In addition to this editor’s note, we are posting two other pieces to Commonplace today. These are previously unavailable selections from October 2008 that we could not locate when we moved the back catalog from the old site to our new URL. As I detailed in my first editor’s note, it was quite an effort to migrate twenty years of material that existed across several platforms to our new site. A very small number of pieces which had been missing from the old site for years were not able to be recovered during the process. I have now managed to recover two of those. The first posting today captures a month of Jeff Pasley’s Publick Occurences 2.0, an occasional blog that he ran from 2008 to 2015. Posts from October 2008 seemed to have eluded the process we used to capture blog entries from the old site and it took a little while to track them down. While these posts are short (some of them are only a couple of hundred words long), it has been important to us to provide the most complete possible archive of everything that we have published on Commonplace.

The second back catalog piece posted today came out of something called Myths of Lost Atlantis, a short-lived blog series put together by Jeff Pasley in dedication to American Antiquarian Society scholar Philip Lampi and his work on A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825. The site has amazing election returns data from a wide variety of early republic contests at various levels of office. For example, with a little poking around, I can see that A. Greenberg (no relation) picked up 2 votes in the 1814 Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor’s race. He only finished 55,503 votes behind Federalist William Phillips, but I’m sure he will get him next time.

The idea behind the Lost Atlantis series was to supplement a politics-themed issue of Commonplace that we published in the runup to the election of 2008. In addition to smart, short pieces by scholars Rosemarie Zagarri, Donald Ratcliffe, Andrew Shankman, Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, and Andrew Robertson that sought to address some myths about politics in the early republic, one of the posts by Matthew Mason had gone missing. It had taken up the question: “Was Slavery Really Not a Major Issue in American Politics Before the Missouri Crisis?” It has now been recovered and is available here.

One purpose of the New Year’s address is to let our readers know what we have been up to at Commonplace over the last year. While it often goes unnoticed, we have been hard at work to enhance the reader experience by adding new features to the website and making some vital backend improvements. Readers and especially teachers have reached out to ask for a more convenient way to access our materials offline, so we added new options to save and print articles while preserving their original formatting. For those who want to stay digital, but distribute and post articles, we have added new share buttons for Mastodon and link copying in addition to the existing options. Backend changes also included moving from http to an https standard so Commonplace.online is more secure to access from a variety of browsers and devices. 

Now we come to the portion of the piece where I ask you to contribute something to help us keep Commonplace going. As I sat down to write this appeal, I was reminded of something I came across many years ago while working on a book about organized labor and masculinity in early republic New York City. On March 7, 1834, a prolabor newspaper called The Man ran its daily “Marriages” column, but instead of a list of newly married couples, it declared: “If the people won’t marry, we can’t help it.”

We are amazingly proud of the articles, reviews, and historical creative writing pieces that we publish and we believe that they offer our readers smart, interesting open access scholarship. This model only works if we receive submissions from our readers. I am thrilled that the quality of our submissions is so high. It makes the editorial process easier from initial review to final publication, but like many journals in the wake of Covid, budget cuts, and worsening academic job markets, we have seen a downturn in submissions. So, I am asking that if you have an idea for an article or review and would like to pitch it, please reach out. If you had to cut something from a larger project and think your darlings might find a home in a short piece for a wider audience, please reach out. If you found something fascinating in the archive and are not sure what to do with it, please reach out. Any other thoughts or questions about Commonplace, please reach out. We can be reached at commonplacejournal@gmail.com.

 

Happy New Year!

 

* This lyric originally comes from the Sex Pistol’s “Submission,” but I prefer the Peel Sessions version by my favorite band, Galaxie 500.

 

This article originally appeared in January 2024.

 

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Joshua R. Greenberg is the editor of Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. He is the author of Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (2020) and Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840 (2008).

Force and Freedom is organized into five chapters which move chronologically through the three decades before the Civil War. Chapter one examines how Black abolitionists like David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet became frustrated with the ineffectiveness of Garrisonian moral suasion and nonresistance strategies and articulated an ideology of political violence as necessary for abolition in their writings and speeches. Chapter two centers the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 as a catalyst that reinvigorated the abolition movement and prompted Black Americans in Northern states to defend themselves individually and as a political group. Chapter three moves through the 1850s and discusses how events like the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision made violence inevitable and drove Black abolitionists to further militancy and radical politics. Chapter four reveals the influence of Black leadership in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 and reframes Brown and his vision as following the lead of Black revolutionary violence. Lastly, Chapter five shows that Black leaders saw the Civil War as a Black war of emancipation and a revolution for Black Americans. 

Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause has drawn attention not only to the centrality of Black actors to the long abolition movement from the Revolution to the Civil War but also to how Black people during and after the Revolution forged and engaged with its legacy as thinkers and activists, a discussion to which Carter Jackson contributes. The presumptive or aspirational “radicalism” of Revolutionary liberty and equality in rhetoric turned into actual political radicalism, Carter Jackson observes, as Black abolitionists summoned a “philosophy of force” against white supremacist domination (2). François Furstenberg explains in his germinal article “Beyond Freedom and Slavery” that early white Americans excluded Black people from their concept of freedom on the basis that they did not virtuously resist enslavement and so must have consented to it (unlike white colonists who contested British administrative overreach). Carter Jackson builds on this thesis by showing how Black abolitionists resisted this exclusion and forged their own radical tradition of American freedom through a language of political violence. They realized that if Black Americans wanted the freedom they deserved, they had to win it by force. Emancipation could not be given but had to be taken and earned.

The Revolution was a vital source of inspiration to Black abolitionists for whom it had a transformative meaning. The famous ultimatum for “liberty or death” resonated with them. By homing in on the necessity of “force for freedom” in that popular slogan, Carter Jackson retrieves the intellectual rationale for collective Black resistance (4). She recognizes the explosiveness of this idea and shows how radical thinking about the Revolution by Black people justified and framed radical action against slavery such as thwarting the Fugitive Slave Law, forming military companies for self-defense, and raiding Harpers Ferry. Black abolitionists were not just critiquing and repurposing a founding creed that did not apply to or include them; they excavated their own creed based on a fundamental critique of the country’s progress. Their critical memory of the founding fueled the abolition movement and their desire to finish an incomplete revolution. 

Insofar as Black abolitionists seized on the fulfillment of founding ideals, Carter Jackson is careful not to neglect the impact of the Haitian Revolution. While the American Revolution “supplied the language and ideology . . . to rationalize a violent overthrow of slavery,” the Haitian Revolution provided a “precedent” of the “successful overthrow of slavery” by Black people through violence. It was a “constant reminder” that the American situation could be improved and that abolition and equality were still possible in the nineteenth century. Combined, these two revolutions offered Black abolitionists the foundation of “an alternate revolutionary tradition” in which they nurtured their own radical notions of egalitarianism (3, 5). Carter Jackson, though, does not see Black activists as mere unthinking vessels for the problematic ideas of the age of revolutions so much as interpreters, reformers, and critics, imagining all means necessary for the United States to live up to its ideals, the most effective being violence rather than Christian morality. Black abolitionists had a distinct political tradition which merely appropriated the language of republicanism to make resonant claims to American ideals while finding white fidelity to them wanting. 

By emphasizing the importance of earlier Atlantic revolutions, Force and Freedom traces a genealogy of freedom in which the paradigm of racial exclusion gave way to the pursuit of Black liberation. Carter Jackson argues that violence as a strategy and response must ground abolitionist debate and the road to the Civil War. More than an appropriation of Revolutionary ideology, violence was for Black abolitionists a “rational response to oppression” and “the new political language for the oppressed” (44, 53). The same ideology which justified and animated the American founding also gave renewed license to Black Americans’ individual and collective self-defense and emancipation. They finished the Revolution by leading their own, culminating in the Civil War and abolition. 

Though Carter Jackson is attuned to the gendering of violence as masculine in the historiography and to how Black women disrupted this ascription, her book would have benefited from closer attention to how “freedom” itself was gendered as well as to what female resistance meant for gendered emancipation and equality. Carter Jackson mostly examines the public writings and speeches of prominent Black male abolitionists. While Black female voices are included, they are submerged in a few passages scattered across the work. Carter Jackson admits in the introduction that “[f]ew black women” publicly challenged nonviolence between the 1830s and 50s. She goes on to analyze Black women’s responses within the context of the broader abolition movement, recognizing their equal “influence, rhetoric, and action” (8-9). However, her chapters suggest that the movement was male dominated and that women were also capable of violence, not that they made equal contributions. Carter Jackson mentions Maria Stewart, an early Black female political thinker in Boston, but primarily focuses on how Stewart echoed David Walker’s forceful rhetoric in his Appeal in IV Articles (1829). How could Stewart’s perspective on Black freedom have differed from Walker’s? Was freedom “not gendered” for Stewart, as Carter Jackson proposes, or was Stewart’s analysis driven by the recognition that it was gendered (30)? 

In early and antebellum America, the violence of slavery, and the force necessary to escape it, were coded as masculine. Black men, Carter Jackson rightly notes, sought to prove their manhood in self-defense and self-emancipation just as white revolutionaries had done a generation before them (58-59). Force and freedom were not only gendered by historians but by contemporary political discourse and actors. Given this and the seemingly male-led nature of abolition, the reader is left wondering exactly how women’s contributions shaped or redefined the philosophy of force and the principles which underlaid it. The lack of a clear gender analysis make Black women’s roles appear additive rather than transformative—an appendage to male leadership, thought, and action.

Though Carter Jackson wishes to decenter William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and other white abolitionists in her work, she ends up inadvertently reinforcing an older tendency in scholarship to begin the abolition movement around 1830. To her credit, Carter Jackson counters the traditional foregrounding of Garrison’s Liberator by acknowledging Walker’s Appeal as a starting point for Black abolitionist thought. However, work by Richard Newman, Christopher Cameron, Sinha, and Paul Polgar has pushed back against this periodization, focusing more on the early rise of abolitionism and its radical, interracial nature (167n5). In Standard-Bearers of Equality, for instance, Polgar examines what he calls the first abolition movement in the urban mid-Atlantic around the turn of the nineteenth century. He aims to undermine the Garrisonian depiction of early abolitionism as too gradualist and therefore too conservative. Carter Jackson, however, implies early in her book that the “antislavery movement” started only a few decades before the Civil War, rather than during the colonial period and Revolution, where the origin is now regularly placed in the historiography (8). In doing so, she dismisses the early movement as insignificant, if not nonexistent, and gives the impression that Black Americans only grappled with American republicanism from the 1830s on when we know that they were counter-critiquing and recreating that tradition since the late eighteenth century.

In crafting a “road to the Civil War” narrative, Carter Jackson could do more to acknowledge the deeper origins of the abolition movement and to the dynamic, revolutionary discourse with which Black abolitionists were in conversation. While it makes sense to bookend a story about the abolitionist tactical shift from moral suasion to violence with the 1830s and the 1860s, that story leaves out antislavery and Black radical thought before Walker and Garrison and suggests that the political discourse of violence sprung up in their wake. Carter Jackson’s analysis would have benefited from a brief comparison of early and later abolitionism and how Black thought explored and superseded the Revolution’s ambivalent promise of freedom and equality.

With Force and Freedom, Carter Jackson makes a stimulating and insightful debut which will have a major influence on abolition movement scholarship. She recenters Black leadership in the movement and illuminates how critical it is to understanding the shift in strategy from public persuasion to political violence. While Carter Jackson could have paid more attention in her analysis to the gendering of Black abolitionism and to the earlier movement and development of abolitionist thought, she compellingly connects Black abolitionism and the embrace of revolutionary ideas. Black people and their resistance to slavery were indeed crucial to the expansion of American freedom and equality during the antebellum period and the Civil War. They led a movement devoted to securing perhaps the most radical and elusive principle of all American history: Black humanity.

 

Further Reading

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 2nd ed. (1967; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Christopher Cameron, To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014).

François Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (Mar. 2003): 1295-330.

Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Paul J. Polgar, Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement (Williamsburg and Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Benjamin Quarles, “The Revolutionary War as a Black Declaration of Independence,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 283-301.

Manisha Sinha, “Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: New Press, 2006).

Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

Manisha Sinha, “To ‘Cast Just Obliquy’ on Oppressors: Black Radicalism in the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (Jan. 2007): 149-60.

 

This article originally appeared in December 2023.

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William Morgan is a Ph.D. student in the Indiana University Bloomington Department of History. He studies the cultural history of early America with emphases on early Black politics, the long Revolution, and the first abolition movement.

It’s a commonplace that women remain largely absent from histories in part because of biases in the sources. But for early periods the always scant historical record of women’s activities is even spottier. Thus Mary Brown Vanderlight (1731-95) has been, like other women, even spectacularly privileged women, elusive to history. In a detailed biography of her brother, Moses, she appears three times, all to note her, incorrectly, as a member of his household—just another dependent. In the account of the family that was long the standard, written by the organizer of the family business papers, she doesn’t warrant a single mention. Mary remains so invisible and appears in so few accounts of the family’s or the city’s or the university’s history that even historically-minded folks in Providence today suggested when I began to research her life that she couldn’t possibly be a Brown sister, but another of the many Mary Browns—maybe one of the brothers’ aunts. The vagaries of archives, how records are created, preserved, and survive, the ways that historical narrative facilitates some stories over others, and the gendered expectations and narratives about women in the era in which she lived all conspired to make her near-invisible to us. 

Yet what the available pieces of Mary Brown Vanderlight’s life reveal is not only a more richly complex picture of a complex family, but also a fuller account of how elite women facilitated and even instigated the key connections of early American commerce and society. Missing women like her impoverishes our histories in that it leaves them incomplete, but it also leaves us spectacularly ill equipped to understand how women could both struggle in a system of gender hierarchy and also be so privileged that they facilitated and furthered that privilege at the expense of others. An especially tantalizing set of account books at the John Carter Brown Library suggest that the Brown brothers’ sister was a dynamic force in her own right, managing her husband’s business during his life and continuing at least part of it in the years following his death. Other than these books, Mary is seen within the collections of others’ (mostly her brothers’) papers, and occasionally in public accounts. A daughter, sister, wife, mother, and aunt, Mary was also at the very least a businesswoman, wealthy property owner, significant member of Providence society, and perhaps an apothecary or even an erstwhile doctor. Like her brothers, she too was both emblematic and distinctive.

When Mary Brown was born in 1731, she was the fourth child and the only daughter of James Brown, who died when Mary was only eight, and Hope Power Brown, who would remain a dominant figure in Mary’s life. Her oldest brother died young, at sea, and another older brother died as a toddler. She married David Vanderlight, a doctor and Dutch immigrant, in the early 1750s. Both her husband and their only child, a baby boy, died in February of 1755. When she died in the spring of 1795, Mary Brown Vanderlight had been a widow for four decades, and lived on her own or with her mother. Like her mother, she remained a stalwart of the Baptist church that their forebears had helped found (though her brothers wandered to Quakerism and the Anglican church). Like her mother, she never remarried. Like her mother, she was the administrator of her husband’s estate, a complex job that came with significant legal and other practical responsibilities. For most of her life, then, it was Mary, her mother, the four brothers, and a city full of connected, extended kin.

The Providence of the Brown Brothers—and their sister—was a smallish place in a big and expanding British empire. The homelands of Narragansett, Nipmuc and Wampanoag peoples, Rhode Island’s ports and harbors made the colony attractive to settler merchants, and while from the mid-seventeenth century Newport had been their dominant city, by the end of the eighteenth-century Providence had surpassed its population. In addition to an expanding white population, and growing numbers of both free and enslaved Black people, Indigenous people continued to live in and around the settlers in their midst. Merchant commerce powered both of these small cities’ wealth, with Atlantic trade in anything that could be imported or exported, including whale oils made into candles, sugar made into rum—and enslaved people. 

The Brown Brothers’ slaving was modest both in the family’s overall enterprise and by comparison to Rhode Islanders’ deep investment in the slave trade. But it was devastating in its consequences and indicative of slavery’s inextricable ties to the expansion of colonial commerce and politics. The vast majority of African people captured and sold into slavery in the Americas were in South America, not North America, and the vast majority of those in North America were sold by European slavers. Still, Rhode Islanders dominated the slave voyages that originated in North America. There was little if any of the colony’s commercial activity that was not touched by the slave trade. The family that Mary Brown Vanderlight grew up in was an enslaving family. Her father’s will listed four enslaved persons, and one of his last and most expansive commercial endeavors was the first of the Browns’ slaving voyages. 

In 2006, under the leadership of Ruth Simmons, the first African American president of an Ivy League university, Brown was the first American university to confront its connections with the slave trade. A centerpiece of Brown’s Slavery and Justice Report is the account of the Brown Brothers’ 1764 slaving venture with the ship Sally, on which more than half of the nearly 200 men, women, and children they captured in Africa died before they reached the Americas and a life of enslavement. Two of the brothers ultimately fell out over slavery, with one, Moses, becoming an ardent abolitionist, and another, John, a defender of slavery and slaving. 

Mary isn’t the only woman missing from the center of the Brown’s story. Most histories credit the children’s uncle, the successful merchant Obadiah Brown, with having launched the brothers’ mercantile career after their father’s death, but their mother Hope Power Brown was a figure in her own right. While her husband lived and for all the decades after she would continue to keep her own account books, and continue to reckon accounts with all of her children about who bought and sold and owned what to whom and whose property should be ceded to whom and why. And it was surely their mother who was Mary’s model as a widowed woman of means.

Women’s work is often hidden or marginal within historical records that were meant to show men’s economic and political lives. But historians have been able to show just how regular and central they were to both realms of early American life. In early New England, middling and wealthy free women could play key roles in protecting and increasing their property, including in court. Historian Sara Damiano, for example, has recently written about how white women’s “financial and legal work” in New England’s cities “was an essential component of . . . [the region’s] political economy.” Free women of middling means and more could create and hold debts—the essence of an economy that ran on credit—and went to court to vigorously defend their financial interests. Though women were a relatively small slice of the eighteenth-century financial industry, they were essential to its function. The evidence of Hope Power Brown’s extensive accounts with local businesses while she was raising her children, and then her pervasive presence in her family members’ financial dealings, as well as the lives and financial affairs of otherwise unrelated business associates including as an estate administrator, show her to be active and energetic in advancing all of their interests—and her own. Hers was a model for Mary Brown Vanderlight to follow. 

Imagine that a historian was trying to reconstruct something of your life from just a few years of bank statements, with perhaps a handful of random emails. What we know about Mary Brown Vanderlight is a little like this. We have to build a picture from what we know of others in her family and community, and what we know of other people she associated with or even just people whose experiences may have been something like hers. One of the many missing pieces of Mary Brown Vanderlight’s story is the date of her marriage. Like other key documents, perhaps it will turn up. Why are they missing? After all, the eighteenth-century record for such things is remarkably full. Still, absences occur, and likely much more often for women. But we do have David’s estate inventory along with the three account books. The former tells us a little of their life together, and the latter may look just as dry as a bank statement, with debts and credits listed under the debtors’ and creditors’ names in the accepted practice of the time. But they are remarkably revealing, especially when placed alongside the bits and pieces of Mary’s life and interests that survive among her brother’s papers.

What’s clear is that Mary started keeping the Vanderlight accounts as soon as she married.

A key challenge in writing women back into the center of the history they lived is the law that firmly put them at the margins. The laws of coverture in colonial British America meant that women’s property was largely ceded to their husbands upon marriage, and they became “covered” legally—part of his household. But this law could not change the reality that most economic undertaking was a family enterprise to one degree or another. When David and Mary married, the business made use of both of their talents and skills including her management of the medical and pharmaceutical practices. 

The account books show a lively business. David Vanderlight only kept his own accounts briefly before Mary took them over, suggesting not only that they married fairly quickly after he arrived in Rhode Island but also the extent of Mary’s skill with financial recordation. In 1752 he was referring to Hope Brown as “Mrs Brown” in his account book, but soon she was “Mother Brown.” He seemed to have quickly become part of the Browns’ circle. The patients he saw included Stephen Hopkins, very soon to be the governor of the colony, other doctors, and any number of prominent merchants. He treated and they provided to Ann Hopkins, the wife of Stephen, “Sundre[y] Medicyns, visits, and Attend[ing].” They also saw enslaved and free Black Rhode Islanders. Under Joseph Olney’s account Mary noted that David had treated a “Negro Woman” for “Sickness” and provided her what was described as the same “Sundr[y] Medicyns, visits, & attend[ing]” as Mrs. Hopkins. Some patients received more specific treatments and medicines. The Vanderlights also traded in a wider variety of goods, including tea and spices. Among things they sold early on to Hope Brown were bottles of “elixir” as well as nutmeg, ginger, tea, and sugar.

While David Vanderlight lived, they had their home and business on Towne Street, at the corner of what is now Main and Hopkins, now the site of the Superior Court buildings. All of the early and mid-eighteenth-century homes were fairly closely clustered. Hope Power Brown’s home on the river side of the street was likely just a few blocks away while the site of Joseph Brown’s was practically next door. Though the other Browns’ late eighteenth-century houses in Providence are impressive and stately, including the Joseph Brown House, the John Brown House (now a museum of the Rhode Island Historical Society) and the Nightingale-Brown House (now the John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University), it’s likely that the Vanderlights’ mid-eighteenth-century home and workplace was much more modest. Views of the house are always just out of site in various eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century views of the Market House (across the street) or the full city, including a famous 1809 drop scene at the Rhode Island Historical Society. 

The Vanderlights’ home and shop was full of medical equipment as well as the apothecary goods they dispensed. There was “myrtle,” “myrrh,” a version of arsenic, but also plenty of equipment, including bottles and “ointment pots,” boxes and cases, and tools including a “case of Pockett Instruments.” A Dutch immigrant who arrived in Rhode Island by way of Guyana, David was educated at the University of Leiden and was reputed the most educated man in mid-eighteenth-century Providence. He was a founding member of the city’s new library (which morphed and merged and is now the Providence Athenaeum), and was part of the small committee charged with purchasing its initial collection. 

Did they know that David’s illness (likely malaria) would be fatal so quickly? Or was he carried off by a different seasonal illness that also killed their little boy? One obvious conclusion from the Vandelights’ account books is how close the medical community in Providence and Newport was. The Bowens were several generations of doctors and bought quite a bit of equipment and medicine from the Vanderlights (and may have bought some of the Vanderlights’ stock from Mary after David’s death). Surely they all discussed extensively who was sick, and what treatments they were providing. Being a doctor then as now was no surety against disease and death.

From the time David died, Mary continued the surviving account books. It looks like she also continued to serve patients at least by selling medicines but maybe also by practicing—or even teaching. As late as 1757 she was billing her neighbor Elisha Shearman for having trained his son in the “arts of apothicary.” She also took up her husband’s role in the library and was listed as one of only two women among the nearly 150 “proprietors” who regularly paid to support—and use—it. The other was another widow in the Browns’ circle who had also, perhaps unsurprisingly, been one of the Vanderlights’ patients and customers. She also kept investing. These investments included, according to a single notation in one of her brother’s accounts, helping to finance the infamous slaving voyage of the Sally.  On the cover of one of the surviving Vanderlight account books, she has written her name in large, bold letters: “Mary Vanderlights Book.” This is one of the few extant examples, besides the accounts she wrote and her signature on deeds and other financial instruments, where we can see how firmly she identified and claimed her position.

As she aged, Mary may have continued to be a source of medical expertise and information for her family. Women typically had practical experience as healthcare workers, tending to children and the sick and elderly as part of their expected domestic duties. In 1776 she was inoculated for smallpox, along with Moses and others in the family—though she and Moses seem to have purposely done theirs together. Mary also seems to have been entrusted with particularly sensitive family medical cases, including traveling with her fragile and ailing niece, Joanna, in the 1780s. From the tone of letters sent from school in Boston back to family in Providence, Joanna was a lively girl; she died in 1785 just before her nineteenth birthday. A sad number of the Brown siblings’ children died, with the management of both grief and the practicalities of care, burial, and memorialization intensive. In the throes of Joanna’s illness her father Nicholas Brown wrote in some despair that “the Whole Business of this Life is to Learn to Die Well.” As Joanna weakened in the year before her death, her aunt Mary took her to Newport to consult doctors, and around the Rhode Island coast for the fresh air. None of Mary’s letters—in this period or any other—seem to have survived. But her brothers’ long letters about Joanna’s condition and about their travels for her health convey a wealth of detail about how the pair was trying to treat his daughter. They fretted over the seasonal temperature (she should wear layers of woolens if they were to return to Providence by boat), the herbals she was prescribed, and the status of her sleep and stools. But as to her real state, Nicholas Brown acknowledged to his “dear” and “Worthy Sister” that “no one can tell as well as you that take constant care of her.”

It seems obvious that Mary had other account books that have not survived or at least are not extant in public repositories. Notations in the surviving three with cross reference to other “folios” and to accounts noted elsewhere suggest she had a full system in place and kept it up. Additionally, managing her husband’s medical practice and then his estate was far from Mary’s only or even her most extensive financial experience. How could it be? She, like her brothers, inherited from their father’s estate. Even before she was widowed she would have been a woman of property. They divided and re-sorted some of that estate multiple times over the decades. When Hope Power Brown died in 1792 it was at Mary’s house that the siblings convened to discuss sorting out their mother’s estate.

Because the records are so spotty, neither Hope Power Brown nor Mary Brown Vanderlight’s estate inventories or wills are extant, confounding not just me but the city archivists I spoke with. And despite her clearly having controlled significant real estate, based on records of divisions of her parents’ property and accounts with her brothers, we don’t even know where Mary lived. She may have stayed at her home with David for some time, and then sold it. Possibly she moved in with her mother, which a bit of correspondence and that meeting after Hope Power Brown’s death suggests. And we don’t know what their household looked like, except for a few hints that it was modest. On a rare colonial census in 1774, Hope Power Brown was listed as a head of household of three, with only 2 other adult white women. Presumably Mary was one of them? Mary’s brothers all lived in households with Black men and women, some of them enslaved.

Mary Brown Vanderlight died while visiting her brother Moses at his home in what is now Providence’s East Side neighborhood of Wayland Square. She was memorialized with a stone in Providence’s North Burial Ground, like most of her family. Her husband had been buried there, too, four decades earlier, though his tombstone has now all but disappeared. If their tiny son ever had a stone, it isn’t apparent. One wonders if she tended it. Or if she visited Joanna’s grave, which is directly across from where Mary herself is now buried.

History yields more easily to the subjects it best documents: wars, politics and political structures, economy and economic activity, powerful people more than marginal ones, always men more than women. This is true despite, as scholars have shown us, women’s key roles in the central economic and political developments of their time, including slavery. But Mary Brown Vanderlight was also disappearing from her own time, in her own lifetime. Though there are multiple family accounts of her last days and her death, notices of her passing described her life in terms of relationships: she was described as “the relict of Dr. John Vanderlight” and the “Daughter of Mr. James Brown, and Hope his Wife.”  She died “at the House of her Brother, Mr. Moses Brown, the 6th Day of May 1795, in the 62nd Year of her Age.” Thus she was, to the last, publicly defined by the men to whom she was related—and at least her mother. Even her husband’s name is incorrect on her own tombstone, John instead of David. So she was, to the last, consigned to error and erasure.

 

Further reading

Sylvia Brown, Grappling with Legacy: Rhode Island’s Brown Family and the American Philanthropic Impulse (Bloomington, IN: Archway Publishing, 2017).

Brown University’s Slavery and Justice Report, With Commentary on Context and Impact (2nd Edition of the Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, 2021).

Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change 1630-1800 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).

Sara Damiano, To Her Credit: Gender, Law, and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).

James B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations, the Colonial Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952).

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

Jane Lancaster, Inquire Within: A Social History of the Providence Athenaeum Since 1753 (Providence: Providence Athenaeum, 2003).

Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

Mack Thompson, Moses Brown, Reluctant Reformer (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 1962).

 

Acknowledgements

The fragmentary materials for Mary Brown Vanderlight’s life as I have described it are primarily at the John Carter Brown Library, where colleagues have been enormously helpful with this project. I want to also thank the staffs of the Rhode Island Historical Society and the Providence City Archives, who helped as I sought to find more about Mary’s life in the margins and interstices of other records—sometimes with luck, and sometimes not. Special thanks to Kate Wodehouse at the Providence Athenaeum who shared copies from the Library registers showing Mary’s membership. I am grateful to the Brown family for their ongoing interest and support for history and research.

 

This article originally appeared in December 2023.

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Karin Wulf is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director & Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, and Professor of History at Brown University. A historian of gender, family, and politics in British America, her book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Unfortunately, this did not prepare me for “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (by the Marxist-Feminist Gayatri Spivak) . . . or for a weekly load of plowing through three hefty monographs. Reading for obsession had never taken any discipline; time be damned, I soaked in every page. Reading for academia, the damned hours evaporated, as if I did not know how to read at all.

I despaired of surviving coursework and could not envision training students myself someday. But if ever, I dreamed of showing them not just what to read but how to read. How to read and not run out of time. How to read and retain something. Most of all, how to read and have a life. Bibliophiles especially need help with “book-life balance”—a catchphrase popularized in 2017 on Bookriot by Yaika Sabat, then a Master’s student. She and other great minds with the same thought coined a name for what got me through my Ph.D. For going on thirty years now, I’ve been preaching and teaching that philosophy.

My early advisees dubbed the techniques I showed them “the Sandage Method,” but the X-ray Method describes the goal more clearly. Before starting a book, examine its bones and organs, its muscles and ailments. Then make a diagnostic snapshot for easy reference in class discussion or exam preparation. I show every incoming student how to x-ray a book, on day one.

On my first day of grad school, in August 1989, I had never heard of “historiography.” I took no history at all in college, still under the misimpression that it was all dead presidents. (I majored in German by default, keeping up my high school language, but mostly I took English writing courses.) I fell in love with the archives researching my honors thesis on Broadway’s George M. Cohan—Scott’s latest mania—but I had no yen for academia well into my twenties.  One night at Kramer Books in Washington, D.C., I picked up Warren Susman’s Culture as History. The cover alone was a revelation. However, I managed just a few pages a day on the subway.

By the time I called Rutgers to inquire if Professor Susman was accepting advisees, the program secretary explained how he had famously dropped dead at a conference. The good news: they had hired a new cultural historian, Jackson Lears. I have never forgotten his exact words after our first meeting: “You seem like you’ll do very well here, if you can avoid the Ph.D. student epidemic of immobilizing self-doubt.”

I felt too ashamed to confess that I was already infected, a carrier in fact. Having lived with depression all my life, I entered therapy at 11, a weepy boy with “school phobia” and archaic fascinations. Going into my second year at Rutgers, I had a major breakdown in the parking lot of a New Jersey diner. I’ve been treated off and on ever since—which itself is one of the layers of privilege that sustain me despite a history of mental illness. Checking some of my privilege by being open is nothing less than a duty. So, it’s not only the first personal thing I share with new students; it frontloads self-care as the explicit context when I shift our conversation to book-life balance.

Back at Rutgers I got all the usual advice. “Just learn to skim.” “Just read the first and last sentence of every paragraph.” “Just read for the argument, not the narrative.” Always a sponge for details, with no conception of historiography, I lagged or lacked focus. My natural pace was around fifteen pages an hour, which I could push to twenty, tops. Another Lears student who easily absorbed sixty pages in that time (she is now a university president) took me under her wing and shared her concise notes. While I scribbled a dozen-plus pages for every book, she never exceeded one typed page. Finally some useable advice! Limiting my notes to the flyleaf, I developed the habit of making my own index, handy at a glance in class discussion. I passed my exams, wrote a dissertation, and entered the market when there were still jobs.

Writing a cultural history of failure as my dissertation felt like destiny and therapy combined. Jackson often said that all history is autobiography, and of all my serial passions, a multiyear obsession with depression was the most personal. Such a perfect topic and such a bummer, yet the dissertation and a tenure-track job came easy: professional good luck built upon historical bad luck. Imposter! Book revisions dragged on for years, the darkest of my life even as I found true love. What saved me was teaching, the inescapable obligation of showing up and learning together. Mrs. Colby and Jackson were just two of many great educators whom I could never repay, except forward, yet I had never entertained any ambition for teaching. Discovering that I’m good at it, I experienced the renewable hope and joy of mentoring others who feel not good enough.

One of my first doctoral advisees, Sonya Barclay, came in better prepared than I had been, but we found much in common. We both grew up gay and bookish in farm country, both working-class and first-generation college grads. Her path had been much harder than mine, and I admired her sunny determination as a nontraditional student who was already older than me. Having put herself through college, earning her B.A. at forty, Sonya started her Ph.D. with family burdens I had never carried. We bonded over words and sentences, emailing nice passages and new vocabulary to each other. Savorers, of course, consequently tend to be slower readers.

Until Sonya wept in my office and begged for help, I had never listed systematically the tricks picked up in grad school or since. I always shared how I had struggled to keep up and recognize arguments. I extolled book-life balance but hadn’t taught it step by step. I had not accepted or fully conceived an actual duty to teach the skills we blithely expect of advanced students, whom we too easily leave to sink or swim under a workload many come in not imagining or expecting.

On the spot, I asked Sonya what was in her book bag. She was lugging around Richard White’s The Middle Ground, kind of afraid to open it. Perfect. I showed her how to make a reading plan.

Richard White is one of those brilliantly accommodating authors who makes his point in his book titles, empowering us to read for argument without too many details. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Everyone knows that a middle ground is a space for negotiation. Given the where and when in the title, anyone with basic knowledge of early America can guess that the empires are France and Britain. Are the US and indigenous confederacies empires, too, or maybe the titular republics? So this is a study of power, negotiation, and changing players over time. Without opening the cover!

Sonya easily made these educated guesses. Next, we turned to the table of contents. Based on the presumed argument, which might be the key chapters? Chapter two, “The middle ground,” was easy to flag (as was chapter seven, repeating the key phrase in its title). Chapter three, “The fur trade,” named a player not cued by the book title. Chapters five and six, respectively, focused on “republicans” and “empires.” Chapter ten, “Confederacies,” did not echo the book title but confirmed our guess about indigenous alliances. That made half a dozen chapters out of eleven, not to dismiss all the rest, but simply to mark those six as potentially most important.

Long before showing Sonya, I had discovered that a book’s index is a more useful tool before reading than after. We go back to the index to relocate some hazy detail, but certain entries can also preview main topics, themes, and arguments to guide your reading. Scan for abstract nouns more than for proper names, entries listing many pages, and especially multipage ranges. For example, in White’s index, “alliances,” “chiefs,” “gifts,” “middle ground,” “republics,” and “trade goods” (as well as several subtopics under each) identify key sections within chapters.

Again, Sonya easily checked these pages against parts already chosen, merely by inference from the book and chapter titles, to refine her plan for where and what to focus on.

Do you know what discursive footnotes are? Of course you do, as did Sonya: less citations than wordy asides for litigating scholarly debates, interpretations, and arguments. I asked her to flip through every page. (White chose footnotes over endnotes, which academic readers prefer, but for this step endnotes are easier to scan continuously.) Sonya located a big one on page 154, in a chapter that she had not flagged, and several other long, chatty notes that explained debates she (and I) might have lost in White’s compellingly detailed narrative.

After tallying fights picked or points scored in the notes, we checked the acknowledgements for White’s colleagues and friends. Sonya recognized Bill Cronon, Ramon Gutierrez, and others. OK, so Richard White is that kind of historian.

Having her list sections and pages she planned to read, so far, I showed her how I had done that on the flyleaf of my own copy. Book indexes vary in utility, so I make my own—tracking themes I find interesting but don’t find in the printed entries. “Power,” for example, at pages 33-38, 57, 148, and 174-175. The “village world,” at 16, 37, 143, 185, 316, and 413. “Exchange,” at pages 99-103, 116, 128+, 265, and 334. It’s a good habit (and good fun) to index your own obsessions along with the author’s. So is keeping an eye out for one or two pages that sum up the entire book. For me, White does that at pages 456-457 . . . with still nearly 100 pages to go. 

The Middle Ground has a four-page epilogue, which I asked Sonya to read right then and there–to test her educated guesses. If you’ve really deduced the key arguments, themes, and threads in the 500 pages of prologue, shouldn’t the epilogue already make some sense? For the first time, Sonya pushed back, one fanatical Sherlock Holmes nerd to another. She said something to the effect that peeking at the last page is cheating. It spoils the surprise that “the butler did it!”

Here again, the book at hand was a perfect teaching tool. Richard White is the rare scholar who enthralls like a novelist; since that day with Sonya, I’ve always used The Middle Ground with all who followed her. Most bookworms honor the taboo that it’s wrong to skip to the end. While a monograph is not a novel, doesn’t it disrespect a renowned stylist like White not to savor his masterpiece word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page, chapter by chapter? Maybe, but no more so than not finishing a great book at all, reading it like we learned in third grade.

The bane of grad students (and all harried lovers of serious nonfiction) is running out of time without getting to what’s most important. That’s a common if secret shame when you’re trying to digest three doorstops a week. Relearning how to read, under pressure, means getting what you (and nobody else) need most from this book. To do that consistently, you must plan before you scan.

A good plan has two parts. First, make a list (in pencil) of all pages you will read, adjusting it step by step. Second, and most important, be realistic about the maximum amount of time you can give to this book. Being realistic means respecting your daily rituals and the relationships that keep you happy and functional. Rather than get only as far as you can before running out of time, you have made a plan to read what you decide are the most important parts, within a preset time limit that respects yourself as much as the author. This is why you need a plan: to read attentively but efficiently, and sustainably, without surrendering your book-life balance.

There is one more catch: your limit must include time for taking notes. For my grad classes and advisees preparing for exams, I prescribe a strict one-page template. Start with the complete Chicago-style citation, the main argument(s) in your own words, historiographical keywords from relevant debates, and names of a few scholars or books in dialogue with this one. Then list all chapter titles, but take notes (including key pages and brief quotations) only on sections you actually read. The goal of making a concise, easily reviewable record of what you consider most useful in this book—and doing so within the time set aside for reading—is to avoid taking too many notes or procrastinating note-taking and having to reread.

Following these steps, Sonya read The Middle Ground with time to spare. Characteristically, she made a fun handout explaining them in her own way: “The Butler Did It: The Sandage Method of Devouring the Book.” Who knew I had a method? Not me, until dear Sonya inspired me to articulate and ritualize it with my new advisees. She embraced it as self-care and self-help, not just study help. “This method will help you,” she promised from experience, “to survive graduate school reading without undue stress.” Ironically, Sonya herself survived just barely. 

She read the books, passed her exams, and wrote her dissertation: a lyrical meditation on how class identity looks and feels different in the countryside. She walked miles around the county where she was born and raised, using old plat maps to relocate ghost farms described in her tax records and estate inventories. She needed to see the topography for herself, to visualize the layout of homeplace and outbuildings. Where she could find no other trace, she extrapolated lost sites and features by uncovering the family graveyard. In her shoulder bag, Sonya carried tulip bulbs to plant for the dead. Imagine leaving spring colors to mark your research path.

Defended in May 2008, “Reading the Social Landscape: A Lexicon of Rural Class in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1860” has never been published, nor did Dr. Sonya Marie Barclay, Ph.D., go on to the career she deserved.

She adjuncted that fall at Carnegie Mellon, as an award winning and beloved instructor. Between the final class and crush of final grading, we made a date to edit her CV and job cover letters. I was in my office at the appointed time when she called from an emergency room. It was December 10, 2008, a Wednesday morning. Her tests revealed uterine cancer, stage four. Sonya insisted on completing her grading in the hospital bed where she died two weeks later, on Christmas Day. We who loved her came to believe she had ignored early symptoms in her drive to defend her dissertation, six months before we lost her.

Sonya remains a legend to doctoral students who never knew her, because her handout “The Butler Did It” still circulates around their cubicles at CMU–and beyond. An alumnus three years behind Sonya, Professor Lee Vinsel at Virginia Tech, had used it with his own advisees for years before sending it viral on (the platform formerly known as) Twitter in August 2019.

When I was a PhD student, the “Sandage Method” for reading in graduate school was handed around samizdat style. Put together by a grad student without @ScottSandage‘s permission, I think, it’s now something I give to all my grad students. Mine is a copy of a copy of a copy of a pic.twitter.com/VSixDluoC5

— Lee Vinsel (@STS_News) August 28, 2019

Lee prompted me to write up “the Sandage Method” myself finally. Later refinements made for a round ten steps. I took to calling it “The X-Ray Method” as a technique for seeing through a book, examining its skeleton before you decide how you will read it, within the realistic time available. Recent advisees dubbed their one-page book notes “x-rays.” Diagnose before you read a book, then make a snapshot record of it.

It makes me happy that a single page may be my most read piece of writing. Lee Vinsel or I have reposted my handout with Sonya’s annually, to start each academic year. Retweets have made me feel like a “Bluebird” again, fifty years after I first discovered the joy of serious reading. I prod advisees not to lose that feeling, as I nearly did. Books keep piling up and oppressing us. Too many we have to read get stacked atop ones we want to read. The last things I tell students on day one are that not all books can or should be read this way, and that the glorious choice to savor any particular volume still belongs to them alone.

The x-ray method is most of all a tool for restoring and maintaining book-life balance. Book by book, you can take back your time and decide for yourself. Learning to read more efficiently—and sustainably—can even empower you to read joyously again. And obsessively, for those of us who are so inclined.

 

Further Reading

Sonya Marie Barclay, “Reading the Social Landscape: A Lexicon of Rural Class in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1860,” Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2008.

Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks! (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1961).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313.

Yaika Sabat, “On Finding Book-Life Balance,” Book Riot, October 6, 2023, https://bookriot.com/finding-book-life-balance/.

Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).

Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

 

This article originally appeared in November 2023.

 

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Scott A. Sandage is the author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Harvard University Press, 2005) and is currently obsessed with writing Laughing Buffalo in Paris: A Tall Tale from the Half-Breed Rez, a six-generation saga of Métis-Omaha families in Nebraska. An Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he and his husband of twenty-three years live happily in a house they are trying to rid of unread books.

Knowing what is missing is an important first step. Indeed, sometimes simply bringing a problem to light can speed its solution. One of the more recent examples of this is the rediscovery of Kate Chopin’s late, lost short story, “Her First Party,” in 2013. The story was known to have existed, but for decades scholars despaired of knowing where to look. Success finally came when researchers Bonnie James Shaker and Angela Pettitt combed through an online periodicals database “outside the logical, searchable framework of Chopin’s lifespan” (386). It is my hope that the list below—of known and suspected missing texts by nineteenth-century Americans—will encourage similar collaboration and unorthodoxy. This list is naturally incomplete, a beginning; a fuller accounting would fill whole volumes. What follows was inspired by the pioneering collaborative work of scholars like those highlighted below, as well as by Johanna Ortner, whose essay “Lost No More: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves” appeared in Commonplace in 2015 and had an early impact on this writer.

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Hawthorne’s 1819 poem(s) in print: Among known missing works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, those topping any “most wanted” list will be his earliest publications by far: his juvenile poems. In a letter addressed to his older sister, Louisa, and dated September 28, 1819, Hawthorne, then sixteen years old, included several stanzas that he had recently composed. “I am full of scraps of poetry,” he writes, “can’t keep it out of my brain . . . I could vomit up a dozen pages more if I was a mind to so turn over.” He adds, with obvious pride: “Tell Ebe [his younger sister] she’s not the only one of the family whose works have appeared in the papers.” Julian Hawthorne later reported that Hawthorne sent verses (presumably these) “to a Boston newspaper” at age sixteen. “These have not yet been identified,” notes Joel Myerson, editor of Hawthorne’s Selected Letters (27).

Whitman’s early newspaper pieces and lost novels: Decades before he would become a poetic iconoclast, a young Walt Whitman, age twelve, found a job as an editor’s apprentice at the Long-Island Patriot, his father’s Democratic newspaper of choice. During the year or so he worked for the paper (1831-32), he published in the Patriot what he would later call “a few sentimental bits,” none of which have been identified so far.

Later, for much of his twenties, Whitman worked as a correspondent for a number of Brooklyn and Manhattan newspapers. During the period spanning 1841 to 1848, he is also known to have published miscellaneous prose tales, novellas, and sketches. Whitman was not particularly proud of his work from this period, which tended to be rapidly written and sensationalistic. He later wrote that “[m]y serious wish were to have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp’d in oblivion—but to avoid the annoyance of their surreptitious issue” he published about two dozen of them in 1892, in Collect and Other Prose. However, the Library of America’s Story of the Week webseries notes that “[s]ince many were published anonymously or pseudonymously, there might be others that have not yet been identified.” These pieces might be found in any number of New York periodicals, including the Aurora, the Evening Tattler, the Statesman, the Daily Plebian, the Mirror, the Democrat, the Sun, the Subterranean, the Daily Tribune, the Sunday Times & Noah’s Weekly Messenger, the Rover, the Washingtonian and Organ, the American Review, and Brooklyn’s Daily Eagle and Evening Star.

Whitman is also believed to have written, and perhaps published, at least one and perhaps two novels around the time of his first publishing Leaves of Grass (1855). Letters and manuscripts from the period detail the general plot outlines of these two potboilers, titled The Sleeptalker (ca. 1851) and Proud Antoinette (ca. 1858-60), at least one of which, the former, Whitman claimed to have completed. Whatever their publications histories, if any, the whereabouts of their manuscripts today are unknown.

The origins of the phrase “the Great American Novel”: An essay written by novelist John William de Forest and published in The Nation in 1868, is generally regarded as the beginning of the ongoing popular discussion of “the great American novel.” However, de Forest’s essay is not the origin of the phrase itself, as Lawrence Buell notes in his 2014 book on the subject. P. T. Barnum toyed with the phrase in 1866, and it is clear that the term was already in general circulation by then. I have performed a number of searches for the phrase—always using the article “the,” since the phrase “a great American novel” does not necessarily convey the same sense—and have found a number of earlier uses of the term. As for early candidates for the title, de Forest himself said that “[t]he nearest approach to the desired phenomenon is ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.” I now believe he may be right. The earliest usage I can locate refers to Stowe’s bestseller. In an 1852 English edition of the work, published in six unbound parts by Vickers and T. C. Johns (both of London), the book is referred to as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Great American Novel, To Be Completed in Six Weekly Numbers, Price One Penny Each. I imagine that with effort, even earlier uses of the phrase may be found. 

Early African American fiction: Given the merciless oppressions of American slavery, the eventual collapse of Reconstruction after emancipation, and the ongoing terrorism of whites toward African Americans during the Jim Crow Era, it is perhaps unsurprising that so few short stories and novels are known to have been written by African Americans prior to 1900. What is surprising, though, is that after decades of pioneering efforts by scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Brigitte Fielder, Jean Lutes, Denise Burgher, Caroline Gebhard, Katherine Adams, Sandra A. Zagarell, and many others, the full extent of early and pioneering African American engagement with fiction is still only just coming to light. Prominent recovered African American fictions—be they published or preserved in manuscript—include Harriet E. Wilson’s 1859 Our Nig (rediscovered by Gates in 1981), Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (written ca. 1853-61, rediscovered by Gates in 2001), and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s planned volume of short stories Annals of ’Steenth Street (written largely in the 1890s, reconstructed by Fielder, Lutes, and Burgher), as well as short stories published in periodicals like The Anglo-African Magazine, the Colored American, and The Christian Recorder. These discoveries join the ranks of early fictions by the likes of Victor Séjour, William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Martin Delany, and Frederick Douglass; they also suggest that much more early African American fiction is likely buried in periodicals and archived manuscripts around the US.

In some instances, information at least exists to provide researchers a place to begin. For example, until recently the earliest known literary publication by Charles W. Chesnutt—the late-nineteenth-century author of tales and novels addressing race relations in the post-Reconstruction South—was thought to be “A Father’s Dream.” This short story was published in the Cleveland Voice in the spring of 1885, when Chesnutt was twenty-six years old. However, in 1999 a much earlier tale was rediscovered: “Frisk’s First Rat,” a brief short story that appeared on the second page of the Fayetteville, North Carolina, Educator on March 20, 1875, signed “Chas. W. Chesnutt.” From that date until the appearance of “A Father’s Dream,” no Chesnutt-authored publications are known.

However, even during his lifetime there was the suggestion that unspecified Chesnutt juvenilia was extant somewhere. In an 1899 promotional sketch of Chesnutt’s life, for example, provided by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. (publisher of his then-new collection of tales, The Conjure Woman), it is asserted that “Mr. Chesnutt’s first story was written at fourteen, and was published in a newspaper issued by a colored man in North Carolina. Its motive was the baleful effects on the youthful mind of reading dime novels. Since 1884,” it adds, “he has contributed stories to various periodicals.” (See “The Rambler” column in the Book Buyer for June 1899, page 361.) No publications of Chesnutt’s have surfaced from these time periods—neither for the year he was fourteen years old (1872-73) nor for 1884 (one year prior to “A Father’s Dream”). One may doubt the veracity of the Book Buyer sketch—not least because it contains a miscalculation of Chesnutt’s age—but the details of his ostensible first tale, which evidently lampooned “the baleful effects on the youthful mind of reading dime novels,” are specific enough to suggest that Chesnutt himself provided them to his publisher. Yet they do not match any known work of his.

Beyond known or suspected missing fictions by African Americans, there must be many more unknowns that lie unsought, unconnected to any scholarly bibliography. Their recovery and redistribution will be the work of generations of scholars to come. 

Melville’s book(s) of 1853: While not altogether free of conjecture, this topic is compelling enough to merit a place here. Herman Melville is known to have spent around four months, from December 1852 to April 1853, writing a sustained work, to which his sister Augusta and cousin Priscilla refer as “Isle of the Cross” in correspondence of the period. He then submitted a work, presumably this one, to the publisher Harper’s that spring but did not see its publication. Scholars tend to agree that this work was some version of the “story of Agatha” to which Melville refers in a trio of letters to Hawthorne, but they disagree as to the ultimate result of this literary effort. Some have concluded that it was a novel-length effort, now lost; others believe it ultimately saw publication in 1854 in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, as a sketch in “The Encantadas” series. Melville writes in a letter to Harper and Brothers, dated November 24, 1853, that

[i]n addition to the work which I took to New York last Spring, but which I was prevented from printing at that time; I have now in hand, and pretty well on towards completion, another book—300 pages, say—partly of nautical adventure, and partly—or, rather, chiefly, of Tortoise Hunting Adventure. It will be ready

for press some time in the coming January. (Correspondence 250)

This “Tortoise Hunting Adventure” likewise has never surfaced, even though Melville sent the Harpers an extract in December 1853 (for which he received a cash advance of $300) and wrote to them asking their opinion of some portion of the “Tortoise Book” (which he refers to as “Tortoise Hunters”) in June 1854 (251, 267). It is unlikely that this work was anywhere near completion, however, since Melville specifies in the latter letter that “it would be difficult, if not impossible, for me to get the entire Tortoise Book ready for publication before Spring [1855],” though he acknowledges that he could “pick out & finish parts, here & there” (267).

Louisa May Alcott’s missing works of 1855-59: In her “Notes and Memoranda” ledger (now housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and published as part of her Journals), Louisa May Alcott kept track of roughly thirty years’ worth of personal earnings and major family events. For 1857, her listed earnings include:

Lovering                                60

Sewing                                  20

‘Agatha’s Confession’          10

Our Sunbeam                        10

Cross On The Tower             10

New Year’s Gift                    5

Pea Blossoms                        10

Several of the items are self-evident, like “Sewing” and “New Year’s Gift.” Likewise, “Lovering’” surely refers to the Loverings, for whom Alcott served as a governess between 1851 and 1859. However, three of the items on the list—“Agatha’s Confession,” “Our Sunbeam,” and “Pea Blossoms”—have not been found. This is not unusual for this volume; in the two years previous, Alcott had listed “King Goldenrod” (1855) and “Painter’s Dream” (1856), neither of which has yet to be identified. The following years’ memoranda contain similar mysteries—e.g., an 1858 entry listed as “Hope’s Treasures,” which has not been located, and fully five unidentified entries for 1859: “Ottilia’s Oath,” “Steel Bracelet,” “A Phantom Face,” “Laird of Leigh,” and “Faith’s Tryst.” Alcott biographer Harriet Reisen believes that these missing titles are likely short stories and that some may have been published, considering the earnings Alcott lists.

Additional publications of Dickinson’s prose or verse, in her lifetime: The most recent rediscoveries of Emily Dickinson verses published in the poet’s lifetime were in 1982 and 1984, both by scholar Karen Dandurand. Her list of the publications of Dickinson’s poems in her lifetime (to which has only been added her 1850 “Magnum bonum harum scarum” Valentine Eve letter) is the still-comprehensive standard. So far as is known, Dickinson never asked for her poetry to be published, which may explain why these publications are invariably unsigned and must be correlated to a known manuscript. Nearly all were printed between 1850 and 1870, with most appearing in the nine-year window of 1858-66.

That said, more could certainly exist in newsprint or between covers. Researchers hoping to take up the torch from Dandurand might consider systematically searching electronic newspaper databases for more unsigned verses, either using keyphrases from known Dickinson poems, or else combining words and phrases commonly recycled by the poet in her writings (such as bobolink, circumference, immortality, in purple, I could not/cannot stop for that, etc).

Twain’s early newspaper writings: A full accounting of Mark Twain’s published works is ongoing, particularly of those writings that appeared in small newspapers early in his career. As Merle Johnson, Twain’s first serious bibliographer, explained in 1910, the author’s “literary production covered a period of practically five decades. His range of activities included newspaper, magazine, book, and speech. He lived in a dozen places, from Honolulu to Vienna. Europe, Canada, and the United States vied for the first publication of his work. These things, together with the immense volume of publication, render it practically impossible to make these lists technically complete.” Though the situation has improved significantly in the past century, Johnson’s statement is still accurate. A number of Twain’s early periodical writings, particularly those written in or before 1865, are either missing or available only as reprintings, a situation complicated by the young correspondent’s near-constant use of pseudonyms—e.g., “Josh,” “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass,” “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab” (or “W.E.A.B.”), “Sergeant Fathom,” “A Dog-be-Deviled Citizen,” “Rambler,” “Grumbler,” “John Snooks,” and eventually, of course, “Mark Twain.” Articles published in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, one of Twain’s first newspaper assignments, are particularly rare. Independent scholar Barbara Schmidt keeps a well-updated list of these works on her website, twainquotes.com. 

Spofford’s early stories: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s tale “In a Cellar,” which first appeared anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, was the beginning of her popularity as a writer of mysteries and Gothic romances. But it was not the beginning of her writing career; she’d spent much of the 1850s submitting stories to Boston newspapers, usually receiving tiny sums for them. While Spofford’s novels are now well known, none of her early anonymous works have yet been found.

Missing lecture transcripts: Over the course of the 19th century, popular American authors often delivered speeches on the lecture circuits of their day—primarily in lyceums, library associations, local clubs, and subscription-based societies—as a way of engaging the public and securing supplemental income. Some lectures were reprinted or carefully transcribed (see Emerson’s, for example). Others were not. Nevertheless, missing lecture transcriptions may still exist in archived or digitized newspapers from the period. Twain, for example, lectured on Hawaii (then called the Sandwich Islands) after returning from an assignment there in 1866. In all, he delivered fifteen or sixteen such speeches, primarily in Grass Valley, California, and Nevada City, Nevada. Other than their general subject matter, these lectures are considered entirely lost. In his book on the subject, Walter Francis Frear not only assumes that the lecture notes were destroyed by the author, but also considers attempts at their reconstruction to be futile, since “the more or less scanty newspaper accounts necessarily lack much in diction and manner of presentation by the lecturer” (177, 184). Nevertheless, it may be possible to locate more complete descriptions (if not transcripts) of these lectures in digitized newspaper archives. Other authors have similarly incomplete lecture corpuses, including Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry Ward Beecher, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Douglass’s and Beecher’s numerous lectures and sermons have been scrupulously catalogued, but they gave so many during their lifetimes that their lecture bibliographies are almost certainly incomplete. Gilman’s situation is practically the inverse: scholar Carol Farley Kessler notes that though Gilman “delivered so many lectures on ethics, economics, and sociology that she . . . lost count” (97), less than one hundred notices of her lectures have been found in print.

 

Further Reading

Louisa May Alcott, The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, and Madeleine B. Sterne (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

P. T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World (New York: Carleton Publisher, 1866).

Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014).

Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Time-Warner Books, 2002).

Karen Dandurand, “Another Dickinson Poem Published in her Lifetime,” American Literature 54 (no. 3, 1982): 434-37.

Karen Dandurand, “New Dickinson Civil War Publications,” American Literature 55 (no. 1, 1984), 17-27.

Karen Dandurand, “Publication of Dickinson’s Poems in Her Lifetime,” Legacy 1 (no. 1, 1984), 7.

[John William de Forest,] “The Great American Novel,” The Nation 6 (no. 132, January 9, 1868): 28.

Brigitte Fielder, “Nineteenth-Century African American Literature Recommendations,” The Dickens Project, UC Santa Cruz, August 6, 2022, https://dickens.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/afam-lit-recommendations.html .

Walter Francis Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1947).

Caroline Gebhard, Katherine Adams, and Sandra A. Zagarell, “Recovered from the Archive: Two Stories by Alice Dunbar-Nelson,” Legacy, 33 (no. 2, 2016): 404-7.

Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, A Biography, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1884).

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, vol. 15, ed. William Charvat, et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989).

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Joel Myerson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002).

Merle Johnson, A Bibliography of the Work of Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910).

Carol Farley Kessler, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935,” Modern American Women Writers ed. Elaine Showalter, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).

Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993).

Johanna Ortner, “Lost No More: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves,” Commonplace 15 (no. 4, Summer 2015).

Hershel Parker, “Herman Melville’s The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology,” American Literature 62 (no. 1, 1990): 1-16.

Basem L. Ra’ad, “‘The Encantadas’ and ‘The Isle of the Cross’: Melvillean Dubieties, 1853-54.” American Literature 63 (no. 2, 1991): 316-23.

Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (New York: Macmillan, 2010).

Bonnie James Shaker and Angela Gianoglio Pettitt, “‘Her First Party’ as Her Last Story: Recovering Kate Chopin’s Fiction,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 30 (no. 2, 2013): 384-96.

Zachary Turpin, “Searching for Proud Antoinette: Evidence and Prospects for Whitman’s Phantom Novel,” WWQR 37 (no. ¾, Winter/Spring 2020): 225-47.

William White, “Whitman’s First ‘Literary’ Letter,” American Literature 35 (no. 1, March 1963): 83-5.

Walt Whitman, The Early Poems and the Fiction, ed. Thomas L. Brasher (New York: New York University Press, 1963).

Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, ed. Zachary Turpin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017).

Walt Whitman, Prose Works 1892, vol. 1, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1962).

“Wild Frank’s Return,” Story of the Week, Library of America, October 18, 2013, http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/10/wild-franks-return.html .

Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Richard J. Ellis (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

 

This article originally appeared in October 2023.

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Zachary Turpin is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Idaho, a former Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, and a former Peterson Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. A scholar of nineteenth-century American periodical culture, as well as physical and digital archival research methods, he specializes in recovering the lost writings of nineteenth-century authors, including major works by Walt Whitman, Emma Lazarus, and Rebecca Harding Davis. His writings have appeared inJ19, ESQ, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, PMLA, and elsewhere.

The bronze bell was created from copper and other metal, heated and cast in a process that has changed little over centuries. An artisan created it around 1750, fulfilling a request from Franciscan missionaries working in the far northern reaches of Spanish claims in the Americas. Bells played a vital role in the sparsely settled mission-presidio communities in the frontier territory claimed by Spain. Their casting and transportation from Spain or Mexico City were significant endeavors. Omnipresent and insistent reminders of the newcomers, they rang daily, compelling residents to attend mass and labor, reminding them to pray the Ave María, announcing baptisms, marriages, and deaths, warning of imminent Apache attacks, and celebrating Catholic feast days.

San Antonio, a small frontier settlement, was populated by Spanish and mestizo soldiers and settlers, isleños from the Canaries, and native Pajalats, Tacames, Siquipils, Tilpacopals, Patumacas, and Coahuiltecos gathered around the missions. A 1772 inventory from Mission Concepción lists two bells, one of which could be the colonial bell in possession of the Rosenberg Library. The same year’s inventory from Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) lists three large bells of unspecified weights, and Mission San Francisco de Espada’s friar inventoried bells in both 1746 and 1772. Additional research might uncover receipts, transportation records, or additional information about the bells that rang in eighteenth-century San Antonio, while spectrographic analysis could help determine the bell’s metal composition, possibly connecting it to other extant bells or to a particular place or region. The studded cross provides one clue to its birthplace; this design is similar to other mission bells cast in Seville and Mexico City. 

In 1794, with the secularization of the missions and the transfer of control to diocesan priests, some bells were relocated to newer missions, while others were repurposed or remained in place. During the waning years of the Spanish empire, they continued to mark daily and special occasions for San Antonio’s residents, as well as the Anglo-American newcomers. By 1835, Tejano militias joined with Anglo newcomers to declare independence against a Mexican state they considered oppressive. 

Late nineteenth-century sources tie the bell to the Texas independence struggle. Texians removed the bells from Mission Concepción and transported them to camp, where they unsuccessfully attempted to melt and mold them into ammunition. One bell was left hanging in a tree. Sam Damon, connected by marriage to descendants of Daniel Boone, brought it by wagon to his land grant in Brazoria County. Some accounts state the bell was torched when Santa Anna’s Mexican Army burned Damon’s barn months later. 

The bell’s original Texas home isn’t clear, but the possibility that it “tocsined the alarum that called to their last battle the spirits of Travis, of Crockett, of Bowie and their followers,” and “sounded the last knell of the murdered patriots, the sacrifice of whom gave to this great empire State its watchword liberty” was too tantalizing not to report in the 1874 press. They were written by men who pined for the past, elite white former Confederates who saw themselves as victims of occupation by an oppressive United States government during Reconstruction. Nostalgic rhetoric oozes from their recollections of the bell, which emphasize the bell’s connection to Anglo-American Texas, not its Spanish colonial past. 

One of these accounts, written in October 1874, states that after the Texas Revolution, Samuel Damon rang the bell to start and end the workday at his sawmill in the 1840s. He later gave it to David Randon for use at his nearby plantation. The account also offers a prosaic celebration of its role in antebellum plantation life. Our bell leads the way out of the wild tangle of darkness to the culture and civilization of Randon’s home:

How oft, in the olden time, when treading the narrow and winding paths through the dense canebrakes, oppressed with the profound solitude of the jungle, and anxious to reach the hospitable roof of my friend Randon before the darkness came upon me, have I listened for the soft peal of that bell, calling the then happy laborer from his work to refreshment and repose, and . . . directing lost ones to safety and deliverance. 

The author continues his journey to his friend’s porch by walking through the cotton field, where a “stentorian voice” sings upon hearing the bell, and the voices of humans enslaved on Randon’s plantation respond. In this telling, the bell was a protagonist in the happy, productive life on Randon’s cotton plantation, bringing about the melodies of content humans and birds as the sun set on a tranquil workday. It actively shaped a strict hierarchy of race-based class and power, not so dissimilar from the way in which it functioned in San Antonio under Spanish religious and colonial authorities.

Sometime in 1854 or 1855, Randon gave the bell to Richmond Academy, where “it called the school-boy with his satchel and shining morning face” to his studies. While there, it “rung out the declaration of Southern independence” when Texas seceded. The school closed in 1862 and the property was sold to Judge William E. Kendall, who converted it into a family home. In its final public act, the bell “burst with grief in tolling the knell of Southern freedom” at the Civil War’s conclusion.

After being approached by a prospective buyer who wanted the bell for its ties to the Texas Revolution, Judge Kendall gifted the bell to the Texas Historical Society, which had been formed by elite families involved in finance, trade, and cotton. By 1893, it was stored safely in Galveston’s Masonic Temple, just as elite interest in preservation of the Alamo and the other four San Antonio missions had begun. In 1895, the group’s secretary took the bell to a chemist to see if it could be restored with an acid wash. It was the subject of an inquiry by the state in 1897, when a commissioner sought to relocate it to the new state museum in Austin. Although a large part of the Historical Society’s collection was damaged or destroyed in the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the bell survived. In 1931 the Historical Society donated its artifacts and papers to the Rosenberg Library.

In the first half of the twentieth century, women like Adina de Zavala and Clara Driscoll worked to preserve San Antonio’s Spanish colonial past. De Zavala, granddaughter of a Tejano participant in the Texas Revolution, introduced Bessie Lee Fitzhugh, a fellow educator and author, to the bell in the 1940s. Fitzhugh included it in her 1955 book Bells Over Texas. The Star of the Republic of Texas Museum requested the bell on loan in the last decades of the twentieth century, during which Texas celebrated the sesquicentennial of its independence; after which the bell was returned to the library, where it is currently on display.

What can we learn from considering the way in which this bell was valued by the range of individuals and groups who owned it? Before it was cast, its value was as metal, which had the potential to be converted into a variety of items for quotidian, ritual, military, or commercial use. Friars valued the finished object for its power to sanctify space and organize time. In Texas’s independence struggle, the bell’s value was in its metal, but when melting other bells failed to produce the desired result, it was useful enough to save and transport out of the melee. As Texas’s economy shifted to capitalism, the bell’s value was in its regulation of laborers. For those in later years, the bell’s value lay not in its powerful sound, but in its visual representation. The now-silent object was tied to its role in a glorified past: hardworking friars of the imagined collaborative mission community, heroes of the Texas Revolution, antebellum plantation owners, Texas’s version of the liberty bell.

Although its origin and path to the display case in the second-floor hallway of the Rosenberg Library remain murky, this resilient object is intimately tied to the exercise of power. In Texas’s Spanish colonial period, it rang out to restructure daily and ritual time, reminding all within its sound of the Spanish economic and cultural presence and the balance of power between the friars and indigenous residents. Perhaps the native inhabitants of the region resented its aural intrusion. Surely its funereal tolls were a grim reminder of the powerful smallpox and measles epidemics. It changed hands and locations along with power shifts in Texas that marginalized Hispanos and Mexicans and privileged Anglo-American settler colonists. In the antebellum period, it signaled the start and end of mill work and cotton harvesting, sounding control over laborers, including those enslaved by David Randon. Changing hands again, its sound structured the daily lives of students. After the Civil War, the bell passed into the control of the white male political and economic elite who formed the Texas Historical Society. They argued for the bell’s centrality in Texas’s foundational myth—the larger-than-life Battle of the Alamo with its Anglo-American protagonists—instead of viewing its importance as a record of the Spanish colonial past. Then, as cities like Houston, Austin, and Dallas began to replace Galveston as the center of economic activity in twentieth-century Texas, the Rosenberg bell was briefly contested by politicians in Austin, who argued “it serves a higher purpose now; resting after years of service it is eloquent of what has been, teaching lessons of patriotism and pride to each succeeding generation.” In the twentieth century, the colonial artifact was resurrected to represent a benign and pastoral vision of Texas’s past, by preservationists, then as part of sesquicentennial celebrations, which emphasized the state’s multicultural past, in the 1980s.

We may never know the precise history of this bell’s journey through Texas history. In the silent spaces and gaps, we should try to understand the ways in which this bell was understood, and perhaps sometimes ignored or even challenged, by the people it summoned on a daily basis. These actions are more difficult to piece together from the documentary record. Although my search for evidence about the bell’s journey continues, I recognize that its importance as an object lies not only in that history, but also in its transition from an aural to a visual object, remembered and interpreted by those who have used it to tell their versions of Texas history.

 

Further Reading

Bessie Lee Fitzhugh, Bells Over Texas (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1955).

Bessie Lee Fitzhugh Papers, The Texas Collection and University Archives, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

Galveston Daily News articles in Portal to Texas History.

Kristin Dutcher Mann, The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590-1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press and the Academy of American Franciscan History, 2010).

Rosenberg Library Museum and Archives, Galveston, Texas.

Mark Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas. See entries on Mission Nuestra Señora de Purisima Concepción, Samuel Damon, David Randon, William Kendall, Texas Historical Society, Texas Revolution, and Adina de Zavala.

 

This article originally appeared in October 2023.

 

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Kristin Dutcher Mann, Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is the author of The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, as well as articles and chapters on the cultural history of the colonial Spanish Borderlands. She is a former high school history and geography teacher and she coordinates the Department’s social studies education program.

The most remarkable aspect of these volumes is their very existence. The assemblage does not grow out of the efforts of librarians, bibliographers, or book collectors retrospectively documenting the printed record of an important episode in the American past. Rather, it is a contemporary collection put together by local witnesses to the populist outrage sweeping through Concord and so many other towns. In 1835 the three-man executive committee of the Concord Social Library, an association of shareholders who maintained a substantial collection of books and periodicals for their own and their neighbors’ use, took note of the “anti-masonic excitement which entered so deeply into the peoples’ interests and [had] biased their social and political judgment for six or eight years.” One member was the son of a Freemason; his colleagues had no connection to the fraternity. None aligned themselves with the populist crusade. Yet, in the heat of the controversy, Dr. Edward Jarvis, Rev. Hersey Goodwin, and businessman Nehemiah Ball took a long view of the conflict and decided that its printed record should be preserved for posterity. If they did not act now, the true significance of the episode might be lost forever, to be remembered by later historians merely “as one of the passing clouds that overshadowed a few people and its story told in a paragraph of tradition or history.” With a sense of urgency they called on the townspeople to scour their houses for pamphlets not just about Anti-Masonry but about “all the great questions that have agitated our country for the last 50 years” and to donate what they found to the “town library.” The call drew an astonishing response; out of the barrels and attics of Concord poured some two thousand pamphlets, which the committee had bound into one hundred and fifty volumes. “They are now an invaluable collection of the fleeting literature & history of the days of their appearance,” Jarvis observed with pardonable pride, “& will transmit to succeeding time a better memorial of their day than will be found in more digested & formal history.”

A good many of these titles have been lost or discarded over the years. But the pamphlets on Masonry and Anti-Masonry, which instigated the collecting project, have passed from the social library into the public library and thence into the William Munroe Special Collections, and they have survived pretty much in their original form. Within the three volumes, Jarvis recollected, “is the history of the agitation.” A partial history is more precise. It is tempting to view these pamphlets, all handily gathered together, as constituting the field of discourse on which the combatants disputed the issues of secrecy and exclusiveness, openness and democracy, during those heated years of the Anti-Masonic crusade. But like any collection, it is selective, representing not only what items were held by townspeople in 1835 but also which titles they were willing to contribute. A few leading participants in the fight were donors themselves, including the most powerful politician and pre-eminent Freemason in town, the richest property-holder, and the “turncoat” printer who deserted his Masonic brethren and his principal patrons to enlist his newspaper in the Anti-Masonic campaign; their names are inscribed on the items they once owned. A couple pamphlets reproduce speeches to the local lodge; another contains the testimony of the Anti-Masonic editor before a committee of the Massachusetts House. 

Seldom do these voices directly engage one another. Nor do they present a debate between dueling parties intent on defeating opponents with well-chosen words. Far from it. The discussion is asymmetrical. The disputants make their cases to different audiences through forms of print as distinctive as the positions they took. Preaching to their respective choirs, the partisans who penned these polemics were well-aware of their adversaries, yet they made little effort to address or win them over. Unlike the pamphlet debates in the era of the American Revolution or the famous exchange between Burke and Paine, these rhetorical forays over Masonry were one-way conversations, calculated to shore up partisan loyalties and turn out supporters at the polls. To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

Consider the opposite approaches to print taken by the two sides. Of the eleven pamphlets in the volume on Masonry, ten were addresses to local lodges by visiting dignitaries in the upper ranks of the fraternity or climbing the ladder to the top; two had been delivered in Concord itself. The publications were keepsakes of those occasions, brought into print at the request and the expense of the listeners. Instead of a copyright notice, each pamphlet records its origin in fraternal exchange. The host lodge appoints a committee to wait on the speaker, express thanks for the discourse, and request a copy for the press; the lecturer acknowledges the courtesy and complies. Often printers in the brotherhood were hired to produce the works, and copies were then distributed within the lodge. These titles were not on offer to the public at large. Rather, they served to enhance personal bonds among members of the order, as was the case with an 1826 address to the grand lodge of Massachusetts by John Abbot, outgoing grand master. The copy was owned by Concord’s power broker, Hon. John Keyes, who had served on the committee to arrange for the publication. The two men were well-acquainted. Keyes had grown up in the town of Westford, ten miles to Concord’s northwest, where Abbot was a prominent lawyer; following his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1809, Keyes had studied for the bar under Abbot’s supervision. The Squire was also familiar with the men responsible for the imprint, fellow Masons William Hilliard and Eliab W. Metcalf, whose Cambridge firm was the official printer of Harvard College for three decades. Embedded in personal relationships, these printed addresses were as distinctive of the fraternity as its public celebrations of St. John’s Day and its secret rituals behind the closed doors of Freemasons’ Hall. 

By contrast, the publications of the Anti-Masons were sent forth to the citizenry in general under the auspices of legislative bodies and political organizations. Setting themselves apart from the secretive fraternity, Anti-Masons put a premium on transparency. All their proceedings were purportedly open to view in the printed records of county, state, and national conventions: the names of delegates and officials, the nomination and selection of candidates, the resolutions and debates. Should one not have time to pore over the numerous columns of small print, “abstracts” and “brief reports” were also available. The Boston Advocate, the principal organ of Anti-Masonry in the state, took pains to produce and circulate these materials; it also disseminated speeches and public letters by prominent supporters of the movement, such as former Congressman Timothy Fuller (father of the better-known Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller) and Suffolk County Sheriff Charles Pinckney Sumner (father of the famous senator). These materials, cheaply made and quickly produced, were probably available at the printing offices that doubled as party headquarters. No advertisements for their sale appear in the local press. Likewise, the reports of legislative investigations must have been distributed to voters by Anti-Masonic representatives to the General Court. Like the printed petitions the Anti-Masons presented for signatures in the towns and like the Bibles and tracts distributed by benevolent societies to “destitute” Christians everywhere, these publications united citizens in a common cause, whose message was unmediated by local elites. Though produced and sold outside a commercial nexus, they gathered up a mass audience for print. Indeed, the polemics of Masonry and Anti-Masonry were, with few exceptions, conducted in the public domain. Only a few works took advantage of copyright law to seek profit. Appropriately for a popular movement, Anti-Masonic publications were the result of collaborative effort and collective authorship. 

Yet the contrast between these bitter rivals can be overdrawn. In the face of a determined campaign to drive Freemasons from public office, deny them fellowship in churches, and criminalize their secret oaths, the fraternity did not unilaterally disarm. It counted on the press to defend its cause. In 1825 twenty-four-year-old printer Charles W. Moore launched the Boston Masonic Mirror, the first newspaper devoted to the fraternity anywhere in the world. Founded a year and a half before the Morgan affair, the Mirror found itself “in the battle of masonry against free-masonry” in the public arena. It had few imitators. For a long time, Massachusetts Masons entrusted their fate to independent newspapers, few of which took much notice of the gathering storm. In Concord brother Herman Atwill safeguarded his lodge’s interests from the editorial helm of the Yeoman’s Gazette. In the 1820s the newspaper filled its columns with friendly accounts of Masonic parades, speeches, and installations of officers, at the same time as it ignored reports of the “outrages” in New York State or dismissed their significance. If any crimes were committed, the Gazette insisted, they were the fault of a few bad apples and not of the Institution itself. When an Anti-Masonic Free Press was started in Boston in 1828, Atwill denounced the bid “to introduce the contemptible Morgan fever into New-England.” As late as spring 1832 he ran a derisive notice of an “Anti-Secret Society Meeting” (A.S.S!) in town, attended by a “baker’s dozen” of Anti-Masons. “Not being one of the initiated,” he explained, “we are unable to make public their proceedings.” 

Silence and ridicule went only so far. As instruments of self-defense, they could not counteract “the high state of excitement” aroused in “the public mind” by the “partial and inflammatory” accusations made “by a few misguided members.” Eventually the fraternity felt compelled to respond. In December 1832, twelve hundred Masons from all over Massachusetts signed a public statement, composed by Charles Moore, portraying the association as law-abiding, virtuous, moral, and patriotic. Widely reprinted in the press, it brought forth a detailed rebuttal, three times as long, from the forces of Anti-Masonry. Sometimes words were not enough. When Herman Atwill, a signer of the 1831 declaration along with twenty-five of his Concord brothers, finally decided to jump ship in the winter of 1832-33 and enlist the Yeoman’s Gazette in the Anti-Masonic crusade, the local establishment retaliated swiftly. Masons and their friends set out to destroy Atwill economically. Angry readers canceled subscriptions. Indignant creditors demanded immediate payment of his debts. John Keyes called in his mortgage on Atwill’s land. County magistrates pulled official advertising from the Gazette. Atwill withstood the fury, shrewdly exposing every act of intimidation in his columns. 

Unable to close him down, the friends of Masonry tried another gambit. They recruited the editor of the Bunker-Hill Aurora in Charlestown to move his shop to Concord. Though not a Freemason himself, William W. Wheildon was the half-brother of Moore and the son-in-law of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge’s official lecturer. For six months he manfully opposed the attempts by “ambitious and unworthy, and designing men”—by the hypocrite Atwill, in particular—to deprive “a very respectable portion of the community” from “the enjoyment of their unalienable and original rights.” He also denied the existence of any “combined determination” on the part of Masons and others, “to persecute or oppress” his rival at the Gazette, while simultaneously revealing that Atwill had sold his newspaper to a consortium of Anti-Masonic politicians. This was a crucial acquisition, establishing Concord as the headquarters of the populist movement in Middlesex County. Unable to prevail running a general newspaper with pro-Mason sentiments, Wheildon soon returned to Charlestown, where he would eventually partner with his half-brother Moore and re-establish his newspaper as the Bunker Hill Aurora and Mirror. The refashioned newspaper regularly ran a “Masonic department” overseen by Moore, but the fraternity no longer had an authoritative organ on its behalf.

In these embattled circumstances the fraternity eschewed direct engagement with critics and focused on shoring up support in its own ranks. A few speakers to local lodges explicitly addressed “the Claims of Anti-Masonry, and Duty of Masons” with the goal of arming the brethren to resist “the war of extermination” being waged against them. Two pamphlets in this vein ended up in the Concord collection—rare instances of polemical writing by Masonic authors in the decade of dispute. One speaker, the Yale-educated clergyman Simeon Colton, saw no need to answer at length the unreasonable charges against the institution. He dispatched them quickly; then, like a modern literary critic, he set out to expose the extravagant language and the manipulative methods of the foe. One disgraceful tactic was to “ridicule” the fraternity and render it “odious” and “contemptible”; another was to exaggerate its power and liken it “in all the array and terror of the Inquisition.” Such violent rhetoric exceeded all bounds; driven by a “persecuting spirit,” it “savor[ed] too much of passion, prejudice, and party zeal.” By such hyperbolic means Anti-Masonry sowed division and distrust. It invited “political demagogues” to “widen the breach” in society; it shattered the peace of the church. These were “the devastating effects of the wide-spreading pestilence,” whose “poisonous effluvia . . . from the caverns of corruption” were “producing a sickly state of public feeling . . . .” How to combat it? Colton ingeniously extended the alarm. The assault on Freemasons did not affect the fraternity alone; it was “an attack . . . upon rights and privileges that lie at the foundation of all good society.” To “proscribe” individuals from serving on juries or holding public office because of a private affiliation was to infringe liberty and to deny freedom of association. Anti-Masonry was thus a threat not just to members of the fraternity; it posed a danger to all. “The dearest interests of individuals and society are at stake.” 

Freemasons were at a disadvantage in this debate. The aim of their exclusive association was to foster virtue and promote peace. Members were forbidden to agitate sectarian or partisan questions within the group. Lodges affirmed these consensual ideals in their names: Harmony, Unity, and, in the case of Concord, Corinthian, in imitation of St. Paul’s campaign to end conflict and impose order among early Christians. No one could be admitted to a lodge without a unanimous vote. Ideologically and psychologically, Freemasons were ill-equipped to press disagreements and expose contradictions. Not so the Anti-Masons, many of whom were veterans of a long sectarian struggle within Massachusetts Congregationalism; opposed to the liberal Protestantism inculcated at Harvard College, these evangelicals demanded a return to the purity of New England’s founding fathers. From their perspective compromise was intolerable. Anti-Masons worked to mobilize all the true believers they could, unite them on a militant platform, and march them to the polls under the banner of “the people” versus the “aristocracy.”  

A key weapon in this campaign was the personal testimony of renegade Masons, among whom Concord’s Herman Atwill loomed large. The Report of the Joint Committee of the Legislature of Massachusetts on Freemasonry, issued in March 1834 and included in the Concord pamphlets, features the testimony of the turncoat editor, exposing the fearful rituals of initiation and challenging the association’s claim to be a “a religious and a moral Institution.” His breaking point came when he proposed to publish John Quincy Adams’s Letters on the Entered Apprentice’s Oath . . . Demonstrating That the First Step in Masonry is Wrong, another pamphlet in the Concord set. His financial backers immediately raised objections, and after Atwill went through with the plan, they dropped their patronage. Atwill opted for Anti-Masonry to sustain his freedom to publish what he wished. 

Anti-Masonry thus relied on the power of personal example nearly as much as did the fraternity. But where Freemasonry invoked the public honors, civic service, and social standing of its members, opponents stressed the personal sacrifices of men like Atwill in the name of liberty and democracy. The two sides were, in the end, ships passing in the night, unseen by one another. Each relied on a different strategy of persuasion through divergent means of communication. Neither could appreciate the polemics of the other. In these choices they may have anticipated our current media world. Opting for different newspapers and imprints, the competing sides in the fight over Freemasonry were no more disposed to take in the same information and messages than are Americans today in their separate enclaves constituted by Fox News and MSNBC, not to mention their separate Twitter feeds. Ironically, the bound pamphlets at the Concord Public Library bring them closer together in the archives than they ever were in life.

 

Further Reading

Bound pamphlets on Masonry and Antimasonry, 1797-1834: Topical Pamphlet Collection, 1741-1996, Box I.7 Vault B20, Unit 1, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library.

John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Ronald P. Formisano and Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Antimasonry and Masonry: The Genesis of Protest, 1826–1827,” American Quarterly 29 (Summer 1977): 139–65.

Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England 1826-1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Robert A. Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).

Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds., An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the

New Nation, 1790–1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

David G. Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014).

Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

 

This article originally appeared in September 2023.

 

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Robert A. Gross is James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His first book, The Minutemen and Their World (1976), recipient of the Bancroft Prize, was released in a revised and expanded edition by Picador Press in 2022. His latest work, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), was awarded the Peter J. Gomes Book Award by the Massachusetts Historical Society and named among the top ten books of 2021 by the Wall Street Journal.

I first encountered this Indigenous Belonging as an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College in 2014, when the college was in the process of becoming compliant with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), nearly twenty-five years after the law came into being. In the process of reviewing the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum’s Native American collections, the associate curator of the museum, Aaron Miller, highlighted a significant collection of Native-made items held within the College’s earliest collection, entitled the Missionary Collection. Mount Holyoke was initially founded in 1837 by Mary Lyon as a female seminary, which aimed to train women primarily as teachers or Protestant missionaries. Lyon was a significant supporter of missionary work throughout her lifetime, and maintained connections to family friends and Mount Holyoke graduates who worked as missionaries in multiple locales, including Anishinaabe homelands. These missionaries often sent items back to the seminary, which became the Missionary Collection.

Before the Art Museum was established in 1876, the Missionary Collection was initially displayed in Mount Holyoke’s original seminary building after 1837 as “curiosities,” a term that reveals Eurocentric and colonial ideas about Indigenous material culture. European and American collectors acquired Indigenous material culture to display in cabinets of curiosity, which reflected colonial categorizations of Native people as savage and connected to nature. This process removed these Native-made items from existing networks of community knowledge and instead displayed them as exotic specimens. I challenge these frameworks, instead honoring material culture as present-day receptacles of Indigenous knowledge that educate and transmit information to current people. Rather than terms like “curiosity” or “object,” I refer to these items as Belongings, following the work of Lorén Spears, the Narragansett and Niantic executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, who writes that this term “recognizes that they are interconnected to the cultural contexts of their creation and maintain connections to people, both historical and contemporary.”

The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum knew very little about the miniature mokuk when I began researching it in 2014, but the mokuk is not a “curiosity.” While at the museum conducting research within this collection, I took Christine DeLucia’s material culture seminar, which—alongside her mentorship over the years—has deeply shaped my understanding of these histories of collecting and the “transits of Indigenous material culture” within institutions like Mount Holyoke. In a recent Commonplace essay, DeLucia identified critical interdisciplinary methodologies for researching Indigenous Belongings that are missing provenance information and appear “lost,” providing clear ways to retrace their pathways and reconnect them with descendant communities. This piece takes up these methods via the miniature mokuk to argue for the importance of restoring Indigenous histories and knowledge to collections in order to facilitate relationships between Native people and their cultural Belongings, as well as to ensure these Belongings are seen as vital sources for understanding and reckoning with institutional histories of colonialism.

The Missionary Collection includes one other birchbark miniature: a canoe decorated with green, orange, and red flat quillwork. During his 2023 visit, Hemenway stated that he believed both the mokuk and the canoe were from Michilimackinac, noting that early Odawa quillworkers used orange quillwork. While only the canoe is listed in a “Catalogue of Cabinet of articles Sent by Missionaries to Mt. Hol. Fem. Sem. all before 1892,” both miniatures likely entered the collection from the same source, although perhaps not from the same artist or community. Several miniature mokuks collected by Austrian trader and businessman Johann Georg Schwarz, which are currently held in the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien, display remarkable similarities to the mokuk in the Missionary Collection, evincing a potential connection between these Belongings. Schwarz traveled to Michilimackinac in 1820 and 1821, during the same decade that missionaries with connections to Mary Lyon established themselves on the island. The mokuks held at the Weltmuseum Wien have been preliminarily identified as Myaamia or Menominee. While the mokuk at Mount Holyoke is likely of Anishinaabe origin, its maker is unknown. If it were made by a Myaamia or Menominee artist, its origin at Michilimackinac evinces the intertribal trade networks that continued to structure the Odawa island throughout the nineteenth century.

Though it has no paperwork associated with it, the mokuk includes the following description, written in scrawling pen on the bottom of the basket: “Basket of maple sugar made by the Indians.” This description was likely written on the mokuk when it came into the Missionary Collection at Mount Holyoke, probably between 1837 and 1892. In Anishinaabemowin, specifically the Odawa language, the moon that corresponds to around April is the Ziisabaakdake Gizis, or the Sugarbush Moon, when sap begins flowing from maple trees. Native peoples across the Northeast have crafted mokuks for millennia, which they used to store maple sugar, made during the Ziisabaakdake Gizis by reducing maple sap over a fire in trays until it became crystallized and the water evaporated. As Leah Hopkins, a Narragansett museum educator currently working at the Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University, has described, mokuks are an important Indigenous technology that kept bacteria out of maple sugar and that effectively stored it for long periods of time—like a “traditional Tupperware.” The one at Mount Holyoke is a miniaturized version of a mokuk, made to sell to Victorian Americans in the nineteenth century as a means of making money after the imposition of capitalism and policies of land loss that deliberately prevented Indigenous access to homelands that held the ecological means for their survival. 

To trace the origins of these two Belongings, I turned to Mount Holyoke’s archives and special collections, which holds a repository of documents related to missionary work at the Seminary. There, I found letters between Mary Lyon and her close friend Amanda White-Ferry, who served as a missionary at Michilimackinac, Michigan, in the early nineteenth century. Amanda White was born in the same year (1797) and place (Ashfield, Massachusetts) as Mary Lyon, and knew her well. In 1823, White married William Montague Ferry, moving with him to Michilimackinac. Their daughter, Amanda Harwood Ferry, later graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847. At Michilimackinac, William Ferry became the first Superintendent of the Protestant Mission to the Indians established by the United Foreign Mission Society in 1823, which also opened a mission school that November, where Amanda taught. In 1821, two years before the establishment of the Protestant Mission, Henry Schoolcraft had called for the establishment of missionary schools. He wrote, “There is neither school or preaching upon the island . . . there appears therefore in the present society of the ’Mackinac the want of a preacher, a school-master, an attorney, and a physician,—of merchants there are always too many.” The White-Ferry family responded directly to his call, filling the positions of both preacher and schoolmaster on the island. One of the known students at their Presbyterian school was William Blackbird, the son of Odawa leader Mackadepenessy and the brother of author Andrew Blackbird and quillworker Margaret Blackbird Boyd. Each held significant leadership roles in the Odawa community at Waganakising, the home of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. 

Michilimackinac is an Odawa place where two Great Lakes, Michigan and Huron, meet. This island was a traditional gathering place where Native peoples engaged in exchange, diplomacy, and occasional conflict for millennia before European conquest. Despite colonial impositions, including the establishment of a colonial fort that was at various points controlled by French, British, and American forces, Michilimackinac remained a collective and contested Indigenous place. According to Andrew Blackbird, William Blackbird’s brother and the Odawa historian and leader who published a History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in 1887, in their agreement with the United States’ government when they were forced to cede the island, Ojibwe people reserved “a strip of land all around the island as far as a stone’s throw from its water’s edge as their encampment grounds when they might come to the island to trade or for other business.” This agreement demonstrates how Indigenous mobility practices persisted throughout early American history, as well as the strategic ways Native nations protected their rights to return to places like Michilimackinac on a seasonal basis. 

The need to reserve this land responded to destructive settler colonial policies. Mokuks played a critical role in securing Indigenous survival despite land loss. Even before the miniaturization of mokuks as souvenir items, these folded birchbark baskets served as trade items that also facilitated diplomacy between Native and colonial nations. A journal from between 1795 and 1801 kept by Thomas Duggan, the storekeeper of the British Army’s post at Fort Michilimackinac, lists more than two hundred mokuks full of maple sugar brought by Native people from multiple nations, including the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi as well as Cherokee and Sioux. They traded these mokuks in late spring and early summer alongside beaver skins and other items not only to receive provisions, but also to conduct diplomacy with the British and, in the words of Lisa Brooks, to “bind words to deeds” using strings of wampum. This exchange of material culture not only secured food, arms, and other supplies, but represented reciprocity through gift-giving and trade, as affirmed by Duggan’s terminology of “presents” to describe these provisions. Yet this terminology also represented British paternalism. Duggan mistook these reciprocal exchanges as “charity,” describing the Native peoples as “children” and the English as their “father.”

The miniaturization process reflected the growth of tourism in the Great Lakes region in the early 1800s, when wealthy Victorian Americans travelled to and summered at sites within Anishinaabe homelands. As Henry Schoolcraft listed in 1821, rush mats, mokuks, quilled moccasins, shot pouches, and “other fancy goods of Indian fabric” were “generally in demand as articles of curiosity” by visitors to Michilimackinac. Native people adapted their material culture to this growing market, and it was within this context that the White-Ferry family likely acquired the miniature mokuk. Amidst their missionary conviction to civilize and convert the “savages,” a goal clearly articulated in the letters exchanged between Lyon and White-Ferry, a Native artist folded, sewed, and quilled this miniature birchbark basket. The mokuk is a key to understanding material networks of Indigenous resistance to these settler colonial processes across the Great Lakes.

While the miniaturization of mokuks reflected Indigenous adaptation to Victorian American desires, the Native woman who crafted it drew from longstanding networks of environmental knowledge, as described by contemporary artists like Odawa quillworker Yvonne Walker Keshick. During a 2013 conservation consultation session at the National Museum of the American Indian, Keshick shared how her mentors have taught her that “the bark is ready to pick from the trees when the strawberries are ripe in June.” The process of harvesting bark was also spiritual. As Keshick explained, she “puts tobacco down at the first tree, general prayer for all the trees that I’m going to cut. We don’t cut every tree we come to. If the tree is stripping, we cut.” The respect and mutuality that Keshick describes operated in contravention of European policies of private property ownership and environmental exploitation. When they gathered birchbark, spruce roots, cedar, and porcupine quills to make mokuks and other Belongings, Native artists defied civilizing missions and government-sponsored land loss, such as those spearheaded people like Schoolcraft, White-Ferry, and Ferry. Forced to enter the capitalist economy, Native people exploited the existing market of visitors, missionaries, and traders to make a living through their material culture. The goods and money they received in exchange for these items were not adequate payments for their labor or craft, but souvenirs helped Native communities persist. Keshick also described how quilled birchbark baskets have been used by the Anishinaabeg throughout history as boxes to store dried food, seeds, herbs, and medicines. Reflecting on the arrival of Europeans, she remarked, “I don’t think Odawa people could have survived without the use of the birchbark tree.” Her gratitude to birchbark for its role in Indigenous survivance speaks to the importance of mokuks and other Belongings in the study of Indigenous history.

Where, then, does that leave us with regards to the miniature mokuk, which almost certainly traveled to Mount Holyoke from Michilimackinac via the White-Ferry family? While it sits in storage at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, disconnected from its Native creator and the environment of the Great Lakes, this Belonging retains connections to this place and the peoples who continue to live there. Moreover, during Eric Hemenway’s visit, he noted the mokuk’s ongoing relationship not only to Native people and places, but also other Belongings, including the group of miniature mokuks at the Weltmuseum Wien in Vienna, Austria. In 2016, Hemenway and other members of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians traveled there to study the museum’s Indigenous collections from the Great Lakes and advise in the conception of a permanent exhibition. At Mount Holyoke, nearly a decade after I first encountered the mokuk and seven years after Hemenway visited the Weltmuseum Wien, we found ourselves wondering if any of the mokuks in Vienna had been crafted by the same artist. What would it mean to return these mokuks to their homelands to visit each other and their descendant communities? What new connections would form?

 

Further Reading/Watching/Listening

Andrew J. Blackbird, History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan; a Grammar of their Language, and Personal and Family History of the Author (Ypsilanti: The Ypsilantian Job Printing House, 1887).

Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Gerard van Bussel and Eric Hemenway, eds., Around Lake Michigan: American Indians, 1820-1850 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021).

Christine DeLucia, “Antiquarian Collecting and the Transits of Indigenous Material Culture,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, accessed May 17, 2023.

Thomas Duggan Journal, 1949.M-731, William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan.

C. Edwards, “Catalogue of Cabinet of Articles sent by Missionaries to Mt. Hol. Fem. Sem. all before 1892,” Mount Holyoke College Art Museum: A-1, section on “American Indians.”

Leah Hopkins, “Gather. Make. Sustain. Maple Madness,” Haffenreffer Museum, Brown University, March 8, 2021.

Theodore J. Karamanski, Blackbird’s Song: Andrew J. Blackbird and the Odawa People (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012).

Sylvia S. Kasprycki, “A Devout Collector: Johann Georg Schwarz and Early Nineteenth-Century Menominee Art,” in Three Centuries of Woodlands Indian Art, eds. J. C. H. King and Christian F. Feest (Altenstadt: ZKF Publishers, 2007).

Scott Manning Stevens, “Collectors, and Museums: From Cabinets of Curiosities to Indigenous Cultural Centers,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

James McClurken, Gah-Baeh-Jhagwah-Buk, the Way It Happened: A Visual Culture History of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1991). 

Henry Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal of Travels Through the Northwestern Regions of the United States: Extending from Detroit Through the Great Chain of American Lakes, to the Sources of the Mississippi River (Albany: E. & E. Hosford, 1821).

Lorén Spears and Amanda Thompson, “‘As We Have Always Done’: Decolonizing the Tomaquag Museum’s Collections Management Policy,” Collections 18, no. 1 (March 2022): 31-41.

Mina Toulouse, Theodore Toulouse and Yvonne Walker Keshick, “Conservation Consultation for Beyond the Horizon Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes,” National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, November 25, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRn07eHpvAE. 

 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Eric Hemenway (Director of Repatriation, Archives and Records, Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians), Aaron Miller (Associate Curator of Visual and Material Culture and NAGPRA Coordinator, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum), Christine DeLucia (Associate Professor of History, Williams College), Steven Lubar (Professor of American Studies, History, and History of Art and Architecture, Brown University), and Adriana Greci Green (Curator of Indigenous Art of the Americas, Fralin Art Museum, University of Virginia) for your collaborative work to help trace histories of this miniature mokuk and critically interrogate museum collecting practices.

 

This article originally appeared in September 2023

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Allyson LaForge is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Brown University whose research engages Native American and Indigenous Studies, settler colonial studies, and histories of the Native Northeast. Her dissertation project, “Materializing Futurity: Networks of Native Organizing in the Northeast,” examines the role Indigenous material culture played during transnational Native Northeast movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led by coalitions of Native leaders, activists, artists, craftspeople, and writers who worked to resist settler colonialism and ensure Indigenous futurity.

Most immediately, Jones and Allen’s account of the yellow fever epidemic can be understood as a corrective to publisher Mathew Carey’s slanderous account of the actions of Black Philadelphians in his A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793). In that account, Carey reproduced the incorrect theory that people of African descent were immune to yellow fever and accused Black residents who served as nurses and gravediggers of exploiting the crisis for financial gain. Jones and Allen’s response to Carey can serve as historical precedent for understanding the sharp rise in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jones and Allen positioned the experiences of Black Philadelphians during the yellow fever epidemic within a larger history of racial violence. Likewise, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) scholars and activists have positioned these hate crimes within centuries of scapegoating rhetoric weaponized against the AAPI community in response to economic, political, and public health crises. They have also argued that this most recent threat of violence might be partially responsible for higher COVID-19 mortality rates among Asian Americans. 

In addition to this direct connection between past and present, I find Jones and Allen’s narrative strategies useful for thinking about our narratives of crisis more generally. As Derrick Spires has recently argued, it’s important to understand Jones and Allen as not only responding to Carey, but as also proposing their own radical and expansive theories of citizenship. Building off this work, I’d also like to enlarge our understanding of Jones and Allen as critics of a certain kind of reaction to crisis that, as Kyle Whyte has shown, in its misunderstanding of crisis as unprecedented, justifies the expendability of certain populations. Jones and Allen’s Narrative forces readers to confront what Lauren Berlant has described as the environmental conditions of slow death, recontextualizing the yellow fever epidemic within a broader and ongoing history of violence and neglect.

Jones and Allen append to their account of the epidemic “An Address to those who keep slaves, and approve the practice” (23). This address offers a theory for why the white citizens of Philadelphia have been so “willfully blind” in their characterizations of Black health and civic duty (24). Capturing the slippage between “those who keep slaves” and those who “approve the practice,” the opening sentence of this address seamlessly shifts from description to direct address: “The judicious part of mankind will think it unreasonable, that a superior conduct is looked for, from our race, by those who stigmatize us as men, whose baseness is incurable, and may therefore be held in a state of servitude, that a merciful man would not doom a beast to; yet you try what you can to prevent our rising from the state of barbarism, you represent us to be in.” The shift in pronouns links “those who keep slaves” to the “you” of Jones and Allen’s readers: both “prevent our rising from” a “state of barbarism” that is itself a fictional construction that justifies white supremacy. The city’s post-slavery racial hierarchy depends on diagnosing Black residents as suffering from “incurable” “baseness.” Only this widened historical lens provides sufficient context for understanding why the Black residents of Philadelphia were impressed into service during the epidemic and how their public service continues to be portrayed in its aftermath.

The incorrect theory that people of African descent were immune to yellow fever led large numbers of the city’s Black residents to be impressed into service caring for the sick and disposing of bodies. The idea that Black residents were inherently immune was convenient because it justified both the impressment of Black residents as front-line health care workers and their enslavement and disenfranchisement through polygenist definitions of race. Jones and Allen open their Narrative noting that this theory of immunity was always in doubt, characterizing it as only “a kind of assurance,” while attributing their own service to “our sense of duty to do all the good we could” rather than to any confidence in their safety (3). Although the Narrative highlights that Black Philadelphians’ “distress hath been very great, but much unknown to the white people,” it also argues that this position of unknowing is one of deliberate cultivation rather than innocence (15). Although the theory of Black immunity was quickly disproven in the early weeks of the epidemic, “it is even to this day a generally received opinion in this city.” Jones and Allen note that when “it became too notorious to be denied” that Black residents were in fact dying of yellow fever, “then we were told some few died but not many.” This new claim could have been disputed by “any reasonable man” who examined the burial records of 1792 and 1793. Carefully documenting the shifting nature of the justifications for the impressment and neglect of Black residents, Jones and Allen attribute the incoherence of the medical discourse to a purposeful strategy of having “our services extorted” rather than a lack of information. 

Mathew Carey did eventually revise subsequent editions of his Short Account to correct the theory of Black immunity and to temper the charges of extortion he leveled against Black nurses. Jones and Allen did not anticipate that these future editions would sufficiently counter the proliferating versions of misinformation that have already stigmatized the Black residents of Philadelphia: “Mr. Carey’s first, second, and third editions, are gone forth into the world, and in all probability, have been read by thousands that will never read his fourth—consequently, any alteration he may hereafter make, in the paragraph alluded to, cannot have the desired effect, or atone for the past; therefore we apprehend it necessary to publish our thoughts on the occasion” (13). Confirming Jones and Allen’s skepticism about the efficacy of future corrections, in the fourth edition of his Short Account (1794) Carey acknowledges that the theory of Black immunity turned out to be wrong, but he also argues that this mistake was ultimately beneficial to the city’s white residents, because it meant Black nurses were not afraid to serve. This correction only emphasizes the expendability of Black residents in the face of crisis and continues to ignore that the Black nurses described by Jones and Allen served despite understanding the risk of infection.

For Jones and Allen, the problem was not a lack of information, but stubbornly partial accounts of that information. Critiques of partiality appear throughout the Narrative: Jones and Allen refer to “partial” accounts, relations, representations, paragraphs, and men eight times. As Carey’s corrections in his fourth and fifth editions demonstrate, partial’s dual meanings of biased and incomplete operate together, as Carey’s racial bias kept him from seeing a complete picture of the epidemic, including the ways that Black residents suffered and the civic duty they performed. Although Carey accuses “the vilest of the blacks” of extortion, from his very first edition he also specifically praises “Absalom Jones and Richard Allen” for their service, declaring “it is wrong to cast a censure on the whole for this sort of conduct” (77). Refusing to serve as exceptions that prove Carey’s rule, Jones and Allen respond by claiming that being praised individually for their exceptional service, “leaves these others, in the hazardous state of being classed with those who are called the ‘vilest’” (12-13). Speculating about the “bad consequences” of this “partial relation of our conduct,” Jones and Allen again expand our incomplete historical frame, but this time towards the future, as they imagine a Black resident who served as a nurse during the epidemic being “abhorred, despised, and perhaps dismissed from employment” (10). In this vision of “some future day,” the problem is not only that Carey’s “partial relation” has served to “prejudice the minds of the people in general against us,” but that “it is impossible that one individual, can have knowledge of all” other individuals. Because no one individual can have knowledge of the whole, how the part is represented becomes lethally important. Jones and Allen’s single, definitive, copyrighted account of the yellow fever epidemic does not suggest that there’s no way of knowing the truth or that one partial account is as good as the next. Instead, Jones and Allen claim a kind of “power” from their own particularized “situation” to chronicle the material consequences and foreclosed possibilities of a historical record that is congealing before their very eyes (3).

There is also an even more radical implication to Jones and Allen’s refusal to accept Carey’s partial praise: if virtue can be so easily misread as criminal, then insurgency can also be misread as contentment. Although Jones and Allen argue that any “alteration” made in the “hereafter” cannot “atone for the past,” they do suggest that imagining the future can impact the present (13). Rather than a sentimental futurism that defers action in the present to an ever-receding horizon, Jones and Allen claim that imagining future possibilities—possibilities of both equality and vengeance—should have an immediate effect on the present. While Jones and Allen firmly contrast the moral excellence of Black residents to the moral failure of white residents, they find Biblical precedent for considering “the contrary effects of liberty and slavery upon the mind of man,” and tell their readers “it is in our posterity enjoying the same privileges with your own, that you ought to look for better things” (24). But they also caution readers about their partial knowledge of what lies in the “hearts” of enslaved Black Americans: “We have shewn the cause of our incapacity, we will also shew why we appear contented; were we to attempt to plead with our masters, it would be deemed insolence, for which cause they appear as contented as they can in your fight, but the dreadful insurrections they have made, when opportunity has offered, is enough to convince a reasonable man, that great uneasiness and not contentment, is the inhabitant of their hearts” (25). Here surely “the dreadful insurrections” Jones and Allen refer to are in Haiti, a vision of a certain future for the United States should slavery not be ended in the immediate present, and a hyperlinked invocation of xenophobic associations between the contagion of fever and the contagion of insurrection. Collapsing geographic and temporal distance, this passage imagines Haiti’s past as America’s future.

This was not only the warning of a jeremiad, but also a reminder of the insurrectionary action that has already been taken by the enslaved and self-emancipated in the Atlantic world, and yet another recontextualization of that history as a just response, as a future to be anticipated rather than feared. The present perfect tense—“the dreadful insurrections they have made, when opportunity has offered”—and another seamless shift in pronouns from “our” to “they”—renders this history not so much a warning sign of a distant future to be averted as a proximate past that is catching up to the present. Just as readers can’t be sure where Haiti’s past-present ends and America’s future-present begins, they also can’t be sure of what lies beneath the “contented” appearances of Black Americans. Although the community Jones and Allen speak for privileges deliberation in the face of fear—the Narrative opens recounting that “we and a few others met and consulted how to act on so truly alarming and melancholy an occasion”—the Narrative also cautions against an expectation of a “superior good conduct,” of resiliency and mercy, that dissociates deliberation from “insurrections” (3, 23, 25).

Even as Jones and Allen contextualize the treatment of Black residents during the epidemic within a larger history of enslavement, oppression, and revolution, they also anchor the reader in the scene of immediate crisis by punctuating their narrative with the sights, sounds, and smells of the epidemic: “lunacy,” “ordure and other evacuations of the sick,” “vomiting blood, and screaming” (8, 9, 14). Their narrative forces the reader to experience the crisis as ongoing rather than complete. Jones and Allen do not use narrative to contain the disruptive effects of crisis, but to position those effects as part of an incomplete past and undetermined future. This theorizing of how to narrate crisis is what I have found so useful for thinking alongside Jones and Allen at a regional public university with students who are already well-equipped to recognize how unevenly the effects of crises accumulate across lives and institutions. By documenting the partial nature of the judgment that distinguishes between past and present, Jones and Allen empower students to see that perspective does not require detachment.

 

Further Reading

“The Blame Game: How Political Rhetoric Inflames Anti-Asian Scapegoating,” Stop AAPI Hate, October 2022.

Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (no. 3, Summer 2007): 754-80.

Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Mathew Carey, A short account of the malignant fever, lately prevalent in Philadelphia: with a statement of the proceedings that took place on the subject in different parts of the United States (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1793).

Mathew Carey, A short account of the malignant fever, lately prevalent in Philadelphia: with a statement of the proceedings that took place on the subject in different parts of the United States, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1794).

Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown Upon Them in Some Late Publications. By A.J. and R.A. (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1794).

Stephen Knadler, “Narrating Slow Violence: Post-Reconstruction’s Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 5 (no. 1, Spring 2017): 21-50.

Thomas Koenigs, “The ‘Mysterious Depths’ of Slave Interiority: Fiction and Intersubjective Knowledge in The Heroic Slave,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 8 (no. 2, Fall 2020): 193-217.

Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Kyle Whyte, “Against Crisis Epistemology,” in Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, ed. Brendan Hokowhitu et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).

Brandon W. Yan et al. “Death Toll of COVID-19 on Asian Americans: Disparities Revealed,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 36 (no. 11, 2021): 3545-49. doi:10.1007/s11606-021-07003-0.

 

This article originally appeared in August 2023.

 

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Laurel V. Hankins is Associate Professor of English & Communication at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she teaches and publishes work in early American literature. Her work can be found in African American Review, Legacy: A Journal of Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Martin’s confession detailed his experiences growing up in Ireland and his struggles in America during the previous two years, dating from his arrival in Salem, Massachusetts, in May of 1819 through to his Medford highway robbery and apprehension. The facts he offered about his life in America can all be independently verified. However, the bulk of the stories he told to Waldo concerned the various adventures of Captains Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in Ireland and Scotland, where they gained infamy as daring, clever outlaws, outwitting authorities and robbing wealthy English landowners. Martin related these picaresque episodes in lively, good-natured, but barely credible detail. Several of the exploits strain belief: the duo trick wealthy sisters and all their estate servants into entering a room, lock the door, and then plunder the house; Captain Lightfoot (Martin) attends a wedding in drag so that they can rob party attendees; Martin confronts the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in his garden and robs him; Martin woos the widow MacBriar while posing as a rich member of the gentry; Captain Thunderbolt impersonates a physician for weeks, etc.

Francis W. Waldo published Martin’s confession in long pamphlet form a few weeks after Martin’s execution in December 1821. The publication was widely circulated and proved to be immensely popular. Ungrounded speculation arose among its many readers that Martin’s mentor and partner John Doherty still lived and was secretly residing in New England—though Martin’s confession never placed Doherty in America. Indeed, Martin stated that he had last heard of “Thunderbolt” through a letter sent by him from the West Indies.

In 1823, a Portland, Maine, barber named Richard Relhan went on criminal spree under the alias “John Johnson” and created a flurry of excitement that he was “Captain Thunderbolt.” Relhan was chased by a posse across the Canadian border, causing a minor international incident, and was returned to Portland to stand trial for stealing a horse. At that point, Relhan’s real name was revealed, as was his history as a former resident of Philadelphia since 1809—predating the adventures of Lightfoot and Thunderbolt in Ireland. He reformed and later lived many years as an upstanding Portland businessman.

Many years later, in 1847, when long-time local physician Dr. John Wilson died in Brattleboro, Vermont, a publisher there put out a pamphlet claiming that Wilson was Captain Thunderbolt. The claim was based on Wilson’s Scottish heritage, his physical similarities to Martin’s description, and on Wilson’s allegedly suspicious behavior—all of which was highly circumstantial. These allegations can easily be explained or refuted, as Wilson’s friends and family unsuccessfully attempted. Many in Southern Vermont still believe Dr. Wilson was Captain Thunderbolt. 

Over the decades, the legend of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot took on a life of its own in popular culture through stage dramas and embellished, romanticized fictions by such writers as Emerson Bennett and W. R. Burnett. Burnett’s novel Captain Lightfoot presented the pair as heroic Irish rebel outlaws. It was immediately made into a 1955 movie of the same name directed by Douglas Sirk, starring Rock Hudson and Barbara Rush. Martin’s confession also inspired a 1974 movie Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, written and directed by the quirky Michael Cimino, that re-imagined a tale of a veteran criminal abetted by a young partner set in the contemporary American West, starring Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges. In many respects, Cimino’s retelling was more faithful to the source material than the efforts of Burnett and Sirk.

Although the tales of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot reached folklore status in the United States, there was no commentary to be found in Irish, Scottish, or English sources to confirm that their exploits were known there. Indeed, when Douglas Sirk was filming Captain Lightfoot on location in Ireland (the landscape is one of the stars of the movie), no mentions were made in the Irish or British press that the movie was based on an allegedly true account. It appears that it was taken for granted that Hollywood’s Irish outlaws were a scriptwriter’s fiction, though many elements of the story would have been recognized.

A long tradition exists in Irish history, literature, and oral storytelling of the deeds of Irish outlaws active during the many decades of oppressive English rule. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, these outlaws were associated both with Catholic rebel groups and an allied Presbyterian organization, the United Irishmen. These outlaws were constituted as localized cells, with the leaders of each cell taking on menacing-sounding titles of rank: Captain Stout, Captain Whack, Captain Hawk, Captain Dasher, Captain Fearnot, etc. In fact, there was a real “Captain Thunderbolt,” John Duggan, who was captured after a 1799 house raid led by his uncle resulted in a murder. Duggan was brutally executed that same year, about fifteen or sixteen years prior to the supposed fame of Michael Martin’s “Captain Thunderbolt.”

It seems likely that Michael Martin was familiar with some of the classic literature of Irish outlaws: The Life and Adventures of James Freney (1754); Cosgrave’s A genuine history of the lives and actions of the most notorious Irish highwaymen, Tories and Rapparees (1747); and The Life and Adventures of Jeremiah Grant (1816). The Grant title was in print just before Michael Martin departed for America. Though these sources might have inspired Michael Martin, he did not re-use any specific episodes found in these. Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 

The names of Michael Martin, John Doherty, Captain Lightfoot and Captain Thunderbolt do not appear in any Irish or British newspaper accounts from 1814 through 1819. Nor do any accounts of outlaws in that period match their description. Martin portrays John Doherty (Thunderbolt) as a remarkable figure: tall and muscular, a master of disguise, able to romance any woman (and married five times under different names), a career thief who had never been captured, and well-versed in many disciplines, including medicine. Yet no other publications or commentators describe anyone matching Martin’s description of Doherty. At one point Martin asserts that in 1816 there was a reward of £500 on Doherty’s head. Only a few criminals accused of murder—or attacking uniformed officers, or arson, or heavy forgeries—had such a price put on their capture, and they were well-advertised. Yet no reward offers printed in newspapers of the time match Doherty.

Several of the names that Martin drops cannot be verified: the Martin family’s landlord, Sir William Morris; the widow MacBriar; Colonel Brierton; and the Wilbrook sisters. It is not obvious why he would want to hide the identity of his robbery victims, unless they were fictions. Similarly, Martin offers several clues about his family origins, but an Irish genealogist could not verify any of the information, even given that genealogical records of that period are now scarce.

People today who have heard the stories of Captain Lightfoot and Captain Thunderbolt may be disappointed to learn that not only was “Captain Thunderbolt” never a resident of New England, but that he likely never existed at all, except in the fertile mind of Michael Martin. More amazing than the adventures of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is the story of what Michael Martin, condemned to death, did in prison in October and November of 1821. Within these two months, Martin created a heroic narrative for himself, and placed it firmly in the tradition of Irish outlaw lore.

Moreover, during these same two months, Martin and his outside accomplices devised a prison escape attempt that was highly technical—and which nearly worked. Martin was secured within his cell by leg shackles chained to a ring in the center of the room. Somehow, he was supplied with a crude saw, which he used to file a gap through one the links of the chain of his shackles. His shackles were inspected weekly, but he disguised the gaps by mixing ashes and wax to match the color of the chain. One day, when his jailor brought him his meal, he feigned weakness and asked the jailor to pick up something he had dropped. Martin then knocked the jailor over the head, slipped his shackles off the chain to the ring, and rushed out the open door. He pounded the locked outside gate until it burst open, and then ran across a field. However, there were still irons on his legs, and he was quickly chased down and subdued.

The sophistication of Michael Martin’s escape attempt suggests that he was very familiar with prison routines, yet there was no mention of any prior jailings in the account he gave to Francis Waldo. It can be conjectured that he had once been imprisoned in Ireland, where he had the time and access to collect or create tales of adventurous robberies, which he then offered to Waldo as the story of Captain Lightfoot and Captain Thunderbolt. As entertaining as those stories are, they hardly compare to the inventiveness and daring that Martin displayed in the space of two months, while waiting to be hanged. Michael Martin’s escape attempt failed, but his efforts to mythologize himself were a wild success. 

Martin was known as “the last of the New England highwaymen.” Highway robbery is a high-risk crime of opportunity, and in settled regions of the country, professional criminals found more reliable methods to target wealth. Prior to Martin, during the Revolutionary War, groups of roving loyalist Tories were described as highwaymen. After Martin’s time, banditti flourished in the American frontier as it expanded westward—in Western Pennsylvania, in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, and finally in the western territories. The highwayman as a folklore figure resurfaced in the tales of stagecoach holdups and outlaw gangs of the American West.

 

Further Reading

For further reading on the investigation of Michael Martin’s narrative and a closer look at several of the works of popular culture they inspired, check the author’s web site on this project. 

See also Ray Cashman, “The Heroic Outlaw in Irish Folklore and Popular Literature,” Folklore 111, no. 2 (Oct. 2000): 191-215.

A full version of Michael Martin’s confession is available via the Internet Archive, printed in 1926 by the Wayside Press.

 

This article originally appeared in August 2023.

 

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Jerry Kuntz is a retired electronic resources librarian living in the Hudson Valley region of New York. He has authored and edited a number of books on little-known stories of nineteenth-century America, including the award-winning story of early underwater exploration The Heroic Age of Diving (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). He can be reached through this email.