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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acknowledgments

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

A discussion between Madison Smartt Bell and Laurent Dubois

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation

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

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

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

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

School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Journey West

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin

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

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

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

Acknowledgements:

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.