Henry Clay’s funeral on July 10, 1852, was the largest ceremonial occasion ever witnessed in Lexington, Kentucky, up until that time. When the correspondent from the Frankfort Commonwealth arrived in town at 6 a.m., he “found the streets already thronged with strangers and citizens, while every road leading to the city poured in a continual stream of carriages, horseman [sic] and pedestrians.” “The number of people assembled at Lexington, was greater than ever was seen in her streets before,” he wrote. Estimates from other observers ranged between 30,000 and 100,000 in attendance. Lexington’s businesses closed, and black crepe, banners, and portraits of the dead senator adorned streets and houses all over town.

After an Episcopal service at Clay’s estate, Ashland, a grand and solemn funeral procession of local, state, and national government officials and dignitaries accompanied Clay’s remains to the Lexington Cemetery at the western edge of town. The people of Lexington and out of town visitors followed on foot for hours as church bells tolled. The reporter claimed the procession “was the most imposing demonstration of sorrow we ever saw. The carriages in it passed two abreast, and by far the greater portion of its length was occupied by persons on foot marching … its length must have been from a mile and a quarter to a mile and a half long.”

At the grave, upon watching “all that [was] capable of interment” being placed in Clay’s vault, the correspondent was moved to quote U.S. Senate chaplain C. M. Butler’s eulogy to Clay: “Burying Henry Clay? Bury the records of your country’s history—bury the hearts of the living millions—bury the mountains, the rivers, the lakes, and the spreading lands from sea to sea, with which his name is inseparably associated, and even then you would not bury HENRY CLAY.”

The Lexington funeral commemorating Henry Clay as an esteemed national politician and hometown hero was, however, merely the culminating event in a weeks-long festival of mourning occasioned by Clay’s death in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 1852. Clay’s remains had traversed many of the expansive rivers and lands that he embodied in the imagination of the Senate chaplain and the Kentucky newspaper reporter. For two weeks before arriving in Lexington, Henry Clay’s remains had traveled a long, circuitous path from D.C. through Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio to Kentucky, stopping in major cities along the way so that elaborate funerals rituals could be enacted (fig. 1).

Public grief had played an important role in American political culture since the eighteenth century, but Clay’s funerals marked a turning point toward a more modern form of ritualized mourning that combined an interest in his body with an extensive apparatus of popular culture and publicity. When the sitting president, Zachary Taylor, died just two years earlier than Clay, a huge funeral was held for him in Washington D.C., and the solemn occasion was commemorated with ceremonies and church services around the country. Even so, the commemorations for Taylor were smaller and less numerous than those held for Clay, and Taylor’s body did not play a significant role in the national mourning the way Clay’s would. After being temporarily interred in Washington D.C., Taylor’s remains traveled via rail and steamboat to Louisville, Kentucky, without much publicity and without public celebration. Taylor did receive a second large funeral when he was buried in the family cemetery at Louisville, but the public mourning for Taylor that was quite impressive in 1850 paled by comparison to what took place when Clay died in 1852. Clay’s body, which had not been embalmed, traveled a longer route from Washington to Kentucky accompanied by huge rituals at every stop along the way. (fig. 2)

Clay’s unprecedented funerals owed something to the man who simultaneously embodied and bridged two different traditions of political culture, and something to accelerating anxieties about the cohesiveness of the union. Clay represented a traditional nationalist hero, the kind of man who was supposed to unite the American public in their reverence for him. Turning out to mourn Clay allowed many Americans to express their national identity by taking part in the kind of collective festival that had helped to define U.S. nationalism since the American Revolution; it resembled the rituals that had commemorated George Washington or the martyrs of the Revolutionary War, Joseph Warren or Richard Montgomery—albeit on a scale enhanced by technological advances in printing and transportation. But the supposed unanimity of the American populace had been fractured since 1800 by openly partisan politics, sectionalism, and conflicts over slavery. The historian Elizabeth Varon reminds us that “both the Whig and Democratic parties had emerged from the debates of 1850 and 1851 battered and divided.” Even when both Whig and Democratic newspaper editors around the country agreed about the necessity of mourning Clay as a public hero, they also sometimes allowed party conflict and even presidential campaigning to accompany his funeral coverage. Mourning for Clay became a way to express political anxieties over the longevity of American union even as the trans-sectional Whig party he had helped to found fractured.

Clay was the perfect candidate for this transitional moment because he embodied both union and conflict, and he had been the subject of political pageantry as politics and popular culture developed alongside one another in the early nineteenth century. His long career in national politics spanned almost fifty years: he was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1806 and subsequently served in the House of Representatives, as Speaker of the House, and as Secretary of State. Upon his death, Clay was best known as a four-time-unsuccessful presidential candidate and senator; he served several terms in the Senate from 1831 until his death in 1852. During his long political career, Clay had represented regional interests, but also always managed to express conviction in national unity as sectional tensions changed and grew.

Known as “Harry of the West,” Clay started his career as a western Democratic Republican and built his reputation as a War Hawk advocate of the War of 1812. In the 1820s, Clay, who was also a slaveholder, fused northern, western, and southern interests as the architect of economic development in the American System. Clay helped to hold together disparate northerners and southerners in the Whig party through the 1830s and 40s. He was dubbed “The Great Compromiser” for his role in orchestrating both the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, and even his political enemies respected his parliamentary acumen. When Sen. Henry S. Foote accused Clay of forsaking southern interests in the Compromise of 1850, Clay responded on the floor of the Senate: “I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe my allegiance … My allegiance is to this Union and to my own state.” This ability to embody both regional interests and union during his long career enhanced his appeal as a symbol, even after death.

The symbolic appeal of Henry Clay’s remains was also enhanced by the attention contemporaries paid to his physical being. Much of Clay’s political power was grounded in his great abilities as an orator, a skill which many observers related to the special character of his physical body. A frequent presence in political cartoons that became newly popular in the first half of the nineteenth century, Clay’s physical form was as familiar as it was celebrated. As the Whig presidential candidate in 1844, Clay was one of the first politicians whose portrait was sold in elaborate, fine-quality steel engravings meant to be framed and hung on parlor walls. Portrait engravings of Clay were popular, and he was well known as a physical role model (fig. 4 and 5). An 1849 oratorical manual for boys declared Clay the “highest exemplification of masculine charms” and described his “impressive” body and face in exquisite detail. An 1845 phrenology manual that related the talents of great public figures to their cranial measurements declared Clay to be the greatest bodily specimen among politicians because of his large head and good organ placement. S. G. Brown eulogized Clay at Dartmouth College by reminding students that Clay’s oratorical skill depended on “the glance of the eye, the motion of the hand, the firm or yielding position of the body … His form seemed to dilate to a superhuman height, rising, as one said of him on a certain occasion, ‘forty feet high’ in … remonstrance.” The National Era newspaper claimed that “his bodily strength seemed inexhaustible,” especially in the service of a grand cause. Some took this literally; the political cartoon “The Clay Statue. A Model of a Man.” represented Clay as a larger-than-life physical monument to “Compromise,” created by the goddess of liberty to control the chaos of 1850 (fig. 6). A body that in life had been used as a model and turned into a monument could easily become the object of public fascination upon its death. As Clay’s remains toured, several different groups around the country began working on monuments to permanently enshrine him in bodily form.

When Clay died on June 29, 1852 (fig. 3), President Fillmore closed all executive offices, Congress adjourned, and the U.S. Senate immediately took action to prepare an elaborate Washington funeral and to send six senators to accompany Clay’s remains to Lexington, where he had indicated he wished to be buried. Whig and Democratic senators and congressmen rose to eulogize Clay, and the eulogies were reprinted in newspapers in every region of the country for weeks to come. On June 30, the Senate held a solemn funeral for Clay in its chambers. Afterwards, Clay became the first person ever to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, as a “vast multitude assembled” to view “all that remains of Henry Clay.” Senate chaplain Clement Moore Butler said, “In many cities banners droop, bells toll, cannons boom, funereal draperies wave. In crowded streets and on sounding wharfs, upon steamboats and upon cars, in fields and in workshops, in homes, in schools, millions of men, women, and children have their thoughts fixed upon this scene” as the nation’s leaders mourned Henry Clay. As a long-time advocate of market activities and internal improvements, Clay would have delighted in Moore’s image of busy Americans pausing in workshops and fields, on steamboats and railroads to commemorate him.

In fact, Moore’s eulogy could have served as a template for the next few weeks, as millions of Americans would, in fact, pause and have the chance to memorialize Clay in person and as millions more followed the progress of his remains in the press. The same rail cars, steamboats, and city streets that Moore imagined actually provided the means for Clay’s body to travel through a large part of the northern United States with greater speed than anyone could have imagined even twenty years before. Transportation improvements had formed a cornerstone of Clay’s nationalist economic program since just after the War of 1812, and although the entirety of his grand federal vision had never been implemented (and had been the subject of serious political battles), the journey of Clay’s corpse over rail, land, and water testified to the eventual success of his vision. As Americans gathered together at many points along the route to catch a glimpse of one of the specially decorated rail cars bearing Clay’s coffin or one of the steamboats or ferries that carried him across lakes and rivers, they saw both the progress of his bodily remains and the progress of his political vision.

Following the Senate funeral on June 30, citizens from Washington, D.C., and all the surrounding towns gathered in the streets to watch as a gilded hearse transported Clay’s remains to the railroad depot. The elaborately decorated coffin, along with six designated Congressional representatives, Clay family members, and other dignitaries, departed at 4:00 p.m. on a special train to Baltimore. Baltimore officials met Clay’s body early on the morning of July 1, and a procession through the city followed at noon. The Baltimore Weekly Sun declared that all businesses closed, and “The city presented a gloomy and mournful aspect … The bells of all the churches, engine houses and other places were tolled … the sidewalks completely jammed up with men, women and children, all eager to take a last look at the remains of the great American statesman.” Clay lay in repose on a specially constructed catafalque in the rotunda of the Exchange Building until the next day, as thousands of people filed by to see his face, which was exposed through a glass window in his metal coffin.

On July 2, the delegation left Baltimore with Clay’s body on another train, and passed through Wilmington, Delaware, where his coffin was again unloaded and placed in repose at City Hall. The plate covering his face was again removed, as “an immense concourse of citizens, male and female, passed through the lines and took a last look at the features of the deceased.” The Congressional committee, now augmented by town committees from both Baltimore and Wilmington, then accompanied the body back on the train to Philadelphia, where they arrived at 9:00 p.m. Clay’s remains were paraded for two hours through Philadelphia in a torch-lit procession to Independence Hall, which “was brilliantly lit up with bonfires, and [where] thousands of ladies had congregated inside its walls to witness the passage of the procession.” Clay’s coffin was placed on a cenotaph in the center of Independence Hall, and crowds of people flocked to see it through the night.

The next morning, July 3, Clay’s remains departed Philadelphia on the steamer Trenton on the Delaware and Raritan Canal to Trenton, New Jersey, where the coffin was placed on another train. As the train traveled through New Jersey, it stopped at the towns of Princeton, New Brunswick, Elizabethtown, and Rahway, where town committees had erected triumphal arches over the tracks and where crowds gathered to see the train, even though they were not allowed to glimpse the coffin, which was stowed safely in a special freight car. The coffin was removed from the train at Jersey City and marched slowly through the streets. At the Jersey City ferry landing, where the delegation departed for New York, “a large concourse of people assembled” under a sign expressing “our love for the remains.”

When Clay’s boat arrived at Castle Garden in New York City on the afternoon of July 3, thousands of people were on hand to greet it, and “an immense military and civic procession was then formed, which escorted the remains to the City Hall” in an open hearse. New York City, long a hotbed of support for Clay and home of the Whig Clay Festival Association, which had organized public birthday celebrations for Clay, tried to outdo all the previous cities in the lavish honors it paid to Clay. The procession accompanying Clay’s remains through New York streets lasted more than three hours as hotels, theaters, “The City Hall, Broadway, Chatham Street, and Park Row were literally shrouded in mourning.” New Yorkers paid respects to Clay as he lay in state at City Hall overnight, although visitors were unable to gaze upon his face. The face plate was not removed from his coffin because of the hot weather that threatened to damage his remains before they reached Kentucky. All day on July 4, “great numbers of citizens” continued to file past his coffin, which was displayed with huge floral tributes and a sign reading “A Nation Mourns Its Loss.” Since Independence Day fell on a Sunday, clergy all over town preached sermons that wove together a commemoration of the national holiday and a eulogy for Clay.

Clay’s funeral delegation departed New York City on the morning of July 5 to travel up the Hudson River aboard the steamer Santa Claus. During the journey to Albany, residents of Poughkeepsie used small boats to deposit floral arrangements on the deck of the Santa Claus. The steamer paused at Newburgh, so local officials could board to pay their respects. At Albany, Clay’s coffin was accompanied by fire companies bearing torches to the New York state capitol, where guards attended the body overnight. The next morning, Clay was placed aboard a special car on the New York Central Railroad. He traveled west through Schenectady, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, and Rochester to Buffalo, where he was loaded directly on the Erie steamer Buckeye State, which carried him overnight to Ohio.

On the morning of July 7, Clay’s remains arrived in Cleveland and then moved via rail through Columbus to Cincinnati, arriving on July 8. In Cincinnati, “a large procession of military, Free Masons, Odd Fellows, Firemen and citizens, conducted the remains through a portion of the city” for more than an hour as over 10,000 people gathered outside heavily draped public buildings. After the procession through Cincinnati, Clay’s remains were placed aboard the U.S. mail boat Ben Franklin bound for Louisville. The steamer Ben Franklin was specially (and expensively) outfitted with a decorated dais and pillars, so that Clay’s coffin could be displayed in the open as it steamed down the Ohio River. The Cincinnati Daily Gazette reported that the coffin “was thus the most prominent object seen from shore, presenting, as it moved down the Ohio, the grandest and most solemn pageant ever borne on its bosom.” Onlookers gathered on the river’s banks to catch a glimpse of Clay’s coffin, and several papers emphasized the touching scene as the boat passed Rising Sun, Indiana, where “grouped together were some 200 ladies, one of whom was dressed in the deepest mourning, attended by the rest dressed in white with armlets of black ribbon.” On July 9, Clay’s body made its final journey via rail from Louisville through Frankfort to Lexington.

The New York Times had opined upon first reporting Clay’s demise that “his death will be celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the land, with heartfelt grief,” and the two-week tour of Clay’s remains seemed to bear out the prediction. The Charleston Courier noted that “such evidences of national sorrow have not been witnessed since the death of WASHINGTON.” Clay’s fellow senator from Kentucky, Joseph R. Underwood, the chair of the committee that accompanied Clay’s remains on the long journey, alluded to the similarity between Clay’s journey and another kind of spectacle familiar to Americans—triumphal tours of politicians and heroes. Underwood remarked upon arrival in Lexington: “Our journey since we left Washington has been a continued procession. Every where the people have pressed forward to manifest their feelings towards the illustrious dead. Delegations from cities, towns, and village have waited on us … It has been no triumphal procession in honor of a living man, stimulated by hopes of a reward. It has been the voluntary tribute of a free and grateful people to the glorious dead.” The cost of Clay’s tour was shared by Congress, municipalities, political organizations, and private citizens. Like the nation-wide tour of the Marquis de Lafayette in 1824 and 1825, for example, celebrating Clay’s remains was meant to remind U.S. citizens of their unity. Clay’s tour also contained elements of campaign tours and the tours of successful candidates such as those conducted by James Monroe and Andrew Jackson. But this time, the politician on tour was a corpse, and the spectacle of mourning replaced the campaign swing.

Just as in those previous tours and in keeping with traditions of American festive culture, press coverage played a huge role in the celebrations that accompanied Clay’s remains on the journey to Lexington. Newspapers in every region updated readers daily on the progress of Clay’s body and detailed the military processions, décor, flags flown at half mast, tolling bells, and the number and character of the crowds of people attending. Even after Clay was buried in Kentucky, church and civic ceremonies in his honor (sometimes accompanied by mock funeral processions) continued in St. Louis; Newark; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Springfield, Illinois; Athens, Tennessee; Hagerstown, Maryland; Warrenton, Virginia; Milton, Florida; Easton, Pennsylvania; Savannah; New Orleans; Chicago, and San Francisco. The U.S. Senate paid for Clay’s obituaries and eulogies to be published in book form. The press coverage, eulogies, and continuing funeral celebrations effectively spread the mourning experienced by those who directly saw Clay’s remains to a much wider population. S. Lisle Smith, Clay’s Chicago eulogist, noted how widespread the mourning was: “Already has the solemn procession wended its way through our crowded cities, our busy towns, our smiling villages,—amid tolling bells, and booming cannon…Already have thousands, and tens of thousands of freemen gazed upon the lineaments of the great departed.” Another funeral sermon in Newark that July commented on the lingering effect of the massive mourning rituals that had expressed grief “throughout the length of this extended country.” The extensive press coverage, and the republication of Clay eulogies and portraits which further saturated print culture, helped to connect Americans in an “imagined community” of mourners for Henry Clay.

The community of mourners was not entirely imaginary, however. A significant portion of the U.S. population could have seen Clay’s extended funeral procession in person. Consider a map tracing the path of Clay’s remains along rail lines, waterways, and through cities and supplementing it with information from the 1850 U.S. Census (fig. 7). The population of the counties through which the remains traveled was almost 3.5 million, or 15% of the total U.S. population in 1850. If we allow that some people may have traveled to see the body, and add a 20-mile buffer to those counties, the total increases to almost 6 million, or roughly 26% of the population in 1850. Obviously, not every single person in this area viewed Clay’s funeral cortege, but even so, Clay’s trip through some of the most densely populated areas in the U.S. meant that a significant number of people saw the funerals or knew someone who did. When President Taylor died in 1850, close to 100,000 people saw his funeral in Washington, D.C., and tens of thousands more witnessed his burial in Kentucky, but the public did not attend his body in between. A vastly larger number of Americans mourned Clay in person.

Whigs often took the lead in memorializing Clay, but grief for Clay was not their sole property. Comparing the Clay funeral map to maps of the 1844, 1848, and 1852 presidential elections shows that Clay was celebrated in counties that were strongly Whig, but also in several that voted majority Democrat and even majority Free Soil. Several Whig editors did try to juxtapose stories about Clay’s funeral procession with coverage of the 1852 Whig nominating conventions and with positive stories about Whig candidate Winfield Scott. But Democratic editors countered with their own panegyrics and with coverage of Democrat Franklin Pierce’s eulogy for Clay delivered at a nonpartisan meeting in Concord, New Hampshire. Several editors hoped that the public mourning for Clay would “soften” the political struggle leading into the presidential election. But that did not entirely work. The Rochester (NY) Daily Advertiser, a Democratic paper, wrote that “We regret to notice that a few of the Whig papers are attempting to make political capital, or at least to indulge their political spleen at the circumstance that many prominent Democrats and Democratic presses are speaking in laudatory strains of the life and services of HENRY CLAY…We are willing, on such an occasion as this, to drop the curtain of oblivion, and to remember only that in the character of the distinguished patriot, which we can admire and approve.” The same editor later accused Whigs of shedding “crocodile tears” over Clay, when they had not sufficiently supported him since the Compromise of 1850. Mourning for Clay allowed both Whigs and Democrats simultaneously to claim the mantle of impartial national spirit and to engage in partisan battle.

The one group who outright rejected public grief for Clay was abolitionists, further confirming that Clay’s remains functioned as a symbol of the union held together by compromise. Abolitionists rejected any compromise that perpetuated slavery, and therefore they rejected mourning for Clay. The Boston Free Soil newspaper wrote that “no incense can be burnt upon the altar of his memory by a single sincere lover of truth and the right.” A letter to the editor in the Cleveland Plain Dealer raged: “We acknowledge his genius and talents, his eloquence, his statesmanship, but Missouri, black with the curse of slavery sends a groan back to his grave, re-echoed and repeated by his own slaves in bondage … his death has not effaced their wrongs.” The Liberator, the most prominent of all abolitionist papers, reported on a Providence, Rhode Island, abolitionist named Samuel W. Wheeler who hung a sign in his shop window during Clay’s funeral procession reading: “Humanity hath no tears or sorrow to manifest for the death of slaveholders, and other oppressors of the human race.” A Canadian abolitionist newspaper called Clay the “dead … embodiment of pro-slavery.” As far as the abolitionist press was concerned, the national unity created by mourning for Henry Clay came at the cost of “compromising” with slavery and the abuse of black people. This was further confirmed for them when Clay’s will did not emancipate all his slaves. Abolitionists did not want the union preserved if it meant preserving slavery, and so they declined to take part in the spectacle of grief for the Great Compromiser.

Many others who had taken part in the outpouring of public mourning for Henry Clay worried that his passing also marked the death of sectional compromise, as signs gathered that the union itself could be imperiled. The Board of Assistant Aldermen in New York City resolved “that our admiration of his character and our sorrow at his loss, are increased by the reflection that he crowned his splendid labors by devoting … the evening of his life, and the last efforts of his genial spirit and his matchless eloquence, to reconciling sectional animosities, and to vindicating and preserving that glorious Union in whose service he has so long and so faithfully labored.” These New Yorkers and the many others who paid their funeral respects to Henry Clay in 1852 felt like part of an American nation that they hoped could be united in grief for a political hero—as it had been many times before. The spectacle of Henry Clay’s remains traveling thousands of miles across the United States combined the reassuring comfort of familiar political and nationalist ritual and the exciting new opportunity to gaze upon the great man’s body itself.

The tour of Henry Clay’s remains demonstrated well how technological advances in transportation, communication, and printing could include a larger-than-ever number of Americans in the chance to engage in ritualized public grief. Political mourning had been important since the American Revolution, but now lithography, railroads, steam boats, steel engravings, and faster communications spread it farther and faster than ever. But the technological advance did not remove the personal, bodily element of ritualized mourning. In fact, the innovative tour of Clay’s remains offered more Americans than ever the chance to personally encounter the subject of their ritualized grief. It was not just that Henry Clay’s funeral was the subject of newspaper coverage, sermons, and visual depictions. His actual body traveled through densely populated areas as funeral rituals were repeatedly reenacted. The celebration of Clay’s remains combined traditional political culture and well-worn themes of unity in American national identity with a new emphasis on bodily proximity. Clay’s passing body allowed Americans—both those who could see his body and those who subsequently read about the tour or who attended local church services in his honor—to express a sense of national identity in the form of public grief.

The journey of Henry Clay’s remains and the ritualized funeral celebrations that accompanied it marked a turning point in the role of political funerals in American culture and a transition to public mourning on a new scale for political figures in the United States. Widespread mourning for great politicians was not new in 1852, but Clay’s 1,200-mile funeral procession ushered in something new. Political eulogies, sometimes accompanied by mock funerals, comprised an important part of American political culture by the 1850s, but Clay’s funeral marked their coming of age.

Henry Clay’s funeral procession demonstrated an innovation in political funeral ritual—the wide-scale chance for people to interact with the dead politician’s remains. Many observers treated Clay’s body as a sacred political relic. Clay was one of the most powerful and controversial political leaders of the first half of the nineteenth century, but his death set in motion a celebration of him as a nationalist symbol—albeit sometimes a contested one. The journey of Clay’s remains and his ritualized mourning drew together traditions of American political grief and antebellum political campaigning to create a new kind and scale of political funeral—one that would become more familiar to Americans in the 1860s.

Anthropologist Katherine Verdery reminds us that “dead bodies have enjoyed political life the world over and since far back in time,” but Henry Clay’s body played a specific role at a perilous moment in U.S. history. His death allowed Americans to express anxieties over the possible death of their national union in particularly vivid terms. Some Americans looked on the widespread mourning for Clay’s decaying remains as a sign of union—just as the union itself was increasingly threatening to fracture and decay.

But large-scale pageantry and mourning were not enough to guarantee national unity. The political controversy around Clay’s mourning—the squabbling of Whigs and Democrats as the Whig party was weakened by regional tensions; the objections to Clay by abolitionists—made it clear that unity was not absolute and could not be taken for granted. Eulogists were also correct to worry that the loss of Clay’s political talents meant that compromise would become increasingly difficult in the years that followed his 1852 funerals. The travels of Henry Clay’s remains foreshadowed Civil War corpses traveling to be buried and, most of all, the funerals for the assassinated Civil War president, Abraham Lincoln. The innovative spectacle of Henry Clay’s funerals set a precedent, not for future rituals of compromise and union, but for the many ritualized funerals that would result from the Civil War once the union was fractured.

Further reading:

The brief volume by Winston J. Coleman, The Last Days, Death, and Funeral of Henry Clay (Lexington, Ky., 1951) provides basic coverage of Clay’s funerals. The most recent biography of Henry Clay is David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler’s Henry Clay: The Essential American (New York, 2010), though it does not discuss his funeral extensively. To get a flavor of the eulogies delivered for Clay, consult Obituary Addresses Preached on the Occasion of the Death of the Hon. Henry Clay published by the order of Congress in Washington, D.C. (1852); a good analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s eulogy of Clay can be found in Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered by John Channing Briggs (Baltimore, 2005). Many newspapers around the country covered Clay’s funeral and the journey of his remains, and many articles can be located in the America’s Historical Newspapers database based upon collections at the American Antiquarian Society.

To learn more about mourning for previous American politicians and heroes, readers should consult Gary Laderman’s book The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883 (New Haven, Conn., 1996), the volume Mortal Remains: Death in Early America edited by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (Philadelphia, 2003), or my own book Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, 2002), which also discusses the phenomenon of triumphal tours. Readers who may be interested in the comparisons between Clay’s funeral and the similarly huge funeral rites for the Duke of Wellington in November 1852 should consult Peter W. Sinnema, The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852 (Athens, Ohio, 2006). One of the most interesting works about how dead bodies can function as political symbols and relics is Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York, 1999).

To understand more about the political context surrounding Clay’s funerals, look to Elizabeth Varon’s Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008) and Michael F. Holt’s The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (Oxford, 1999). Readers who want to think more about how Clay’s funerals foreshadowed Civil War mourning should consult Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008) and Merrill D. Peterson’s Lincoln in American Memory (Oxford, 1997).

Census data for 1850 is available from the Inter-University Consortium for Social and Political Research website Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data, 1790-1970, and you can read more about using geographical analysis in history on the website GIS for History. Voting patterns can be observed on the excellent maps in The Historical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1788-2004, edited by J. Clark Archer, et al. (Washington, D.C., 2006).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.3 (April, 2012).

John Clark was out on a surveying expedition in western New Mexico Territory on May 7, 1865, when he heard. Gold miners heading the other way told him that President Lincoln had been assassinated. It was horrible and incredible news. And the murderer was Edwin Booth Jr., the actor! (John Wilkes would have been devastated to know that his work had been so misattributed). Clark was devastated. Abraham Lincoln was not only the revered president; he was an old friend from Illinois and the reason that Clark was out here in the first place. Lincoln had appointed him surveyor-general of New Mexico Territory in the spring of 1861.

For the next two days Clark made his way eastward toward Santa Fe, stunned. “How long OH! How long will thou afflict & chastise this nation, oh God!” he wrote in his diary. Lincoln “seemed to have been specially set apart and dedicated to the great work of preserving & reforming the nation.” Why had this happened? Perhaps the northern people had “trusted more in him than in Him who directed & controlled him & this is our punishment.” Clark hoped that there was some mistake; but when he arrived at Fort Wingate almost a week later, the papers confirmed the news. “His loss at this time,” Clark wrote, “is irreparable.”

After he arrived back in Santa Fe, Clark continued to mourn his friend, and worried about the nation’s future. But soon his mind turned to other things. He had to organize his office after his time away and write up the report of his journey into New Mexico’s gold country. After his entry from Fort Wingate on May 13, John Clark made no more mention of Lincoln—or his death—in his diary.

The ways that John Clark heard about, disbelieved, misunderstood, reckoned with, wrote about, and then moved on from Lincoln’s assassination were commensurate with the responses of Union supporters all over the nation, as Martha Hodes tracks them in her riveting new book, Mourning Lincoln. This group of Lincoln’s mourners produced voluminous personal records—diaries and letters, in particular—detailing their reactions to Lincoln’s death and funeral in April 1865. So many records in fact, Hodes argues, that Union supporters created an “illusion of collective grief,” a perception that the entire nation—North and South, black and white—was unified in its response to the assassination. Hodes suspected that this could not possibly be true, and in Mourning Lincoln she uncovers a broad range of reactions to the Union president’s death that cut across regional and racial lines. “This end-of-the-war moment,” she writes, “was less a time of unity and closure” and more a time of violent passions and disagreements (10).

In chapters that are both thematic and chronological, Hodes keeps a tight focus on individual acts of mourning (or celebration)—talking to neighbors, putting up bunting, gathering together at Lincoln’s funeral or at the railroad track as his funeral train passed, going to church, writing accounts—in the weeks after Lincoln’s assassination. She begins each chapter with an examination of the emotions and activities of three “protagonists”: Sarah and Albert Browne, white abolitionists from Salem, Mass., who are Union supporters (“Lincoln’s mourners”); and Rodney Dorman, a white Confederate lawyer in Florida who is one of “Lincoln’s antagonists.” This is a useful narrative tool, as it provides readers with continuous threads that bind the entire book together. These three people eloquently and vociferously express a range of reactions—shock, fury, sorrow, confusion, religious doubt, resentment, anger, glee—that, for Hodes, confirm a broader pattern of responses across the nation. Those who identify as “Lincoln’s mourners” and “Lincoln’s antagonists” are mostly exactly who you suppose they might be, but Hodes does find significant disagreement within regions: not all Southerners were gleeful at the news, and not all Northerners grieved Lincoln’s loss.

Hodes makes her most important discoveries by examining the emotional upheaval that African Americans experienced in the wake of the assassination. This proved difficult to root out; as Hodes says in her “Note on Method,” the personal writings of African Americans from this period are scant. She therefore turned to black newspapers and the records of whites who worked closely with blacks to try and make these “submerged voices” audible (276). Exuberant but also wary in the last months of the war, African Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line were troubled by the leniency toward Confederates that Lincoln’s second inaugural seemed to suggest, but were then buoyed by his final speech advocating black citizenship rights. Initially they were hopeful that Andrew Johnson would prove an ally; his first few months in office dashed those hopes. They celebrated the justice that the deaths of Booth and his conspirators seemed to bring. They fought for their own rights, helped by their white Republican allies in Congress. But despite some gains, African Americans looked to their futures with trepidation and wondered what could have been. In the end, Hodes argues, Lincoln’s assassination “was the first volley in the war that came after Appomattox—a war on black freedom and equality” (274).

Hodes conveys all of her points in compelling prose, using parenthetical asides and staccato sentences to create drama in the narrative. She also makes some pleasing analytical and methodological moves, calling attention to writing itself as an act of mourning and persuasively close-reading diary and letter writers’ emphatic punctuation: exclamation points, question marks, underlines, inked borders.

She also inserts a somewhat unusual narrative structure into Mourning Lincoln: short (two-three-page) snippets of writing between chapters, in which she considers specific metaphors or images of mourning or celebration. I was initially excited to encounter these “interludes”—I yearn for history books that diverge from the usual Intro-Five Chapter-Conclusion structure. I was disappointed, however. The interludes serve only to interrupt the narrative flow of the chapters (for which Hodes has written lovely transitions from one to the next) and to silo some potentially revealing evidence from the larger arguments that the chapters convey. Strangely, Hodes makes no mention of these interludes or their purpose in her preface, and so they become merely narrative curiosities, initially interesting but ultimately distracting.

In the end, however, Mourning Lincoln helps us to understand the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination and its multiple and complex meanings for all Americans. It is a dark history of the president’s death, revealing the rancor and emotional volatility that shaped individual lives across the nation at this moment. Grief over the president’s death was not universal—neither were visions of the future of the United States, or African American rights. And that grief was not long lasting. Like John Clark, most Americans had more pressing concerns and they recovered from the shock within a few weeks. Mourning Lincoln reveals all of these processes to us, a useful reminder that national tragedies can violently alienate people from one another in the moment, and then fade just as quickly from our collective consciousness.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3.5 (July, 2016).

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian, and cultural critic based in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She is the author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012) and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (2005)—and is working on a third book, Path of the Dead Man: How the West was Won—and Lost—during the American Civil War.

Anti-war perspectives from the early republic

President Bush and his courtiers like to remind us that we are “at war,” a prepositional phrase that casts a pall over the entire culture. With whom or what are we at war, you ask? Not Al Qaeda, or the assorted fanatics it inspired by killing three thousand people on 9/11, or even the shadowy insurgents of Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather, we are at war with an abstraction: “terror.” Plainly, such a war has no discernible end point; clearly, this is the intention. War not only serves the geopolitical designs of our right-wing rulers but also vindicates their absolutist cosmology, in which force and “faith” obviate reason, circumstance, and the decent opinion of others. However much they boast and hector and call for blood, they do not want to win so much as they want to remain “at war.” The best evidence of this is how impatiently they prosecuted a war of grim necessity (Afghanistan) in order to wage one of predatory choice (Iraq).

In order to contest this Orwellian strategy and the carnage that ensues, opponents of war in general and the Iraq disaster in particular need to ground their arguments in a coherent rationale of civic virtue. It is not enough to simply say, “peace is patriotic,” because the terms of patriotism have been contaminated by the cynical dichotomies of us versus them, good versus evil, freedom versus terror. The meanings of public duty and good citizenship must be rebuilt to reflect the saner voices within and among us, or else the present bloodletting will merge seamlessly into some other war for some other reason. I write rebuilt because those antiwar principles once represented a potent voice in American civic life. Like the wisdom of such organizations as Veterans for Peace, the arguments of the fifty-odd “Peace Societies” of the 1810s and 1820s offer a valuable perspective that might enable a less homicidal future.

It is always easy to dismiss peace writers as hapless dreamers, holed up in pleasant bubbles of their own making. True to script, the “friends of peace” of the early nineteenth century were often New England Unitarians who presumed, evidence notwithstanding, that white Christians were uniquely “civilized” and so destined to uplift the heathen masses of the earth. And yet they also included veterans of the recent Anglo-American wars and residents of Ohio, North Carolina, New York, and, for that matter, London. Cosmopolitan in spirit if not in lifestyle, they had inherited the eighteenth-century principle of “universal benevolence,” or goodwill to all nations. That global perspective fell out of favor during the French Revolution, when conservatives such as Edmund Burke applauded “national prejudices” as positive and natural. But after the prodigious bloodshed of the Napoleonic era, peace writers revived the humanistic ideal and sought to apply it in a more practical and wizened way. In short, they were idealists, not dreamers.

Indeed, their most important insight was that “society”—shorthand for all the hopes of the Enlightenment—could also bring out the worst in people. The mysterious energy that held strangers together, these early peace activists believed, sometimes unlocked human goodness and sometimes suffocated an innate moral sense. The “war spirit,” for example, began with a small number of politicians and generals who excelled at scaring ordinary people. After devising an obtuse reason for going to war with one nation or another, they salted the party line with tribal hatreds and primal urges. Once it spread to enough newspapers, broadsides, and speeches, the war spirit inevitably appealed to a variety of feelings and motives in the society, some of which were virtuous. Neighbors embraced neighbors; storekeepers reduced their prices; consumers forswore luxuries. No one could take issue with the anomalous harmony nor remember what had occasioned it. War thus became its own justification.

In contrast to later theories about the grim rationality of warfare (“politics by other means”), these thinkers argued that it actually settled no fundamental conflicts. “[After] all the wars of the last half century . . . what is the recompense?” asked the Reverend Thomas Stone, a pacifist from Maine. “A Bourbon to France. A Holy Alliance to the continent of Europe.” And, for that matter, a commercial treaty between Britain and the United States that much resembled the arrangements in place before the War of 1812. Nothing had changed, aside from the twisted pride the nation now took in the traumas it had endured and inflicted. In other words, aside from those rare cases when an innocent country was attacked, the hollow claims about war as a “national necessity” ultimately boiled down to the narrow interests of a few elites or to the inherently irrational notion of “national honor.” War was a lot like dueling, Stone observed, although duelists at least did their own killing and dying.

Peace writers lamented the bloody insanity of war because they were certain that they could stop it, and their confidence, no less than their grief, ultimately followed an interpretation of world politics. “There is a decided tendency towards what are called liberal institutions,” noted John Ware, a Boston physician and peace writer, in 1824. Unlike contemporary scholars, Ware had no trouble defining “liberal.” Any government worthy of that label was “founded upon a regard to the rights and happiness of mankind at large, and not of a privileged few.” Liberal states and institutions did not exclude, persecute, or divide their people, nor lift one class, order, or race over any other. By their very nature, they looked after their own citizens. But they also imbued their policies and proclamations with universal benevolence, thus robbing the war spirit of its xenophobic marrow.

In an early version of a mantra I first heard in grade school, the peace writers of the early republic thus divined that true democracies would never fight each other. “Till it can be proved that the happiness and prosperity of the mass of mankind, are promoted by the miseries and calamities of war,” Ware reasoned, “we must believe that popular institutions will always be pacific.” War did not grow organically from the social ferment of the civilized age but lingered from the barbaric times when hooded elites ruled supreme. Dethrone the warmongering tyrants and demagogues, and people would realize their common interests and cease murdering each other. Establish liberal and representative polities, and people would intuitively turn to the arts of peace.

It is heartbreaking to read these heady predictions and impossible to count all the ways that our own history has deviated from them. Suffice it to say, the liberal conception of citizenship lost out to racist populism and a curious faith in the just deserts of the “free market.” Suffice it to say, as we Americans acquired a greater share of the world’s wealth and power, we internalized the bizarre claim, loosely derived from covenantal theology, that God blesses our nation with exclusive fervor. Especially since the mid-twentieth century, a massive military establishment centered at the Pentagon has also insured a steady supply of influential people who need to have wars. The baroque lies they invent to justify those conflicts ensnare us in murderous tautologies of kill or be killed, freedom or slavery, “national honor” or “national disgrace.”

What is the underlying logic of such bellicose nationalism? What assumptions does it rely upon and then force on us? Oddly enough, the recent crisis on the Korean peninsula may throw some light on the darkness. After detonating a small nuclear device, the news apparatus of the Stalinist regime beamed the happy news to the masses. Great news! What an achievement! The official language from Pyongyang stressed the glory that this semi-dud of an underground explosion had showered on everyone. Apparently, the North Korean state would have its starving people believe that its destructive power not only defends them but also reflects well on them—or even is them. North Koreans are supposed to identify with the state, to imagine their paltry selves in its spectacular image.

Obviously, America is rich and North Korea poor. Clearly, our leaders do not rule with such naked force. Happily, their adolescent incompetence drew a popular rebuke this past November. But what is the message of right-wing blowhards if not the equivalence of “ordinary” people (white, male, and angry) and the military might of the United States? What does “patriotism” mean to them but the worship of that might as a register of their own virility? The unifying theme of the contemporary right is not the approach of the Rapture or the return of the Confederacy but the manifest destiny of the United States to bestride the world and deal violently with those in the way. This message appeals to brittle egos and authoritarian personalities; it enables people to pretend that they are as fearsome as the war machine they help pay for. Bumper stickers say it best and worst: “First Baghdad, then Paris.” “Kill ’em All, and Let Allah Sort them Out.” One of the ironies of this pathology, of course, is that it also counsels hatred of “the government,” particularly when said government condescends to assist Americans on the losing ends of luck or prejudice or the holy market.

An alternative rationale for patriotism might run like this: we have duties to all our fellow citizens, with whom we share resources, laws, and public space. Our loyalties should therefore extend to other people, not to the government. And while our goodwill naturally concentrates inside the borders of the nation state, just as it does within our own households, it must not exist in tension with the people of the wider world. “He loves his country,” one early peace writer wrote of the ideal person, “but he cannot narrow his mind to love his country alone. He loves the world; he loves the universe.” Alongside your everyday ties and loyalties, he told his audience, you must cultivate “the deep and operative feeling” that “you are not citizens of America more than you are citizens of the world.” The true patriot believes and behaves like a practical humanitarian, not an embittered partisan.

Under the moral sway of this kind of patriotism, no one would dare repeat, “support the troops,” and then abide the pitiless administration that cuts their health and disability benefits. Nor would they use Veterans’ Day or Memorial Day as an opportunity for belligerent rhetoric and star-spangled photo ops. These occasions would instead become a shared moment of quiet contemplation, a time to remember not only the 141,000 Americans now being shot at in Iraq but also the hundreds of thousands of civilians from that country who have died so that neoconservative fantasies might live. Smug demagogues who presently attract good television ratings by swearing cultural “war” on whole swaths of the American population would then be exposed as deficient citizens who need to relearn their obligations.

This kind of patriotism is neither quixotic nor utopian. It neither requires nor offers a fundamental shift in the power arrangements of our society. What it does require is a principled form of leadership and citizenship that takes language and ideas seriously. And what it does offer is a way to knit specific platforms—universal health care, anti-discrimination measures, due attention to humanitarian disasters—into a consistent logic and sensibility. Just as the hegemonic aspirations of right-wing politicos enable and endorse a swaggering hostility to foreigners and a ready pool of the war spirit, enlightened patriotism might promote a general ethos of cooperation and moderation in international affairs.

Needless to say, encouraging such patriotism would only mark the beginning of a much more difficult struggle for a more just and peaceful world. But if there is nothing else to be learned from Bush’s catastrophic reign, it is the power of political leadership to frame and shape the moral parameters of the culture. Our current leaders project a violent, prideful image (their own military records notwithstanding) and insist that we ignore our many problems and focus instead on our ability to blow things up and kill people. Change that leadership, and the terms of being an American can change, too. Change that leadership, and peace can reassert itself as the true and greatest purpose, the last, full measure of democracy itself.

Further Reading:

The primary sources consulted for this essay include Thomas T. Stone, Sermons on War (Boston, 1829) and John Ware, Address Delivered Before the Massachusetts Peace Society, at their Ninth Anniversary (Boston, 1825). On “universal benevolence,” see Evan Radcliffe, “Revolutionary Writing, Moral Philosophy, and Universal Benevolence in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (April 1993): 221-40.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.2 (January, 2007).

J. M. Opal teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He is just beginning a book on the relationships between war, memory, and democratic politics in the early Jacksonian era.

Using Folk Songs to Teach American History

When I took world history in high school many years ago, I wrote a term paper tracing the Scottish history of “Scarborough Fair” after hearing Simon and Garfunkel’s version. My teacher was not amused and was clearly upset that I had found that almost every reference was sexual (a totally unforeseen conclusion). She was even more offended that I thought folk songs had any place in a history class, suggesting I put it back in English class where it belonged.

Ironically, now that I teach United States history, I use an American song practically every day. I find songs to be one of the best motivators a teacher can employ. I use them to set the mood, to illustrate an aspect of history, to trace the history of popular culture, but especially as an important primary source. Some songs underline economic change; some commemorate a historical event; some are campaign songs; some are protest songs; and some may bring a voice to an overlooked people.

A song works as well, and in many ways better, than video. Songs are short and flexible for use within a lesson, the equipment can be kept in the closet, and, most importantly, the students do not have time to lose focus.

Printed lyrics for the students are essential, not only because they help students understand the songs but also because they provide regular reading assignments. I often hand out the lyrics as the students enter the classroom, especially if the text is difficult. Lyrics are frequently found with the recording of the song, or can be transcribed if necessary. An excellent way to find song lyrics is to search Websites dedicated to collecting them, such as those listed at the end of this essay. Some sites provide illustrations, additional discussion, or even the music itself.

Realistically, students, sitting in their hard little desks, will not transport themselves to a historical era and embrace it just because they hear a song. Be forewarned that they, in fact, may often hate it. I will never forget inner-city students’ expressions of polite disgust when introduced to Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” The usual responses are, “Do you listen to this for fun? Do you actually like this? This is the worst song I ever heard!” One girl clapped her hands over her ears, horrorstricken, during an entire song. At the end she cried, “My friends will never believe I listened to country music!” That actually gave me a nice opportunity to discuss the origins of country music.

Despite their skepticism, eventually students’ feet start tapping and I hear them singing in the hall. One day my rowdy ninth period was almost in tears listening to IZ Kamakawiwo’ole sing “Hawai’i 78,” his tribute to Hawaiian culture prior to United States annexation.

I have had particular classroom success with two songs related to the bitter presidential election of 1824. Andrew Jackson’s supporters sang the lighthearted “Hunters of Kentucky” commemorating their candidate’s generalship in the victorious battle of New Orleans:

But Jackson he was wide awake, and wasn’t scared at trifles, 
For well he knew what aim we take with our Kentucky rifles;
He led us down to Cyprus swamp, the ground was low and mucky, 
There stood John Bull in martial pomp, and here stood old Kentucky.
Old Hickory led our little band, none wished it to be greater, 
For every man was half a horse and half an alligator.

The lesser-known song used by partisans of John Quincy Adams, “Little Know Ye Who’s Comin’” on the other hand, is wonderfully dark and scary warning to those who would bring that “frontier madman” Jackson to the White House:

Little know ye who’s comin’
If John Quincy not be comin’
Fire’s comin’, swords are comin’
Pistols, guns and knives are comin’
Famine’s comin’, famine’s comin’
Slavery’s coming, knavery’s comin’
Fears are coming, tears are comin’
Plague and Pestilence’s comin’
Satan’s comin’, Satan’s comin’

The song is an ideal starting point for a discussion of negative campaigning and the related rise of modern political parties in the Jacksonian era.

Which songs should be included in a class? I try to use only songs that underscore the essential points of the day’s lesson. That is, I try not to include songs simply because they were typical of the day, unless the focus of the lesson is exclusively on popular culture. While Stephen Foster’s Oh Susanna is a good sample of the popular culture of its era, for example, the lesser-known Gold-Rush version may actually help students remember that particular event:

I come from Salem City with my wash pan on my knee;
I’m going to California, the gold dust for to see.
It rained all day the day I left; the weather it was dry.
The sun so hot I froze to death. Oh brothers, don’t you cry.

To further engage students I challenge them to seek out songs that speak to historical themes. That is how I discovered a They Might Be Giants’ song about the often-neglected James K. Polk:

But precious few have mourned the passing of
Mister James K. Polk, our eleventh president
Young Hickory, Napoleon of the Stump.

A student’s choice of Weird Al Yankovic’s parody of Amish life (“As I walk through the valley where I harvest my grain / I take a look at my wife and realize she’s very plain”) provided a good counterpoint to “Simple Gifts,” the classic Shaker hymn, and ignited a spirited discussion of the conflicting American ideals of the country and the city.

Unfortunately, some contemporary music tends to be profane, so be advised: never play a song you have not previewed. I had to tell a student I could not play Against All Authority’s excellent, but vulgar, “Sacco and Vanzetti,” because the lyrics could not be shared with the class.

An additional way to help students establish ownership of the songs is to have them actually sing the songs. When I teach the Mexican-American War, I have the students sing the “Marine Corps Hymn.” We also sang the Civil War classic, “John Brown’s Body” as we examined the martyrdom of the radical abolitionist.

Once the students begin actively listening to the songs, their enthusiasm for the material grows. For me, it is clear that songs are taking them into another world, another time, and another place. What could be more gratifying for a history teacher?

Folk Songs for Teaching U.S. History

Lyrics and Background Information

• Apple Pie Music
• Lyrics World
• “Making Sense of American Popular Song,” by Ronald G. Walters and John Spitzer
• McGuinn’s Folkden
• Mudcat Cafe
• Popular Songs in American History
• Public Domain Music
• Volkslieder

Album Sources

• Amazon.com
• Rediscover Music
• Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
• Songs for Teaching

British

• “Scarborough Fair,” anon., as performed by Simon & Garfunkel, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Sony, 2001

Colonial

• “When I First Came to This Land,” anon., as performed by Keith and Rusty McNeil, Colonial and Revolution Songs, Wem, 1989
• “Greenland Whale Fishery,” anon., as performed by the Weavers, Wasn’t That a Time, Vanguard Records, 1993

Great Awakening

• “Bound for the Promised Land,” Samuel Sennet (1798), as performed by the Waverly Consort, An American Journey, Angel, 1996

French and Indian War

• “Death of General Wolfe,” anon., as performed by Keith and Rusty McNeil, Colonial and Revolution Songs, Wem, 1989

Revolution

• “Yankee Doodle,” anon., as performed by Judy Caplan Ginsburgh and David Marler, Musical America, Ginsburgh, 2004
• “Castle Island Song,” anon., as performed by Keith and Rusty McNeil, Colonial and Revolution Songs, Wem, 1989
• “Liberty Tree,” Thomas Paine (1775), as performed by the Waverly Consort, An American Journey, Angel, 1996

Early Presidents

• “Follow Washington,” anon., as performed by Oscar Brand, Presidential Campaign Songs 1789-1996, Smithsonian Folkways, 1999
• “Copper Kettle,” anon., as performed by Joan Baez, In Concert 1, Vanguard Records, 1990
• “For Jefferson and Liberty,” anon., as performed by Oscar Brand, Presidential Campaign Songs 1789-1996, Smithsonian Folkways, 1999

War of 1812

• “Parliament of England,” anon., as performed by Keith and Rusty McNeil, Colonial and Revolution Songs, Wem, 1989
• “Battle of New Orleans,” Jimmy Driftwood (1959), as performed by Johnny Horton, Greatest Hits, Sony, 1990

Jacksonian Politics

• “Hunters of Kentucky,” Samuel Woodward (1822), as performed by Oscar Brand, Presidential Campaign Songs 1789-1996, Smithsonian Folkways, 1999, and also as performed by Keith and Rusty McNeil Colonial and Revolution Songs, Wem, 1989
• “Little Know Ye Who’s Coming,” anon., as performed by Oscar Brand, Presidential Campaign Songs 1789-1996, Smithsonian Folkways, 1999

Utopian Reform

• “Simple Gifts,” Elder Joseph Brackett (1848), as performed by the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Simple Gifts: Shaker Chants and Spirituals, Elektra, 1995
• “Amish Paradise,” Weird Al Yankovic, Bad Hair Day, Scotti Bros, 1996

Women’s Rights

• “Ain’t I a Woman,” Sojourner Truth (1851), as performed by Sally Rogers, Generations, Flying Fish Records, 1992, and also as performed by Kim & Reggie Harris, Steal Away-Music of the Underground Railroad, Appleseed Records, 1998
• “Wagoner’s Lad,” anon., as performed by Joan Baez, In Concert 2, Vanguard Records, 2002

Temperance

• “Father Come Home,” anon., as performed by George Jessel, George Jessel Sings Tear Jerkers For The Not-So-Gay Nineties, Treasure, c. 1960

Industrialization

• “Paddy’s Working on the Railroad,” anon., as performed by the Limelighters, We The People–A Celebration of the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, Rediscover Music, 1976
• “Cotton Mill Girls,” Hedy West (1963), as performed by Keith and Rusty McNeil, Working and Union Songs, Wem Records, 1989
• “Erie Canal,” anon., as performed by Judy Caplan Ginsburgh and David Marler, Musical America, Ginsburgh, 2004

Manifest Destiny

• “Indian Nation,” John D. Loudermilk (1968), as performed by Paul Revere and the Raiders, Legend of Paul Revere and the Raiders, Sony, 1990
• “Remember the Alamo,” anon., as performed by the Kingston Trio, Capitol Years, Capitol, 1995
• “The Marine Corps Hymn,” as performed by the Sun Harbor Men’s Chorus, Patriotic Songs of America, the Sun Harbor Men’s Chorus, 2001
• “James K Polk,” Mathew Hill (1990), as performed by They Might Be Giants, Dial-A-Song: 20 years of They Might Be Giants, Rhino Records, 2002
• “Heart of the Appaloosa,” Fred Small, The Heart of the Appaloosa, Rounder, 1992
• “Frozen Logger,” anon., lyrics found in James Stevens, Bunk Shanty Ballads and Tales (1949), as performed by Odetta, At Town Hall, Vanguard Records, 1991 “Oh Susanna,” anon., as performed by Judy Caplan Ginsburgh and David Marler, Musical America, Ginsburgh, 2004

Slavery

• “Some Time’s I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” anon., as performed by Paul Robeson, The Essential Paul Robeson, Living Era, 2001
• “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” anon., as performed by Kim and Reggie Harris, Steal Away-Music of the Underground Railroad, Appleseed Records, 1998

Civil War

• “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Howe (1862), The Civil War-Traditional American Songs and Instrumental Music Featured in the Film by Ken Burns, Nonesuch, 1990
• “John Brown’s Body,” anon., as performed by Pete Seeger, American Favorite Ballads vol. 1, Smithsonian Folkways, 2002

Reconstruction/Segregated South

• “The Night They Drove Old Dixie down,” Robbie Robertson (1970), as performed by Joan Baez, Joan Baez-Greatest Hits, A&M Records, 1996
• “Unreconstructed Rebel,” Major Innes Randolph (1914), as performed by Cumberland Three, Songs of the Civil War, Rhino Records, 1991
• “Strange Fruit,” Abel Meeropol (1939), as performed by Billie Holiday, The Commodore Master Takes, Polygram Records, 2000
• “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” Bob Dylan (1963), Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Folk Era Records, 1994

Imperialism

• “Battleship of Maine,” anon., as performed by the New Lost City Ramblers, The Early Years (1958-1962), Smithsonian Folkways, 1992
• “Buffalo Soldier,” Bob Marley (1984), Legend of Bob Marley, Island, 2002
• “Send the Marines,” Tom Lehrer (1963), That Was The Year That Was, Warner Brothers, 1990
• “Hawai’i 78,” Israel “IZ” Kamakawio’ole, Facing Future, Mountain Apple Company, 1993

1920s

• “Sacco and Vanzetti,”Against all Authority, Nothing New for Trash like You, Sub City Records, 2001

This article originally appeared in issue 5.4 (July, 2005).

Andrea Maxeiner has been interested in folk music ever since her grandparents gave her Joan Baez’s first album. Since then, she has earned a Ph.D. in history from the Catholic University of America. She now teaches advanced placement United States history at Hicksville High School in New York.

Digitizing the manuscripts of Philadelphia composer William Henry Fry

Reading rooms are never silent. They host countless imaginary conversations between researchers and the voices creaking out of the friendly confines of the archival box. At times, though, the walls come alive in a special way: with the sound of music. It is a distinct pleasure for musicologists to unearth manuscripts for works that have not seen the light of day—or reached open ears—since they were first composed. I recently experienced this pleasure at the Library Company of Philadelphia, a repository known mostly for its rare books but which also holds the music manuscripts of William Henry Fry (1813-1864), a composer whose music is rarely heard today.

Next to Stephen Foster, William Henry Fry was arguably the most important American composer working before the Civil War. A native of Philadelphia, Fry’s career was, curiously enough, a tale of brotherly love: his closest collaborators were two of his brothers, Edward and Joseph. Beginning in the mid-1830s, the Frys composed and wrote the words for three full-length operas and produced a translation for a fourth, Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma. In 1845, they staged Leonora, one of their original works, and it was the nation’s first production of a grand opera written by an American composer. For nearly a decade, this trio almost single-handedly developed the city’s interest in opera.

In addition to musical talent, the brothers clearly displayed a literary proclivity. Their father, William (1777-1855), was a successful printer and newspaperman who operated Philadelphia’s National Gazette and Literary Register. The younger William followed in his father’s footsteps by writing music criticism for local newspapers. In 1846, while working for the Public Ledger, he sailed for Europe to be a Parisian correspondent. His letters to the Ledger, a notorious organ for the Whig party, eventually caught the eye of fellow reformer Horace Greeley, who hired Fry to be a Parisian correspondent for the New York Tribune. In the meantime, one of his brothers had become an opera impresario in New York, where he was unsuccessful in his attempts to produce Leonora.

Upon returning to the United States in 1852, William joined the Tribune‘s editorial staff, a post he retained until his death. In an effort to counter the bad publicity brought by his impresario brother’s bad luck, he gave a series of musical lectures in New York’s Metropolitan Hall, which, for better or worse, immediately raised his public profile in the city and the region. Late in 1853, his reputation received an unexpected boost. The Barnumesque French conductor Louis-Antoine Jullien agreed to have his London-based virtuosic orchestra perform some of Fry’s symphonies. These wildly popular performances, including one infamous rendition of Fry’s Santa Claus: A Christmas Symphony (with sleigh bells, whip, and all), sparked a critical firestorm, but Jullien was undeterred. His orchestra continued to perform Fry’s works on tour around the United States and in London.

After Jullien left New York for London in 1854, Fry focused more exclusively on music criticism. It would be ten years before he produced another large-scale original work. That opera, Notre-Dame of Paris, was performed in 1864 at Philadelphia’s Great Central Fair for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. What Quasimodo has to do with wounded soldiers is anyone’s guess! William died of tuberculosis in December of that year, and his brother Edward eventually donated his music manuscripts to the Library Company, where they now reside.

There I was, 142 years later, looking at these same manuscripts and wondering what to do with them. They are not like letters or diaries, which, if you are lucky, explicitly reveal the writer’s most intimate thoughts and feelings. Nor are they like public records, which give us all sorts of raw data. The only biography of Fry is hopelessly outdated, and the author transcribed so little from the manuscripts that it is difficult to get a sense of how Fry’s music actually sounds.

First things first: transcription of the scores into a usable format. Blessed by technology, musicologists today can painstakingly transcribe manuscripts note by note into electronic notation software—in my case, a program called Finale. In short, the process moves from this:

to this clean copy of Finale score.

Transcription into the software is largely a mechanical process, but it does present challenges similar to those presented by any handwritten document. For example, what do you do when the notation is unclear, or how do you interpret a lengthy passage of empty measures? As in verbal sources, context provides valuable clues. A composer will rarely depart from idiosyncratic musical procedures (harmonic, melodic, etc.), so it is easy to determine if a note fits into the composer’s standard musical syntax. Composers also develop idiosyncratic working methods. In Fry’s case, he typically used empty measures to direct a hired copyist to repeat a given passage in the performing score and parts. Final transcription choices thus require interpretive judgments, but like any critical scholarly endeavor, these decisions must be defended.

In addition to creating legible copies of scores, Finale also allows the user to play back what has been entered. Although the sound reproduction is not as realistic as one would like, it does give an idea of how a piece actually sounds. And, of course, the alternative is not usually feasible. Researchers rarely have musicians on call.

In the evenings of my fellowship residency at the Library Company, I transcribed pages from Fry’s manuscripts into my laptop. More specifically, I worked on an art song, “Orphan’s Lament,” and a symphony, Hagar in the Wilderness. Eager to share the results with the library staff and other fellows, I offered to attach a speaker to my computer and let Finale play the music. What a treat! We were hearing this music for the first time in nearly a century and a half. 

Since Finale does not reproduce voices very well, I decided to score the work for piano and viola, my own primary instrument. Mission accomplished. Or was it?

Although transcription and listening provide a certain degree of intellectual satisfaction, deeper musicological investigation probes the relationships between musical production, reception, and broader cultural trends. Why does a composer write in a particular style, and what is accomplished by doing so?

In the case of “Orphan’s Lament,” the song’s text provides an obvious clue. With the singer literally embodying the orphan’s voice, Fry was able to give a realistic human touch to one of the nation’s most pressing reform causes: orphan asylums. The startlingly dissonant and pulsating accompaniment heightens the text’s sense of melodrama and urgency. This one-to-one correspondence between text and music is common in the European art-song tradition. As an active member of New York City’s Republican Party, Fry had a personal political stake in the issue of asylums and indeed championed a variety of social reforms, including abolition. Although there is no evidence of a public performance of the “Orphan’s Lament,” it is entirely plausible that Fry performed the work himself at private parlor gatherings.

Instrumental music is harder to penetrate on an interpretive level. Why would Fry write a symphony based on the biblical story of Hagar, or Santa Claus for that matter? In a roundabout way, I believe Fry is also communicating a political message in his symphonies.

Beginning in the 1830s, politically liberal musicians and critics in German-speaking lands began to imbue the genre of the symphony with overtly political content. For them, the harmoniousness, or “symphony,” of the orchestra’s many instruments represented the possibility of social harmony and political unity. Symphonies, especially Beethoven’s, increasingly became symbols for the political goals of republicanism and German unification, two central issues at stake in the revolutions of 1848-49.

This was precisely the period when Fry was in Europe immersing himself in the political and musical culture of the Continent. As early as 1845, just before he left, Fry noted the potential nationalistic significance of symphonies written specifically by American composers. His printed letters from Paris reveal that he developed his ideas further while overseas. When Jullien’s orchestra came to town just months after Fry returned from Europe, he jumped at the chance to have his symphonies performed before a live audience.

Santa Claus sounds like a hodge-podge of three different European musical styles: the lush orchestration of Hector Berlioz, the theatricality of French grand opera, and the melodies of Italian bel canto opera, a ubiquitous musical genre in American cities. Noticeably missing from this mixture are many techniques of the Austro-German symphonic tradition exemplified in Beethoven’s symphonies. At times, Fry vilified Beethoven’s style by calling it “aristocratic.” Clearly he did not hear in Beethoven that much-celebrated spirit of republican unity.

What made Fry’s works different? Unlike the Germans who more or less followed Beethoven’s style (Schumann, Mendelssohn), Fry transplanted operatic gestures into the purely instrumental context of the symphony. By doing so, he could retain the monumentality and grandeur of the symphonic genre, which nearly all critics recognized, while at the same time offering audiences something stylistically new and, in his formulation, more democratic. Since Italian opera was so popular at the time, its resonances in Fry’s music provided audiences with an immediate point of access.

Fry was also a firm believer in music’s ability to represent, or depict, nonmusical scenes. A striking document in the manuscript collection—a printed synopsis of the Santa Claus symphony’s musical story—opens a window onto his political vision for the symphony. The scenes are essentially taken from everyday life—a family gathering, a mother and child, a vagrant in the cold, etc.—but they also accentuate the condition of the working class. In other words, they suggest a reformer’s sensibility. The scenes may seem like tawdry remnants of Victorian sentimentality, but in the context of midcentury European musical style and aesthetics, they carry a clearly discernible political message.

After the failed revolutions, radical Continental composers, such as Franz Liszt, tended to steer clear of Beethoven’s style in their symphonic works, but they did not follow through on the genre’s potential to express democratic ideals. Although he recognized this potential in his writings, Liszt based several of his symphonic works from the 1850s on lofty epic poetry. These two elements seem to be at odds with one another. Liszt, like so many other idealistic composers, saw himself as a musical prophet whose role was to bring great art to the masses. Unsurprisingly, Liszt’s symphonic music was never popular.

Fry, on the other hand, based his works on scenes from everyday life and used the orchestra to transform them into something sublime. And he did not need complex musical theories or procedures to achieve this goal. For example, listen to a passage near the end of Santa Claus, a stunningly beautiful orchestral arrangement of “Adeste Fideles” (“O Come, All Ye Faithful”) that mysteriously appears in the wake of Santa’s sleigh.

He has taken a popular Christmas carol, placed it in an everyday context (remember the synopsis), and musically transformed it into a representation of one of history’s greatest miracles, the birth of Christ. I would be hard pressed to think of a better way to valorize the American “democratic spirit” and to show an audience the true value of “the everyday” than this. The audiences, made up largely of regular people, loved it.

Further Reading:

The majority of Fry’s letters from Paris, signed “W. H. F.,” may be found periodically in the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Tribune from 1849 to 1852. His abolitionist writings are in Republican Party, Republican “campaign” text-book, for the year 1860 (New York, 1860). For a discussion of the symphony’s political symbolism in prerevolutionary German culture, see Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton, N.J., 2006). The outdated biography of Fry is William Treat Upton, William Henry Fry: American Journalist and Composer-Critic (New York, 1954).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Douglas Shadle is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His primary research focus is national identity formation in antebellum American symphonies.

Students think with their bodies

Standing in the discussion circle at the end of the first full session of “Dancing American History,” I am surprised to hear the students say they understand why the slaves danced the “ring shout.” This response is what I had hoped for, but I find it hard to believe. How could these modern-day college students even imagine what an enslaved African felt? During the dancing portion of the class it seemed like the students were anything but “feeling” the moment; I had to keep encouraging the shuffling and patting and discouraging the chatting. But in the circle they are entirely sincere: “I could see how after working so hard all day dancing like this was a release. I let go of everything that was bothering me. It was definitely both physical and spiritual.” “It took me awhile to get into it, but after you turned the lights out, I saw why they liked doing it. I felt connected to everyone else.” Such words confirm my belief that the physical act of dancing can teach us about the slave experience.

“Dancing American History: From Slavery to Hip Hop” is a senior seminar I teach at SUNY Stony Brook, which uses dance as a primary source for teaching American history. I devised this course three years ago as a pedagogical experiment stemming from my research on the relationship between Irish and African American music and dance. The premise of the class is that learning to dance as other people danced provides information—missing from other sources—that can deepen our understanding of the past. This is not a “history of dance” class. Rather, the class presents dance as an embodiment of its historical context.

The course is a blast to teach, and most of the students who are game enough to take it love it. But it is not lightweight. Instead, it balances an exhilarating physical experience with serious intellectual work. To counter the idea that fun history is not real history, I assign tough reading and demand excellent writing. Even so, there are always a few students who find the dancing more challenging than the reading and writing.

Over the course of a semester, I lead the class through two hundred years and fourteen dances. Students keep a weekly journal, reflecting on their substantial reading in both primary and secondary sources. Then, we jig in the eighteenth century, waltz in the 1840s, reel in the 1860s, “spiel” in the 1890s, Charleston in the 1920s, swing in the 1940s, and so on. The journals are meant to encourage pre-reading and informed discussion. They consist of two weekly entries: one is a response to the week’s readings, written before coming to class and brought to class to use as prompts for discussion; the other, written after class, is a record of the experience of dancing. I collect and grade the journals three times during the semester as an incentive to keep everyone reading and talking. Each session is divided into two parts. During the first half, we talk about the week’s readings and any music, illustrations, or film clips presented in class. Then, after a short break, I teach the students a dance, and we dance it! A few minutes before class ends, we gather again briefly to reflect on the historical insights dancing has given us.

Like learning the steps to a dance, the readings and discussion are really the groundwork that makes the dancing meaningful and pleasurable. Each set of texts covers a particular group of people or a notable historical process (say, for instance, Native Americans or industrialization), but the connection between the readings and the dance is not always obvious. This uncertainty makes each session resemble historical research. At the beginning of class, students often admit they have no idea what a reading, like the chapter on Scots-Irish Presbyterians in Kevin Kenny’s The American Irish: A History (New York, 2000), has to do with dancing. But they begin to figure it out during the discussion, and after we’ve danced they make more connections.

In a dance, movement and steps are like words and sentences. They are the media for communication between two or more dancers or between dancers and audiences. Dances develop out of specific social and geographic environs, replicating the society in which they become popular. For example, the Virginia reel, a group dance enjoyed in isolated frontier communities during the nineteenth century, was easy to learn and therefore inclusive, mirroring and reinforcing the farm families’ need to work together for survival.

Yet the way people move, like the way they talk, is always changing. In America, a land of immigrants and migrants, there has never been one institutionalized or traditional dance form. Old forms of dance survive or are revived, but the new setting revises their significance. Jigs and reels performed today do not function as they did at barn raisings in the 1800s. American dance is a living language rooted in cultural pasts yet continually reworked in the present. This dichotomy makes dancing a splendid document for capturing specific moments and for charting change over time.

Learning dances chronologically gives students a powerful place to store knowledge: their bodies. I use Lynn Fauley Emery’s Black Dance: From 1619 to Today (1972; London, 1988) as a basic text for the class. I also teach many of the dances she documents. Toward mid-semester, students begin to recognize in new dances African American movements and steps from earlier sessions. This kinesthetic knowledge is raw historical evidence. For example, if the new dance originates from the white community, those steps signify some kind of interaction between blacks and whites. To find out where the exchange took place, the students must return to the readings. As their physical and factual knowledge increase, they make ever-more complex connections.

The course works because it reconnects the mind and body, which are unnaturally separated in modern life. Actually doing the dances shocks the students out of their normal frame of reference. It interrupts their way of seeing and being in the world. If they don’t like doing a dance, I make them use historical knowledge to explain why our subjects did. Dancing compels them to think with their bodies, to give historical significance to their physical sensations.

Dancing also obliges the students to interact with one another. They become friends. They talk about the course outside of class. They work together. One semester, the group cohesion was so strong that when a handicapped student fell to the floor during a raucous dance his classmates just swept him up and kept on going. Dancing teaches them to value those who fearlessly join in. They begin to notice each other’s strengths. “Everyone should experience ‘the Barry,’” one student wrote in her journal, referring to a particularly enthusiastic partner.

Each week the discussions get longer and more intense as the excitement generated by the dancing permeates the class. Last semester, our discussion of the sixties moved from political protest to countercultural experimentation and ended in a lively debate over whether today’s youth are apathetic. We talked for almost two hours, which left little time to rock ’n’ roll. In journal entries for that class, several students said they wished we’d had more time to dance but did not want the discussion to end. As the semester progresses, more and more entries begin with, “I have to say that tonight’s dance was my favorite,” and I know why. Dancing has become the payoff for doing the intellectual work. It is not easy to make connections between movement and historical events, but, when they do, students find it immensely satisfying.

People often ask me how I learn all the dances. To be honest, I often just watch videotapes. If a dance is too hard for me, I invite an expert to come to class. I always hire an instructor from Swing Dance Long Island to teach the Lindy Hop, and I never teach Native American dance myself, since dance retains sacred elements in many Native communities and since many Native Americans derive their livelihood from dance performances. I have also reconstructed ragtime dances of the 1890s, like “spieling” and “ballin’ the jack,” from written descriptions. In most cases, just the basic steps will get the points across. Of course, this method can be embarrassing. I have had a history major who was also a professional ballroom-dance instructor take the class and a ballet dancer and a contra dance caller. Fortunately, rather than being put off by my limited dancing skills, each of them offered to help when I taught her dance and seemed glad to study its historical significance.

In the end, what the students get from “Dancing American History” far outweighs any mortification I might experience teaching it. To pass the course, students must write a final ten-page research paper, and, as in any class, I confront in their written work a range of technical and literary ability. But sometimes these papers amaze me. In one, a student discovered the political origins of the Zeibekiko, a dance her Greek American family always makes her do at weddings. In another, a student who conducted oral interviews on swing dancing during World War II found out his great-uncle and great-aunt met at a USO dance. In a third, a student concluded that the singing and clapping she does at her mother’s church actually stem from slave dancing. And yet, with all the marvelous ways it connects the students to history, I really teach this course because I love to dance. I also love the infectious noise that rises in the room as my students begin to learn the steps, and their ruddy cheeks and sweaty brows as they dance the dance, and their shining eyes when the dancing is done and they gather in the circle, eager to connect what they feel to what they know.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.1 (October, 2005).

April Masten teaches American history at SUNY Stony Brook. Her publications include “Shake Hands? Lilly Martin Spencer and the Politics of Art” (American Quarterly, June 2004), for which she won the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2005 Article Prize for interdisciplinary writing. Masten is currently researching the exchange of music and dance among African, Irish, and Native North Americans.

Published in 1684, Increase Mather’s An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing Drawn out of the Quiver of the Scriptures is an example of the significant opposition to dancing in Puritan New England. Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1639 and later educated at Harvard, Increase Mather became a minister as his father Richard Mather did before him. He saw the popularization of dance to be a threat to Puritanism and the founding mission of New England, perhaps most famously described by John Winthrop as an exemplary “citty upon a hill.”[1] Dancing masters – instructors of dance – were advertising their services in Boston, and many colonists found dance to be an enjoyable use of their leisure time. However, in the eyes of many Puritan leaders, dance was threatening the upstanding morality of New England, prompting Increase Mather’s passionately-written diatribe against dance in late seventeenth-century New England.

Increase Mather’s primary target was “Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing” of men and women together. He quoted Scripture’s warnings against dance through arguing that the Seventh Commandment prohibited dancing and through using several Biblical stories to describe its evils. Furthermore, “the Heathen” were the ones to make dancing a pastime, making it unacceptable that Puritans would partake of such immoral entertainment. In fact, New England writers occasionally described Native American dances as performances in which “the Devil appears in bodily shape,” reinforcing the godliness of Puritans in contrast to others they encountered.[2] In addition to his use of Scripture, Increase Mather also incorporated a common Puritan rhetoric of anti-popery. By portraying “papists” as ones who enjoyed dance and occasionally demoting it to a “venial sin,” Increase Mather worked to portray religious opposition as immoral and hypocritical, emphasizing the morality of Puritanism. However, with the popularization of dance, many Puritan leaders grew concerned that the dance popular among “papists” was also gaining popularity in New England. This preference suggested a significant threat to the religious superiority of Puritanism. Increase Mather and others used these well-known religious analogies and Biblical references to bolster their arguments against dance. They were unafraid to challenge what was deemed acceptable by society if it was unacceptable according to the Scriptures.

Well aware of the popularity of dancing among many Puritans, Increase Mather also strove to preclude arguments in favor of dance through a question and answer section in his pamphlet. One popular argument was that it encouraged “good Behaviour and decent Carriage” by teaching manners and grace. However, some were fearful that “mixt dancing” threatened people’s virtue and focused too much on appearance. The emphasis on mannerisms and appearance would inevitably encourage pride among dancers. In these many ways, religion was very closely tied to one’s choice of entertainment, and religion was one use of leisure time that became very controversial.

Increase Mather was not the only one to oppose dancing. Several other Puritan ministers, including his own son Cotton, would express their concerns. Following in the footsteps of his father, Cotton Mather also published a pamphlet against dance entitled “A Cloud of Witnesses.”[3] However, his criticism was slightly less severe than his father’s, evidence of the ever-growing popularity of dance among each new generation of Puritans. While opposition to dancing would continue to exist in the following decades, it slowly lost its power and popularity. By the eighteenth century, dance was becoming an increasingly popular pastime as well as a significant way for colonists – later Americans – to display their skills and etiquette in public. The very things that Increase Mather was so strongly against – colonists wasting their time on dancing, parents sending their children to learn from dancing masters, and men and women dancing together – became not only acceptable, but even encouraged. The Puritan legacy did not entirely vanish, however. Dancing masters’ advertisements in newspapers would often emphasize that they taught separate classes for boys and girls, while dancing assemblies and balls often posted strict rules of acceptable behavior. Nevertheless, dance became an increasingly acceptable part of colonial culture. In this way, the meaning of dance in American society took a significant turn – a change which Increase Mather saw coming and wanted to destroy with “An Arrow… Drawn from the Quiver of the Scriptures.” Within a century after Mather’s publication, colonial leaders not only accepted but enjoyed dance as an important aspect of American Revolution culture, even performing dances honoring the war’s heroes and battles. Thus, dance had not only grown in popularity, but become an important way for colonists to entertain themselves, display their class status through elaborate balls, and highlight their political leanings.    

Further reading

“An Invitation to Dance: A History of Social Dance in America.” American Antiquarian Society. 2007. 

Daniels, Bruce C. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England.  New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995.

Keller, Kate Van Winkle. Dance and its Music in America, 1528-1789. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2007.

Mather, Cotton. A Cloud of Witnesses; Darting Out Light upon a Case, too Unseasonably made Seasonable to be Discoursed on. Boston: B. Green and J. Allen?, 1700?.

Wagner, Ann. Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

[1] John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: 1630, 1838), 3^rd series, 7: 47.

[2] Mather, 23.

[3] Cotton Mather, A Cloud of Witnesses; Darting Out Light upon a Case, too Unseasonably made Seasonable to be Discoursed on (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen?, 1700?).

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

Laura Asson is a history PhD student at the University of Connecticut. Her research is on the role of music and dance in early America with a focus on the Revolutionary War. She studies both soldiers’ and civilians’ use of performing arts as a way to display their class status, adapt to war, and express their political loyalties

There have been Shakers in the United States as long as the U.S. has been a nation. Never numbering more than a few thousand at any given time, the Shakers have contributed to American culture to a degree unmatched by any other small religious sect. With their American origins in upstate New York of the Revolutionary era, the Shakers are iconic within American culture for their innovation, work ethic, and sheer creative impulse. In all areas of the Shakers’ material output—from architecture and furniture to tools, housewares, textiles, and inspired drawings—a recognizable aesthetic emerged, renowned for its simplicity, elegance, and great beauty. But one area of Shaker creative output has received considerably less attention: music. Besides the ubiquitous “Simple Gifts,” first popularized by Aaron Copeland when he incorporated it as one of several folk themes in Appalachian Spring, Shaker music is virtually unknown today other than to a miniscule segment of scholars and Shaker enthusiasts. Yet, in music as in other areas, the Shakers exhibited astounding innovation and productivity. The quantity of original music produced by nineteenth-century Shakers is truly prodigious. From its earliest period in America, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—or Shakers—developed a tradition of music and dance unlike that of any other religious congregation in America.

American Shakers

Founded in England and led by the visionary Ann Lee, the Shakers began to stir the religious atmosphere of the northeast just a few years following their arrival in America as English refugees in 1774. They shared some impulses with other radical sects, such as concern over political corruptibility of clergy and the rejection of “papist” religious ritual, denominational creeds and doctrines, and oath-swearing. Distinctively, the group denounced sexual relations, and expressed its freedom from sin in physical form through exuberant group dances in worship, a practice that accounts for the derisive moniker “Shakers,” a term that the sect decided to embrace. During the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the Shakers drew hundreds of converts across upstate New York and the New England states, establishing nearly a dozen settlements of celibate believers living communally in self-supporting villages.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Shakerism was making its mark on America. From radical conceptions of God, to gender equality, ecstatic dancing and celibacy, Shaker practices drew converts and detractors alike. As the faith developed more elaborate social organization in the growing eastern villages, the Shaker “Ministry” confronted the challenge of further growth. Beginning in 1805, the Shaker movement spread from its core region of upstate New York and adjacent Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine to the trans-Appalachian west. The experience of frontier evangelism gave rise to a dramatic phase in the evolution of Shaker music, stimulating the Shakers’ first production of hymns, a musical genre that would remain central to Shaker worship thereafter. However, western expansion was also critical to other aspects of Shaker musical development. Shaker doctrines involving gender and race equality and the dual-gendered nature of the godhead achieved their first formal articulation in the hands of Shaker songwriters in the west, many of them western men and women converts. This contributed to the infusion into Shaker music of rich and varied expressions of gender and collectivity without parallel in other American religious sects. Voices from the Shaker west also took active roles in finding fresh ways to articulate the notions of spiritual family and believers’ relationship to heavenly “parents.” Such concepts had been evolving in Shaker thought since the preaching of “Mother” Ann Lee, the sect’s visionary founder.

Shaker music

Thousands of music manuscripts survive, and individual songs number perhaps in the tens of thousands.

Although the Shakers’ material culture has received the most modern attention, arguably the most vital facet of Shaker life was not the production of material objects, but rather the production of music. The Shakers were—and are—first and foremost a religious movement, bound together by a unique theology and approach to worship. Music was the indispensable underpinning of Shaker worship, generating a unique aural environment and visual spectacle that drew onlookers by the hundreds or even thousands to Shaker villages from Maine to Indiana during the sect’s height and well beyond. Music helped to define and shape the dance practices that distinguished Shakers from other American sects. And music was among the Shakers’ most important cultural tools. It was through music that many of the vital complexities of Shaker doctrine were diffused and reinforced among rank-and-file believers. Music, with its catalytic capacity for emotional inspiration, helped the Shaker collective achieve the spiritual fervor that sustained the movement over generations. And because music could be even more mobile than Shakers themselves, it could be a potent tool for social cohesion as members of the sect migrated west. The sharing and circulation of music was the crucial instrument that allowed the Shakers to create and maintain a unified and coherent cultural identity across a thousand-mile territory in the early American republic.

Ironically, two distinctive features of Shaker music—its usual form of notation and its prodigious diffusion in manuscript, as opposed to printed publications—have been largely responsible for shielding it from extensive scholarly attention. By the late 1820s, Shakers everywhere began to favor the use of a notation system in which lower-case letters of the alphabet represented notes of the scale. This replaced a hodgepodge of less effective earlier approaches, ranging from recording texts only and holding tunes in oral tradition, to using conventional music notation in round notes or shape-notes, to using capital letters or other symbols in place of musical notes. The “letteral notation” system adopted after the late 1820s dominated Shaker music everywhere for at least half a century. Thanks to the efforts of several gifted music theorists within the Shaker ranks, the system was formalized so that it could easily be taught (fig. 1). Consequently, hundreds upon hundreds of Shaker music manuscripts survive in which this letteral notation system predominates. Many of these manuscripts are substantial song books comprising hundreds of pages and containing a thousand or more individual songs. Yet because this rich corpus of music appeared to the uninitiated to be so much gibberish, it was consigned largely to obscurity until after the middle of the twentieth century. Also, the hymn books published by the Shakers in the early nineteenth century comprised—like the hymn books of many religious denominations—only hymn texts with no printed notation whatsoever. Consequently, folk musicologists examining American musical traditions in the early twentieth century had virtually no way to document the early music of the Shakers. Collections of Shaker music manuscripts were not then available to scholars. Among twentieth-century Shakers, few survived who knew how to interpret letteral notation any longer. Instead, the remaining Shaker communities were mainly using a set of late nineteenth-century hymnals printed by the Shakers using standard mainstream musical notation, whose contents represented a sharp departure from the music that had dominated the movement at its height decades before. Because of this singular set of circumstances, the landmark early studies of American folk music traditions sidestep the Shakers altogether. It has been left to later scholars to explore and analyze the rich and distinctive musical culture of the Shakers.

Shaker letteral notation was part of a group of related technical innovations that enabled early Shakers to record and disseminate an immense amount of music. Because it used letters of the alphabet, something the highly literate Shakers knew anyway, its use encouraged the production and recording of music across a far wider swath of the Shaker population than might have been the case had traditional music notation been employed. Use of a five-line staff was optional. The Shaker music theorist Isaac Newton Youngs devised a five-line staff pen around 1834, and many Shaker music manuscripts do place letteral notation on a staff (fig. 2). But just as often, tunes simply appear as strings of lower-case letters interlined with words (fig. 3). The problem of how to convey the movement of the melody stimulated another innovative feature of Shaker notation, namely, the graphic meandering of the letters on the written page. Melodic movement is signaled by the meandering of those strings of letters uphill or downhill relative to the horizontal plane of each written line. Still other music scribes developed diacritical markings to indicate movement of intervals within a melody, allowing songs to be notated using simply strings of letters and their markings in straight horizontal lines, below which the song texts would appear (fig. 4).

But while the technical innovations of letteral notation set Shaker music apart in some obvious respects relative to other forms of early American music, they do not represent Shaker music’s most significant features. Far more profound are the social and performative innovations. The Shakers engineered a wide range of entirely different musical genres to complement the various aspects of worship—wordless dance songs, hymns, one-verse songs, “occasional” songs, anthems, inspired songs. These genres developed over time, as Shakerism itself evolved. Collective worship might employ many genres simultaneously, often in the same meeting. Some of the older genres never fell entirely out of use but continued to be used alongside much newer ones. The “Compendious Index” from a comprehensive 1845 manuscript compilation by Shaker Russel Haskell of Enfield, Connecticut, reflects the range of Shaker musical genres at mid-century (fig. 5).

During the Shakers’ beginnings in 1780s New England, music consisted mostly of wordless improvised melodies, to which were fitted vocalized syllables or “vocables” (such as “lo-lo” or “vum-vum”). This sort of non-verbal singing freed the worshippers both for group dancing and for the experience of spiritual extremes, unencumbered by complex lyrics. The use of such tunes to accompany dance continued unabated for nearly a century in some Shaker communities. Russel Haskell, the first Shaker to historicize Shaker musical tradition, writes that in the earliest period, “the young converts were led to sing, some of the time, such as they had been accustomed to sing before they believed.” Indeed, the Shakers integrated some “worldly” tunes, especially in the Shakers’ first generation. Some of the tunes adapted to the gender-divided collective dancing bore enough superficial resemblance to popular tunes of the early republic that detractors declared that Shakers worshipped to the bawdy strains of “Yankee Doodle” and “Black Joke.” Eventually, wordless tunes were subdivided according to time signature for different categories of dance, with most taking on 2/4 or 6/8 time for marches and “back-order” dances, versus shuffles and circle dances, respectively.

More innovations ensued as Shakerism entered the nineteenth century. The use of hymns with lyrics seems to be a common enough feature of American sacred music. But for the Shakers, hymn lyrics were an innovation that emerged as the first flush of northeastern expansion gave way to more systematic and wide-ranging missionary work mainly targeting the trans-Appalachian west. The wordless songs alone could lead to spiritual excesses among young believers that were difficult to reign in. During the early western expansion, worship with young converts could easily get out of hand. But hymns could convey Shaker doctrine and history to people who had never seen Shakers before, while at the same time encouraging orderly deportment among exuberant converts. As a proselytizing tool, lyrics could help convey the themes and nuances of Shaker doctrine, as well as the powerful narrative of the Shakers’ short but dramatic history, in ways that wordless dance songs could not possibly accomplish. Several Shaker leaders involved in codifying doctrine also happened to be capable poets, and this contributed to a thriving hymn enterprise. While familiar tunes from hymnody or balladry were sometimes adapted by the Shakers and fitted with new lyrics, new tunes also emerged, albeit with strong folk music influence.

Other innovations followed. Anthems first emerged among eastern Shakers sometime in the early 1810s. Anthems consisted of lengthy prose texts set to continuous, meandering melodies. Shaker anthems appear to be related to the choral anthem tradition found in New England hymnody of the late eighteenth century, in which prose texts often of Biblical origin are set to long, wandering arrangements in three or four-part harmony. In Shaker worship, it is probable that solo individuals sang the anthems, as inspired and scripture-based exhortations to the assembly of listeners. Common anthem motifs include the use of “spirit language” phrases, or one form of what the Shakers considered to be “speaking in tongues,” integrated into spiritual exhortations (such as, “But if ye do as ye are taught by my salinda va, sa lac navoo ar tala van, not one of them shall fail,” a typical phrase from an 1830s anthem). Another common anthem motif was the spelling out of key words in sung phrase (i.e., the sustained spelling of “P-E-A-C-E” or “P-R-A-I-S-E” over a drawn out melodic phrase).

Obedience, order, and union were all highly valued in Shaker life, and one musical innovation that seemed to underscore them was unison singing. While unison singing was by far the dominant mode until the 1870s, harmony was not unheard of. Close examination of some music manuscripts produced by western Shakers in the 1830s reveals a surprising number of hymns and wordless songs recorded in three-part harmony, suggesting that harmonized singing was practiced in specific communities and favored by specific Shakers (figs. 6 and 7). An eastern Shaker experienced “gifts” of harmony in the form of clumsily harmonized anthems in the 1840s. But it was not until the 1870s, when the some of the Shakers’ own unique musical innovations began to be laid aside, that vocal harmonies became a regular feature of Shaker singing.

The music of Shaker worship has never involved any use of musical instruments. The Shakers, like other primitive Christian denominations, have favored the human voice as “the sacred harp” for creating worshipful musical expression. A capella singing tends to set songs in keys of convenience rather than according to absolute pitch, and Shaker singing is no exception. However, for the ease of recording the songs in letteral notation, Shakers developed the practice of recording all major key tunes in C, to prevent the need to integrate sharps and flats (fig. 8). For minor key tunes, Shaker practice is divided. Some manuscripts set virtually all minor tunes in A minor, or the “aeolian” mode (figs. 3 and 4), while others use D minor, or the “dorian” mode (fig. 9). This division reflects a debate that was carried on during the 1840s between two dominant Shaker music scribes over which mode constituted the true “natural” minor. Again, the purpose was to obviate the need for sharps and flats.

In a social sense, Shaker music emerged as a form of democratic expression within the Shaker collective. Shakers permitted music to grow organically from within each community. In sharp contrast, other religious denominations of the nineteenth century removed music production from practitioners’ hands and redirected it to distant, institutionalized boards and publishing houses. For the Shakers, the process of producing music was deeply embedded in the everyday lives of all individuals, in all communities, east and west. Every believer possessed equal potential for experiencing a musical “gift” that could be integrated into the ever-growing repository of music. Ironically, for a sect in which rigid leadership hierarchies helped to impose “Gospel Order,” music production was remarkably free of hierarchical control. Musical gifts could issue from the humblest believer to those holding higher offices. Songs came from women and men, teenaged to elderly, white and black, mixed-race and immigrant believers. And during many periods of Shaker history, songs poured forth spontaneously in seemingly endless quantities, sometimes in the very midst of worship. The contrast with most American religious sects could not be greater. One could hardly imagine a routine worship service in most American denominational settings in which an individual congregant would feel freed and empowered to deliver a newly inspired song on the spot with complete spontaneity, teach it to fellow congregants, and perform it collectively. Yet such was the norm in Shaker worship for more than fifty years. And far from being considered trivial or banal, such music was valued, carefully learned, enthusiastically shared, and meticulously recorded for posterity.

Shakers, the most dispersed communal society in American history, also shaped their music to meet the challenges of geographic separation. Creating and maintaining gospel union lay at the core of Shaker identity, but accomplishing that across a span of a thousand miles was daunting indeed. Yet, because music was democratized and organic, it could be applied more flexibly and prescriptively to suit a range of uses, spiritual and cultural alike, in the life of any Shaker community. Manuscripts reveal songs carefully produced by the hundreds to mark specific holidays, visits, funerals, and other cultural milestones. Songs could also act as custodians of Shakers’ intimate friendships, helping many Shakers living in disparate communities sustain friendships across vast distances for many years. Songs were regularly transmitted in correspondence, carried by visitors, and given as gifts, in addition to being bound into printed collections. While one Shaker in Kentucky might have little available opportunity to feel in “union” with another in New Hampshire, shared songs allowed Shakers to communicate with distant strangers in a common language. In some cases, believers tried to engineer specific days and times when a given song would be collectively performed by a multitude of Shakers as various locations. In one example, believers across both East and West were directed in 1835 to pause on March 1 at six o’clock in the evening and sing two specific hymns to mark the birthday of Ann Lee, because, “the consideration that all the faithful in every Society throughout the land are, at the same time, engaged cannot fail to . . . animate the zeal and cheer the spirits of all her faithful children.” Similarly, one hymnal records that an 1850 New Hampshire song called “All Glean With Care” was “appointed to be universally sung among Believers, Sept. 1, 1850.” And many mid-century hymnals, eastern and western alike, record a song entitled “Saturday Evening,” which promoted a shared period of collective spiritual reflection across the entire Shaker world as the Sabbath neared.

The Shaker music enterprise moves west

On New Year’s Day, 1805, three Shaker missionaries set out on foot from New Lebanon, New York, the spiritual center of the Shaker world. Their destination lay somewhere beyond the Appalachian mountains in the region of the Ohio Valley. News of the remarkable “Kentucky Revivals” had reached eastern cities, and the Shakers hoped that the region’s apparent religious fervor might augur well for a further expansion of the Shaker movement. A journey of nearly three months took the missionary trio through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, into Tennessee, across the Cumberland Gap, through celebrated revival sites of central Kentucky, and into southwestern Ohio. It was at Turtle Creek in Warren County, some twenty-five miles north of Cincinnati, that the first converts were gathered and the seeds of a permanent western Shaker enterprise were planted.

Music was a crucial component of the Shakers’ westward enterprise. Although the Shakers were just one among many sects active in the revivals of the trans-Appalachian frontier, Shaker worship was nonetheless distinctive for its practices of ecstatic collective singing and dancing. The missionaries had to be effective singers and dancers in order to teach the characteristic features of Shaker worship to entirely new audiences. Also, the missionaries were conscious of their goal of establishing distant communities that would nonetheless be part of one larger collective, with common values, common beliefs, and a common heritage. In the trans-Appalachian west of 1805, few had heard of Ann Lee. The Shakers promoted radical ideas: a dual-gendered godhead, a Christ-spirit that had been manifested in a working-class woman immigrant from Manchester, England, the renunciation of the marriage bed and all sexual relations, the notion of undoing biological family ties to live collectively in spiritual families with shared community of goods, and the conviction that one could confess sins to an elder and thereafter live free from sin apart from the “world’s people” in a separate sphere of “Zion” on earth. In 1805, these ideas had not been formally written down and circulated in any printed tract, except for the lurid distortions and misinformation published by detractors. It quickly became clear that hymns could serve a vital function of transmitting Shaker beliefs and ideals, along with some background of the sect’s short but colorful history. And because the content and structure of hymns was limited only by poets’ imaginations, hymns could also serve a range of didactic functions, inculcating western converts in the expectations of communal life, Shaker work ethic, cultural norms ranging from dress to diet to entertainment, and nuances of Shaker social relations.

During the opening years of the western Shaker missionaries’ work, large groups of converted families were “gathered” at many different locations throughout the region. To assist the original three Shaker missionaries, more eastern Shakers were sent. The eastern Shaker Ministry at New Lebanon, New York, carefully selected each missionary dispatched to the west. Doctrinal grasp, spiritual zeal, charisma, hardy constitution, singing ability, organizational skills, and writing abilities were all considered. In 1806, the first eastern Shaker women arrived, a crucial step in successfully establishing the Shaker faith in the west. Though most converts—men and women alike—made their initial confession of faith to a male Shaker preacher, the difficult work of beginning to transform converts’ households to conform to Shaker ideals needed the guidance of seasoned Shaker sisters. Also, experienced eastern sisters could better counsel women converts on balancing the exhilarating exertion of Shaker worship—which sent women’s hair and clothing flying into disarray—with the need for modesty and decorum. In just a few years, around two dozen eastern Shakers—women and men in equal numbers—were sent to the western region. At each of the settlements organized under communal covenants, the easterners were assigned chief leadership positions of elder or eldress, with western men and women mostly assuming secondary leadership assignments.

Western convert Richard McNemar was instrumental in persuading the eastern Shaker ministry to collect and publish the first set of Shaker hymns. As a singer, poet, and preacher, Richard had joined in the evangelism process after his own conversion in 1805, partnering with the Shaker missionaries and traveling throughout the region to spread the Shaker message to new audiences. Richard was also a deeply erudite man, fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, with a commanding knowledge of scripture. He quickly set his pen to the composition of dozens of hymns laying out all aspects of Shaker doctrine and theology. As the eastern Shaker music scribe Russel Haskell later wrote, “Our first hymns originated among the young believers residing in Ohio or in some of the western states.” Correspondence between eastern and western Shaker leaders during the crucial opening years of the west reveals plans to collect these newly composed hymns, print them, and share them among the eastern Shaker communities. Other Shakers with poetic and musical abilities joined the hymn writing enterprise, including several easterners such as Issachar Bates, the Shakers’ most charismatic frontier preacher who had been part of the initial missionary trio dispatched to the west. By 1812, the eastern Shaker ministry published the sect’s first hymn book, Millennial Praises. Of the 200 or so hymns it contains, the majority were composed in the west, and over half were the work of Richard McNemar. Millennial Praises represented one of the earliest published expressions of Shaker theology. The other major printed theological treatise from this period, Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing, was also authored in the west and bore the strong influence of several of the western converts. Clearly, Shakerism’s western expansion was noticeably shaping both the movement’s music and its theology.

Babes, mothers, and virgins

Shakers in the west were deeply conscious of being a branch of the broader Shaker spiritual family. All of Shaker culture was predicated on the notion of family, reflected in the forms of address for leaders and rank-and-file believers—Mother, Father, Sister, Brother. Stories of Mother Ann Lee, as recounted in hymns, played a vital role in reinforcing the collective identity of the Shakers across the various communities. Because the western converts’ experience of Shakerism was far removed, both temporally and spatially, from the scenes involving Mother Ann and the other Gospel Parents, narratives contained in hymns were all the more important. Also important was the guidance of the eastern Shaker men and women, who represented a physical link among the distant portions of the Shaker family, and many of whom recalled Mother Ann personally. While Shaker leadership was equally divided between genders, the role of “Mother” was particularly potent. “Mother” was a title reserved for a select few, including the female “lead” of the New Lebanon Ministry.

Shakers in both east and west were acutely aware that their sect’s entirely non-sexual understanding of gender and family constituted probably the biggest single distinction between Shakers and the larger world. Reverence for the concept of motherhood, together with all sorts of family-based metaphors, were woven into the fabric of Shaker culture at all levels, from everyday conversations to correspondence, worship, poetry, and hymns. Letters between east and west were replete with expressions of maternal love: “Therefore you are Mother’s children—and are near her heart. Yea she loveth you as her darlings,” and “Mother’s little children here have a desire to acquaint their spirits with the spirits of Mother’s pretty little children in the east” are typical passages. Familial figures of speech could become excessive and even turn to outright childishness. In an 1818 letter from South Union, Kentucky, Eldress Molly Goodrich, a native easterner, addresses her desire to visit the east and see the Ministry female lead, Mother Lucy Wright. In it she reveals the childish banter exchanged between herself and Elder Benjamin (“Benny”) Seth Youngs:

Now don’t you think it would be very comforting to little Molly to have the privilege to be in the good old first families meeting once more? Yea … ask the baby’s pretty Mamma to let it come home so it can get the chance to suck a little once more; yea … we think that would be a very good way to fat up the poor little Babe. For that little Benny since he has been home & had such a good chance to feast has got as fat as a little pig … I tell him every once in a while that I mean to go home too, and he says nay, Mother won’t let you got home but she lets me go home, for she loves me better than she loves you; then I’ll say nay she don’t, she loves me the best; and so the children goes on.

Biblical references to virgins preparing to receive the bridegroom also served as sources of another figure of speech common in Shaker discourse. All Shakers, men and women alike, thought of themselves as “virgins” espoused to the Christ-spirit. Biblical passages describing the virgins’ preparation of fine garments for wedding nuptials were grist for a great many Shaker hymn texts. Especially in the Shaker west, references to garments were popular and could be read on several levels. From the beginning, western Shaker converts had sought to signal their devotion by dressing like their eastern counterparts. In a frontier setting where cloth was scarce and produced only through great labor, one’s garments were important possessions, and abundant clothing was a sign of wealth. Among the Shakers, gifts of clothing sometimes passed from east to west, with great impact on the recipient, even if the fit was less than perfect, as is evident in a note of thanks written by a western Shaker sister in Indiana territory:

I feel myself honored … for the beautiful garment you sent me. O what a pretty thing—Sure enough what a beauty! I never had so much as dreamed of this … But if I could do with it as little girls of the world do with a present of their Mother’s garment, to have it laid up for them till they grow big enough to wear it, and so look at it once in a while to see how pretty it looks. But but alas! This will not do! For it is too little now, or else I am too big—and yet it was sent to me to put on and wear. And I must and will do it …

Serendipitously, among the early missionaries dispatched to the west were a few gifted poets and singers. Chief among these was Issachar Bates, a member of the first missionary trio, who had been a long-time choirmaster and published poet before becoming a Shaker in 1801. Likewise, some of the earliest western converts included men and women who were already talented hymn writers, as well as enthusiastic singers. Richard McNemar, a leading “New Light” preacher (the term applied to several Kentucky preachers who left the Presbyterian denomination in 1803 when they believed that new revelation or “light” was leading them to deviate from established doctrine) of the region who converted about a month after the Shakers arrived, had taught singing schools and written poetry. Samuel Hooser, an early Shaker convert at the Mercer County, Kentucky, location that became the robust village of Pleasant Hill, had been a Methodist minister from North Carolina with longstanding interests in hymn composition. Hooser, who entered the Shakers with a group of other family members, was among the chief songwriters at Pleasant Hill for decades, together with his niece Hortency Hooser, who also wrote abundant songs. In western Kentucky, the very musical Eades family converted, including Sally Eades, a young mother with an infant named Harvey. Both Sally and Harvey Eades would contribute an enormous quantity of hymns and songs to the western Kentucky Shaker settlement of South Union. Within the work of these western Shaker composers can be found hymns and songs whose themes include family and motherhood, virginity, and the wearing of fine garments.

The title of this essay comes from a hymn called “Do Or Die” written by Issachar Bates. Taking the perspective of a western Shaker, it incorporates familial and maternal metaphors, including a mother nursing her infants (song score 1).

Among the virtually countless hymns composed by Richard McNemar are two that take the form of ballads presenting aspects of Shaker history, including episodes from the life of Ann Lee. Significantly, early correspondence from the Shaker west includes specific requests for historical detail from the easterners so that western converts might better be oriented to their spiritual heritage as Shakers. Such detail was probably intended for integration into these hymns (song scores 2 and 3).

“The Wedding Garment” reflects an early point in the western Shaker experience, probably circa 1807. It integrates scriptural references to the virgins preparing to receive the bridegroom together with numerous garment metaphors also drawn from scripture. Its strong melody also incorporates a wordless phrase, indicating that dance may have accompanied the singing of this hymn (song score 4).

“Is Christ Come Again?” is a doctrinal hymn written by Sally Eades of South Union, Kentucky. Eades was among the earliest converts in far western Kentucky, and her family had originated in Virginia. Nothing is known of her earlier education or musical knowledge. But her complex hymn texts number in the dozens, and many of her songs are recorded in three-part harmony. This one displays a sophisticated understanding of the dual-gendered godhead, along with the parallel gender structure of Shaker authority and membership tiers (song score 5).

Hortency Hooser, a Pleasant Hill sister, was probably around thirty years old when she wrote the popular song “In Love.” It uses a repeated refrain, a somewhat more common feature of western Shaker hymnody (song score 6). Hooser also produced “Golden Street,” a joyous vision of Zion filled with gorgeously attired virgins (song score 7). Her uncle Samuel Hooser produced several hymns circulated and sung throughout the Shaker world for nearly a century. One of his many hymns alludes to the strong cord of unity binding the Shakers west and east, a popular theme in Shaker hymnody (song score 8).

Thousands of Shaker songs are unattributed to any specific individual, but bear attributions of a place of origin. Such is the case with two songs that present the popular theme of spiritual garments or “robes.” Both songs are classified as dance music, are identified as coming from Ohio, and appear to date to around 1815 (song scores 9 and 10).

Today the Shakers are perhaps best known for the many distinctive things they crafted, built, and manufactured, from furniture and cabinets to architectural structures and household tools. Renowned for their simplicity and elegance, Shaker-made objects are presumed to contain some transcendent vestige of the fervent spiritual movement of which they were a part. And perhaps they do. After all, the value in the marketplace of Shaker-made objects points to that possibility.

And yet, Shaker songs are the one completely genuine Shaker-made creation that can be acquired at virtually no cost, apart from the effort required to locate and view them in scores and manuscripts, sing them, and learn them. They are every bit as Shaker-made as any finely crafted chair, cabinet, basket, or oval box, because music has always been just as central to the Shakers’ cultural output as any material object. Indeed, because Shakers produced their music precisely to enliven and guide their spiritual lives and collective worship, it reflects core Shaker values far more directly than any other aspect of their creative practice. Yet today only a handful of Shaker songs are widely known.

A Shaker sister wrote in the 1840s of a vision in which Ann Lee reassured her that the enormous time taken to learn and record so many songs was not wasted time. In the vision, Ann Lee declared that the time would come that these songs would be “needed” for the edification of people yet unborn. With renewed public interest in early forms of American folk music, perhaps that time has come. This obscure music still has the power to awe, impress, astonish, and inspire a contemporary audience. The Shaker movement remains without question a powerful and even iconic element in American folk culture. Because the Shakers’ music was among the sect’s most potent forms of spiritual expression and creative output, it deserves fresh attention.

Further Reading

Efforts by non-Shaker scholars to document Shaker history began over a century ago with the work of J. P. MacLean, an Ohio historian who began collecting Shaker manuscripts and talking to aging Shakers at the dwindling communities in southwestern Ohio. His book, Shakers of Ohio (Columbus, Ohio, 1907), remains the most comprehensive descriptive history of the Shaker west, though the information MacLean presents is not referenced. In the mid-twentieth century, Edward Deming Andrews produced the first comprehensive history of the entire Shaker movement, The People Called Shakers: A Search for the Perfect Society (Mineola, New York, 1963). A more recent general history is Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, Conn., 1992). The early relationship between the Shaker east and west is addressed in “‘Our Spiritual Ancestors’: Alonzo Hollister’s Record of Shaker “Pioneers” in the West,” Communal Societies 31:2 (November 2011): 45-60. The drama of the west’s first thirty years, along with the role of music in the expansion process, is addressed in Carol Medlicott, Issachar Bates: A Shaker’s Life Journey (University Press of New England, forthcoming 2013).

Edward Deming Andrews was also the first non-Shaker to produce a book-length survey of Shaker music, The Gift to be Simple: Songs, Dances, and Rituals of the American Shakers (New York, 1940). Two major surveys followed in the 1970s, including Daniel W. Patterson’s impressive and indispensable The Shaker Spiritual (Princeton, N.J., 1979); and Harold E. Cook, Shaker Music: A Manifestation of American Folk Culture (Lewisburg, Penn., 1973). More recently, scholars of Shaker music have focused on specific genres, hymn books, or settings within the Shaker world. Christian Goodwillie and Jane Crosthwaite present the story of the Shakers’ production of their first hymnal Millennial Praises, and—significantly—restore the majority of its tunes, in Millennial Praises: A Shaker Hymnal (Amherst, Mass., 2009). Carol Medlicott and Christian Goodwillie, in Richard McNemar, Music, and the Western Shaker Communities: Branches of One Living Tree (Kent, Ohio, 2013), execute a similar project for the Shakers’ “western” hymnal of 1833, reconstructing over 100 original tunes and analyzing the hymnal as a window into the history of the west’s first thirty years. Essays in that book also explore the evolution of Shaker hymnody and music notation more generally, and trace the Shakers’ involvement in a printing enterprise. The importance of the hymn genre as a binding element in Shaker culture across the nineteenth century is explored by Carol Medlicott in ‘Partake a Little Morsel’: Popular Shaker Hymns of the Nineteenth Century (Clinton, New York, 2010), who examines evidence for a set of hymns relatively unknown to Shaker scholars that in fact may have dominated worship across much of the nineteenth century. Carol Medlicott offers a series of fresh arguments about the specific innovative aspects of Shaker music in “Innovations in Music and Song,” in Inspired Innovations: A Celebration of Shaker Ingenuity, by M. Stephen Miller (Lebanon, N.H., 2010): 199-206.

There are many significant collections of Shaker primary sources, some of which include vast numbers of music manuscripts. Western Reserve Historical Society alone possesses over 500 Shaker music manuscripts. The Library of Congress is also an important source for Shaker music manuscripts, including an exquisite early hymn compilation by Paulina Bryant of Pleasant Hill, “Record of Ancient songs” (Item 361, Shaker Manuscript Collection). The Library of Congress also houses in its music collection the 600-page manuscript volume assembled by Connecticut Shaker Russel Haskell in 1845, “A Record of Spiritual Songs … in Twelve Parts” (Music Division, 2131/.S4E5). In it, Haskell explains the origin of the hymn genre around 1805 and how it was a marked departure from earlier Shaker songs that were mostly wordless.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Carol Medlicott is a cultural and historical geographer at Northern Kentucky University. Her work considers various aspects of the western Shaker experience and of early Shaker expansion more broadly. Her publications on the Shaker west include Richard McNemar and the Music of the Shaker West: Branches of One Living Tree (co-authored with Christian Goodwillie, Kent State University Press, 2013) and Issachar Bates: A Shaker’s Journey (University Press of New England, 2013).

Flipping idly through the end of this book, noting the dozens of titles published in Wesleyan’s Music/Culture series (to which Listening and Longing is a recent addition), I was struck by the exotic scenes and subcultures under investigation: Romani music of Greek Macedonia, Wangga music of North Australia, underground dance music in NYC, Moroccan Ganawa trance music, hip hop from Down Under, salsa from Cali, Colombia. Daniel Cavicchi’s historical subjects, mainly northern U.S. urban-dwelling white middle-class aspiring music lovers in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, seem relatively familiar and bland in comparison.

Then there is Ossian E. Dodge, introduced in the first chapter. A self-made jack of all trades—novelty vocalist, writer of comic songs, editor of small magazines—and P.T. Barnum manqué, Dodge achieved national celebrity in 1850 by bidding $625 in a Boston auction to purchase a ticket to a concert by Jenny Lind, “the Swedish Nightingale,” probably the biggest musical phenomenon to hit America in the nineteenth century. This sum was well beyond his means and $400 more than was bid in a similar auction in New York City, also organized by the tour’s sponsor, Barnum himself. Dodge seized on the buzz generated by his inexplicable munificence to commission a lithograph of an imaginary scene depicting himself being introduced to Lind by Barnum. He then leveraged this newfound celebrity to promote his own short-lived career as a singer of strange songs before he left the arts for greener pastures, eventually settling in St. Paul, Minnesota, wealthy from real estate.

As Cavicchi explains it, a figure like Dodge could only have arisen in the burgeoning world of commercial music made possible by the market revolution of the 1820s and 1830s. “Dodge, the hustling ‘Boston vocalist,’ was part of a passing generation,” he writes, “but Dodge, the music-loving ticket bidder, was a symbol of the future” (39). Previously music had been a mostly amateur endeavor, confined mainly to churches and homes, with the occasional street parade. As the century wore on, commercial music figured increasingly in the musical lives of Americans, significantly multiplying the choices available to audiences and elevating their aesthetic sophistication. “The first music lovers, as witnesses to the beginnings of the commercialization of culture in the nineteenth century,” Cavicchi asserts, “were among the earliest to assume the role of the audience-consumer and to create the strategies many use today for understanding the world of stars, merchandizing, and spectacle” (185).

At one level the book offers a conventional history of how the market revolution reshaped social life and popular culture in the nineteenth century. New forms of capitalist enterprise seduced young people from family farms and small communities to expanding cities. Industrial development drove the expansion of railroad networks, which in turn made it easier for musicians to tour distant cities and reach larger audiences. Before the 1820s, musical life even in urban areas was hit or miss. But entertainment of all types was increasingly available in public venues, usually for a price. Many of Cavicchi’s sources are young clerks who recorded their wide-eared wonder at the variety of sounds available to them in city streets. Some subjects are famous, like George Templeton Strong and Walt Whitman, who roamed the streets feasting indiscriminately on an eclectic sonic diet of street parades, concerts, sermons, and opera. These pioneering music lovers sought out the musical riches proffered by entrepreneurs in pleasure gardens, concert halls, and theaters, using their burgeoning musical awareness as a means of fashioning a new kind of urban identity. African Americans and women were also drawn to the musical riches, but were constrained by pervasive northern racism and the “cult of true womanhood,” which limited the public activity of single women.

Cavicchi presents the social context effectively to support his claims about changes in what he calls “audiencing.” But the real interest and originality of the book lies in how it probes the inner lives of individual men and women drawn to music. The development of a “musical ear” gradually became an important marker of middle-class refinement as well as a means of emotional expression. After the Civil War, for the new cohort of more sophisticated music listeners, it was not enough to simply listen to and appreciate, as Whitman did, a wide variety of musical sounds. It became increasingly important to make discriminations, to know which composers or performers were worthy of admiration and might increase one’s social capital. By the final decades of the century, according to Cavicchi, urban music audiences were dividing between refined listeners and those drawn to spectacle and celebrity.

Of particular interest is the final chapter, which canvasses critical public reactions to these passionate music lovers. Listeners who responded too ecstatically to the performances and persona of Jenny Lind in the 1850s, or to the operas of Richard Wagner in the 1880s, were suspected of harboring tendencies toward psychic instability, “monomania.” Excessive enthusiasm was also denigrated as a sign of a lack of refinement, of an unseemly, even dangerous mob mentality, or of a suspiciously feminine, passive, and over-emotional nature. Critics found grist for acerbic cartoons and published satires in “Lindmania,” over-the-top Wagner devotees (the source of the term “long-hair” as applied to classical music intellectuals), and the “Monster Concerts for the Masses” in vogue after the Civil War that featured orchestras of 2,000 and choruses of 20,000 (including thousands of school children). Guest composer Johann Strauss wrote of the 1872 World Peace Jubilee in Boston:

Now just conceive of my position face to face with a public of four hundred thousand Americans. There I stood at the raised desk, high above all the others. How would the business start, how would it end? Suddenly a cannon-shot rang out a gentle hint for us twenty thousand to begin playing The Blue Danube. I gave the signal, my hundred assistant conductors followed me as quickly as well as they could, and then there broke out an unholy row such as I shall never forget (120).

A man living 26 miles outside Boston knew when the “Anvil Chorus” was being played by listening for the sound of the cannon.

To write a book about as private an experience as listening to music requires major sleuthing. It’s one thing to track down published reviews by professional critics, another to access the reactions of lay listeners. According to Cavicchi, other historians have tried but given up for lack of evidence. Perusing dozens of unpublished journals in a kind of needle-in-a-haystack quest, he made some lucky finds. Especially intriguing are the embossed leather-bound sheet music binders kept by amateur women pianists. Containing years’ worth of deeply personalized sheet music—often given by friends or suitors, carefully indexed, sometimes annotated with detailed marginal comments—these binders provide a fascinating window into the musical lives of nineteenth-century women who created music in the home. “Music lovers used diaries not simply as tools, but as stand-ins, indices, for music performances themselves,” he concludes, and the diaries helped them relive their musical pleasure in an era before sound recordings (135).

A particularly rich source is Lucy Lowell, an intelligent and independent woman who developed into a quintessential music lover whose life revolved around the schedule of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Born in 1860 to one of the storied families of New England, raised in the Boston suburb of Chestnut Hill, she filled seven volumes of her diary during her twenties with detailed and exacting commentary on musical performances, including two tours of Europe during which she saw Wagner performed at the Vienna Opera House and at Bayreuth. Of an Italian production of Barber of Seville she saw in Boston: “Gerster was utterly, entirely perfectly bewitching … You get a good idea of her genius by seeing her first in ‘Lucia’ & then in ‘The Barber,’ for two more different parts can’t be imagined & when you see how exquisitely she does them both, you appreciate her power” (115).

How do we reconcile this highly refined aesthetic sensibility with the crass tone-deaf self-promotion of an impresario like Ossian Dodge, whom Cavicchi early on states represented the wave of the future? Listening and Longing posits a bifurcation into “two different kinds of music engagement in the twentieth century: one based on the intellectual ecstasies of inner contemplation, fostered and supported by the performance of ‘good music,’ and one based on passionate participation in the world of stars, spectacle and collecting, relegated to the realm of ‘popular’ culture. While music lover continued to be used to refer to enthusiastic patrons of classical music, practitioners of the older form of music loving were given a new name taken from sports: fans” (184).

One can immediately think of audiences that straddle and destabilize these categories, like jazz fans and devotees of the 1960s Folk Revival. But do we really need the term “audiencing” for this argument to work? The beauty of influential musicologist Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” was that analyzing music through the gestalt of social practice dissolves many of the false binaries that have crept into the academic study of music—between composer and musician, performer and audience, text and context. The activities that Cavicchi highlights through “audiencing” are already present in Small’s more capacious category of “musicking.” (His book is titled Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening.) “Whatever it is we are doing,” Small writes, “we are all doing it together—performers, listeners (should there be any apart from the performers), composer (should there be one apart from the performers), dancers, ticket collectors, piano movers, roadies, cleaners and all” (Musicking, 10). In effect, then, Cavicchi reinscribes a dichotomy, between “musicking” and “audiencing,” that Small helped us think beyond. Regardless, this is a well-researched, elegant and thought-provoking book.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

David W. Stowe is a 2012-13 research fellow at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, writing a book about Psalm 137 in American music.

The Effie Afton, the Rock Island Bridge, and the making of America

On April 1, 1856, engineers of the Railroad Bridge Company conducted a comprehensive examination of the just completed Rock Island Bridge. Built with more than two hundred and twenty thousand pounds of cast iron, four hundred thousand pounds of wrought iron, and one million feet of timber, the structure was the first railroad bridge to span the mighty Mississippi River. On April 21, confident in the integrity of the bridge but still exercising caution, company officials watched as a single locomotive, the Des Moines, rolled across the bridge from Rock Island, Illinois, to Davenport, Iowa. When three locomotives coupled to eight passenger cars completed the same short trip the following day, people standing along the tracks cheered and church bells rang out from both banks of the Mississippi.

Just fifteen days later, on May 6, there was a celebration of a decidedly different nature between the two river towns. The late-model steamship Effie Afton, powering upriver through the draw of the Rock Island Bridge, collided with one and then another of the piers supporting the structure. The passengers and crew managed to escape harm, but the boat caught fire and was lost, as was its entire cargo. Before the incapacitated Effie Afton swung free of the bridge, drifted down river, and eventually sank, the long flames of the fire had reached the wooden trusses of the bridge. As the bridge began to burn, the other steamboats afloat on the river and tied up at Rock Island and Davenport blew their whistles in approval. When a section of the bridge collapsed, river captains, pilots, and crews cheered wildly. So loud was the scene that, as one newspaper reported, “it sounded like a vast menagerie of elephants and hippopotamuses howling with rage.” The Rock Island Bridge stirred up trouble in the waters of the Mississippi.

Boat destroyed and bridge damaged, the owners moved their conflict indoors, off the river and into the courtroom. Jacob S. Hurd, captain and co-owner of the Effie Afton, sued the Railroad Bridge Company. Alleging that the bridge was a material obstruction to the free navigation of the Mississippi River and therefore illegal, he and his fellow owners sought a judgment for “the value of the boat, her cargo, and such other damages as they may be entitled by law and the evidence to recover,” all of which they calculated to be sixty-five thousand dollars. The trial began sixteen months later in September 1857 in the United States Circuit Court in Chicago, with Supreme Court Justice John McLean presiding. The Chicago Daily Press informed its readers that it would surrender considerable space to covering “the celebrated Effie Afton case.” The editors explained that the trial was indicative of a fundamental national struggle in desperate need of resolution. In pressing their suit, the plaintiffs were defending the primacy of the navigable rivers, “the great natural channel of trade of the Mississippi Valley,” against the lengthening railroads, “the great artificial lines of travel and communication.” The editors believed that the conflict was “one of the most important ever to engage the attention of our courts.” Accordingly, they “made such arrangements as will enable us to lay before our readers . . . verbatim reports of all the more important portions of the arguments and evidence.”

Representing Hurd and his associates, Hezekiah M. Wead, Corydon Beckwith, and Timothy D. Lincoln professed a willingness to accommodate the growing railroad interests. In his closing statement Wead claimed “it was no part of [our] cause to prohibit the bridging of the Mississippi River.” He insisted that a bridge, properly designed and properly located, would pose no danger to river traffic. The Rock Island Railroad Bridge, he contended, however, was neither. Four and one-half years earlier, on January 17, 1853, the Illinois legislature had incorporated the Railroad Bridge Company “with the power to build, maintain and use a railroad bridge over the Mississippi River” between Rock Island and Davenport. The charter specified, though, that the bridge be erected “in such manner as shall not materially obstruct or interfere with the free navigation of said river.”‘

The Rock Island Bridge consisted of three sections, two of which were, in fact, distinct bridges. In the midst of the river between Rock Island and Davenport was an island—Rock Island—for which the Illinois town and the entire bridge structure were named. Moving east to west, the first section was a three-span bridge, 474 feet in length, connecting the city called Rock Island to the island called Rock Island. The middle section was the tracks across the island. Connecting the island to Davenport was the major section; this was the one at issue. It consisted of five 250-foot stationary spans and a 285-foot draw span. The draw span, which was the third span from the island and crossed over the main channel of the river, rotated atop a 386-foot-long turntable pier. The other piers supporting the main section of the bridge were significantly shorter: only 53 feet.

Whatever achievement the bridge represented in the field of engineering, Wead argued, the Railroad Bridge Company had built it in a manner uniquely suited to inhibit navigation. To begin with, the turntable pier was “placed laterally across the current of the stream.” This meant, according to the plaintiffs, that the water did “not run square under the draw.” Rather than directly “running between the long and the short pier,” water “strikes” the long pier, generating dangerous and unpredictable crosscurrents and eddies. Moreover, the Railroad Bridge Company located the bridge precisely where, in that stretch of river, the velocity of the current was greatest. The presence of Rock Island effectively narrowed the width of the river and increased the force of the stream. That condition was aggravated further by the addition of the bridge’s piers and by the ships themselves. The turbulent water, which made the draw virtually un-navigable, forced the Effie Afton into the bridge. In combination, the design and the location of the bridge qualified it as an unnatural, material obstruction to navigation on the river. Wead cast the Railroad Bridge Company as a “grasping corporation,” which placed the bridge where it pleased, disregarding navigation and disrespecting the public. More to the point, though, the Rock Island Bridge stood in violation of its charter.

Wead did not want the jury to trust him when he said Rock Island Bridge was an obstruction. He conceded that “obtaining accurate knowledge of the navigation of such a stream” was terribly difficult for “all men.” Referring to the specific circumstances that the Effie Afton faced, he said, “No man can tell what the difficulties of that navigation will be until he tries it.” “Without experience,” he believed, one really could not be “a competent judge” of such things. Accordingly, to help the jury fully comprehend the degree of obstruction to navigation, Wead turned to the men who made their living on the Mississippi River and its tributaries. They came from places like Galena and Savannah, Illinois, and from Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and in addition to river boat captains, they included the highly esteemed river pilots.

By Justice McLean’s count, over fifty of these men testified that the design of the bridge “caused cross-currents and eddies in the draw,” which led to the “loss of the Effie Afton.” Witness after witness, pilot after pilot asserted that the bridge was an obstruction to navigation: “a material obstruction,” “a great obstruction,” “a serious obstruction,” “the worst obstruction on the Western waters.” Fifty-year-old Thomas Taylor had spent half his life as a pilot on the Mississippi. In his estimation the bridge was “a serious obstacle,” and he said to the person taking his deposition, “You may emphasize that as much as you please.” The pilots were equally adamant that the speed of the river increased dramatically in the draw. There was no consensus, though, on just how much faster the water was moving. Some estimated the current reached six miles per hour; others judged it to hit twelve miles an hour; one simply said the current was “a heap stronger at the bridge.” None had measured the speed of the current.

However fast the river, the pilots agreed, passing the bridge was “very unsafe.” William White, a river pilot between St. Louis and St. Paul for more than two decades, believed there was “a risk of life and property in going through the bridge.” He was not alone. David Moore “considered [passing the bridge] so dangerous that I took my money and other valuables on my person, to be ready for any trouble.” While Wead argued that only [river men] could truly appreciate the challenges of navigation, the pilots themselves noted that the danger posed by the bridge did not escape common passengers. Pittsburgh pilot George Neare recounted a story in which his passengers were so frightened at the prospect of passing through the draw of the Rock Island Bridge that they insisted on disembarking, walking around the bridge, and reboarding once—if—Neare safely guided the steamship to the other side. Moreover, he noted, marine insurance companies judged the bridge a significant risk: rates “have been greatly increased by the bridge.”

Wead aimed to win the legal case for Jacob Hurd and his associates on a narrow, technical point about river navigation. He sought to win the public relations case by situating the loss of the Effie Afton within a particular historical narrative about the father of the waters and the American nation. Wead reminded the jury that “the law is that the citizens of the United States have a right to the free navigation of the Mississippi River.” That had not always been true, though.

For Americans living west of the Appalachian Mountains, the Mississippi offered the only reasonable, economical way to deliver their surplus products to the markets of the world. In the two decades following the Revolutionary War, one of the most critical and troubling questions facing the emerging nation was thus whether Americans would enjoy the free navigation of the Mississippi River. Although the 1783 Peace of Paris established the western boundary of the United States at the middle of the channel, New Orleans and the mouth of the river fell under the control of the Spanish and then, briefly, of the French.

While European imperial powers could and did limit American use of the Mississippi through the 1780s and 1790s, western Americans regularly appealed to their Confederation and Federal governments for assistance. So vital did they consider easy access to the river that they even contemplated dissolving their political ties to the United States and pledging allegiance to whichever of the European powers would guarantee that access. In 1794 John Breckinridge of Kentucky explained to Samuel Hopkins of Virginia that while westerners were not yet prepared to form an alliance with the Spanish or even with the British, such a scenario was not inconceivable. He warned, “The Miss[issippi] we willhave. If Government will not procure it for us, we must procure it for ourselves. Whether that is to be done by sword or negotiation is yet to [be seen].” America’s jurisdiction over the Mississippi remained vulnerable until the British evacuated the Old Northwest following the War of 1812.

If Wead’s diplomatic history was somewhat weak, so too was his domestic political history. As he continued to make his case for the eternal and free-born American right to navigable waterways, he announced to the jury sitting in the Chicago courtroom that “care has always been taken to keep [the Mississippi] free from obstruction,” but he was overstating the case.

Although there were local efforts to improve sections of the rivers dating to before the Revolution and although a number of western states—Missouri, Minnesota, and Arkansas among them—called for state-level sponsorship of river-improvement projects in their original state constitutions, they ultimately did little to improve river navigation. On the national level, in February 1819, the United States Congress allocated sixty-five hundred dollars for “making a survey of the water courses tributary to and west of the Mississippi. Also, those tributary to and north and west of the Ohio.” The following year Congress provided “for making a survey, maps, and charts of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers from the rapids of the Ohio at Louisville to the Balize, for the purpose of facilitating and ascertaining the most practicable mode of improving the navigation of those rivers.”

Not until 1824, though, did Congress fund projects for the actual physical transformation of western rivers. Congress targeted six sandbars and the trees, “commonly called planters, sawyers, or snags,” that were fixed to the river beds and threatened to puncture the hulls of passing vessels. Perhaps the most important consequence of this legislation was the development in 1829 of Henry Shreve’s Heliopolis, the first snag boat. These boats, designed with a powerful crane set between double hulls could relatively easily remove deeply embedded trees weighing as much as seventy-five tons. Within just a few years snag boats removed most of the underwater forests of the Mississippi. By 1844 Congress devoted $2.5 million to various improvement projects, primarily on the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers. For the remainder of the antebellum period, though, funding was uneven; indeed there were stretches of several years when Congress made no appropriations for the general improvement of the western rivers.

Even though Wead bent his facts, he did not break them. There had been a long history—though not quite as long as Wead would have had the jury believe—of Americans upholding and defending the free navigation of the country’s main waterways. And, similarly, there was some history of the government funding “internal improvements,” such as the dredging of rivers. From these precedents, he explained to the jury, only one conclusion could be drawn: Americans prized the free navigation of their rivers above most anything. Wead could have added some potent voices to his case. In 1783, following the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, George Washington himself wrote that he was “struck with the immense diffusion and importance” of “the vast inland navigation of these United States.” As Washington contemplated the nation’s inland waterways, he was impressed by the “goodness of that Providence which has dealt her favors to us with so profuse a hand.” Washington hoped “to God” that Americans “may have the wisdom to improve them.”

If Americans had not always enjoyed free access to navigable waterways, some of them, at least, had always believed such access to be a right of citizenship and a requirement for union.

Representing Rock Island Bridge Company, Norman B. Judd, Joseph Knox, and Abraham Lincoln charged that opposing counsel Hezekiah Wead was “entirely mistaken in his statement of the facts,” and they proceeded to develop a multilayered defense. With detailed statistics of bridge passings, multiple scientific tests conducted by qualified engineers, and the observations of lay people living in the vicinity of the Rock Island Bridge, the counsel for the defense sought to dismantle Wead’s case by demonstrating that the bridge was not a material obstruction to the navigation of the Mississippi River.

Seth Gurney, among the first witnesses called by the defense, was the caretaker of the Rock Island Bridge and had been since April 19, 1856, two days before the steam locomotive Des Moines rolled across the bridge from Illinois to Iowa. Gurney stated that the bridge had been repaired by August 4, 1856, less than three months after the collision. He testified that he kept “a book in which by order I enter . . . every boat which passes.” According to Gurney’s log, in the thirteen months since the bridge had been repaired, “958 passages of boats have been made,” and only seven boats suffered damage. Referring to these figures and the river pilots’ insistence that the bridge constituted a dangerous obstruction, Knox said, “The pilots say that it is mere chance that they get through unhurt. Surely they are the luckiest men in the world.” He wondered, “Would not these boatmen soon amass a fortune if they could deal in lottery tickets?”

Defense counsel argued that the low number of accidents at Rock Island Bridge was not, in fact, due to the pilots’ luck. Nor did they offer that it might be the result of the same pilots’ well-developed skills. Rather, they argued there were few accidents because the bridge was well designed. To convince the jury of this, the defense called six engineers who had extensive experience with railroads, bridges, and rivers. Each of them visited the Rock Island Bridge and studied its construction and its effect upon the river. Each either conducted or observed tests of the direction, the predictability, and the speed of the current. They described the various tests they ran, most of which involved dropping weighted floats into the stream “some two hundred feet above the draw” and watching their movement as the current carried them down river through the draw. These tests, one engineer stated, were “regarded as a reliable means of determining currents in our profession.” The engineers agreed that there were no crosscurrents or eddies in the main channel and that the bridge was placed nearly as well as it could be. Knox acknowledged that the plaintiff’s counsel also “brought three engineers here” to add their testimony to the pilots’. Of the three, though, “only one ever saw Rock Island, and that was in February, when the river was frozen over.” None of the three conducted any tests on or even saw the effect of the bridge on the river.

To help the jury properly interpret their engineers’ tests, defense counsel called a number of local residents. John Deere, a fifty-three-year-old resident of Moline who was “engaged in the manufacture of plows,” witnessed some of the tests conducted by the defendant’s engineers. He described himself as “unskilled in navigation” and admitted that he had never passed through the bridge on a boat himself, but he still concluded that there were no crosscurrents in the main draw. Were there currents, he said, “the tests would have discovered them.” Patrick Greg, physician and mayor of Rock Island, testified that he had “watched floats pass in regular file down through the draw, never diverging to the left or the right.” He said, “The current according to my observation passes through the piers on the Rock Island side as smoothly and evenly as it is possible for water to run between piers.” Oliver P. Wharton was the “publisher of the Rock Island Advertiser,” and his “office window commands a view of the bridge and vicinity.” He had seen “floats in numbers,” “several hundred boats,” and “objects on the surface” pass through the draw “straight with the pier.” He said that he was “certain there are no cross-currents.” He thought “no difficulty whatever is offered by the bridge to the navigation of steamboats.”

Quincy McNeal, clerk of the Circuit Court of Rock Island, admitted, “From what had been told me I expected that there was difficulty until tests and experience proved to me that there is none whatever.” He had “seen the floats tried and pass through straight.” He concluded, “There are no cross currents in the draw.” McNeal said, “If a boat is left to drift from the opening of the chute she will go right through,” and David Barnes unintentionally demonstrated as much. Barnes was a resident of Rock Island and had been “engaged in the lumber trade for four years.” He recounted losing control of a raft, four hundred feet long and seventy-five feet wide—significantly larger than the Effie Afton—above the Rock Island Bridge in September 1856. He got caught in “the steamboat channel leading to the draw, and I could not get out of it to go to the usual place” where rafts passed the bridge. Barnes gave up and let the current carry the raft where it would. The raft “went straight down through the draw without touching.”

McNeal went so far as to say, “It is impossible for anything to get against those piers, except it be from some other influence than the current.” Defense counsel believed they could reasonably point to other influences. Judd charged that the fate of the Effie Afton was the consequence of no more than “the carelessness of her officers.” After all, immediately upon leaving Rock Island, the Effie Afton bumped into a steam ferryboat. From careless to reckless: with the bridge just three-fourths of a mile off, the Effie Afton engaged another steamer, the J. B. Carson, in a race to the draw, which affected the angle at which the Effie Afton approached the draw. Knox did not hesitate to attack the pilot Nathan Parker personally: although Parker may be in some respects “very excellent,” he was a “very timid man” with “delicate nerves.” He said that not until he listened to the plaintiff’s counsel had he “heard the praises of Mr. Parker as a tip-top pilot.” Knox asked the jury rhetorically, was Parker’s performance “not the height of unskillfulness?”

Although the defense alleged incompetence, they also suspected devious intent. The plaintiff had claimed that the fire that ultimately destroyed the Effie Afton and that damaged the bridge was the accidental consequence of a stove tipping over during the collision. But Judd argued the fire was no accident at all: “The fact is she got there where she would probably be lost and she had no insurance save against fire and some of them thinking it better to take half a loaf than nothing, set her on fire.” A physician who happened to be on the steamer Vienna the morning of May 6, 1856, testified that he witnessed Captain Hurd and a few members of the crew discussing the fact that the Effie Afton was only insured against fire. He believed that “one of them said: ‘It is a pity she don’t burn; she is good for nothing,’ and with an oath said: ‘I would burn her and get the insurance.’” Shortly thereafter the Effie Afton was burning out of control.

In his closing Knox cast the Railroad Bridge Company as “a little company” now under attack by the “the greatest river interest,” and he described the bridge not as an obstacle but as an “improvement” and one “which has benefited the whole land.” He moved the railroad into the position long held by the rivers. Abraham Lincoln followed Knox with a closing of his own and pushed the argument further. He said he had no desire “to have one of these great channels, extending almost from where it never freezes to where it never thaws, blocked up.” But the jury needed to see that Americans moved from east to west as well as north to south and that east-west travel “is growing larger and larger.” Between September 8, 1856, and August 8, 1857, Lincoln said, 12,586 freight cars and 74,179 passengers crossed over the Rock Island Bridge. Were it not for the Mississippi River’s “advantage in priority and legislation,” the railroad “would surpass it.” Navigation had been shut down for nearly four months the previous year when the river had been frozen. Moreover, Lincoln added, there is “a considerable portion of time when floating or thin ice makes the river useless, while the bridge is as useful as ever.” The artificial line was surpassing the natural channel, and speaking of the railroad, Lincoln said, “This current of travel has its rights” too.

The jury deadlocked at nine to three in favor of the bridge, so Jacob Hurd and his associates did not recover damages. After continued legal struggles, the final fate of the Rock Island Bridge was determined in January 1863 when the United States Supreme Court determined it could stand. By then, not a bridge but a war had stopped commercial traffic on the Mississippi River.

Further Reading:

Reporter Robert Hitt covered the Rock Island Bridge trial and provided the transcriptions of the proceedings for the Chicago Daily Press. All trial quotations excerpted above appeared in the Chicago Daily Press, September 9-25, 1857. For more on the Rock Island Bridge, see Frank F. Fowle, “The Original Rock Island Bridge Across the Mississippi River,” in the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin 56 (1941): 55-63; Benedict K. Zobrist, “Steamboat Men versus Railroad Men: The First Bridging of the Mississippi River” in Missouri Historical Review 59:2 (January 1965): 159-172; and David A. Pfeiffer, “Bridging the Mississippi: The Railroads and Steamboats Clash at Rock Island Bridge” in Prologue Magazine 36:2 (Summer 2004). The image from William Riebe’s “Government Bridge” that appears above was taken from Pfeiffer’s article. For steamboats and river improvements, see Erik F. Haites, James Mak, and Gary M. Walton, Western River Transportation: The Era of Early Internal Development, 1810-1860 (Baltimore, 1975); Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, 1949; New York, 1993). See also Michael Allen, Western Rivermen, 1763-1861: Ohio and Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse (Baton Rouge, 1990); Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington, Ind., 2006); Timothy R. Mahoney, River Towns of the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the West, 1820-1870 (Cambridge, 1990); Willard Price, The Amazing Mississippi (New York, 1963); and Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

Jenry Morsman is a stay-at-home dad, is ABD at the University of Virginia, and teaches occasionally at Middlebury College. He published “Securing America: Jefferson’s Fluid Plans for the Western Perimeter” in Douglas Seefeldt, Jeffrey L. Hantman, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Across the Continent: Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America (Charlottesville, 2005).