On April Fools Day in 1857, an article just two sentences long appeared on the front page of The New York Times, announcing the U.S. government’s plan to purchase Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec for $15 million. It was no joke, but why did the U.S. government want to buy (at a bargain-basement price) the Mexican isthmus? The word “Tehuantepec” hasn’t appeared on the front page of the New York Times since 1938. These days, most people in the United States have never heard of the region. But in the 1850s, it was as familiar as Puerto Rico is today.

The New York Times began publication in 1851, less than three years after the U.S. annexation of northern Mexico—what would become California, Oregon, Washington, and several other U.S. states—after the U.S.-Mexico War. During its first two years in publication, the Times ran hundreds of articles about the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. A news column titled “Isthmus of Tehuantepec” appeared regularly in the newspaper’s front section.

Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec is a 120-mile-wide slice of land that stretches east-west, connecting the Yucatan Peninsula to the rest of Mexico. An 1865 U.S. atlas shows the isthmus as a separate state, not part of the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca, as it is today. In the left corner of that map, there is also a detailed map of the isthmus—the only part of the country the cartographers chose to show in detail for a U.S. audience. Why so much attention from U.S. cartographers, politicians, and journalists devoted to a tiny sliver of Mexican land?

To understand that flurry of nineteenth-century interest in a region now little known to us, we must to turn our attention to the narrow dirt road that cut across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec a century and a half ago. In 1853, four years before that two-sentence New York Times cover article announced U.S. government designs on the isthmus, local residents there seceded from the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, announcing a new Mexican state, with its capital in the city of Tehuantepec. In 1855, a group of New York investors completed a railroad across the Panamanian isthmus, at that time still part of Colombia. And finally, just four months before the April Fools Day story, a U.S. company completed the “Tehuantepec Turnpike”—an earthen path wide enough for a stagecoach—running from the Coatzacoalcos River that drained into the Gulf of Mexico and La Ventosa Bay, on the southern, Pacific coast of the isthmus.

The Tehuantepec Turnpike opened a decade after the U.S. annexation of northern Mexico. Even more important, it came a decade before the completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. The U.S. government, and its corporations, urgently needed a faster route between the country’s east and west coasts. In an era when transport was primarily via water, U.S. leaders looked south. In the years that followed the annexation, plans for the next North American grab (or purchase) of Mexican lands became a regular topic of debate on the pages of U.S. newspapers. Should the United States annex Baja California? The states of Sinaloa and Sonora along the Sea of Cortez? Or Tehuantepec? The Mexican isthmus offered the United States a link between the east and west coasts of our suddenly vast country.

At that time, there were only two routes for mail and news between New York and San Francisco. One was the Pony Express, a network of riders who made the dangerous two-week trip across snowy mountain passes and dry plains. The other route took nearly as long, via ship from the East Coast, then railroad across the Panamanian isthmus, then another ship to the West Coast. Tehuantepec offered the third option. In November 1858 the first bundles of “California mails” arrived in the Gulf port of New Orleans, having traveled from San Francisco via the Tehuantepec isthmus. The packages arrived in New York a full week earlier than those shipped via Panama. New York Times articles about the new western territories began by noting, “The mails have arrived from Tehuantepec.”

A Times article published in February 1858 declared, “[L]et a stable government be established and the tide of American progress will set resistlessly toward the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.” There was regular steamer service between the U.S. Gulf coast and the Mexican port city Coatzacoalcos. The next logical step was to transform the dirt-road turnpike into a state-of-the-art planked roadway. Huge crates of wood for building frame houses arrived from Florida and construction workers arrived from New York with four months’ provisions.

Those U.S. workers showing up to transform the built environment of the Mexican isthmus continued a trend started by those who had built the Tehuantepec Turnpike. The word turnpike, meaning toll road, comes from the Middle English words turne pike meaning “spiked barrier.” The name probably seemed particularly appropriate to the istmeños—the local residents—when gringos showed up with steamer boats, scythes, and rifles to cut a stagecoach road through field and forest.

The hundreds of Times articles published about the Mexican isthmus between 1851 and 1858 focused on its role in U.S. hemispheric interests, and on the natural resources available there for exploitation. In the late 1850s, with a small but significant number of North Americans living in the region, daily events on the isthmus became worthy of detailed description. Here is one example from the northern isthmus city of Minatitlán, in 1858:

The river at this time is quite high, though as yet we have had no flood. Should we not have one, many of those engaged in the mahogany cutting will be unable to get out their year’s work, and will thus be greatly injured pecuniarily….

The town is improving. Carpenters command good wages; that is, from $2.50 to $3.50 per day. We have but very few here sick, and it may be said that the health of the town is very good. Most people upon their arrival have a slight attack of the calentura, but with care, and a low diet, it soon passes off. It is generally brought on by mixing fruit and liquor, and strangers can rarely be induced to believe the mixture injurious until they have felt the effects of indulgence.

The opening of the Tehuantepec Turnpike made both mahogany-cutting and colonization possible. A few years after the turnpike was completed, a French visitor to the isthmus noted that the region’s forest was “overly frequented by the North Americans, and had already lost a large part of its virgin beauty.”

Upbeat reports of the expanding U.S. presence in isthmus towns were one of three types of articles that appeared in the Times during this period. The other two often contradicted each other. Opinion leaders in Washington, D.C., and New York promoted the region’s positive attributes, including vast natural resources and purportedly good weather. An 1858 New York Times editorial noted: “The route passes through a healthy and delightful region, and when opened will be a favorite with the traveling and trading public.” On-the-ground reports from North American travelers rendered a more complicated reality. Just two months before that editorial appeared, a traveler from San Francisco, John Hackett, complained in a long letter to the editor about “the rays of burning sun.” Anyone who has traveled at midday on horseback in the isthmus region—as nineteenth-century travelers did—knows that Hackett came closer to the truth.

On February 19, 1858, John Hackett boarded a southbound ship called Golden Age in San Francisco. Six days later, in Mexico’s Pacific port of Acapulco, he and fifteen others disembarked, then boarded the steamer Oregon, bound for the Mexican isthmus, which lay further south. There should have been sixteen traveling with him, Hackett reported, but one of the passengers, “while under mental aberration, superinduced by whiskey,” had climbed off the Golden Age and drowned.

Oregon reached La Ventosa Bay, at night. Around daybreak the following morning, March 1, two metal boats arrived shipside to take both travelers and baggage to shore. Huge waves pummeled the Oregon, threatening to smash the small boats against its hull. After the passengers flung their trunks and themselves from ship to boat, seven istmeños rowed them to shore. Both the harshness of the local environment and the skill of the local boatmen in overcoming it impressed Hackett. Twenty yards from shore, the boats bottomed out. The indigenous longshoremen jumped into the water, hauled the boats onto their shoulders, and carried the travelers to dry sand.

The travelers then entered the customs office, a thatched-roof hut, before slogging three-quarters of a mile through the sand to board a stagecoach for the city of Tehuantepec. Three hours later they had traversed the fifteen miles “of tolerably smooth road” to arrive in the city of Tehuantepec. The easy ride ended there. After that, Hackett reported, the ride on the Tehuantepec Turnpike was “jolting to such an extent as to pound one almost to the consistency of a jelly.” When the path was too rough for the stagecoach, the passengers rode horseback.

About the time they passed what is now Matías Romero, one man “got off his animal, staggered and fell.” They managed to carry him to a nearby camp, but there was no one to offer medical help. He died about fifteen minutes later. He carried $1,300 worth of gold—a goldrusher returning from the West Coast with the loot he panned from California’s rivers. The gold that was once Mexican returned to Mexican soil.

The travelers finally reached the end of the stagecoach line, at the town of Suchil—the dateline for many New York Times articles about the isthmus. Hackett noted dryly that the long-anticipated Suchil was “an imposing city of three staked wig-wams and one wooden house.” The steamer to New Orleans was supposed to meet them there, but since it was the dry season, the Coatzacoalcos River ran too low to be navigable. Hackett bragged that he and his traveling partners rowed themselves down the river in a dugout mahogany canoe for a day and a half, with nothing but river water to sustain them.

When he finally reached New Orleans on March 9, Hackett wrote to the editors of The New York Times immediately. His long account ended, “I have detailed without the slightest exaggeration my actual experience across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and regret that these embarrassments to the perfect success of the route exist.” He concluded that the geography of the region “must ever be a stumbling block in the way to the perfect success of the [trans-isthmus] route.”

In spite of Hackett’s pessimistic testimonial, news articles datelined Minatitlán or Coatzacoalcos reflected a bustling Isthmus of Tehuantepec that resembled any North American Wild West outpost. September 1858: “We stand in need here of a newspaper, and a cabinet-makers’ shop.” August 1859: “Quite a number of wealthy Mexicans from the City of Mexico are now on the isthmus locating lands and taking up territory, which they feel satisfied must soon come under the United States.”

In early New York Times articles about North American expansion on the isthmus, local residents were rarely mentioned. But as the carpetbaggers began to face hard times in the late 1850s, news articles focusing on native istmeños began to appear for the first time. The Times correspondent in Minatitlán noted in 1859:

The new church is to be dedicated to-morrow, and I have never heard so much noise, and of such variety, on any similar occasion. First, there is the constant firing of an old gun near the church, then the ringing of a half-dozen bells which have been gathered from wrecked vessels…The natives, large and small, male and female—but particularly the latter, who are the most pious—have been busy for several days in toiling earth from a neighboring hillside, in aprons, bags, and turtle shells, and depositing it near the church. The people here are very cleanly in their habit, and are perfectly honest. Mechanics drop their tools on the spot where they work, and nothing is ever taken. No one thinks of locking his doors here as a security against thieves.

Even as New York Times writers and editors seemed to perceive the isthmus in the most utilitarian terms—a short path between the oceans—the place still held mystery. Their reports exoticized it, suffused it with an other-worldly quality. As one article put it, the place had a “lifeless and dreamy appearance.” The journalist continued, “The rainy season has commenced, and the few showers we have already had have covered the surrounding mountains with verdure. I returned from Ventosa this morning and was delighted with the variety and fragrance of the flowers which literally perfumed the lonely forest-road…” (The writer conveniently leaves out the mosquitoes, also brought by the rains, which in turn brought yellow fever.)

The optimism about the region’s potential for the U.S. government, then focused on the realization of Manifest Destiny, was short-lived. In September 1859, newspaper headlines hinted at boom towns busting: “Isthmus of Tehuantepec: Rainy and Sickly Season—Desperation and Hard Swearing Among The Employees—Robbery of the California Mail—New Rumors, &c” With temperatures topping 120 degrees and foreigners sweating out severe fevers, looters attacked the incoming ships from the United States, robbing passengers and pilfering the mail. The Tehuantepec Turnpike collapsed into economic ruin. Gringos who had traveled to the isthmus looking for jobs and opportunity languished, unable to afford return passage home.

Tensions rose between the istmeños and gringos. By February 1860, U.S. Marines were stationed at the isthmus city of Minatitlán, supposedly to protect North Americans living there from Mexican soldiers. Istmeños became outraged at the presence of U.S. troops in their towns. Mexican government officials demanded an explanation from the U.S. consul in Minatitlán: what was the U.S. military doing on the isthmus? According to a New Orleans journalist living in Minatitlán, the consul insisted, “[T]he United States of America had the right to send their men-of-war to any part of the globe where they had fellow countrymen to protect.” Minatitlán’s North American enclave began to fear “the seizure of all American property and the assassination of American citizens.” The tension led to a Mexican-only meeting, at which “the discussion was long, heated and acrimonious. Finally, after four hours’ deliberation, it was decided that the Americans, in the port of Minatitlán, be treated coldly but politely, until sufficient force be obtained to drive them out.” Even the New Orleans journalist acknowledged, if indirectly, that the North Americans lived on isthmus land without the blessing of the istmeños.

As the situation became more difficult for North Americans on the isthmus, the political situation shifted back in the United States. The conflict between the U.S. North and South grew, exploding into the Civil War in 1861. The Union government feared the growing economic power of the Confederate South. Suddenly, cargo ships moving busily between Coatzacoalcos on the isthmus and the Southern ports of Mobile and New Orleans were seen as a threat bolstering the Confederacy’s economy.

From those southern ports, the Gulf port of Coatzacoalcos is less than half as far as the Panamanian isthmus. However, Panama lies so far east that it’s slightly closer to New York than Coatzacoalcos is. As far as northerners were concerned, the Tehuantepec isthmus offered no geographic advantage over the Panamanian isthmus. With the U.S. South economically and politically weakened by the Civil War, U.S. government and corporate interest in Tehuantepec faded.

However, once the Civil War ended, the political winds shifted back; interest in the Mexican isthmus rose again. An economically prosperous U.S. South was no longer perceived as dangerous, but necessary. In 1867, just two years after the war’s end, a U.S. company based in New Orleans signed an agreement with the Mexican government to build a railroad across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. A U.S. Navy expedition, led by Robert Wilson Shufeldt, was sent to survey the region for a new transcontinental transit corridor. The group, which included hydrologists, astronomers, engineers, naturalists, photographers, and meteorologists, arrived in Minatitlán on November 11, 1870. The expedition’s long report to the U.S. government included everything from the region’s hydrology, to lists of native plants, to a short glossary from the local languages of Zapotec and Zoque. The report was enormously detailed, cataloguing the type of soil under every isthmus village they visited, the type of rock on every hill they climbed, the location and appearance of each tree species that gave them shade.

The report is remarkable in both its precision and its single-mindedness. The lists of animals, minerals, soils, plant species, and local vocabularies have a relentless focus: assessing the usefulness of the natural resources for commercial exploitation. Shufeldt’s findings were encouraging, from the perspective of North American industrialists. Nonetheless, they received scant mention in The New York Times. A single sentence appeared on the newspaper’s front page in April 1871, datelined Mexico City, announcing “the discovery of a practicable route” across the isthmus.

The dream of a U.S.-controlled transit corridor was foiled again in 1871, this time by events in Mexico. Political unrest exploded following the close presidential race between Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz. The North Americans still living in the isthmus region were caught up in the violence. When posters appeared on their front doors threatening their lives, they abandoned their cotton plantations and mahogany sawmills. Their letters tell of their panicked departure: “We must abandon the Isthmus to God and the Mexicans.” “The foreigners are flying for their lives.”

English capitalists saw opportunity in the North Americans’ flight. With Canada’s growing autonomy, England sought another path across the Americas to India. The U.S. looked on grudgingly, considering it “England in our waters.” The U.S. government worried about the threat to North American supremacy in the region, whining that Mexico was only doing twice as much trade with the United States as it was with England. An 1885 article, reprinted from The Mexican Financier, ascribed ulterior motives to England’s interest in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec: “It may be that English diplomacy would like to build up on the southern border of the United States a strong nation, not openly hostile to American influence on this continent, but yet quietly exerting a counteracting force to American supremacy.”

In spite of gringo fears, a joint British-North American company finally completed construction of the first Mexican trans-isthmus railroad in 1894. On September 11 of that year, the inaugural train made the trip from the Gulf port of Coatzacoalcos to the Pacific port of Salina Cruz in ten hours and twenty minutes. TheTimes reported, “The Mexican Government is determined to make the National Tehuantepec Railroad a great international traffic route. In order to bring about the desired result extensive improvements will be made to the harbors of Coatzacoalcos and Salina Cruz …” Still, after investing somewhere between $25 million and $50 million, the isthmus had only, as the Times put it, “utterly worthless track.” By the turn of the twentieth century, the railroad offered nothing to international commerce. Though still viable for local transit, its tracks were unable to support the weight of loaded boxcars, while the ports at either end were far too small for seagoing ships.

Meanwhile, U.S. government attention had shifted south, to digging a canal across newly independent Panama, where both land and government seemed more compliant.

Further Reading

An earlier version of this essay appears (in Spanish) in the book Región del Istmo de Tehuantepec: Interacciones sociales y flujos comercios, published in 2011 by the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Center for Advanced Studies and Research in Social Anthropology) in Oaxaca, Mexico. Portions of it also appear in Wendy Call’s new book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (Lincoln, Neb., 2011).

In addition to the digital archive of The New York Times, available at many libraries, two articles provide key historical detail about Mexico’s trans-isthmus railroad: Paul Garner’s “The Politics of National Development in Late Porfirian Mexico: The Reconstruction of the Tehuantepec National Railway 1896-1907,” from the Bulletin of Latin American Research 14:3 (1995) and Francie Chassen-López‘s “El Ferrocarril Nacional de Tehuantepec,” from Acervos 10 (Oct.-Dec. 1998). Dr. Chassen-López’s book, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico 1867-1911 (University Park, Penn., 2004), offers a deeper sense of the economy and society of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the late nineteenth century.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.4 (July, 2011).

Thirty years ago, Robert W. Johannsen published To The Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination, inspiring historians to explore the impact that the conflict had on American society. Since then a number of books have examined how the U.S.-Mexican War influenced the domestic politics and culture of the United States. Adding to this growing body of work is John C. Pinheiro’s Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War. This latest volume in Oxford’s much-touted “Religion in America” series draws from an impressive collection of antebellum sermons, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, and memoirs to bring to light the religious context of the United States’ 1846 invasion of its southern neighbor. Specifically, Pinheiro argues that the religious history of the U.S.-Mexican War shows “how anti-Catholicism emerged as integral to nineteenth-century American identity as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant republic” (1). Indeed, animus toward Mexico’s state religion played a role in many aspects of the conflict, from the recruitment of soldiers to the drafting of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Pinheiro introduces his study by highlighting the growing anti-papist fervor of the Second Great Awakening. Although a distrust of Catholicism existed before the framing of the nation, increasing immigration from Ireland and a growing fear of Vatican plots in northern Mexico during the 1830s converted a religious issue to a political one. In 1834, nativist Protestants burned the Ursuline Convent and School at Charlestown, Massachusetts, an event the author considers seminal to galvanizing anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment in the nation. Not coincidentally, this occurred as Yankee pioneers began to covet the Mexican provinces of Texas, Nuevo México, and Alta California. Pinheiro documents how this decade-long process influenced both United States’ society and politics.

As Americans looked westward for new territory, many viewed mixed-raced Mexicans and their Roman Catholic religion as inferior and incompatible with the Anglo-Saxon Protestant republicanism that was fated to sweep the continent. Firebrand ministers such as Lyman Beecher synthesized the ideas of white supremacy, anti-Catholicism, and Manifest Destiny into books, sermons, and pamphlets which shaped public perceptions of Mexico. Anti-Catholicism began as a domestic phenomenon, but its philosophies infiltrated the nation’s foreign policy following the presidential election of 1844. This contest was essentially a referendum on Manifest Destiny, with expansionist Democrats scoring a narrow victory, putting the United States on the path of war with Mexico.

After setting the stage for conflict, the book focuses on the ways in which anti-Catholic rhetoric was used to recruit volunteers to fight in Mexico. This was no easy task as immigrants born in Ireland and southern Germany composed a sizable minority of the standing army in 1846. President James K. Polk and his commanders Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott also understood the danger of Mexico perceiving their campaigns as a religious war. To counter the appearance of a sectarian crusade, the president ordered Catholic chaplains to accompany the military into Mexico.

Later chapters examine how anti-Catholicism affected the waging of the war, from the goals of the political elite to the behavior of enlisted men and volunteers. As conflict came to the nation, Whigs, Democrats, nativists, and abolitionists all engaged with anti-Catholicism, often at their own peril. Democrats, in particular, had to balance their desire for national expansion with their growing Catholic electoral base. This continued to be a difficult feat as American troops pushed farther into Mexican territory in 1847. Pinheiro notes that “American politicians recognized that only through some combination of anti-Catholic sentiment, racism, and republican principles could they maintain a nationally coherent stand on the war” (107). He finishes his study with an analysis of how such sentiment shaped congressional debates over the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and how this bigotry gave rise to the short-lived but influential Know Nothing Party of the 1850s.

Pinheiro’s research is exhaustive and his writing clear. As the director of the Catholic Studies Program at Aquinas College and a noted scholar of the early American republic, he is firmly in his element. Among his most interesting discoveries is the relationship between race and religion during the 1840s. While there has been significant work done in the role of race in the United States’ decision to invade and annex northern Mexico, Pinheiro adds to this by demonstrating the ways in which many Americans conflated race and religion in forming their opinions of Mexico. Drawing from an interesting diversity of sources, the author highlights the anti-Catholic rhetoric that droned in the background of the national dialogue about Manifest Destiny.

Pinheiro focuses on many instances of religious bigotry, but he is careful not to paint the nation with too broad a brush. While giving numerous examples of the bigoted views and actions of individual soldiers, for example, he does not ascribe anti-Catholic motivation to all servicemen. In fact, he cites several instances of Catholic officers and enlisted men fighting in Mexico with as much vigor as their Protestant counterparts. This is in keeping with Tyler V. Johnson’s complementary Devotion to the Adopted Country: U.S. Immigrant Volunteers in the Mexican War, which showed how many Catholic soldiers saw the war as a way to prove their patriotism and allegiance to the United States.

Although its subtitle hints at a more comprehensive work, Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War is largely focused on pervasive anti-Catholicism in the United States. There are enticing mentions of Catholic counterstrategies, denominational schisms over slavery, violence against Mormons, and Catholic reactions in Mexico, but this book is primarily concerned with evangelical Protestants in the lead-up to and execution of war. This is not to say that Pinheiro’s study is in any way deficient. He proves his thesis by clearly linking the development of American identity during the U.S.-Mexican War to the era’s marked opposition to the Catholic Church. Even so, promise remains for other perspectives in the complex religious history of this oft-overlooked war, and Pinheiro is to be commended for opening the door to this future research.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3 (Spring, 2015).

Michael Scott Van Wagenen is an associate professor and public history coordinator at Georgia Southern University. He is the author of The Texas Republic and the Mormon Kingdom of God (2002) and Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.-Mexican War (2012).

In the summer of 1680, the governor of Barbados, Jonathan Atkins, sent a chart of this “Caribby” island “Situate on the Easterne part of America” to the Council of Trade and Plantations in London. The copy he submitted is likely the one pictured here (Fig. 1), now in the Map Collection of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Entitled A New Map of the Island of Barbadoes wherein every Parish, Plantation, Watermill, Windmill & Cattlemill, is described with the name of the Present Possesor, and all things els Remarkable according to a Late Exact Survey thereof, the impressive cartographic image was drawn from a survey undertaken by the Bridgetown-based Quaker Richard Forde. Measuring roughly a half-meter squared, it shows the island fully inhabited and barely a patch uncultivated; the entire territory, criss-crossed by roads, is studded with English names and symbols marking plantation houses and mills. Even the title’s repetition of “mill” seems designed to propel our sense of the colony’s continuous, contiguous industry—all these mills being, as the key in the top-right corner explains, “imployd in the grinding of Sugar Canes.” By the 1660s, Barbados had become probably the most densely populated and intensively cultivated agricultural area in the English-speaking world, deeply interconnected with England’s other colonies in America and far beyond. In the early 1680s the free white population is estimated to have reached around 20,000; the enslaved black population, whose brutal forced labor supplied and worked the mills, outnumbered the whites by more than two to one. The violence, and indeed even the mere fact of slavery, is silenced by the map.

Looking at this peaceful, productive view alone, you would likewise never imagine that five years earlier, in August 1675, Barbados was hit by a devastating hurricane that reduced the machinery of the booming sugar industry to smithereens. “Never was seen such prodigious ruin in three hours,” wrote Governor Atkins in a letter to officials in London. A thousand houses, three churches and most of the mills on the west side of the island were destroyed, and hundreds of people were killed, “whole families being buried in the ruins of their houses.” The disaster went down in colonial history as one of the most dreadful events that ever happened to the island, which “changed much the face of the country.” The effects were exacerbated by the scale and density of the settlement by 1675, and by a hurricane the previous year that “whirled us like a top about all points of the compass” and did great damage. With each hurricane, the lack of shelter resulting from extensive deforestation left people, buildings and crops more vulnerable.

In transforming the physical landscape, the hurricanes also disturbed the stratified social landscape. Refusing to discriminate between free, indentured and enslaved, they tore down the built spaces that regulated and reinforced these differences. The literal and figurative levelling effect raised the idea, very dangerous to the interests of the colonial elite, that everyone was equal after all, and opened up space for resistance. An anonymous pamphlet published in 1676, Great Newes from the Barbadoes, Or, A True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes against the English (see title page in Fig. 2), exposes how the fear within the colonial elite elicited a murderous response to the threat of a slave rebellion: the title page highlights the number (at least 42) “of those that were burned alive, Beheaded, and otherwise Executed for their Horrid Crimes.”  It is in the context of this brutal oppression, and the propaganda of the pamphlet—which concludes with the line that Barbados is “the finest and worthiest Island in the World”—that we should consider the map.

The picture of calamity, chaos and confusion conjured by textual descriptions of the successive hurricanes and their aftermaths is ostensibly countered by the map’s calm visual order (the note on climate in the “Description” mentions only the “fresh gales of wind” that relieve the heat of a typical day). Yet uncertainty over the print’s production, publication and reliability reflects the rupture, exacerbated by the distance of space and time between colony and metropole.

Forde appears to have drawn up the map (in draft form at least) by January 1675 and sometime afterwards sent it to England to be “perfected” and published. Yet there is evidence to suggest that, with his draft in effect torn up by the hurricane in August 1675, he was attempting to revise it according to new conditions in the summer of 1676 and perhaps even later. Meanwhile, the Lords of Trade were growing impatient at the “want of maps” they believed was hindering their administration of the colonies, and ordered all overseas governors to “send home maps of their plantations.” Atkins (and he was not alone) was slow to deliver. In 1679, four years after the initial request, he received a letter insisting that he despatch “what their Lordships have already demanded without effect, viz. description and map of the country which he promised to send in 1675.” When the map finally arrived in Whitehall in 1680, Atkins was not at all confident it served the purpose: “I have at last procured a chart of the Island, but I cannot commend it much,” he wrote; “that it is true in all particulars I cannot assume.” The disturbances and transformations incurred by the hurricane must in part account for those doubts—in addition to the Quaker surveyor’s deliberate omission (for religious reasons) of the word “church” and almost any sign of fortifications, the coverage and condition of which for the purposes of both internal and external defense were a prime concern of officials in London.

We do not know exactly what imperial officials thought of the map, but without close inspection they may have been pleasantly surprised and reassured by the handsome image. The print shown here was certainly added to the Office of Trade’s growing map library and today remains among a sampling of that once-extensive collection known as the Blathwayt Atlas (after the Office of Trade’s secretary William Blathwayt, who oversaw their acquisition in the 1670s and 1680s). The inclusion of Barbados, alongside maps charting an array of colonial and commercial settlements from Massachusetts Bay to Bermuda and Bombay, confirms the island’s importance within England’s expanding territorial interests through the seventeenth century, not just in the Atlantic region but around the world. Thanks to recent digitization by the John Carter Brown Library, it is now possible to view the Blathwayt Atlas maps online and to study individual items in minute detail—to see them both in context and close-up.

Scholars have stressed the importance of Forde’s work as the “first systematic” and “first economic” map of the island, but from such a perspective (like that of Governor Atkins) the details may disappoint, or indeed obscure. A prime purpose of the printed work, through its powerful combination of image and text, was to promote the colonial project and persuasively smooth over its challenges and contingencies, and the coercion at its core. That Forde’s map did so successfully for audiences in England is suggested by its continued use in different editions over a period of more than thirty years. With its simultaneous projection of progress and indeterminate history amid the hurricanes, the New Map of the Island of Barbadoes leaves us with a complex view of a colony—and empire—in the process of construction and reconstruction. 

Further Reading:

The only full study to consider the significance of the maps as a collection is Jeannette D. Black’s The Blathwayt Atlas, 2 vols (Providence, RI, 1970-75). On Forde’s map (including the spelling of his surname, often given simply as Ford), see 180-85. See also P. F. Campbell, Some Early Barbadian History (St Michael, Barbados, 1993), 191-96. For a social and economic perspective that discusses the map in relation to a contemporary census, see Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972; repr. 2000), 84-116 (esp. 96-100), an expanded version of Dunn’s “Barbados Census of 1680,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 26 (1969): 3-30. For a recent digital humanities approach, see Peter Koby, “The Modern Utility of Ford’s Colonial Map of Barbados, 1674,” Journal of Map and Geography Libraries 11, no. 1 (2015): 60-79. For introductions to demography, society and identity in Barbados within an early modern American context, see Dunn’s works above and Jack P. Greene, “Changing Identity in the British West Indies in the Early Modern Era: Barbados as a Case Study,” in Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville, VA, 1992), 13-67. The correspondence between Governor Atkins and the Lords of Trade is recorded in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

Dr. Emily Mann is a postdoctoral Research Associate with the Centre for the Political Economies of International Commerce (PEIC) at the University of Kent and, from September 2017, Early Career Lecturer in Early Modern Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She is working on an edited volume exploring the Blathwayt Atlas maps. emily.mann@courtauld.ac.uk

Historians slip easily into categorical thinking. We assign a group or a trend to a category, such as “pirate” or “puritan,” and then all too often we let that well-worn category do the work of analysis. Designating an individual a pirate bestows motives and perspectives, creating a shortcut to deeper understanding. That ubiquitous (and in American historiography nearly meaningless) category of “puritan” covers a multitude of religious inclinations and explains numerous aspects of human existence, from childrearing to politics. Categories allow us to gloss over context and, more importantly, over gaps in evidence. When we have few sources, assigning a category automatically fills in silences and suggests explanations consistent with the particular group or movement. In this era of click-bait headlines and little time to settle in with a complicated and nuanced book (not to mention pressures to publish), categories offer a quick way to make sense of complex phenomena. 

Maroonage represents a case in point: a widespread but only sporadically documentable historical trend, the category of maroon invokes a host of historical specificities. Maroons created independent enclaves of formerly enslaved people and eventually their children, away from and beyond the control of their masters. The Spanish who first confronted and named such a population labeled these communities of escaped slaves  “cimarróns,” a term for domesticated cattle that had escaped to live feral in the woods or mountains. The English employed a variation of the word later when they encountered such communities in the Americas. Maroonage arose in locations where geography cooperated, flourishing in topography that granted runaways places not only to hide but to carve out permanent habitations away from their former masters. They emerged on larger islands or the South American mainland where inaccessible retreats sheltered organized enclaves of former slaves. They sustained themselves by growing their own food crops, culling semi-feral livestock, and stealing from the plantations where they had once been held in bondage. They offered haven to later runaways, thereby augmenting their populations; on occasion in Jamaica and elsewhere, they agreed with colonial authorities to return fleeing slaves in exchange for being left alone.  Maroonage provided numerous Africans and their descendants an opportunity to live independent of slave regimes. Before the dramatic success of the Haitian Revolution, maroons enjoyed the best hope of African autonomy and self-determination in the Americas.  Historians today find the category maroon infinitely appealing, a reversal of the discomfort and confusion with which European imperialists viewed them at the time.

The seductiveness of this category and of categorical thinking generally has shaped the standard narrative of the origins of the Jamaica maroons, one of the best known cases of maroonage in the Caribbean. Their oft-repeated story dates their origins from the English invasion of the island in 1655. In the prevailing account, the invasion granted the island’s slaves an opportunity to flee their Spanish masters and establish the first independent maroon communities in the Jamaican mountains. In doing so, they successfully removed themselves from the slave system, forming autonomous enclaves free of both colonial and imperial authority. The Jamaica maroons persisted for over a century and successfully fought off imperial forces on numerous occasions. Finally in 1796, victorious British authorities demanded that they leave the island en masse. Despite the eighteenth-century order to leave, maroons persist in Jamaica to this day, and many others retained their identity in diasporic movements to Nova Scotia and later West Africa.

This narrative of Jamaica maroonage arising in the aftermath of the English invasion, while highly serviceable, obscures the origins of the autonomous African communities that organized in the Jamaican hinterland. The first independent enclaves were not runaway slaves but rather refugees. They came together in the mountains during an ongoing guerrilla war that pitted the island’s residents under Spanish rule against the newly arrived English invaders. Not classic runaway maroons, they constituted a community of refugees of mixed status (both enslaved and free) who together chose a separate existence in a context of warfare, conquest, and potential exile. Among the assortment of Jamaicans who fled to the interior, those who chose to reside there permanently and peaceably withdrew from the war between Spanish and English forces on the island. They opted out of moving to Cuba, where they would have taken up a social status (whether slave or free) in accordance with that which they had held in Jamaica before the invaders disturbed them. Instead, they chose to fashion a new life of subsistence and autonomy away from both English and Spanish colonists. Their decision was collective rather than individual, and the options they had differed from those available to runaway slaves. By consigning their experience to the category of maroon, we assume we know their identity (former slaves) and goals (autonomous living separate from their masters) even in the absence of definitive evidence.

The men, women and children who erected villages in the isolated reaches of Jamaica did so within a context of warfare and displacement.  When the English invaded Jamaica, virtually all the residents of the island fled. Initially everyone ran from the main town of Santiago de la Vega, taking their valuables with them. They had been through this drill before: bands of raiders arrived, at irregular intervals, intruding briefly in search of wealth and food and water to resupply their ships. Later, when the population knew that the invaders intended the permanent capture of the island, almost everyone withdrew farther into the mountains rather than accept the terms of the treaty they were offered.

An invasion changed the situation dramatically, forcing the islanders to consider a new future very different from the lives they had lived on Jamaica. The English terms granted European colonists exile to an unnamed Spanish American territory, with transportation provided compliments of the English navy. A handful took that option, becoming wartime refugees, dumped on another population and dependent on the aid it offered. The English hoped that non-Spanish residents would throw their lot in with the invaders. The conquering army also ordered “that all the slaves, negroes and others be ordered by their masters to appear [at a designated meeting place and time]  . . . to hear and understand favours and acts of grace that will be told them concerning their freedom.” Expecting these subaltern populations to greet the English as liberators, the army commanders declined to spell out the details of this offer until the meeting. But the African-descended residents chose not to take their chances on the English. This refusal stunned the English, who were aghast when not one slave appeared at the meeting place. With the small resident population—a mix of Spanish, Indian and African—scattered in the inaccessible interior and the English army encamped around Santiago de la Vega (today’s Spanish Town), the scene was set for a five-year-long guerrilla war. The resistance would be fought under the command of a Spaniard, Cristoval Ysassi, whom Philip IV eventually named governor of the island (with instructions to retake it from the English).

At this moment, everyone who had fled before the invaders faced choices: to fight in the resistance and try to reclaim the island; to surrender to the English and accept whatever treatment they meted out; or to slip away from Jamaica without English assistance. Rejecting all those options, some eventually decided to create another future, withdrawing from all European hostilities while remaining in Jamaica. Their process in coming to that decision cannot be documented, but the broad outlines of their lives can be understood. The Africans living in Jamaica when the English arrived were a mix of free and enslaved individuals. Most had been born on the island or had lived there for decades, spoke Spanish, and worshipped in the island’s Catholic church. Their language skills and high level of acculturation prompted the English invariably to refer to them as “Spanish Negroes,” distinguishing them from Africans who arrived as part of the invasion force or subsequently. Joining with the fleeing Spanish women, children, and elderly, some African refugees slipped away in small boats to Cuba. In doing so, they accepted that their status in Jamaica would carry over to Cuba, and there they would live in a Spanish community as an enslaved or free person, as they had done in Jamaica. Of those who stayed in Jamaica, some fought alongside the Spanish against the English. Others chose to strike out on their own; this group established the first isolated African settlements in the interior, as early as February 1656, some ten months after the English landed. These were not runaway slaves, but rather refugees (both slave and free) pursuing their own strategy against the invaders and eventually in defiance of the authority of Ysassi. Their withdrawal departs from the usual maroon narrative at various points, but especially in that they made that choice collectively. As opposed to runaway slaves—who struck out for freedom alone or in small groups—these individuals gathered as a sizeable group. Their joint decision created the communities they formed and an alternate future for themselves and their children in one dramatic moment.

Both the Spanish and the English were astonished when they realized that some of the refugees had opted out of their struggle altogether to chart their own, separate path. Ysassi, commanding the Spanish resistance, claimed that all the Africans were answerable to him and fighting the English under his command. Yet when the English officer Kempo Sybada, a multilingual Frisian man, happened upon a mounted African, he denied Ysassi’s version of events and claimed complete autonomy for his community. His appears to have been one of a number of independent enclaves of Spanish speaking, predominantly African individuals that coalesced on Jamaica in this period. They came together out of the refugee population and refused to return to slavery or to their lives within Spanish colonial society. Distrusting the English invaders, they created lives away from European colonizers, imperial rivalries, and a world of slavery.

One of these communities would eventually be forced into a relationship with the English government, and we can see through that outcome how it prized its autonomy and self-determination. This connection was forged only after an English party located a village in Lluidas Vale, and threatened to burn its extensive garden crop unless it would help extirpate the Spanish forces on the island. Under the leadership of Juan de Bola, it did so, playing the pivotal role in ending the guerrilla war. After the remaining Spanish departed from the island, de Bola’s community agreed with the English that they would live independently under their own leaders, but would contribute to the English colonial undertaking by serving in the militia (again, under their own officers).

At least in the short term, their deal with the English held. De Bola died in an ambush set by another “Spanish Negro” leader whose community the militia sought to locate and bring under English authority. He and other community leaders received (or regained) houses in Santiago de la Vega, which allowed them to move back and forth between the Vale where the community was centered and the town where their interactions with the English occurred. Far from a case of maroonage, their status represented a different strategy for maintaining freedom and some autonomy under colonial rule.

Other communities—never so unfortunate as to be discovered by the English army—maintained the independent existence they initially chose. At least one other community (and possibly two) remained utterly independent and, despite efforts of the English (aided by de Bola’s troops) to subdue them, they continued as autonomous entities within Jamaica. With similar refugee origins, they presumably became the basis of a future maroon enclave, augmented by increasing numbers of runaways after the English began importing enslaved Africans and Indians. No trace remains to help us understand the transition from the Spanish-speaking refugee communities to a population intermixed with individuals born elsewhere who fled Jamaican slavery. We can only imagine how the refugees and their descendants responded to newly arrived enslaved Africans, people who were unlikely to speak Spanish and who came into the Jamaican interior along a markedly different personal pathway. Out of this complex mix of backgrounds—refugee and runaway—Jamaica’s maroon communities emerged.

Refugee encampments, though they do not conform to the usual narratives of fugitive slaves or outright rebellion, represent another form of resistance. Refugees created autonomous villages and offered another way for Africans in the Atlantic world to seize opportunities to forge a life of their own making. In this case they carved out a space between warring imperial forces, seeing their opportunity to strike out for freedom as a group. Their community formed in an instant—not through a slow accretion of runaways—and they brought to it shared language, culture, and a collective past. Depositing all independent African enclaves into the familiar category of runaway slave maroons reduces the range of African experiences of freedom and struggle in the Americas.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Marisa Fuentes for urging me to write this history in a short and accessible form.

Further Reading

The most comprehensive account of the Jamaica maroons remains Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal (Granby, Mass., 1988). An interesting literary perspective can be found in Cynthia James’s The Maroon Narrative: Caribbean Literature in English across Boundaries, Ethnicities, and Centuries, Studies in Caribbean Literature (Portsmouth, N.H., 2002), 11-14. For treaties between slave-owning authorities and maroons that included provisions for the return of runaways, see Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Jamaica, 2006), 208-11. My book, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2017), reconsiders the English invasion and the resultant refugee exodus and guerrilla war, among other topics. The Anglo-Spanish treaty, negotiated but never adopted (and quoted above), can be found in “Articles of Capitulation at the Conquest of Jamaica, 1655,” Jamaica Historical Review I:1 (1945): 114-15. 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

Carla Gardina Pestana is professor and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World at UCLA. She writes on religion, empire, and the Atlantic world; her most recent book, published by Belknap, is The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire.

When I started teaching Atlantic World History in 2006, one of the problems I confronted was how to help students grasp the dynamics of Caribbean history in a course that is organized by themes—environmental history, imperial strategies, the slave trade and the African diaspora—rather than by region. I introduce my students to Caribbean geography in a map lecture early in the year, and the Caribbean “sugar and slaves” complex impinges on nearly every unit. But I also hope to give students a vivid sense of the Caribbean’s role as the linchpin of European geopolitical competition in the Atlantic world—and, ideally, accomplish this in just one or two lessons.

The first fact that students of the early modern Caribbean must wrap their minds around is the decimation of the region’s indigenous population, which came sooner, faster, and perhaps more completely in the Caribbean than on the mainland. In class, after students read selections from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies (2001) and Shawn Miller’s Environmental History of Latin America (2007) that deal with this topic, I complicate the story with a two-part exercise. First, students examine a table of population statistics from contemporary North and South America. The nations that report the highest proportions of Native American and mestizo ethnicity today are, for the most part, the regions that had high population density in the pre-Columbian era: Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru. In contrast, Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil report high proportions of African-American ethnicity but tiny proportions of Native American ethnicity—even though the pre-Columbian Caribbean and the Amazon Basin both had sizeable indigenous populations. This contrast makes a good launch pad for a discussion of where most African slaves ended up, and why.

But then the students turn their handouts over to discover a table that charts Puerto Ricans’ ethnic identity in four ways: by self-reporting in the 2000 and 2010 U.S. censuses, by a 2002 study of mitochondrial DNA (which traces deep ancestry in the female line), and by a 2001 Y-chromosome study (which traces deep ancestry in the male line). The data suggest that at least half of Puerto Ricans have Native American ancestry in the female line, but vanishingly few report it, likely because they are themselves unaware of it. African ancestry (which appears in both the maternal and paternal lines) is also underreported, but not to the same degree. As the students consider this table, they develop a vision of a society forged by the blending of European and African blood, in the male line, with Native American and African blood, in the female line. This brief look at contemporary data helps them anticipate the history they will learn.

Several weeks later, toward the end of a long unit on the five major European powers’ colonization styles, we embark on the “Caribbean game,” which I sometimes call “Beyond the Line” in a nod to the principle established by the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 that skirmishes that occurred west of mid-Atlantic lines of amity would not provoke hostilities in Europe. (Or, to put it more simply, what happened in the Caribbean stayed in the Caribbean.) My unit on colonization styles focuses mainly on the Spanish, Portuguese, and French empires, because those are the ones with which my students are least familiar; they have already encountered the British and Dutch empires in U.S. History. But I make the Caribbean the centerpiece of my brief treatment of British and Dutch colonization, because doing so instills important lessons about those two empires’ priorities: Which American colonies mattered most from a metropolitan British perspective, and how does this explain the relative freedom that mainland colonists enjoyed? Why did the Dutch spread themselves so thinly, and how did they cope with repeated failure, in Pernambuco, New Netherland, and various Caribbean islands? What, ultimately, was the Dutch strategy for gleaning profit from the New World?

The Caribbean game is profoundly simple. On the floor of the classroom, I lay out two dozen hand-drawn cards, each representing a Caribbean island, in a roughly correct map. Cuba’s card is the largest; Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico are smaller; the rest are quite small. Students, assigned to represent various European powers, array themselves around the corners of the map. Teams of two or three students represent the major Atlantic powers of France, Spain, England, and the Dutch Republic; individuals represent lesser powers, such as Denmark and Courland. (“What is Courland?” the students ask. Well, look it up—this is a good lesson that not all countries last forever!) Someone plays the part of “slave uprising,” intimating unrest with drumming, and someone else plays the part of hurricanes, tempests, and other forces of nature.

Once everything is in order, the game begins. I read aloud a timeline of the European conquest of the Caribbean, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s claiming Hispaniola and Cuba for Spain in 1492, and working my way slowly (over eighty minutes or so) to the territorial exchanges that resulted from the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolutionary War. As I read, the players act out what happened. Spain snatches Hispaniola, and Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and Montserrat, and St. Kitts, and Jamaica, and on and on; France encroaches on various Spanish territories and is repelled; Britain approaches, looks around, and backs away. I read about Spanish slave raiding against Native settlements and give occasional updates on the Native American population collapse, but in the main, the Caribbean game focuses on European conflicts over the Caribbean.

The real point of the game is observation and conversation. Along about 1570 or 1600, I pause and ask the students representing Spain how they like the game so far. Then I ask France and England the same question. Usually at least one of the competing teams has a sense of grievance by this point, and as we move into the seventeenth century, they become more aggressive. Faces are made and hands are slapped as France and England begin to wrestle a few islands out of Spain’s grasp. The Dutch and Scandinavian players struggle gamely for tiny victories. Meanwhile (this has actually happened) the student representing Portugal falls asleep.

We stop and talk about the action frequently as it unfolds: Why did Spain initially get all the islands it wanted? Why did many of the Lesser Antilles remain uncolonized for decades, and were they really prizes for the French and English when they finally claimed them? How did the decimation of the Caribbean’s Native American population affect the value of the region in Spanish eyes? Why did competition over the region become so much more intense in the 1620s and 1630s? To what extent could different European powers trust each other to honor agreements and treaties? Why was Portugal so little involved in the European conquest of the Caribbean? Some aspects of the story I simply want students to remember on a visceral level: the relentless frequency of slave uprisings, especially as the enslaved population grew; the way in which a hurricane or another natural disaster could abruptly alter a settlement’s fortunes.

In my Caribbean “game,” unlike some history class games, such as those designed by Reacting to the Past, the players have no freedom of action; they play the moves I dictate, selected from the historical record, and their freedom lies only in doing so hopefully or angrily, in articulating subsurface motivations or expressing suspicion of their rivals. In essence, I use the Caribbean game to build students’ experiential memory of the winds of empire that blew across the early modern Caribbean. There are a few things that I require them to memorize—1655 (the English conquest of Jamaica), 1763 (the end of the Seven Years’ War), the names and thumbnail histories of the four Greater Antilles—but only a few. Mainly, I want them to understand the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch approaches to the Caribbean: motives, prospects, rivalries, grudges, and the imperial strategies that emerged from this cauldron.

Calling the exercise a Caribbean “game” begs the question of who, in the end, won the Caribbean. It is perhaps easier to say who lost: the indigenous population, catastrophically. Assessing the European players’ success is trickier: Spain appeared, in the sixteenth century, to be winning but later had to meet significant challenges from other European nations and submit to significant territorial losses; France and Britain ultimately gleaned great benefit from the Caribbean, but at a high price; Portugal focused its energies elsewhere; and the Dutch Republic, after a series of frustrating adventures, developed an alternative strategy of refining and marketing sugar and companion products such as coffee and chocolate, thereby benefiting from the Caribbean’s star industry without having to do as much of the work of conquest and plantation as the French and English did. Students often conclude that the Dutch “won” the game, even though it is doubtful that that is how it looked to anyone in the seventeenth century.

The question of who “won” the Caribbean may sound gimmicky, but it bears a lot of discussion. Did the Spanish—who were facing a rapid die-off of the population they had relied upon for labor, as well as extensive piracy by other European powers, well before 1600—ever feel like they were “winning” the region, even in the sixteenth century? Most of my students find the violence of the European conquest repugnant, and one particularly peace-loving class argued that Denmark actually won the game, because it managed to acquire a few, very small islands without warfare, by purchase or treaty. This is, needless to say, a completely impractical position from a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century point of view, but it opens a window for discussing why early modern Europeans thought that Caribbean islands—sometimes even small ones, with scant arable land—were worth going to war over, and also for discussing why hostilities in the Caribbean were long considered a thing apart from warfare in Europe.

The person who crafts the game has a lot of power to shape students’ perceptions of the region, and these choices are also worth discussing with students. I deliberately centered the game on the theme of inter-European competition because I believe that the topics of the Native American population collapse, slavery, and trade are more effectively taught in other ways, but over the years, I have tweaked the timeline I use for the game to place more emphasis on slaves’ resistance and on natural disasters. As European colonizers’ investment in plantations and plantation slavery mounted, so too did their physical and economic vulnerability. Another premise of the game that is worth discussing with students is whether it makes good pedagogical sense to discuss the Caribbean in a vacuum. By the time the class reaches the Caribbean game, students already know that the Spanish and Portuguese empires’ main interests were on the mainland and can effectively contrast Spain’s dependence on the Caribbean ports of Havana, Veracruz, Nombre de Dios/ Portobelo, and Cartagena with the Atlantic orientation of Portuguese Brazil. For the French, English, and Dutch, Caribbean islands were elements in portfolios that also included North American and (in the Dutch case, for a brief but pivotal period) South American territorial claims. As students readily intuit, each nation’s approach to the Caribbean was conditioned by the extent and perceived value of its mainland claims.

The Caribbean game is not, of course, my entire treatment of Caribbean history. We spend a lesson on the mechanics of sugar production and marketing; we spend another lesson on seafaring and piracy; and we spend three weeks on approaches to the study of Atlantic slavery, including some topics (such as Vaudou and Santeria) and some primary sources (such as Louis XIV’s 1685 Code Noir) that bear directly on the Caribbean. But for many students, the Caribbean game is a highlight of the course, and their experiential memory of it fixes the dynamics of inter-European competition for the Caribbean in their minds more effectively than even the most engaging reading assignment would be likely to do. Living through the arc of Caribbean history as a stakeholder—at the breakneck speed of three centuries in eighty minutes—gives them enough of a mental framework that when they are confronted with, for example, the Code Noir, they can situate the document within an impressionistic but accurate vision of what was going on in the Caribbean in the 1680s from the French perspective. Teaching with this “game” has spurred me to seek other opportunities to cultivate students’ experiential memory of key passages within the material they study.

Further Reading

The best recent overview of Caribbean history is Carrie Gibson, Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day (London, 2014). Gibson’s “Gazetteer” is useful for compiling a timeline of events for the Caribbean game. Another valuable resource is Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano, eds., The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), which includes essays on specific European nations’ Caribbean enterprises, on formative features such as geography and ecology, and on “masterless people” who functioned on the fringes of the dominant power systems.

The scholarly literature on the early modern Caribbean is vast; most of it centers on slavery and the plantation economy. Two essential recent works on these topics, both comparative, are Richard S. Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), and Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia, 2016).

One of my primary goals in the Caribbean game is to introduce students to different European nations’ signature colonization styles. On French colonization, see the opening chapters of Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, 2004). Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, eds., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2006) is a splendid tool for teaching and also covers the backstory of the development of colonial Saint-Domingue. On the Dutch Caribbean, see Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens, Ga., 2012), and Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca, 2016). The books on the Spanish Caribbean that I have found most illuminating focus on the nineteenth century, when Spanish Cuba succeeded French Saint-Domingue as the world’s leading sugar producer. See, for example, Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, 2014), and Laird W. Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (Cambridge, 2007).           

On Caribbean settlements’ vulnerability to natural forces, see Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Baltimore, 2006), and John Robert McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York, 2010). Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641: the Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1993) is a wholesome reminder of the sheer diversity of seventeenth-century European ventures in the Caribbean. Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens, Ga., 2012) offers a window onto individual Caribbean settlers’ experiences.

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

Darcy R. Fryer teaches history at the Brearley School and edits the Common School column.

Imagining Aaron Burr and Haiti in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History

Strangely, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek can help contemporary readers understand the significance of Leonora Sansay’s fascinating and only recently rediscovered novel of Caribbean intrigue, Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808). Defending the Iraq War, Rumsfeld classified the threats posed by Iraq’s weapons: 1) known knowns, or what we know that we know; 2) known unknowns, or what we know that we don’t yet know; and 3) unknown unknowns, or what we don’t even know that we don’t yet know. According to Rumsfeld, these unknown unknowns were the gravest threat, the unanticipated weapons of mass destruction secretly in manufacture or ready for deployment. Žižek responded to this “amateur philosophising” in the Guardian. He cleverly noted that Rumsfeld left out a fourth category: “the ‘unknown knowns,’ things we don’t know that we know,” or, “the Freudian unconscious.” Although Rumsfeld believed that the unknown unknowns were most disturbing, “the Abu Ghraib scandal shows where the main dangers actually are in the ‘unknown knowns,’ the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.”

This structure of known/unknown is oddly germane to the development of early republican imaginative prose and especially to Sansay’s peculiar novel. Secret History exposes the unknown known of early republican culture: the nation’s repressed struggle with slavery and the universalist principles embraced in its foundational documents. Turning to fiction, Sansay capitalized on the pioneers of the early American novel but also leveraged the popular appetite for partisan exposé, the indelicate literature of hagiography and partisan penchant for character assassination. Though obscure in its own time and as of yet in ours, too, her synthesis of fiction and biography ought to be recognized as a significant development in American fiction, one that influenced the mock-historical imagination of Washington Irving, the broad historical canvas of James Fenimore Cooper, and the revisionist novels of Gore Vidal. Secret History is a self-consciously diagnostic, imaginative exploration of trends in American letters and their relationship to broader social and political contexts. It’s a great read, but it’s also a tremendously rich experiment in stretching the potential of fiction in the early nineteenth century.

Details about Sansay’s life are sparse. Here’s a summary of what we know: after a many-years’-long relationship with future vice president Aaron Burr, Sansay married a refugee planter from Saint Domingue. Louis Sansay had left his plantation behind at the apex of the slave revolt that would ultimately result in the founding of Haiti in 1804. The Haitian Revolution has so many twists and turns that no satisfactory account can be rendered here, but it should suffice to note that in 1802 the French military reinvaded its break-away colony, seeking to reinstitute slavery and overthrow the revolution’s ambitious leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture. L’Ouverture, a former slave, had promulgated a constitution in 1801 and effectively declared independence. He named himself general in chief for life, established a state religion, and warranted trade relations with the United States, arguably a counterrevolutionary, anti-Jacobin agenda. The constitution turned Toussaint into an object of intense fascination and critical scrutiny in the States; the document was almost immediately translated and widely circulated in the American press in the fall of 1801.

The French invasion abruptly curtailed Toussaint’s rule. In 1802, he was captured, imprisoned, and transported to France, where he would die. Some were extremely gratified by this turn of events. If the chronology of Secret History is to be believed, Louis Sansay and his twenty-nine-year-old wife Leonora arrived back in Saint Domingue on the very date that the defeated Toussaint was embarked for France. Hoping to reclaim his plantation, Louis banked on the triumph of French colonial rule. Leonora accompanied him reluctantly. A letter from Louis Sansay to Burr requests aid to convince Leonora to return to New York; she had apparently run off for Burr’s protection in Washington. Louis feared his wife was having an affair, but it does not appear that Burr was the suspected adulterer. For his part, Burr apparently coaxed Leonora to rejoin her husband. In the end, Louis Sansay was disappointed; France retained control over the island for less than two years before Haiti successfully declared its independence.

The plot of Secret History closely corresponds to this historical record. In it, St. Louis and his beautiful wife Clara arrive in Saint Domingue in 1802, a strained marital relationship is revealed, and finally, as history indicates, once the liberated slaves defeat the expedition sent to re-enslave them, flight to refugee asylums elsewhere in the Caribbean ensues. Leonora’s reasons for returning, alone, to Pennsylvania in 1804 are suggested by the novel’s conclusion, where Clara is subjected to marital abuse, has aqua fortis, an acidic, thrown in her face, and is raped by her husband. Clara’s flight from revolutionary Saint Domingue is thus doubled in her flight from the abusive St. Louis. Eventually, she reconnects with her sister, returns to the United States and also, presumably, to Burr. Clara’s transformation—from victim to liberated, island-hopping, ethnographer of the Caribbean—drives the second half of the novel. It is a story of a woman in flight from both domestic and socio-political strife who finds resources of hope in independence and a series of female-bonding and class-blurring experiences. And as for Sansay? We know that Sansay rendezvoused with Burr and participated in his alleged conspiracy to colonize the western territories; she shows up in court records as a letter carrier for Burr and his associates. But with Burr’s acquittal and subsequent exile to Europe, Sansay turned to fiction, publishing Secret History and Laura almost before the dust of the spectacular trial had settled.

So what makes this novel fit the bill for a starring role in early nineteenth-century American letters? Neither the fascinating details of Sansay’s life nor the plot of her eminently readable novel makes Secret History into much more than a recovered work of women’s writing or an interesting novelization of trans-Caribbean travel amid the tumult of slave insurrection. Rather, it is Sansay’s literary insight that most intrigues. And here, I return to amplify my initial assertion: Leonora Sansay’s Secret History illuminates the early republic’s “unknown known”—its political unconscious—with incredible precision. It makes manifest the young republic’s dominant but repressed problem: a republic founded on liberty that held a vast population in bondage.

Sansay’s title alone is a rich object of inquiry and deserves to be presented whole: Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo, in a Series of Letters Written By A Lady At Cape Francois To Colonel Burr, Late Vice-President Of The United States, Principally During The Command Of General Rochambeau. What can we learn here? For one, there is no admission that the book is a work of fiction. Although it was long considered a historical work, Sansay herself described “the Story of Clara” as a romance in a letter to Burr.

The title moreover shows how Sansay positioned her work in a publishing environment dominated by novels from Europe and the domestic obsession with partisan disputes fought out through contrary biographical sketches of the Founding Fathers. Mason Locke Weems had published his first edition of The Life of Washington in 1800. Franklin’s works were being made available for the first time, and interest in the second generation political celebrities, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, was stoked through a thoroughly partisan press war. If Secret History gestures to Haiti as the latent but yet unexcavated core of early republican culture, Sansay’s reference to Colonel Burr in her title posits that this oddly enigmatic and politically ambivalent figure offered an occasion for making such a claim. Burr, who personified an underlying disorder, disrupted the cults of personality nourished by the partisans of the 1800s in a manner comparable to the way the Haitian Revolution disturbed the self-absorbed fancies of the American political imagination.

As with the permutations of known and unknown, Sansay’s title gestures at four strands of early republican writing circa 1808 and, in combining these, asserts a common, fundamental thread. The known known corresponds to the rationalist strain of late eighteenth-century fiction, exemplified by Charles Brockden Brown and, in England, the political fiction of William Godwin, especially Caleb Williams. These novelists adapted a gothic aura of mystery and supernaturalism to show the costs of not acting on what ought to have been known about the material world. In Secret History, this corresponds to the manifest content of the secret history to be revealed. The known unknown aptly describes the thinly veiled romans à clef (fictional representations of real events and real people with the names altered) such as William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy and Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, both of which took actual New England sex scandals as bases for their plots. Here, rumor circulates and feeds speculation about the unknown motivations of private individuals whose private actions have attracted intense public interest. These novels manifest what is supposedly known about what remains, in fact, unknown, the moral coding of private misfortune, often through epistolary correspondence made visible for public consumption. Sansay, too, adopts the epistolary form and teases her readers with a tale of seduction, marital violence, and flight. Sansay’s use of Saint Domingue and its revolutionary chaos for her novel’s setting denotes the unknown unknown, the undisclosed intentions of Toussaint, the secret plots of southern slaves, the widespread fear of insurrection, and the lurking fear that discussions of potential insurgency would somehow inspire real insurgency. And finally, the unknown known is brought to the surface through Sansay’s enigmatic reference to Burr, that “Forgotten Founder,” to quote Nancy Isenberg. As with the revolution in Saint Domingue, which revealed strange affinities once placed in service of partisan struggle, Burr disrupted the symbolic coding of the founders. Here we find Sansay’s stunning insight: Haiti and Burr, placed literally on the same page, reveal the partisan frenzy of character assassination and hagiography for a shell game, one that displaced slavery from public consciousness.

There is a notable dead period in the production of domestic fiction after the turn of the nineteenth century. Charles Brockden Brown abandoned writing novels, while Tabitha Tenney, Hannah Foster, and Susanna Rowson turned to more explicit but narrowly pedagogical projects—conduct books for young women. If domestically produced fiction went into hiatus in this first decade, it was in part replaced by the production of partisan biographical sketches of political celebrities.

“It has become customary of late with the federal or tory editors to reprobate the revolution which gave freedom and independence to this country,” wrote Democratic-Republican editor William Duane in “TORYISM called FEDERALISM.” These very same editors, he continued, noting a paradox, “in the same papers eulogize Washington as the greatest and best of men.” The symbolic elevation of Washington had intensified after his death in 1799, and Duane was correct to suspect a partisan motivation. Eulogies and hagiographic character studies were written in spades. Here, Mason Locke Weems’s Life of Washington may be the fullest expression of Federalist nostalgia. In Weems, Democratic-Republicans had a worthy adversary, who crafted a counterrevolutionary but almost saintly portrait of Washington that made Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party appear to be a coven of atheists, radicals, and traitors. Infamous for creating the myth of Washington and the cherry tree, Weems’s key theme was that Washington was a deeply religious man and that those who aimed to lead after his death, but failed to live up to the standards he had set, fell short because they lacked religious faith. Washington the rebel was displaced by Washington the saint of a lost golden age of virtue and stability. As with Weems’s Life, the canonization of Washington often accompanied harsh criticism of the current administration. An early occasion for criticism was Jefferson’s decision to invite Thomas Paine to return from France. Paine’s efforts on behalf of American independence had been eclipsed once he wrote The Age of Reason, within which Federalists divined Paine’s atheism, and after he had had the temerity to publicly criticize Washington in a widely reprinted letter. Jefferson’s patronage left the third president open to charges of a too enthusiastic Francophilia or worse, Jacobinism. Unlike Washington, whose virtues were martial, pragmatic, and confident, Jefferson’s fawning over revolutionary France made him sycophantic, overly philosophical, and weak. His “hand is well enough qualified for the nice adjustment of quadrants and telescopes, but far too feeble and unsteady for managing the helm of government,” wrote Charles Brockden Brown in an anonymously published pamphlet in 1803.

Republicans also played the character assassination game. We’ve already seen how William Duane used the Aurora to ridicule Federalist Tories. The publication in 1802 of John Wood’s History of the Administration of John Adams reached new heights of sarcasm. In his History, Wood, a hack journalist and faithful Jeffersonian, drew favorable character sketches of Jefferson and Burr while pillorying former president Adams and other Federalist luminaries. Fearful that the character sketches were so scurrilous as to harm Republican credibility, Burr bought up all the remaining copies. Not only had the damage already been done, but Burr’s move only spurred the next round of recriminations. Not long after, James Cheatham, one of Jefferson’s harshest critics, published A Narrative of the Suppression by Colonel Burr of the History of the Administration of John Adams, which sought to expose Burr for double-dealing, a threat to both Republicans and Federalists alike. Burrites responded with their own publications in defense of Burr, An Examination of the Various Charges Exhibited Against Aaron Burr, Esq. being but one example .

Burr had Federalist supporters but also had Hamilton as his vociferous nemesis; he was embraced but later spurned by Jeffersonians after the election of 1800; he was targeted as well by New York’s Republican dynasty, the so-called Clintonian Faction; and following Burr’s duel with Alexander Hamilton, he became a figure of desire and disgust for both parties. This was the Aaron Burr presciently identified in Sansay’s title, that odd spectre who appears in the epistolary novel only as the silent recipient of letters.

What about Burr made him essential to Sansay’s narrative design? In 1808, he transfixed the public imagination. Not only had he, while the sitting vice president, killed Alexander Hamilton, but he had also recently been acquitted of treason at a wildly engrossing trial in Virginia where spectacular criminal allegations were leveled and an all-star cast of cultural celebrities made significant appearances. Within the partisan tally of legitimate and illegitimate founders, Burr played an indefinite but clearly disruptive role. He had long been associated with sexual deviance and wholly self-interested political machinations. Though a Republican vice president, Burr soon became a favorite son of disempowered Federalists who saw in this grandson of Jonathan Edwards—fine New England stock—a potential turncoat ally. Object of both attraction and repulsion from both nominal friends and nominal enemies, Burr might have been identified with the same symbolic attachments generated by Toussaint L’Ouverture had his contemporaries been willing, as Sansay seems to have been, to see the relationship between Saint Domingue and the biographical obsession with the nation’s founders.

Charles Brockden Brown may have been first to present Toussaint L’Ouverture using a language similar to that usually reserved for celebrations of Washington’s legacy. Criticizing Jeffersonian America in yet another anonymous pamphlet of 1803, Brown assumed the voice of a French counselor of state to argue that Americans had become weak, sullied by self-interested compulsions for personal gain. Aloof to such declension, the intellectual Jefferson was effete, dilatory, and overly bookish—completely ineffective. Toussaint, by contrast, had crafted a ragtag militia of liberated slaves into a disciplined military corps now on the verge of defeating Napoleon’s storied forces. It sounds a lot like Washington at Valley Forge! Jefferson, who never carried arms in the American Revolution, was weak and cowardly; Toussaint was strong, a leader of men, determinate, and in later accounts, a committed Christian as well—all qualities that had animated the recent sketches of Washington. Soon, James Callendar began circulating rumors of Jefferson’s affair with his slave Sally Hemings, a further indication of Republican hypocrisy and moral decline. Toussaint was the publicly esteemed black general; Sally Hemings, by contrast, exposed the scandalous secret life of the slaveholder. The black general of Saint Domingue was preferable to the “Negro president,” so-called not for the Hemings affair but for relying on the electoral advantage given southern states in the constitution’s three-fifths clause. Toussaint fought the France of Federalist ire, while Jefferson co-opted the shameful bonus of the slave population to win power and entrust American policy to the dictates of French puppet masters.

This admiration for Toussaint became a standard Federalist posture. The party of Washington and Adams admired Toussaint for reestablishing order, privileging internal economic stability, strengthening mercantile trade agreements with the United States, reinstating a state religion, and sticking it to revolutionary France and Napoleon. Evidence of this is peppered throughout the Federalist press in 1801, not long after Jefferson’s inauguration. One example was a widely reprinted article entitled “Character of the Celebrated Black General, Toussaint L’ouverture,” a short text that described the “extraordinary man” in terms of his intelligence, achievements, gratitude, and humanity but above all his pragmatism.

Almost as soon as their own standard bearers had lost the reins of government and their heroic patriarch had died, Federalists stumbled upon an ideal replacement in Toussaint. In fact, Toussaint may have even temporarily superseded Washington—in a sense, a better Federalist than the former president. It was Toussaint who was able to enact a constitution, maintain its authority, and to create the order and stability to which Federalists had always aspired but had failed to secure in the nation’s first decade. Toussaint faced no comparable internal dissention—no Shays, Fries, or Whiskey rebellions. No opposition party had formed to contest his legitimacy. Electoral defeat in 1800, then, was not only a sign of the people being led astray by irresponsible demagoguery but also an indictment of the incomplete program of republicanism that Federalists had envisioned and crafted.

By contrast, Democratic-Republicans railed against Toussaint’s rise and the quasi-independent state he had created. They identified him as a tyrant who lurked beneath a thin veneer of republicanism. They criticized Toussaint’s constitution, which installed him in power for life and gave him broad authority to censor the press, critiques not much different than those previously leveled against supposed monarchist John Adams and his infamous Alien and Sedition Acts. Moreover, Democratic-Republicans also began to draw out the implications of independence in Saint Domingue for race relations at home. The Aurora‘s Duane urged Congress to relax naturalization regulations so that more European whites could be enticed to immigrate to the southern states. This, he argued, would balance out racial demographics and help prevent an insurgency among domestic slaves. “[M]ore can and should be thought and done [on this subject],” he concluded, “than ought to be published.”

Thus, while Federalists depicted Toussaint as if he could, sans race and foreign origin, take a place in the pantheon of Founding Fathers and assessed Jefferson as increasingly inadequate, Democratic-Republicans leveraged racial anxieties surrounding Saint Domingue to cast Federalists as naively out of touch with the times and dangerously flirting with the nation’s potential destruction. In both cases, however, each used Toussaint as a means to score points in the ongoing partisan battles preceding and following regime change in the United States. Such partisanship occluded the more meaningful, if latent, truth that the passage of authority from Washington to Jefferson, from one Virginian to another, did nothing to resolve slavery’s intransigent grip on the republic.

Instead, partisans on both sides continued to produce biographical sketches of celebrity surrogates. The drive to elevate or disparage the nation’s founding figures both hid and symptomatically revealed this known unknown of America’s political unconscious. The substitution through displacement replayed the stilted drama of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, its awkward euphemisms for slavery—”Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” (Article I, section 9)—and the twenty-year-long prohibition against discussing regulation of the slave trade itself (Article IX, section 1). Now nearing the end of that twenty-year period of institutionalized, collective repression, a contest between rival cults of personality repeated the original dynamic. Hagiography and character assassination covered what everyone knew but could not yet acknowledge as the childless Washington—a slaveholder, yes, but also the model of southern civility and benevolence—yielded to Jefferson, an abstruse, philosophizing coward, who slept with his own slaves and peopled the nation with his unacknowledged offspring.

Like Toussaint, Aaron Burr was similarly an object of desire and disgust. If the diverse attachments to Toussaint briefly named blackness and slavery as the underpinnings of partisan dispute, Burr soon came to fill and obscure that insight, a political, psychical, and deracinated surrogate. Though interest in Toussaint and his constitution was intense, it was also short lived. The fascination with Burr may be understood to extend the psychic and regionally differentiated reception of the Black Caesar. Burr allowed for the repression of the racial issue surrounding celebration or castigation of Toussaint. Gone but, like Freudian slips or symptoms of unconscious drives, still present, race became the unknown but known dilemma, its psychic energy tagged to Burr’s suspicious, mysterious character.

Leonora Sansay’s fictional experiments in Secret History unveil these unknown knowns, those repressed desires and practices that we pretend not to know about although they underlie or even undermine the values Americans consciously held dear. These are the issues brought to the fore when Sansay placed Aaron Burr on the title page of her inaugural publication, one that explicitly pivoted on the aftermath of the revolt on Saint Domingue. There she implied that a broadly held American fantasy had condensed Haiti, its black general, the idea of Black Republicanism, domestic slavery, and the developing and regional conflict over its future in the figure of Burr, that sexually suspect killer, that double-faced and self-interested traitor. She put innovative narrative strategies to the task of unpacking Americans’ vague but complex racial fantasies and in turn rejuvenated domestic fiction.

To conclude, I want to consider but one example from the novel itself where, as with the title and its intimate reference to Aaron Burr, history is recast as provocative, reshaped to indicate that more is going on behind the scenes. When Clara first visits General Rochambeau, who would be the last white French governor to rule Saint Domingue, at his government house in Cap François, she enters a hall decorated with military trophies and with walls each graced with the names of “some distinguished chief.” Clara boldly and perhaps flirtatiously remarks that Washington had no place in the display. This prompts Rochambeau, already thoroughly enthralled by Clara’s charms and ready to dispatch her husband so as to rid himself of a rival to her affections, to correct the oversight in advance of her next visit. A new panel has since been added reading, “Washington, Liberty, and Independence!” Not only do we see the name Washington used as a token for seduction; grouped with Napoleon and Frederic the Great, Washington’s image is also appropriated to the class of martial, European leaders. The reference to liberty and independence can only be ironic as Rochambeau continues his suppression of a slave revolt and exercises autocratic control over the remaining white inhabitants.

With Clara’s flight from Saint Domingue and, later, from marital turmoil, Sansay points toward an alternative, less cynical resolution all made possible only once the former slaves of Saint Domingue make their final push to claim independence. Thus, unlike other women authors from her era, Sansay did not retreat to the boarding school to compensate for a truncated access to civic participation. Rather, she found a utopian potential in Caribbean migration spurred by the disruptions of a massive slave revolt. The longed for reunion with Burr, the participation in his supposed conspiracy, and the use of his allure to reach for a publicly resonant voice together create powerful links between the disruptive Burr, the Haitian revolt, and a woman’s innovative use of fiction as a means of civic and social agency.

Further Reading:

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura are available from Broadview Press. A critical appraisal of the novel is Elizabeth M. Dillon’s “The Secret History of the Early American Novel: Leonora Sansay and Revolution in Saint-Domingue,” Novel 40:1/2 (2006): 77-105. Colin Dayan was the first to recognize Secret History‘s literary qualities in her book Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, Calif., 1995). On the diplomatic history of Haiti and the United States see Gordon Brown, Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (Jackson, Miss., 2005) and Phillipe Girard’s recent article, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Diplomacy, 1798-1802,” in William and Mary Quarterly 66:1 (2009): 87-124. An English language collection of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s writings, including a translation of the 1801 constitution, is available from Verso with an introduction by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. There are many excellent books about the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint L’Ouverture more generally. Among the most recent are Laurent Dubois’s Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) and Madison Smartt Bell’s Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York, 2007). There are also many good biographies of Aaron Burr, including but not limited to Nathan Schachner’s classic Aaron Burr, A Biography (New York, 1937) and Nancy Isenberg’s more recent Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York, 2007).

Michael Drexler and Ed White, of the University of Florida, are completing a book entitled The Traumatic Colonel: The Burr of American Literature, in which the argument above is presented in greater detail and with a broader scope. One chapter, entitled “Secret Witness; or The Fantasy Structure of U.S. Republicanism,” will appear in Early American Literature 44:2 (2009). Another on Toussaint’s constitution in the U.S. press will appear in the Blackwell Companion to African-American Literature.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Michael J. Drexler teaches American literature at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. His edition of Leonora Sansay’s Secret History and Laura is available from Broadview Press. He has also coedited Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives in Early African-American Literature (2008) with Ed White.

A discussion between Madison Smartt Bell and Laurent Dubois

Laurent Dubois: To start off our discussion, I thought I might ask you a question. I was struck in reading your biography of Toussaint Louverture how it both followed the narrative presented in your Haitian Revolution trilogy and also, of course, represented a very different narrative style. What was it like writing a biography after having written so elegantly, but also imaginatively, about Louverture in your novels?

Madison Smartt Bell: I’ve spent most of my writing time on fiction since the early 1980s, so the idea that I can’t make anything up took some getting used to at first. That said, I think biography and novels both require the writer to imagine the character—to breathe life into what you can construct from the information you have. That’s particularly true in the case of Toussaint, a character who has to be constructed out of rather small and widely scattered shards. It actually helped me quite a bit that I never set out to fictionalize him much in the novels either—I always meant to portray him as I believe him really to have been (and I had plenty of room to work out my make-it-up jones on the horde of fictional characters). So in fact I had done a lot of the preliminary work of projecting the character already. The difference was supporting the projection with facts alone (not to mention a few reasonable conjectures).

Which leads to a question I wanted to ask you—there’s a recent trend of a sort of novelistic characterization of historical figures in works of history, and since Avengers of the New World is the first place I saw it, I sort of wondered if you started it. David Bell does it in his new book The First Total War, using as one of a number of wandering heroes Lauzun, a personage previously unknown to nonspecialists, I think. A forthcoming book about North American colonists and Indians by Peter Silver uses similar techniques. And there is the forthcoming Boone, by Robert Morgan. I don’t really remember seeing this before Avengers, except for Shelby Foote, but he’s another crossover from fiction writing, and he always understood himself as writing a sort of Homeric epic (while Homer probably understood himself as recording history . . .  but that’s another story . . .  ).

LD: I think there has always been cross-fertilization between history and literature, going way back, and certainly among the great nineteenth-century historians like Michelet in France, Parkman in the United States, and also Thomas Madiou in Haiti. But I think you are right that there is a kind of new trend in a lot of works of history to bring in relatively unknown people and make them into characters, braiding their stories through whatever larger narrative is being told. You can see this in Simon Schama’s work, notably in his recent Rough Crossings; in Shelby Foote; in work by Natalie Davis; and many other places.

Although different writers obviously do this for different reasons, I think it has something to do both with developments within the field of history and with the continuing inspiration provided by literature to historians. In part, bringing in lesser-known figures is a way of incorporating the insights of social history, particularly the idea that we need to understand people’s everyday life and everyday struggles, and also to multiply and expand our notion of who the actors of history are. It also allows writers—and it allowed me in Avengers—to foreground the interpretive problems of history writing, particularly the need to situate and contextualize the sources we use to get at that history, by effectively turning our sources into characters. So, for instance, in Avengers it was important to me to present Moreau de Saint-Méry as a character, in a sense, precisely because I was depending on him so much to help me describe Saint-Domingue. Not only do such characters provide a narrative strand that you can carry through the story, they also remind readers that what they are reading is itself based on the writings of people who lived through the period and who had their own personalities, blind-spots, and obsessions.

One of the things I liked about your novels was that people who I think of primarily as historical sources showed up as characters—I’m thinking notably of Descourtilz in The Stone that the Builder Refused (2004)—and I was curious whether you included them in part with a similar intention of acknowledging and highlighting the works you were drawing on for the novel.

MSB: Well, Descourtilz certainly was a character, in the sense that my grandmother would have used the word—that is, an unusual person of marked eccentricity, perhaps. I think I had already committed to the character of Doctor Hébert before I crossed Descourtilz’s trail. For the novelistic purposes they might have been collapsed into one character but . . .  my doctor is more politically and socially progressive than Descourtilz portrays himself to have been, and then I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of treating real persons as fictional characters to any great extent—such as projecting their inner lives or portraying them in important actions that the record doesn’t prove they undertook. But there was an irresistible quality to Descourtilz as a character—because of his cranky but acute appraisals of things and the fact that he really was bang in the center of key episodes like the battle at la Crête à Pierrot. So I brought him and my doctor together there and used them more or less as foils for each other.

Other minor historical players who seemed to give me something to attach to were the Procurator Gros and, especially, Pamphile de Lacroix, himself a sophisticated writer with a flair for characterizing others directly and himself rather more indirectly.

And yes, everyone does have his own ax to grind! That’s one of the reasons why, in the history of Saint Domingue, it’s so hard to get to a definitive understanding of (for example) whether there was or was not a royalist conspiracy to touch off the insurrection of 1791—because every reporter on that point had a propagandistic purpose . . .  among other things . . .

Meanwhile, here is something that began to puzzle me while writing the biography: the fact of Toussaint’s case is that he had been free for fifteen years or so when the first rising erupted on the Northern Plain. We know that he owned at least a few slaves. The description of his property to Cafarelli at the end suggests that he might well have owned more than a few slaves . . .  to take care of the very significant amount of real estate in his possession. Thanks to the extent of his holdings, in some ways Toussaint had more common interest with the grand blanc proprietor class (which included his friends and associates Bayon de Libertat and colonels Cambefort and Touzard). Yet the power base for revolution was with the great mass of slaves who became the nouveau libres. Toussaint in all his rhetoric identified himself with that group, to which he did not in fact belong.

What puzzles me is why nobody ever attacked him on this point of weakness. That Toussaint was a free owner of land and slaves for over a decade before the revolution could not have been a total secret and it certainly would have hurt his identification with the nouveau libres, had it become generally known. Enemies who did all they could to damage him (Kerverseau, Sonthonax, Rigaud) somehow never mentioned this point. Indeed until the 1970s the version where Toussaint breaks the chains of his own slavery in 1791 became part of his image and legend. Do you have any idea how he was able to spin that story so successfully?

LD: You are right—and you show well in your novels and in the biography—that Louverture was a masterful stylist, in his writings and (so far as we can tell) in his speeches, and he does seem to have been remarkably successful at broadcasting a partial narrative of his own life, one that tied him to thenouveau libres. Although I did notice with interest in your biography that at one point Louverture basically admitted that he had been free before the revolution, an admission that interestingly most historians overlooked until 1977, when Gabriel Debien and his colleagues published their famous article in Conjonction showing that he had been free and a slave owner before the revolution. I think Louverture was not the only one invested in a narrative of his life that tied him to thenouveau libres masses.

I do think some of his enemies, particularly Sonthonax, did attack him on this point of weakness, though somewhat indirectly, when they criticized him for being too soft onémigrés (like his former owner) and too close to the grand-blanc class. Sonthonax tried hard at some points (especially after his expulsion from the colony) to argue that Louverture was in fact quite a counterrevolutionary. Most of the powerful white leaders who were enemies of Louverture by the late 1790s and early 1800s, however, were conservative enough that attacking him for his ties to the planter class wouldn’t have made sense. I do think that, among some of thenouveau libres, there always lingered some suspicion about his loyalties, especially by the late 1790s as his regime became more and more coercive and focused on plantation production. Moïse’s uprising, for instance, was partly driven, I think, by the sense that Louverture was ultimately not the friend of the nouveau libres. This is one place where it is actually remarkable how little we really know and where there is a lot of research that could be done in the rich sources from the period: What did people in Saint-Domingue really think of Louverture, of his representatives, of his regime? How did they experience his regulations on a daily level, not only in the cities, but in the countryside? I think it would be possible to reconstruct some of this through more archival research, and it would be great to deepen our understanding of this.

One of the many books based on the idea that Louverture had in fact been a slave until the revolution is C. L. R. James’s classic Black Jacobins (1963). I know this book was an inspiration to you as you started your trilogy. Can you tell us a bit about your encounter with that book, about whether you had heard about the Haitian Revolution before reading it, and more broadly about what drove you to decide to write novels about the event?

MSB: Well, let me double back to those attacks on Toussaint for being a counterrevolutionary. Moïse, a fairly inscrutable character who has left only a few of his words in the record, certainly did blame and mistrust Toussaint for his friendliness to whites of the slave-master class. He may have complained that Toussaint himself had been a slave master, and we don’t know about it. But Sonthonax never made that explicit complaint—though it would have been a very powerful piece of evidence supporting his accusation that Toussaint was a counterrevolutionary . . .  though he almost certainly must have known about it (seeing among other things that he was married by then to a femme de couleur of prominent standing—surely she would have known). Seems weird to me.

As for the experience of Toussaint’s regulations, etc., as usual the eyewitness reports are almost all written by blancs. Descourtilz is vociferous on the subject as I’m sure you know. The manuscript of your namesake Pélage-Marie Duboys has a lot to say about it. This reporter is not exactly objective either, but his observations about the intrusion of the military into absolutely everything under Toussaint’s rule are pretty interesting, especially considering the course that sort of thing has taken in later Haitian history.

The first book I read about the Haitian Revolution (back in 1983) was Ralph Korngold’s Citizen Toussaint (1945), which was enough on its own to give me my first notion of writing a novel about the story. One of the first things to strike me was that I had not heard of the Haitian Revolution before—though it struck me that it was a story all U.S. citizens ought to know. Things have changed a bit since then—the Haitian Revolution is featured in my daughter’s high school history textbook, for example—but I don’t think that would have been true even ten years ago.

In the 1980s (and on up until Avengers came out) The Black Jacobins was the Anglophone bible for the Haitian Revolution. I reread it recently in order to write a commentary for a new Italian edition and was struck by how very good it still is, despite being dated by errors in factual matters that had not been discovered at the time of James’s writing.

I would say that James is, well, possessed by Toussaint’s version of his own story. He tells it, beautifully, just the way Toussaint wanted it told. And I believe that version of the story really is substantially true, though it has been shaped, sculpted, and improved just a little to make it more effective in the purposes for which it was intended. Translate the situation into the terms of Vodou and one might say that James’s work stands as an extraordinary service to the spirit of Toussaint.

Further Reading:

The full titles of works mentioned in this discussion are David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, 2007); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (New York, 2006); Gabriel Debien, Jean Fouchard, and Marie Antoinette Menier, “Toussaint Louverture avant 1789: Légendes et Réalités,” Conjonction 134 (June-July 1977); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1963; rev. ed., London, 1980).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels and two collections of short stories. All Souls Rising, the first of Bell’s three-volume Haitian Revolution trilogy, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. Bell’s most recent book is Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (2007).

Laurent Dubois, professor of history and romance studies at Duke University, is the author of the award-winning A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2004) and Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004), which was a Los Angeles Times best book of 2004.

In 1995 anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot made an elegant case for the difficulty of truly understanding important aspects of Western history without considering the presence of Haiti. Or, rather, its absence. The word “history,” Trouillot reminded, encompasses both past events and their telling. Haiti, and the Haitian Revolution, had fallen into the space between the two iterations. In lifting it out, historians would better see the dynamics that made it “unthinkable” to contemporaries and which “silenced” it in histories thereafter, dynamics that similarly stood behind the story of western development and dominance. While the epistemological merits of Trouillot’s challenge have been assessed over the past decade-plus, his call has mostly been answered. A voluminous body of work has collectively recovered events in Revolutionary Saint Domingue within wider contexts. As a result, especially among historians of the Atlantic world over the eighteenth century, it is Haiti’s absence that has become “unthinkable.”

These two books place Ashli White and Matthew Clavin on the crest of this wave as it reaches American historians. White’s focus is the post-Revolutionary republic and Clavin’s the antebellum and Civil War period. In recovering the vibrant presence of Saint Domingue/Haiti in these American moments, both books exemplify the power and promise of adopting an Atlantic lens in telling a national story, a perspective David Armitage has termed “cis-Atlantic.” In pushing against the nation methodologically, each offers a new view onto the familiar landscape of American political development between the Revolution and Reconstruction. While neither work makes a case for a definitive Haitian imprint, both—separately and in tandem—suggest that the Haitian presence shaped the trajectory of developments in the United States in important ways.

The connective tissue—the sine qua non behind Haiti’s capacity in the United States—is the character of the Haitian Revolution, as observers understood it. To be sure, colonial Saint Domingue produced physical connections as well, but the force of its presence in these works is ideational. White, in treating Saint Domingue’s emanations in the United States as the events of the Revolution were unfolding—events only demarcated as “Haitian” or “revolutionary” later—gives us access to American ideas about their own post-Revolutionary republic. Her accomplishment is to show how American identity was relational and unfixed; the meaning of the American Revolution was made in its aftermath and with the ongoing events in Saint Domingue as context. This is an approach that will resonate with historians of culture and politics in other post-colonial settings. Clavin’s period, by contrast, is one in which “Hayti” was an established fact among Americans. Here too, however, the meaning of “America” was in flux. Though he doesn’t expressly interrogate the notion of the American Civil War as a “second American Revolution,” Clavin’s focus is the ways in which those sorts of debates were strained through the Haitian idiom. Readers won’t be able to leave these books with a sense that the arc of United States history was in any sense set in stone or the product of transcendent ideals moving over time. Neither White nor Clavin is interested in locating or analyzing the essence of the American Revolution or Civil War as foundational moments. Instead, each posits a fluid ideological environment, one in which a wide spectrum of ideas and directions was possible. Taken together, they show how the presence of Saint Domingue/Haiti as a radical alternative mattered.

In Encountering Revolution, Ashli White effectively dismantles the modern American proclivity toward viewing Haiti as marginal. Though tacitly allowing the littoral communities that produce most of her evidence to stand in for the nation as a whole, her chapters evoke an Atlantic community in which French Saint Domingue and contemporary America were interconnected by a web whose filaments were both conceptual and corporeal. As such, events in Saint Domingue accessed Americans’ ideas about their position in the world and their relationship to the revolutionary shifts going on around it. In working out the premises behind that relationship, Americans confronted the tension between their connections with these “fellow men” and the potential disruptions produced (at least theoretically) by admitting what could be dangerous Atlantic elements. Different Americans saw different dangers: one person’s radical was another’s republican; the threat produced by “French Negroes” might inspire the domestic downtrodden; the changing nature of the rebellion in Saint Domingue—whether conceived of as a movement for colonial autonomy, against slavery, for emancipation, against royalist counterrevolutionaries, or, eventually, for independence—determined which particular American fear might be triggered.

White’s argument is that, paradoxically, that fear was a source of stability. Events in Saint Domingue offered white Americans opportunities to make public demonstrations. If, as a French colony, Saint Domingue tested the universality of republican bonds, it also presented Americans with an occasion to assert their republic’s rectitude. If the complexity and longevity of disruptions in the French colony raised problems that made the seams of that American republican identity emerge, White shows that many issues were disentangled from any explicit position on the increasingly divisive French Revolution and instead treated on “neutral ground” (85) as a question of humanitarian aid, pushing the factors that divided (white) Americans aside. In other spheres, particular facets of developments in Saint Domingue made such elisions more difficult, but White argues that the net effect was the same. She deftly shows how the white refugees from the colony, whose politics were varied, failed to “fit” neatly into the burgeoning Federalist and Democratic Republican divide. While this suggests the complexity involved in charting coherent positions in the revolutionary Atlantic world, White argues that American politicos largely ignored such variances. Here as elsewhere, Americans found what they were looking for in Saint Domingue: Federalists argued that its lesson by the mid-1790s was the need to avoid sweeping changes and fundamentally challenge order; Democratic Republicans saw in the colony’s travails a clear message that racial divisions were dangerous and that white solidarity was the best basis for political stability, as well for as expanded liberty.

Among white Americans, Saint Domingue’s meaning for slavery was far easier to reconcile with prominent ideas about the institution than their recurrent hysterical evocations of “the horrors of St. Domingo” might suggest. Even as they disagreed over whether antislavery efforts or slavery itself caused the revolt, White shows that white Americans largely joining in a self-congratulatory notion that their presumed solution to the problem of slavery was the right one. Violence being the sign of failure, antislavery activists could hold up the cautious logic driving American gradual emancipation, while those more comfortable with slavery could settle on portrayals of American slavery as relatively benign, or imagine its end only coming with a removal of the black population altogether. The Haitian Revolution’s impact on American slavery, therefore, was to affirm its conceptualization among whites as a feature of domestic politics: white Americans followed their “impulse to particularize the Haitian Revolution in order to stave off its consequences” (138).

The “French Negroes” who embodied those consequences—the refugees of color who were among those waves of immigrants that poured into American port cities, especially after 1793—were the means by which this conceptualization took place. White argues that the fears of “imported” revolutionary resistance against slavery in the United States, while real, functioned within this basic framework of confidence. Hamstrung by their inability to truly consider black actors as political beings, various episodes of furor over seeming “contagion” from Saint Domingue were actually moments in which tensions and fears over American slavery were subsumed beneath an assertion that, if “French” influences were dangerous, the American context provided a safe and successful way for the system to endure.

This utilitarian approach, White explains, stood behind public policy toward Saint Domingue, and then Haiti, as well. Having demonstrated the pallid and almost rhetorical nature of white American fears of “St. Domingo” by the late 1790s, she shows how the Adams administration’s willingness to treat with the Louverture government stemmed from economic interests. These were “trumped” (161) by a more basic American racism, however, once Thomas Jefferson became president. Jefferson, too, could be pragmatic: while he presided over a severe curtailing of contact with first the quasi-independent colony and then with the new Haitian nation, his reticence over Napoleon’s intentions led him to withdraw his support of the French invasion. This was a significant factor in the ultimate French defeat, which, in turn, led to the American acquisition of the Louisiana Territory. The final irony the book explores is the fact that the American refusal to acknowledge or accept Haitian independence was fundamental to the availability of the lands that would produce Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.”

Of course, shadowing these white reactions and ruminations were the responses of African American communities and leaders to the people, news, and ideas of Saint Domingue/Haiti. In several compelling sections across the book, White describes episodes that reveal alternate understandings of the meaning and function of Haitian Revolutionary developments, ones that tied issues such as emancipation and independence to calls for similar expansions of freedom and liberty at home. In other cases, she describes ways that the simple disruptions produced by events in the Caribbean opened up spaces for personal declarations of independence, through self-assertion and running away. These sorts of possibilities remind us of the radical potential of this moment, an observation that serves to reemphasize White’s central argument about the stasis in the United States.

Matthew Clavin’s America is one that has inherited this legacy. Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War recovers the unfamiliar among the familiar—the enduring and pervasive presence of Haiti and the figure of Toussaint Louverture among the well-trodden discussions about slavery, abolitionism, secession, African American soldiers, and emancipation that charted the lead up to and conduct of the American Civil War. His accomplishment is to reveal that unfamiliarity to be our own, not his actors’. Clavin brings forth an astonishing array of moments in which Haiti was evoked, claimed, and discussed. Readers of White’s book won’t be surprised to find this presence in American discourse, but others might. Clavin’s task is to show how it was deployed.

Of course, during the period Clavin explores, the actual nation of Haiti existed alongside this figure. His study, therefore, is of America, not of America within an Atlantic landscape. He demonstrates the continuing relevance of the Haitian past to the American present. As such, his findings stand in tension with White’s depiction of white American knowledge of Haiti, which she argues is reductive, if active. Clavin’s study provides a picture of the enduring problems produced for Americans by the possibilities and challenge that the Haitian Revolution embodied: “St. Domingo” continued to roil American imaginations, producing fears and hopes that ribboned through antebellum American developments. At the same time, however, the fact that Haiti existed—a real place with which Americans continued to do some trade, whose political events continued to be noted in the American press because of its remarkable past, and which stood at the center of a region into which various Americans increasingly imagined expanding the nation’s influence—raises the possibility that Clavin’s conclusions about “St. Domingo’s” role may be part of an even larger story.

The story he does provide, however, is rife with implications. By the antebellum period, Clavin shows, groups of influential Americans were raising “St. Domingo” and Louverture to a host of ends and with a variety of emphases. Almost all of these were historically inaccurate—Louverture was treated synonymously with the Revolution, despite his complicated and incomplete relationship to it—but that is beside the point. The intensive, albeit flawed, public knowledge of (some) events and personalities in Saint Domingue during the 1790s goes to show that Clavin’s actors had only a generalized understanding of the Haitian Revolution. For most, it existed as a trope for racial violence.

This was a blunt instrument, one with demonstrated force. Yet Clavin demonstrates the ways it was available to a variety of purposes. In the hands of a certain strain of abolitionists, “St. Domingo” was proof of black humanity, an example of radical resistance to slavery, and a commentary on the slave system’s inherent instability. Louverture’s figure, which was developed in wildly fanciful accounts and biographies, might serve as an exemplar of black masculinity, rationality, and beneficence. To southern fire-eaters, these same images were shibboleths by which they made the case for secession: abolitionists were modern-day Sonthonaxes, wild-eyed ideologues willing to tamper with the social order no matter what the cost, fomenting bloodshed on a nightmarish scale. “St. Domingo” was a tale of white extermination.

This approach offers several important conclusions, some of which are tacit in Clavin’s chapters, others of which are made explicit. While not overtly addressing the question of the Civil War’s origins, Clavin’s findings unavoidably make slavery the center of the conflict. In a striking early chapter, he charts connections between militant black antislavery activists’ ideas about the Haitian Revolution and American episodes of armed resistance. If slave revolts such as Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy and Nat Turner’s rebellion are difficult (but not impossible) to link to “Haitian” influences, Clavin emphatically shows how John Brown expressly identified his project with the Haitian Revolution and himself with Louverture. This point suggests an under-appreciated continuity in American antislavery activity. Strands subsumed in the early republic within, among other things, the white agreements over the meaning of the Haitian Revolution that White discusses, are here found to be bursting forth in the 1840s and 1850s among white immediatists such as Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, who turned to the Haitian Revolution to advocate for armed battle in the name of universal rights. These same images empowered and enlivened proslavery secessionists, who saw a revolutionary threat in the Lincoln administration and who used the common images of Haitian violence to spell out, in horrific detail, the threat to white society its agenda would mean.

By this reading, the Civil War is a clash of irreconcilable positions, driven by extremists on both sides. Whether their turn to the Haitian Revolution makes this true, or makes it seem true, is left unstated. Brown’s actions had an unmistakable effect, but it isn’t clear whether or not the secessionists’ words are to be taken as attempts to persuade or reflections of wider Southern sentiment. Undoubtedly they were both, but without an explanation of the ways in which less extreme members of the sections related to these uses, the precise nature of Haiti’s role is hard to identify. Some in the South, for example, claimed that the union, properly run, avoided the radical threats that militant abolitionists and fire-eaters agreed emanated from the French and Haitian examples. Some in the North rejected the connection between the radicals’ agenda and their cause.

Clavin’s point—and it is an important one—is that the availability of ideas about Haiti allowed the sides to harden and the conflict to flare. These questions endure, however, in the book’s chapters treating the war itself. Here Clavin treats the unmistakably revolutionary changes that took place during the conflict. He finds Haiti and Louverture in the public eye repeatedly amid discussions around the decision to incorporate African Americans into the Union forces. He cites moments in which Haiti surfaced in and around the call for emancipation. In these instances, Haitian figures were malleable in the hands of their handlers. Louverture, now less useful as a militant, was a heroic proof of black humanity. “St. Domingo’s” horrors now functioned as proof of the dangers of delay. Clavin convincingly uses these shifts to demonstrate abolitionists’ sway in these debates, but the “cultural work” (92) done by these Haitian images isn’t as clear. Was Haiti simply a convenient means of expressing these imperatives, especially given the Union’s desperate straits in 1862? If these historical referents were fabricated in this way, what does this tell us about the character of the changes they helped usher in? Clavin’s evidence suggests that White’s Atlantic web continued to exist in the nineteenth century, but the nature of its strands, once they are mostly figurative, isn’t discussed.

To be fair, this isn’t Clavin’s intent. After recovering this presence and establishing its resonance, Clavin offers the payoff over his final three chapters in which he leaves political developments to treat questions of identity. Writ large, his argument is that images of the “horrors” of “St. Domingo” operated across the sections, ultimately contributing to a white identity that would be the basis of reconciliation when the War was over. Among African Americans, meanwhile, Haiti, and especially the figure of Louverture, served as a “touchstone” (122) that vitalized a “black” identity. Here, Clavin’s earlier claims for the “subversive” (78) nature of such references are made more fully clear. By identifying with and through Haiti, African Americans of various stations were able to push the war in radical directions. These efforts collectively refuted the intellectual bases of white supremacy and articulated a black consciousness that was neither simply pan-African nor assimilationist. Instead, their turn to Haiti demonstrated a sense of intra-Atlantic connections, one born by their act of relating temporally distant groups of slaves and people of color standing in opposition to the system of oppression that faced them both.

These are excellent points, and are sustained by numerous and effective examples. For one thing, these chapters bolster the idea that the various elisions, errors, and confusions over the Haitian past are immaterial. It is the very presence of the (constructed) idea of Haiti, Clavin argues, that served to emphasize certain possibilities, goals, and intentions among black activists and thinkers. At the same time, the generalized Haitian threat established whiteness as the centerpiece of an American nationalism, a feature that allowed it to withstand the challenges to that conceptualization. Clavin suggests that, ironically, it was American emancipation that “silenced” the Haitian Revolution. Following David Blight, he notes that, once the problem of slavery was “solved” it could be removed from the narrative of American history and sanitized in the memory of American formation. The Haitian Revolution, which all Americans agreed was about slavery, had lost its relevance, at least among whites.

Haiti, however, endured. The radicalism of the forces involved in its creation—the potential and processes conceptualized by Trouillot’s call—were seminal components of the flux that characterized the portion of the period that historians discuss as an “Age of Revolution.” White’s and Clavin’s projects show its presence and witness its functional obfuscation. Their books recognize what all contemporaries knew, but couldn’t understand: that the events in Saint Domingue were central to this “Age”; they brought it together as a site, as a logical culmination of its most radical ideas, as a motor of some of its key developments, and as a mirror by which to see the dynamics of its unfolding. The success of these books in evoking these qualities suggests possibilities for further analysis.

To understand these possibilities, it is helpful to return to Trouillot’s notion of “silencing,” especially that which went on within Haiti itself. Even the Saint Domingue/Haiti that contemporary Americans experienced was incomplete and inchoate. To be sure, the principled rejection of the social order inherent to the actions of the initial insurrectionaries was beyond contemporaries’ ken, but historians of Haiti have argued that that radical challenge endured, prompting resistance by various leaders whose efforts were active and conscious, not merely the result of their limited notions of liberty, equality and fraternity. This suggests a spectrum of radicalism operating in Saint Domingue, the most fundamental iteration of which was embodied in the efforts of ex-slaves to resist attempts to coopt, or constrain, their freedom of action—attempts made in many cases by the Revolutionary leadership itself. Scholars such as Carolyn Fick and Laurent Dubois have shown that these sorts of struggles shaped the course and meaning of Saint Domingue’s “revolutionary” moment. The “Haiti” that Clavin’s Americans discussed had thus been doubly silenced, in part by the “Louverture” they equated with it. White’s actors can be forgiven for not understanding the full nature of the challenge they were confronting, but their responses can be explored as part of its effacement.

To examine the Haitian Revolution in these terms is to evaluate it as a process, rather than as a single entity, and to expand that process forward outside the temporal boundaries by which historians like to measure “Revolutions.” It is also to reorder and re-conceptualize the “Age” of which these revolutionary moments were a part. Such an “Age” is defined less by its ideological coherence than by the broad forces (capitalism, imperialism, slavery) that formed it. That formation was made up of struggles that revealed the tensions between elements of those forces: between the emerging capitalist order and older notions of corporatist community, say, or involving competing inflections of ideas about humanity, universal rights, and personal liberty. It is an “Age” that is not easily schematized. Its politics are widened to the point where all strata of society are admissible as actors, and historical trends can hinge on contingencies and chance to a degree previously unacceptable to historians looking to demonstrate the playing out of particular ideas or interests over time. In placing the Haitian Revolution into this landscape, historians have differed over the nature of the break it represents—whether it was of a piece with other sorts of changes or sui generis. White’s analysis helps remind us that the question itself was being answered by contemporaries, people with their own conceptions of which acts and trends were “revolutionary” and what using that concept meant. This consciousness emphasizes the fact that “revolution” involved an act of ascription, one in which certain elements could be placed beyond the pale.

By dint of their cis-Atlantic perspectives, neither White nor Clavin engage with this issue directly. White’s image of a web introduces the notion that revolutionary moments around the Atlantic could be interconnected, but her interest in demonstrating the absence of a Haitian impact in America directs the force behind the “making” in her subtitle towards explaining the space between the two places, rather than their interrelation. Paradoxically, it seems that this stance derives from her focus on the refugees, figures who transcended that space. This emphasis usefully establishes the web: the refugees are physical emanations of it and their movements display its tugs. In her hands, these people and the issues they raise serve as analytic mirrors—they reveal American realities.

This conceptualization provokes further questions having to do with the extent to which the web’s strands extended through these physical bodies into the stuff of American political and racial identity. How did particular moments of radical change in Saint Domingue affect American radicalism? How far could ideas about universal citizenship, human rights, and transnational republicanism go in the United States of the 1790s? How were the moments of American pragmatism related to like shifts among those in power in the colony? White has established Saint Domingue/Haiti as a vital presence; the particular effect of that presence is not her quarry. Still, the evidence she supplies suggests that both the Haitian and American Revolutions were being “made” in her period. Trouillot’s formulation helps us see the ways the relative power of different portions of the web ultimately reduced “St. Domingo” to a shibboleth for violence and anarchy. Adopting a trans-Atlantic perspective on the “Age” as a whole raises the possibility that the American republic remained fluid in some ways, even as ideas about the American Revolution ossified. This, in turn, begs questions about the relationship between the American reaction to the Haitian Revolution writ large and a more generalized Atlantic Thermidor.

Because of the period it treats and the innovative tack it takes, Clavin’s project implicitly asks these questions. This quality makes the absence of an express treatment of the specific terms by which the “second” revolutions were delineated and discussed problematic to his overall thesis. Clavin convincingly demonstrates that his actors accessed the tortured ground White has set out. The particular emphases they excavated, however, could just as easily come from their ideas about British abolition, other slave uprisings, or separate episodes when armed subalterns fragmented a factionalized society. At a broad level, this leaves the particularly “Haitian” features of this discourse unspecified. The possibility exists, for example, that referencing Rigaud or Dessalines instead of Louverture was not simply laziness, but a particular inflection with intent. This sort of possibility, in turn, raises questions about the uses of “St. Domingo” as an expression of reality or rhetoric. Does the fluidity of Louverture’s image, for example, drive a change in ideas about the meaning of the Civil War (or about black humanity, or slavery), or does it register that such a change had occurred? Clavin amply proves the power of its deployment, but his examples leave us wanting to know more about the specific ways this history was used.

Taken together, these books offer definitive proof of the power of the silencing that Michel-Rolph Trouillot decried. The spectacular reduction of Saint Domingue, one of the most “successful” sites of the forces and peoples that constituted the Atlantic world, and its replacement with Haiti, a profoundly different but no less logical assemblage of those ingredients, was widely noticed and noted as an American phenomenon. White and Clavin have demonstrated this development, successfully producing an internationalized history of portions of the American

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

James Alexander Dun is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University.

Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation

A delicately woven ivory silk map, embroidered in the first years of the nineteenth century, offers lessons about how early Americans envisioned the future of the new nation. The fabric bears a map of the United States outlined in couched chenille, its margins only slightly torn and frayed (fig. 1). Though slightly stained and bearing minor holes, the fabric is clean and intact, as are most of the stitches upon it. In the lower right, an oval cartouche embraced by a richly embroidered tree identifies the maker as one Cecilia Lewis, and gives the year in which she stitched the map: 1809. One of the rarest extant American cartographic samplers, this map of the United States was embroidered by eighteen-year-old Cecilia Goold Lewis, a pupil at the Pleasant Valley boarding school on the banks of the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie, New York. The map is significant not only for its primary subject—the young United States—but also for its inclusion of Native American tribes (figs. 1a and 1b). And unlike other map samplers that are now held in collections on the eastern seaboard, where they were made, this map eventually made the long journey with its maker to the land of the “Outigamis” and “Chipawas” west of the Great Lakes. What can the sampler tell us about nineteenth-century culture and life in the United States, and, conversely, in what ways might historical records illuminate the object and the life of its maker?

Embodying a rich and storied history, Lewis’s map transcends its own physical materiality beyond her skill with a needle. Government census and genealogical records can help us flesh out the temporal and geographic context of the embroiderer, granddaughter of Francis Lewis, a uniform supplier and signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Elizabeth Annesley Lewis, who was held captive by the British during the Revolutionary War. Cecilia was born in the village of Flushing, Long Island, in New York on January 12, 1791, to Elizabeth Ludlow and Francis Lewis Jr., a businessman like his father. In the crucible of burgeoning revolution, her Tory maternal grandparents had vigorously objected to the marriage of their daughter to a young man whose father “would certainly be hung,” according to one history of Flushing. Given the family’s active political participation in the birth of the new nation, a sampler bearing an image of the United States might have had particular familial meaning above and beyond its value as a geography exercise.

What can the sampler tell us about nineteenth-century culture and life in the United States?

A tint of blue paint along the raised, embroidered shorelines enhances the low relief of the landmass, diffusing out to greater depths into the Atlantic and within each of the Great Lakes. Hair-fine black silk thread spells out the names of places and peoples. Guidelines in ink peek out below loosened or missing stitches and delineate the finely gridded graticule that subtly undergirds the picture plane. Couched silk chenille lines in earthen tones invite the viewer to touch, to feel one’s way into the far reaches of the continental interior along the courses of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and to follow the horizontally cast boundaries of the central states. The visual logic of engraved maps directs the eye to enter and travel by way of printed lines—or, in the case of the embroidered map, by what path the needle might next pursue. Though the masthead-like form of Maine pushes northeasterly, the ribbon of words loosely paralleling the national form—Atlantic Ocean, Lower Canada, Upper Canada—reins the eye back into the body of the landmass. The seamstress penetrated the surface of her imagined silken countryside to reconstruct a nation in miniature, not unlike the farmers whose plows cut lines into unturned earth at the local level, each a participatory exercise in patriotism. Like other American maps, Lewis’s embroidery encouraged viewers to read cartographic pictures of their nation from right to left, or east to west, the direction in which the country would expand. Embedded within the map lay a perceptual friction between text read from left to right, as habituated by European writing systems, and the visual scanning of westward-bound cartographic expansion.

School

Needle arts historian Betty Ring has linked the map stylistically to others made by students at the Pleasant Valley School, an establishment operated by three Quaker women, two of whom had recently migrated from England. Founders Ann Shipley and her niece Agnes Dean brought to America their knowledge of embroidering maps, already a common practice in eighteenth-century imperial Britain. The map samplers made at their school resembled those made at Esther Tuke’s boarding school in York, England, which were similarly worked “upon white silk … in chenille.” (Ann Shipley likely knew the headmistress and her school, which listed two other Shipley girls in attendance in 1802.) The cartouche embroidery in the Lewis sampler exemplifies the style and form found in other Pleasant Valley embroidered maps, as does the stitching of boundaries and tinted coastlines. Pupil Mary M. Franklin, for example, constructed a larger and more elaborate map of the western hemisphere (held at the Winterthur Museum), employing the same colors and types of stitches on an off-white silk background (fig. 2). The lushly articulated trees and flowers surrounding both cartouches are of the same technique and form, and each embroiderer paid careful attention to lines of longitude and latitude. With extra-heavy embroidery Franklin highlighted the configuration of the United States within the North American continent, the same national boundaries appearing in the Lewis sampler. Both maps reflect the visual acuity and dexterity of youthful seamstresses who were already advanced in needlework.

The new Pleasant Valley School advertised in the June 7, 1803, issue of The Poughkeepsie Journal, & Constitutional Republican, offering instruction in “most kinds of Needle Work …” including “working maps” (fig. 3):

Boarding School at
Pleasant Valley
Ann Shipley, Agnes Dean, and
Phebe Shipley
Respectfully inform their friends and the public, that they
have this day opened a BOARDING SCHOOL for Female
Education, at Pleasant-Valley, near Poughkeepsie; where
GIRLS from six of age and upwards, will be boarded
and instructed in different branches of learning, on the fol-
lowing terms, viz.
Reading and Plain Sewing at 20 Dols. Per Quarter
Grammar, Writing, Arithmetic, and most
kinds of Needle Work… 25 ” “
Geography, Working Maps, the
Use of the Globes &c. 30 ” “
One quarter’s advance with each scholar will be expected.
Strict attention will be paid, not only to the education, but
to the morals and behavior of those pupils who may be
placed under their care.
N. B. Books and Stationery will be provided free of expense.
Pleasant-Valley, 6^th mo. 1^St, 1803.

Furthermore, the announcement explicitly emphasized geography as essential to the well-rounded education of young women who might someday nurture into adulthood a society of moral American citizens. As Martin Brückner has written, geographic literacy and map skills in the early republic came to be understood as vital to the education of young Americans in a new democratic nation where territorial expansion and the cohesion of distinct states were imperative to national success. Through the creative configuration of lines and shapes upon a two-dimensional surface, maps of the United States instilled—visually and aesthetically—the notion of a collective national identity.

Embroidered maps and globes were among the first cartographic objects to be made and used in the classroom in the United States, though only a limited number of establishments offered such instruction. Those families who were fortunate enough to have a daughter attending such a school typically displayed map samplers as decorative household items alongside other fancy needlework to showcase a young lady’s educational and cultural accomplishments, sometimes for the benefit of potential suitors. Female education in the American colonies and early republic customarily included instruction in needlework, from plain sewing to more elaborate needle arts; even when girls and boys studied side by side in the same schools, girls typically received sewing and embroidery lessons while boys learned surveying, a skill understood as indispensable in a nation of new landowners and expanding territories.

After students had spent long hours constructing their maps—having carefully fingered every textured line—the names and shapes of each political unit would remain entrenched in both mental and muscle memory. As the nineteenth century progressed, American youth increasingly learned their geographies experientially through three-dimensional cartographic objects that capitalized upon a multi-pronged engagement of the students’ senses, unlike the nearly exclusive reliance on memorization of the written word in previous centuries (more of these pedagogical objects can be seen in the accompanying image gallery. The practice of sewing maps waned by the 1840s with the normalization of female education, as girls joined their male counterparts in drawing maps on paper.

Far less common than in England, where eighteenth and early nineteenth-century map publishers circulated patterns in magazines and sold pre-printed fabric to be worked by fashionable ladies, nineteenth-century schoolgirl maps in the United States were largely copied onto fabric either by the student or instructor. Lewis’s map does not, in fact, reflect the state of the union in 1809, but instead matches a historic map drawn according to the Treaty of Peace of 1783, which later appeared in an atlas published in 1796 (fig. 4). Distortions in the atlas map, such as the shapes of Michigan and Lake Superior, are replicated in the Lewis map, and the spellings of Indian and place names are also copied letter for letter. East and West Florida are divided, and Alabama and Mississippi have not yet been defined (fig. 4a). Organized states do not yet appear north and west of Pennsylvania on either map. Perhaps more remarkably, the embroiderer has strictly adhered to the curvature and placement of the longitudinal and latitudinal lines along the numbered border, which demonstrates a comprehension of cartography that transcended the merely decorative. That Lewis or her teacher chose a map of the newly independent United States suggests that the exercise may have been part of a history lesson, or perhaps influenced by her own family’s illustrious participation in that history.

The Journey West

As is often the case in the lifespan of objects, the sampler survived long beyond its maker, passing from the hands of one daughter to the next through the next three generations. In 1813, Lewis had married Samuel Carman, a physician whose family lived near her boarding school. In the early 1850s—four decades after making the sampler—Lewis and her family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, a fledgling town in a region identified on her sampler as the domain of the “Outigamis” and “Chipawas.” The map ostensibly made the westward journey to Wisconsin with Lewis sometime between 1850, when the Carmans were recorded as living in Ridgeway, New York, and 1854, when the family appeared on the member list of Madison’s First Congregational Church. The object materially traced Lewis’s own cross-country emigration: like its maker, the silken rectangle bearing an obsolete image of the early republic had weathered four long decades and over a thousand miles of travel when it arrived in the Old Northwest Territory.

At the time Lewis executed her map, Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery had only recently returned from the search for a Pacific route to Asia, and national lawmakers remained skeptical about the feasibility of stretching and maintaining federal oversight over a vast and distant continental interior (a territory largely absent from Lewis’s map). Whereas the openness of the territory east of the “Mississipi” River invites the eye westward, the heavily embroidered river functions visually and tangibly as a vertical border, bringing the viewer’s eyes back into the space of the map. Only at the most northwesterly source of the river, signaled by the pointed western tip of Lake Superior, does one find a visual outlet and the possibility, perhaps a lure, to venture further into an unarticulated and largely unknown interior.

The Lewis sampler, based on a 1783 map, did not include the vast lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which had doubled the size of the nation—here the letters of the word “Louisiana” lie vertically parallel to the Mississippi River, thereby constructing another, yet more porous, visual boundary. Indian names sprawled across the region north and west of the Ohio River spell out a vast but vague and unorganized native presence. The absence of engraved political borders between indigenous nations suggests to the viewer a lack of knowledge on the part of the cartographer from whom the embroiderer received the information, but it might also be read as a silent mediation that erases actual British, French, and Indian presence. Furthermore, the space also communicates a kind of geographic emptiness that might be filled by the reader’s imagination, as well as the notion that indigenous peoples had little official claim over this uncharted territory—territory that Native people had occupied for millennia and about which they had sophisticated geographic knowledge.

As the nation rapidly expanded in the following decades, many Americans came to perceive the continent itself as a vast fabric upon which the technologies of steam power, telegraph, and rail lines constituted the threads that bound the nation together. Contemporaneous writers observed that the iron rails and wooden ties connecting distant populations “stitched” one region to another, as did the printed hatched lines of rail routes on maps. By compositionally correlating the right and left picture borders with the east and west coordinates of the American map, artists who imaged westward emigration after mid-century routinely treated the picture plane as a cartographic surface upon which to inscribe the ideologies of Manifest Destiny, the Euro-American imperative to populate the continent. This compositional trope coincided with a golden era in United States cartography and the corresponding mass democratic dissemination of printed maps that encouraged many citizens to think of the nation and the picture plane as a map. For example, in his 1860 painting On the Road, Pennsylvania artist Thomas P. Otter contrasted the streamlined, sun-kissed trajectory of rail travel with the dirt-lined, winding route taken by a lumbering Conestoga wagon (fig. 5). (The painting was likely commissioned by Matthias W. Baldwin and Joseph H. Harrison, locomotive manufacturers for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, who would have had a vested interest in showcasing the sleek efficiency of modern railroad technology.) In the context of the American cartographic boom, Otter’s small slice of road might be understood as a fragmentary piece of a longer itinerary on contemporaneous railroad maps, some of which featured small train icons crawling along the engraved routes. Similarly, the stone mile marker in the foreground identifies Otter as the image’s maker, not wholly unlike the role played by a cartouche on a map.

At mid-century the nation possessed contiguous land extending westward to the Pacific Ocean, and romantic tales of the Oregon Trail and the California Gold Rush dominated the American imaginary. But in actuality more people—in the tens of thousands—were moving into and taking up residence in the Mississippi Valley. Like so many other Yankees, the extended Carman family moved westward in search of new possibilities, and similarly, may have used one of the many portable pocket guides, such as Colton’s Western Tourist and Emigrant’s Guide, which offered geographical statistics, travel advice, large fold-out maps, and appealing inducements in the form of cheap land and agricultural promise (fig. 6).

Most emigrants came to Wisconsin through the port of Milwaukee by way of Great Lakes steamers and the Erie Canal, but the Carmans may have opted for rail travel. It would not have been so straightforward as suggested by Otter’s picture, however, given that there were no direct rail lines to Chicago—only a rhizomatic web of shorter connections averaging nineteen miles between hinterland towns on non-standardized gauges. One young man arriving in Milwaukee from Cleveland at the time, for example, transferred through four different railroads, with extended intermediary stretches by stage coach. An 1851 railroad map illustrates the tangled arteries of main lines and their “tributaries” that emigrants had to navigate (figs. 7 and 7a). The horizontality of the map, nevertheless, pulls the eye visually along linear branches that reach left/westward. Wisconsin first introduced rail travel in 1850 along an unassuming ten-mile stretch from Milwaukee toward Waukesha; therefore, the Carmans would have had to traverse many miles by stage, a jolting affair over rough “newborn” roads that, in the words of Frederika Bremer en route to Madison in 1849, were “no roads at all.” The family, however, would have found a growing town of about 3,000—as well as many of the amenities they needed for living—where only eighteen log cabins had stood the decade before.

Wisconsin

On Lewis’s map, bare ivory silk fills the empty spaces between boundaries, but by the time the Carmans emigrated, new maps reflected the work of thousands of surveyors who had dissected and subdivided Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and the southern part of Wisconsin into rectilinear counties, townships, and sections according to the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Jeffersonian mandate for organizing unmeasured land for new property ownership. The result was a filled-in geometric pattern that represented to many Euro-Americans the rich potential for further growth and opportunity in an already organized, well-ordered land. Maps of these young states, like the large fold-out version that accompanied the J. H. Colton emigrant’s guide, resembled patchwork quilts in four colors that easily accommodated the addition of ever more rectangles (figs. 8 and 8a). Wisconsin won statehood in 1848 and, like other Midwestern states, witnessed explosive population growth—from 31,000 in 1840 to 305,000 by 1850. The stark contrast between these officially printed maps from the 1850s and the one made by Lewis reveals the massive changes taking place in the land of the “Outigamis” and “Chipawas” in just four decades. One might imagine that an expansive gridded blanket had been laid over the open spaces of the Lewis sampler.

Identified in the upper section of the sampler, the Chippewas (“Chipawas”)—also known as the Ojibwe peoples of the upper Great Lakes—formed an Anishinaabe alliance that included the Odawas (“Utawas” or Ottawas). The Meskwaki or Fox peoples, called the Outagamies in the Anishinaabe language, allied themselves with the Sauks farther south. (The obsolete name survives on maps of Wisconsin in the form of Outagamie County.) But the Dakota, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee peoples also claimed large portions of the region as their homes. Lewis had placed the “Nadowessis,” a Dakota tribe, in the far north. Indigenous presence in Wisconsin was never static and, in fact, constituted a complex, fluid web of intercultural alliances, interactions, and negotiations as large numbers of refugees from eastern tribes had flooded the region earlier, pushed westward by Euro-American settlement and the powerful Iroquois. In other words, change marked the lands west of Lake Michigan long before surveyors’ gridded maps made visible the influx of white American settlers. Lewis’s map does not address this complexity, nor does it mark the presence of thousands of indigenous peoples who, despite mounting pressures to move westward, continued to make their homes in the eastern states. Native Wisconsin villages often counted among their residents people from several different tribes, and intermarriage with itinerant and transplanted French traders since the mid-seventeenth century had also contributed to the multicultural presence throughout the Great Lakes region. Despite these changing geographic and sociopolitical circumstances, a number of tribes nevertheless maintained cultural and ethnic sovereignty. Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, however, many native residents faced displacement to territories west of the Mississippi, and in a succession of treaties to make way for white emigrants like the Carmans, the large Ojibwe population was forced to concede nearly two-thirds of northern Wisconsin by 1842, leaving them with a much reduced land base. The diminishment of sovereign territory was a pattern experienced, likewise, by many other tribal peoples and native villagers in Wisconsin during these decades.

It is unknown whether Lewis’s death in 1855 was caused by illness or perhaps the toll of the thousand-mile odyssey across the national map, but the schoolgirl sampler survived remarkably intact. With forethought to the object’s preservation and recognition of its historical significance, Lewis’s great-granddaughter Alice Palmer Washington entrusted the family heirloom to the Wisconsin Historical Society in 1984, yet another resting place on the map’s own passage through time and space from the moment when a young lady put needle to silk along the Hudson River.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to express thanks and appreciation to the staff at the American Antiquarian Society and the Wisconsin Historical Society for their assistance in making this article possible, and to column editors Ellery Foutch and Sarah Carter for their inspiration and thoughtful editorial guidance. Much gratitude also goes to David Rumsey for the generous provision of images from his esteemed historical map collection.

Further Reading:

The Cecilia Lewis map has been displayed for public view at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and in a 2007 Chicago exhibit sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution. It has also appeared in Betty Ring’s comprehensive text, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Needlework, 1650-1850, vol. II (New York, 1993). Ring’s books are an excellent resource for further reading on Quaker and other historic needlework in the United States. The accompanying image gallery features additional examples of schoolgirl embroidered maps, as well as other nineteenth-century objects used in teaching geography. As the century progressed, American-made map puzzles, geographic board games, and portable globes responded to new pedagogical philosophies and needs, and geography lessons continued to serve as vehicles for teaching patriotism, United States history, and concepts about space and place from an American perspective.

To read more about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century schoolgirl embroidery in the United States, see Gloria Seaman Allen, Columbia’s Daughters: Girlhood Embroidery from the District of Columbia (Baltimore, 2012), A Maryland Sampling: Girlhood Embroidery, 1738-1860 (Baltimore, 2007), and Mary Jaene Edmonds, Samplers and Samplermakers: An American Schoolgirl Art, 1700-1850 (New York and Los Angeles, 1991). Geographer Judith Tyner has written a number of articles on embroidered maps and globes: “Geography Through the Needle’s Eye,” The Map Collector 66 (Spring 1994): 3-7; “The World in Silk: Embroidered Globes of Westtown School,” The Map Collector 74 (Spring 1996): 11-14; and “Following the Thread: The Origins and Diffusion of Embroidered Maps,” Mercator’s World 6:2 (March/April 2001): 36-41.

For a thorough, insightful analysis of geographic education in the early republic, see Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006). Susan Schulten examined Emma Willard’s influential role in nineteenth-century geographic education in “Emma Willard and the graphic foundations of American history,” Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007): 542-564. For a history of nineteenth-century female education, see Margaret A. Nash,Women’s Education in the United States (New York, 2005). Historian Richard White unraveled the complex threads of Indian and European occupation and interaction in the upper Midwest in his groundbreaking text, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge and New York, 1991). To learn more about Wisconsin, see Robert C. Nesbit, Wisconsin: A History (Madison, Wis., 1989).

To read more about themes of progress and westward emigration in American landscape art, see Patricia Hills, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Manifest Destiny,” in William H. Truettner, ed., The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920 (Washington and London, 1991) and Roger Cushing Aikin, “Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation,” American Art 14 (Autumn, 2000): 78-89.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Mary Peterson Zundo received an MFA in printmaking and an MA in American art history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is completing a dissertation on the interrelationships of maps and pictures in the construction of nationhood, race, and identity in the American West before and after the Civil War.

While fleeing Boston to evade his indenture, Benjamin Franklin saved a man from drowning. Crossing Hudson Bay in 1732, Franklin’s boat was driven onto the shore of Long Island. In the confusion, one passenger—“a drunk Dutchman”—fell overboard, and Franklin pulled him back on board by his hair. As a reward, the rescued man presented Franklin with his “old favorite author Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in Dutch, finely printed on good paper with copper cuts.” Franklin then paused to meditate on Bunyan’s importance to the English book trade and English literature: “ . . . it has been translated into most of the languages of Europe, and suppose it has been more generally read than any other book except, perhaps, the Bible. Honest John was the first that I know of who mixes narration and dialogue, a method of writing very engaging to the reader.”

Franklin was right on both counts. Pilgrim’s Progress (1684) was ubiquitous across the British Empire. In the first eighty years of American imprints, only John Bunyan and Isaac Watts issued from American presses at least once each decade. Pilgrim’s Progress appeared both in fancy dress, trimmed in fine copper engravings like those of Franklin’s gift, and humble fustian—Isaiah Thomas’s American edition sports only rude woodcuts and a duodecimo format suggesting a humble clientele. Bunyan’s masterpiece adorned the stalls of bookshops in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Yet it also turned up in the North Carolina backcountry, at one William Johnston’s general store. The pervasiveness of these colonial editions was mirrored across the English book trade as a whole. As in America, the non-conformist allegory met with brisk sales in the English countryside and in remote foreign missions. Sometimes it was even translated into the local idiom. Before he arrived from Shropshire to become a printer of government documents in Annapolis and Williamsburg, for example, William Parks published a Welsh-language edition of Pilgrim’s Progress.

The one thing Franklin did not foresee, however, was the critical role Bunyan’s book would play in European colonization, especially among the Protestant missionaries who fanned out across the globe in the nineteenth century. By the 1840s, missionary publishing houses like the American Tract Society were extolling the cross-cultural potential of Pilgrim’s Progress. In its 1848 guidebook for colporteurs, the society argued that Bunyan’s book “suits all the various descriptions of persons who profess godliness . . . The child may read it for intense interest for the story . . . and as he advances in the Christian course he will read it again to learn the Christian warfare.” Though these comments were primarily directed at the book’s reach across Anglo-American social strata, coded within terms like “heedless youth” and “Christian warfare” are implicit references to indigenous peoples and imperial rule. Throughout the nineteenth century, natural historians and theologians alike characterized the Native peoples of Africa, Australia, and the Americas (as does Favell Mortimer’s 1844 Ojibwa language tract) as “but children in understanding; and the more simple the form of thought and language in which instruction is conveyed to their minds, the more perfectly do they comprehend it.” The remarks about Christian warfare similarly speak to what literary theorists describe as the “linguistic colonialism” practiced by missionaries, whose activities included the burning of Mexican codices, forced European literacy education, and the outlawing of rival vernacular cultural linguistic and ritual practices.

A religious steady-seller that outlived its non-conformist cultural roots, Pilgrim’s Progress had joined a growing list of titles generated by an emerging circum-Atlantic missionary print network. A subset of the larger English book trade, this system vigorously promoted works like Bunyan’s allegory as “plain” texts whose piety was intimately linked to their cheapness and ease of reading. Because such works were “short, and . . . plain,” one proponent of this system explained, everyday readers “cannot fail of understanding.” Their cheapness and availability assured that they would be “always at hand, and read over often.”

Such books grew even more popular as English missionaries shrewdly exploited the business side of the trade to entice wider circulation. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), for example, solicited contributions from “Corresponding Members” giving them bound tracts at cost, so that they could easily dispense them to rural and distant clergy and laity alike. What began as a marketing ploy rapidly took the form of an ad hoc print network that stretched across the Atlantic.

By the nineteenth century, this evangelical print consortium had matured into a full-fledged national distribution network, as missionary printing concerns like the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society were founded in major eastern seaboard cities, with satellite publishing hubs in Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, that facilitated expansion into the American West. The missionary print system embraced cutting-edge technologies like stereotype printing, steam presses, and paper making, thereby keeping down costs to realize the SPG’s vision of Christian books “always at hand.” In 1810 the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was formed to extend these networks worldwide, their yearly fund-raising publications featuring maps that located their missions in a world system of Christian education. Pilgrim’s Progress was ideally suited for this market.

As Isabel Hofmeyr has observed of the eighty translations of Bunyan that circulated in colonial Africa, the book was a quintessential “translingual mass text.” Its production and circulation within indigenous societies forged a hybrid sort of discourse, pitting the missionaries’ “relentless imperialism” and faith in the universal translatability of Christian doctrine against local understandings of storytelling and representation, and alternative views of the role alphabetic literacy might play in colonized communities. Unlike editions of Bunyan that were produced for the Anglo-American colonial public (or the rural poor of Wales), indigenous language editions of Bunyan’s masterpiece expose print’s potential to generate unforeseen material practices on the periphery of the British book trade. Vernacular language translations of Bunyan’s work also yield surprising insights into their production and consumption, revealing multi-cultural (multi-ethnic?) social networks that challenge hegemonic models of the relationship between colonialism and print culture.

Missionaries and their indigenous parishioners in Canada and the United States were in the vanguard of this movement. In 1842, Pilgrim’s Progress was printed in Native Hawaiian under the title Ka Hele Malihini Ana. Bunyan’s book was again published in an indigenous language in 1858, when the American Tract Society printed a Dakota version, Mahpiya ekta oicimani ya; John Bunyan oyaka. In 1886, the London-based Religious Tract Society released The Pilgrim’s Progress . . . translated into the language of the Cree Indians. At the turn of the twentieth century, two more North American vernacular editions were created. Takkorngartaub Avertarninga (1901), also printed by the Religious Tract Society, was sent to a Moravian Inuit mission in Labrador. In 1904, Mennonite missionaries released a Cheyenne-language edition of Bunyan, Assetosemeheo heamoxovistavátoz na: (1904) for use in present-day Oklahoma.

Ka Hele Malihini Ana was translated by the Rev. Artemas Bishop, a New Yorker who had sailed to Hawaii with the second wave of ABCFM missionaries in 1823. Well regarded for his translation abilities, Bishop had been in Hawaii for nearly 20 years before he attempted to make Bunyan available in the islanders’ language. It is likely he took that time to absorb traditional Hawaiian storytelling practices, for he—like many ABCFM missionaries—had been instructed to evangelize the local population with some eye toward indigenous cultural preferences.

The title page of his edition bears this out, offering linguistic evidence that the Native idiom helped him shape the book’s presentation in ways to make it more accessible to the locals. The full title of the Hawaiian translation in modern orthography is Ka Hele Malihini ‘ana mai kēia Ao aku a hiki i kēlā Ao; He ‘Ōlelo Nane i Ho‘ohālike ‘ia me he Moe ‘Uhane lā, which roughly translates into The First/Foreign/Stranger’s/Visitor’s Travel from this World to that World; A Riddle/Puzzle/Allegory Similar/Compared to a Dream.

Malihini, here acting adverbially in describing the verb hele (to go), is the word Bishop used for the English word “pilgrim.” Malihini can suggest a range of concepts that connect to being new or unfamiliar to a place, person, thing, or practice—or simply being inexperienced or ignorant. Malihini is often paired or contrasted with the word “kama‘āina,” which refers to being well-acquainted with a place, person, thing, or practice, or to be from a particular area. Malihini are guests, while kama‘āina are often their hosts, and each status comes with a particular set of responsibilities.

These responsibilities are made legible in the proverb “ho‘okahi lā o ka malihini,” or “one day as a visitor.” It means that malihini are always welcomed, given food, and shelter on the first day of their arrival, but after that, they are expected to pitch in and start helping the kama‘āina, their hosts, with whatever needs to be done. Once the relationship between the malihini and the particular place, person, etc. grows, the malihini actually can, after a great deal of time and effort, become a kama‘āina, which generally has a more positive connotation.

Thus, this section of title implies (for Hawaiian readers) a journey being undertaken by a stranger or someone unfamiliar with the area and its culture. It hews closely to an English-speaker’s understanding of pilgrim, but also carries with it the trace connotation that such pilgrims are a bit foolish and ignorant. The general expectation of a malihini is also that she will try to become more kama‘āina, so it is likely that Hawaiian readers of Ka Hele Malihini Ana would understand that the journeys Bunyan describes are similar to those that the pilgrims/malihini take when seeking knowledge to become kama‘āina. Kama‘āina is a compound of kama [child] and ‘āina [land], and the sense of familiarity denoted by kama‘āina comes from the idea that someone is a child of the land, or a long-time resident. Thus, the knowledge needed to become kama‘āina in the Hawaiian sense does not come through heavenly salvation from God, but from the very earthbound and worldly knowledge of the land, through the actual traversing of the land and speaking with the people.

Finally, Bishop’s translation of “dream” as “moe‘uhane” further extends these allusions to local cultural practices. This Hawaiian word translates into something like “spirit sleep,” a concept drawn from Hawaiian belief that dreaming is the journey that your spirit takes while you sleep. It implies a certain kind of travel that “dream” does not, and refers to pre-Christian Hawaiian belief, further undermining the Christian message intended by the translation.

Despite the potential for cultural dissonance raised by certain elements of the translation, the mission had high hopes for its edition of Bunyan. In 1841, Artemas Bishop confidently wrote to the mission board: “If I do not much miscalculate on probabilities it will prove one of the most popular works in the Hawaiian Language.” Yet by all accounts, it was a bomb. The Hawaiian-language Bible had just been published in its entirety three years prior, and it was still enjoying massive popularity. Ka Hele Malihini Ana had an initial print run of 10,000 copies, but in two years, only 3,600 copies were distributed among the missions and schools. For the next nine years, the bindery reported no movement of the remaining 6,000 copies, the bulk of which were given away at the turn of the century to Chinese merchants to wrap their vegetables.

Some have attributed its failure to the fact that Hawaiians found the book incomprehensible because of the allegorical personal and place names—Evangelist, Mrs. Filth, Giant Despair, Lucre Hill. Yet, the fact of the matter is that the meanings of Hawaiian personal names and place names often played a large role in traditional Hawaiian mo‘olelo (story/account/history/legend) and that Hawaiians were already very familiar with this sort of allegorical story. The Hawaiian appreciation for kaona—essentially a sort of directed meaning through metaphor, allusion, and implication in which different messages were encoded for different audiences in the same sign—meant that most stories would automatically be read for allegorical intent. The problem, then, was that while Ka Hele Malihini Ana fit very easily into the genre of a kaona-laden mo‘olelo, but turned out not to be a very good example of that genre. While examples of kaona in Hawaiian poetry and mo‘olelo were often quite ribald, the artistry and subtlety of the way someone employed kaona was what was actually valued, and Ka Hele Malihini Ana, with characters named things like Christian, Mr. Worldly Wisdom, Hopeful, and Great-Heart, would probably have been seen as just too obvious.

Although many contemporaries hailed Bishop as a very good translator, as he had worked on several sections of the Bible and other books that were more successful than Ka Hele Malihini Ana, one crucial change in his translation strategy proved to be debilitating. Bishop was so confident in his own abilities that he

Dispense[d] with constant native aid, . . . merely . . . read[ing] over with care the manuscript copy to a few judicious natives, and to adopt such of their corrections as appeared proper.

This strategy may have worked for his later translations of primers and the like, but Ka Hele Malihini Ana was meant for popular use. Bishop would have done well to consult with those Hawaiians such as Kuakini, John Papa ‘Ī‘ī, Kamakau, Hoapili, and David Malo, who had previously assisted him on the form and approach of the translation, as many were themselves keepers of traditional moʻolelo and could have guided him in shaping the translation to fit Hawaiian tastes, rather than relying on “a few judicious natives” merely to check grammar and offer “corrections.”

Thomas Vincent’s 1886 translation of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress into Cree syllabics has much in common with Bishop’s Hawaiian version, except for the fact that Vincent was of Cree ancestry. A native speaker of the language, Vincent was thus able to avoid the errors that befell Bishop’s Hawaiian edition. Just one in a long line of English-language religious texts translated into Cree syllabics—the Holy Bible, the Common Book of Prayer, and numerous collections of hymns preceded it—Vincent’s work exemplifies how evangelization and vernacular literacy were entwined in the Canadian north from the seventeenth century forward, as they were elsewhere across the globe.

From its title page on, the physical properties of Vincent’s text suggest that it was a production of much more limited resources that Bishop’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress. The cover is plain, the typeset quality poor, the illustrations are randomly placed with no relationship to the text, and are likely drawn from different European editions. Unlike other nineteenth-century Cree syllabic translations, Vincent follows the convention of word separation with limited punctuation. While he does employ commas, even an exclamation point here and there, he generally reserves periods for scripture quotations.

For a modern Cree reader, reading Vincent’s syllabic text is time-consuming and difficult. At the time of its publication in 1886, there existed only one system of syllabics for the Cree language. Today there are two, Western Cree syllabics and Eastern Cree syllabics, each with its dialectical variances, in addition to a standardized Roman orthography (SRO). Vincent’s syllabic translation contains what might be considered archaic glyph forms that are no longer used and a number of differently or misspelled words when translated into SRO. For example, the title in Cree syllabics translates into SRO as two words: opapâmohtêw (one who walks) and either ê-pimipicim (a misspelling of either opimipiciw [the traveler]) or ê-pimimipicit (as s/he travels about). It is likely that the Cree title for The Pilgrim’s Progress is “One Who Walks as S/he Travels About.” Bunyan’s subtitle, In the Similitude of a Dream, is not translated or otherwise included in the Cree syllabic edition. As there are no gender pronouns in Cree, the gender of the “walker” would be determined by the translation, illustrations, and the individual reader. If Vincent’s translation were read aloud to an audience, as was also likely, the composition of the audience and the context of the performance would also be factors in the determination of gender. What is most interesting about this translation is the omission of Christian’s name. Vincent refers to Christian through non-gendered Cree verbs. Similarly, there is no direct translation for “pilgrim” in Cree; the concept did not exist at the time of the original translation. Even today, it is not listed in either the Alberta Elders’ Cree Dictionary or The Student’s Dictionary of Literary Plains Cree, the two most utilized print dictionaries for the language.

Vincent’s method of translation is what today would be called free translation—a direct, literal translation into Cree would have been for the most part impossible. Beyond the difference in cultural concepts such as “pilgrim” and “celestial,” there are differences in language structure. There are no adjectives in the Cree language; rather, they are expressed through the use of verbs. Time is also figured differently in a Cree context, and is expressed as such within Vincent’s translation. For example, when the giant Despair threatens to rip the pilgrims to pieces in ten days, Vincent translates this as “I will do this to you before it will be the tenth day.”

Cree narrative practices are also embedded in the translation. Many sentences begin with phrases such as “So this way, s/he tells about …” and “So far, again …” or “Happening, right now …” These initial phrases are a way of structuring the narrative to indicate continuous action in a communal storytelling setting. Although the translation was intended to increase individual literacy and encourage solitary reading practices of suitable material, Vincent’s translation was undertaken in such a way as to make Bunyan’s seventeenth century, very English religious allegory congruent with Cree narrative practices.

Vincent’s translation also provides valuable information about language shift, changes in word usage, and indigenous narrative structure in this Cree community. More significantly, however, it shows how important the context of production (or translation) is when indigenous translators have performed the work. One of the most important contexts for understanding the Cree edition of Bunyan is Vincent’s biography. The grandson of a Scottish Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader and his Cree wife, Vincent found little opportunity for advancement in the economic structure of his time due to his mixed race status. He turned instead to the Church of England, working as a laborer, teacher, translator, catechist, and clergyman. Throughout his time in the church, he worked in remote northern missions established to evangelize the Cree and Ojibwa in what was then called Rupertsland. He is said to have been against the use of the drum and other traditional spiritual practices. Vincent was eventually given the honorific of Archdeacon, but never achieved the title of Bishop. He took on the translation project of his own accord, and although approved by his superior, John Horden, bishop of Moosonee, Vincent traveled to London at his own expense to oversee the printing process, an expense that was routinely covered for non-Native clergy.

It is against this backdrop of social, economic, and political marginality that the Cree edition of Pilgrim’s Progress achieves a very different form of “engagement” from that Benjamin Franklin spoke of in his autobiography. As Arlette Zinck and Sylvia Brown observe in their comparative study of Canadian First Nations editions of Bunyan (“The Pilgrim’s Progress Among Aboriginal Canadians”), Vincent’s translation and publication of the text served as a “passport into a world into which he didn’t quite belong: the educated, Christian, and British missionary culture.” Through the Cree syllabary Bunyan, Vincent hoped to engage simultaneously with Britain’s global missionary and imperial enterprise as well as the oral, narrative traditions of his homeland.

In this way, Vincent’s adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress shares with its many indigenous language contemporaries interesting social contexts for the hit-or-miss effectiveness of such books in Native communities, their manner of composition, and their divergent afterlives in the communities they were produced to serve.

In the case of Stephen Riggs’s Mahpiya, there was little initial interest in the book among the Dakota until the mass imprisonment of more than 200 men, women, and children in 1862 in the aftermath of what the whites called the Dakota Uprising led to an urgent need for written communication between separated family members and with legal representatives.

Once in prison, Dakota who before ridiculed English-language literacy now begged for lessons in vernacular reading and writing. In true evangelical fashion, Stephen Riggs attributed the uptick in requests for literacy education among the Dakota imprisoned at Mankato as evidence that Native prisoners had realized that “The power of the white man had prevailed; and the religion of the Great Spirit, or the white man’s God, was to be supreme.” Riggs called it “a revolution in letters,” and stood amazed at how reading becomes “a perfect mania” among the prisoners; men and women of 60 years were trying to read. After quickly exhausting 400 copies of the little spelling book he had “improvised and printed at St. Paul,” he turned to his edition of Bunyan and distributed at least 100 copies to the prisoners. The apparent success of Pilgrim’s Progress among the imprisoned Dakota later inspired the ABCFM to stereotype Riggs’s translation in 1892, but these later editions exhibit little use, and it appears that Dakota language speakers much preferred the vernacular Bible and hymnals in their own language to the Christian conversion story as sources for learning to write the vernacular for use in legal and political battles.

In Hawaii, Artemas Bishop’s edition of Bunyan served green grocers better than parishioners for similar reasons. Not only did the story not match up well with Kanaka Maoli cultural practices, but also its deployment of the vernacular proved much less useful than the collaboratively produced primers and tracts that served as a critical foundation for the Native Hawaiians’ growing and substantial vernacular language print culture of newspaper articles, essays, and broadsides.

Reading from just a few of the hundreds of indigenous language editions of Pilgrim’s Progress that flowed from English presses in the nineteenth century, we experience print cultures whose conceptions of both “print” and “culture” were as divergent as the languages and peoples they engaged. At the same time, the diversity of uses to which different communities applied these versions of Bunyan suggests the fluidity of the book trade as a medium in forging new kinds of social connections both within and without indigenous societies. Men like Artemas Bishop and Kuakini, Stephen Riggs and Joseph Renville, and Thomas Vincent and John Horden worked together to make Bunyan “engaging” to generations and communities for distinctly local purposes, and in the process helped produce reading and writing publics whose engagement reached beyond mimicry to promote the radical restructuring of societies under siege by European imperialism.

Further Reading

Clifford Canku and Michael Simon, ed. and trans., The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters (Minneapolis, 2013).

Patricia Demers, Naomi McIlwraith and Dorothy Thunder, eds. and trans., The Beginning of Print Culture in Athabasca Country (Edmonton, 2010).

Puakea Nogelemeier, Mai Paʻa i ka Leo: Historical Voices in Hawaiian Primary Materials, Looking Forward and Listening Back (Honolulu, 2010).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Stephanie J. Fitzgerald (Cree) is associate professor of English at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Native Women and Land: Narratives of Dispossession and Resurgence (University of New Mexico Press, 2015).

Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada believes in the power and potential of ea, of life, of breath, rising, of sovereignty, because he sees it all around him, embodied in the ʻāina, the kai, his family, his friends, and his beautiful community. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, focusing on translation theory. He is editor of the journal Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, and works as a Hawaiian-language editor and translator.

Phillip Round is professor of English and American Indian and Native Studies at the University of Iowa. His most recent book, Removable Type (2010), was awarded the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. His current research has been supported by a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.