When John James Audubon died, in 1851, he had many admirers, but probably none more ardent than a Kentucky-born adventurer and author named Charles Wilkins Webber. Soon after Audubon’s death, Webber published a decidedly energetic description about first encountering Audubon on a canal boat in late 1843, when the aging naturalist was returning from a trip out West to study wildlife. As soon as Webber boarded the boat, he “heard above the buzz the name of Audubon spoken.” Apparently already familiar with Audubon’s reputation, Webber wrote that “there was one NAME that had so filled my life, that it alone would have been sufficient to inspire me.”

Audubon! Audubon! Delightful name! Ah, do I not remember well the hold it took upon my young imagination when I heard the fragmented rumor from afar, that there was a strange man aboard then, who lived in the wilderness with only his dog and gun, and did nothing by day, but follow up the birds; watching every thing they might do; keeping in sight of them all the time, wherever they went, while light lasted; then sleeping beneath the tree where they perched, to be up again to follow them again with the dawn, until he knew every habit and way that belonged to them.

And so Webber went on for a dozen exuberant pages, describing Audubon’s “fine, classic head” and “patriarchal beard” and “hawk-like eyes,” asserting that “the very hem of his garments—of that rusty and faded green blanket, ought to be sacred to all devotees of science.” Webber finally concluding in almost breathless satisfaction, “Thus it was I came first to meet him, laurelled and grey, my highest ideal of the Hunter-Naturalist,—the old Audubon!” (fig. 2)

To a modern reader, Webber’s passionate praise might seem like a bit of excessive adulation for a man whose fame came, after all, from studying and painting birds: on the scale of outdoor activities, ornithology is not normally ranked as an especially dangerous endeavor, nor are artists typically depicted as rugged adventurers. But Webber’s eulogy reflected its context—the American West in the middle of the nineteenth century—which, for Webber, could hardly have been an unconscious or coincidental choice. Writing at a time when talk of Manifest Destiny filled the political air—when the United States had just been pushing against the Oregon border in a battle of menacing words with Great Britain and had just taken a vast expanse of land, from Texas to California, in a true shooting war with Mexico—Webber depicted Audubon as a man of the West, returning from a trip up the Missouri River after retracing part of the path of Lewis and Clark. Like those two explorers four decades earlier, Audubon expressed the expansionist reach of American science. Much more than a master of ornithology or avian art, he embodied the “hero of the ideal,” an unapologetically masculine embodiment of the “pioneer” American naturalist. In Webber’s wide-eyed assessment, Audubon became the living image of the connection between natural history and national history.

But Webber did not stop simply with this strenuous celebration of Audubon. In creating this image of the “Hunter-Naturalist,” Webber set Audubon against another sort of scientist, what he derided as the formulaic, effete, and implicitly feminine European naturalists, who, as Susan Branson has shown elsewhere in this issue of Common-place, had long been mocked as “Macaroni” (fig. 3). Too many “scientific pedants in silk stockings” and “pur-blind Professors,” Webber complained, had “technicalised” the study of nature “into what may almost be called a perfect whalebone state of sapless system … so heavily overlaid by the dry bones of Linnaean nomenclature as to become a veritable Golgotha of Science.” Given the taxonomic complexity those “pedants in silk stockings” had imposed on nature, he insisted, ordinary people had become isolated from science, “repulsed, in dismay of its formidable hieroglyphics, from what is to them as a sealed book.” By contrast, “Our glorious Audubon,” the Hunter-Naturalist of the new nation, “lived and wrote like one of the people,” and he thus represented a distinctly American—and masculine—approach to natural history, a two-way relationship between the rugged naturalist of the still-wild American landscape and the ordinary folk of the new nation. Therefore, Webber declared, “we love and venerate him passed away.”

Long before Webber’s energetic eulogy, of course, Audubon had already become the early republic’s first true celebrity scientist, a self-promoting showman, perhaps, but also a remarkably skilled ornithologist and artist, a man whose work could be both scientifically accurate and emotionally engaging at the same time. He is most famous, of course, for his monumental (and now exceedingly valuable) mega-book, the four-volume compendium of 435 engraved plates, The Birds of America (1827-1838). He is a little less known for the companion book, the five-volume Ornithological Biography (1831-1839),a series of essays about ornithology, to be sure, but also about American places and people and, quite often, about Audubon himself. In fact, those self-portraits in prose can be as evocative as the several portraits of Audubon in paint; taken together, as we shall see, they reveal a pattern of personal self-fashioning that had been evident in Audubon’s life long before Charles Wilkins Webber ever met him.

As a twenty-first-century historian, I can’t allow myself to “love and venerate” Audubon as openly as Webber did, but I do find him an elusive but illustrative figure, frustrating but always fascinating. For the sake of this essay, I think Audubon bears investigation on two interrelated levels. First, because he was so self-consciously someone who defined himself by his achievements in science as much as art, he gives us a good focus for looking at an emerging American approach to natural history in his era. In Audubon’s America—essentially the first half of the nineteenth century—ornithology and other branches of natural history lay embedded in a trans-Atlantic scientific discourse that had long engaged students on both sides of the ocean. No matter how much natural historians in the early American republic might have tried to declare their scientific independence from their European predecessors, sometimes engaging in competitive and petty disparagement of those whom Webber would call the “scientific pedants in silk stockings,” the Americans’ very ability to work as nineteenth-century naturalists rested on the foundations that had been in place for at least two centuries. Indeed, Audubon worked (and frequently quarreled) with gentlemen of science of the both sides of the ocean, and he put great stock in his status in the scientific community: the engraved images in The Birds of America always carried the initials FRS and FLS—Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Linnaean Society—right after his name.

But beyond establishing his personal credentials, Audubon played a critical role in helping establish those of American science. As much as he drew attention to himself as an artist and man of science—and he did so ceaselessly and shamelessly—he also drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature in America, helping them see it in national as well as environmental terms. Much like Thomas Jefferson a generation earlier, Audubon sought to declare America’s scientific independence from the Buffonian insistence on the inferiority of American species. In The Birds of America, Audubon offered a dramatic celebration of the new nation’s avian species, and in doing so he engaged in an act of scientific possession. He did not simply present his birds as stiff specimens for close ornithological examination; he gave them life and location, creating engaging images embedded in the American landscape. “The Birds of America” implicitly meant “The Birds of the United States.” Audubon never used the term “Manifest Destiny”—a term that entered the American political lexicon in 1845, when Audubon was well past his writing prime—but he stood squarely at the intersection of art and science at a time when natural history became entwined with national history. He was much more than a passive spectator in that process: in the first half of the nineteenth century, no one in the world of American art or science did more to stimulate a national conversation about nature in the United States.

In that regard, Audubon also embodied another important notion: that the American scientific community was by no means an entirely enclosed community, nor could it claim isolation from the rest of society. In Audubon’s America, science had not yet become subdivided into academic disciplines and institutionalized in university departments. Indeed, the study of natural history in academic repositories seemed only a far-distant second to the dramatic discoveries still available in a largely uncatalogued continent. Thomas Nuttall, Audubon’s fellow natural historian and eventual ornithological ally, perhaps best expressed the contrast. He fidgeted with frustration while holding position of curator of the botanic garden at Harvard, describing his experience there as “vegetating” among the plant collections. As soon as he had a chance, he headed west with the Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth expedition of 1834, going all the way to the Pacific Northwest and then on to Hawai’i, collecting specimens all the way. In fact, he became memorialized in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast as “Old Curious,” the naturalist who walked along the beach “in a sailors’ pea jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells.” The real sailors considered him eccentric in his commitment to collecting, but in his appearance, if not his behavior, he blended in among them.

What Nuttall did implicitly, Audubon did much more explicitly, making clear the connections between the American natural historian and ordinary people and, above all, their reciprocal relationship in exchanging knowledge about the natural world. In Audubon’s America, the study of natural history remained within the reach of almost everyone, and Audubon acknowledged that as he addressed his reader in the opening pages of Ornithological Biography: “I am convinced that you love nature—that you admire and study her. Every individual, possessed of a sound heart, listens with delight to the love-notes of the woodland warblers. He never casts a glance upon their lovely forms without proposing to himself questions respecting them.” Studying nature and proposing questions about what one sees, of course, form the basic tasks of the natural historian. Particularly in the era of the early republic, at a time when the answers to many questions of natural history still remained unanswered and when many parts of the continent still remained relatively unexamined by naturalists, Audubon recognized that the observant amateur could see just as much as he could. To get answers to various questions about bird identification, migration, and such, he invited his reader to take part in the investigation, and the questions recur frequently throughout Audubon’s writings—”Can you, reader, solve the question?”; “Reader, is this instinct or reason?”; “Reader, can you assist me?” By the same token, Audubon created a bond of imagined companionship in the wild—”Reader, many times have I wished that you and I were in it”—and called to the reader to “make up your mind, shoulder your gun, muster all your spirits” and go into the “interesting unknown.”

Today, his occasional admissions of ornithological ignorance and his repeated reaching out to the reader for help may seem little more than an act of authorial artifice, perhaps even a disingenuous literary device for subtly asserting Audubon’s own authority by raising questions he knew most readers could not answer, or by posing challenges he knew most readers could not take. In reading Audubon, it always makes sense to take a careful, even skeptical, view of his self-conscious construction of his role as a naturalist: whenever he seems to be talking to the reader, he is most often talking about himself. But at the same time, he is talking about himself within a particular historical and cultural context. Like his counterparts in the political arena of the early republic, Audubon embraced and often celebrated his reciprocal relationship with the common people. In doing so, he popularized and enhanced the standing of natural history—and therefore his own standing—in the new nation that celebrated the image of the “common man” as a political and cultural icon. He would become a similar icon of his own sort.

Consider, for instance, the various portraits we have of Audubon in his heyday. Throughout his life, he perfected his persona as the wilderness artist, the long-haired, buckskin-clad, gun-toting naturalist, even on the far side of the Atlantic. Audubon took up temporary residence in Great Britain (first Scotland, then England) in 1826-27, beginning work on The Birds of America in earnest. Soon after he arrived in Great Britain, he sat to be painted himself, and to be painted not as an artist, but as a woodsman—or, as he would soon come to call himself, the “American Woodsman” (fig. 4).

He wrote his wife, Lucy, who was still living back in the United States, that he was “now a strange looking figure with gun, strap and buckles, and eyes that to me are more those of an enraged eagle than mine.” Being in Great Britain, in fact, made him even more aware of his American identity as a man of the woods, underscoring his “sense of recollection” of his place in the world: “[nothing] could make me relinquish the idea that in my universe of America, the deer runs free, and the Hunter as free forever.—No—America will always be my land. I never close my eyes without travelling thousands of miles along our noble steams and traversing our noble forests.” As he became increasingly well-known in artistic and scientific circles in the Atlantic world, he became increasingly committed to his embrace of America as his “universe,” and to his self-styled image of himself as the “hunter … free forever” (figs. 5, 6, 7)

Audubon was not by any means the first American to adopt an especially woodsy-looking aura when he went to the far side of the Atlantic—we think, of course, of the fur-hatted Franklin in Paris in 1784—and Audubon’s aquiline image, with gun, strap, and buckles, might be seen as only playing to type (fig. 8).

But for Audubon, costume spoke to character, even when he lived in an urban environment; the elements that became constants in his many portraits—wearing the garb of a man of the woods, displaying a gun as the critical tool of his trade, locating himself in the American outdoors—defined the self-conscious core of his artistic and scientific identity.

His approach to both art and science rested on one central premise: he drew the birds well because he knew the birds well. Knowing the birds, of course, meant tracking them in the environment they inhabited, and that meant going into many dark, dangerous, and uncharted places:

Many times, when I had laid myself down in the deepest recesses of the western forests, have I been suddenly awakened by the apparition of dismal prospects that have presented themselves to my mind. … At other times the Red Indian, erect and bold, tortured my ears with horrible yells, and threatened to put an end to my existence; or white-skinned murderers aimed their rifles at me. Snakes, loathsome and venomous, entwined my limbs, while vultures, lean and ravenous, looked on with impatience. Once, too, I dreamed, when asleep on a sand-bar on one of the Florida Keys, that a huge shark had me in his jaws, and was dragging me into the deep.

In this one passage Audubon conjures up many of the standard menacing images that recurred in the long-standard literary descriptions of the American wilderness—dark forests, deadly quicksand, howling Indians, murderous backwoodsmen, loathsome snakes, ravenous vultures, even a shark thrown in for special effect—that modern readers might now consider a cliché. But he created this compendium of wilderness terrors not so much to evoke a nightmarish vision of nature. Rather, he listed the rigors of the naturalist’s life to impress upon the reader that there could be no other scientifically legitimate way to know nature: “[H]ow difficult must it be,” Audubon wrote, “for a ‘closet naturalist’ to ascertain the true distinctions of these birds, when, having no better samples of the species than some dried skins, perhaps mangled, and certainly distorted, with shriveled bills and withered feet.” Whatever the distinction between birds themselves, the distinction between students of birds seemed clear: relying on the dried and withered specimens of fellow collectors, the “closet naturalist” would never come close to the fresh specimens an outdoor ornithologist could have at hand. Audubon always took care to assure us that he, Audubon the ornithologist, Audubon the artist, would pursue his calling with courage and face nature in its wildest form.

In that regard, Audubon was by no means altogether unique. Throughout the early years of the nineteenth century, the work of the American naturalist had become increasingly associated with the image of risk-taking manliness that Audubon eventually embodied. The image began perhaps most explicitly with Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), the man who gained the coveted, albeit occasionally disputed, title of “Father of American Ornithology” some years before Audubon became famous. Beginning in 1808, Wilson published the first volumes of American Ornithology (1808-1814), the nine-volume collection of bird paintings and descriptions that defined the field until Audubon began producing The Birds of America over two decades later.

Wilson and Audubon famously, perhaps predictably, came to be cast as scientific rivals, but their parallel approaches to describing their work are of more immediate concern here. Wilson was, like Audubon, an immigrant to the United States, having arrived in 1794 from his native Scotland, where he had worked as a weaver and then as a political activist and commercially unsuccessful poet. Soon after coming to America, Wilson made the pursuit of birds his passion for almost twenty years, and as Audubon did later, he tended to describe the American naturalist’s work in rugged-sounding terms, portraying himself as man of science struggling against the physical rigors required in research. He wrote about it to his brother in 1810: “Since February, I have slept for several weeks in the wilderness alone, in an Indian country, with my guns and my pistols in my bosom, and have found myself so reduced by sickness, as to be scarcely able to stand.”

Wilson also described almost losing his life in the pursuit of a bird, a pied oyster-catcher, when he took to the water in pursuit of it at Cape May, New Jersey (fig 9).

He had wounded the bird with his gun, and as the bird tried to escape into the ocean, he plunged in after it—only to remember, too late, that he was still “encumbered with a gun and all my shooting apparatus.” As the ebb tide started carrying him farther away from the shore, Wilson had to choose between his own survival or his escaped specimen, and, almost reluctantly, he made his way back to the beach “with considerable mortification, and the total destruction of my powder-horn.” As if to mock him, the wounded oyster-catcher rose to the surface “and swam with great buoyancy out among the breakers.” Oyster-catchers are not especially menacing birds (except to oysters), but for Wilson, it was the pursuit of the bird, the pursuit of science, that mattered, and living in the woods or diving into the ocean was the only way Wilson would have it.

In language that Charles Wilkins Webber could well appreciate decades later, Wilson also complained of the tendency among naturalists to become too technical, to spend so much time separating birds into so many “Classes, Orders, Genera, Species, and Varieties” that the resulting complexity and disagreement had “proved a source of great perplexity” to ordinary people. One of the main reasons for this confusion, Wilson continued, was the failure, or perhaps refusal, of other naturalists to observe personally “the manners of the living birds, in their unconfined state, and in their native countries.” The naturalist had to get out into nature, into the woods or even the ocean, to see the birds and do good work.

Doing good work turned into bad health for Wilson, who suffered from stress and sickness, finally dying of dysentery in 1813. In death, he received a rugged-sounding eulogy from his Philadelphia friend and ally, George Ord, that would anticipate elements of Charles Wilkins Webber’s later celebration of Audubon as the Hunter-Naturalist. Ord described Wilson as an outdoor ornithologist, certainly “no closet philosopher—exchanging the frock of activity for the night-gown and slippers.” Wilson’s knowledge, Ord explained, came not from reading books about nature, “which err,” but from engaging nature itself, “which is infallible.” Though hardly as excessively strident or as aggressively masculine as Webber’s later praise for Audubon, Ord’s celebration of Wilson drew on some of the same elements—in this case, the contrast between the woodsman’s “frock of activity” and the more effeminate-sounding “night-gown and slippers,” between knowledge derived from the “unwearied research amongst forests, swamps, and morasses,” and the precious little one could learn in the library. Ord never devised a phrase quite as evocative as Webber’s “Hunter-Naturalist,” but it would have fit his depiction of Wilson quite well. As it was, Ord shared with Audubon a dismissive term for the other sort of naturalist, the much-despised “closet philosopher” or “closet-naturalist.”

No one pursued birds or science or, above all, the image of the manly naturalist more effectively or aggressively than Audubon himself. Never to be outdone by his ornithological rival Wilson, he told his own tale about pursuing a great horned owl so far into a swamp that he got “sunk in quicksand up to my armpits,” only to be rescued at the last minute by his companions. The story may or may not have been exactly accurate—many of his tales tended to be self-serving embellishments on the truth—but it had a purpose: “I have related this occurrence to you, kind reader,—and it is only one out of many—to shew you that every student of nature must encounter some difficulties in obtaining the objects of his research, although these difficulties are little thought of when he has succeeded.”

Audubon defined ornithology as manly work, and he liked to locate himself in the world of men, particularly the rugged hunters of the American frontier. Indeed, Audubon had his own story about how he once “happened to spend a night … under the same roof” with that true icon of frontier masculinity, Daniel Boone. “We had returned from a shooting excursion,” Audubon began, rather casually putting himself in company with Boone in the outdoors. Like a star-struck fan of a famous athlete, Audubon gushed not only about his hero’s skills with a gun, but about his physique: “The stature and general appearance of this wanderer of the western forests approached the gigantic. His chest was broad and prominent; his muscular powers displayed themselves in every limb; his countenance gave indication of his great courage, enterprise, and perseverance.” Boone declined to sleep in a bed, Audubon said, but “merely took off his hunting shirt, and arranged a few folds of blankets on the floor, choosing to lie there than on the softest bed.” And so the two men bedded down for the night—Audubon presumably in a bed, but Boone shirtless and on the floor—before resuming the hunt the following day.

Audubon’s Boone story was a good one, to be sure, but it was also a complete fiction: it never happened. Audubon did once write to Boone and ask to go hunting with him, in 1813, but Boone turned him down. Audubon was in his late twenties then, but Boone was almost eighty, and almost blind. They did not have a hunting date, but that never stopped Audubon from writing about one. And that underscores an important point: to read Audubon for the absolute truth is to miss his larger meaning. Audubon’s agenda, rather, was to create an effect—or an affectation—the image of the naturalist as a “wanderer of the western forests,” just as bold as Daniel Boone. If going shooting with Daniel Boone would make the point in print, then the story would work well enough.

Audubon tells one equally evocative tale in paint, in this case the Golden Eagle (fig. 10). We can deconstruct the image easily enough: the eagle rising into the sky above a rugged, mountainous landscape, crying out as it clutches a bloodied rabbit in its talons, the powerful predator with its now-deceased prey. And below, down on the log over the precipice, creeping along with a hatchet, a gun and a bird (probably a golden eagle) strapped to his back, we see the hunter-naturalist (probably a self-portrait of Audubon himself), vulnerable but brave, taking a risk in the wilderness, giving his all for ornithology (fig. 11).

The true story, however, is that Audubon didn’t capture the eagle in the wild, didn’t crawl over the precipice with his specimen. He bought it from a friend in Boston, a bird in a cage that cost fourteen dollars. Then he took it back to his hotel room, kept it in the cage for three days, and tried to kill it by covering the cage closely with a blanket, putting a pan of burning charcoal in the room, closing the door and windows tightly, and waiting for the eagle to die. It didn’t work. After a few hours, Audubon writes, he “opened the door, raised the blankets, and peeped under them amidst a mass of suffocating fumes.” There the eagle still stood, Audubon continues, “with his bright unflinching eye turned towards me, and as lively and vigorous as ever!” The next morning, to make the fumes even more toxic, Audubon added some sulfur to the smoldering charcoal, making the indoor environment a small-scale version of Hell itself, but again “the noble bird continued to stand erect, and to look defiance at us whenever we approached his post of martyrdom.” Finally, to finish off the defiant bird and to make the martyrdom complete, Audubon “thrust a long pointed piece of steel through his heart, when my proud prisoner instantly fell dead, without even ruffling a feather.”

It’s a bizarre story, something Poe might write if he were to venture into ornithological Gothic. But again, it’s not so much the accuracy of the written narrative that matters, at least not to Audubon. It’s the accuracy of the art and the accuracy of the science that matter, and the embellishments of the painting serve another purpose: to underscore the rigors of scientific research, the manly work of the American Woodsman.

In that regard, I want to close by trying to be fair to Audubon. No matter how often he might have stretched the truth about his own exploits and pulled the reader’s leg, either in print or in paint—and he did that much of the time—he came much closer to the truth when he turned to birds. He valued his status as a naturalist, and he craved credibility in the scientific community. Although his descriptions of birds could contain lively stories that a modern ornithologist might dismiss as unscientific fluff, he also took care to provide the kind of close observations about physical characteristics, habits, and habitat that still bear scientific scrutiny. The proof, of course, lay ultimately in the painting, where his detailed knowledge of birds became most evident. And no matter how he got the golden eagle, that’s a good and accurate painting of the bird.

And what about his picture of himself? Audubon was, like Alexander Wilson and Thomas Nuttall, an immigrant to the United States, and he may have posed, both in his paintings and in his own prose, as a rugged, outdoors naturalist in order to define his American-ness and underscore his sense of distance from his trans-Atlantic background. Still, it was not all pose alone. Even when taken at a discount for all their rhetorical excess, Audubon’s many tales of the rigors of art and science in America contained an element of truth, and they certainly had a larger rhetorical point: the alternative to taking risks in the name of nature, he warned, would be to risk becoming that most sedentary sort of scientist, the effete European “closet-naturalist.” It might be easy enough to rest in one’s armchair and read from a text and take the word of others, right or wrong; nothing, however, could take the place of “personal observation when it can be obtained,” of actually seeing the birds and counting the eggs, no matter what the personal challenges. To be anAmerican naturalist, then, meant taking a decidedly risky, even defiantly manly approach to the pursuit of science.

On that point, Audubon himself had unmistakably made his choice, both for his primary activity as a naturalist and for his personal identity as the “American Woodsman.” Anyone curious and courageous enough to study nature, he implied, could do the same. Perhaps more like an avuncular invitation than a chest-thumping challenge, Audubon’s direct call to the reader to get out of the chair and take to the forest still drew a clear distinction between those who would encounter nature out of doors or those would continue to sit inside and merely read about it. Facing dangers and dismal prospects of the “deepest recesses of the western forests”—hostile Indians, white-skinned murderers, snakes, vultures, and other menaces, real or imagined—defined the crucible of scientific credibility. “It is,” Audubon assured his reader, “the ‘American Woodsman’ that tells you so.”

Further reading

Audubon has always been good for the biography business. At least six Audubon biographies appeared in print in the twentieth century, the best of the lot being Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time, 2 vols. (New York, 1917); and Alice Ford, John James Audubon: A Biography (Norman, Oklahoma, 1964; 2^nd ed., New York, 1988). Earlier in this current century, three new Audubon biographies came into print: Duff Hart-Davis, Audubon’s Elephant: America’s Greatest Naturalist and the Making of The Birds of America (New York, 2004); William Souder, Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America (New York, 2004); and Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York, 2004). While I generally respect the research and the basic narrative of all these works, I think they sometimes become so concerned with the day-to-day developments in Audubon’s individual case that they fail to see many of the larger issues at stake. Too often, the authors go from looking at him to seeing the world through him, adopting his personal perspective and therefore losing a broader focus on the larger world he inhabited.

The history of American natural history seems to be on the rise of late. A generation or so ago, George H. Daniels’s American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York, 1968) did not even mention Audubon or Alexander Wilson, and Thomas Nuttall got only a brief biographical blurb. Thirty years later, however, an issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, 59: 2, 3 (1998), edited by Amy R. W. Meyers and devoted to “Art and Science in America: Issues of Representation,” brought together a collection of essays on the visual presentation of American natural history, most of them based on book-length studies then in progress. Similarly, Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730-1860, edited by Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia, 2003), offered a brief but useful introduction into the field. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006), has quickly become a standard work for the eighteenth century, and Andrew Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the early republic (Philadelphia, 2011) carries the investigation into the nineteenth century. Christopher Iannini’s forthcoming Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011) promises to be an important addition to the field.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.2 (January, 2012).

Gregory Nobles is a decent birder who is also professor of history at Georgia Tech, where he directs the university’s Honors Program. This essay was first presented at meetings of the British Group in Early American History (2010) and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (2011), and it will later be incorporated into a book, The Art and Science of John James Audubon: Bringing Nature to the Nation.

In Fatal Revolutions, Iannini connects the growth of the West Indian plantation as a new social and economic institution to the rise of natural history as a scientific and literary discourse and argues that these developments establish the conditions for the practice of letters in the eighteenth-century Americas (3). The first part of this study examines the primacy of the West Indies in the emergent literary and scientific practices of natural history in the Atlantic world. Early natural histories by Hans Sloane and Mark Catesby not only circulate knowledge about the colonies but also raise complex questions about the “moral significance of colonial slavery,” about the geographical bounds of the Caribbean region, and about the possibility of improving its climate through plantation-style agriculture (9). In part two, Iannini demonstrates that this Caribbean-centered natural history lays the groundwork for the articulation of new political and social identities in late colonial North America and the early United States. Crèvecoeur, William Bartram, Jefferson, and Audubon appropriate the “ideological assumptions, discursive conventions, and representational techniques” of earlier Caribbean natural histories to debate the implications of plantation slavery for a nation ostensibly committed to equality. Iannini concludes that these later writers remove the Caribbean from its privileged place within natural history and replace it with North America to argue that the continent’s natural abundance will fuel a “planetary future of republican liberty” (16).

In the first chapter, Iannini draws on the work of art historian Kay Dian Kriz to argue that Sloane’s formally sophisticated and lavishly printed Voyage to … Jamaica (1707-1725) revived early modern techniques of representation to present the ‘”specimen-as-emblem”‘ (26). Sloane connected the objects he examined to larger spiritual or social contexts using a combination of visual cues and supporting text. Readers interpreted Sloane’s engravings and drawings by consulting the image’s label, the index, and descriptive sections, with the goal of locating the objects’ “hidden providential or socioethical significance” (7). Thus, as people read Voyage to … Jamaica, they not only analyzed objects from the Caribbean but also considered the contexts of plantation slavery and agricultural transformation in which these objects originated, and they contemplated their own roles as consumers in global commercial networks. Natural histories did not, as the now standard account holds, efface the contexts in which collectors and readers encountered objects. Instead, the specimen-as-emblem represented the new relationships that global commerce created among objects, merchants, and consumers and between planters and enslaved Africans.

Iannini shows that Sloane employed emblems to address the challenges posed by new West Indian commercial objects, from Africans who were valued as chattel slaves to specimens of natural knowledge such as sugar cane that were also important commodities. Formal experimentation—mixing narrative with description—and complex emblematic representations—combining human and natural objects—allowed Sloane to evoke the histories in which objects obtained their meaning and value. Iannini examines, for example, the engraving of “Land Crab and Pot Shards Found in a Cave,” which juxtaposes natural and human artifacts. By consulting the printed labels, index, and catalog descriptions for each object, a reader would discover that Africans employed both crabs and fragments of pottery as sustenance or as storage for food, respectively. Moreover, both objects reference a history of “mass death”—the crabs can poison eaters if not properly prepared, the potsherd originally held bones (66). The objects’ meanings attest to the consequences of colonialism and of slavery by linking the accumulation of specimens with mortality.

In the Natural History of Carolina (1731-43), the focus of Iannini’s second chapter, Mark Catesby adopted Sloane’s emblematic techniques but employed them to represent environmental relationships and to consider the consequences of North American planters’ decisions to import West Indian flora, fauna, and agricultural practices. Catesby offered “contradictory hypotheses” about these consequences by suggesting that Caribbean knowledge and organisms had the capacity both to create a “global garden” and to result in a “barbaric natural environment characterized by upheaval and violence” (80). As Catesby and other North American intellectuals contemplated the extension of West Indian slave plantations into British America, they admitted that knowledge of Caribbean natural history would allow them to claim an identity as enlightened. They acknowledged as well that Caribbean influences threatened to corrupt this identity with desires for luxury and profit rather than for increased knowledge.

Sloane and Catesby’s emblematic techniques, as well as the threats of violence and degeneration referenced by these techniques, penetrated the writings of late colonial North America and the early American republic. Not every writer considered in part two of Fatal Revolutions employed the specimen-as-emblem. Yet, all engaged Caribbean natural history and addressed the influence of plantation slavery and agricultural techniques—forms of commerce and labor seemingly at odds with republicanism. In chapter three, Iannini explains that Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s writings, especially his “Sketches of Jamaica and Bermudas and Other Subjects” (not published in English until 1995), question whether North Americans could participate in commercial exchanges with the West Indies without being corrupted by opulence and luxury. In Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), the underlying threats of degeneration and insurrection that result from Caribbean commerce are made clear when Farmer James’s examination of the South Carolinian landscape results in the discovery of violence: a slave left to die in a cage. Iannini also reads the Letters in the context of the failed museum and unpublished natural history of Crèvecoeur’s fellow member of the American Philosophical Society, Pierre Eugène du Simitière. For both men, the natural history specimen continued to offer a framework through which to contemplate West Indian slavery. Chapter four argues that William Bartram’s writings, particularly his major published work, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1791), and the draft manuscript of the Travels also respond to the threat of tropical corruption in North America. Bartram sought to show that his failure to found a rice plantation was not the result of his degeneration or ineptitude. He argued for the value of his experiences in Florida by giving flora and fauna spiritual significance, in this way making specimens stand in for the profit he had hoped to make on the plantation.

Iannini concludes by demonstrating that Thomas Jefferson and John Audubon employed the strategies of natural history to respond to the epistemological and political crises posed by the Haitian Revolution. Chapter five shows that Jefferson cultivated exchanges of knowledge and specimens with planters in the West Indies, despite his concurrent investment in the image of the self-sufficient American yeoman farmer. Iannini argues that Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) engages not just in transatlantic debates about the status of Anglo-American minds and bodies but also in hemispheric debates about slavery. Jefferson later revised his statements on slavery and African intelligence in the Notes in his correspondence with West Indian planters and natural historians; he ultimately argued that the West Indian climate differentiated the region from North America and made the Caribbean ideally suited for Africans. In chapter six, Iannini analyzes how Audubon reflected upon the Haitian Revolution and the social and cultural disruption it caused in The Birds of America (1827-38) and in two posthumously published works, “Myself” (1893), and the Mississippi River Journal (written 1820-21). In these works, Audubon attempted to employ the strategies of natural history to restore order in both natural and social contexts.

These four writers’ engagement with the Caribbean is evidenced not only in the content of their published work and letters but also, as Iannini shows, in their discarded or unpublished manuscripts that represented exchanges between the United States and the West Indies. As these forgotten texts show, writers on the continent were not simply fascinated with the West Indies as an exotic, tropical space but depended on epistolary, scientific, and trade relations with planters and fellow natural historians in the Caribbean. The discarded manuscripts not only manifest writers’ concerns about various factors, such as copyright law and publication costs, but also attest to their disavowal of connections to the Caribbean in order to define North America as a distinct geographical and cultural entity. As Iannini shows, late colonial and early republican writers’ engagement with West Indian specimens, patrons, and institutions created a “circumatlantic world of letters” (30), one that produced a “strange, new account of enlightened modernity” in which the Caribbean was present only as traces (32).

At stake in this new “enlightened modernity” was, of course, the agency of enslaved Africans, as displayed in insurrections, and the question of whether such agency could be included in narratives of U.S. revolutions and republicanism (32). While many early national writers processed their encounters with African resistance and knowledge by contemplating the effects that plantation slavery had upon human beings, their natural histories also suppressed these forms of agency by figuring enslaved peoples and revolutions as objects of study. For example, du Simitière collected objects from Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica (which began on Easter Sunday, 1760, not in August 1761, as Iannini has it) in order to question African humanity. In his Travels, Bartram aligned slave agency with “predatory deception [and] secret mobility” he observed in nature, particularly in the sink holes that led to subterranean lakes impenetrable to observation (210). These natural features paralleled slaves’ ability to maintain secret connections and mobility invisible to planters.

Iannini’s consideration throughout Fatal Revolutions of how colonial and early national writers subsumed African agency raises the question of whether the form that natural history takes in Iannini’s account forecloses a more sustained engagement with specific elements of and uses for African practices and knowledge. For example, Iannini argues convincingly that Sloane’s natural history stumbles over the fact that Africans were both objects and sources of knowledge from the Caribbean. But Sloane seems peculiarly disinclined to acknowledge the contributions of enslaved Africans, compared to other planters and natural historians. To take just two examples, Henry Barham, who contributed to Sloane’s natural history and whose botanical manuscript circulated widely before it was published in 1794, frequently cited his slaves’ knowledge of plants with which he was unfamiliar; similarly, James Grainger presented Africans’ medical knowledge as useful for planters in his 1764 georgic poem The Sugar-Cane. Iannini suggests that Sloane viewed African healers as competitors and their “inverted double,” the obeah man, who allegedly put spells on fellow slaves and poisoned colonists, as a threat to order on plantations (47). But obeah men both healed and poisoned; the same man could assume both responsibilities. The obeah man was thus less the “inverted double” of the African healer than his complement, and many planters and natural historians acknowledged that obeah men possessed useful medical knowledge. Do the emblematic techniques employed by Sloane and the other writers studied in Fatal Revolutions reduce African knowledge to a healer-poisoner binary? What was it about natural historians such as Sloane and Jefferson that made them so hesitant to acknowledge African assistance and knowledge, especially when their colleagues did so more readily? As these questions indicate, Fatal Revolutions offers an exciting new perspective not only on Caribbean natural histories but also on the literatures of the early American republic, one that will no doubt shape the ways in which scholars analyze natural histories and American prose more generally.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.1.5 (November, 2012).

Kelly Wisecup is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Texas. Her articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, and The Southern Literary Journal. Her book, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press.

Students re-create New England history

Beverly High School’s “Primary Research Through the History of Beverly” class was discussing the Industrial Revolution’s impact on the early nineteenth-century New England farmer. Our focus turned to stone walls, a ubiquitous reminder of the past in New England. In the woods and parks of New England, stone walls serve as a palimpsest of what was once an agricultural landscape. Students were amazed to learn that there are far more trees in Massachusetts today than there were one hundred and fifty years ago. This discussion generated some interesting questions. One student asked if stone walls were made to mark the boundaries of the farms or were they built to keep in livestock? Another wondered if the form of the stone wall had any relation to its agricultural function. These original questions generated a myriad of others leading to a semester-long research project, culminating in a group effort to build a stone wall on the grounds of our high school.

To answer these initial questions, we studied the history of New England stone walls. We learned that they typically enclosed cemeteries, pastures, farms, and animal pounds. We had never before heard of a “fence viewer,” whose job was, according to state law, to monitor all fences in the community for proper condition and height. The measurement of stone walls was particularly fascinating: in colonial Massachusetts, all fences were required to be measured in units of “chains” or “perches.” The term chain originated from the surveying invention of Englishman Edmond Gunther in 1620. Gunther’s chain is a predecessor of the tape measure. The chain was sixty-six feet long, consisting of one hundred links measuring approximately 7.92 inches apiece. Many modern-day units of measure, including furlongs, acres, and miles, are based on Gunther’s sixty-six-foot chain.

Robert Thorson’s Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls (2002) identifies the “golden age” of stone walls in New England as between 1775 and 1825. We tested Thorson’s theory by measuring the growth of lichen. Although there are environmental variables that make this dating technique less than perfect, it has proven to be relatively effective. Foliose and crustose lichens (found commonly in New England) grow at fairly predictable rates. For example, crustose lichens grow at a rate of one millimeter per year. By measuring from the center of the lichen to the edge, students could guess the age of the wall. To check the accuracy of their hypotheses, they measured similar lichens on nearby colonial gravestones and checked the estimated date against the date on the front of the stone. This proved the lichen-dating technique (or “lichenometry”) to be reasonably accurate.

Inspired by their readings and by in-class discussions, the class wondered what it would be like to actually build a stone wall. With the help of our enthusiastic principal, Dr. Carla Scuzzarella, who gave us permission to use a location near the front of the high school, we determined the shape and length of the wall. To measure, we made our own Gunther’s chain. Based on the length of our proposed wall (a half chain, or thirty-three feet), we then determined how much stone we needed. As there was no funding for the project, we began searching for a construction company or quarry that would be willing to help. Lillian, one of our students, made dozens of calls to local stone sources. Her diligence was rewarded by Margaret McGinnis of nearby Bevenento Sand and Stone. The company donated over thirty tons of stone and peastone gravel for the project.

We began with only a rudimentary idea of how to build the wall. We turned to Kevin Gardner, the author of The Granite Kiss: Traditions and Techniques of Building New England Stone Walls (2001), for professional guidance. Soon after learning about our project he offered to visit the class. Our students were thrilled that the author of one of their textbooks would show up to offer his expertise. Gardner is an author, teacher, public-radio producer, and most importantly to us, a stone-wall builder.

Kevin used small stones on a table to demonstrate wall building techniques. Students then created their own tabletop stone walls. He is a masterful teacher who so excited the students that they asked him to go outside in the rain with them to view our stones and plan a design. We had planned a thirty-three-foot, semi-circular double wall approximately three-and-a-half feet high (fourteen links on a Gunther’s chain). Kevin suggested that we start from a center point and begin to sort the stones by size and function.

Using a wheelbarrow and dolly (as oxen and plows were unavailable), we began sorting the stones by size and function. We divided the stones into categories of footing stones, cap stones, building stones, corner stones, and rubble stones.

First we dug a trench following an outline drawn by building grounds supervisor Bill Bourque and filled it with peastone gravel. Then, keeping Gardner’s and Bourque’s advice in mind, we began building the wall. We slanted stones to the center for stability and laid one stone over two. We began the wall at both ends as well as the middle to ensure uniformity.

The construction began in October 2004 and was completed by the following summer. The members of the class—Lillian Barres, Justin Desrocher, Megan Nylund, David O’Brien, Sarah O’Shea, and Corey Schweitzer—should be commended for a Herculean effort. The construction of Carla’s Wall (named after our principal) was not the only unit in the course since these students spent hundreds of hours researching all aspects of Beverly’s rich history, including a wonderful class project on colonial gravestone carving.

In addition to class time, the construction of the wall took place before school, after school, on weekends, and on school vacations in all kinds of New England weather. Yet, these students never complained or deviated from their self-appointed goal. We also managed to have fun along the way. We visited Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” at his family farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and had the opportunity to meet author Robert Thorson after hearing him discuss his book one evening at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. Along with Kevin Gardner, Robert Thorson was an inspiration to the students and their project.

From these latter-day artisans and from their own labors, the students learned a variety of skills that helped shape them into intellectual decathletes. More importantly, they demonstrated an intellectual hunger and civic virtue that were rarely fueled by the roar of the crowd. They became quiet leaders who got the job done, always thinking of making their school and community a better place without any consideration of personal gain or recognition. The exemplary effort of these dedicated students, along with the support of enthusiastic and altruistic people such as Gardner, Thorson, Bourque, and Benevento Sand and Stone, shows what can be done with a lot of good will and a minimal budget.

We are planning a formal dedication ceremony of Carla’s Wall in May 2006. All are invited. For more details on the project, including student research papers and photos, visit http://www.primaryresearch.org/stonewalls.

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

W. Dean Eastman teaches history at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, and has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Disney American Teacher Award (1991), Harvard University’s Derek Bok Prize for Public Service (2000), and the Preserve America Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year Award (2004).

Kevin McGrath is a library teacher at Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts.

One of the most common printed images of the first half of the nineteenth century was also the one of the most derided—often, treacherously, in its own caption. Right under his woodcut of “The Anatomy”—the image of a male body linked to the signs of the zodiac that began most American almanacs—the almanac-maker David Young wrote sourly in 1848: “It is thought proper to notice in this place, that in this enlightened age of the world, people in general place no confidence in these signs, nor the prognostics of the weather.” In this, as he certainly knew himself, Young was wrong. “There are many men at the present age, so far behind the times,” complained another author, two years before Young’s Almanac “that if they have a tooth to pull, a vein to open, a pig or a calf to castrate, a patch of thistles to mow, a bunch of white birches or scrub oaks to cut down, or a dose of physic to swallow, the chapter of signs must be consulted, and their connection with the body, or the plant ascertained before anything can be done.” At least one of these men, as demonstrated in the margin of the second image on the left, was using my copy of Young’s almanac.

If by the 1840s the Anatomy and the columns of calendrical symbols to which it was keyed had been an embarrassment to American almanac makers for more than a hundred years, they nevertheless still stood as required elements of the agricultural Almanac, the most stable features of a famously volatile and various form. One reason for their persistence was their importance to the practices of “moon farming,” which used astrological information to mark time and schedule agricultural tasks. The astrological tables were, as such, as important as the other (more recognizably utilitarian) forms of information that almanacs provided—critical elements of these objects that rural Americans hung from hooks on the wall, whose ripped pages they repaired with careful stitches, and, as above, whose margins they marked with signs of their own.

To contemporary historians, the first pages of an almanac can be frustrating to work with. It’s tempting to skip to the later sections—rich, if confusing, collections of texts that mingle seasonal poetry, jokes about Irishmen, and stories of canny farmers, with helpful information about circuit court session dates and the “Use of Sulphuric Acid as a Manure.” The first pages, by contrast, consist of the Anatomy, some astronomical calculations, and a twelve-page calendar packed top to bottom with unfamiliar symbols. When students in my classes seem to be identifying too much with seemingly “modern” nineteenth-century farmers, a short almanac “problem set” quickly restores their sense that they’re dealing with a culture alien to them.

Some of this seeming impenetrability comes from our lack of familiarity with the night sky. The anatomy refers, on one level, to perfectly visible astronomical phenomena that were rather more reliable than nineteenth-century clockwork. For farmers, the signs of the zodiac retained their concrete physical meaning: the east-to-west procession of twelve constellations through which the sun and the moon and the planets seem to move, imprisoned in the flattened disk of the solar system. Where our modern newspaper horoscope tells us about our birthdate in terms of the sun’s place in this sequence, breaking the year into twelve months, nineteenth-century farmers were primarily interested in the faster circuits of the moon, which moves across the whole zodiac every twenty-eight days, spending about two days in most signs. Almost all almanac calendars devoted a column to this cycle, allowing readers to determine the sign of the moon when the moon and stars were hidden by daylight or by the rotation of the earth. The anatomy connected this macroscopic physical phenomenon to the smaller cosmos of the human body, linking each body part to a corresponding sign—the two arms to Gemini, the twins; the breast to Cancer, the Crab; the “secrets” to Scorpio, the scorpion.

But what did the signs and the phases of the moon mean to moon farmers in the 1840s? In the almanac we have the tools of moon farming, but explicit guidance for the everyday use of these tools had been stripped out of almanacs in the eighteenth century, as the reputation of astrology declined. Our clearest accounts of the changing oral tradition of nineteenth-century moon farming in fact come from its most voluble enemies, the self-consciously scientific “improving agriculturists” who controlled the agricultural journals, and who made attacks on moon farming a standard genre of agricultural journalism.

Several consistent sets of rules can be pieced together through these hostile sources. The first set followed the waning and waxing of the moon—usually described in the columns of the almanac by a moon face marking each quarter. Some described analogies between the increase and decrease of moonlight and increase and decrease of substance on earth; thus, for example, pork cured in the light of the waning moon would itself dwindle to nothing. Others connected darkness to subterranean activity, and light to activity above ground. Potatoes, beets, and turnips should be planted in the old or declining moon; oats, corn, and wheat planted in the old moon would produce “roots, and no stalk, or seed.”

The second set of rules followed the anatomy itself, and relied on analogies between the plants and animals of the farm, and the human body. The moon’s presence in each sign, it was argued, brought an effusion of blood to the corresponding organ in the anatomy. Physicians had to avoid operating on these flooded organs to avoid hemorrhage; manipulating nonhuman bodies, farmers had to take similar issues into account. For example, when the moon passed into Leo, a sign keyed to the heart, farmers knew that cutting trees and vines would be satisfactorily deadly, but on the other hand, “wo be to the unlucky calf or colt, that happened to undergo castration when the sign indicated the forbidden region [Scorpio]” Other sign rules were less clearly medical. When the moon was in Virgo, “sometimes called the Posey Girl,” a committee investigating “Lunar influence in Agriculture” in the Southern Planter, reported disapprovingly and disbelievingly, “everything then sown or planted, will expend all its energy in blossoms on account of that girl’s propensity for flowers.”

Relatively simple, these rules are the ones I use in my classes, the easiest to grasp for both undergraduates and anti-moon-farming reformers. However, it’s clear from a few references that other rules surrounded other kinds of calendrical information. For example, the ascending and descending nodes of the moon (also known as the dragon’s head, and the dragon’s tail)—that is, its movement north and south of the path of the sun, and the direction of the moon’s horns, as well as the exact clock time of the full and new moon—were certainly used to make the weather predictions that some almanacs included and others left to their readers. Agricultural improvers rarely touch on these matters. Perhaps these rules were less commonly used, or artifacts of older practice; perhaps they were merely too complex for improvers interested only in superficial dismissal. It is possible, indeed, that much of the uniformity of accounts of moon farming came not from a still unified moon-farming culture but instead from the echo-chamber of anti-moon-farming rhetoric, bounced from exchange column to exchange column in the nation’s agricultural journals.

It is easy to look at the Anatomy and see unchanging tradition, perhaps even active resistance to modernity and the market. The Man of Signs, after all, reaches back to at least 1300, and some of the rules of moon farming can be traced back to classical authors, Pliny in particular. Improving farmers assiduously created this impression. Moon farmers, described as slaves of a tyrannical “Ancient Astrology,” fit well into a broader improving narrative of a battle against superstition. Complaints about moon farmers merged seamlessly into an even more common trope—that of the bull-headed, “plow-jogging” neighbor, mindlessly adhering to old ways in the face of the new kinds of empirical evidence.

Bucking narrative convenience, however, almanacs and moon farmers regularly incorporated new scientific knowledge. Young’s Almanac of 1848 took into account not only the heliocentric universe, introduced to American almanacs in the mid-eighteenth century, but also the motions of a new planet called “Herschel” that had only been known since its discovery by William Herschel in 1781 (later to be renamed Uranus). Perhaps more importantly, even as improvers cast moon farmers as the enemies of improvement, moon farmers were improvising rules to govern improvers’ most prized scientific practices: growing fertilizing crops like clover and employing soil amendments like plaster of Paris. One improving lecturer complained that his moon-farming neighbors refused to allow cattle “to run on clover plastered during the full moon” since, “they will certainly burst, in consequence of the extending principle imparted to the elements of vegetation at this critical phase.” It is perhaps worth noticing that improvers and moon farmers, like modern veterinarians, recognized the tendency of cattle suddenly to inflate, a sometimes fatal malady cured then and now by a sharp three pointed knife stabbed into the fourth stomach, releasing trapped gas, which could be lit by a candle as it escaped. (Cattle really are more interesting than they look.)

According to improvers’ accounts, moreover, moon-farming neighbors defended their terrain with a market-oriented language of yields and profits. As new techniques emerged in the commercializing agriculture of the nineteenth century, moon farming extended to include them. Indeed, this blending of old and new methods was supported by improvers themselves, who, lured both by almanacs’ profitability and by their broad audience, themselves printed almanacs, complete with anatomy, signs, disclaimer, and instructions in improving practices, and advertisements for the Cultivator or the American Agriculturists.

Though I’ve been collecting rules and hints for several years, I don’t yet understand the cosmos that nineteenth-century almanacs describe. Indeed, I am sure that that cosmos, if it was even unified enough to call a cosmos, is no longer knowable, given the many prisms through which it has been refracted and distorted. However, assembling an imperfect picture of moon-farming practice, using rules learned from moon farming’s enemies, reaffirms that the dichotomy between “modern” and “traditional,” which has remained stubbornly evident in historians’ writing about rural Americans, wavers on closer inspection, even when looking at the Man of Signs.

Further Reading:

The (still-useful) classic account of American almanacs is Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York, 1977). For a rich account of the incorporation of new science into the eighteenth-century almanac, see Sarah Gronim, Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York (Camden, N.J., 2007). Maureen Perkins explores the parallel transformation of the almanac form in Great Britain in Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change, 1777-1870, (Oxford, 1996). Thomas Horrocks gives a broader picture of the use of almanacs in medicine in early America in Thomas A. Horrocks, Popular Print and Popular Medicine: Almanacs and Health Advice in Early America (Amherst, Mass., 2008).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

Emily Pawley is assistant professor of history at Dickinson College. She is currently finishing a book on agricultural knowledge in the nineteenth century.

Part I

The farm staff at Plimoth Plantation agonized over what to do. A main attraction of the living history museum is its assortment of heritage animals–cows, goats, and pigs painstakingly bred to resemble their seventeenth-century ancestors. But the rapid spread of foot-and-mouth disease among cloven-hoofed animals across the Atlantic presented a terrible threat. At the start of the English outbreak in February 2001, a dozen farms a day were reported to be infected; soon the number climbed to fifty. Up to ten percent of the visitors to Plimoth Plantation come from Great Britain, and many of them arrive within a day or two of landing at Boston’s Logan International Airport. The aphthovirus that caused the disease can live for thirty days and can be spread through the air–a sneeze will do the job nicely–or tracked in on shoes. When members of the plantation staff considered their situation in light of the ironclad agricultural policy in force both in the United States and in England, which calls for eradicating livestock known to have been exposed to foot-and-mouth, few options presented themselves. So in late March, just days before Plimoth Plantation’s village of 1627 was to come to life for the 2001 season, the museum’s 130 head of livestock were rounded up and removed to a modern breeding barn at the back of the property. Over the next few weeks, many of the animals were transported to foster farms in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, where they would remain safely tucked away until the threat had abated.

A few hundred miles to the south, the granddaddy of living history museums was in a similar quandary. Colonial Williamsburg, which is modeled on life in Virginia during the decade leading up to the American Revolution, is a community with full-time inhabitants who need to come and go at will. Its cows, sheep, and horses are fenced in, but they often greet visitors. Colonial Williamsburg’s overseers decided there was no practical way to control contact between animals and people, and they held their collective breath. Much the same strategy prevailed at Old Sturbridge Village, which depicts life in an agrarian community of 1830. The village, in Massachusetts just north of the Connecticut border, has two farms, one typical of a family of middling means and another representing the circumstances of a wealthy landowner. Over the years, the museum has moved toward providing a hands-on experience with the animals, and some visitors have even watched its ewes give birth to their young. “This year, with foot-and-mouth, we asked them not to touch the animals,” explained Rich Pavlick, who serves as project coordinator for agriculture. “Ninety-nine percent of the visitors were very understanding. One or two people were a little bit annoyed.”

Was the hand wringing really necessary? It is hard to argue the fears were misplaced. In the last quarter century, heritage animal breeding has transformed living history museums and challenged both the public and historians to reconsider colonial Americans’ animal world.

Part II   No such thing as overkill

Although foot-and-mouth disease has remained common in large regions of the world, last year’s outbreak in England presented the significant possibility that the virus would reach these shores. And those familiar with several decades of efforts to save heritage breeds from extinction would aver that no amount of caution–especially in the museums that have been in the forefront of the movement–could be called overkill. Indeed, in certain circles, talk of the Wiltshire sheep, with its gracious, curved horns, or the Milking Red Devon cow, with its deep color and gentle nature, is just as passionate as wildlife advocates’ discussions of the peregrine falcon or the snow leopard. Farmers, scientists, historians, educators, and conservationists are banding together in the campaign to preserve as many as one hundred breeds of domesticated animals that were once as common as corn in August but are now perilously close to disappearing from our world.

The extent of what was at stake when foot-and-mouth emerged this past spring can be taken as a testament to the preservationists’ success. As recently as the mid-1980s, when Plimoth embarked on its quest for animals that would reflect the qualities of their colonial counterparts, there was a fair share of skepticism about saving rare breeds. Yet today it is acknowledged that the accomplishments of the conservationists and their colleagues in the labs could be important to the safety of commercial livestock. In many instances, the gene pools of cattle, pigs, and sheep have been diminished as farmers have bred their stock with the sole aim of increasing productivity. This has resulted in compromised immune systems. If a commercial breed were to be hit by a devastating epizootic disease, the genes of a hardy rare breed could be used to help re-establish the immunity of a commercial one. At the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, scientists are looking into establishing a repository to hold semen, embryos, and cells for future studies. “I want enough genetic diversity in the library so that a whole breed could be revived at the same time,” said Dr. George Saperstein, a livestock veterinarian.

When Plimoth launched its search for breed documentation in 1986, researchers found little to work with; early settlers had left few specifics behind about the livestock that accompanied them from England and the Netherlands. What did exist were sketches in documents concerning the “division of cattle” in May of 1627, which ended the colony’s holding of livestock in common. The animals were described as “two black cows, a red cow, a white backt cow and four black heifers.” The Kerry cow, an ancient English dairy breed, and the Milking Red Devon were tapped to represent their black and red forebears. The plantation’s staff found that the Kerry was a near match for a black cow described by seventeenth-century British livestock authority Gervase Markham, who wrote that it had “hair like velvet, large white horns with black tips,” and added, “They are of stately shape, bigge, round, and well buckled together in every member, short joynted, and most comely to the eyes.” Sheep and hogs presented an even bigger challenge. The Wiltshire Horn sheep of colonial days was smaller and hardier than the modern type, which has been developed as a hefty meat producer with little or no fleece. Getting the right look, or phenotype, meant using more than one breed. The farming staff crossed the Wiltshire with the Dorset Horn, a small breed with a heavy wool coat. On the swine front, the Tamworth hog, a reddish-colored lean and hardy forager, was crossed with a European boar to produce the Iron-Age pig, which is covered in coarse hair and is one-third the size of its normal domestic counterpart. While farm records of the period contain little information about goats, they were a primary source of milk and meat for early settlers. To represent this tough little animal, Plimoth has imported and bred the Arapawa Island goat of New Zealand, an endangered breed that most closely resembles the now extinct Old English Milch goat.

But Plimoth wanted its breeding program to be more than fleece deep. “In our quest for the most accurate recreation of a seventeenth-century type,” the farm staff wrote in 1993, “we must not lose sight of the importance of maintaining the genetic material found in these older breeds.” There is little question that the Kerry and Milking Red Devon were–and still are–in dire need of saving. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, a nonprofit group that strives to protect historic lines from extinction, rates each as “critical,” with fewer than two thousand animals alive. The sheep are better off–but not by much. The Wiltshire is termed “rare,” with fewer than five thousand in existence, and the Dorset, with twice as many alive, is in the “watch” category. As a result, the farm staff has devised a program in which the two breeds are crossed for looks and also are maintained independently in order to preserve their genotype. The same is true of the “rare” Tamworth pig and the European boar.

Plimoth’s program aggressively attempts to marry historical accuracy with the concerns of preservation. Other institutions have chosen simpler paths. Although Colonial Williamsburg has had domesticated animals since its founding in 1926, farm manager Elaine Shirley said the museum did not worry much about whether the animals were close cousins to their ancestors. When Williamsburg launched its rare breed program sixteen years ago, it had one thing in mind: preserving genetic diversity. In focusing on genotype, rather than phenotype, it managed, rather serendipitously, to introduce more historically accurate breeds into its population.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the breeding of livestock was dramatically changed by Robert Bakewell, an English agriculturist. Until then, livestock was either of a type common to a region or of no particular description at all. Bakewell bucked a taboo and inbred a type of sheep found in Leicestershire to accentuate certain desirable characteristics. In doing so, he hit upon the fastest way to livestock improvement and created the method of developing bloodlines that is still in use today. Bakewell bred what came to be known as the Leicester Longwool, a sheep with a barrel-shaped body, a thick coat, and high-quality meat. He went on to breed cattle and horses, and his schemes were widely publicized in English journals. Gentleman farmers in America who pored over those publications were intrigued. George Washington was among them, and he is known to have imported his own flock of Leicester Longwools. When Williamsburg launched its rare breed program, the Leicester Longwool had become extinct in this country. Once its greatest attribute, the Leicester’s long wool became its downfall. The fleece, greatly valued for hand spinning, did not work well in mechanized textile mills. At the same time, farmers raising sheep for meat began to favor well-muscled breeds that were smaller. They crossed the longwools with the smaller sheep to get a somewhat larger frame and in the process diluted the breed out of existence. Richard Nicoll, Williamsburg’s director of coach and livestock, took an interest in the Longwool, and the museum imported its original herd from Tasmania. Along with the Longwools, its program now features American Cream Draft and Canadian horses, American Milking Red Devons, and four types of chickens: Dorking, Dominique, Hamburg, and English Game Fowl.

Old Sturbridge Village, for its part, has stuck with its plan to breed animals back to the correct phenotype, rather than engage in a program that would focus on genotype. The strategy was intended to recreate the appearance of early American livestock, as opposed to increasing the number of animals whose genes matched those of rare breeds. A museum publication details nearly forty years of work, noting that cattle belonging to a typical farmer were of no identifiable breed and tended to be “red with middle-sized horns, a mixture of all breeds introduced in the colonial era.” The farm staff has crossbred Milking Red Devon, Shorthorn, Ayrshire, Guernsey, Hereford, and Lineback lines to arrive at what was once referred to as “native” cattle. In reading an article called “Barnyard Dynamics” from two decades ago, I got the impression that back breeding occasionally meant revisiting the personalities of these hardy, independent mongrels. “Some cattle are sold because they have undesirable traits,” the writer recounted. “Ruby disliked anyone with a long dress, Village milkmaids included, of course. Hannah was the athletic type who jumped fences. She was put into a jumping yoke designed to catch on the fence before the cow leaped. She jumped again, and this time took down the entire fence. She was sold soon after.”

Like Plimoth, Sturbridge has recreated the common sheep of its era by crossing the Wiltshire with the Dorset. But Salem Towne, a gentleman farmer of the early nineteenth century, whose lifestyle is depicted at the village, had little interest in such a flock. He was a progressive in his field and he kept a large herd of Merinos, which were first imported to America in 1793. A Spanish breed, the Merino had particularly fine fleece that was in great demand in the emerging New England textile industry. Because the modern type is larger and has a much heavier coat, the farm staff looked for a primitive counterpart with bare legs and dark, coarse wool; a feral breed native to Florida provided many of the unimproved Merino’s traits and was brought north.

Part III   Small farm, bay view

The large museums have the advantage of deep pockets, which allow them to replicate their time periods in grand fashion, not only through their breeding programs, but also through their buildings, furnishings, equipment, and interpretive staff. Yet small museums, too, are raising heritage breeds, and in some ways may come closer to capturing the ambiance of life on an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century farm. Tiny Coggeshall Farm in Bristol, R.I., raises Milking Red Devons, Wiltshires, and a handful of Dominique chickens, along with several “dunghill fowl,” as poultry of mixed breed were known. A short history of the museum explains, “The Coggeshall family began renting the farm in the 1830s, when Wilbur and Eliza came there to live. They were both descendants of John Coggeshall, a contemporary of Roger Williams and the first president of the Rhode Island colony. They had twelve children, some of whom lived on the farm into the twentieth century.” The farm actually represents the years predating the Coggeshalls’ arrival. Set next to Colt State Park, the forty-acre spread seems isolated, although it is not far from the main road leading into town. As I approached, I had a sense of what rural life in the Revolutionary era might have looked like. The farm is bounded on three sides by stone walls and woodland. It sits on a rise and offers a glorious view of Mill Gut, with the white-capped waters of Narragansett Bay beyond it. The day was blustery, and Luis Mendes, his red wool cap pulled down over his ears, could be seen in the distance herding five Red Devons. The sun reflected off the lustrous coats of these majestic animals as they came across a pasture enclosed by hand-split post-and-rail fencing.

Mendes has been Coggeshall’s historical interpreter for eight years, explaining to school groups and other occasional visitors that the animals provided food, fiber, and labor and were essential to a family’s existence. He and Walter Katkevich, the museum’s director, maintain the farm and carry on the breeding program. Mendes knows how to artificially inseminate the cows. “The semen comes on the Greyhound,” he remarked. The day I was at Coggeshall, thirteen sheep were in residence, mostly proud-looking Wiltshires. Several reposed beside a pen, while others peered out from between the slats. Mendes said that he and Katkevich were planning to part with either their bull calf or a steer and four or five of the sheep. I asked if the animals would be slaughtered. “I’m a vegetarian, so it makes it a little tricky,” he replied. Living history museums often find homes for the animals they cull from their herds, or they send them to petting zoos. But some are not appropriate for those situations. Ever wonder where your favorite gourmet restaurant got that delicious bit of chicken, beef, or lamb? It just might have been from a Dominique, Shorthorn, or Wiltshire.

Coggeshall also has two Guinea hogs, huge creatures with pointed ears and bristly hair. Once considered excellent for lard, they later fell out of favor, and the breed is now endangered. As his charges alternately snoozed and snorted in their specially built shed, Katkevich made note of their docile nature, but said he doubted that the farm had Guinea hogs two hundred years ago. They were brought over on slave ships and sent to the South. Bristol was a leading port for the slave trade, and Katkevich figured the hogs would show the town’s connection to that enterprise. Along with the original small red house, the farm now has two barns, a sheep pen, and several sheds. “We’re not trying to re-create an eighteenth-century farm. We represent a farm,” Katkevich said, noting that in the old days, there would have been one barn, if that, and a lean-to for the pigs. The sheep would have shared a pen with the cattle. Of course, all museums, large and small, would incur the wrath of the public–and perhaps feel the long arm of the law–if they attempted to keep animals in the exact conditions in which they existed two hundred or more years ago. Katkevich pointed out that back then, people lived with pain and early death, and livestock served a practical purpose. They were treated in ways that could not–and should not–be replicated for the sake of historical accuracy. “The oxen would die of overwork,” Katkevich said. “To be sentimental about your cattle was not realistic.”

In the colonies of the seventeenth century, domesticated animals mostly fended for themselves. They roamed free, and crops were fenced off. Calves and sheep were often picked off by wolves, though hogs were good runners, able to survive encounters with bears and rattlesnakes. As Percy Bidwell and John Falconer pointed out in their History of Agriculture in the Northern United States 1620-1860, “With such care the New England cattle early acquired through a vigorous process of natural selection a reputation for tough vitality.” Despite the harsh conditions, the numbers of livestock steadily increased, and the settlers devised a system whereby the animals grazed on common fields in the winter and early spring. When crops were in the ground, they were pastured outside of the village and tended by herders, while the working oxen, horses, and milk cows were kept nearby. Howard S. Russell, who traced three centuries of New England farming in his book A Long, Deep Furrow, noted that by the mid-1630s the town of Cambridge had set each Thursday as market day, when produce and animals were for sale. “For several years after 1635 farmers did very well, and when Stephen Daye set up his Cambridge printing press, the first booklet printed (1639) was that useful agricultural item, an almanac,” Russell wrote. Still, the farmers did little to improve conditions through the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Fences were put up, but shelter and feed were lacking; during the harsh winters, snow would pile high on the animals’ backs. Oxen were used for plowing and hauling, but as they got older and slowed down, they were fattened and slaughtered for meat. During this time, farmers began to raise more sheep, in part because of government incentives seeking to reduce dependence on costly imported wool. Russell noted that in an effort to protect flocks, bounties were placed on wolves, and a dog that killed a sheep was treated as a murderer and hanged.

Even as colonists moved to protect their animals and develop markets, American Indians were finding their lives drastically altered by the introduction of cattle, pigs, and sheep into their environment. Indians subsisted according to the dictates of the season, hunting deer, moose, and beaver in the fall and winter. An Indian claimed to own an animal only at the moment it was killed. Colonists, on the other hand, took ownership of their animals and exerted total control over their lives. William Cronon, in his book Changes in the Land, wrote that the keeping of animals, combined with the raising of crops, drastically changed the New England landscape, and thus how Indians were able to live. The miles of fencing that farmers used to keep livestock from eating crops became the symbol for property ownership–and the English rationale for taking Indian lands. Moreover, the use of oxen to plow fields allowed colonists to convert acre upon acre to farmland. A system of roads cut through the countryside to bring produce to market.

It was not only the land that livestock affected. The ravenous appetites and ravages of swine, which reproduce rapidly and in great numbers, soon constituted a nuisance–and a danger–to the colonists, who exiled them to distant locations, often coastal areas and offshore islands. The animals wreaked havoc on oyster banks and other Indian shellfish gathering sites. They are said to have watched for the low water, as Indian women did, and competed directly with them for food. “Pigs thus became both the agents and the emblems for a European colonialism that was systematically reorganizing Indian ecological relationships,” Cronon wrote.

As colonists’ settlements grew, putting pressure on the ecosystem, Indians were forced to adjust to a different way of life. The white-tailed deer they had used for food and clothing largely disappeared, threatened by changes in habitat and competition from domestic animals. Cronon wrote that Indians were thus forced to live in “fixed locations on a more permanent basis. Earlier subsistence practices, which had depended on seasonal dispersal, were gradually being abandoned, with important ecological effects.” Living more closely together for longer periods of time put even greater pressure on their hunting and planting areas and encouraged the spread of infectious diseases, which were to soon take a devastating toll on their population. Alfred W. Crosby, in his 1986 book, Ecological Imperialism, summed up the situation this way: “If the Europeans had arrived in the new world . . . with twentieth-century technology in hand, but no animals, they would not have made as great a change as they did by arriving with horses, cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, asses, chickens, cats, and so forth. Because these animals are self-replicators, the efficiency and speed with which they can alter environments, even continental environments, are superior to those for any machine we have thus far devised.”

Along with their capacity for rapid reproduction, the animals arriving from Europe carried with them a variety of diseases and pests. A distemper of some sort killed hogs, and Russell told the story of a farmer named Clough who, in May 1635, found a dead one and examined its throat. Within three weeks he, too, was dead, along with three children from the area. Hog cholera was recorded in the middle of the seventeenth century, and an infectious sheep disease called “scab” later set off alarms among farmers. Bot flies killed horses, and rabies appeared for the first time in 1760, bringing death to dogs and hogs.

Change for livestock finally arrived at the start of the nineteenth century, when progressive farmers began approaching agriculture as a practical science and took an interest in Bakewell’s methods of selective breeding. In 1807, Elkanah Watson organized an agricultural fair with an exhibit of sheep under an old elm tree in Pittsfield, Mass. He believed their fleece would produce wool equal to the finest in Europe. Watson was delighted when he staged an event three years later that drew more than five hundred cattle and sheep. Between 1820 and 1840, representatives of all of the important English breeds of cattle, including improved Durhams and Shorthorns, were brought to the United States. These animals were well cared for and exhibited at livestock shows, which had quickly become annual events.

But the influences did not reach everywhere, and life remained wretched for many animals. Agricultural journals advised their readers on better methods and provided a vehicle for farmers to trade helpful hints. In the July 31, 1839, edition of the New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register, a Genesee farmer wrote that “there are many who have not yet learned the difference there is in the richness and flavor of eggs produced by fat and well fed hens, and those from birds that have been half starved through our winters.” He went on to suggest the right feed, including “an abundance of fine gravel that they may be able to grind and prepare for digestion the food they receive.” Another farmer asked the journal to reprint a cure for wounds on horses and cattle, “which alone has been worth more to me than ten years subscription.” A third offered a commentary on the “free martin,” a heifer calf born as a twin to a bull calf. The free martin had an anatomical abnormality and was never able to reproduce, but “works well in a yoke,” the farmer wrote. “Why the female of the ox family, when produced as a twin, should alone of all other animals, be incapable of reproduction, is one of those physiological anomalies left for future observers to explain,” he concluded.

Like the breeding practices that slowly gained currency, the approaches to disease that have carried into the present–the very strategies that were deployed in Great Britain just months ago and that caused such worries at the living history museums–hesitantly took shape. The policy of aggressively fighting infectious disease among livestock was first introduced in Massachusetts in 1859, when deadly pleuropneumonia was discovered in a cow in Worcester County that was traced back to a herd of imported Holsteins outside of Boston. The disease spread, and the Massachusetts legislature set up a cattle control board with broad powers to quarantine and destroy. Thousands of animals were slaughtered, and the disease was wiped out by 1867. Russell offered the view that those actions were to set the pattern nationally for control of foot-and-mouth disease, which appeared in Massachusetts in 1870, and for subsequent battles against bovine tuberculosis and other animal infections.

Roughly seventy percent of the American population lived on farms in the 1830s, but economic forces were pulling more and more young men and women away to mills, cities, and nonagricultural pursuits. That trend would continue throughout the nineteenth century, even as a steady stream of families pulled up stakes and headed west to more fertile soil and new lives, sending farming in the East into a gradual, inexorable decline. Fast-forwarding to the end of World War II reveals an America in which specialized production methods and increases in technology have made large, mechanized farms more advantageous. It also sets the stage for the opportunities and dangers that helped to create the burgeoning scientific and conservation movements that relate to heritage animals.

In the postwar era, farmers began to focus on a few breeds that proved to be highly productive–and sometimes highly profitable–under controlled circumstances. The dairy industry chose the Holstein. The process of natural selection was set aside, and artificial reproduction techniques were introduced using semen from a select group of superior bulls. The animals have been repeatedly inbred to produce more and more milk. “You breed for feet, legs, bone structure, udder suspension,” said Steve Prouty, who ran a dairy farm in Hardwick, Mass., for fifteen years and then turned to produce. “Today, you can fill out a list of qualities and the computer can do the selection. They are able to tweak the traits more and more with each generation.” Characteristics such as a strong immune system have largely been ignored, however; instead, the animals are vaccinated against disease and loaded up with antibiotics. “We pickle them,” Prouty remarked. Saperstein, the Tufts livestock veterinarian, described today’s Holstein as a delicate machine. “It has always worried me that we are breeding animals that are less resistant to disease because we haven’t had to worry about it,” he said. This approach has produced an abundance of food at low cost, but it has come with a price: the decline, and in many cases extinction, of breeds well adapted to particular environments. “In my career I’ve seen the minor breeds disappear,” Saperstein reflected. “It’s sad. The Guernsey and Jersey cow were different. We domesticated these animals for our use. It’s our history, and we’re throwing it away.”

By the 1970s, around the time the nation was celebrating its bicentennial, such views had spread, and the early signs of today’s effort to save heritage animals were visible. The response from many connected with animal husbandry was dismissive. “For the first ten years, we were completely pooh-poohed,” recalled Dr. Donald E. Bixby, a veterinarian and executive director of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, which was formed in 1977. “The attitude was, ‘Why should we keep these old breeds? They’re obviously inefficient.'” As time passed, however, the livestock industry continued reducing the gene pool, and concern mounted. Gradually, with the support of the conservancy, backyard efforts initiated by people with a passion for a particular breed began to appear. By the mid-1980s, the living history museums had gotten involved and the movement had gained considerable momentum.

In 1995, Robyn Shotwell Metcalfe, whose husband, Robert, founded 3Com Corp., formed the Kelmscott Rare Breeds Foundation and Farm in Lincolnville, Maine. She had first become interested in historic breeds during a stay in England in the early 1990s. When the Metcalfes returned to California, she bought several Cotswold sheep and raised them in her yard. Later, the couple moved east and Ms. Metcalfe established Kelmscott, which raises Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs, Cotswold sheep, and Kerry cattle, among other breeds. The staff carefully documents bloodlines and preserves genetic material; as success is gained with one breed, the farm imports another. Kelmscott’s fundamental philosophy is that historic breeds have to be more than a hobby or the entire endeavor is doomed. The farm is no petting zoo, as a talk with Executive Director Craig Olson makes clear. It markets its meat to tony Manhattan restaurants and gets top dollar. “We harvest the wool, send the animals to slaughter,” Olson said. “That’s the only way to show that they can have economic viability.”

Two years after Kelmscott opened its doors, a group of livestock breeders that shared its viewpoint founded the New England Heritage Breeds Conservancy. Its aim? To foster the raising of historic breeds on sustainable farms, so known because the livestock are treated as part of a natural cycle and the methods employed have a minimal impact on the environment. Last year, armed with a half-million-dollar grant, the group formed a collaboration with Hancock Shaker Village, a living history museum in Pittsfield. The Shakers, who were known for efficiency and innovation, operated highly successful farms well into the twentieth century. Together, the two groups are assisting farmers raising heritage livestock and seeking out niche markets for their meat.

In recent years, attitudes about conserving historic breeds have begun to harden–another sign, perhaps, that the movement is coming into its own. Not long ago, Pavlick, the Old Sturbridge Village agricultural coordinator, was shopping around for a Milking Red Devon. The prospective seller balked, fearing the line would be diluted by crossbreeding. The museum went on to make the purchase, but only with the promise that the pure bloodline would be maintained. “It has to do with relations with the rest of the world,” Pavlick explained. “With the dwindling genetic pool, it’s becoming more in our interest to maintain these rare lines. We’ll gain back some goodwill.”

Meanwhile, those in the heritage movement’s historical, cultural, and educational vanguard are finding more allies among those who specialize in science and public policy, and who see it as vital to save the beautiful and hardy heritage breeds in the tank as well as on the hoof; that way, material will be available in the event of a genetic mutation, in the aftermath of a devastating epidemic, or simply to breed a trait back into a commercial line. In the age of tainted mail and Osama bin Laden, the logic runs, it does not make sense to reject the idea of planning for the worst. The Office International des Epizooties, which keeps track of transmissible livestock diseases worldwide, places fifteen in the “most serious” category for economic and public health consequences, with foot-and-mouth at the top of the list. There are several dozen others, anthrax among them, classified as significant. No matter how quickly officials in developed countries move to wipe out potential epidemics, authorities warn, the threat of bioterrorism will remain real. “It will happen,” Saperstein predicted. “They could do it for fifty cents.” As a hedge, scientists have been urging the federal government to set up a national livestock “genebank” in which the frozen semen and embryos of rare breeds, and even cells for cloning, would be kept; the government has recently taken steps to follow through. The federal plans are expected to be complemented by other developments, possibly including Tufts’ genetic repository.

Part IV   True-to-life scenes can be bloody

It is worth considering that, with all it has become, the movement to save heritage breeds was initially spurred by living history museums seeking to make the interpretations of their periods more authentic. Although many of the animals appear similar to their cousins of yesteryear, modern sensibilities would hardly allow an accurate interpretation of their life cycle. Each year, Old Sturbridge Village butchers a pig in early December. The animal is shot at dawn; its carcass is hung from a barn door to be bled and gutted, as would have been done in an earlier era. The staff warns visitors about what is going on. Adults often question the necessity for the killing, while children seem to have an innocent curiosity. “We explain that we do it for education because then, as today, people eat meat. Meat comes from animals,” Pavlick said. “If I could sum up our approach with one word: ‘tact.'” At Kelmscott, some animals are slaughtered, but that does not prevent the depiction on the farm’s Website of “Charlotte the Cotswold” and “Muriel the Old Spots pig,” both of whom can be “adopted.” Those succumbing to the pitch will not actually have to welcome the animals into their living rooms; rather, they will be helping to support the “very existence” of heritage breeds.

Think of how it was two centuries ago. The stark contrast is brought home in one of the few autobiographical narratives to come down to us from someone who grew up on a small Massachusetts farm. His name was Asa Sheldon, and he could drive a team of oxen by the time he was seven. At nine, he was placed in servitude to a neighboring farmer and spent that spring plowing the fields with four oxen and a horse. His father made the arrangement again the next year for the price of a cow, and Asa eventually was bound out to the farmer until he turned twenty-one. He tells how one April during a snowstorm, he was sent after the sheep. He found a lamb that had been dropped in the snow and the farmer allowed him to retain it, with the agreement that if it survived, its ewe lambs would be kept for wool, while Asa could send the males to slaughter and hang onto the proceeds. “The coming season I exchanged my lamb for an older sheep, which brought me the next spring two fine ram lambs that were destined for slaughter,” he wrote. By dealing in sheep, he eventually saved thirty dollars.

On that windy day in Rhode Island, I found it intriguing to consider how perfectly the Wiltshires, Devons, and Dominiques could symbolize pieces of both America’s past and America’s present. Clearly, they are the breathing proof of an enterprise that is thriving and replete with possibilities. But it is more complicated than that. No matter how true to life historic animals may be, they will represent a different kind of treasure in the twenty-first century than they did in the previous ones. For with all that it may become, the heritage movement must be seen at least in part as an attempt to recapture what has been lost. “We feel we’re missing something,” said Prouty, the former dairy farmer. Dr. Eric W. Overstrom, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at Tufts, put a similar sentiment in different words. “Society has evolved to an increased understanding and a desire to have a relationship with animals,” Overstrom said. “We’ve achieved a level of comfort so that we can reflect on the value of animals in our lives.” If Overstrom is right, what has changed between Sheldon’s day and our own is largely a matter of meaning. Our ancestors on the farm certainly prized their animals, and they spent a great deal of time with them. Yet the role of livestock was straightforward, as vital to survival as it was to progress. Now the brutes of the field are valued at least in part for something that is less tangible, creating a tension that cannot be easily resolved by those who are seeking to ensure that rare breeds live on. Earlier generations accepted a reality that many of us have a hard time acknowledging: Charlotte may be cute, but she’s also mighty tasty.

Further Reading: Several invaluable sources cited above were Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States 1620-1860 (Washington, D.C., 1941); Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, N.H., 1976); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); and Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1986). Other material used for the historical portions and descriptions of historic breeds included Jared Eliot, Essays Upon Field Husbandry in New England 1748-1762 (New York, 1967); James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York, 2000); and Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). An excellent description of farming life in early America can be found in Yankee Drover: Being the Unpretending Life of Asa Sheldon, Farmer, Trader, and Working Man 1788-1870 (Hanover, N.H., 1988). Also used for background were issues of the New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register (Boston, published starting 1821); and The Rural Visitor and Old Sturbridge Visitor (Old Sturbridge Village, 1968-99). Websites consulted include those of The International Association of Fairs and Expositions and Iowa State University Animal Science Archives. Information on livestock diseases and animal genetics was obtained from J.K. Oldenbroek, ed., Genebanks and the Conservation of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (DLO Institute for Animal Science, 1999); and The Global Strategy for the Management of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1999). Information was gleaned from Websites for the United States Department of Agriculture, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Food & Agriculture, and the Office International des Epizooties. The Websites of living history museums and organizations dedicated to historic breeds contain a wealth of information. I consulted those of Plimoth Plantation, Old Sturbridge Village, Hancock Shaker Village, the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy; the New England Heritage Breeds Conservancy; the American Milking Devon Association; Davis’ Farmland; Kelmscott Rare Breeds Foundation and Farm; and Colonial Williamsburg. In addition, there are people to whom I am deeply grateful for their time and assistance, but who are not cited in the text because of space constraints. My thanks to Cindy Barber, assistant farm manager, Plimoth Plantation; Eric White, director of education and public programs, and Nancy Johnston, librarian, Old Sturbridge Village; Heather B. Ware, associate director of agriculture and education, Hancock Shaker Village and New England Heritage Breeds Conservancy; and Doug Davis of Davis’ Farmland in Sterling, Mass.  

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2003).

Pamela H. Sacks is a writer based in Worcester, Mass., and a contributing editor to Animals magazine.

The quest for the superlative American ham

No food in colonial Anglo-America declared gustatory adequacy at the world table more forcefully than ham. Travelers to the English territories, such as Rev. Andrew Burnaby, declared American pork superior in flavor to any in the world. With the establishment of the republic, the ingenuity of a population of artisanal food producers fixed upon improving the most estimable of American products, ham. Eminence in the sociable world of the agricultural societies, distinction in the market place, and victory in the food contests at the burgeoning world of fairs stimulated innovation in the curing of hams. Here we will chronicle the articulation of two schools of ham production: the dry-cure sect, who would increasingly view themselves as purists and traditionalists, and the wet curists, who regarded themselves as experimentalists in taste, economy, and scientific agriculture, yet whose pork brined in a barrel was the staple of the common household.

Antiquity conveyed the ur-cure, the primordial method of preserving meat. Salting and drying meat prevented the decomposition of flesh because moisture is a requisite for most bacterial reproduction and salt (sodium chloride) draws moisture from flesh. Unfortunately, sweating meat in rock salt turned muscle tissue gray and tough. It was discovered, however, that certain types of rock salt—salt with impurities—kept meat red and somewhat moist. This impure form of salt—called saltpeter—was sought out and admixed with salt for meat preservation until the Middle Ages when smoking was added to salt and saltpeter to impart flavor and to counter insect depredations. The method practiced by Europeans at the time of the settlement of Jamestown—common to Westphalian ham and Jamon de Iberica—was the “three s method”: salt, saltpeter, smoke.

Ham modernity dates from the erection of what Wolfgang Shivelbusch has called the first global drug culture—the oceanic trading system that made the exchange of sugar, spice, tea, coffee, and chocolate the engine of the world system. Only after the explosion of the world sugar supply occasioned by the consolidation of the Brazilian cane plantations in the sixteenth century was the commodity cheap enough for trial and error in the kitchen and smokehouse. Indeed, there was decidedly a sugar moment in Western cuisine, when sucrose was added to everything as the pangustatory element. When added as the fourth s to the ancient cure, sugar mellowed the harshness of salted flesh. Sugar-cured hams became the bedrock of American porcine cuisine.

Ham constitutes the thigh of a back leg of a hog. The thigh has three large cross braided muscles, now designated the inside round, outside round, and sirloin tip. The shank end in traditional hams was cut through at the joint with the skin left on. The butt end was cut in roughly at the hip. Certain of the fat was trimmed. A more modern way of trimming a whole ham leg shortens the shank and trims the skin and fat from that end.

Ever since Hernando DeSoto brought his thirteen hogs into Florida, swine have flourished in North America. The earliest breeds did not resemble today’s industrial pink pig. Indeed, the first settled hogs, the Iberico Black hog, the Old English breed, do not resemble their breed descendents, the Spanish Black and the Hampshire. Of these early types there is only one extraordinarily rare example left in America: the Ossabaw Island pig, a mottled descendent of the pigs that Spaniards loosed on the islands of the Caribbean and along the southeastern coast. One population survived into the twenty-first century on Ossabaw Island off the coast of Georgia. Slow-growing, irritable, and the most efficient fat-producing mammal known to science, the breed has become the fascination of biologists working on obesity studies. Because of its harsh habitat, the wild Ossabaws themselves rarely become bulky. But the fat they do produce marbles the muscle, and since fat is the source of ham flavor, the Ossabaw ham is the most extraordinary delicacy in American porcine cuisine. Emile DeFelice of St. Matthews, South Carolina, periodically produces Ossabaw hams and chops at his Caw Caw Creek Farm. To secure one you will have to vie with two New York chefs who amuse themselves by bidding every pig into a stratospheric region that gives nosebleeds to even the well-heeled pork connoisseur.

In Anglo-America the institutionalization of swine breeding occurred in the early 1830s when a group of Kentucky farmers imported a group of Hampshires from the border of England and Scotland. The rise of industrial-scale butchery in Cincinnati in the late 1820s had prompted a consciousness in market farmers about regularization of their swine herds as a means of competing with industrial pork. Distinguished breeds, they claimed, provided a better quality ham but could not be the product of industrial meatpacking. Shortly thereafter the first Berkshire pigs, with their enormous girth and mellow flesh, were brought into Ohio. In the quest for the ideal ham, the breed of the hog being butchered and prepared was a consequential matter. Sometime in the twentieth century it ceased to be, so now, even among producers of artisanal country hams there is little inclination to search out those heritage breeds that first won renown for New World hams. And is there anything more ludicrous than the present day barbeque contests in which contestants are prohibited from supplying meat that might be more sapid than those of their fellows? The organizers give everyone the same hybrid pink pig. It’s all about the sauce, the rub, the heat—it has nothing to do with meat.

Testimonies about the quality of New World ham date from 1688 when Rev. John Clayton, reporting to the Royal Society his observations on the commodities of Virginia, declared the meat as good as any to be had in Westphalia. This is a far more informative claim than it might appear on the surface, for it reveals much about the mode of preparation. Traditional Westphalian ham is made from hogs fattened with acorns from the oak forests of western Germany and then dry cured and smoked over a cold fire of beechwood and juniper boughs. The original Virginia ham derived its flavor from an acorn mast and dry curing. It was smoked. This is worth noting because during the eighteenth century there would be disagreement about the proper feeding of pigs and a related alteration in the method of curing.

William Byrd (1674-1744), the Virginia gentleman who championed an ethic of agricultural improvement, criticized the habit among country farmers (typified, for him, by the lazy North Carolinians described in his Histories of the Dividing Line) of letting hogs roam free in the forests to graze on roots and acorns. The semi-wild hog developed stringy muscle from its robust wandering life, and the farmer lost the benefit of its manure. Byrd would keep his pigs penned and fed on dung heap scraps. But with this diet, the meat of his animals, while more tender, risked becoming less palatable. What mattered more, taste or economy? In the nineteenth century critics began to opt for taste: “I am satisfied that it is ‘not good economy’ to endeavor to make manure from hogs by keeping them up in a pen. I am convinced that ten bushels of corn, fed on a clean board, will make as much good solid pork, as fifteen fed on a dung heap—and with this additional recommendation, that the pork is perfectly sweet and entirely free from that nauseous flavor which is so peculiar to pork kept in a filthy state, and having their food administered to them in dung or litter.” Feeding hogs on corn was pioneered in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century. In Virginia, where the taste of the mast-fed pig haunted the gustatory imagination, traditionalists followed the old country practice of letting swine loose in the woods. The practice continued until the early twentieth century when peanut mast was found to instill in pork something like that piquant yet mellow flavor infused by acorns.

Every method of curing—dry or wet—used salt, and since antiquity the purity of the salt posed a problem. In the early nineteenth century, three sources had begun vying for the dollars of those who aspired to the production of superior hams. Liverpool salt, imported from England, had been a staple of American commerce since the development of the Cheshire rock salt beds in the 1690s and was used largely in the salting of cod from Massachusetts to Newfoundland. Its purity and durable reputation made it the favorite salt of eighteenth-century American ham curers and butter makers. In the South, salt from the Turks and Caicos islands in the Caribbean possessed similar repute. From the late eighteenth century, various domestic salt works began vying for the trade. Two managed to build strong reputations during the 1820s and 1830s. At lake Onondaga, New York, salt works were erected in Liverpool and Syracuse. Their product was derived from the boiling of lake brine into flavorful crystal. On Turkey Island, Florida, a mined salt dome provided southern markets with fine salt through the 1830s and 1840s. But for many country folk, purchase of premium salt often proved too costly. Locally produced salt, however, presented a familiar problem: strange tastes arising from impurities, usually sulphate of magnesia and lime, nitrate of soda and muriate of magnesia. What to do?

Place a peck of salt into a large kettle with just clear rain water enough to dissolve it; boil it and skim off every particle of scum that rises to the surface. Then dissolve one ounce of carbonate of soda in four ounces of water, put it in the kettle and stir it well; then boil again for ten minutes, taking off all the scum that rises; then strain the brine through several folds of flannel. A considerable quantity of earthy matter will be found in the bottom of the kettle, and that is the cause of the impurity. After this straining, a small quantity of muriatic acid must be added to the brine to neutralize the soda; say half an ounce or so; then the brine is to be put back into the kettle and boiled again till it chrystalizes, or it may be put into a shallow wooden vessel and the water evaporated in the sun. Boiling is the quickest method. As soon as the salt is re-chrystalized, it should be washed by putting it in a clean basket, and throwing a bucket of perfectly pure water over it and letting it drain off rapidly; then dry. In this way, salt perfectly pure may be obtained.

Saltpeter, while essential for the preservation of hams, proved equally if not more important as an ingredient of gunpowder. In June 1642 the General Court of Massachusetts ordered every town to erect a shed and “make saltpeter from urine of men, beastes, goates, hennes, hogs and horses dung.” Thomas Paine’s first publication in America was a magazine article instructing persons in the manufacture of saltpeter . . . for ammunition. A translation of Lavoisier’s “L’art de fabriquer le salin et la potasse” was published anonymously (pirated?) for American use sometime at the end of the eighteenth century, and by the end of the Revolution (and the concurrent decline in demand for gunpowder) saltpeter had become a widely traded and readily available domestic commodity.

Putting chilled, freshly butchered hams in salt was the only part of the process that did not suffer alteration in any of the schools of dry-cure preparation. European tradition usually had the slaughter of winter meat occur on St. Martinmass Day, November 11. But because of the importance of cool weather in the curing of hams, it took place substantially later in the American South: December in Virginia; January in the Carolinas. The fresh-butchered meat had to be cooled to about forty degrees Fahrenheit when salting was begun. Traditionalists would follow salting with the other two s‘s of the “dry cure”: saltpeter and smoke. The proportions varied, but J. Q. Hewlitt’s formula of one thousand pounds of meat, three pecks of Liverpool salt, and four pounds of saltpeter presented a norm. The hams were packed in tubs or casks. These were often perforated to allow liquid to drip out during the minimum of three weeks sitting. At the end of the salting period, during which fresh salt was often added to the tubs, the ham would be extracted and the salt coating washed off. Hewlitt then smoked the hams in a closed room using green hickory chips. It was important that the smoke be cool, so as not to cook the hams. Temperature in the smokehouse was not to exceed human body temperature. At the end of February the hams would be sewn up in bags for protection.

A modern school of dry curing developed during the colonial era when spices (pepper, sugar, and red pepper most frequently) were scrubbed into the meat after the salting and during the smoking. While sugar boosted flavor, pepper boosted the survivability of the ham. Both red and black pepper deterred the infestation of meat by the dreaded trinity of insects—the cheese skipper, the larder beetle, and the red-legged ham beetle. Of these the skipper (Piophila casei), a small two-winged fly with striped abdomen, inspired most anxiety, for its larvae could reduce salted hams to slimy rot in a short time. Because the larvae can withstand human stomach acid, ingestion may further lead to the colonization and injuring of one’s intestines. Hence the imperative to balk the fly’s depredations on ham was and is great. Both the skin side and the cut side of the ham were liberally doused, but the cut side received the most attention. Smoking alone could not counter the pests.

Smoke was, however, the element of ham flavor considered the sine qua non. Both dry curers and the more ambitious briners smoked their hams. While hickory remained the favored wood of the majority of meat processors, experimentalists employed a range of fruit woods and oak. Only the resinous conifer trees were declared off limits, because of the bitterness their smoke imparted to meat.

Wet curing hams in brines tended to proceed in one of two ways. Either one salted the ham as one would in dry curing and then soused it in pickle with eventual smoking optional. Or one pickled the ham from the get go and then smoked it. Method one was the poor man’s path, followed because one could leave the meat in the barrel without worrying about insect infestation for months or until one scraped the bottom of the pork barrel sometime in summer. The October 19, 1803, issue of The Lancaster Hive supplies a recipe typical of this approach. “Take about a tea spoonful of powdered salpetre, and rub it well on the skin side of each ham, and let it remain for two or three hours—then take fine salt, and mix with it as much molasses as will make it the colour of light brown sugar; with this rub the hams well all over, and then pack them up in a tight cask with their skin side downwards, put a weight on the whole, and let them remain for eight or ten days—if the hams exceed twelve or fourteen pounds each, a little more saltpeter may be added—after eight or ten days, take out the hams and drain them, then take the liquor from the cask, and add to it sixteen gallons of cold water, to which add as much salt as will make the pickle bear an egg, one pound of saltpeter and two pounds of brown sugar-boil this liquor, and skim it well when boiling—and when cold, pour it over the hams, and let them remain in it for three or four weeks, according to their size; then smoke them.” The majority of practitioners, even in the colonial era, opted not to smoke, leaving their pork in the barrel.

The second method became the favorite of contest curers, producing hams for state fairs. Wet curing produced a moist ham, suffused to the bone with sweetness. Perhaps the pinnacle of this approach was achieved late in the antebellum period by the Maryland farmwife, Mrs. D. Brown, who won contests throughout the Chesapeake region. She could even best Virginians with her “Maryland Ham—Ne Plus Ultra.”

Maryland Ham—Ne Plus Ultra (1858)

Take a single pound of Pepper, four times as much of Salt:
Two ounces of good Allspice, and a quart of Barley Malt;
Potash, about two ounces, Salt Petre twice as much;
One pound of good White sugar, which feels sandy to the touch;
A little common Soda, (to make the lean more mellow,)
And prevent the fatty part of meat, from becoming yellow.
Put these in filtered water, (five gallons is enough)
And boil them altogether—what a precious mess of stuff!
Skim off the foreign matter as it is not fit to eat,
When you will have the brine, for one hundred pounds of meat.
You need not stop to cool it, it is all the better hot,
But pour it, sans ceremonie, directly from the pot;
There let the meat for thirty days, lie soaking in this brine,
(but just add a small nutmeg, and a pint of Glycerine.)—
Then take it from the pickling tub, and wash it in cold water.
Next hang it up to smoke ten days, “leastwise” I think you ought to;
Burn Maple, Oak, Corn-Cobs or Tan, most any wood will do;
The old fogy song, ’bout Hickory wood, I don’t believe is true;
Don’t smoke whilst wind comes from the east, or southeast or the south;
For take my word that meat will taste quite bitter in the mouth;
But choose it north, north west or west, your meat will then smoke right,
And not present, as t’other would, a very ugly plight;
You then will have an article, that will the palate tickle;
I’m sure you will agree with me, that ’tis a pretty pickle.
You think the next thing to be told is how to keep it good;
That surely is not difficult, if once ’tis understood—
Sew up in canvas and suspend, but not quite to the skies,
You’ll keep it thus secure against, the Rats, Mice, Bugs, and Flies.
Now don’t you think this last is plain, as plain as plain need be,
I think it is so very plain, a blind man it would see.

Early Americans sought for cures and found four: two dry, two wet. The ancient country ham, dry cured with salt, saltpeter, and smoke contested with the modern manifestation in which sugar and pepper were added to the rub. The common wet cure, in which ham was salted then pickled, became the poor-household’s staple. A more elaborate method, of brining and smoking, emerged in the contest world. It was this path that would be developed by meat packers into “city ham,” the moist-sweet haunch of commerce.

Further Reading:

For commentaries on colonial ham see Andrew Burnaby, Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America, in the Years 1759 and 1760; with Observations upon the State of the Colonies (London, 1775) and John Clayton, “Letter to the Royal Society, May 12, 1688,” in Peter Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America to the Year 1776, vol. III, no. 12: 36. For the history and uses of sodium nitrite as a meat preservative, see Ronald J. Pegg and Fereidoon Shahidi, Nitrite Curing of Meat: The N-Nitrosamine Problem and Nitrite Alternatives (London, 2000). For the global ramifications of the expansion of sugar planting, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants (New York, 1993). To learn about the Ossabaw pig and its current employments, consult useful Websites at Oklahoma State University and at Purdue University. If you wish to order an Ossabaw ham, contact Emile DeFelice, Caw Caw Creek Farms. For brining hams and the use of the pork barrel, see Sarah F. McMahon, “‘All Things in Their Proper Season’: Seasonal Rhythms of Diet in Nineteenth-Century New England,” Agricultural History 63:2 (Spring 1989).

The quotation in paragraph eight advocating feeding pigs corn to improve the flavor of the meat is from The Genesee Farmer 8:51 (December 22, 1838). J. Q. Hewlitt’s formula in the tenth paragraph is found in The American Farmer 14:7 (January 1859).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

David S. Shields is the editor of Early American Literature and McClintock Professor of Southern Letters in the department of English at the University of South Carolina.

 In Farm, Shop, Landing, a sprightly book about the mid Hudson River Valley counties of Columbia and Greene, Martin Bruegel has boldly entered into the long-running debate over economic development and the so-called “market revolution” of post-Revolutionary America. Breugel argues that the primacy of the market—where supply and demand determined price and where farmers and artisans strove for profit over security—emerged in the Hudson River Valley during the early nineteenth century, when waged labor, agricultural specialization, long-distance markets, and industrial development began. Before then, farmers ran diversified farms because they wanted a sufficiency, wanted to produce enough to feed their families and to swap with neighbors and storekeepers for what they could not grow or make.

Bruegel builds his case through a wealth of detail about farm operations, commerce, and industry garnered from both literary and quantifiable sources. He has thoroughly researched manuscript collections, newspapers, court records, tax digests, and probate records. Far from adopting the style of a cliometrician, Bruegel peoples his book with the stories of men and women struggling to comprehend economic changes occurring all around them, gradually changing their behavior, forming new voluntary associations, and building new (classical) liberal ideologies to defend their innovations.

I find the evidence, but not the arguments, of Bruegel’s book persuasive. The evidence suggests that a market economy and society emerged in the Hudson River Valley long before the late eighteenth century, when Breugel begins his book. The economic changes Bruegel finds demonstrate something different—a transition to capitalism, complete with the formation of classes of bourgeois factory owners and merchants, petty-producer farmers, and debased proletarians. To show the utility of such a framework, I will briefly analyze the region’s political geography, forms of local and market exchange, economic development, and patterns of political conflict.

The political geography and settlement patterns of the Hudson valley made a big difference in the forms and timing of economic development found there, as Bruegel would be the first to recognize. The area contrasted greatly with nearby communities in western Massachusetts and on Long Island. Although the first European inhabitants arrived early in the seventeenth century, substantial Euro-American settlement did not occur until the mid-eighteenth century at the earliest. The reasons are not hard to discover. Greene County, half the area Bruegel studies, was hilly, even mountainous, hardly ideal territory for farmers seeking to cultivate grains with hand tools and wooden plows. Great landlords who refused to sell land to would-be farmers dominated the other, potentially more productive half, Columbia County. Conflicts between landlord and tenant broke out repeatedly, starting in the 1750s and not ending until the 1840s, where landlords finally lost their feudal rights. This political geography retarded economic development until the middle decades of the nineteenth century, leaving the region far behind New England.

Bruegel draws a compelling picture of farmer exchange in the late eighteenth century. Like farmers nearly everywhere in North America, those in the Hudson River Valley, whether freeholders or tenants, strove for safety first. They created and sustained a “borrowing system,” to use John Mack Faragher’s felicitous phrase. Given the precarious conditions of life—warfare, floods, droughts, pestilence—they sought first to feed and clothe their families and then to produce small surpluses to trade with neighbors or at the marketplace. As a result, only a tiny number of farmers sold grain or other goods bound directly for distant or foreign markets. Both men and women exchanged labor with neighbors, particularly at harvest and house raising, but through the year as well; they swapped goods without demanding regular payments.

Face-to-face interpersonal relations took on far more importance in this society than abstract, impersonal economic relations, symbolized by commercial paper (whose origin might be unknown) or distant banks. Even merchants were caught up in these intense personal relations, each demanding that they know the character of those with whom they traded. Close (not necessarily conflict-free) relations permeated the culture as well. Men insisted that others recognize their integrity and honor, and if they did not, fought or took them to court. Noisy rituals of shaming—skimmingtons or rough music—commonly occurred when middling folk wanted to distinguish themselves from their debased inferiors, especially when a woman or man of low character married.

This portrait of eighteenth-century Hudson River Valley society rings true but it is incomplete. Class conflicts, such as the anti-rent rebellions, permeated the region, beginning in the 1750s, and exploded during the Revolutionary Era and the 1790s. Rebels sought to overthrow the manorial system, replace manorial government with their own courts, and during the Revolution, tenants everywhere in the region along the Hudson chose a different side than their lords, whom they loathed. These rebellions never become a major part of Bruegel’s analysis of economic development (or the lack of it), despite his acknowledgment of their importance and his publication of a major article in 1996 in the Journal of American History on the topic. Instead, eighteenth-century farmers and tenants, in Bruegel’s telling, as well as great landlords usually supported a hierarchical society (one of ranks or orders), where inferiors obsequiously deferred to superiors and where superiors patronized inferiors.

In addition, Bruegel minimizes the level of commercial activity in the region, insisting that few households participated in the market. Farm-gate prices for commodities like wheat, he contends, failed to follow New York City prices until sometime in the nineteenth century (his evidence is from 1824), when they had converged. But his data are hardly conclusive, for he provides no eighteenth-century farm-gate price series.

Breugel’s evidence suggests that nearly everyone participated, directly or indirectly, in commercial markets, where supply and demand determined price, even if few farmers sold goods directly. First, the borrowing system depended upon commercial markets to operate, for everyone needed some minimal cash, available only through commercial transactions. Second, farmers’ surpluses did regularly reach New York City (and beyond); tenants, in particular, sold their wheat to their landlords (their leases demanded it) and poorer and middling farmers probably followed suit, selling to wealthier neighbors who then sent grain downriver. Third, Bruegel exaggerates the significance of face-to-face relations for merchants. All merchants, no matter how small, had to pay for the goods they bought with commercial paper, usually on a short timeframe. They could afford to carry farmers year in and year out and provide “book” credit, which allowed gradual repayment, only if they, like merchants elsewhere in early America, instituted a two-price system, where cash customers paid far less for goods than those who needed credit.

A commercial, market society, then, had come to the Hudson River Valley long before the nineteenth century, and the market revolution, if there ever was one, took place in late medieval England. Yet Bruegel documents, persuasively, massive economic change in the region, particularly in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. The proportion of farmers selling goods (wheat, other grains, hay) to merchants increased markedly; specialization took hold, with farmers abandoning grain production (western New York and the Ohio country grew it more cheaply) for herding, dairying, and haying; farmers hired more and more wage laborers, both at harvest and for longer terms of six months or more; textile mills (at first, with weaving outwork), tanning operations, and brick-making factories opened. As economic development proceeded, the utility of the borrowing system diminished. Farmers still swapped goods and labor, but more and more middling farm folk participated in market relations, buying food and cloth and acquiring manufactured goods they had never been able to afford before.

Economic development (as well as population growth) led to increased land prices; higher land prices, population growth, and in-migration probably led to relative land scarcity and encouraged the growth of a class of wage laborers (at first mostly young) as well as increasing the wealth of the middling sorts. Such changes in productive relations, cemented by the attack on feudal tenures (actually, the increasing demands of landlord for capitalist ground rent) by a “liberal” and capitalist-leaning faction of the ruling class, sustained, in my view, an ever growing capitalist revolution.

How can we explain such developments, and particularly their timing? Economic transformation began in New England perhaps two decades earlier than in the Hudson River Valley. The long-term, and disastrous, effects of tenancy go a long way to explaining the timing of economic change. Prominent Yorkers had complained long before the nineteenth century that tenancy retarded population growth and economic development. Tenants, as Breugel indicates, understood the problem differently: they would improve their holdings only when they actually owned them and could reap the fruits of their own labor. Their labor (not some feudal legal doctrine) gave their land value, and they deeply resented the expropriation (of both product and labor time) of their output. (A Marxist would define such behavior as “exploitation,” the taking of surplus value). The destruction of fratricidal civil war during the Revolution set back economic development even more. The expansion of population into less hospitable freehold areas and the expropriation of some (Tory) estates after the Revolution opened up new land for development, while—at the same time—the growing manorial population demanded freeholds (sometimes violently). Such a confluence of events, Bruegel’s evidence suggests, created and sustained capitalist development.

I seriously doubt that Bruegel would accept my spin on his evidence. He adopts definitions of commerce and class that come out of Max Weber’s sociology; I tend to a more Marxian exposition. Yet no matter what framework one adapts, Farm, Shop, Landing does raise significant questions about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ones others might research. Bruegel, for instance, does not distinguish the behavior of tenants and freehold farmers, assuming similarities instead. Yet the analysis here suggests that differences ought to have occurred, with tenants engaging in less developmental activity, less often adapting specialized agriculture than their freehold neighbors of similar wealth. Nor does he directly connect the tradition-bound behavior (shaming ceremonies, the strong borrowing system) he observes to the persistence of the manorial system.

On the first several pages of Farm, Shop, Landing, Bruegel opens up the question of capitalist development. He demonstrates that the word “capital” did not appear in the region until around 1800 but by the 1830s and 1840s came to represent the impersonal relations of a market society. Following Bruegel’s lead, early Americanists should turn to the issue of capitalist development, whether dubbed a market revolution or a transition to capitalism, in other regions of early America.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Allan Kulikoff, the Abraham Baldwin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, department of history, University of Georgia, has had a long interest in early American rural societies, publishing three books—Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, 1986); The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, 1992); and From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel Hill, 2000). He is currently working on three book-length projects: Reinventing Early American History, The Making of the American Yeoman Class, and The Farmer’s Revolution.

At a slim forty-seven pages and mere twenty centimeters high, the weightiest thing about the 1770 book, Directions for the Breeding and Management of Silk-Worms: Extracted from the Treatises of The Abbé Boissier de Sauvages, and Pullein, with a Preface giving some Account of the Rise and Progress of the Scheme For encouraging the Culture of Silk, in Pennsylvania, and the Adjacent Colonies, is its title. This visually undistinguished octavo is small and plain, with no images or diagrams. Only a single printer’s ornament on the title page—a horizontal chain common enough to be used by printers from Boston to Charleston—graphically enlivens its text. Yet this visually unassuming book is vividly illustrative. This slender volume discloses wide-ranging connections among science, commerce, politics, gender, religion, and print culture in the eighteenth-century British and French Atlantic worlds that coalesced around the making of silk, or sericulture.