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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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