Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s latest book addresses a more specific topic than the title Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America suggests. She examines English relations with Algonquian-speaking peoples in the first few decades of English settlement on the eastern seaboard of North America. Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth are the primary settings for her study, but she also brings in material from early Maryland and Connecticut. Since Kupperman has already published extensively on seventeenth-century English-Indian interactions, one might expect this book to be a synthesis of her earlier work. Instead, it offers a new interpretive framework for conceptualizing how Europeans came to know the Native people of the Americas.

Her argument is complex and subtle, by necessity, for Kupperman proposes that English responses to Indians were mixed. English commentators describing their experiences in the New World had an incentive to present Indians in the best possible light. The American environment had to be portrayed as healthful and productive to justify colonization, and so English writers depicted Native American people, the product of that environment, as intelligent, inventive, and moral beings. English colonists also saw in Native cultures attributes that reminded them of their own Saxon heritage as celebrated in Tacitus’s history of ancient Germans and Britons. Thus, the English could readily envision Native cultures as being both primitive and noble, just as they imagined their own ancestors to have been in the past. However, according to Kupperman, not all written accounts of Indians can be classified as representations buttressing up an English sense of self. Because the English were also curious about these new people and uncertain about how to get along with them, Indians appearing in English records should be considered more than just “mirror images” (the title of chapter 1) and as real people who influenced English actions and English perceptions of them.

Kupperman’s argument is so sensible, it is surprising in retrospect that no previous historian has ventured to make the same case. The scholarly enterprise, particularly the need to pursue a single-minded thesis, does not allow for much exploration of the contradictions and ambiguities that Kupperman shows were constant features of English-Indian relations. Kupperman establishes order amid the cacophony of discordant voices by approaching the problem thematically. In successive chapters on “Reading Indian Bodies,” political structures, religious practices, and economies, she persuasively contends that the English recognized the essential humanity of Indians and the complex social and cultural institutions that humanity entailed. The last two chapters, in the spirit of mixed and contradictory developments in English-Indian relations, deal with “Incorporating the Other” and “Resisting the Other.” Throughout the book, her examples are richly detailed and her collection of source material wide-ranging.

I have no criticisms of the book itself and recommend it for its thought-provoking reinterpretation of English colonists’ perceptions of Indians. I do, however, think the title of the book and the promotional blurb on the book jacket misrepresent the book’s achievements by implying that it fits within the expanding literature on Indian and European encounters as represented by Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (1991) and by the work of James Axtell, James Merrell, Daniel Richter, and so on. Phrases such as Indians & English, “All parties in these dramas were uncertain . . .”, and “Indians and English both believed . . .” suggest that the book intends to explicate how both Indians and Europeans perceived of each other and were changed by their evolving relationships. The book does give some inkling of what Indians must have been thinking about the English, particularly so in a thoroughly fascinating recounting of Pocahontas and her entourage on the fatal trip to England. And Kupperman also brings in insights and information derived from Indian oral traditions that have appeared in print in the writings of twentieth-century tribal historians. But there is no chapter called “Reading English Bodies” complementing the chapter on “Reading Indian Bodies,” just one of many indications that the book belongs more to the historiography on European images of Indians, such as in Robert F. Berkhofer Jr.’s The White Man’s Indian (1978).

Although Indian perspectives fall outside the book’s main purpose, it can still be asserted, as on the book jacket, that Kupperman “argues convincingly that we must see both Indians and English as active participants in this unfolding drama.” Indeed, the book’s claim that Indians were not passive but active agents in the making of history lies at the heart of Kupperman’s argument and constitutes Indians & English’s most significant contribution. English colonists were well aware of their Indian acquaintances’ power to shape and alter the course of events, and so Indians were active agents in that sense. Moreover, as Europeans developed images of American Indians, personal experiences intermingled with culturally engrained expectations to make for a constantly shifting conglomeration of ideas about who Indians were. Too often, scholars looking for the origins of stereotypes or images of Indians look only to the European past for the prototypes that were then applied to Indians. As Kupperman shows, early English ideas about Native Americans traveled a more twisted, tangled path.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Nancy Shoemaker is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut-Storrs.

As that scourge of academia, former National Endowment for the Humanities director Lynne Cheney, prepares to become Second Lady, it may be appropriate to reflect on the intense dislike that many Americans feel for the insouciant, disrespectful, debunking attitude that (they imagine) current academic historians take toward the men most of us learned in school to call the Founding Fathers. This was brought home by an e-mail that I received, out of the blue, from a web-surfing citizen who happened upon an archived post of mine on the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s discussion list. The post in question was part of a February 1999 thread on whether “Founders,” the less mythopoetic replacement for “Founding Fathers,” was still a useful concept. I actually defended the concept in my post, but made the mistake of agreeing with many of the critics’ premises. To this, the concerned citizen replied, “Regarding your take on ‘Founders’ as a concept, I don’t think I have to be a knuckle-dragging, slack-jawed, ultra-right/ultra-white social critic to say that you and your academic ilk have your heads squarely up your asses. Cut the crap and wake up.”

Most professional historians are justifiably proud of the historiographic revolution that has occurred since the 1960s, which has opened vast new fields of inquiry and allowed the vast majority of the American population to take their rightfully important place in the historical record. Yet out in the culture the new histories are often perceived, sometimes based on very little information, as a form of national character assassination, shocking in their disregard for the men and ideas that many Americans were raised to believe made the country great. Hence the slights to the Founders that Lynne Cheney and others detected in the National History Standards became a controversial issue and a talking point for those eager to break the alleged liberal stranglehold on the educational establishment. Indeed, especially since that controversy, conservatives have been working to take control of the Founders’ political legacy, on many fronts. One has been a string of pro-Founder books by nonhistorians, including polemics such as Thomas G. West’s Vindicating the Founders, monographs in political philosophy treating various Founders as brilliant “lawgivers” and farsighted statesmen, and popular biographies and appreciations such as the volumes on George Washington and Alexander Hamilton by National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser.

Coming in this context, William Safire’s novel Scandalmonger is a pleasant surprise. Though Safire is a conservative pundit, a former aide to President Richard Nixon, and recently a tireless promoter of the various Clinton administration scandals, he is not out to put the Founders back on their pedestals. Instead, Safire’s hero is one of the Founders’ most infamous detractors, the Scottish émigré journalist James Thomson Callender, whose publications were instrumental in launching many of the scandals that (as the New York Times might put it) have dogged the Founders ever since. Safire follows Callender sympathetically through all the events that have led a bipartisan coalition of historians (including defenders of both Jefferson and Hamilton) to savage the journalist over the years, with occasional time off as a martyr to freedom of the press. The novel is divided into four sets of scandals, though only two of the incidents described follow the usual definition of that word. “The Hamilton Scandals” imaginatively portrays Callender’s role in exposing what was then called the Reynolds affair, in which Alexander Hamilton claimed that an extramarital affair and blackmail explained his suspicious payments to James Reynolds, a man suspected of insider trading in government securities. “The Sedition Scandal” provides an overly melodramatic account of Callender’s and Matthew Lyon’s travails as victims of the Sedition Act. “The Jefferson Scandals” covers the acts that have earned Callender the nastiest epithets from historians, his turn against Thomas Jefferson and his subsequent origination of the public controversy over the president’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, among other moral failings. The final section, “The Libel Scandals,” deals with the persecutions suffered by Callender and Federalist editor Harry Croswell for their criticisms of Jefferson, and Callender’s allegedly suspicious death in Richmond.

The setting of Scandalmonger is the political demimonde where Callender worked, and while Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, and other bona fide Founders make substantial appearances, hack writers and politicians such as William Cobbett and first House of Representatives clerk John Beckley loom even larger. A more important character yet is Maria Reynolds, the femme fatale whose “slim waist and full bosom” (34) stoked the passions of Alexander Hamilton and (in Safire’s account) Aaron Burr and James T. Callender as well. Callender not only gets to be the protagonist of the novel, but also, in what is easily Safire’s most far-fetched invention, its romantic hero as well. Apparently the years of heavy drinking and malnutrition were good for Callender, who is described as “darkly handsome” (50) with a “hard body” (305), doubtless toned by the long hours sitting in chairs scribbling political essays. Representations of Reynolds’s décolletage and Callender’s surprisingly voluptuous lips decorate the book’s dust jacket.

Though Safire is a conservative pundit, a former aide to President Richard Nixon, and recently a tireless promoter of the various Clinton administration scandals, he is not out to put the Founders back on their pedestals.

As these details indicate, Safire’s general approach is much closer to the left-leaning historical novelist Gore Vidal than to other conservative writers on the Early Republic. Like Vidal’s Burr, Scandalmongerviews the period from the vantage point of a secondary figure maligned in most standard accounts, and strives to present the men and women of the period as full-, or even hot-, blooded human beings. Those keeping score at home will want to note that Safire and Vidal concur on Burr as the finest lover among the Founders, though in ScandalmongerHamilton gets what Safire apparently intends as his book’s steamiest love scenes. “Only when he was certain she was quite ready for him did he commit himself,” Safire’s Hamilton remembers, sounding as if he were gauging congressional support for one of his financial proposals. “She took him in with a long cry of unashamed delight, which pleasured him no end” (34). Move over, Jackie Collins.

Despite including these bodice-ripping romance novel elements, Safire is actually quite punctilious in distinguishing historical fact from invention. Perhaps remembering how journalists pilloried Oliver Stone for indiscriminately mixing staged and archival footage in JFK, Safire announces the fictionality of the Callender-Reynolds romance at the outset and then provides an elaborate “Underbook” noting the sources of many quotations and anecdotes and identifying invented conversations and incidents. Unlike many other writers of popular history and historical fiction, Safire clearly respects and has absorbed at least some of the recent historiography on his subject. He singles out two books by Michael Durey (a biography of Callender and a later monograph on transatlantic radicals) as major sources, and in truth, this novel would not have been possible to write without Durey’s work. Safire and his research assistants also made extensive use of various published primary sources, Callender’s and William Cobbett’s published writings, and at least one little-known manuscript item from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. This preparation allows Safire to deal honestly with some issues that tend not to show up in more Founder-centered accounts, such as the principled objections many Jeffersonian radicals had to the iconification of George Washington, and the role of class and wealth in structuring some of the political relationships and outcomes of the early party conflict. It is refreshing to find the Founders treated as working politicians and as members of the social and economic elite, rather than merely as statesmen with profounder thoughts than everyone else.

Truth in reviewing notice: the bibliography at the end of the “Underbook” includes a 1996 article on John Beckley by the present author. That piece seems to have influenced Safire’s characterization of Beckley and some other aspects of the book, so I may be somewhat biased in assessing his historiographical acumen. I would, however, disclaim any credit for a ludicrous, admittedly fictional early scene in which Beckley greets both Callender and Cobbett at the Philadelphia docks holding a “Clerk of the House” sign like a modern airport limousine driver (42).

One area where Safire seems to differ from the historiography concerns the motivations behind Callender’s activities. While contemporaries and historians have called him a traitorous hack, Michael Durey’s biography makes it clear that Callender was driven by ideology as much as money or revenge, though the latter factors were certainly present. One of the most uncompromising radicals among the Republican exile journalists of the 1790s and a man who suffered as much as any of them for his beliefs, Callender was also marked by his Scottish Calvinist background with a stern moralism and an extremely dark view of human nature. Conditioned to expect sin and compelled to expunge it, Durey’s Callender could not help lashing out against the hypocritical sexual culture he found in Virginia.

As the title of the novel indicates, Safire paints Callender as a figure much more congenial to the ideals of modern reporters and pundits. His considerably less grim Callender is primarily a driven newsman, whose overriding imperative is to find, tell, and sell good stories about the high and mighty. (His moral outrage is considerably restrained by the fact that Safire has him conducting an affair with Maria Reynolds at the time.) For Safire’s Callender, the insult “scandalmonger” is a badge of honor.

While the signs are less obvious than they might have been, the conclusion is hard to avoid that William Safire’s identification with James Thomson Callender, scandalmonger against President Jefferson, has something to do with his own role as a scandalmonger against President William Jefferson Clinton. This becomes particularly clear toward the end of the book, as Callender’s scandals fail to damage Jefferson politically. Safire has at least two characters (374, 393) wonder “how Jefferson had been able to maintain, through all these sordid revelations, his hold on the public sentiment.” In the same section of the book, Safire has Jefferson allies in Richmond facilitating Callender’s death, echoing the insinuations made about the suicide of Clinton aide Vincent Foster.

Interestingly, Safire does not follow the Monica Lewinsky era conservative jeremiads in moralizing on this theme, and indeed he mutes the whole moral element in Callender’s campaign against Jefferson. Instead, one of the stronger (and relatively few) justifications offered for scandalmongering is psychosexual in nature. One scene has Maria Reynolds pondering the reasons for her putative attraction to Callender. Normally he was not much sexually, “more like a son . . . than a lover.” Callender only became hot stuff when wielding his pen in a scandal, when he “found some inviting target in his sights, and became consumed with the need to bring down the reputation of the high and mighty.” Then “his passion transformed him, if just for a few hours, into the man of power she had come to dread,” and swoon over (326). The notion of muckraking journalism as an aphrodisiac seems like mere pundit wish fulfillment. More serious and revealing of the scandalmongering impulse is the suggestion that bringing down a reputation suffuses the journalist, normally a weak and passive observer, with a gratifying, quasi-sexual sense of power.

Finally, it must be admitted that, while similar to Gore Vidal’s Burr in some respects, Scandalmonger does not come close to Burr as a novel. Safire does better as a historian than he does as a writer of imaginative fiction. For instance, a great deal of historical background information is presented in a reasonably accurate but often comically awkward fashion, as the thoughts or dialogue of characters. The effect is not unlike characters in old musicals who suddenly break into song while walking down the street or brushing their teeth, except that Safire’s characters break into . . . exposition. Often their words and thoughts are tinged with prophecy as well, showing a remarkable knowledge of how historians centuries hence would explain (and name) the events they were living through.

On the way to his first assignation with Maria Reynolds, Alexander Hamilton puts a bank bill in his pocket and begins to “envision the day when banknotes would be issued throughout the nation by the United States Bank, backed by the full faith and credit of the Federal government, and not . . . by local banks that were all too often on the brink of insolvency.” He then spends the next few blocks recalling congressional passage of the bank bill, his debate with Jefferson and Madison over enumerated versus implied constitutional powers, and the fact that Washington had signed the bill “and, perhaps without fully realizing the strength he was gathering to the Executive, laid the foundation for financing a continental empire.” When he reaches the Reynolds home, Maria’s seductive small talk begins with a question about Hamilton’s use of pseudonyms in the press (33-34).

Even more ham-fisted is a moment much later in the book when James Monroe stops to ponder “the growing spiritual movement that called itself ‘the second Great Awakening,'” an historians’ term that almost certainly never passed the lips of any early nineteenth century political figure. “This was a surge of religious enthusiasm among the more Calvinistic of the Congregationalists, along with the ‘gospel’ Methodists and Baptists,” Monroe explains to himself, before making “a mental note to urge Jefferson to begin to be seen attending church regularly in Washington” (348), apparently for the benefit of the television cameras. In a similar vein, characters mention the “code duello” by name, explain, and re-explain it in such literal terms as to suggest that dueling was required by statute rather than growing from a set of customs (81, 90, 362, 367, 378-79, 385).

William Safire has made a noble effort to present a less pious and better-rounded view of the Founders and their politics than many conservatives prefer, but his book is trapped uncomfortably in a limbo between history and fiction that, stylistically at any rate, renders it less than effective as either.

Further Reading:

For conservative defenses and appreciations of the Founders, see, among others: Thomas G. West,Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham, Md., 1997); C. Bradley Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (Lawrence, Kans., 1999); Gary Rosen, American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding (Lawrence, Kans., 1999); Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government (Lawrence, Kans., 1999); Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (New York, 1996); Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton, American (New York, 1999). Somewhere in this category one would have to put former secretary of education William J. Bennett’s weird book of advice from the Founders (including some for the lovelorn),Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice from the Founders in Stories, Letters, Poems, and Speeches(New York, 1997).

The following works listed in Safire’s “Underbook” are mentioned above: Michael Durey, “With the Hammer of Truth”: James Thomson Callender and America’s Early National Heroes (Charlottesville, Va., 1990); Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence, Kans., 1997); and Jeffrey L. Pasley, “‘A Journeyman, Either in Law or Politics’: John Beckley and the Social Origins of Political Campaigning,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996): 531-69.

On William Safire’s role in creating and sustaining the Clinton scandals, see Gene Lyons, Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (New York, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Jeffrey L. Pasley is assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of “The Tyranny of Printers:” Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, which will be published by University Press of Virginia in spring 2001.

“License my roving hands, and let them go / Behind, before, above, between, below / O my America! my new-found-land / My kingdom, safeliest when with one man man’d.” So wrote John Donne, poet, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and onetime Gentleman Adventurer. In 1596, Jack, as the young bachelor reputed for his womanizing was known to many, joined the naval expedition led by his friends Walter Raleigh and Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, against the Spanish naval stronghold of Cadiz. The following year he joined an expedition to the Azores, still thirsty for the exotic. For Rebecca Blevins Faery, author of Cartographies of Desire, these foreign exploits are as essential to Donne’s poetry as his faith and his lusts. The deft metaphorical allusions in “Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” reproduced above, are indicative of his tendency to marry his explorer dreams to his erotic fantasies. Allying images of untouched womanhood and the unconquered New World in a poetics informed by his own experiences of the exotic, Donne, Faery argues, became a characteristic exponent of a particular strand of Anglo-American cultural discourse that has remained persistent and problematic. Donne was among the first in an unbroken chain of poets, politicians, dramatists, novelists and, Faery would have it, cartoonists, who have linked conceptions of land with ideas of gender.

These sexualized conceits have emerged, Faery asserts, in two distinct forms, the ‘Indian princess’ and the ‘white female captive,’ each of which has been deployed by white male elites seeking to impose their authority on the land. For instance, the legend of Pocahontas, the most prominent example of the ‘Indian princess’ conceit is, Faery contends, the product of an Anglo-American process of reduction and idealization designed to create and maintain gender and racial hierarchies. Pocahontas, like other unspoiled natives, is rescued and smitten, protected and civilized by the virile representative of the colonial father state. As such, the Pocahontas figure has come to symbolize, like Donne’s poetic incarnation, a female America “who is virginal, seductive, open and receptive to English settlement” (128). Comforting with the notion that these ‘wild’ creatures could be tamed, such portrayals bolstered the pride and confidence of Anglo-Americans as they haltingly advanced across the continent. Indeed, Faery asserts, these representations were the only means by which Anglo-American society could countenance the occasional penetration of their society by those so apparently different from themselves. Women like Pocahontas essentially became, like Pygmalion, characters eventually submissive to certain English manners and mores, made devoid of all cultural threat by their nearly complete assimilation into dominant, white society.

But it was not only Native American women who found themselves confronted with possible acculturation and absorption in the contact zones of the New World. White women wrestled with similar paradigm shifts in consequence of their encounters with Native Americans, none more so than Mary Rowlandson, the most famous of the several hundred women captured in the course of the colonial period by raiding Indians. Taken for ransom, or as contemporary white men feared, for food and sexual satisfaction, the stories of these white women captives have been fashioned over the years in such a way that they have come to represent the defensibility of Anglo-American culture from nonwhite encroachments. It was vital for “the project of white colonization and nation building” (190) that white women captives maintain their chastity in the face of their captors and that nonwhite women offer themselves willingly and unreservedly to the advances of their white conquerors. Ultimately, Faery argues, the constancy of white female virtue came to symbolize the impervious surety of white-occupied land and white society.

These two groups of women, native and colonial, while racially and socially dissimilar found themselves in the same cultural antipodes. Piercing layers of ideology that have served to highlight the involuntary captivity of white women while obscuring the essential captivity of many Indian women, Pocahontas included, Faery’s agenda emphasizes the common experience of captives. In recovering these commonalities, Faery’s argument necessarily deconstructs and complicates the myths that have veiled them. For instance, Faery expertly reconstructs the tensions in Rowlandson’s famous narrative of her hostage experience in order to demonstrate that far from being simply a pietistic piece of Puritan redemptive writing, Rowlandson’s narration contains a ‘colloquial’ undercurrent, a voice deeply sympathetic toward Indian culture and even, on occasion, toward her captors. Furthermore, Faery exposes the ways that even the more familiar story of Pocahontas, the young Indian girl who falls in love with the dashing English sea captain, has been drastically perverted. In the story’s most dramatic moment, replayed countless times in literature and lore, Pocahontas lays her own head in the path of the executioner to save her beloved Englishman from certain demise. Yet even in this central anchoring tableau, things may not be as they appear. Recalling the ethnographic detective work that surrounded Captain Cook’s death in the Pacific Islands, Faery contends that perhaps Smith, from whose account this scene derives, misunderstood the will of the Powhatans. Rather than a surprise execution, “Smith, all unawares, was perhaps being adopted into the Powhatan tribe, with Pocahontas as his sponsor” (115). In a position of ritual submission, Smith was in fact the inductee in an elaborate hospitality ritual.

Faery’s arguments expose the patrolling of cultural boundaries manifest in the romanticized retelling and buttressing of these stories. Like Mary Rowlandson’s Puritan preface-writers, subsequent authorities have deployed her narrative and hundreds like it with the intention that they be read in a way that removes all evidence of acquiescence and acculturation and that emphasizes resistance and constancy so that the white woman may be neatly returned to (or redeemed by) her white family and friends upon her release. In contrast, the myth of the Indian princess does just the opposite; the violence and deprivation inherent in removal from one’s native culture are obscured in favor of notions of liberation from depravity and subsequent assimilation. Indeed, in one fascinating demonstration Faery reveals that, in illustrations, the physical figure of Pocahontas grew visibly whiter as her legend became, like her supposed person, increasingly assimilated, or as Faery asserts, increasingly captive.

Uncovering this mythmaking process is only part of her agenda, however; Faery also chronicles the rescue of these women from their legends. She reveals the ways in which modern Native women writers, among others, have questioned and in some instances undermined the messages of dominant white male culture and revivified the voices of these otherwise spoken-for women. In one instance, Faery quotes at length the poetry of Paula Gunn Allen and the critical insights of Toni Morrison and bell hooks to help debunk and discredit the distortions epitomized in Disney’s 1995 film Pocahontas.

While her use of African American critical theory to eliminate these distortions is effective, in her passages concerning racial ideologies Faery demonstrates a tendency to homogenize white perceptions of Indians and Africans in order to advance her thesis. Citing similarly eccentric schemes for the large-scale deportation of Native and African Americans to sustain an argument of common racialized treatment by whites, Faery neglects the wealth of evidence assembled by numerous historians including Winthrop Jordan and Betty Wood that exposes the subtle but vital differences in the ways Anglo-Americans conceived of these two very different racial groups. These elisions are merely unsteadying, however; more damaging to the success of her book is the narrow extent of Faery’s historical vision. Her agenda, while faithfully followed, is unable to substantively connect either with the wider historiography or current issues in white-Native American relations. Her argument is repetitive and the result is a book lacking in historicity. Faery’s attempts to track the changing fortunes of the two intertwining myths of ‘Indian princess’ and ‘white female captive,’ before the recent attacks upon them, seem halfhearted; her historical coverage is intermittent, seemingly random, and her statements sometimes sweeping. Moreover, while demonstrating a wide reading, she is at times overly reliant on the work of other scholars to form the building blocks of her argument.

Each of Faery’s three substantial chapters is bookended by the kind of personal vignettes that are increasingly de rigeur in cultural history writing. Luckily, Faery writes with a confident flourish that focuses rather than distracts the reader. Bringing to life and to bear episodes of discovery and meditation from her travels in Massachusetts, Virginia, deep rural Iowa, and the Thames Estuary (Pocahontas was buried in Gravesend having reluctantly disembarked from a ship sailing home to the Chesapeake on health grounds), Faery establishes an amiable yet cutting authorial voice, never more effective than when describing the bizarre spectacle of a ‘world premiere’ of Disney’s Pocahontas replete with bunting and church choir in a nearly deserted Iowa town.

Although the ultimate success of this book is marred by the essential limitations of its argument and the occasional inadequacy of its proofs, Cartographies of Desire is an important and engaging contribution to cultural history and to Atlantic studies. The reader cannot escape the sense that, whatever its shortcomings, Faery’s work hits close to the mark as a persuasive piece of historical writing that weaves history and criticism together into a convincing thread. In these ways, like Donne’s female America, it is virgin territory eloquently mastered.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Richard J. Bell is a graduate student in history at Harvard University and author of a forthcoming article in The Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 2000.

In The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863), a painting by the American artist Elihu Vedder, a man in a desolate desert landscape kneels before the giant stone head of a sphinx, pressing his ear to the ancient stony lips. The modern Questioner still asks, but Vedder’s sphinx is blank and silent. For Leigh Eric Schmidt, in his fascinating new book, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, Vedder’s stark vision of spiritual alienation is emblematic of “the oracular silences that had descended upon some modern listeners” (130). Enlightenment science and modern rationality re-tuned the ear, nullifying what were once considered to be the voices of oracles, angels, or God as trickery or madness. But that is only half of the story, for even in today’s secular America millions still claim to hear divine voices and supernatural sounds. Schmidt’s book traces the complex relationship of these two historical processes: how modern science disciplined aural perception, and how popular spiritual practices that place a premium on spiritual “hearing” persisted nonetheless.

This is a work of impressive research, sparkling intelligence, and grand sweep. The publisher will surely be able to find a reader who will call it “a brilliant tour de force” for the dust jacket blurb. In a philosophical prolegomenon, Schmidt examines twin interpretive narratives that, he argues, have obscured the study of modern hearing. The first contends that the modern obsession with vision, optics, and literacy displaced traditional aural and oral cultures. The second mourns the loss of divine presence in the secular disenchantment of the world. Schmidt tells a more complicated and interesting story. His second chapter, “Sound Christians,” focuses mostly on noisy eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicals, and describes how they practiced a religion of the ear. Converts’ spirits were stirred by impassioned preaching and hymn singing, and moved by holy laughter and ecstatic barking at revival meetings; some claimed to hear mysterious voices in otherwise empty rooms or angelic choirs at their deathbeds; still others tried to describe their new spiritual perceptions as in some ways analogous to listening. (Elsewhere in the book, Schmidt unfortunately collapses these experiences into the single category of pre-modern “hearing.”)

The freshest and most engaging material in Hearing Things, however, comes in chapters 3 and 4, “Oracles of Reason” and “How to Become a Ventriloquist,” which together account for nearly half of the book. The developing science of acoustics allowed Enlightenment philosophes and the Christian literati to explain how ancient priests could have made their idols speak to dupe the credulous. Figuring out the ventriloquist’s tricks also helped the learned demystify mysterious sounds. Speaking tubes and “talking” statues not only led to new forms of entertainment that would be exploited by showmen like P. T. Barnum, but provided a technology that supported the disciplined senses of Common Sense epistemology (once we learn how the eye and ear can be tricked, we won’t be tricked again). Techniques that could duplicate what were once taken to be religious marvels also supported the Enlightenment’s natural history of religion, which swept away a world of wonders as merely devious priestcraft and the delusions of the uneducated. Schmidt moves from Renaissance magic to experiments in acoustics to Thomas Edison, and from treatises on witchcraft to Charles Brockden Brown’s novels to alienists diagnosing hallucination in their new insane asylums. After this virtuoso performance, Schmidt’s last chapter, “Voices from Spirit-Land,” is a bit of a disappointment. He spends too much time paddling around in what he admits is the “small pond” of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and then hurries to a conclusion (228).

Schmidt’s preface tells us that the book is not “a nostalgic retrieval of a soundscape supposedly lost to modernity” (vii). He denies that his own “thinking about the presences in voices” is grounded in metaphysical or theological presuppositions, and tries to dragoon French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty into philosophical service (33). But the author’s sympathies are evident throughout. He repeatedly describes the Enlightenment pursuit of reason and knowledge as “dreams” and “fantasies.” Debunkers of religious claims offer chimerical explanations and they perform “interpretative sleight-of-hand,” whereas their pious opponents are “especially perceptive” (116, 152). In Schmidt’s view of Enlightenment science, there seems little room for awe and joy in learning about the wonders of nature; it is all about containment, mastery, and the will to technological power. The romantic art that tried to replace religious faith is inevitably hollow (modern statues, after all, don’t cry, bleed, heal, or talk). Moderns like Elihu Vedder are alienated, lost; their landscape is silent, the meaning of life is diminished. Schmidt’s evangelicals and mystics, however, seem to open up rich new worlds of possibility. The prayers of a man convinced that he saw John the Baptist driving a chariot are called “poignant,” while his physician’s insistence that this was a hallucination is said to be driven by an obsession with policing religious experience (197-98). Schmidt’s believers are neither scary nor silly: they aren’t the ones who heard voices telling them to slit their own or someone else’s throat, or who merely heard spooks that went bump in the night.

Early in the book, Schmidt says that he will forgo the popular sport of Enlightenment bashing. It’s true–we don’t hear the buzz saw of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famous critique, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). But one can catch the faint tinkling of New Age religious sentimentality as the author describes the silence created by the Enlightenment sensorium. As Schmidt gently mocks the philosophes and debunks the debunkers, one can detect the tone of an intellectualized neo-spiritualism that claims a wisdom more capacious than modern common sense or postmodern skepticism. He is more suspicious of modern rationality than of those who claim to hear voices from their god’s stony lips. Readers who don’t always put the word “superstition” in quotation marks, or who think that a mental patient’s auditory hallucinations might have more to do with bad brain chemicals than with God or bourgeois social constructs, might not agree. Still, the history in Hearing Things is well worth listening to.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Christopher Grasso teaches in the History Department at the College of William and Mary, and is currently Acting Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly.

I had been working on Trials of Intimacy, my study of the Beecher-Tilton Scandal of 1874-75, for several years when I hit a brick wall. My research had persuaded me that there was no way to know whether Henry Ward Beecher had indeed, as his former best friend and disciple Theodore Tilton charged, committed adultery with Tilton’s wife, Elizabeth. The documents were too spotty and ambiguous. The trial transcript of 1875 contained credible testimony on both sides. The “preponderance of the evidence” in this civil case did not point one way or the other. Yet I had gone into the project determined to resolve the adultery question: to know what had really gone on between Beecher and Mrs. Tilton, both of whom had acknowledged their fondness for one another, but heatedly denied that sexual intimacy had taken place. (Mrs. Tilton changed her story in 1878 and said the adultery had occurred, but there was ample reason to distrust her new claim–as well as her old one.)

For a while I wondered if I should simply bow out with an article about the impossibility of writing “historically” about the scandal. Then one day it dawned on me. My implicit definition of “history” was too narrow. I might not be able to look back on the Beecher-Tilton Scandal and tell the story of what had happened, but I could look back at the stories each of the principals had told about what had happened. Those stories had a great deal to say about the multiple cultures–religious, secular, northern, middle-class–that these people inhabited. In this instance the stories told were not simply raw material from which the facts were to be extracted; they were the facts.

The realization that my history would be the story of these stories did not mean I had to give up on objectivity. It meant I could reaffirm the goal of objectivity by rejecting the practice of earlier historians who had written about the scandal and forced the documents to deliver a yes-or-no verdict on the adultery question. In this case, I believed, objectivity meant refusing to come to a conclusion about what had “really happened.”

That insight was a relief on the one hand, but a cause of further perplexity on the other. I now had to find a strategy for conveying an array of conflicting stories, and for continuously alerting the reader to the indeterminacy of my narrative. I needed a form that would let me keep saying to the reader, in effect, “Please don’t expect a single true story of these events. There is none.”

Several more years passed before I settled on my form: a reversal of chronology. I would start with the principals’ deaths and the last accounts other people gave of them. Next I would treat the final stories they told about themselves and each other in the postscandal years, followed by the narratives of the scandal era itself. After that I would take up the period in which they tried to cover up whatever it was that had happened among them. Finally I would tell the stories of the prescandal period, when Beecher and the Tiltons were plainly in love (each of the three was avowedly in some kind of love with the other two). The resulting treatment wasn’t completely backwards, but a hybrid of backward and forward motion. The main blocks of time were taken up in reverse order, but within each time block the motion was forward as much as backwards.

In telling the story backwards, I was working toward several goals at once. First, the form of the book would keep reminding the reader about the multiplicity of the stories. Knowing my own default position about history-writing–that the historian’s job is to come up with “the” story of what occurred–I wanted to make it hard for other people to revert to that expectation.

Second, the reverse order would let me highlight Beecher’s and the Tiltons’ actual experience of looking backwards. Each of them spent many agonizing moments thinking about the past, pondering the tragic tangle that had undone them, arriving at the kind of retrospective self-knowledge that Olive Chancellor reached in The Bostonians.“These hours of backward clearness,” James wrote (in chapter 39), “come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.”

One of my primary aims throughout the book was to recount the lives of Beecher and Tilton as they had actually lived them, an aim that I knew was impossible to realize fully, but believed was possible in part. For them, looking backwards was as basic to lived experience as looking forward.

In addition, going in reverse would allow me to put the surviving scandal documents at the dramatic core of the book. The events of the prescandal years–the period of Beecher’s and the Tiltons’ acknowledged love–are known to us largely because of documents produced during the scandal. Treating the 1870s before the 1860s highlighted the fragility of our knowledge of their lives in the 1860s: it is derived from the self-interested letters, memos, and testimony produced during the mudslinging of the 1870s.

Finally, the backward strategy would enable me to work my way up to what was for me the most significant part of the narrative: the passionate loving of the 1860s. For me that was the most significant part of the story historically as well as dramatically. Historically because it illuminated the midcentury romanticization of liberal Protestant and middle-class northern culture (a romanticizing that had been discredited by the late 1870s, partly because of the Beecher-Tilton Scandal). Dramatically because it made the early relations of Beecher and the Tiltons–when they gave a trial run to a new kind of intimacy–all the more poignant. Encountering the principals’ romantic effusions of the 1860s at the end of the narrative, readers could re-experience them as pregnant with the disasters to come.

I am not a missionary for backward chronology. I knew it would pose difficulties for the reader. Reviewers and readers seem to be about evenly split about whether the strategy “worked.” Publishers were, too: an editor at a trade house was very interested initially but told me they couldn’t do the book unless I turned the chapters around. “Readers like their history straight,” she said. My next project, a cultural history of Jesus in America, moves chronologically in the main, with some movement across time.

Still, I do think other writers may want to consider a strategy similar to the one I adopted in Trials of Intimacy. There are three situations in which some kind of reverse chronological order may be especially useful. One is biography, or any kind of cultural or intellectual history in which a person’s or a group’s developing consciousness is at the center of the story. When the events of the history are events of consciousness, “hours of backward clearness” come into play and may be best rendered through some kind of backward motion.

Backward narration may also be well suited to histories in which the documentary evidence itself needs to become part of the narrative. Here the consciousness of the historian comes prominently into play, not in the sense that the story is about him or her, but in the sense that his or her (and implicitly the readers’ own) deliberations about the evidence are essential to understanding the facts. Here the process of deciding what the facts really are is made central to the story.

Reversing the chronology might also be an apt strategy when a historian is tracing the development of a tradition of interpretation. When the next Merrill D. Peterson traces the postmortem reputation of a Jefferson or Lincoln, or a Jane Addams or W. E. B. Du Bois or any other continuously influential person, I hope he or she considers starting with the present and moving backwards. The present in which the historian writes contains the inheritance of all of the earlier viewpoints, however mangled, tangled, or apparently forgotten they may be. Working back through this dense fabric of interpretation can emphasize the ways in which our own vantage point has been constructed out of earlier strands. Taking this reverse motion into the years of the subject’s own life can deliver readers to the knowledge that the life was subject to interpretation even as it was being lived.

Writing a book in reverse chronological order does put demands on one’s readers. But it does not put them in a straitjacket. As one recent reviewer of Trials of Intimacy informed me, she read the book backwards.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Common-place asks Richard Wightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, whether he thinks the largely backward-moving narrative he uses in his recent book, Trials of Intimacy, is a strategy other historians might want to try.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly, achieved national prominence in its own day and remains a national icon today. When it first appeared as a serial in 1851-52 in the weekly Washington National Era, Stowe’s tear-jerking tale of the hardships of slavery roused the nation. Published as a book in March of 1852, the novel sold 10,000 copies within a week and 300,000 copies before the year was out. It would become the best selling American novel of the decade, garnering unprecedented sales both at home and abroad. As the nation divided, so did Stowe’s readers. By the time the Civil War broke out, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had come to play such an important role in the national debate over slavery that when Lincoln met Stowe he is rumored to have remarked, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”

A rich resource for anyone interested in [Uncle Tom’s Cabin] and its context.

But that was just the beginning. Before, during, and long after the Civil War ended, Uncle Tom’s Cabin also inspired all kinds of popular entertainment, from ballads and minstrel acts to nursery rhymes and card games. And, with its vivid pictorial qualities and astonishing effect on readers, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was almost immediately adapted to the American stage and remained a fixture in the repertoire of popular drama into the twentieth century, inspiring no fewer than ten films between 1903 and 1927.

Introductions to well-thumbed modern editions of Stowe’s text used in high school and college classrooms across the country almost never fail to quote Lincoln’s reaction to Stowe. Less well known is the popular response to the author and her most famous novel. But both are explored at an exciting new Website, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive”. Developed and directed by Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture” is a rich resource for anyone interested in the novel and its context.

Far reaching in its range, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture” amasses a rich archive of textual material in print, sheet music, song, illustration, and film, allowing viewers to encounter the many faces of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The easily navigable Website organizes its archive into four parts, running chronologically from pre-publication to response. Part One, “Pre-Texts, 1830-1852,” excerpts and reproduces the kind of religious, sentimental, and popular texts that set the stage for Stowe’s writing. For Part Two, “Stowe’s Uncle Toms,” the site wisely adopts a bibliographical approach, presenting mostly nineteenth-century editions of the novel, replete with illustrations, and accessible via a variety of browsable options. This part of the site even offers editions of the work in Yiddish and Swedish, a fascinating experience for someone curious to see the way this overwrought, overdetermined American text looks and reads in a distinctly foreign language and setting (these two foreign editions actually whet the appetite for more). Next, Part Three, “Responses, 1852-1930,” assembles a wide-ranging assortment of reviews organized into categories as general, pro-slavery, and African American. Finally, in Part Four, “Other Media,” Railton has devoted a considerable portion of the site to collecting multimedia representations of this often -reproduced text. Here, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture” uses the visual and audio capacities of the Internet as effectively as it does the archival. A section on films presents clips of nearly half the silent versions of the novel made between 1903-27; on stage productions, general information about dramatic adaptations of the novel and illustrations of leading players; and on songs, sheet music and audio clips of their performance. There is even a collection of “Uncle Tomitudes,” replicas of the novel’s characters and settings in card games, dolls, objects of art, porcelain, and other miscellanies appropriated by a quickly commercializing society. Links help viewers to connect the work to related contextual settings: minstrelsy, domestic sentimentalism, death of children, and slavery.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture” could emerge only from a sustained collaborative effort, as good sites must. Railton lists in his credits a string of scholars, colleagues, performing artists, technical support staff, and sponsoring institutions equal in length to that of a full-length Hollywood film. Like a well-placed director overseeing the finest talent in the profession, he has made excellent use of his situation at the University of Virginia, an institution with a history of excellence in print-based textual scholarship that has now become a pioneer in the creation of electronic texts. He brings the resources of its Electronic Texts Center, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and special collections at Alderman Library into support of the site, backed as well by those of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford. With all this professional and institutional help, Railton has orchestrated a textual site that minimizes the usual weaknesses of the Web–sloppy writing, superficial content, nonfunctional links, and technical inoperability–and maximizes its strengths–archival depth and breadth, visual and audio enhancement, and fluid navigability. The result is a pedagogical Website that positions its everyday readers to place the novel in a rich, deep context, a context that, in earlier times, would have taken a professional scholar considerable time, effort, and expense to reconstruct.

Railton and his collaborators have worked hard to maximize this site’s usefulness, and they have succeeded admirably. They have given its viewers more Uncle Tom’s Cabin-related materials than they could amass from even the finest library and museum together–and have positioned it, of course, right at their fingertips. For scholars, librarians, and students alike, it provides easy access to a rich cross-cultural slice of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americana. Renderings of the past–as text, song, illustration, and film–are nearly instantaneously available. But it is not simply that the site allows viewers to recover versions of the past; it also positions them to explore, interpret, and analyze the past, at least in part, on their own terms.

All of which is to say, this is no ordinary academic Website. I think of it, rather, as a model of what a multimedia humanities site can and should be. To that end, Railton has chosen a perfect subject. Uncle Tom’s Cabin holds a special place not only in our cultural history, consciousness, and language but also in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media. Nothing could be more fitting a tribute to that status than “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture”–the latest cultural production of a text that was born to remarkable media exposure and that for a century and a half has occupied one of the most significant and interesting points of intersection in our history between media and culture.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Ezra Greenspan teaches English at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher.

It’s an autumn night in Philadelphia in 1747, and I’m standing in a room lit with candles, waiting for Benjamin Franklin. There is a table in the middle of the room, and on the table stands an empty wine glass. This is Franklin’s workshop; its shelves are heaped with junk: quires of paper, rags, hammers, tongs, bottles, wires, books, old shoes, rolls of leather, bones, feathers.

Franklin enters with a book in his hand. He squints. He has lost his glasses and the light is dim. He waves his book at me, steps up to the table, and places the volume flat, on top of the wine glass.

The book is Cicero’s Cato Major, or De Senectute, bound in calfskin. It is Franklin’s aim to electrify the Cato or, rather, to electrify the gilt design on its cover. Franklin has tooled the design himself: a rectangle within a rectangle within a rectangle of gold, the inner and the middle joined at the corners with floral rolls (fig. 1). Some variation of this simple design is used across the British colonies, whenever books are gilt, which is rarely.

“Gold is like silver,” says Franklin, “a fine conductor of the electrical fire.”

“And is that,” I ask, “why all the covers of the ledgers and account books in Philly are decorated with gold?–so bankers and merchants can perform electrical experiments?”

“No,” he answers. “Pay attention.”

As a printer, Franklin knows a lot about bookbinding. Recently, he has turned his binder’s press to electrical purposes, using it as a vice for melting strips of gold or silver pressed tightly between plates of glass (223). The electrical and chemical properties of silver and gold are of considerable interest to Franklin and his colleagues in England: Peter Collinson, John Fothergill, and Matthew Boulton. In the 1760s Fothergill and Boulton (of steam-engine fame) will open a furniture gilding, or “ormolu,” shop in Birmingham and, on off-hours, share the secrets of gold amalgams with the Lunar Society, a club of British scientists and manufacturers such as Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood–and, on occasion, Franklin himself. But there’s not much gold in North America. In Pennsylvania, you can see it occasionally on the bindings of books: sermons, Masonic lore, Ciceronian favorites like the Cato, or, most often, on blank account or ledger books–a kind of bestseller in the American business.

“Even now,” I inform Franklin, “down at OfficeMax, the account books and appointment books are gilt with lines of fake gold.”

“Hmm,” grunts Franklin. “Gold supports the money system.”

“I don’t think that’s true anymore,” I tell him.

“Oh. Well. Paper is my preferred medium, anyway–in all matters. But look: I will transform the King of Metals into a medium of electrical conduction.”

Franklin scrounges a wire from his shelves. Holding it up to the candlelight, he bends it into the shape of a long, cursive M. He presses one end of the M around the edge of the book, so that it crosses the gilt like a paper clip. The other end curves awkwardly up into the air (fig. 2). He reaches for his “phial”: a Leyden jar, a device for creating an electrical charge. He positions the Leyden jar carefully on the other end of the book, snuffs out the candles, and leans over his arrangement. In the darkness, Franklin lifts a stick of wax about the size of his index finger, and uses it to push the elevated end of the wire M slowly over towards the mouth of the Leyden jar, from which another wire obtrudes . . . The two wires touch, and ZAP!

“Instantly there is a strong spark and stroke, and the whole line of gold, which completes the communication, between the top and bottom of the bottle, [appears] a vivid flame, like the sharpest lightning” (186).

Wow. You knew he killed turkeys and chickens with jolts of sharpest lightening; but you’d never heard of his electric books.

“Sometimes, in the dark,” Franklin says, “we electrify a book that has a double line of gold round upon the covers, and then apply a knuckle to the gilding; the fire appears every where upon the gold like a flash of lightning; but not upon the leather, nor, if you touch the leather instead of the gold. Neither calfskin, nor goatskin, nor softest buckskin will glow like the King of Metals” (177).

“This matter of electricity,” he continues, “is an extreme subtle fluid, a kind of aether that penetrates all bodies equally, and subsists in them diffused. Whenever it is unevenly distributed–collected in one place, or evacuated from another–it creates a positive versus a negative charge: plus (+) or minus (-). Whenever there is a greater proportion of this fluid in one body than another the body which has the most will communicate to that which has the least, till the proportion becomes equal. Thus, if its communication with the common stock (in the floor or table, or walls) is cut off, you may circulate it; you may also accumulate or subtract it, upon, or from any body . . . (175-76). But let me demonstrate, this time without the gold.”

He goes to the shelf to find more books and pulls out Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, in two volumes. He sets out a second wine glass and, then, carefully balances one volume flat upon each.

I decide to ask a scientific question: “But these bindings are made of animal skin. How do you know that such bodies will conduct the lightning?”

“Because the electrical flow is simply invisible in denser bodies, such as these gilt-less books. In fact, my dear, any body can be charged, or discharged by the subtle flying fluid. As in the electrical kiss.” Franklin smiles, his jowls twitching slightly. “For example, if you stand on the floor, while I stand on wax, and you hold the electrised phial in your hand, while I take hold of the wire, then, when our lips approach, they will be struck and shock’d . . . Thus we vastly increase the force of the electrical kiss” (177).

I glance at the door. “But won’t this fluid just dissolve in the air?”

“The electrical fluid,” sighs Franklin, “does not seem to mix or incorporate willingly with meer air . . . Now, I have placed my Pamela on two wine glasses, back towards back, two or three inches distant. I will set the electrified phial on one, and then touch the wire with my hand. That book will be electrified minus, the electrical fire being drawn out of it by the bottom of the bottle. I now take off the bottle, and then, while holding it in my hand, I touch the other book with the wire. That book will be electrified plus, the fire passing into it from the wire, while the bottle is, at the same time supplied from my hand.”

He scrounges, this time retrieving a small, round cork on a string. He dangles the cork between the two books, where it immediately begins to swing rhythmically back and forth between them. “Thus,” he says, “the small cork-ball will play between the books until equilibrium is restored” (184-85).

“It seems,” I observe, politely, “that electricity ebbs and flows like the tides, but that its motion is controlled, as in a canal. You are an electrical engineer, Dr. Franklin.”

“Well, yes . . . ” he answers. “Although, strictly speaking, electricity subsists quite calmly in all particulate objects, prior to any operation. In its original state it is better described, in fact, as kind of aether-net” (208-09).

Franklin gestures again to the Cato, devoid of charge. “The leaf-gold used in bookbinding is porous. When you hold it to the light, it appears like a net, and, when it is electrified, the fire is seen in its leaping over the vacancies, from body to body, or from particle to particle through the air. For the fire is visible only when it is in motion, as when it passes through the links of a chain” (208).

“Your explanations are all metaphors.” I observe. “Aether net, canal, fluids, channels, chains.”

“Well, yes!” he says. “In fact, you might say that metaphor itself is a very powerful electrical device! Ultimately, indeed, there are no bounds (but what expense and labour give) to the force man may raise and use in the electrical way. For bottle may be added to bottle in infinitum, and all united and discharged together as one (246). Such a force could never be sustained by the leaf-gold, however. One strong shock breaks the continuity of . . . the filleting, and makes it look rather like dust of gold . . . ” (225).

Franklin is fascinated by the gold leaf used in book-gilding because, thin as paper, it makes electricity visible. He walks over to the shelves to find some, and returns carrying a tiny book. He opens it. Between the covers are several hundred squares of pounded gold carefully stacked between equally small sheets of paper. The largest sheets in the book are only two or three inches square. Franklin picks out one of the fragile pages of gold and holds it up to a candle. Then he hands it to me.

“Where does it come from?” I ask.

“Probably from Brazil, the Minas Gerais region–or the province of General Mines” (fig. 3).

I know about this place. The mines west of Rio de Janeiro are famous for their wealth. Brazilian gold fuels English industrial expansion. It is said that, in good years, nearly £50,000 of gold from Brazil arrives in London every week.

While Franklin restacks his leaves, I silently track the flow of bullion from Brazil, making a map of its capillary branches:

Brazilian gold is mined by African slaves, imported from Angola by the Portuguese; from the mines of Minas Gerais, it is conveyed to Rio, and shipped to Lisbon. Since the early years of the eighteenth century, gold has been pouring into Portugal where it stimulates an endless flood of British manufactures into Lisbon. Portuguese merchants use Brazilian gold to pay for British imports. As a result, the flow of gold into Portugal is immediately redirected to London–and from London to northern Europe and around the world. Through Portugal, the British receive enough Brazilian gold to pay for their own essential imports, mostly raw materials arriving from the Baltic countries, India, China, and North America. Because it uses Portuguese gold to pay for raw materials, Britain can concentrate fully upon its own domestic, industrial development. In the process, British manufacturing produces more and more British trade goods–which continue to flood consumer markets around the world, such as Portugal and Brazil.

Unable to develop its own manufacturing base, Portugal copes with British imports by re-exporting them to Brazil (in return, of course, for remittances of Brazilian gold entering Lisbon’s Tagus River, only to be dispatched to London or Amsterdam to pay for British goods). While Franklin experiments with the conducting power of leaf-gold, then, the gold fromMinas Gerais has reduced Portugal to the status of an entrepôt–a middle ground of exchange, a suture point for flows of gold and commodities whose circulation supercharges British manufacturing. Portugal tries to staunch the hemorrhaging of Brazilian gold from Lisbon; but this proves impossible. Whenever the Brazilian fleets arrive on the Tagus, British navy vessels and merchantmen already lie in wait, a continual irritant to Portuguese port authorities. By 1755, Portugal’s prime minister will declare that the English have conquered Portugal without the trouble of a conquest, that they are supplying two-thirds of its needs, and that British agents control the whole of Portuguese trade. Portugal is producing almost nothing, and, as Eduardo Galeano puts it in Open Veins of Latin America (1973), “The wealth brought by gold [is] so illusory that even the black slaves who [mine it are] clothed by the British” (68).

By now, in the mid-eighteenth century, the production of Brazilian gold has exceeded the total volume of gold extracted by Spain from its colonies in the two previous centuries. Portuguese emigrants and some ten million black slaves swell the mining towns of the Brazilian interior: Sabara, Mariana, and, the biggest of all, the Vila Rica de Oura Preto, the “Rich Town of Black Gold.” The slaves eat, sleep, and work in the gold-washing installations: weighed, and shipped from Angola, they are called the “coins of the Indies.” In Brazil, those who survive the voyage become “the hands and feet” of the white master. At Ouro Preto, thecapitaes do mato collect rewards in gold for the heads of slaves who try to escape. Many of these are Bantu, sold to the Portuguese in exchange for clothing, liquor, and guns. But, as Galeano points out, Brazilian miners actually “prefer blacks shipped from the little beach of Ouidah on the Gulf of Guinea because they are more vigorous and [last] somewhat longer. And every miner needs a black mistress from Ouidah to bring him luck . . . ” (66).

Franklin’s voice intrudes insistently.

He is telling me how to gild a book with leaf-gold. “We call the adhesive ‘glaire.’ You make a hole in the shell of an egg, run the white into a cup, and then froth it with a quill. Skim off the froth and add a little vinegar or wine to preserve it. Let it sit for several hours and then apply the glaire to the empty design tooled in the leather. Place a sheet of leaf-gold over the design, and press against it with the hot gilding tool, filling the lines with gold . . . “

“I am beginning to see,” I inform him, “that your electric books are just one component in a remarkableaethernet-of-work, a Net-of-Work which elevates some bodies (as particulate, free, illuminated), while relegating others to invisibility. You exhibit your American electricity as a universal medium that penetrates all things; but it is an artifact of Anglo-American accounting, managed by operators and middlemen in the temperate zone, the middling zone, where matters are technically brought into equilibrium, through exchange, interchange, electrical commerce.”

“And your commerce skips over a lot of things, doesn’t it? When the plusses and minuses are added up, certain objects, certain bodies just fall away–because they don’t register as costs, and for that reason they don’t exist. For example, if something isn’t either obviously dark or light (+ or -), it can’t really be included in the procedure. Am I right? Unbalanceable bodies are nonthings; because they cannot be assimilated to the binary grid of the extractive enterprise, they cannot be seen in the enlightenment of your lightening, of your superprocessing aethernet.”

“And there is another circuitry at work, a linguistic one. The function of metaphor in conducting the power of American electricity suggests that the resources of language too have come to constitute a kind of exploitable cognitive energy that functions exactly like the electrical mechanisms they are supposed to comprehend, leaping over differences (via similarity) and dissolving similarity (via difference). Within the world of electric commerce, analogy and metaphor are just one more device in a diffused synaptic system! And yet you claim that it is the virtue of your science to make sense of things! I can see, Dr. Franklin, that it is you who have already invented the Internet–and the aethernet–as a set of dynamically constellated work sites.”

Franklin smiles. “I must confess,” he says charmingly, “to being a little in the dark about the light. But, might not all these phenomena be conveniently resolved by supposing universal space filled with a subtle elastic fluid, which, when at rest, is not visible, but whose vibrations affect the eye, as the vibrations of the air do the ear . . . ?” (325-26).

I stand up, and, slipping the little leaf of gold into my pocket, I walk out the door.

Sitting on the stoop outside, chin in hand, the wind feels cool–ah, the temperate zone . . . But Franklin sticks his head out behind me, with one more lesson: “If you ever,” he warns, “find yourself sleeping in a house that lacks a lightening rod, and a storm arises, here is what you must do. Suspend a hammock or swinging bed, by silk cords equally distant from the walls on every side, and from the ceiling and floor above and below. This affords the safest situation a person can have in any room whatever; and what indeed may be deemed quite free from danger” (392).

“Exactly,” I think. “Suspended. Particulate. Floating, like a fish of gold.”

I get up and leave him there, then, a figure in the doorframe. It is windy and, as I walk down the street, with nothing in my hands, the dry leaves spin down from the trees, turning over themselves: back to front, back to front.

Further Reading:

Franklin’s dialogue is drawn directly, or paraphrased from his electrical papers of 1747, 1769, and 1774, as published in I. Bernard Cohen’s, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity (Cambridge, Mass., 1941). Quotations, paraphrases, and key terms from Cohen’s edition are referenced throughout the dialogue by page numbers in parentheses.

Franklin’s binding of Cato Major, or de Senectute is discussed by Hannah Dustin French, “Early American Bookbinding by Hand,” in Bookbinding in America: Three Essays, ed. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt (New York and London, 1967): 18-39. This discussion includes a black-and-white photograph of the cover of Franklin’s Cato (134, fig. 6). For a discussion of the English panel style of decoration, known as the “Cambridge style” used by colonial binders “throughout the seventeenth century and part of the eighteenth centuries,” see Edith Diehl, Bookbinding, Its Background and Technique, vol. 1, (Port Washington, N.Y., 1946). Edith Diehl offers a detailed description of the specialized process used by goldbeaters for pounding gold into leaf for use by bookbinders, in Bookbinding, 188-89. Bernard C. Middleton describes the use of glaire in gilding in A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique (New York and London, 1963), 176.

For an overview of orders for bookbinding that Franklin received between 1728 and 1737, see G. S. Eddy, Account Books Kept by Benjamin Franklin, 2 vols. (New York, 1928-29). These volumes also document Franklin’s role in supplying far-flung colonial bookbinders with gold leaf and other materials. C. Clement Samford surveys the numerous kinds of account books (“blank books,” “legers,” “alphabets,” “journals,” “account books,” “day books,” “wastebooks”) bound and gilt by a contemporary Virginia printer in The Bookbinder in Eighteenth-century Williamsburg, and Account of his Life and Times and of his Craft (Williamsburg, 1964), 17.

For Boulton’s and Fothergill’s Birmingham ormolu business, and Franklin’s attendance at the Lunar Society see Nicholas Goodison, Ormolu, The Work of Matthew Boulton (London, 1974), 8. Ormolu is the art of gilding that used an alloy of gold and mercury, creating ornamental metal objects, clocks, candelabra, doorknockers, and mounts; many of Fothergill and Boulton’s designs were based on the neoclassical patterns illustrated in books such as Robert and James Adam, Works in Architecture (1773-79); see vol. 2, no. 4, plate 8 (277, fig. 46).

There are many studies of the discovery and circulation of Brazilian gold and its role in industrialization in Britain. My account draws primarily upon Artur Attman, American Bullion in the European World Trade, 1600-1800 (Goeteborgs Kungl. Vetenskaps-Och Vitterhets Samhaelle. Acta: Humaniora, No. 26, 1986), 64-67; Eduardo Galeano, “Ouro Preto, the Potosi of Gold” in Open Veins of Latin America, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York, 1973), 62-70; James Lydon, “Fish and Flour for Gold: Southern Europe and the Colonial American Balance of Payments,” Business History Review, 39 (1965): 171-83; Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920, trans. Judith White (London, 1976), 222-3l; A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Colonial Brazil: The Gold Cycle, c. 1690-1750,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2, ed. Leslie Bethell, (Cambridge, 1984): 547-600.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Laura Rigal teaches at the University of Iowa. She is working on a study of the colonial contexts of the emergence of North American literary culture and has also been writing on eighteenth-century precursors to the “new” information economy.