If you teach American history outside America, it is very likely that you will have to teach well outside your special area of expertise. Thus, I have often taught twentieth-century American history as well as courses in my specialist area of early America. This year, for example, I teach seminars in American history between 1932 and 1975 while doing courses on early America and on the Atlantic world. On Friday mornings, some students get to overdose on my teaching, as they first listen to my lectures on the Atlantic world then participate in my seminars on mid-twentieth-century American history.

I haven’t asked them how they connect one subject area to the other. The differences, however, between how the two subjects are taught must be immediately apparent. In my courses on early British American and Atlantic history, I range widely over both time and space, with most lectures concentrating on specific geographical areas rather than on topics defined by chronological boundaries. In my seminars on mid-twentieth-century history, however, chronology rules. Seldom pausing to differentiate between the various regions of America (although regional differences in America in the twentieth century were at least as great as in the seventeenth century), we move each week from one decade of American history to the next, from the depressing 1930s, to the dull 1950s, to the exciting 1960s, ending back in depression with the 1970s.

My teaching methods are hardly unusual. Indeed, these frameworks—thematic and regional for early America, chronological for the history of the United States—are normal for teaching these subjects. Look at any textbook on American history. All textbooks devote considerable attention to the colonial period. But more often than not, chapters on colonial life overlap in time. In George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi’s conventional summary of American history, for example, the colonial period is treated in three separate chapters: one concentrating on regional differences in settlement, one on colonial ways of life, and one on politics and empire. The textbooks are designed to get students to be able to compare and contrast colonization in, say, Barbados, Virginia, and Massachusetts before 1660 or to be able to explore how consumption patterns shaped colonial social patterns.

Specialist synthetic works also use region as a principal explanatory device. I use Jack P. Greene’s Pursuit of Happiness, Jon Butler’s Becoming America, Alan Taylor’s American Colonies, and Steven Sarson’s British America 1500-1800. Greene, Taylor, and Sarson all pay some attention to chronology but only within the context of regionalism. Each deal in turn with settlement in the Chesapeake, New England, and the West Indies before dealing with later-settled colonies in the lower South and the mid-Atlantic. It is only in the eighteenth century that they treat colonies all together. Butler’s book collapses time into theme, with chapters on social, political, economic, and religious trends. A similar approach is taken in David Armitage and Michael Braddick’s influential The British Atlantic World 1500-1800. Each essay in their collection covers thematic topics. The overall effect must seem strange to students of later American history. Region is hardly unimportant in twentieth-century history—the South, in particular, usually gets separate treatment in any survey—but to organize the history of the twentieth century as the history of seventeenth-century America is usually organized, with region (the West, the North, the South) and even theme being the primary category of organization would be distinctly strange.

Moreover, the most dynamic areas within contemporary early American historiography—the Atlantic World, the Middle Ground—are defined primarily by geography. Except for a few microhistorical investigations of specific events in specific places where the emphasis is on recreating lost worlds frozen at a particular point in time, almost all books on early America range widely over time and sometimes place. Look at the books published in recent years in the prestigious Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture series. Apart from books on the revolutionary period by Christopher Brown and Michael McDonnell, where close attention is paid to chronology, other monographs published in 2006 and 2007 deal with topics that span centuries. Emily Clark’s book on the New Orleans Ursulines ranges from 1727 to 1834, and Clare Lyon’s book on sex and gender in Philadelphia covers almost exactly the same time span. Brendan McConville’s account of monarchalism in early America extends from 1688 to 1776, while Susan Scott Parrish’s tale of American natural history is about the whole of the colonial period. Martin Bruckner’s book on geography and American literature and Sharon Block’s investigation into early American rape are similarly temporally wide ranging.

Why are early Americanists so obsessed with region—with geography, in short—rather than with chronology? Why is early America generally organized by space rather than time, at least until the Revolution comes along? In part, of course, the reason for such fixation upon space is because the colonial period is the very important prologue to the main event, which is the formation of the nation state and of United States history proper. The colonial period is thus the medieval section of American history. Chronologies matter less because there are fewer events of importance (Tindall and Shi list only three events occurring between Salem in 1692 and 1736 in their timeline of the eighteenth century—the Yamasee War of 1715-1717, the settlement of Georgia in 1733, and the Zenger trial of 1735). Moreover, colonial Americanists are allotted less teaching time in college courses than are their United States historian colleagues, thus discouraging close attention to specific events. Just imagine what damage would be done to the first year American history survey if early Americanists insisted on devoting separate lectures to each decade of the early eighteenth century, our lectures on the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s paralleling those given by our twentieth-century colleagues on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Instead, most early Americanist teachers, in the American history survey, do the whole of the long eighteenth century in either one or perhaps two lectures of breathtakingly wide scope. Early America is also treated very broadly in academic works. The two forthcoming volumes on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American history to be published in the Oxford History of the United States each cover over ninety years. The remaining nine volumes in the series each cover no more than one generation’s experience. Two—those on the Civil War and on the Depression and World War II—deal with fewer than twenty years of American history. If all periods of American history were to be covered equally in depth in this series, then there would need to be at least five volumes on prerevolutionary America.

Early Americanists’ privileging of space over time is so natural as to be almost reflexive. I remember very well putting on a conference for early Americanists where the specific theme was chronology. I hoped, in vain as I knew would be the case, for proposals on specific decades—the 1610s, or 1690s, or 1730s, for example. I still think it would be a useful exercise for early Americanists to concentrate attention on studying all of British America or even all of Atlantic America in small periods of time. It would be useful to differentiate what happened in the 1640s from what had occurred in the 1630s and to make a distinction between British America in the 1720s and British America in the 1740s or 1750s. But, as one might expect, my hopes were not fulfilled. People interpreted chronology through a prism of regionalism—what happened in Virginia, for example, in the first half of the seventeenth century or in Pennsylvania in the mid-eighteenth century. Like medievalists, early Americanists are accustomed to working over whole centuries or at least half centuries and find shorter time periods as well as larger geographical contexts difficult to deal with. The scholarly debate that modern Americanists have over when the 1950s became the 1960s has no counterpart in early American history.

Early Americanists’ devotion to geography may seem normative (it is seldom questioned, at any rate), but it is distinctly odd when compared to other historiographies concentrating on the same time periods as colonialists do. Historians of early modern and eighteenth-century Britain, for example, tend to organize their histories around chronology. Julian Hoppit’s volume on English history between 1689 and 1727 in the New Oxford History of England, for example, starts with a close examination of the Glorious Revolution settlement before an investigation of social realities. Little attention is given to regional differences per se. Penry Williams in his volume in the same series on the later Tudors is similarly concerned with outlining the principal events of the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth before looking at the social history of the period. He hardly does region either. Attention to chronological markers makes sense for a discipline in which early modern history gets as much attention as modern history: the number of years covered in the four volumes in the series dealing with the history of England from 1547 to 1727 is eleven years less than in the four volumes dealing with English history from 1727 to 1918. But even in the more expansively treated medieval period, chronology takes precedence. Moreover, early modern English historians often pay close attention to chronological narrative, as can be seen in their treatment of the English Civil War. John Adamson’s nearly six-hundred-page analysis of the causes of the crisis of 1641-2 and David Cressy’s nearly five-hundred-page narrative of the same years has no counterpart in early American history until we come to studies of the Revolution or the Constitution.

So why are early Americanists so concerned with geography when their peers in United States history and early modern British history concentrate on chronology? It is mostly to do with how the subject has developed in the last half century—a half century, it should be noted, where early American history went from being “a neglected subject” in the words of Carl Bridenbaugh, first director of the Institute of Early American History in a jeremiad issued in 1947—to being an especially dynamic and innovative area of scholarship. The two most noticeable transformations have been the move in the 1960s and 1970s towards “new social history,” in which the customary methodological and geographical boundaries of early American history were greatly extended, and the recent move to Atlantic history, in which early American history was folded into a larger historical geographic project linking North America with other continents surrounding the Atlantic ocean. The connections between the two movements are close. As Bernard Bailyn argues, the sheer profusion of social-science inflected work on ever narrower topics made “discrete and easily controllable” fields of knowledge “boundless” and “incomprehensible” with coherence being the principal casualty. The analytical device of the Atlantic World (and the Middle Ground paradigm for more continentally minded scholars) allowed many disparate studies to connect more closely. Of course, that is Bailyn’s view. Other historians disagree about his particular analysis of the crisis in early American history and his use of an Atlantic-world paradigm to bring order to a disordered historical universe. What is clear, however, is that in the move from one kind of historical writing to another, what has been retained has been a concentration on geography. A central concern of early American historians writing in the last thirty years had been to expand the geographical scope of the subject, so that no one with a serious interest in early America could ever again blithely assume that the United States was just an extension over time of the New England Way.

The most important message that came out of the “new social history” of early America, beside the utility of using methods drawn from social-science disciplines to explore early American mentalities, was that colonial British America was geographically diffuse. One of its achievements was the naturalization of region as the best explanatory framework within which the diffuseness of early America could be assessed. Indeed, Jack Greene and J. R. Pole, in their introduction to Colonial British America—an immensely influential 1984 collection of essays, which marked the highpoint of “the new social history” period in early American history—specifically prioritised region as the building block upon which a general developmental framework of colonial history could be built. The advent of Atlantic, Middle Ground, and borderlands perspectives as operating paradigms for early Americanists has only increased our dependence on region as a way of understanding early America, even if nowadays the boundaries between regions, or the fuzziness of those boundaries, draws as much attention as the regions themselves.

Indeed, what is remarkable about recent developments in early American historiography, notably the rush towards seeing everything in an Atlantic context, is how the geographical focus of the “new social history” has not only been retained but has been enhanced. Indeed, I would argue that Atlantic or borderlands histories (both in themselves geographical terms) are convincing evidence of a longstanding geographical turn in early American history, a more long-lasting and more influential turn than more heralded turns towards theory, towards linguistics, and towards anthropology. If anything defines early American history today, it is its relentless geographical focus. It is space, not time, that dominates our attention.

Early Americanists, it is true, have begun to think differently about space as they try to connect the themes of Atlantic and Middle Ground history—the movement of goods, ideas, and people for the former; the contestation of space by different cultures in the latter—to older understandings of regional and cultural difference. They are trying to move beyond seeing space in terms of region or nation or even empire—rigid structures bounded by artificial political boundaries—into seeing space as multiple if networked sets of colliding trajectories. They are interested in seeing connections, collisions, and interactions between different places in ways that illuminate the distinctive features of certain places. In this process, it is the points of connection, the movements and sharp contacts between places that are most interesting, rather than the places that result from colliding geographical trajectories.

What does this mean for practicing early American historians? It mostly means reading more history about other parts of the world. The most noticeable feature of the geographical turn in early American history has been a greater than normal involvement with the work of other historians in cognate fields. It has expanded our horizons, extending our historical geographical reach, and narrowed our focus: the time we spend reading other histories is time we are not spending catching up with developments in other disciplines. Maybe I am speaking only for myself, but I find I am increasingly absorbed in trying to master the historical literatures of many parts of the world, from Europe to Asia to the Americas, and sometimes even of the world itself. Here are a few of the books that have been shaping my thought in the past year. I have read Sir John Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World, a masterly comparison of Spanish and British America. I have read P. J. Marshall’s The Making and Unmaking of Empires, comparing British imperialism in India and America, which has led me on to reading a number of other histories of eighteenth-century India by Nicholas Dirks, Robert Travers, and Durba Ghosh. I followed up reading Huw Bowen’s account of the East India Company in Britain with Brendan Simms’s massive international history of Britain’s wars in eighteenth-century Europe and America, Three Victories and a Defeat. Two quite different works—Linda Colley’s engrossing work on the picaresque life of Elizabeth Marsh, “a woman in world history,” and David Armitage’s brilliant exposition of the worldwide impact of the Declaration of Independence—make me try to link events in the Americas to global history. Meanwhile, Robin Law’s history of Ouidah in the period of the slave trade and John Thornton and Linda Heywood’s account of how vital central Africans were to the making of early African American culture point out how we need to understand African history in order to understand early American history. To get a grip on events in the metropolis in years that were crucial years of transition in early America, I read Tim Harris’s two-volume history of the Glorious Revolution, while in order to work out what was occurring in British society that explains the rise of moral authoritarianism in the latter part of the eighteenth century, I have found Vic Gatrell’s City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London insightful. I could go on and list the contents of my library at tedious length but you get the idea. In order to understand my own topic, I need to try and connect my area of expertise with what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time.

Of course, what is noticeable about this list—one that is eclectic but as a list of reading outside my specialty is probably typical of the type of wider reading that is now customary for early Americanists—is that while it ranges widely over space, it is also reading that is narrowly confined to the discipline of history. It reflects wider changes in the discipline whereby early Americanists have concentrated on expanding their knowledge of historical geography at the expense of reading in other disciplines.

An examination of the early American house journal, The William and Mary Quarterly, bears out these claims. There has been a noticeable drop-off in articles in that journal that pay more than lip service to theory or that show deep reading in disciplines other than history. The exception might be in political thought, which continues to be a subject in which many historians show an interest. But work indebted to anthropology, sociology, and above all economics, all mainstays of the previous “new social history” period, is thin on the ground. Historians of native America have close interactions with anthropologists but not often with anthropologists working in other areas of the world or in other topics besides ethnohistory. For most early Americanists, the 1970s love affair with anthropology has faded. In addition, economic history (in America increasingly done by economists with an interest in history rather than historians with an interest in economics) has gone from being the darling of early American history to being considered rather old-fashioned. We are mostly cultural historians now, as Peter Coclanis lamented in a savage review of treatments of early American slavery that do not employ social-scientific methods in order to ascertain representativeness, which appeared in July 2004 in The William and Mary Quarterly.

At the same time, however, this early Americanist house journal is surprisingly willing to publish articles about geographical areas that lie outside the brief of a journal devoted to the history and culture of British America and those parts of the Americas that later became part of the United States. There have been special issues since 2000 devoted to race and religion in New Spain and to the Atlantic economies of the mid-eighteenth-century Spanish Caribbean. Recent forums in the journal have all been about expanding the spatial, rather than the theoretical, boundaries of the field. It makes early Americanists remarkably ecumenical about the spatial boundaries of their field. Indeed, recent forums devoted to ongoing historical trends have tended to urge early Americanists to widen their spatial boundaries even further than at present. One typical forum was “Beyond the Atlantic,” in October 2006, where several commentators argued for an extension of the Atlantic world concept into British Asia and even into global history. Another formed around a discussion of Jack P. Greene’s provocative polemic in April 2007 in which he argued that early Americanists should take the lead in reshaping later American history around the postcolonial narratives that colonial Americanists have imbibed, placing American history within broader global contexts of comparison and conjunction and encompassing geographies beyond the nations state.

All this is to be applauded. Unlike nation-state fixated historians of the United States, who in my opinion find it impossible to ditch narratives of American exceptionalism for internationalist narratives, early Americanists are at least prepared to contemplate a world beyond America where history happened and where history continues to be read. Early Americanists, in my experience, are less likely than historians of the United States to engage in an egregious practice that always sets my teeth on edge, as a non-American doing American history outside of America. This is the practice of using exclusionary language about the reading audience (“We Americans,” as Gordon Wood proclaims in the first line of his Pulitzer Prize winning history of the American Revolution’s impact), which not only excludes as readers all people who don’t happen to have the fortune to be born American but which also assumes that American history is an internalist history, separate from histories of other places in the world. Early Americanists based in the United States still do use such exclusionary language, unable to envision an audience for American history that exists outside America. But the use of such exclusionary language is less pervasive in early American history than in later American history. I could quote chapter and verse on this depressing trend in American historiography but that might be the subject of a separate diatribe.

Still, there is something very curious about early Americanists’ determination to use space rather than time as the basis for our studies. We have become historical geographers but have done so by reading history rather than geography. Geographers read us (and rather well, as it turns out, as can be seen in works by the British historical geographers Alan Lambert, David Lambert, and Daniel Clayton, all of whom are interested in colonial spaces), but we don’t read them. It is remarkable how little attention is paid by early Americanists to what geographers might say about space and place, despite our knowledge that we need to think differently about space than we did when space meant politically bounded regions conceived of as static entities rather than fluid places of movement. I looked at articles in The William and Mary Quarterly published this century to see which geographers are cited. Apart from D. W. Meinig—whose work on Atlantic America has been immensely influential for the development of Atlantic history but whom Atlantic historians read mostly as a historian rather than a geographer—the only geographical work mentioned is Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen’s The Myth of Continents. Examining what geographers have to say to historians is beyond the brief of this article. But early Americanists should make more of an effort to interrogate their assumptions about space. They might find what geographers have to say about space and place useful starting points for reflections upon the unceasing desire of early Americanists to expand the spatial frontiers or boundaries of their subjects. We might take on board the sensible comments of Alan Baker, author in 2003 of an excellent meditation Geography and History: Bridging the Divide, not often cited by early Americanists, noting that the epistemological foundations of the two subjects are sufficiently different for historians not to assume that historical geographers are just historians masquerading under another name. We might also pay more attention to Felix Driver’s work on imperial landscapes when trying to make sense of how empires shaped Atlantic worlds. I find Doreen Massey’s musings in her important 2005 book, For Space, especially insightful about how to escape the limitations of historically and geographically bounded notions of place. She notes how in traditional historical writing, space is thought of in an essentialist fashion—”first the differences between places exist, and then those different places come into contact.” The differences we see, she suggests, “are the consequence of internal characteristics,” leading us to a “billiard-ball,” “tabular conception of space.” Instead, she postulates, we might think of space as “the sphere of a multiplicity of trajectories.” A trajectory—people, objects, texts, ideas—is not bounded but is defined by movement. Geography is created when different spatial trajectories come together. The differences between places are what happen when trajectories intersect in varied ways across the surface of the earth. Massey’s view of space as constellations of multiple trajectories allows for space to be thought of not in tabular form but as relational constructions. We don’t so much “belong” to a place but “practice” place through the negotiation of intersecting trajectories.

There is much here to think about. What Massey says is not easy for historians to understand, in part because she resists what we do all the time, which is to turn geography into history, space into time. As she argues, “for me, one important aspect of space is that it is the dimension of things (and people) existing at the same moment. If time is the dimension of change then space is the dimension of simultaneity.” Space and time are thus necessarily different. Geographers look at how, in space, all sorts of things happen at once. Historians examine how, through time, change is effected. 

Historians might not find Massey’s ideas about trajectories very helpful. They may prefer the insights of other geographers than the few geographers, all British, noted here. That is of little matter. What is important, however, is that we start to think as seriously about space as we always have thought seriously about time. If there has been a geographical turn in early American history, and I am sure there has been, then we may need to pause in our relentless quest to find more and more histories that intersect with the histories we ourselves are writing; in that pause we ought to consider what we are doing when we are trying to connect two or more spaces or places together. Perhaps we should remember that the historians who did such great things in that golden period of the “new social history,” when early American historians led the way in developing fresh ways of approaching historical topics, did so through intense engagement with other disciplines. Perhaps it is time, once again, to look at what other disciplines might have to offer us as we widen our historical horizons. If early Americanists are indeed becoming historical geographers, almost by default, we might want to think as hard about the geography part of that noun as about the history part.

Further Reading:

Works mentioned in this article are, in alphabetical order: John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007); Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, Imperial America, 1674-1764, Oxford History of the United States (New York, forthcoming); David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York, 2002); Bernard Bailyn, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” The American Historical Review 87:1 (February 1982): 1-24; Alan Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge, 2003); Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756-1833 (Cambridge, 2006); Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Neglected First Half of American History,” The American Historical Review 53:3 (April 1948): 506-517; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu, American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 (Newark, N.J., 2007); Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007); Daniel Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver, BC, 2000); Peter Coclanis, “The Captivity of a Generation,” review of Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, by Ira Berlin, William and Mary Quarterly 61:3 (July 2004): 544-556; Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York, 2007); David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640-1642 (Oxford, 2006); Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Felix Driver and David Gilbert, Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester, UK, 1999); John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, 2006); “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 63:4 (October 2006); “Forum: The Middle Ground Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 63:1 (January 2006); Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (New York, 2007); Durba Ghosh, Sex and Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge, 2006); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988); Jack P. Greene, “Roundtable-Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 64:2 (April 2007): 235-251; Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984); Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685-1720 (London, 2006); Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?: England, 1689-1727 (Oxford, 2000); David Lambert and Alan Lester, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2006); Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’: 1727-1892 (Athens, Ohio, 2004); Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, 1997); Clare Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750-1783 (Oxford, 2005); Doreen Massey, For Space (London, 2005); Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); Michael McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007); D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History: Volume I, Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (New Haven, 1986); Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); Steven Sarson, British America, 1500-1800: Creating Colonies, Imagining an Empire (New York, 2005); Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714-1783 (London, 2007); “Special Issue: New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 58:1 (January 2001); “Special Issue: Slaveries in the Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 59:3 (July 2002); Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001); John Thornton and Linda Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (New York, 2007); George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 7th ed. (New York, 2006); Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (New York, 2007); Penry Williams, The Later Tudors: England, 1547-1603 (New York, 1995); Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, Oxford History of the United States (New York, forthcoming); Gordon S. Wood. The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Trevor Burnard has had a peripatetic career, teaching at universities in the West Indies, his native New Zealand, and in England. He is professor of the history of the Americas at the University of Warwick and will be Archie Davis Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in 2008-9. He is working on a jointly authored work on mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica and Saint Domingue. He has written books and articles on the eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Jamaica.

John Stewart sat hunched in the wooden cage that swung from the ship’s horizontal mainyard, riding out a storm off the coast of India. The rough weather went on for “a considerable time,” but Stewart was content with his mode of travel, given the alternative. The Muslim captain blamed the storm on Stewart and had threatened to throw the infidel traveler into the waves. Stewart could thank his lucky stars and his quick wit: he had persuaded the captain to raise him off the deck instead, technically removing the offending passenger from the ship while avoiding murder at the same time. As Stewart’s cage swayed back and forth above the pitching boat, he used the time to work out his philosophy. For these ideas he would have been drowned, had he not quickly agreed to fold his six-foot frame into a chicken coop.

Stewart’s understanding of the cosmos, shaped by his encounter with Hinduism in India in the 1760s and ’70s, would later intrigue and sometimes offend his American listeners as well. In the early republic Stewart’s cosmology did not usually frighten people, but neither did it gain widespread support. Rather, his unconventional notions became part of the transatlantic swirl of heterodox ideas that engaged people who were living through a time of immense political upheaval. Drastic political and social change called for new ways of thinking about the human condition, and some people were willing to consider unfamiliar approaches. Stewart’s own rethinking of the universe was an idiosyncratic blend of what he learned from English freethinkers, Hindu yogis, and French revolutionaries. His compilation of ideas was eclectic, but no less earnest for all that. Given everything he’d seen, he hoped for a fundamental and peaceful change in the way human beings relate to one another and to all living things. Stewart believed he held the key to universal contentment, and he felt compelled to share this important message with anyone who would listen.

Stewart’s cosmology began with a fundamental monism: the entire cosmos is made of a singular substance composed of the tiniest particles in constant motion. These moving particles, in endless recombination, form all that exists in the universe. When an organism dies, its constituent particles are reorganized to form something else. This motion of matter goes on eternally; particles are never lost, just recombined. Stewart found the idea of a single, shared substance immensely exciting. It meant everything is connected, everything is related, everything is kin.

Stewart’s urgent message was therefore a pacifist one: stop immediately all killing of humans and other animals, end slavery, and live peacefully, or everything in the universe will eventually pay the price.

But there was more. During his sojourn in India, Stewart had come to believe that the tiniest particles register the sensations experienced by the larger organism they constitute. These sensations are not fleeting. They remain within the individual particles as these morph from one life form into the next, so that feelings of pleasure and pain accrue over time in the matter that makes up all things. The important lesson for Stewart was this: the happiness and sorrow that people cause themselves and other beings are not ephemeral feelings. These sensations are retained on the level of atoms and continue to affect all other living things into the future, including future versions of oneself. The eternal recombination of matter ensures that pain experienced by one living being will eventually be experienced by every other organism. To inflict pain of any kind increases the suffering of the universe.

Stewart’s urgent message was therefore a pacifist one: stop immediately all killing of humans and other animals, end slavery, and live peacefully, or everything in the universe will eventually pay the price. Stewart saw gentleness and generosity as matters of obvious self-interest, a gift to one’s own future forms. Meanwhile, religiously based norms of moral conduct were not only misguided, they were entirely unnecessary. No sentient deity figured in Stewart’s cosmology of eternally existent matter, no Creator-God observed human conduct, certainly no divine judge sent souls to heaven or cast them into a fiery pit. Immaterial souls did not exist, and neither did heaven or hell. No wonder a frightened ship captain praying for mercy in a storm wanted the proponent of such heresy removed from the deck of his endangered boat.

Stewart’s airborne voyage over the waves was only one of many harrowing experiences during decades of travel that would eventually bring him to the United States. As a youth, the London-born son of a Scottish linen draper flamboyantly thwarted school discipline and flunked out of two prestigious boarding schools in England. The teenaged drop-out cheerfully relocated to Madras, India, in 1763, to work as a writer for the British East India Company. Shocked by the corruption he witnessed, Stewart wrote to the company’s court of directors describing the extortion and abuse routinely done in the company’s name. He also expressed his boredom, writing that he “was born for nobler pursuits, and higher attainments, than to be a copier of invoices and bills of lading to a company of grocers, haberdashers, and cheesemongers.” Stewart left the company in 1765 and set out to explore his surroundings. When he wandered into territory governed by the anti-British ruler of Mysore, Hyder Ali, Stewart found himself essentially a captive. Out of these lemons he made lemonade, becoming first an interpreter and then a military commander under Ali. Stewart took part in battles that left him wounded in one arm and with a visible dent in his skull. When Stewart requested permission to seek out a European surgeon, Ali granted this request but, suspecting Stewart of treason, ordered his escorts to murder him at the border. Only a swift swim across a river saved Stewart from being killed.

Clever and charismatic, Stewart next became an aid and then personal secretary to Muhammed Ali Khan Wallajah, the (pro-British) Nawab of Arcot. Proving himself capable, Stewart rose to the rank of prime minister. By the late 1770s, the twenty-something Stewart had saved £3,000 and felt it was time to move on. He began the tour on foot that gave him the nickname “Walking” Stewart, traversing India, Africa, and many countries on the Adriatic and Mediterranean seas before arriving in London in about 1783. Still restless, he set out again the following year to walk through much of Europe and central Asia before returning to London by 1790. His next voyage took him to Canada and the United States, where he spent a number of months in 1791.

Stewart was a talker as well as a walker, and everywhere he went he held lectures, planned and impromptu, about sensate matter. Tall and of striking appearance, sporting an increasingly threadbare Armenian coat, and polyglot (he was said to be fluent in eight languages), Stewart was a conspicuous missionary for his cause. Even so, his first visit to North America left few traces in the written record. One mention comes from Benjamin Rush, the eminent Philadelphia physician, who spoke with Stewart on three consecutive days in October 1791. After the first meeting, Rush wrote in his Commonplace book that Stewart “appears to be a man of strong powers, of great eloquence, much observation; but to have started without fixed principles on any subject.” On the second day, over breakfast and again at tea time, Stewart regaled the physician with stories from his travels, and Rush recorded some of the details. Stewart told Rush he had been called eccentric, and Rush noted Stewart’s response: “while the centre of ordinary conduct was Error, he wished to be in a state of eccentricity from it for ever.” On the third day, Rush wrote, Stewart “visited me this morning and for 15 minutes talked unintelligibly. I discovered that he was a materialist and an Atheist. He said ‘he was in search of the origin of moral motion.'” Rush found the gregarious Stewart intriguing, perplexing, and perhaps somewhat disappointing.

In general, Stewart’s first trip to the United States was a bust. His relative, the English chemist William Thomas Brande, later recounted that a few Americans who were “acquainted with the writings of the celebrated European free-thinkers, received him with the utmost respect” and helped him promote his cause. But “the major part of the population heard him with apathy, and even dislike.” Brande attributed this cold reception to the “innumerable” religious sects that “observed a strict union amongst themselves” and shunned those of unlike mind. Especially in the country’s interior, Brande wrote, Stewart encountered little philanthropy and “utter ignorance.” This vexing experience led Stewart to shorten his stay and return to England.

Back in London, Stewart came in with a group of radical freethinkers and social reformers, most notably Thomas Paine, his fellow lodger at the White Bear in Piccadilly and soon his fast friend. William Godwin, by contrast, thought Stewart quite a bore. The self-impressed Stewart, who considered himself “the paragon of his species, and the acme of intellectual energy,” returned the favor, rating his own thinking far bolder than Godwin’s. His conceit notwithstanding, Stewart was part of a loose circle of freethinkers that included Godwin and his equally infamous wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, the bookseller Thomas Clio Rickman, the American poet and diplomat Joel Barlow, and the Scottish radical John Oswald.

Oswald and Stewart had much to talk about, since Oswald had unwittingly followed in John Stewart’s footsteps to India. Yet Oswald’s political development provides a stark contrast to Stewart as well. Oswald arrived in Bombay in 1782 as the officer of a Scottish infantry regiment sent to fight Hyder Ali (the Mysore ruler for whom Stewart had fought in the 1770s). Like Stewart, Oswald soon became disgusted with British colonial oppression. He deserted the army, lived with Brahmins, and adopted some of their practices, including vegetarianism. A professed atheist and critic of Christianity, Oswald loved the Hindu concept of universal sympathy for all living creatures. He eventually traveled through Persia and back to England, everywhere advocating vegetarianism and animal rights.

Oswald combined his concern for all living beings with radical democratic politics. In his pieces for the London Mercury, Oswald lambasted the corruptions of Parliament and called for universal enfranchisement. Even the system of electing representatives to conduct political business seemed to Oswald inferior to direct democracy. He believed people in every region should gather to discuss important issues, and every person should cast a vote. Laws should pass only with ninety percent of popular approval. Oswald’s egalitarian politics found expression in his vegetarianism, which he saw as an act of solidarity with other species as well as with people who could not afford to eat meat. Meat producers who enclosed land for livestock displaced the tenants who had lived there. Inordinate amounts of grass and grain went into making meat for well-to-do carnivores. To eat meat was to participate in a system of economic oppression and social injustice. The same year his close friend Thomas Paine published Rights of Man, Oswald made his views known in The cry of Nature, or, an Appeal to mercy and to justice on behalf of the persecuted animals (1791). He deplored the callousness and cruelty with which humans slaughtered, cut, chewed, and swallowed their fellow creatures, perversely overriding the natural law of universal sympathy.

While Stewart shared Oswald’s passion for avoiding meat, the two differed in their political radicalism. Oswald moved to revolutionary France and became a member of the Jacobin Club, the Cercle Social, and a close collaborator with the leader of the Girondins, Jacques-Pierre Brissot. (It was Brissot who nominated Oswald and Paine for honorary French citizenship.) In his fervor to create an egalitarian society, Oswald called for the deaths of traitors to this revolutionary vision. Killing was certainly evil, Oswald knew, but before peace could be assured, the oppressors must be removed … by killing them. Thomas Paine was remembered to have put it this way to Oswald: “you have lived so long without tasting flesh, that you now have a most voracious appetite for blood.” Oswald did indeed have a strange way of calling for the deaths of people while eating his tenderly prepared roots and herbs. He secretly helped plan a French invasion of England, and in 1793 he organized and led the First Battalion of Volunteer Pikemen (the Picquiers), who sought to quell royalist sympathizers in the Vendée region. The use of pikes in hand-to-hand combat meant killing in its most immediate and raw form. Where was the cry of nature for sympathy with fellow creatures? Oswald died in battle for the revolutionary cause.

John Stewart had a very different experience in Paris. He enjoyed the company of French philosophers and the poet William Wordsworth, who was, in turn, impressed with Stewart’s eloquence. At first Stewart supported the political changes afoot, but his initial enthusiasm soon gave way to alarm about the surge in popular violence. Then revolutionaries confiscated his money. Stewart left precipitously in 1792, repulsed by “the most dreadful symptoms of mob government” and skeptical about the prospects for political revolution. By the time Oswald died in battle and Paine sat in a Paris jail, Stewart was safely back in London. He remained critical of political corruption and of imperialism, but he felt affirmed in his elitist distrust of street-level democratic action. He would ever after advise against too much democracy, and he would never advocate sudden change, even about matters of egregious immorality, such as slavery.

The transformation Stewart sought would come about entirely without violence and through the simple act of adopting his cosmology. When human beings grasp the concept—and, Stewart would say, the reality—of sensate matter, when they understand that every act of charity or cruelty is, in a sense, “paid forward” to future versions of themselves, then bare self-interest will inevitably bring pacifism, vegetarianism, and universal sympathy with all living things. Universal benevolence will spread as the natural result of the insight of “homo-ousia,” that all of nature is made up of one, shared substance. This was Stewart’s message to everyone he encountered. It was his response to the promise and the paranoia of this revolutionary age, his own attempt to promote fundamental change while avoiding the terrifying anarchy and violence he had witnessed in revolutionary France. Intellectually radical and socially and politically conservative, Stewart hoped his ideas would remake the world without shedding a drop of blood.

When most Londoners showed only uncomprehending condescension for his vision of a gently radical “homo-ousia,” Stewart turned his sights once more to North America. Perhaps this time Americans would give his cosmology a better hearing. Ever the optimist, Stewart harbored great hopes for the United States as the seedbed for gradual and peaceful transformation. The physical size of the nation, Stewart thought, and its commitment to “absolute liberty of the press,” gave room for disagreements of any kind. Stewart had his doubts about a democratic republic in which every male citizen had a political voice, and he openly preferred leadership by the educated classes. But he believed that in America political disagreements could occur “without annihilating the domestic peace.” He also appreciated the many utopian communities under way: “quakers, moravians, dunkers, etc. etc. have all established new institutions of domestic life.” Some groups even held property in common. These religious communities could never fully succeed, Stewart thought, because they were based on “superstition.” But at least such experiments could thrive without suppression or persecution. In a country that allowed a broad range of expression, Stewart’s lectures would, he trusted, far surpass religious sects in moving humanity toward perfectability.

When John Stewart arrived in New York in 1795, he received a warm welcome. In the years since his last visit, freethinkers in places like New York and Philadelphia had created societies and newspapers that fostered openly skeptical discussion of organized religion and supernatural beliefs. Some booksellers carried the latest heretical works from France. Maybe the time was right for Stewart to make a big splash. He opened by publishing a thirty-five-page poem about his cosmology, The Revelation of Nature. By December, Stewart was in Philadelphia for a series of twelve weekly “Conversations,” held on Saturday evenings in the large assembly room of Oellers hotel, with 300 tickets available for purchase ($1 each) at Mr. Dobson’s book store. In 1796, Stewart issued a sixteen-page pamphlet that sketched out the lectures he had on offer for any audience, anywhere. That same year, James Sharples, the successful portraitist of many leading political figures in the early republic, made a pastel likeness of Stewart, and reprints appeared in bookstores. In some circles, “John Stewart, the Traveller,” became a minor celebrity, and he stepped into the role with gusto.

By all accounts, Stewart had an impressive talent for extemporaneous speech. His lengthy lectures are not recorded, but we can get a sense of his message from his poem, The Revelation of Nature. The poem opens with “nature’s voice” describing the universe as matter in motion:

Hear nature’s voice, the universe I am,
One whole of matter indistructible
All modes of being my constituent parts;
Connected links on matters circled chain.
Exchanging modes, by death renewing life.

Stewart had some quirky and possibly original ideas, but the notion of matter’s endless rotation through myriad forms was not one of them. This idea had roots in ancient India and Greece, and a modern version of it—in the form of a well-worn edition of Pope’s Essay on Man—accompanied Stewart on all his travels. More surprising was Stewart’s description of how matter moved. Stewart maintained that all organisms continuously and involuntarily emit particles into their surroundings, and instantly those particles merge with other forms they encounter. Stewart remained vague about the process of “emission” and “absorption,” but he described how a writer who takes a stroll unwittingly exudes atoms that become part of the air, part of the grass, part of the sheep grazing nearby. The transference is swift and ongoing. Soon one’s particle might be part of another planet:

The human atom that this moment writes,
The next perhaps is bleating on the plain,
Thence enters herb, or earth, or air,
Or moves thro’ planets in the solar sphere…

The truly transformative idea, the one Stewart thought would change the world, was the notion that individual atoms register sensation, including pain. When an atom jumps from one creature to the next, the atom experiences the sensations of the being it just joined. To explain what this means, Stewart asked his audience to imagine a person beating another creature. When atoms from the perpetrator jump to the victim, the perpetrator is inflicting violence upon part of himself. Stewart put it this way:

Think not O man! my dear coequal part,
That change awaits a slow dissolving death;
O no! that arm that dares uplift the goad
On brute or man, some wretched atom flies
(In flux emissive and absorptive changed)
Ere falls the stroke, incorporate with brute…

We might call this instant karma that occurs on the level of atoms. Stewart’s cosmology was radically equalizing, as—at least on the level of atoms—the oppressor instantly becomes the victim:

See matter transmute in the present life,
The tyrant atom that prepares the rod,
Next moment slave to feel the stroke it will’d,
Whirl’d in emission and absorption’s tides,
The matter forcing turn to matter forc’d;
Now jockey riding and now steed bestrode,
Now Lord imposing and now Hind impos’d.

Many questions about this process remained unanswered, but Stewart found the very idea of shared and sensate matter so compelling, so persuasive on its face, that it required no empirical evidence. The lack of corroboration from natural philosophers concerned Stewart not at all. In general, he was persuaded by his own thinking more than by anything to be learned in books. (He did read Locke, Rousseau, Mirabeau, and Bolingbroke, if only to enjoy pointing out their limitations.) A self-proclaimed autodidact, Stewart disdained the scholarship “spun out in musty volumes of recorded error.” He deplored the memorization of a “rubbish of detail, which oppresses the judgment, and renders learned ignorance incurable.” He especially disdained analytical philosophy and all manner of logical propositions that lead down rabbit holes of error. Precious few intellectual forerunners received his praise: Spinoza, the first human who “got a glimpse of the totality,” and Helvétius, who “pushed on Spinosa’s doctrines.” But Stewart’s approval of these men was not the admiration of a follower, because “long before their voices reached me, I had acquired a comprehensive view of the tree of existence.”

Instead of book-learning, Stewart advocated a form of meditation: using one’s imagination while contemplating the unified cosmos. Focused contemplation could “open a new source of mental powers.” The mind “dwells upon its object, till every possible relation is discovered, not in a particular and separate series, but in its universality of relation or unity, with all existence.” Contemplation brings a holistic understanding of nature, an awareness of the unified whole.

Stewart’s fundamental conviction was this: recognition of sensate matter leads naturally to compassionate conduct toward even the most humble life forms. Take the example of a man plagued by gout. When he eats, the exchange of atoms in his stomach transfers his physical pain to the food he imbibes. While creatures must eat to survive, every unnecessary mouthful the sick man swallows “is gratuitous anguish, transferred to brute matter, his fellow being.” To torture even a single atom in a leaf of lettuce increases the pain in all of nature. Those who understand this have a sense of cosmic kinship, a sensibility we can see in the “homo-ousiast” or “man of nature” who “fears to communicate pain to the crust he eats.” Stewart lauded the tenderness such a person feels for every “sensitive fellow being; he would lift the worm from the path, lest some heedless fool might crush it, and save the drowning fly from his tea cup; he never could be the tyrant of his species, or a torpid link upon the chain of being.” Through all-encompassing compassion and the careful avoidance of violence in everyday life, the enlightened man becomes “the universal self, or man-god.”

Stewart’s materialist cosmology required—then and now—a mind-bending reconsideration of who and what matters. For him, human society was hardly the sole focus of reform. Any and all living organisms have an equal stake in the project of universal improvement. In this regard, Stewart anticipated by two centuries modern-day post-humanist theories. Consider the work of theorist Cary Wolfe, who discusses this “new reality: that the human occupies a new place in the universe, a universe now populated by what I am prepared to call nonhuman subjects.” For Wolfe, post-humanism means “an increase in the vigilance, responsibility, and humility that accompany living in a world so newly, and differently, inhabited.” Stewart’s focus on compassion (“universal benevolence”)—rather than “rights”—as the motivation for the ethical treatment of other living things, anticipates the objection of philosopher Cora Diamond to moral theories that base justice on rights alone and separate it from “mere” kindness. Jane Bennett rethinks “vibrant matter and lively things” that have agency and effect without necessarily having sentience or purpose. Like Stewart before her, Bennett reasons that accepting the vitality of matter logically leads to a different kind of politics of human interaction with the material world of which humans are one—but not a privileged—part. To be sure, Stewart understood that humans would continue to identify most with their own species. But he believed people around the world must learn to conceive in broader and less species-centric terms the great impact and hence responsibility of human actions. Only then would pain and suffering be reduced for the whole.

This shift in perception made Stewart’s work, in his own opinion, the “most important discovery and instruction, that ever was offered to human nature.” It would take time, of course, but ever since the violence of the French revolution, Stewart condoned only gradual change. The “speculative philosopher,” wrote Stewart, “is no revolutionist in action, but a reformer of sentiment.” The “reform of the mind will prepare the change of government, custom, and opinion, without the anarchy of revolution.” Politically conservative, Stewart expressed surprise that his friend Thomas Paine still “idolizes the discretion of the multitude, in that very country, where experience has fully evinced their folly, cruelty, and incapacity of popular government.” In Stewart’s opinion, contemplative men of strong moral sense should lead the way, gently coaxing others to understand the truth of nature. Once people grasp the concept of sensate matter, the rest will take care of itself.

Stewart toured the United States for four years, lecturing on sensate matter and pleading for a supra-species allegiance to all living things. He may have had only one convert, a former Presbyterian minister gone freethinker. Elihu Palmer had given up his pulpit in New York in exchange for free-thought, and he found Stewart’s ideas fascinating. After hearing John Stewart, Palmer explained a singular substance and shared sensation in his book, Principles of Nature (1801). Palmer also promoted Stewart in his newspaper, Prospect: Or View of the Moral World (1803-1805).

But even without many converts, Stewart gained a certain notoriety. Benjamin Rush met Stewart at least twice during this second visit. Rush noted in his Commonplace book what Stewart had to say about the plague in Turkey, but he made no mention this time of Stewart’s views on matter. Rush likely rejected outright Stewart’s materialist cosmology; certainly it lay on the outermost fringes of radical thought. And yet, for all their strangeness, Stewart’s ideas became part of the spectrum of available opinion in the early republic. In an era that required a fundamental rethinking of politics and the social order, Stewart promoted a form of radical egalitarianism that would not produce social and political chaos. He did not persuade many, but his effort, at least, continued to meet with curiosity.

Known as “the celebrated traveller,” Stewart could always draw a crowd, although not without some controversy. In 1798, the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States reprinted a complaint that Stewart “goes from town to town, reading philosophical romances, for money.” The writer attacked the contents of Stewart’s lectures, warning that Stewart was akin to the demagogues of revolutionary France, those “travelling mountebank quacks who under pretext of enlightening the human mind, inspire it with fanaticism.” The innocent listener gets caught up in the talk of doing good, and soon he becomes a violent “demoniac,” ready to “smote his father, the throne, or the altar.” Stewart, an Anglophile who approved of Federalists and their politics, would have scoffed at this description of himself as a rabid Jacobin. Still, the critic had rightly perceived Stewart’s egalitarian materialism as, at least in theory, antithetical to the social order.

Controversy never stopped Stewart. In April of 1799, he got into a small scuffle with “A Serious Christian” in the Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, which may only have stoked public interest in him. In May, “the well known traveller” was in Baltimore delivering lectures on “the Human Mind.” Newspapers in Philadelphia and New York noted that Stewart’s “principles have been warmly and ably attacked in the public papers there, without the appearance of having produced conviction on either side.” In August he lectured to audiences in Newport, Rhode Island. By the end of the year, however, Stewart decided to return to London. In four years of itinerant lecturing, he had made a name for himself in America, but not many converts. When a London newspaper announced on February 1, 1800, that “The celebrated walking Stewart has returned to this country after traversing various parts of America,” the notice made its way into at least eight American newspapers from Rhode Island to South Carolina. Of the readers who cared, probably a majority were glad to know Stewart was safely on the other side of the Atlantic.

Safely, but maybe not for good. Stewart still had high hopes for the United States. His conviction that Europe would succumb first to revolutionary anarchy and then to the dictatorship of military despots led him to see in America “the last asylum of civil liberty.” His 1803 publication of Opus Maximum in London was dedicated to America, that “exalted and transcendent nation” which enjoys not only freedom of the press but also “the separation of religion from state policy.” Stewart quite possibly returned to the United States a third time. Nicholas Low, owner of the Sans Souci hotel in upper state New York, wrote on a leaflet advertising Stewart’s “School of Philosophy” that “Mr. Stewart proposes delivering his Lectures at the Hotel, Ballston Springs in July & August 1804.” Another hint that Stewart returned to the United States appears in the introduction to a reprint of his work, which mentions that his pamphlet The Conquest of the Moral World was “written and printed in America, 1806.” But more striking is the scant number of traces Stewart left in America after his return to London in 1800. The greatest fan of his work on sensate matter seems to have been Elihu Palmer in New York, who continued to promote Stewart’s ideas.

Stewart spent the last decades of his life holding salons in his London home. At some point the East India Company settled the debts of the Nawab of Arcot and gave Stewart £10,000 in back-pay for his work in India. With this veritable fortune Stewart moved into a house at Charing Cross, decorated it with mirrors and chandeliers, and put on lavish salons. He hired professional musicians, ordered plentiful food and drink, and, of course, enlightened his guests with his signature lectures. Stewart also continued to travel and publish pamphlets, for example the Roll of a Tennis Ball, Through the Moral World (1812). He became a ubiquitous presence on the streets of London, and for a time his color-tinted portrait adorned shop windows. He walked five hours a day and could readily be found in St. James’s Park or on Westminster Bridge discussing the unity of nature.

When he reached his seventies, Stewart began to suffer poor health. He strongly felt people should not long endure extreme suffering; it was good neither for them as individuals nor for the entirety of matter. Stewart had repeatedly said that should his life become painful “without hope of remedy,” he would end it. He always found “this prospect of euthanasia” liberating: “it casts a cheerful light” over life. After some months of ill health, which a visit to the seaside town of Margate did not relieve, Stewart died at home. Some said it was the day after his birthday, others that an empty laudanum bottle was found in his room.

Stewart’s younger friend, Thomas De Quincey (famous for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater) remembered him fondly. Of course one must read Stewart’s works “with some indulgence,” De Quincey admitted. The titles were pretentious, the composition “lax and imprecise,” the doctrines “incautiously stated,” and the metaphysical speculations perhaps “untenable.” All this might suggest that Stewart had been a bit unhinged. But De Quincey found that “if Walking Stewart were at all crazy, he was so in a way which did not affect his natural genius and eloquence—but rather exalted them.” De Quincey considered Stewart “a sublime visionary,” a man of “great genius … and eloquence.” Sadly, Stewart was not “a man of talents; or at least his genius was all out of proportion to his talents.” Stewart’s most original thoughts remained “in a crude state—imperfect, obscure, half developed, and not producible to a popular audience. He was aware of this himself.”

Stewart had keenly felt his ideas were ahead of their time, and that he was unable to give them adequate expression. He once wrote that he “never found above ten individuals, over all the world, whose contemplative minds could take a comprehensive view of the tree of existence, or homo-ousia life.” He therefore hoped his works would survive many generations into a future that would better understand—and could better express—the truth he had grasped but could not properly convey. Stewart worried that rulers would forever seek to destroy his books and the radically egalitarian message they contained. He wanted his works translated into Latin, the language he thought most likely to last, and then buried seven or eight feet underground. The location of the books should be kept a closely guarded secret, handed down from one generation of freethinkers to the next, until humankind had developed enough to make proper use of them. He imagined this would take a thousand years.

Stewart might have been pleased to know that his ideas found expression much sooner. Historian Gregory Claeys has argued that Stewart represents a transition to secular social reform of the kind Robert Owen made famous just a few decades later. Perhaps even more to Stewart’s liking would have been his inclusion in a compendium of radical thinkers published in Albany, New York, in 1842. The table of contents lists him alongside some of his favourite authors: Spinoza, Helvétius, Pope, Paine, and Bolingbroke. On sale in bookstores in New York, New Jersey, Boston, and Philadelphia, his writings were preserved, ready to be discovered by an American public of the future. Maybe those future readers would contemplate anew the shared nature of all things and promote a radical egalitarianism through gradual and peaceful means.

Stewart was among the thinkers and social commentators who tried to come to terms with, and also to restrain, the radical impulses of the age. His voice was among the many seeking a transition into a new way of being. Shaped by his travels around the world, Stewart’s ideas of sensate matter and cosmic kinship mingled with those of other freethinkers in America and elsewhere who hoped for a better future. His vision involved neither the radically democratic politics of a Paine or an Oswald, nor the social radicalism found in some utopian Protestant communities. Stewart offered something else entirely: a completely heretical form of materialism with social and political consequences that were potentially egalitarian in the extreme. All living things deserved the same consideration for their well-being. Universal benevolence must have no bounds. Stewart hoped the social repercussions of this radical premise might be contained, as he greatly feared violence of any kind. In his mind’s eye, America was a place where conversion to his cosmology might bring about this peaceful and yet ultimately complete transformation of the way people live in the world.

Acknowledgments:

The author received helpful comments on this essay from Nathalie Caron, Anne Carter, Anna Clark, Joanne Jahnke Wegner, Katherine Solomonson, and the participants of the Early Modern Atlantic Workshop at the University of Minnesota.

Further Reading:

John Stewart wrote about his ideas, not his adventures, but his stories were noted by others who published bits on his fascinating life. See especially William Thomas Brande’s The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart: Including his Travels in the East Indies, Turkey, Germany, & America. By a relative. (London, 1822); Thomas de Quincey, “Walking Stewart,” in The Works of Thomas de Quincey, ed. Frederick Burwick, vol. 3 (London, 2000): 132-142; John Taylor, Records of My Life, vol. 1 (London, 1832); the obituaries in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 92:1 (March 1822): 279-280 and The Annual Biography and Obituary (London, 1823). Modern-day scholarship on Stewart is sparse but includes Bertrand Harris Bronson, “Walking Stewart,” in Facets of the Enlightenment: Studies in English Literature and its Contexts (Oakland, Calif., 1968): 266-297; Tristram Stuart, “John ‘Walking’ Stewart and the Utility of Death,” in The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York, 2006); Gregory Claeys, “‘The Only Man of Nature that Ever Appeared in the World’: John Stewart and the Trajectories of Social Radicalism, 1790-1822,” Journal of British Studies 53:3 (July 2014): 636-59. My discussion of John Oswald leans heavily on Stuart.

The quotes by John Stewart are from three of his works: The revelation of nature, with The prophesy of reason, printed by Mott & Lyon, for the author. In the fifth year of intellectual existence, or the publication of The apocalypse of nature, 3000 years from the Grecian olympiads, and 4800 from recorded knowledge in the Chinese tables of eclipses, beyond which chronology is lost in fable (New York, 1795); Prospectus of a series of lectures, or A new practical system of human reason, calculated to discharge the mind from a great mass of error, and to facilitate its labour in the approximation of moral truth, divested of all metaphysical perplexities and nullities; accommodated to the most ordinary capacities, in a simple method, which dispenses equally with the study of the college, or the lecture of musty libraries (Philadelphia, 1796); Opus maximum; or, the great essay to reduce the world from contingency to system, in the following new sciences: Psyconomy; or, the science of the moral powers … Mathemanomy; or, the laws of knowledge: Logonomy; or, the science of language: Anagognomy; or, the science of education: Ontonomy; or, the science of being (London, 1803).

The post-humanist theories referenced here are from Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, 2010); Cora Diamond, “Injustice and Animals,” in Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics, ed. Carl Elliott (Durham, N.C., 2001); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C., 2010).

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

Kirsten Fischer is associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota and the author of Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (2002). She is writing a book on freethinkers in the early American republic.

I.

I have been a Mark Twain fan since I was six years old, even though I did not read a word he wrote before turning ten. What made me a fan was not hearing one of his stories read aloud. Nor was it seeing a play, television show, or film that did it. What made me a fan was my first trip to Disneyland. One of my favorite sections of the theme park immediately became Tom Sawyer’s Island, and I concluded that anyone who could provide the inspiration for it was worth admiring. When I finally got around to reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I was gratified to discover that Twain really was the great writer that I had imagined him to be. I was also relieved that the characters I met on the page behaved like the ones I had conjured up during Disneyland daydreams.

Things have not always worked out quite this way with expectations formed at Anaheim’s famous theme park. Sometimes, the real thing has failed to live up to the promise of the simulation. Other times, encountering the original has left me feeling that Disney did not do it justice. Learning to drive a car fits into the first category, while seeing the Alps fits into the second. Most books first encountered in childhood and revisited years later fit someplace in between. While The Adventures of Tom Sawyer pleasantly confirmed a set of preconceived notions, encountering other books of Twain’s has often worked out quite differently. When I took a course devoted to the author while a college sophomore, I found that some of the texts we read fit in neatly with images I brought with me into the class. Others, however, most definitely did not. By that point, there was a lot that I knew–or, rather, thought I knew–about the author’s life and work. Many different kinds of things had shaped my notions about him–not just those early trips to Disneyland, but also assorted films and television shows, and even some firsthand encounters with Twain’s books. Taking the class, I found that some of my notions were simply wrong. For example, I came in thinking of Twain as someone who only wrote short stories and novels. It was a surprise to find out how large a role travel writings and essays had played in establishing his reputation as a writer. And in my mind Twain was linked only with the South and the Midwest, so it was surprising to discover that he had spent important parts of his life in California and on the East Coast. I guess, most of all, I was surprised to find out how many works by Twain had not been transformed into shows or films. The works I read for that class that I had already been exposed to in some way beforehand, such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and the Pauper, were certainly enjoyable. But the books that made the deepest impression on me then were several that I had never heard of before.

One of these was The Innocents Abroad, which first appeared in 1869. The book offers a humorous account of an 1867 trip to Europe and the Middle East that Twain took as part of an early group tour. There was something refreshing about reading a book like this, which I came to completely unburdened by expectations. There was no need to ponder, as I read, whether The Wonderful World of Disney had handled the material well. Nor did I find myself thinking about the odd choice a studio had made when casting the lead for a cinematic rendition, as happened when I read Connecticut Yankee with images of Bing Crosby in my head.

Instead, reading Innocents Abroad, which was adapted from letters to newspapers that Twain wrote while taking his tour, I could focus on appreciating the writing simply for its own sake. Well, not quite. The professor teaching the class, though he did a great job at bringing Twain and his times alive, was a bit obsessed with Freudian ideas for my taste. This meant that his students were told to remain vigilantly on the lookout for the appearance of certain kinds of symbols and images. And we were encouraged to be mindful always of how Twain’s humor was linked to a dark view of life and a pessimistic vision of human nature. The professor’s injunctions, though, did little to hinder my uncomplicated enjoyment of books like Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, another book previously unknown to me that became a favorite. In fact, when I started to reread the former, fittingly enough during a recent trip to France (one of the countries described in its pages), I could not remember a single passage that had revealed a Freudian outlook. When I returned to the book some twenty-two years after first encountering it, the only specific passages from it I remembered were silly ones that had made me laugh.

If one section of Innocents stuck most in my memory, it was the part of chapter 27 that finds Twain describing, to delirious effect, how he and some mischievous co-conspirators flummoxed one of their innumerable guides. Sick of having various guides in Italy tell them endless stories about Christopher Columbus, assuming that the great “Christo Columbo” was the one Italian about whom all Americans wanted to know everything, Twain and his partners in mischief took to pretending that they had never heard of the explorer. When the guide showed them a document written by Columbus, they merely commented on the poor quality of the penmanship. (“Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old who could write better than that,” one of Twain’s companions says.) They then asked naively whether this Columbo fellow was dead, a query that greatly irritated the poor guide. So, too, did their irrelevant follow-up questions, such as whether Columbus had died from measles and whether his parents were still alive.

II.

It may seem odd that I began this essay on rereading Innocents Abroad with a series of paragraphs that refer to such quintessentially twentieth-century phenomena as Disneyland, television shows, and films. After all, Twain’s book, in which he often subjects the American travelers in whose company he journeyed to the same sort of humorous scrutiny that he turns on the sites and people of foreign lands, is very much a product of the period in which it was written. That was an era that predated by close to a century the founding of Anaheim’s famous theme park and television’s rise to prominence. The origins of the cinema lie in the very late 1800s, closer to the period of Twain’s first crossing of the Atlantic. Even where film is concerned, however, we are dealing with a medium that did not become a powerful shaper of popular images until Innocents Abroad had been around for about half a century.

This said, it is worth noting that a recurring theme in Twain’s book is precisely the one that my opening paragraphs on Disneyland, television, and film addressed: the experience of encountering for the first time things about which one has already formed images and already has expectations. In Innocents Abroad, Twain repeatedly explores his responses to encountering directly for the first time something to which he has already been exposed in an indirect manner. Sometimes, he describes his initial encounter with the real thing as a source of disappointment, of the sort I felt when I discovered how complicated and worrisome driving was going to be until I got the knack of it. Consider, for example, the section of chapter 34 titled, tellingly, “The Turkish Bath Fraud.” According to Twain, his first Turkish bath was a terrible, indeed traumatic experience, so shockingly devoid was it of the elegance that literary accounts had led him to anticipate.

In other cases, though, Twain shows us how previous exposure via representations can give a new experience a pleasing sense of familiarity mixed with novelty, akin to what I felt when reading Tom Sawyer, after being primed for it by Disneyland. He describes “speeding through the streets of Paris” for the first time, all the while “delightfully recognizing certain names and places with which books had long ago made us familiar.” Seeing pictures of the Louvre in advance prepared him for the look of the “genuine vast palace” itself; it was “like meeting an old friend when we read ‘Rue de Rivoli’ on the street corner”; and he instantly recognized the “brown old Gothic heap” that was Notre Dame, since it was so much “like the pictures” of it he had seen.

In still other cases, he claims, encountering a site about which he thought he knew what to expect in advance could turn out to be nothing short of a revelation. Take, for example, his section on “The Majestic Sphinx,” in which he describes seeing for the first time in person an Egyptian icon that was doubtless as familiar to him via representations of various sorts as the Matterhorn was to me during my Southern California childhood. “After years of waiting, it was before me at last,” he writes, and then begins describing its wondrous qualities in a way that makes it clear that he was unprepared for just how impressive he would find it. So taken with it was he that his description of the Sphinx stands out as an unusual part of the book, since in extolling its glories, Twain drops his usual satirical tone and just enthuses.

But sometimes, Twain suggests, only true novelty–a first encounter, devoid of expectations–will do. “One charm of travel” dies for him in Rome, where he finds there is nothing “to feel, to learn, to hear” that others have not already felt, learned, and heard. While Twain makes it clear that he does not yearn for actual discovery–being the first to go somewhere–he hungers occasionally for the next best thing: to see sites that have not inspired artistic creations or made it into guidebooks.

III.

Twain’s interest in exploring and teasing humor out of the interplay between expectations and encounters resonates powerfully with contemporary concerns, as does his feeling that having clearly formed images of places in advance can sometimes add to but sometimes detract from the experience of travel. Much has been made of late of how important simulations have become in our twenty-first-century lives, and how new media have begun to drown us in representations. And much has also been made of the way that, in the current age, the tourist industry has to play to our desire for both familiarity and the exotic. We want to see firsthand places that we feel we know already, thanks to their appearance in movies, specials on the travel channel, National Geographic feature stories, and so on. And yet, as the popularity of “rough guides” show, we also hunger to get off the beaten track at least a bit and come as close to “discovering” things as we can in an era of information overload.

There are many novelties about the current situation, of course, in terms of the specific media that shape in advance our images of distant places and the way we prepare for trips to far-off locales. Before leaving the United States, Americans can now journey into cyberspace not only to find places to stay but also to see images of their future accommodations. We did just this before the four of us set off to France last June. Prior to arriving in Paris, my wife showed our two children and me a Website that contained a photo of the Parisian apartment she had rented for us. Moreover, sometimes when Americans go abroad, they take with them images of a foreign country formed by more than just things they have read in books and seen on television screens, movie screens, and computer screens. Before our eleven-year-old daughter and fourteen-year-old son ever crossed the Atlantic, for example, they had visited the faux version of France that can be found at Epcot Center. (Just go past Norway and China; if you reach Morocco, then you have gone too far.) It remains an open question, though, whether these sorts of novelties mean that a chasm separates travelers of 1867 and 2004 when it comes to the interplay between images and experience. And reading up on the role of simulations in Twain’s day has convinced me that the divide between then and now is a much subtler one than it appears at first to be.

The work that has done most to push my thinking in this direction is historian Vanessa Schwartz’s fascinating 1998 University of California Press book, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. One of Schwartz’s main themes is that the nineteenth century, like the twentieth, witnessed the rise of many forms of mass media, from serialized novels to panoramas. Another is that, as a result, the mid-to-late 1800s were, like the present, a time when the lines between simulations and “reality” were continually being drawn, erased, and blurred in alternately confusing, disturbing, and exhilarating ways.

There is much in Twain’s account that illuminates the role that the “new media” and newly important genres of the 1800s could have on a traveler. For example, though he could not see any cinematic representation of the Castle d’If before reaching that famous prison, he makes it clear that reading popular novels by Dumas that included scenes set within that edifice colored completely his first direct encounter with it. In addition, though he obviously could not go on the Web to get a preview of his living-quarters abroad, he did read brochures and guidebooks that gave him clues about what to expect. And, as with the Web, the information Twain gleaned from them turned out to be not so much inaccurate as incomplete. The digital photo of our Parisian apartment did not prepare us for the heady aroma that would enter it whenever we opened a window, due to the apartment’s proximity to a string of Egyptian, Greek, and Indian restaurants. Similarly, Twain was surprised that the guidebooks that sang the praises of the soaps of Marseilles did not tell him how hard it would be to find any bars of this substance with which to wash in that city’s hotels.

Switching from sites and accommodations to famous works of art, it is easy to imagine Twain feeling a kinship with the many contemporary travelers who wait in line in Paris to see the great Mona Lisa up close–then go away vaguely unsatisfied. Yes, these people say, it does look just like it does on the greeting cards and t-shirts. But it is hard to appreciate the famous smile when you come close to it, since the glass case encumbers your view. This postmodern disappointment echoes Twain’s reaction to another Da Vinci work, The Last Supper, which he calls “the most celebrated painting in the world.” When he saw The Last Supper, Twain writes, he “recognized it in a moment,” as it had served for centuries as the model for many “engravings” and “copies.” “And, as usual,” he continues, making a comment that he made as well about other renowned works, “I could not help noticing how superior the copies were to the original, that is, to my inexperienced eye.” They were brighter and clearer, for example, the details easier to make out.

Still, one might object, there remain some dramatic contrasts between our day and Twain’s. Yes, there may be contemporary counterparts to the know-it-alls of the 1860s that Twain lampoons, who would spout out, as though they were spontaneously formed opinions, impressive sounding comments on famous sites that turned out to be taken verbatim from a guidebook. The only difference is that now, the plagiarists often go to the Web rather than printed matter for inspiration. But surely, one might argue, there was nothing around in Twain’s time comparable to Epcot. To experience foreign travel then, you had to actually go abroad, did you not? Is it not only recently that going to an entertainment site can give one a literal and metaphoric taste of distant lands, a taste that can prepare you for an actual journey–or take the place of this kind of expensive and inconvenient undertaking? Can we not safely put Disney World in a special category, reserved for contemporary simulations? The answer to all of these questions, I think, is actually no.

Consider, for example, the panoramas and dioramas of the 1800s. In 1824, one travel writer called panoramas “among the happiest contrivances for saving time and expense,” since for a “shilling and a quarter of an hour” they allowed one to make a journey that once cost “a couple of hundred pounds.” Sometimes, panoramas displayed events, such as battles, but sometimes they just represented locales. The same was true of dioramas. In 1845, for example, crowds flocked to a Parisian diorama devoted to simulating the experience of seeing St. Mark’s in Venice. In short, as Schwartz puts it, panoramas and dioramas were early forms of “‘armchair’ tourism” that might “substitute for travel.” Such spectacles belonged to a milieu that included many other sorts of popular simulations that made a fetish of “realism,” yet often included fanciful elements. Wax museums, for example, and the Paris Morgue, a site open to public viewing where bodies awaiting identification were placed on display, sometimes posed in dramatic ways or surrounded by props.

We do not know from Twain’s account whether he saw any panoramas or dioramas or wax tableaus, either before or after heading across the Atlantic, that prepared him in advance for any particular sites. We do know that, while in Paris, he joined the crowds outside the windows of the morgue. And, more significantly, he went to the 1867 International Exposition, also in Paris. The great international expositions and exhibitions of the nineteenth century–two of the most famous of which were in London in 1851 and in Chicago in 1893–were precursors of the World’s Fairs of the twentieth. And these in turn would serve as models for the Disney theme parks.

Twain spent only two hours at the exposition–in part because he “saw at a glance that one would have to spend weeks–yea, even months–in that monstrous establishment, to get an intelligible idea of it.” But he viewed his short time at the gala as a kind of miniaturized version of a world tour. The formal exhibits added up, he wrote, to a “wonderful show,” allowing visitors to see objects from various regions. And yet, he writes, “the moving masses of people of all nations” made “a still more wonderful show,” and he closely examined the faces and modes of dress of those who passed by. It is perhaps no accident that one party he was especially fascinated by was made up of people who had come from the Middle East, the part of the world toward which he was headed.

IV.

Since rereading Innocents Abroad, I have been asking myself three different sets of “what if” questions about Twain’s voyages across the globe and on the page. One set has to do with sites associated with him that are now part of tourist itineraries. What would he make of his birthplace in Hannibal, Missouri, becoming a heritage site? Would he be flattered, annoyed, or simply amused by Tom Sawyer’s Island? And what would he say about the fact that the Magic Kingdom that now stands near Paris does not include this attraction? (Full disclosure: I have not made it to the European park yet, so my information comes from a bit of armchair travel–done twenty-first-century style, of course, via the Web.)

The second sorts of “what if” questions I have been asking myself have to do with what Twain would have thought of Shanghai, the subject of my current research, had he visited there in the late 1800s. He had plans to go China after completing his 1867 trip across the Atlantic, but despite an enduring interest in the country, he never made it. Twain wrote some interesting things about American policies toward China and about treaties that affected the city I study. And a character in one of his works of fiction sets off for America from there. But I can only imagine–and this is frustrating for a Twain-loving Shanghai specialist–what he would have actually thought about the sights, sounds, and smells of the city in the late 1800s. Would he have thought that parts of the old walled city of Shanghai were strangely familiar when he arrived, due to his prior viewings of Chinese artifacts at international exhibitions or visits to one of America’s Chinatowns? And if he had made it to Shanghai, would he have thought that the illustrations he had seen ahead of time of the new Western-style buildings of the famous waterfront “Bund” that ran through its newer foreign-run districts had done them justice? There is, alas, no way to know for sure.

The final set of hypothetical questions I have been asking myself are what Twain’s reaction would have been to certain experiences we had during our recent trip to France. I have decided that he would have liked our Parisian apartment, as the view from its window was a bit like a peephole into an international exposition. Looking out, we could see “people of all nations” pass by, as well as restaurants that not only served food from different countries, but also had hosts or hostesses wearing the traditional clothing of and contained objects associated with those countries. One restaurant had a white statue of a Greek hero, another a sign saying, “Visit Egypt,” and a picture of the Pyramids. Our view was, in a sense, a window onto a miniature Epcot-on-the-Seine.

Another thing about our recent trip that would have impressed Twain is the speed with which we made the journey from Paris to Marseilles. In Innocents Abroad, Twain describes his preference for traveling by stagecoach rather than train, finding railway trips “tedious” and lacking in drama. Still, he was such an admirer of technological breakthroughs that he would have marveled that the TGV could whisk us from Paris to Marseilles in just a few hours. I am less sure what he would have thought of the precise fashion in which we made that journey. Though we had reserved seats, a strike leading to the cancellation of two-thirds of the southbound trains forced us into a small space usually reserved for luggage. Would he have found this a charming throwback to rough and ready travel by stagecoach? Interpreted it as a sign of the importance human factors will always have, no matter what technology accomplishes? Or simply lamented that we were deprived of seeing the landscape between Paris and Marseilles that he had found “bewitching”? There is no way to know.

Similarly hard to decide is what he would have thought about Nice, our final stop, which was not on his 1867 itinerary. Since Twain wrote a few revisionist accounts of Old Testament stories, it would be interesting to bring him back to life and ask his opinion of the representations of these tales in the Chagall Museum. And I would like to hear his comments, after a few days in Nice, on the ways that the clothes people wear at the seaside and the kinds of boats that ply the Mediterranean have changed since the 1860s. Most of all, though, if I could ask the author of Innocents Abroad about just one thing that we saw in Nice, it would be a restaurant-cum-nightclub called “Le Mississippi,” which stands near the city’s famed Hotel Negresco. From peeking into its window, my sense was that the main goal of the décor of Le Mississippi is to simulate for patrons the feeling of being on board a nineteenth-century American riverboat of the sort frequented and then made globally famous by Mark Twain. I would love to know the great man’s reaction to this place, the French Riviera’s glitzy answer to Tom Sawyer’s Island.

Le Mississippi’s existence intrigues me for another reason: it reminds us that cities throughout the world are now filled–much more so than in Twain’s day–with sites that provide residents of other countries with simulated encounters with imagined Americas. It is worth keeping in mind that such simulacra–including, for example, the Hard Rock Cafés found everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires–can be powerful shapers of images. And it is worth considering, as I did in Nice, that such sites may seem just as exotic as additions to the local landscape as Epcot’s faux Eiffel Tower is to that of Orlando.

Further Reading:

On Twain as a travel writer, see Jeffrey Alan Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement (Tuscaloosa and London, 2002). And for a very good general reference work on the author, see A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Oxford, 2002).  The Innocents Abroad (1869) is readily available in several editions. The 2002 Penguin Classics edition–which comes with an introduction by Tom Quirk that does an excellent job of describing and placing into context the evolution of Twain’s account of his travels–was the one I took with me to France. There is also a 2003 Modern Library edition that I discovered after my return but before completing this essay, which contains a poignant introduction by Jane Jacobs that is particularly insightful on the interplay between mockery and empathy in Twain. In addition, there is a digital version of the book–and related materials, such as sample advertisements for it that were used to sell it when it first appeared–available here. On the general subject of travel and tourism, a good collection of recent scholarly writings is Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, 2001). On simulations in the nineteenth century, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), and also Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). For further readings on Paris around the time of Twain’s visit, the citations in Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, will take you to a variety of relevant works by Walter Benjamin and many others. For an idiosyncratic but fascinating account of spending time in this same city as an American toward the end of the twentieth century, see Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (New York, 2000). And for the history of Nice and its changing place on tourist itineraries, start with Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley, 1999), 163-66, and proceed from there to the works he cites in his footnotes.

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

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, a specialist in cultural history and modern China, is the director of the East Asian Studies Center at Indiana University. His most recent book, as editor, is Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches (New York and London, 2003). He is a regular contributor to the TLS and has had essays appear in various magazines, including the Nation and Newsweek. He is currently working on a book-length study of Shanghai’s past and present as a global city.

A renaissance is occurring in the study of American cartography. Just a decade ago, rare early maps of North America were accessible mainly through small black and white reproductions scattered unindexed across many books, journals, and posters. Now many of these maps are easily available, thanks to innovative zoom, scan, and track software deployed on major library Websites such as Gallica from the Bibiliothèque national de France. Many smaller libraries and even private collectors like David Rumsey also offer these digital tools for viewing their maps.

Even as these resources make it easier for curious newcomers to study old maps, printed books are still valuable, for they provide narratives of the history of American maps and exploration. Some of the same graphic technologies that have made map Websites possible have improved the quality of color reproductions on paper. Mapping a Continent is an exquisite coffee-table volume, 13.0 by 10.5 inches, entirely in color and on sale for a very attractive price. The quality of design and reproduction are superb; every tiny place name is legible, and key features are enlarged and discussed in sidebars. 

Historical Atlas of North America, 1492-1814 is the book’s subtitle, but I think it is important to distinguish between two types of historical atlases. The first type is an atlas that depicts, on modern maps, the routes of exploration and migration, the changing boundaries and frontiers, the growth of railroads, highways, and cities. Because United States historiography and ideology has long celebrated westward expansion, this type of atlas has been popular for classroom instruction, often using a four-color, staple-bound Rand McNally edition. But this type of atlas fosters an illusion that the features of the continent were static, patiently waiting for European eyes and minds to discover and dominate.

Mapping a Continent belongs to a second type of historical atlas, which reproduces maps drawn by the explorers and cartographers of yesteryear, showing their conceptions of the world, their efforts to represent and mold the understanding of far-away places, based on their own travels or by collating the written and visual accounts of others. These atlases demand much more from their readers, who must retrain eyes accustomed to recognizing familiar shapes, and they reveal much more as well, for the ways that maps and boundaries failed to match actual landforms often had momentous historical consequences. Notorious cartographic fallacies such as the island of California or the inland sea dubbed the “Mer de l’ouest” by French cartographers are discussed in Mapping a Continent but so are lesser-known affairs. For instance, the 1763 Treaty of Paris and the 1783 Treaty of Versailles both provided that the western boundary of English and then United States territory would follow the middle of the Mississippi River, “from its source to the River Iberville, and from thence, by a line drawn along the middle of this river, and the lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain to the sea” (245). New Orleans and environs thus lay on an island—bisected by the Mississippi—which lay in French and later Spanish territory. But contrary to its depiction on many French maps, the “River Iberville” (now known as Bayou Manchac), was barely navigable and actually dried up in some seasons. Merchant vessels sailing out the mouth of the Mississippi had to pass by New Orleans, in potentially hostile territory. This led Thomas Jefferson to bargain with Napoleon to buy the “island” of New Orleans, and in the negotiations, he was able to strike a deal for the entire Louisiana Purchase.

The distinction between the two types of historical atlas is analogous to the difference between a literary history and an anthology of excerpts or between a historical monograph and a casebook of documents. Anthologies and literary histories are often devoted to defining and celebrating a national literature. Cartography has always been an international endeavor; great cartographers such as Jean-Baptiste Franquelin did not restrict themselves to maps of their native land. Even so, collections of maps can serve a nationalist purpose, and in this volume, published in collaboration with the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales de Québec (home of many of the original maps), the “nation” of interest is Québec. Early chapters emphasize the explorations of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence by cod fishermen and the founding voyages of Jacques Cartier and feature stunning works such as a 1542 map by Jean Rotz of Dieppe. U.S. readers will find a new perspective on colonial founders. John Smith was “a braggart, a teller of tall tales, a compulsive liar” (66), whereas Samuel de Champlain published “drawings and maps that were more detailed than anything previously produced on North America” (83). George Washington’s map of the site of Fort Duquesne arises in connection with his responsibility for the killing of Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville in 1754. The conquest of Québec in 1759 is an important turning point in the narrative. A fine chapter on Lewis and Clark emphasizes how they relied upon French guides and maps.

Because Mapping a Continent (published simultaneously in French as La mésure d’un continent) emphasizes French colonial regions, there’s little on Spanish exploration of the interior West by Coronado, Cabeza de Vaca, Escalante, or Father Kino. It is instructive to compare the book to its most recent competitor, America Discovered: A Historic Atlas of North American Exploration (2004) written by Derek Hayes of Vancouver, British Columbia, and published by a leading Anglo-Canadian publisher, Douglas and McIntyre. Hayes devotes more space to the Spaniards, to the West Coast, and to explorers of the English colonial Southeast such as John Lederer and Thomas Nairne. For Hayes “the fall of Québec in 1763” (130) inspires no elaboration, and the photo credits list no maps from the national library of Quebec.

A historical atlas of America is an essential reference for scholars who wish to understand nationalism or regionalism (such as in Québec) or even continentalism. At the beginning of Mapping a Continent is an exquisite T-O map from a 1460 manuscript depicting the biblical division of the world between Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Less than fifty years later, Martin Waldsemüller’s map was the first to name as “America” the new fourth continent. This map (shown here) was purchased by the U.S. Library of Congress in 2001 for $10 million, a cost justified, perhaps, by the need for the United States to lay claim to “America.” For just $59 one can own a fine reproduction of this and hundreds of other beautiful maps of the continent.

Further Reading:

Earlier historical atlases of the second type include Adrian Johnson, America Explored (New York, 1974) and Cumming, Hiller, Quinn, and Williams, The Exploration of North America, 1630-1776 (New York, 1974). The best atlas of the first type in my opinion is Goetzmann and Williams’s Atlas of North American Exploration (New York, 1992). Recent scholarship has emphasized the role played by Native American informants and mapmakers, for example in Mark Warhus, Another America: Native American Maps and the History of our Land (New York, 1997) and G. Malcolm Lewis, ed., Cartographic Encounters (Chicago, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

Gordon Sayre is professor of English at the University of Oregon and a specialist in French and English colonial literature of North America. He is coeditor of the manuscript memoir by Dumont de Montigny, Regards sur le monde atlantique, 1715-1747, published by Septentrion (2008).

By half past six on Sunday evening, March 17, 1872, Samuel Calvert, a veteran overseer at the New York House of Refuge on Randall’s Island, was nearly finished locking the inmates in for the night. As he approached the last door on the hall, sixteen-year-old Justus Dunn, first admitted to the Refuge when he was thirteen, attacked Calvert with a knife and severed his femoral artery. The guard died a few hours later. Initial coverage of the attack, noting the high esteem in which Calvert’s colleagues held him and Dunn’s “dark record,” suggested the matter would be swiftly and harshly resolved. Instead, the ensuing trial grew from an inquiry into Dunn’s attack on Calvert into a far-reaching investigation of the institution itself. For House of Refuge inmates, murdering a guard became an unlikely opening for exposing the brutality of the nation’s first juvenile reformatory.

Incorporated in 1824, New York’s House of Refuge was at the leading edge of penal reforms that made age, specifically youth, a key consideration in shaping institutional practices toward convicts. The redemption of youthful offenders was the Refuge’s nominal goal, and its 1854 move to state-of-the-art facilities on Randall’s Island—boasting different wings to separate inmates by sex and degrees of “viciousness,” abundant classrooms, and multiple manufacturing shops—seemed to promise future success. Yet improved infrastructure failed to forestall the violence that appeared to be an ineluctable feature of the Refuge’s operations. While conflict between officers and inmates was commonplace across the institution’s history, 1872—punctuated by inmate revolts, work stoppages, and the Calvert murder—stood out for its volatility and the surprising public reaction to Justus Dunn’s trial.

In recent years, violence in New York’s juvenile correctional facilities has once again captured public attention. Kalief Browder’s tragic 2015 suicide demonstrated how deadly the combination of violent abuse, solitary confinement, and delayed justice could be. State investigations of abuse on Riker’s Island and reporting on harrowing individual stories of suffering suggest violence is endemic to juvenile corrections. If violence is a constant, much else separates the present state of corrections from that of 1872: the sheer scale, the racial composition of the incarcerated population, the possibility of escape. Yet, there are also commonalities. Then, as now, incarcerated youths’ pursuit of redress hinged on convincing the public that there was a crisis. Evidence of suffering alone rarely sufficed. Further, the relationship of youth to justice remains unsettled. Americans continue to offer radically different answers to the question at the heart of juvenile justice: when does treating children differently from adults serve the interests of justice, and when does it undermine them? In 1872, a confluence of circumstances made it possible for a small group of white male inmates to challenge the terms of their incarceration, but even their modest success suggests the hazards of imagining children’s rights outside of human rights.

Newspaper coverage of Dunn’s murder trial revealed sharp disagreement about whether his age made him especially innocent or particularly depraved. According to the New York Times, Dunn’s youth was a damning factor. The paper argued that this “utterly unredeemed ruffian” demonstrated the folly of sending sixteen- to twenty-year-olds anywhere but the penitentiary. Calling it a hard but true doctrine, the paper asserted that such boys were unreformable: they were old enough to have the ambition to commit grand crimes yet too young to be checked by an understanding of the risk of punishment. In contrast, the New York Herald referred to Dunn as a “lad,” noting the “imploring way” he looked to the jury. Emphasizing Dunn’s affective capacity and his youthful isolation from supportive family was essential to the Herald’s effort to cast Dunn in a sympathetic light. This, in turn, served the paper’s broader critique of the House of Refuge and its defense of the inmates’ resistance. In short, the paper interpreted the inmates’ “revolt” as an indictment of their treatment rather than a function of their depravity.

Defenders of Dunn and the other rebelling inmates struggled to strike a balance between appeals for sympathy grounded in the boys’ youth and justifications of their violent resistance. The former helped make the inmates’ suffering a crisis worthy of public attention while the latter threatened to undercut their claims to public protection. Citizens who appealed for special consideration by virtue of their youth usually emphasized their dependence and minimized their agency. In this instance, however, both the inmates and their advocates sought to make a more difficult case: that the young inmates’ suffering was worthy of public intervention even though they had not abnegated violent resistance.

Given that committing acts of violence usually undermined youthful offenders’ ability to make successful appeals for relief, the question arises: why did Dunn and his fellow rebels receive a sympathetic hearing in any quarter? Part of the answer lies in who they were. As Gunja SenGupta argues, the kinds of resistance these boys engaged in, and the approbation it received, were contingent on their whiteness, maleness, and crucially, their ability to tap into the city’s denominational conflicts that made the treatment of institutionalized children a volatile issue. Yet timing also mattered. In 1872, the radically democratic politics of Reconstruction, and the idea that they might have some relevance for children, was still alive.

On its face, Reconstruction seemed to offer little to citizens whose rights were restricted by incarceration or age. The Thirteenth Amendment sanctioned involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime, with dire consequences in the South and the North. Further, the redefinition of citizenship in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and Fourteenth Amendment did not challenge the legality of age as a principle for restricting rights. Yet for many citizens, the political possibilities of Reconstruction exceeded the legislative legacies that have come to define it. Northern reformers, for example, took to the press and the stage to argue that the era of children’s rights was at hand. In 1870, Celia Burleigh, soon to be the first woman ordained in the Unitarian Church, delivered a lecture on “The Rights of Children,” covered with varying degrees of respect and ridicule across the nation. In the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, Julia Carney argued that the nineteenth century would not deserve its reputation as “an age of progress and of right” if it failed to address children’s rights. The animal rights crusader Henry Bergh, who attended Dunn’s trial, claimed the “emancipation of the little children” was imminent, an inevitable sequel to the emancipation of slaves and animals. Despite approaching a sometimes radical vision of children’s autonomy, reformers ultimately prioritized what historian Susan Pearson calls children’s right to be dependent. As protection became the governing principle of the movement, it identified parents, and particularly poor parents, as the greatest threat facing children, not the state that had power to incarcerate them.

The rebelling inmates at the House of Refuge offered a different vision of children’s rights, one centered on equality rather than rescue. They argued that equal access to protection under the law would go far toward improving their circumstances. This assertion, and the tactics these young inmates employed, had more in common with popular grassroots Reconstruction politics than the strategies of sentimental antebellum reform. In making their suffering the foundation of demands for redress, the inmates echoed the tactics of freedpeople in the South who made the act of testifying to the violence they endured the foundation of an expansive understanding of citizenship itself.

With the sanction of a sympathetic judge, boys from the House of Refuge transformed Dunn’s murder trial into a platform for testifying to the abuse they had suffered at the hands of guards. They described receiving lashes with multi-thonged whips and being hung up by their thumbs for failing to complete manufacturing tasks. They reported that Calvert, also known as “Sammy the Brainer,” taunted them by referring to their beatings as “candy.” Amplified by the court and the press, the boys used their testimony to challenge authorities’ premise that the House of Refuge was fundamentally different from an adult prison. The principle that the state could best protect itself by reforming rather than punishing child criminals was supposed to organize life within the Refuge. If it was a reformatory in name only, however, denying its inmates due process became less defensible.

Shortly before Dunn’s attack on Calvert, the New York Supreme Court’s decision in Huber v. the People seemed to challenge the legitimacy of the Court of Special Sessions that committed many children to the House of Refuge through expedited trials. While the district attorney insisted the scope of the decision was narrow and should have no bearing on the commitments of most juvenile and adult convicts, House of Refuge inmates advocated an expansive interpretation by bringing suits asserting that the decision invalidated their convictions. At the same time, Dunn used his trial to condemn one of the defining features of juvenile reformatories: indefinite commitment. Reformers argued that indeterminate sentences were essential to incentivizing juveniles to reform rather than count down the days to their release. Reforming children, in this view, required shielding them from a definite sense of time in a way that made their incarceration even more isolating and disruptive than adult imprisonment. To many inmates and parents, the practice was simply unjust. During his trial Justus Dunn proclaimed his preference for confinement to the penitentiary, “for then you know when you are to get out.” Inmates of the House of Refuge used the courts, bodily resistance, and the publicity around Dunn’s murder trial to condemn their treatment and advance the idea that equal protection required eliminating unjust distinctions designed to “protect” the young, but which in actuality made their punishments far harsher.

While Justus Dunn’s trial succeeded in sparking outrage, it did not upend the House of Refuge. Dunn certainly benefited from the expansive turn the trial took, as evidenced by his one-year sentence to Sing Sing, the shortest sentence possible for his conviction. In the months following the trial, New York courts proved sympathetic to parents’ appeals to remove children from the facility through writs of habeas corpus based on improperly filed convictions. Yet the managers had tools to defend themselves. The State Commissioners of Public Charities undertook a special investigation of the institution in the wake of the trial, which seemed designed to exculpate rather than investigate. Institutional managers defended their use of the whip as essential “to quell and crush this spirit of insurrection” among older boys and dismissed the testimony of abuse that emerged during the Dunn trial as nothing but the lies of inveterate criminals. The institution, and its administrators, survived the crises of 1872.

Reconstruction, as a historical context that fostered Americans’ sense of radical political possibility, contributed to the opening seized by incarcerated youth at the House of Refuge to protest their treatment. Although the Dunn trial turned on the particularities of its New York City context, it was not the only instance in which inmates of northern reformatories found courts and a public receptive to their appeals to principles of equal protection. As David Tanenhaus has demonstrated, the Illinois Supreme Court moved toward recognizing children’s rights to due process in 1870 when it found that confining children to a reform school absent a conviction was illegal. Notably, however, in Illinois and in New York it was only white, male prisoners housed in juvenile facilities who succeeded in capitalizing on this window of political opportunity.

These northern battles left the crisis of child incarceration emerging in the postwar South untouched. For the mostly black children who made up the steadily growing population of inmates housed in Virginia’s penitentiary in the years following the Civil War, emancipation was not prelude to a new era of children’s rights but to hard labor, violence, and family disruption. Children sent to Virginia’s penitentiary enjoyed the equality Justus Dunn implied would best serve youth inmates: they received the same treatment as adults. A defined sentence meant little, however, if you did not survive it. Booker Jennings, for example, died at age sixteen, only two years into a ten-year sentence, while working on a canal that claimed the lives of many Virginia convicts. While Virginia lacked separate institutions for child convicts, the state’s justice system was not entirely indifferent to age. Court records and clemency appeals reveal a widespread understanding that youth could be seen as a mitigating factor to reduce or even eliminate punishment. Yet application of this principle was at the discretion of judges, juries, and governors who created a shadow system of juvenile justice that offered some protection to white children while leaving black children exposed.

Thus, in Virginia, juvenile justice reform came not with Reconstruction, but with the reestablishment of white supremacy and the sharp curtailment of black political power. Beginning in 1890, the state’s episodic reforms targeted only white boys accused of low-level crimes, who were diverted from city and county jails rather than the penitentiary. As in New York, the new juvenile reformatory was almost immediately dogged by reports of violence and overwork, as well as habeas corpus challenges by inmates and parents. The evidence of abuse white boys suffered in this new system made O.M. Steward wary of African American reformers’ efforts to establish a reformatory for black children. In a letter to the state’s leading black newspaper, the Richmond Planet, he argued that “if such things are reported of the reformatory of the white people of the state who are abundantly able to defend and take care of themselves and their children, what may we expect from the reformatory of the colored people . . .?” Steward suggested that a juvenile reformatory’s promise to protect black children would prove hollow in the absence of meaningful rights for all African Americans.

In the postwar North, reformers and incarcerated children saw potential in the political ferment of the 1870s to advocate principles of equal protection for children. Yet whiteness operated as an unnamed prerequisite of their appeals, not just as an unacknowledged requirement for standing as a deserving child, but as a marker of membership in a group whose rights deserved recognition. These experiments in appeals to children’s rights demonstrate that legal mandates to protect children mean little in the absence of commitments to protect the rights of the communities of which they are members. In the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth, children’s rights mean nothing in the absence of human rights.

Further Reading

The trial of Justus Dunn was covered extensively in the New York press, much of which can be accessed through Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, hosted by the Library of Congress. The records of the New York House of Refuge, including reports on the investigations that followed the 1872 trial, are housed at the New York State Archives and are available on microfilm.

For the fullest treatments of the history of the House of Refuge, and the unrest of 1872, see Gunja SenGupta, From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 (New York, 2009) and Robert S. Pickett, House of Refuge: Origins of Juvenile Reform in New York State, 1815-1857 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1969). On the history of child protection, see Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2011) and on children’s rights see Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Tragedy of Children’s Rights from Ben Franklin to Lionel Tate (Princeton, N.J., 2011).

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

Catherine Jones is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia (2015) and is currently working on a book about the history of child incarceration in the nineteenth century.

Scholars of colonial New England are familiar with the dramatic literary narratives of the Antinomian Controversy, the Salem witch trials, and King Phillip’s War; although fewer scholars have explored the full archival records from this era. In 1853, volume 1 of Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay was printed from Nathaniel Shurtleff’s transcriptions of the original seventeenth-century manuscripts. These records offer insights into the quotidiana of the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay and of the lives of the indigenous tribes who dwelled there long before 1628.

Reading through patterns of legal action over the first decades of the colony offers new perspective on the lives in one small bay in the larger Atlantic world. The crimes committed are numerous (playing cards or dice, selling “strong water” to the Indians, allowing rams to graze among ewes, seditious writing, idleness, and many, many instances of drunkenness); and peppered among them is a persistent anxiety of relations with indigenous tribes. We must remember the mediation inherent to all archives and take caution in bringing stories of disenfranchised or oppressed people into current discussions. Nonetheless, in the case of the Records of the Bay Colony, the mediation may be precisely what allows us to comprehend how the “free men” (white males with suffrage) perceived the women, servants, and indigenous people who lived alongside them.

Scholars are likely most familiar with the version of Puritan history published in John Winthrop’s Journal. However, that record has troubling elisions when compared to other historical documents—such as its omission of Anne Hutchinson’s fiery defenses during the Antinomian trials. Too often, it seems like authors with literary credibility, like Winthrop, are included in popular American Literature anthologies while alternate records that may give voice to women or people of color are dismissed as merely historical sources. Studying the Records of the Governor and Company opens other narrative spaces for research. The transcripts do not include direct quotes (except a two-page narrative by John Winthrop inserted without explanation); yet they offer rich content for use across many fields of study.

The first volume covers the colony’s first decades of struggling existence (1628-1641), and the government edicts reveal the budding community’s frustrations. Some seem inconsequential, such as dozens of fluctuations regarding the wages for essential workers like bricklayers, carpenters, and thatchers. Other pronouncements, though, may horrify us in their intensity. In November 1630, John Baker was “whipped for shooteing att fowle on the Sabboth day”; and in June 1631, it was ordered that Phillip Ratliffe should be whipped, have his ears cut off, and be banished “for vttering mallitious and scandulous speeches against the goumt. & the church of Salem.” In these punishments for transgressions against the church or its morals, it appears that the Puritan identity was far removed from our more-familiar American idealization for freedom of speech and action. In fact, deviations from moral norms receive some of the harshest punishments, such as in October 1631, when the court determined that to copulate with another man’s wife was punishable by death.

This capital punishment juxtaposes with the casual handling of abuses against indigenous people. When James Woodward burned down two wigwams, the court determined that “7 yards of cloath” sufficed to “satisfie the Indians for the wronge done to them.” Overall, the records prove a constant privileging of Puritan interests over those of their indigenous neighbors. This alone will not come as a surprise, yet the colonial history seems more disturbing when the records indicate that the Puritans knew an organized society already existed in the area, and yet they continually disregarded the indigenous presence. For example, on July 3, 1632, the Court of Assistants devotes itself to granting land to its members and their heirs to have “for euer.” To Sam Skelton, they grant a 200-acre “necke of land . . . called by the Indeans Wahquack, bounded on the south vpon a little ryv[er] called by the Indeans Conamabsqnooncant; vpon the north abbuting another ryver, called by the Indeans Pouomeneauheant.” To grant a plot of land to a colonist while using indigenous names to dictate the boundaries seems particularly pernicious, more so because there is no record that the court of assistants ever “purchased” the land from its original inhabitants before declaring it in eternal ownership of a white man.

Although indigenous people appear often in records (sometimes by name, sometimes tangentially), women appear in court generally only when family structures or sex are involved. Mrs. Freeman was punished for having an affair, Mary Ridge and Elizabeth Marson were both whipped for fornication, Joyce Bradwicke was fined for promising marriage without having her father’s consent, and Weybro Lovell was “seriously admonished” for “light & whoarish behavior.” Even “the wife of Mr. William Hutchinson,” for all her significance in the history of the colony, receives only a few lines in the record: “for traduceing the ministers & their ministry in this country . . . [Anne] therevpon was banished.”

The inattention paid in the official record to women or indigenous land compels us to force open gaps and bring alternative narratives to light. Without this work, John Winthrop’s will be the only story told in textbooks about this country’s colonial history. Instead, the Records of the Governor and Company allow us to teach other realities, like that of the unnamed Indian woman who was coerced into sex by John Dawe. The Puritan freemen may have the loudest voices in the archive, but theirs are not the only narratives being told.

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

Lara Rose recently traded the Rocky Mountains for the Massachusetts Bay to better understand globalization before western expansion. When she isn’t reading for her comprehensive exams at Northeastern University, she is managing the new Oceanic Exchanges project, researching for the Women Writers Project, and helping prepare the Early Caribbean Digital Archive for its official launch in fall 2017.

This is a story about how a small piece of historical evidence, just a few words on an old map, shed new light on a dramatic murder case from early-eighteenth-century Boston. The evidence involves the spread of a horrible disease that was a scourge of both the Old World and the New and that, recently, has returned to haunt our own. The legal case is that of Joseph Hanno, a freed slave from Africa who, in 1721, was executed for killing his wife. It was a crime of brutality, enacted on the margins of colonial society–and one that, ironically, would challenge the authority of one of the most important religious leaders of the day.

I had encountered the story of Joseph Hanno before. As a graduate student, I had read an essay titled “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675-1800.” The author described a sermon given upon Hanno’s execution as having “[set] the pattern” for the pamphlet accounts of black robbery, rape, and murder that peppered the colonies, stories that frequently implied that blacks were inherently inferior to whites–criminals by nature. As I debated how to begin a new book on the history of Afro-American citizenship, I recalled the article, and I soon found myself squinting at the first page of a sermon projected on the screen of a microcard reader. It bore an impressive title and an imposing array of typefaces (fig. 1): TREMENDA: The DREADFUL SOUND with which the WICKED are to be THUNDERSTRUCK, Delivered upon the Execution of a MISERABLE AFRICAN for a most inhumane and uncommon MURDER.

Who was this “miserable African”? From what evidence remains, we know that Hanno was a former slave, probably from Madagascar, who arrived in New England as a child around 1677. His masters were said to have “brought [him] up in the Christian Faith,” and Hanno, baptized and literate, came to be known in Boston for the breadth of his Christian knowledge: he once was described as “always vain gloriously Quoting of Sentences from [the Bible] wherever [he] came.” In 1721, about thirteen years after he was set free, Hanno was accused of murdering his wife, Nanny Negro, as she was getting ready for bed, by hitting her over the head with the blunt end of an axe. He was indicted, tried before a jury at the court of assize and general gaol delivery, convicted (after the trial, he admitted his guilt), and sentenced to die by hanging.

Save for their interest in retribution, an interesting point of comparison between the seventeenth century and the twenty-first, Puritans approached matters of crime rather differently than we do today. Among other distinctions, it was typical for a minister to give a sermon just before a condemned criminal was executed. These were extraordinary affairs. Picture a minister in his pulpit explaining the spiritual meaning of a criminal’s actions to his congregation while the condemned stood between them, perhaps in chains–after which the felon would be taken outside, asked to declare that other citizens should avoid the path of his sinful ways, and hanged. The sermon was a contiguous part of the legal system, a public morality play of sin and redemption, central to what punishment was meant to accomplish.

This tradition was followed in the case of Joseph Hanno as well, and the minister who gave the sermon was none other than the great Puritan divine Cotton Mather (fig. 2). Once parodied by Benjamin Franklin as “Silence Dogood,” Mather is popularly (mis)remembered for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, in which he helped probe the truth of accounts made about the invisible world. As I gazed at the fantastic typography of TREMENDA, I was certain I had found the ideal story with which to begin my book. I imagined Mather’s lecture would be an extended fire-and-brimstone exercise of the persecuting spirit, in classic New England style, undertaken by one of its best-known icons and directed specifically at the black “other.” I imagined it would be the Scottsboro Boys, 1720s style.

It wasn’t. Hanno certainly came in for his share of condemnation, as befit the crime to which he had confessed. But where I had expected to find wholesale antiblack racism, I instead found Mather’s comments about Africans to be mild by the lights of his day. They certainly did not express the view that blacks were inherently criminals. And Mather spent at least as much time, if not more, berating whites for their own sins as he spent criticizing Hanno for his. The sermon seemed more like an abstract, though passionate meditation on the nature of wickedness and the torments of a guilty conscience in the face of divine punishment–that was the “dreadful sound” of the title, heard especially before a man’s impending death.

And a sense of divine punishment there surely was. Here is a typical passage, with some accommodations made for modern spelling and punctuation:

But what a dreadful sound is made by these threatenings in the ears of all ungodly and unrighteous men? Hearken to the dreadful sound, which the word of God makes, in the threatenings of it.  Hear attentively, the noise of His voice, and the sound that goeth out of His mouth. The voice roareth; he thundereth with the voice of His excellency. He thundereth marvelously with His voice, the dreadful things which he will do unto the wicked: things which we cannot comprehend! Is there not a dreadful sound in that word of God! . . . Is there not a dreadful sound in that word of God! . . . Is there not a dreadful sound in that word of God! In the predictions of what was to befal a wicked world, we read of a treble wo-trumpet, whereon, An angel flying through the midst of heaven, says with a loud voice, Wo, wo, wo to the inhabitants of the Earth.

It was stirring stuff, liable to make a young scholar a little anxious during a cold New England winter night. (Mather recorded in his diary that the lecture had made a “great impression,” and it seems that some of his congregation moaned just after he read the passage quoted above.) The sermon contained a feeling of urgency, a sense of the immediate presence of a wrathful God strong even for a Puritan minister–and that seemed curious to me, too. Hanno might have had “the dreadful sound” in his ears, but why others should be hearing the treble wo-trumpet so loudly at just that moment, I could not fathom.

I began to dig into the archival record. Among other items, I found the coroner’s report made upon Hanno’s death. It showed that the foreman of the inquest was the shipbuilder Joshua Gee, whose son was a minister who preached with Cotton Mather in the Old North Church. I also found the warrant for Hanno’s execution. It was signed by Judge Samuel Sewall, a notable figure in the history of early American race relations: years earlier, in 1704, he had written the first antislavery pamphlet in New England. Judge Sewall also was Joshua Gee’s father-in-law. The documents began to round out my sense of Hanno’s case and the legal environment in which it occurred. This was a world whose elite citizens were connected by a tight web of familial and institutional associations–a closely knit, urban religious community–in which foreman, judge, and jurors knew each other well.

I also began to learn a bit about Cotton Mather. When I began my research, I prided myself on knowing that Mather was not the backward-looking figure of medieval superstition he is often portrayed as being; I knew, for example, that he maintained a lively interest in medical science, and that he was something of a man of the Enlightenment. Nor was his role in the witch trials what our popular imagination had made it out to be. What I did not know was that Mather’s views about race were far more complicated than I had expected–complicated in ways that seem contradictory from a modern perspective and that, slowly, began to shed light on the meaning of his sermon and the significance of Hanno’s case.

For one, Mather was committed to an ideal of spiritual equality among the races. Many Christians of the day believed blacks were the descendants of Ham and had inherited his curse of perpetual bondage, and some even thought blacks might not have souls. Mather took a more universalistic view. In his 1706 pamphlet The Negro Christianized, he called the idea that blacks lacked souls a “Bruitish insinuation” and asserted that God’s saints, at least theoretically, could be found amongst all peoples. For Mather, no human could truly know who was and was not among the elect–this was a central tenet of his faith–and blacks therefore had to be given the same chance to show themselves to be true Christians as were whites. “Suppose these wretched Negroes to be the offspring of Ham (which yet is not so very certain),” he wrote, “yet let us make a tryal, whether the Christ who dwelt in the tents of Shem have not some of His Chosen among them.”

These were not mere idle words for the minister. He enthusiastically put them into practice, devoting his time and money to the cause of black spiritual welfare in Boston. He invited black parishioners to his home for Christian discussion. He helped blacks found a Religious Society for Negroes. He created a free school to teach Africans and their descendants to read the Bible. And he lobbied his fellow believers to teach their slaves the Holy Word, distributing copies of The Negro Christianized to convince masters to apply themselves to black religious instruction. “Let not this opportunity be lost,” he admonished, “if you have any concern for souls, your own or others.” Mather’s Calvinist orthodoxy made his commitment to converting blacks a serious matter.

But for all his concern for black conversion, Mather, like most other Christians of the time, also believed that racial equality before God did not demand equality on Earth–and, in particular, that it was wholly compatible with the institution of slavery. He asserted that blacks should be granted the opportunity for baptism with the same vigor with which he insisted that the conversion of slaves did not render them free as a matter of law. (This fear prevented some colonists from giving their slaves religious instruction, and Mather sought to reassure them.) And when members of his church gave Mather an African slave, he joyfully called the gift “a mighty smile of Heaven upon my family.” The slave, Onesimus, would remain with Mather’s family for years. For Mather, slavery and Christianity were in full accord.

Indeed, they were not just in accord: they were symbiotic. Slavery allowed heathen Africans to find Jesus Christ. And to owners skeptical about black conversion, Mather argued that religion would make blacks more compliant, better able to know their places within a well-ordered Christian world. Accordingly, he sternly counseled blacks that earthly submission to whites was an essential component of their spiritual duty. To the question, “If you serve Jesus Christ, what must you do?” the Christianized Negro was to answer, in a catechism, “I must love all men, and never quarrel, nor be drunk, nor be unchaste, nor steal, nor tell a lie, nor be discontent with my condition.” It was an injunction, records show, that Hanno had studied.

Joseph Hanno’s crime opened a rift in Mather’s complex views about race, slavery, and Christianity: it put them in tension. On one hand, Joseph Hanno was the product of precisely the kind of spiritual inclusiveness that Mather advocated. “I have a great deal of knowledge,” Hanno told Mather of his own Christian education. “Nobody of my color, in old England or new, has so much.” And yet Hanno’s knowledge of Christ clearly had not made this particular African more law abiding, as Mather promised whites it would. Hanno instead had committed a crime that struck at the very foundation of the Puritan vision of social order: the benevolent exercise of paternal authority. In the dead of night, Hanno had struck his wife’s head with the blunt end of an ax and placed her in their common bed (he then slit her throat with a razor for good measure).

In Tremenda, Mather seemed to be searching for a way to resolve the moral and social tension created by Hanno’s crime–to condemn Hanno while, at the same time, deflecting the criticism that Christian education was somehow at fault in the case and thus inappropriate for blacks. The absence of strong antiblack racism in the sermon was consistent with that impulse, as was the way Mather used Hanno’s life as an object lesson to all members of his congregation, white as much as black. For Mather, Hanno wasn’t an archetype of the black man as criminal, but rather a symbol of all humans in a fallen world. That was why he spent so much time condemning the sins of whites and discussing the nature of wickedness in the abstract: all people were “slaves” to sin who wore “chains” of darkness.

Learning about Mather shed a good deal of light on what may have been at stake for him in his sermon on Hanno’s execution. But there were still aspects of the document that remained obscure, particularly its sense of urgency. The force with which the minister asked his congregation to see themselves in Hanno’s place, as sinners facing divine punishment, seemed somehow too great for the occasion. There were, for example, those highly charged references to death. And then there was a quiet implication in the text that Hanno had brought the hand of God down upon the community through his actions, that Hanno had “brought plagues upon all about you.” Was the past simply so different that I would never understand what motivated Tremenda, or was I just missing something? After more than five months of reading and research, I still had a deep sense of unease that true knowledge of the case remained beyond my grasp.

And then I found it, wholly by accident. In my sixth month of research, I was trying to add some local color to the narrative I was writing by pinpointing where various participants in Hanno’s case lived in town–the grand and petit jurors, the members of the coroner’s inquest, the sheriff, and so on. I imagined writing sentences like, “As Elias Goodman turned left from his home on Brattle Street, walking in the direction of the Common, he would have passed the stately home of Judge Sewall on his left.” I had found the addresses of my dramatis personae in various old record books, and a kindly librarian had pointed out that a Captain John Bonner had made a map of Boston in 1722, the year after Hanno’s execution (fig. 3). As I marked the location of the events of Hanno’s case, I imagined my cast of characters walking through the crooked streets depicted on Captain Bonner’s handsome chart.

And then I noticed something curious in the lower left-hand corner: a list of dates when smallpox had struck Boston. Smallpox was a devastating disease for colonists and regularly left much of the population of Boston dead or covered with disfiguring scars; in 1678, the year after Hanno was brought to Massachusetts, it had killed 25 percent of the residents there. We fear the threat of smallpox in our own day, of course. But to the very anxious Puritan mind, in which the material world had theological significance, the disease was not just a medical event: smallpox also was a symbol of divine judgment against a society of sinners.

I remember sitting straight up in my chair when I saw that Bonner’s map indicated that this divine judgment also descended in the year 1721.  The 1721 epidemic, I learned, killed eight hundred people (this from a population of about twelve thousand). Had Hanno brought “plagues” upon all about him? Could it be that the term was not only metaphorical but literal? With a bit more research, I was able to find that indeed, Hanno was executed just as smallpox was descending upon Boston. And in reading Mather’s diary, I discovered that Mather had been informed of Hanno’s need for spiritual counsel the day after the pox had been discovered (the minister immediately asked that a new edition of one of his essays be “scattered thro town and country” to provide solace to “them who are expecting an hour of travail, to quicken their preparation for death”).

Reading Mather’s sermon with this new context in mind, I suddenly saw that it was laced with implicit references to smallpox and the reality of impending death. Take the very first page (fig. 4). Mather began his sermon with a quote from Job–”A dreadful sound is in his ears” (the sound of a guilty conscience in the ears of the wicked)–to which he returned throughout the lecture. I now looked to the full biblical passage. Puritans were excellent readers of the Bible, and they would have known it well: it describes how the man with the dreadful sound in his ears “dweleath in desolate cities that are about to become heaps.” The title page citation, too, from Deuteronomy, “All Israel shall hear and fear,” refers to the destruction of cities: “And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you. If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which the LORD thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying, certain men . . . are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods . . . Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly.” The passages, I saw, were not only about individual responsibility, about Hanno’s crime, but also about collective guilt in an urban society. A community that had fallen away from the Lord would surely feel the scourge of what Mather, in his diary, called “the destroying angel.”

Here was the missing key to understanding Mather’s sermon. The reason for its sense of urgency was now clear: those who came to hear Mather discuss Hanno’s crime also expected that they might shortly die a painful death. And this was a fear that Mather put to theological and civic use. He employed the occasion of Hanno’s execution not to assert a view of inherent black inferiority or criminality or separateness, but rather to assert the spiritual commonality between whites and blacks. Smallpox, like sin, knew no racial boundaries; everyone was about to die for their wickedness. At the same time, Mather entreated blacks to make a special effort to live up to standards of Christian behavior, defying Hanno’s example, particularly by obeying their superiors. The sermon was an occasion in which Mather could use the spectacle of impending execution to reassert his vision of black Christianity and civic belonging, to resolve the tension Hanno’s crime had created.

Four days after Mather’s sermon, a notice in the Boston News-letter announced Hanno’s death: “On Thursday last the 25th Current,” read the announcement, “was Executed here One Joseph Hono, Negro, for Murdering his Wife; he had been in the Country about 44 years, and about 14 Years free for himself, and by his Masters brought up in the Christian Faith; and he hoped that all Mankind would take warning by him to keep themselves from committing such Sin & Wickedness as he was guilty of, particularly, Sabbath-breaking and willful Murder, the one being the Ringleader to the other, for which last he was justly Condemned, which had he not been guilty of the first he might probably have never committed the second.” By that time, eight persons had been reported sick with pox.

The terrible epidemic that descended–soon, nearly half the town would contract the disease–provided the occasion for Mather to make medical history. Based on his reading of recent British scientific journals, as well as conversations about African folk medicine with his slave Onesimus, the minister fought tremendous opposition to introduce the practice of inoculation to North America (there were even attempts on his life). The scourge of 1721 commemorated on Bonner’s map is remembered for that extraordinary medical advance, that achievement of a Puritan man of Enlightenment. But it was not, I now saw, the only reason Mather had to give thanks.

Further Reading:

See, Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (New York, 1993); Lornezo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York, 1968); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York, 1997); Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York, 1963); Bernard Rosenthal, “Puritan Conscience and New England Slavery,” New England Quarterly 46 (1) (1973): 62-81; Richard H. Shryock, “Cotton Mather: First Significant Figure in American Medicine,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 63 (Worcester, 1953): 37-274; Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (Cambridge, 1970); Richard Slotkin, “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675-1800,” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 3-31; Margot Minardi, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721-1722: An Incident in the History of Race,” William & Mary Quarterly 61 (January 2004): 47-76.

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

Mark S. Weiner is an assistant professor at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, New Jersey. His book Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in the fall of 2004.

Those who adore archival research often imagine coming upon a find as glorious as the spectacles Nicholas Cage digs from Independence Hall in the movie National Treasure. The project that currently occupies my days is an inversion of this romantic ideal—think something more along the lines of National Trash. I too spend a great deal of time excavating with exhilaration, but instead of glorious and legendary relics of faux American history, I am searching for smut, digging for the materials that survived the attacks of legendary censor Anthony Comstock (fig. 1).

My interest in Comstock began during research on the artist Thomas Eakins. Diaries, letters, and board minutes from the late nineteenth-century art scene in Philadelphia and New York often referred off-handedly to Comstock as a threat to be avoided. Artists, trustees, and administrators altered exhibition and publication plans, debating how to avoid prosecution. Others held a “bring it on” attitude—many in the art world wanted to be the hero who defeated Comstock.

Those who nervously censored themselves were not wrong to take seriously the threat of prosecution. Born in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1844, Comstock was raised in a family of evangelical Congregationalists who believed, like their Puritan ancestors, that lust, intemperance, and lewdness were the causes of man’s downfall. After brief service in the Civil War, Comstock moved to New York City, and was shocked by the vice he found there. With the aid of backers at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), Comstock helped create the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) in 1873, and then served as its secretary, and as an inspector for the U.S. Postal Service, until his death in 1915. During his career, Comstock held broad prosecutorial authority; following passage of the federal Comstock Act in 1873, his puritanical aesthetics served as the legal definition of obscenity in many American courtrooms. In his first empowered year alone, Comstock destroyed 13,000 pounds of books, 200,000 “bad pictures,” and 14,000 pounds of stereotype plates for printing books— and sent forty perpetrators to jail for a combined twenty-seven years.

Searching for the prey of an effective censor makes the thrill of discovery especially tantalizing, since the “treasure” is not meant to be found. A good example is a thoroughly obscene pamphlet Comstock himself authored in 1872—a “PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL” report to the directors of the YMCA in New York, informing them of “the baldest facts” regarding the dangerous materials in their midst (fig. 2). Readers must have been titillated before even turning the first page, as the cover text promised description of “a warfare against obscene books, etc.” The 100 copies were each numbered, “and the name of each person who received one from the Secretary was preserved with the number of the pamphlet.” Robert McBurney, then secretary of the YMCA, presumably retrieved the distributed copies and burned them. The unnumbered pamphlet reproduced here may be the only surviving 1872 version—an example of careful record-keeping, as it resides today in the Committee Files of the Kautz Family YMCA archives at the University of Minnesota. This document is the kind of thing one can only find by emphasizing the “search” aspect of research. After YMCA staff in New York directed me to their colleagues in Minnesota, I applied for a travel grant, and spent two weeks in Minneapolis reading through every file relating to the New York branch between 1868 and 1878, hunting for evidence of Comstock’s earliest efforts.

In 1872, the YMCA’s Committee for the Suppression of Vice was raising funds to provide financial backing for Comstock’s work. Comstock emphasized the direness of the situation by listing items he had already destroyed, including: “Thirty thousand articles made of rubber for indecent purposes, viz.: the prevention of conception for the use of both sexes; “dildoes” (that being the trade name), made of stout rubber, and in the form of the male organ of generation, for self-pollution; five thousand five hundred playing cards which, when held to the light, exhibit obscene pictures;” and more than 125,000 books “known as the writings of ‘Paul de Kock.'” Finding this bit of smut was a definite thrill amidst the numerous less-fascinating accounts of building expenses and daily programs.

Given the elaborate efforts made to prevent its circulation, the 1872 pamphlet in Minneapolis is a fortuitous survivor. Thankfully for a smut-hunter’s sake, such survivals happened more often than Comstock would have liked. In late 1872 and 1873, it was widely reported in the press—most famously in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly—that Theodore Tilton said he had seen his wife, Elizabeth, having sex with their Preacher on “a little red lounge.” In 1875, an author calling himself James C. Edwards (or “Ginger”) published a lengthy and somewhat bawdy poetic account of the reputed affair. “The Little Red Lounge; or Beecher’s Fix” (fig. 3) survives in two printed versions in a handful of collections, including the Library of Congress and Houghton Library at Harvard University. The prose is delightfully indecent:

There lived in Brooklyn, high above the bay,
A Pastor old, with spirit light and gay;
Of gentle manners as of generous race;
Blest with much sense, true inwardness and grace.
Yet, led astray by VENUS’ soft delights,
He scarcely could rule some idle appetites;
For all we know, since NOAH and the flood,
The best of pastors are but flesh and blood…

Full soon the sheets were spread and Bess undress’d;
The room was perfum’d, the red lounge was bless’d.
What next ensued beseems me not to say;

Although the poem’s euphemisms today seem more witty than outrageous, Comstock’s Congregationalist sensibilities were provoked. He had already assisted in the prosecution of Victoria Woodhull, and destroyed many of her weekly newspapers recounting the alleged affair. On October 27, 1875, he arrested Hugh McDermott, editor and proprietor of the Jersey City Herald, and his fifteen-year-old son, for selling copies of “The Little Red Lounge.” Comstock recorded the progress of the case meticulously in a truly spectacular treasure “from the vault”—the NYSSV arrest blotters preserved in the Library of Congress: “McD. attempted to defy law & this Society. This pamphlet is a plagiarism on [Alexander] Pope, with Beecher’s name dragged in … He had 12,000 printed & had sold about 100 …” Although Comstock failed in three different courts to get a judge to take the case, he nevertheless won the battle: the “obscene matter” was destroyed, leaving the publisher out a good deal of money. This was a common outcome of Comstock’s raids. The arrest blotters detailing cases such as this have been used by several scholars in the past, and microfilmed versions may even be borrowed via inter-library loan.

It may seem surprising that in the year of its trial, “The Little Red Lounge” was “entered according to an Act of Congress … in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.” However, this often was the case, with censored books sometimes kept in locked cages or back rooms. Today, there are few titles that are not freely circulated, and in the age of the Internet, it is remarkably easy to find books that stoked incinerators more than a century ago. I began by compiling a list of book and picture titles in the NYSSV arrest blotters. Using a variety of databases such as WorldCat, the Library of Congress catalogue, and Google scholar searches, I found at least one copy of almost everything Comstock wished I would never see, and (ironically) received copies of several of these, shipped through the mail, via inter-library loan. My special goal as an art historian was to find illustrated books—of course, they are much more fun anyway.

A particularly amusing example of a censored book is Le Nu de Rabelais, d’apres Jules Garnier, par Armand Silvestre, Illustrations de Japhet, which the College of Holy Cross librarians kindly shipped to our librarians at Saint Michael’s College. French books, pictures, and “rubber goods” make up a significant percentage of the material Comstock pursued, hardly surprising to historians of the gilded age. Le Nu abounds with preposterous Rabelaisian adventures and cavorting nudes. Despite the absence of anything sexually explicit, there was no question for Comstock that such images violated the Comstock Act, which forbade “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” books, pictures, etc., as well as “any publication of an indecent character.” Although Comstock recorded several mass seizures of this book in 1895, close to two dozen library collections today hold Le Nu; the University of Michigan, in collaboration with Google, has even posted a copy, dirty pictures and all, online. Another great example of a censored illustrated book entered in the Library of Congress is an 1874 version of Balzac’s bawdy Droll Stories (fig. 4).

Although many libraries play host to smutty books (as Comstock would have seen them), censored circulars and pamphlets are harder to find, because they often are not catalogued individually in online databases. This is where reference librarians, inventive thinking, and determination are a must. In this regard, my luckiest smut-hunting discovery has been the “Case Files of Investigations” of the Bureau of the Chief Inspector, which form part of the Records of the Post Office Department housed in the National Archives.

I got a tip from a reference specialist at the U.S. Postal Service Library in Washington, D.C., that inspectors sent reports to the postmaster general about each case they prosecuted. At the National Archives, the librarian in charge of civil records referred me to a “finding aid” which consisted of an old binder with cryptic and extremely general descriptions of the collection. I started by ordering an index of postal defendants, which did include some prominent Comstock victims, seemingly paired with a number for the box the report was in. After two days of “pulled” boxes that did not have the files I needed, I realized that the index cards were for an older filing system. The current organization was entirely chronological, so I needed to order boxes by date and not number. But what dates? After looking through the reports, it became clear that the date of arrest was the key. So, I went back to the blotters in the Library of Congress, wrote down the dates of arrest of interesting-sounding cases, and voila! Boxes that seem scarcely to have been looked at in the past century yielded Comstock’s reports, often hand-written and filled with editorializing about the defendants, judges, etc. Some files even contain copies of the evidence seized, such as a circular advertising “Art portfolios of full page Photo Prints of Nude Female Figures … reproduced from paintings of the most Beautiful Living Models in existence” (fig. 5). Despite the advertised claim that these books were “especially for the use of Artists and Art Students,” Comstock refused to concede their professional necessity.

Self-reported “medical” necessities also failed to escape the net of postal inspectors. Dr. Chalco’s Magnetic Developer promised “a veritable boon to mankind” (fig. 6). A customer’s testimonial claimed that after only a few days “to my surprise I find my organs to have been enlarged to nearly twice their former size.” Whether or not the claim was accurate, the advertisement nonetheless resulted in a $100 fine.

Throughout the movie National Treasure, the outcome of the treasure hunt is obvious: the dashing and adventurous historian will obtain the beautiful curator, as well as the treasures of the Ancient World. It makes sense to consider what the correlate reward is in a pursuit of our national incinerator-fodder. In his day, Anthony Comstock was a household name, signifying an older order of values. H. L. Menken described him in A Book of Prefaces (1917) as “more than the greatest Puritan gladiator of his time; he was the Copernicus of quite a new art and science.” He was anti-lust, anti-immigration, anti-gambling, anti-drinking, anti-birth control, and he believed that government should regulate morality by any means necessary. Because his raids were so voluminous and well-publicized (even when they weren’t successful), his aesthetics served for forty years as the national line between virtue and vice. Recovery and analysis of where that line was drawn in historical periods provides an indispensable context for understanding the bright lines of our own day, particularly as they are drawn differently within micro-communities defined by diverse ideologies, demographic characteristics, and regional variations.

Uncovering the materials Comstock tried so hard to bury is informative in another sense, for whatever idea we may have that Victorians chose virtue far more often than ourselves is undermined by the sheer volume of smut Comstock rounded up. The trash he tried to bury helps us understand the choices Americans made in those facets of their lives they did not often present for display. As in the case of Dr. Chalco’s magnetic developer, we may find more commonality with our predecessors than we might expect—in other words, Comstock’s story is a great reminder that some things really never change.

The long-term outcome of Comstock’s efforts surely would have disappointed him. Who would deny that his battle to save our national souls from the dangers of obscenity was utterly lost? And yet, his career did have some profound and lasting results. The list of prominent individuals Comstock prosecuted reads like a Who’s Who of America’s post-Civil War radicals, including Victoria Woodhull, Ezra Heywood, Moses Harman, D. M. Bennett, E. B. Foote, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger (via her husband, William). These individuals seldom agreed on the fine points of free love, anarchism, conjugal relations, contraceptive methods, eugenics, or women’s suffrage. However, there was one creed on which they did agree:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Comstock galvanized these figures, and many more, to form organizations of common purpose to defeat him, and ultimately, their legacy far outshone his. No figure in American history has brought the significance and survival of the First Amendment as much into question as Anthony Comstock. Our constitution is, of course, our true National Treasure. Any search that helps us better understand the wisdom of that document is worthwhile, even if it compels us to examine our nation’s most disreputable waste.

Further Reading:

The most comprehensive biography of Anthony Comstock is Heywood Campbell Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the Lord (New York, 1927); for a more recent and focused study of his efforts, read Nicola Kay Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, 1997). Two excellent studies regarding the Woodhull case are: Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia, 2004), and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s,” The Journal of American History 87:2 (September 2000): 403-34. An excellent recent biography of Henry Ward Beecher is Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America (New York, 2006). Two relevant dissertations also are worth excavating: Comstock’s targeting of immigrant groups is well tabulated and analyzed in Richard Christian Johnson’s “Anthony Comstock: Reform, Vice, and the American Way” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973), and Elizabeth Bainum Hovey analyzes the evolution of obscenity law during Comstock’s years in “Stamping Out Smut: The Enforcement of Obscenity Laws, 1872—1915” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 11.1 (October, 2010).

Amy Werbel is professor of fine arts at Saint Michael’s College, Colchester, Vermont. She is currently completing a book, American Visual Culture during the Reign of Anthony Comstock. Her previous scholarship includes Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (2007).

Jen Manion’s incisive and multi-layered new study places gender, race, and sexuality at the center of the revolution in punishment that took place in the early American republic. Manion focuses primarily on Philadelphia and the Walnut Street Prison, but utilizes sources from the rest of Pennsylvania as well as other penal institutions to adeptly narrate a “transformation” in the penal system that occurred between the 1790s and 1830s and resulted in long-lasting consequences. As Manion demonstrates, this shift in the function of punishment from a “public spectacle” to “a private one” was accomplished by transforming punishment into a vehicle for social control, particularly as it could be employed against the disorderly classes: the poor, the immoral, and the irregular (5). The book’s approach to documenting cultural experiences of crime, punishment, and incarceration allows the profound “corporal” and “spiritual” meanings behind these contexts to take center stage (5). At its core, Liberty’s Prisoners demonstrates convincingly that “ideas about race, gender, and sexuality … were central, driving forces in the transformation of punishment” (5). The book advances the argument that women involved in both crime and punishment can be viewed as “public women” who “challenged patriarchal authority and ideals” (85). This facilitates deeper analysis of the dichotomy between public and private that dominated life in early America. For scholars of early national Philadelphia or penal reform, the arc of Liberty’s Prisoners will be familiar, but Manion complicates that familiarity with a sharp, interrogative eye and archival thoroughness. The book is described as an “intersectional study of crime” but in practice is also an intersectional study of gender, poverty, and class (5).

Firmly situated in the post-revolutionary context, the broad category of labor—as produced by and extracted from workers and prisoners—is of utmost importance in the study’s analysis of the social disorder that followed the war. Labor in this period was conjured both as cause for punishment and as punishment itself. This was part of an effort to ensure that the lower classes participated in the labor economy to an extent deemed sufficient by lawmakers and law enforcement, coerced by the looming fear of punishment for vagrancy and punitive incarceration. The power dispute that resulted from this construction led to a dynamic that allowed “poverty and its attendant life circumstances” to “threaten the American experiment more than the British military ever could” (15). One of the ways that authorities attempted to limit the negative impacts of poverty was through regulation and control of the activities of those most deeply affected by it. By punishing the poor and disorderly with incarceration, the newly found “freedom” of the American republic was “mediated through the prison” (27). This had a particularly profound effect on those whom the revolution compelled to claim their own liberty, as myriad laws implemented at the end of the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century curtailed the movements of runaway enslaved people and servants in an effort to punish and reform their impulse to independence.

Manion argues convincingly that one of the most important consequences of being poor, especially for women and for people of color, was the criminalization of the activities associated with the status of being impoverished. This book tells a compelling story about how subsistence activities—the theft of food, rebellion against abusive owners or employers, and prostitution, to name a few—were viewed by elites and authorities as dangerous, illegal, and immoral and opened the discussion of the criminalization of certain sexualities and sexual activities. Within this framework, the rhetoric of bodily punishment and reality of biology is central to this text—both in reminders of the physical experiences of prisoners, described by contemporaries as “emaciated with poverty and disease,” and in demonstrating how gender and sex were central to assigning criminality as well as punishing it (88). Considerations of sex and sexuality, most threateningly between prisoners, was central to the regulation of inmate populations. Authorities responded to the proclivities of the populace by introducing a series of impediments to sexual activities within prisons, between men and women as well as same-sex involvements. In this way, Manion argues, “sex shape[d] punishment and punishment shaped sex” (164).

At the center of Liberty’s Prisoners are women who did not fit into the dominant ideology of the republican mother: female thieves, arsonists, prostitutes, and other “criminals.” But the narrative also recognizes the impact that the near absence of middle- and upper-class white women from the penal regime had on penal policy and the structure of punishment. This emphasis on women expands the range of sources for the ideas covered in this book, but there is also reliance on separate spheres ideology to explain gendered distinctions in crime, punishment, and charitable reform efforts that occasionally reads as incomplete or perhaps over-simplified. The emphasis on the tension between the public and the private is compelling at all levels. On this subject Manion articulates what many scholars of early American prisons have only begun to address, recognizing the importance of ideology in shaping reformers’ efforts while drawing attention to the coexisting gap between experience and ideology.

Liberty’s Prisoners acknowledges the important role that sentiment played in shaping reformers’ ideas about class distinction, racial categories, and the role of the prison. This assessment adds new dimension to historians’ considerations of the ideological impulses motivating reformers. It also further acknowledges the ways in which the prison both reflected the order that was in place outside of it as well as attempted to impose a new, spatially arranged and segregated system on its inhabitants. Racial classification is a prime example of this mirrored order, and Manion notes that while post-revolutionary Philadelphia penal authorities used numerous adjectives to describe people of color, after 1820, a more distinct black/white dichotomy emerged. This shift in terminology affected whites as well, who began to be denoted as white in penal records for the first time. Beyond exploring the shift in racial classification, Liberty’s Prisoners provides a valuable update to the age-old classification of the deserving and undeserving poor that dominated the reform and punishment apparatus, showing that falling into the latter category was often the specific result of a failure to uphold family life or responsibly participate in the labor force (to the benefit of one’s family), rather than a strictly amorphous category of immorality (87).

Perhaps the most important achievement in this text is the key analytical perspective of poverty and imprisonment in early Philadelphia not as a class status and a temporary infringement on liberty but as a circulation throughout the city that infused daily life. There was a constant back-and-forth between the almshouse and the prison, Manion writes, that functioned essentially as a continuum for the poor and for subsistence criminals. This created a relationship between the two groups, including admixture, as well as intra-institutional links between the two socio-political and built structures. Manion casts prisoners as pushing back against the social death that resulted from the long-lasting effects of punishment and incarceration in early America, the legacy of which, the book’s conclusion emphasizes, the nation has not yet undone.

On the subject of policing, the text reads with a sense of twenty-first-century urgency, most potently in the discussion of legislation to prevent the entrance and movement of free blacks in Pennsylvania. Describing prominent artisan and freeman James Forten’s view on this proposal, Manion draws out the claim that constables, as a nascent police force, were “already known to have great ‘antipathy’ toward African Americans and would abuse this legislation to exact vengeance” (142-143). These connections are expanded in the conclusion, where the issue of explicitly disproportionate racial representation in the prison population is afforded paramount importance in the enduring significance of these issues.

Because of the depth of the roots that tied punishment and poverty together, reformers’ “minor gestures of humanitarian relief for prisoners” and almshouse and Magdalen inhabitants “helped alleviate any misgivings or guilt … about the larger political and economic forces that oppressed the masses while rewarding the few” (192). In this way, philanthropy, especially conducted privately, did more harm than good for the lower and criminal classes and perpetuated the legacy of social control that originally led to the rise of the prison. Liberty’s Prisoners achieves its goal of assessing “how a system so fundamentally flawed came to justify not only its very existence but also its rapid expansion” by interrogating the interrelations of poverty and crime in ways that were intensively gendered and racialized (192). The modern penitentiary, as Manion notes, “was born of failure” (190), and by documenting this failure, scholars can begin to undo nineteenth-century reformers’ efforts to obscure “the excessive violence in punishment” and thus, “in American nation-building” (86).

This article originally appeared in issue 16:4.5 (November, 2016).

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan holds a PhD in history from the University of Leicester in England and an MA in modern history from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. She teaches in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where she acts as coordinator of public history. She is currently developing a manuscript on indigent transiency in the early American republic.

When I mention to colleagues that I’m working on a book on the history of blackmail in England and America, tracing its development from the sixteenth century to the present, I always expect to be asked first for salacious details: the raunchiest secret over which a victim was ever blackmailed, or the most a victim ever forked over to his or her tormentor in exchange for their silence. Surprisingly, however, my colleagues’ first question is invariably an archival one: Where does one even find evidence of blackmail, they ask? How is it possible to do that sort of research?

The curiosity behind such questions is not without foundation, for blackmail seems to be the sort of phenomenon that almost by definition resists recovery. A blackmailer and his or her victim both have a vested interest in keeping the victim’s secret a secret, and this interest—driven by fear and mortification on the part of the victim and avarice on the part of the blackmailer—more often than not exceeds the ability of the researcher to render the secret public. Blackmail therefore presents an extreme case of what sociologist Gary T. Marx has called the “hidden and dirty data problem,” by which he means the difficulty scholars confront in attempting to recover information that is both concealed and discrediting. The challenges of digging into the secrets of “dead informants,” as Karen Hansen and Cameron McDonald call them, are still more acute, since all we have are textual traces that endure in the archive. And the difficulty in finding evidence of blackmail is compounded still more by our tendency to misread the etymology of the “mail” in blackmail as having something to do with letters (“mail” here actually derives from the Old French word for rent), reinforcing our archetypal image of blackmail as an act that, at best, leaves few traces other than a threatening note. We all too easily imagine the scenario: a letter arrives in the mailbox, or is slipped under the door. It claims knowledge of a well-hidden moral flaw, and it threatens exposure, humiliation, and ruin, unless payment is advanced. The letter is destroyed, payment is made, and both blackmailer and victim carry their secrets to the grave. Or perhaps there is no letter in the first place, simply a late-night encounter, a whispered insinuation, a sharp intake of breath, and a hurried exchange of money for silence.