reach, European expansion into the Atlantic–and, from there, into the Indian and Pacific Oceans–raised the possibility of a new Christian order overseas. Under the “watchful eye of the papacy” (Pagden, 55), in 1493 the monarchs of Portugal and Castile agreed to divide all the world into two jurisdictions. Thereafter, they sought to claim the riches of the Americas on behalf of both their crowns and their church. Yet from the beginning there were countercurrents of criticism and protest even within orthodox Iberian Catholicism. Bartolomé de las Casas, though he accepted the validity of European imperialism overseas, sharply criticized the “indiscriminate exploitation” (Pagden, 72) of the peoples they found there.

At roughly the same time, the Protestant Reformation split the church in Europe. In a striking analysis of early English imperial ideology, David Armitage argues that it is difficult to discover any enduring, specifically Protestant ideology of empire in the writings of men like Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas. Indeed, because Protestantism was by its nature skeptical of the universalist claims of the Roman church, Armitage even suggests that Protestantism vitiated English attempts to discover a unifying sense of religious purpose. Instead, Hakluyt drew upon classical conceptions of the good life and the successful polity in his efforts to make sense of England’s imperial goals. Armitage contends that the post-Renaissance context for the ideological origins of the British Empire may have been more significant than the post-Reformation one. But Christian humanism and post-Machiavellian republicanism both expressed deep ambivalence about imperial enterprise. Empires were “by definition expansionist,” Muldoon notes, “a fact that inevitably led to the moral corruption of their citizens” (113). Armitage follows the efforts of seventeenth-century English theorists to reconcile the demands of empire with their desire to sustain liberty. Machiavelli had argued that the greatness (grandezza) of a commonwealth derives from its liberty, but that it could only be sustained by expansion. Expansion, in turn, would destroy liberty. Machiavelli concluded that greatness was worth the price and that it was preferable for a state to pursue expansion, even at the cost of liberty. But English theorists were loath to make such a concession. Algernon Sidney suggested that the cycle of declension might be broken if an empire promoted expansion through commerce. Trade depended upon liberty, sustained greatness, and promoted expansion, he believed, yet did so without the dangers inherent in territorial conquest.

Thus English writers, politicians, and subjects nurtured the idea that their overseas dominion was a benign commercial sphere whose growth did not endanger the character of their kingdom. Armitage suggests that the simultaneous problem of defining the relationship among the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland made it impossible for English theorists to devise an unproblematic political definition of imperial dominion. Instead, they turned from politics to trade as a reason of state and, in the process, devised the field of political economy as a distinct realm of inquiry and analysis. This shift in the theoretical elaboration of empire turned attention away from thorny questions about the locus of political sovereignty, and at the same time “offered one resolution of the ancient dilemma of imperium and libertas” (169). He further contends that this conception of the British Empire was “originally provincial” (181), most clearly articulated and most ardently championed by colonial planters, imperial administrators, and Irish unionists in the eighteenth century. It was on the periphery that the idea of “the British Empire as a congeries of territories linked by their commerce, united with common interests and centred politically upon London” (181) was most compelling. Armitage dates the emergence of an understanding of the British Empire as “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free” (173) to the 1730s, coincident with and strengthened by the War of Jenkins’s Ear. He emphasizes that the actual character of the empire was both debatable and unstable; it gave way, in fact, to a more hierarchical and authoritarian form in the wake of the American war. But even as the character of the empire changed at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, this conception of the British Empire lived on and gained strength as a source of identity for Britons.

This is a persuasive and appealing formulation, one that does much to explain the widespread perception that Britain’s imperial experience was singular. Yet while Armitage relies on figures like Sir William Keith, a Scot and former deputy governor of Pennsylvania, to make the case that provincials “argued that only gentle treatment of the colonies by the metropolis” (177) would sustain the colonial relationship, other men of similar background took a harder line on the question of colonial autonomy. Timothy Shannon’s Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754(Ithaca, N.Y., 2000) identifies a loose circle of seasoned colonial administrators, some of provincial origin, who argued instead that the colonies needed to be drawn together under a “well-ordered dependency” (61) to solve the most pressing problems of imperial administration. His reading of James Abercromby, Henry McCulloh, William Shirley, Thomas Pownall, and two New Yorkers, Archibald Kennedy and Cadwallader Colden, suggests that Armitage’s claims, though persuasive, do not tell the whole story about the view of empire from the provinces.

All of these books provide extended meditations on the ambiguities of power. Empire itself is an endlessly variant term, always imprecisely invoked and vaguely understood. “‘Empire’ has become as much a metaphor as a description of a particular kind of society,” according to Pagden (xx-xxi). England struggled, as Armitage argues, with the problem of distinguishing between imperium, or sovereignty, and dominium, or property, in its American colonies. Muldoon notes that, paradoxically, though we typically think of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as the “golden age” of empire, in fact none of the great leaders of that era–not Charles V or Philip II, not Henry VIII or James II or George III–referred to themselves as emperors, and their dominions were almost never officially called empires. In part, their reticence derived from the fact that the creation of overseas empires occurred simultaneously with domestic processes of state formation. As monarchs worked to rationalize and centralize the constituent parts of their various kingdoms–to move from the era of “composite monarchies” to the era of centralized states–they could not simultaneously take on the inflated pretensions of an emperor, with all its connotations of universality and absolutism. “Empire” only became a useful term for legal theorists, according to Muldoon, when the weighty burden of its medieval associations fell away, especially the connotations of moral decay that had been so inextricably linked to empire building in the thought of earlier writers. If Armitage is correct, it became useful somewhat sooner as a looser popular concept, particularly given the paradoxical association, in British minds, of empire with liberty.

But Armitage is careful to remind us that, while the association of the British Empire with liberty was crucial ideologically, it was not necessarily an accurate description of its nature. Pagden offsets his discussion of empires of trade and liberty–a category to which he adds France and the Netherlands–with a chapter devoted to the extraordinary expansion of chattel slavery that accompanied their rise. The topic of slavery reminds us that we cannot take the claims of commercially oriented empires to moral superiority at face value. Eighteenth-century observers understood clearly, as historians have sometimes not, that, for an overseas commercial power like Britain, everything hinged on slavery. “‘No African Trade, no Negroes, no Negroes, no Sugar; no Sugar no Islands, no Islands no Continent, no Continent no Trade; that is to say farewell to your American Trade, your West Indian Trade,'” is how Daniel Defoe put it in 1713 (Pagden, 103). Nor can we accept a sharp distinction between commercial and territorial empires. British observers hoped that a commercial orientation might save their empires from the dangers of territorial entanglement–dangers that were as much moral as fiscal. Edmund Burke recognized the danger clearly. He indicted the East India Company as “‘one of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies that probably ever existed'” (Pagden, 96) and energetically pursued the prosecution of the corrupt governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings. For Burke, as Pagden writes, empire was not only, perhaps not even predominantly, an economic enterprise. “It was a sacred trust, ‘given by an incomprehensible dispensation of Divine providence into our hands'” (98). Burke recognized, but could not check, the corrosive forces at work at the heart of Britain’s empire and Europe’s civilizing mission.

For all their differences and ambiguities, empires have shared in common a will to power that should make us skeptical of their most optimistic self-assessments. From Alexander to the present day, builders of empire have professed their idealism and described their enterprises in altruistic terms. They aimed to glorify God by expanding the horizons of the known world, by spreading a gospel, by extending the benefits of commerce. Yet expansion and growth are intoxicants that undermine such claims. Pagden notes of Alexander, “More than that of any other would-be world ruler, his life became a tale of the elision of knowledge and understanding with power, of the merging of science and exploration with domination and settlement” (14). Alexander may epitomize the type, but he was surely not alone in this elision. At a much later date, European explorers fanned out across the Pacific in the interests of expanding the horizons of science. They sailed, as Pagden notes, in ships named “Discovery, Resolution, Adventure, and Endeavour; Géographie and Naturaliste; L’Astrolabe and La Boussole” (126). Soon enough, science itself “became a recognized source of power and a new terrain on which the European powers fought one another for preeminence” (127). And soon, too, science had generated a complex theory of racial hierarchy and the dangers of race mixing that gave the most exploitative and brutal imperial practices a veneer of justifiability and even respectability. For a time, racialist ideologies gave permission to the failures of empire; in the end, empire itself–at least the distinctive form of empire that arose in Europe during the nineteenth century and crashed suddenly to the ground in the mid-twentieth–foundered on their insupportability.

The books considered here do a great deal to explain how Europeans understood their imperial aims and enterprises. Each is rich with material I have not touched on. Each also misses important opportunities that merit further attention, two of which deserve a brief mention here. First, in their focus on legal and theoretical writings, these authors all, to some degree, explore the intellectual scaffolding of empires but give less attention to their informal dynamics, where their true natures are often most clearly revealed. One feels at times that they have found the patient’s skeleton but missed his beating heart. This should not be understood as a critique of these books, each of which succeeds marvelously on its own terms, so much as a suggestion that they be read in concert with a wider literature. Second, I found myself wishing at times for more explicit comparisons among various empires. Pagden’s book is the most comparative in spirit, and yet by focusing exclusively on the empires of the (so-called) West he misses a marvelous opportunity to introduce brief sketches of the Chinese, say, or Ottoman experience to a general readership. Similarly, early Americanists need much more systematic comparisons among the Spanish, English, Dutch, French, and Portuguese Empires in the Americas than are currently available in the literature. We cannot effectively evaluate the claims of eighteenth-century Britons to the distinctiveness of their empire, for example, without understanding it more clearly in terms that can be directly compared to other nations’ experiences. Imperialism, an old and venerable topic, lives and breathes still as a vital subject of historical inquiry and analysis.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

Eric Hinderaker teaches history at the University of Utah. He is the author of Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (New York, 1997), and is currently working on a project on the comparative colonization of the Americas.

Inspired by the advances in gender and women’s history, interest in the study of manhood has grown dramatically in the course of the last fifteen years. Scholars in a broad variety of fields have recognized that the construction of masculinities and femininities constitutes fundamental social and cultural processes. Caleb Crain’s stimulating American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation concentrates on one dimension of this process. Crain uses the diaries, letters, and essays written by three groups–a circle of young Philadelphians in the 1780s, Charles Brockden Brown and friends, and Ralph Emerson and the Transcendentalists–to understand how these men described, questioned, and mediated their friendship through writing, and what their words and acts can tell us about changing conceptions of manliness and acceptable manly behavior in the early republic.

In the late-eighteenth-century world “sympathy” denoted a cluster of feelings revolving around emotional closeness and empathy. In this regard sympathy appears to have had a more specific meaning than the more frequently used and now better known term “sensibility.” Crain establishes sympathy as a specific stage in the history of emotions: “At the height of sympathy’s reign, American men could express emotions to each other with a fervor and openness that could not have been detached from religious enthusiasm a generation earlier and would have to be consigned to sexual perversion a few generations later” (35). By no means paradoxically, the core of this book on compassion is framed by two executions: of John André, hanged as a British spy during the American Revolution, and of Billy Budd, the fictional sailor of Herman Melville’s last novel, hanged for instigating a mutiny at sea. André was the object of the American officers’ sympathy, not the least of the young Alexander Hamilton, whose account of André’s captivity and death was among sympathy’s earliest literary representations. Melville, in turn, described a maritime world in which one man’s feelings for another man could no longer be expressed openly.

Inevitably, questions over the character of these relationships quickly move into the foreground. Did the emotional bonds between men assume homoerotic or homosexual dimensions? Here American Sympathydeals with a historical topic that is notoriously difficult to recover and distorted by layers of presentist assumptions. Like previous scholars, such as Anthony Rotundo, Crain carefully and convincingly recreates a culture in which physical intimacy, such as sharing a bed and affection between men, did not translate into our understanding of sexual relations and homoeroticism. Ultimately, Crain considers “the question of did they or didn’t they somewhat irrelevant” (48). While some readers may consider this approach as a cop-out, Crain certainly takes into account what and how much can be said based on the available evidence. Instead, he concentrates on sympathy and its literary portrayals, “how a group of men in the United States wrote about what they felt for one another, and how in the process they created literature” (13).

Crain begins with three Philadelphians who embraced a new understanding of friendship, free of colonial patronage relations, mercantile self-interest, and the duties of marriage. The diaries they kept for each other’s perusal reveal a complex mixture of intimacy and sincerity as well as frequent emotional testing and manipulation. A little later, Charles Brockden Brown went further in letters to his friends that blended disguise, invention, and dissimulation to test their sympathy–but disclosed little about Brown.

At the same time as Brown concealed his true feelings, he also tried to establish a sincere and “sympathetic identification” with his friends (72). Brown had laid out the irreducible prerequisites for a “romantic friendship”: “Between friends there must exist a perfect and entire similarity of disposition . . . Soul must be knit unto Soul” (66-67). As Brown and his circle of correspondents worked through the choices and tensions facing young men choosing a career in the 1790s, his high hopes clashed with reality. Initially Brown was torn between pursuing professional success and his literary interests. Interacting with his friends contributed to the slow and often torturous process of recognizing his calling as an author. However, different occupational choices–and Brown’s refusal to make a respectable choice–tore apart the close bonds with some of his correspondents.

In contrast, Elihu Hubbard Smith, a New York physician, scientist, and editor, not only supported Brown’s literary aspirations, but forced him to be sincere rather than evasive and pretending. Smith’s encouragement–brought to an end by his death in 1798–forced Brown to turn to writing his first fully developed pieces of fiction to exercise his imagination, rather than to spring more tales on his friends. Brown’s characters confronted authenticity and deception, sincerity and artifice, and the limited possibilities of achieving a lasting sympathetic connection to another human being. While Crain nowhere suggests that some of the major themes of Brown’s fiction were merely an extension of his life, he makes it thoroughly clear that they cannot be dissociated from the life.

Crain invokes Tocqueville to describe the “democratic sympathy” of the 1830s. Without the feudal ties of Europe that commanded allegiance and support, Americans stood alone, and adopted a “general compassion” for the plight of others that encompassed their neighbors as much as strangers. “But because democrats felt sympathy so promiscuously, their emotions were spread thin” (149). Crain, still following Tocqueville, credits the influence of a democratic public sphere, the power and omnipresence of print and association, in transforming American sympathy. This is the most explicit connection Crain makes between social and cultural developments and his history of sympathy. Emerson epitomizes the new public intellectual and professional writer suited to understand the changes in the affective economy. “Like Tocqueville, Emerson recognized that modern men resembled each other more and more but affected each other less and less” (151).

Emerson turned to literature as the only legitimate and safe means to write about love between men in a culture that increasingly stigmatized the private as well as public expression of such feelings. For Emerson, writing became not just the expression of desire, but the relationship itself: “The cultural logic that granted literature this dispensation to express homosexual sentiments, not permissible elsewhere in public, would coincide with the attraction that his literary exception must have had for men who felt tabooed homosexual sentiments in private” (152). In contrast to the Philadelphia diarists as well as Brown and his friends, Emerson’s personal letters became a substitute for having an “original relationship” with another man: for him, writing carried “not just the weight of recording a relationship but the weight of being a relationship” (173).

Crain establishes this pattern in two chapters on Emerson’s torturous crush on another Harvard student and on his relations with members of the Transcendentalist circle. Despite Emerson’s published remarks in “Friendship” that advocated the search for a soulmate and did not appear to distinguish homosexual from heterosexual relationships, he was much more effusive when describing his affection for men. Ultimately, he preferred to keep both men and women at an emotional distance, and would have preferred to see the Transcendentalists forever suspended in a variety of platonic rather than monogamous physical relations.

As a historian, I am of two minds about American Sympathy. In trying to present the book’s argument, I have focused on what it can tell us about the history of male friendship and emotions in the early republic. Consequently, I have imposed a perhaps too great coherence on Crain’s narrative. And I have given more weight to Tocqueville’s position in this story than Crain would probably find acceptable, and downplayed his rich and sophisticated literary analysis and occasionally dazzling explication of detail. My version does not credit many of the book’s subplots and approaches, including the use of psychoanalytic concepts in the chapter on Brown’s fiction, or Crain’s turn to Socrates and Virgil on homosexual desire to investigate the genealogy of Emerson’s poetry. Similarly, the chapter on the sources of Emerson’s “Friendship” essay uses Margaret Fuller as a foil, and is as much about Fuller as Emerson, and also deals in some detail with the romantic connections between Emerson’s male and female friends. Crain’s treatment of Melville’s Billy Budd opens with Oscar Wilde, then turns to the novel’s reception history, before comparing it with its adaptation in Benjamin Britten’s opera. None of this is irrelevant and, taken together, adds layer upon layer to our understanding of these writers.

But what can Crain’s reading of these writers tell us about American emotional history in this period? Even though Crain invokes Tocqueville and presents Emerson as particularly attuned to larger currents, he is reluctant to draw connections between his subjects and American culture, or to look elsewhere for further support of his interpretation. And Crain suggests that he is studying a distinct cultural formation, beginning during the American Revolution and fading away in the middle of the nineteenth century; but he left me looking for a fuller explanation of the causes of the rise and fall of sympathy. As a work of literary biography and analysis American Sympathy is compelling. As a work of history it has to claim Emerson as its main defender: “there is properly no history; only biography” (152).

Further Reading: The best historical monograph on American masculinity remains E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993); more specifically see also Rotundo, “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in The Northern United States, 1800-1900,” Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 1-25, and Anya Jabour, “Male Friendship and Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and His Friends,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (2000): 83-111. For additional background on the study of the history of manhood see John Tosh’s influential “What Should Historians Do With Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History Workshop 38 (1994): 179-202, as well as Bryce Traister, “Academic Viagara: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies” American Quarterly 52 (2000): 274-304. For another example of the literary mediation of friendship see Lucia McMahon and Deborah Schriver, eds., To Read My Heart: The Journal of Rachel Van Dyke, 1810-1811 (Philadelphia, 2000). On similar literary communities see David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, 1997), and Catherine Kaplan’s forthcoming We, the Readers: Culture, Opposition, and Community in the New Nation. For an introduction to the history of emotions see Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States(New York, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

Albrecht Koschnik teaches early American history at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He is currently writing a book on young men, voluntary associations, and political culture in early republican Philadelphia, and most recently published “The Democratic Societies of Philadelphia and the Limits of the American Public Sphere, circa 1793-1795,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 57 (July 2001): 615-36.