Following the June 17, 2015, murders of nine worshipers in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, many commentators pinpointed 1822 as the most significant year in the history of violence directed against Charleston black churchgoers and their institutions. In 1822, Denmark Vesey was hanged after a guilty verdict in court and an independent black meeting house was razed by a mob of Charleston whites. Less understood, however, is a generation of vicious attacks before 1822 on Charleston black Methodists and the churches they attended. The destruction of the African Church in 1822 culminated a series of events that was in full force in Charleston no later than 1786. Almost from the end of the War of Independence, black Methodists in Charleston were subject to harassment. Instead of describing the destruction of the black meeting house as part of anger and paranoia revolving around Vesey and his accused co-conspirators, we should see a collision between two strands of violence. One strand was the decades of abuse directed at Charleston black Methodists who worshiped in mixed-race congregations in which they were the majority; the other strand was a precipitate response to rumors of an imminent slave insurrection.

In this essay, I analyze the decades of abuse and violence prior to 1822. Nineteenth-century commentators disturbed by the mistreatment understood it as a response to the large number of Charleston black Methodists as well as to the enthusiastic worship practices of those churches. This understanding was correct but inadequate on two counts. First, it never took a true measure of the significance of the number of Charleston black Methodists. They constituted the greatest number and the densest concentration of black Protestants in the world around 1820. No other center of black Protestantism—for example, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, St. John’s (Antigua), Kingston (Jamaica)—came even close to Charleston for numbers of black worshipers. Second, it gave black worshipers little credit for enthusiasm, conversions, and revivals among whites as well as among blacks. Yet the commentary of white contemporaries suggested that African Americans were at the forefront of enthusiasm. We gain a better comprehension not only of this history of violence but also of Charleston black Methodists’ self-understanding if we gauge the significance of their numbers and if we understand them as principal actors in the Methodist Episcopal Church and, later, in an independent congregation.

From the moment of the first Methodist presence in Charleston, black worshipers were present. In 1736, John and Charles Wesley visited the town, where they held services in the Protestant Episcopal Church. The minister at this church was Alexander Garden, namesake of the gardenia and, later, scourge of Methodist revivalist George Whitefield. The black worshipers at the service made an impression on John Wesley with their numbers and their piety. Curious about the black members, he tried to explore their faith. He recorded a telling conversation with a black woman in which he informed her that the body and the soul were discontinuous. She disagreed. In Wesley’s words, “I asked her if she knew what a soul was. She answered, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Do you not know there is something in you different from your body?—something you cannot see or feel?’ She replied, ‘I never heard so much before.’” Wesley reported on the conversation but seems not to have comprehended it. He perceived only a need for religious tutelage of black congregants, but in retrospect we see this exchange as a prophecy of the enthusiastic worship that would characterize Charleston Methodist congregations. The black woman (whom Wesley never named) had brought body and soul together in piety in a way that the Methodist theologian seems not to have been able to countenance. Worshipers, black and white, came to express the integration of body and soul, not their distinction, as black worshipers became, within two years of the founding of the first church, a majority among Charleston Methodists. In these congregations, black worshipers came to be, in effect, evangelists and revivalists, no matter who occupied the pulpit.

Religious enthusiasm was, of course, a feature of revivalistic religion, black or white. Yet white Methodists rarely credited blacks with fostering spirited worship and religious conversions.

The Wesleys’ 1736 visit also established two continuing themes in Charleston Methodism as, first, black Christians responded to white preachers who took risks in their efforts to spread the Word, and, second, itinerants ignited fires of religious zeal that spread through England, mainland North America, and the West Indies, encompassing blacks and whites equally. For example, the Wesleys were caught in a dangerous storm in St. Helena’s Sound on the voyage to spread the word into the South Carolina Lowcountry. Such risks would be undertaken later by George Whitefield and other Methodist itinerants, and the memories of the dangers inherent to ministry would become part of the collective memory of Charleston Methodists. Such willingness to face danger in the Lord’s service struck the hearts of black men and black women. And although white Methodists rarely recognized all the egalitarian and antislavery implications inherent in their church practices, black Methodists did not miss the message. Charleston Methodist churches of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provided one of the clearest examples of equality dawning in congregations in which both blacks and whites contributed to revivals.

The Wesleys were soon followed, in 1739, by the greatest Methodist evangelist of the eighteenth century, George Whitefield. Like other Methodist itinerants, Whitefield preached in the open air or in dissenting churches when he was unwelcome in the pulpits of the established church. In 1740, during an evangelical tour in Charleston, Whitefield was challenged by Alexander Garden for “field-preaching” and extemporaneous prayer. Although Whitefield was suspended by a colonial ecclesiastical court from preaching in any Protestant Episcopal Church, such spiritistic practices were embraced among black worshipers, drawing the racist ire of some of white Charleston who were suspicious of such enthusiasm. After his suspension, Whitefield simply sought alternative venues in the Charleston Independent (i.e., Congregational) Church and among the Huguenot congregation. Both these were Calvinist in theology (Whitefield and the Wesleys had not yet separated because of theological differences).

Braving storms, Whitefield returned to Charleston several times. During one of Whitefield’s stays, in the 1760s, John Marrant, one of the most famous early African American Methodists, was converted during a revival meeting in which Whitefield was exhorting. Like the appreciation of the daring of itinerants and the egalitarian implications of mixed-race congregations, revival meetings would later figure in a vast increase in the number of Charleston black Methodists. In 1775, even before a Methodist church existed in Charleston, white Methodists were, as Philip D. Morgan notes, “reprimanded for sponsoring black preachers who proclaimed radical messages.”

The success of the Methodists in gaining black as well as white adherents in places like Charleston is well explained by John Walsh. “It was the crucial determination of Wesley and Whitefield to launch into itinerancy, making the world their parish and not the parish their world, that turned Methodism from a small awakening to a full-scale revival,” Walsh writes. “The spread of early Methodism depended on its ability to integrate diverse constituent groups into the associational network of its societies. . . . Methodism was as much a missionary movement as a revival.” One of the greatest American missionaries was Francis Asbury, who was born in England in 1745 and migrated to the North American colonies in 1771. Beginning in 1780, Asbury took a special interest in black Christians and traveled with “Black Harry” Hosier, who drove their carriage, preached with Asbury, and, perhaps, shared interpretations of Scripture with the white itinerant. Soon Asbury turned his attention to Charleston.

In 1785, Asbury arrived in the city, procuring, with the help of a local white sympathizer, an abandoned Baptist meeting house between Water and Tradd Streets. The Methodist Episcopal Church had just separated from the Episcopal Church in December 1784, and Asbury had just been ordained and named superintendent (later, over the objections of English Methodists, bishop). The Baptist congregation scattered by the War of Independence, the building became Charleston’s first Methodist meeting house. In Charleston, the Arminian Asbury felt beset by Calvinist Independents, Huguenots, and Scots Presbyterians on the one side and the wicked population of the major slave-trading port of North America on the other. In a series of visits to Charleston, Asbury realized that black churchgoers were a mainstay of his support. In December 1785, the Charleston Methodist Church reported thirty-five white and twenty-three black members—the only year in its first half century of existence in which white members were a majority.

The year 1786, in which blacks became a majority, saw the first attack on the church. The “success” of the Methodists—their increase in numbers, which was almost all due to new black members—led to vandalism. In the words of their nineteenth-century historian, Francis Asbury Mood, “When the congregation assembled one Sabbath morning, they found the benches helter-skelter in the street, and the doors and windows barred against them. This was taken as a hint that they were desired to change their quarters.” They found a new place of worship in a private home.

Nineteenth-century white Methodists like Mood understood that those who attacked their churches were angered by both spiritistic worship and the presence of black worshipers. Religious enthusiasm was, of course, a feature of revivalistic religion, black or white. Yet white Methodists rarely credited blacks with fostering spirited worship and religious conversions. Today we need to emphasize that the spiritism of black worshipers—including the experience of the black woman who refused to disjoin body and soul—helped form the very environment in which conversions occurred. Our challenge as scholars is that white authors almost never named black converts or assumed that their experiences should be inscribed in print. Today scholars recognize that black worshipers were a crucial part of the context in which white conversions took place. Conversions during church services or revival meetings were communal rites. An enthusiastic preacher, an emotional crowd with its own cries, songs, and movements, and some members gripped by their own mix of Christian beliefs and deeply felt regrets over past sins added up to emotional conversions. Records of Methodist Charleston include a terrible paradox: black members created the matrix in which conversions occurred and of course they converted themselves, yet when the chroniclers of the churches named converts, they chose white ones, not black.

White Charlestonian George Airs was, for example, identified when not one black member of his black-majority church was named. Yet his conversion occurred in the context of a congregation in which white men were a minority. “We may mention the conversion of George Airs,” Mood wrote:

He was a man of impulsive, ardent temperament, and had been long confirmed in sinful habits. He was seeking religion for some days under poignant grief for his sins. Light at length broke in upon his darkness, his captive soul was freed, and, as we might expect, the demonstration he made was not a little boisterous. After strongly assuring all present of the wondrous change which had passed upon him, he rushed from the building, anxious to tell the world what a merciful Saviour he had found. He ran towards East Bay, ‘Hallelujah!’ bursting from his strong lungs at every step. This produced a great sensation in the neighborhood, and quite a crowd took after the supposed maniac, who had been rendered so at the Methodist meeting. And ranging around several squares, much to the horror of the people living thereabout, what was their surprise to see him quietly return to the house, the big tears streaming down his face! Instead of finding a maniac, they had in truth fallen upon one who had been just clothed and put in his right mind, as his subsequent life of piety abundantly proved.

It is likely—though never stated—that one trigger of the attacks on the churches was black members prompting such dramatic conversions of white members. Sadly, the rich detail concerning a white convert contrasted with parsimony of words when a black Methodist became the subject. Mood everywhere recorded the presence and the spirit of black worshipers, but nowhere gave them credit for conversions. Yet it seems unlikely that the attackers of the church missed the role black worshipers played in conversions among the church membership at large.

There were other slights of blacks in print—an absence in presence based on an assumption that white worshipers would be dignified with names but black ones would not. When the Charleston Methodists finally built their own meeting house, which came to be known as the Cumberland Methodist Episcopal Church, it required not only “galleries for the accommodation of the colored people” but also, of course, labor and materials for construction. The white men who provided materials were named, along with the prices paid them, in the 1856 history of the church. The lowest price was 1 pound, once for nails and once for stones, the highest 10 pounds, for labor, possibly that of slaves owned by the member. In any case, there were clearly unnamed laborers. For instance, some men were paid 5 shillings for carrying boards, while 10 shillings 6 pence was expended for “corn for workmen” (in a time when corn mush was a common food for Southern slaves). Emma Hart has noted the presence of enslaved workers in the building trades: “Up to 1800, Charleston building artisans owned at least 250 slave carpenters, bricklayers, painters, and plasterers.” Similarly, once the building was open for services, its “floor was always covered with a layer of clean white sand.” Who hauled the boards? Who spread the sand? No word was recorded about the race of the lowest-paid laborers, yet the pattern of the attestations suggests that white men would be named while black men would not be. It seems likely that heavy or relatively poorly compensated labor was performed by black men.

By 1787, the Charleston Methodist Church had thirty-five white and fifty-three black members. February 1788 saw an attack on worshipers themselves (as opposed to their place of worship). A crowded church was “greeted with the first open demonstration of hostility from the inhabitants. There was a riot raised at the door. A general panic seized the audience. . . . At night, while the Bishop [Asbury] was preaching, the house again crowded to overflowing, it was assailed on all sides with stones and brickbats.” Asbury stood his ground as the mixed-race congregation was besieged. He recalled his sermon on Isaiah 52:7 as one of the most inspired of his long career. “I have had,” he reported, “more liberty to speak in Charleston than ever before, and I am of the opinion that God will work here.”

In 1789, the presence of Thomas Coke stirred another riot. A great apostle of Wesleyanism, Coke had evangelized in the West Indies, criticized enslavement, and helped establish in St. John’s, Antigua, one of the world’s great centers of black Protestantism. It was under his guidance that two memoirists of black or colored Antigua—Anne Hart and Elizabeth Hart—were converted. Although hardly antislavery, Mood’s 1856 history, in touching upon Coke’s visit, condemned “the illegal and cowardly assaults made by the ‘young chivalry’ of Charleston upon unoffending women and children while worshipping their God.”

Again in 1790, during a conference in which Methodist ministers and leaders proposed “Sunday-schools for poor children, black and white,” there were disruptions and insults directed at Charleston Methodists. The schools never opened. By 1792, the Charleston Methodist Church enrolled sixty-six white and 119 black members. By this time, slurs directed against the Charleston Methodists included that they fostered “negro-churches” and listened to “negro preachers.” Yet its members were grateful for their “season of revival” without acknowledging that the emotional and theological life of the congregation was conditioned by the mix of races within it. At the end of 1793, after a year of revivals, the congregation comprised sixty-five white and 280 black members.

In 1795, again the meeting house was attacked as “a crowd assailed the church, beating open the doors, and breaking down the windows.” Returning to Charleston, Asbury held prayer meetings for black worshipers. In 1797, the congregation “was still called to suffer much annoyance from rioters and mobs.” A grand jury of the Charleston district declined to recommend charges against the malefactors. Thus, “every night the services were interrupted by riotous proceedings outside; and the congregation, while in-doors, and especially when dispersing, were grossly insulted, because their cowardly assailants felt they could do it with impunity.”

Also in 1797, the congregation began construction of a second building, Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church, possibly to counter schismatic members who had seceded to form a Primitive Methodist Church. With a less central location, the Bethel meeting house proved attractive to black members seeking to avoid white mobs. This was a time of a “large increase of colored members.” Mob violence occurred again in 1800, worsening when it became known that a Methodist minister assigned to Charleston for the year had received a packet of seemingly antislavery writings from the North. A crowd of “patriotic bullies” mobbed the minister as he left church and sought to “dunk” him under a nearby water pump. After he escaped, the mob grabbed another Methodist and dunked him to near-drowning.

Asbury preached in the Bethel Church in 1798, reporting that in the parsonage he received “visitors, ministers, and people, white, and black, and yellow. It was a paradise to me and some others.” Again the nineteenth-century historian omitted the name of a significant black man. Asbury had arrived to find the parsonage building completed but unfurnished. He “gravely sat down on the door-step, no one knowing of his arrival. A negro man passing observed him sitting there, and recognizing him to be the Bishop, stopped, and told him no one lived there. ‘I know that,’ said the Bishop. ‘Where do you want to go, sir? I will show you the way.’ ‘I want to go nowhere,’ said the Bishop: ‘I will spend the night here.’” After this exchange, the black man informed some other church members of Asbury’s arrival and intentions. They pressed upon him to go with them instead of staying on the street. When he refused, they carried furnishings to the parsonage to make him comfortable. Once again, the language could suggest black church members. It is certain, in any event, that black believers populated Asbury’s “paradise.” “He was able there, untrammelled by forms or customs, to manage things his own way, and, as far as possible, make a paradise below, by constant communion with his God.” He convened “family worship,” attended “by a number of colored persons . . . so that often at family prayer at the parsonage, there would be an assembly of forty or fifty persons.”

Another glimpse of the type of white minister appeared in commentary on one of Asbury’s itinerant colleagues who died in 1803, possibly of yellow fever. Bennet Kendrick “was a close student, and a skilful eloquent preacher; and, with it all, perhaps his highest eulogy is, ‘The poor Africans repeated his name and death with tears. He was a willing servant to slaves for the sake of Christ.’”

No one could better evoke the link between violence and church demographics than Mood. From 1794 to 1804, “there was a decrease of three white members; and, as it includes the period of the most violent open hostility to the church, this should go far toward convincing those who think that persecution is the time most favorable for the growth of the Church, that they may be mistaken. The colored membership, however, continued to increase with a steady growth. They averaged, during this decade, a yearly increase of sixty-two; so that at the close of the year 1804, they numbered nine hundred and three.”

Disruptions of religious services occurred again in 1804 and 1807. Black worshipers gravitated toward the Bethel Church since its location seemed to attract less attention from the mobs. “The blacks had become so subject to annoyance at Cumberland, that they preferred to attend Bethel, which thus so far had not seemed to attract much attention from the rioters. The church, as was always the case on Sabbath afternoon, was crowded with blacks.” That day the captain of the city guard marched up the aisle and ordered the mixed-race congregation to disperse. Black churchgoers “emerged into the street and graveyard only to find themselves captured. Then, in a hollow square, as felons or incendiaries, they were deposited en masse in what was then known popularly as the ‘Sugar House.’ Singular to state, no reason was ever assigned for this outrage, nor any explanation given for this extraordinary procedure.” An 1838 narrative by a runaway South Carolina slave described this house of correction: “I have heard a great deal said about hell, and wicked places, but I don’t think there is any worse hell than that sugar house. It’s as bad a place as can be.”

Revivals surged through the congregations in 1807 and 1808. In 1811, a “powerful religious influence rested upon the congregations during the year, and at its close an increase was reported of eighty-one whites and four hundred and fifteen colored members.” Church membership swelled, with black membership increasing at a rate five times that of the white membership. By this time, there were established classes led by black laypersons for prayer and religious conversation among black believers. The classes were an important institution insofar as they kept believers close to Methodist beliefs and they allowed some black church members leadership roles as class leaders. At “the Conference of 1815, a membership was reported of two hundred and eight-two whites, and three thousand seven hundred and ninety-three colored.”

However, the stage was being set for an exodus of black members. First, in 1815, the white minister then in charge, Anthony Senter, initiated an investigation into the use of funds collected from black Methodists, which had remained with black class leaders. The inquiry revealed what appeared to at least some white Methodists to be “much corruption.” A modern account mentions that some donations were used to purchase the freedom of slaves who were to be sold away, but there was no indication in the primary documentation that Methodist preachers objected to that as corrupt. Donations from black churchgoers were ordered to be transmitted to the stewards of the Methodist Episcopal Church, no longer retained by black class leaders. Second, white members announced that part of the church’s black burial ground was to hold a storage building for hearses. Third, a rapid increase in black members led to a total of 5,690 by 1818. The black worshipers almost certainly felt that they had enough strength in numbers to form their own congregation. The question inherited by early twenty-first-century scholars of American religion is what the worshipers thought their congregation might be. Most scholars have assumed that the goal was an African Methodist Episcopal church, but the evidence from Charleston suggests that it was more likely to have been an independent Methodist church.

Two Charleston black Methodists, Morris Brown and Henry Drayton, traveled to Philadelphia in 1816 and then again in 1818. Brown had been attending the Charleston Methodist Bethel meeting house. In Philadelphia, in May 1818, Brown was ordained an elder and Drayton was elected a deacon. In 1817, a Methodist minister, Solomon Bryan, wrote to the Charleston city council with his concerns about black worshipers forming their own congregation. Then, in Charleston, in 1818, “at one fell swoop nearly every leader delivered up his class-papers, and four thousand three hundred and sixty-seven members withdrew.” Class papers were documents maintained by class leaders for recording the activities of church members as well as keeping track of those who were trial members of the congregation. Black class leaders in other locations, such as Antigua, similarly maintained their own class papers. Since the class leader not only kept the documents but also inquired into the religious experience of his class members, possession of the papers indicated a leadership role. Yet class papers also served as a record of the attendance of members at prayer meetings. For instance, class leaders marked each person as “p” (present), “d” (distant), “s” (sick), “n” (neglectful), “b” (away on legitimate business), or “a” (absent), records that might well have been used against black people in Charleston’s racist, slave-holding environment. In surrendering their papers, the class leaders of black Charleston were removing themselves from white authority.

Although 1,323 black churchgoers remained within their traditional church home, the white Methodists were stunned by the loss of almost eighty percent of their black brothers and black sisters. Mood confirmed that piety had been corporeally felt during Charleston Methodist Episcopal services. “None but those who are accustomed to attend the churches in Charleston, with their crowded galleries, can well appreciate the effect of such an immense withdrawal. The galleries, hitherto crowded, were almost completely deserted, and it was a vacancy that could be felt. The absence of their responses and hearty songs was really felt to be a loss to those so long accustomed to hear them.” These lines were the closest Mood ever came to acknowledging the value of Charleston black Methodists in any way other than their numbers or their assistance to Asbury.

The 4,367 who left united into an African Church, according to Mood. Modern scholars have often called this an “African Methodist Episcopal Church,” but it was not clearly described that way at its inception, notwithstanding Brown’s and Drayton’s attendance at A.M.E. conferences. The evidence from around 1820 more likely suggested that its members viewed it as an independent black Methodist church. The African Church possibly envisioned itself as an independent Methodist congregation unaffiliated with a regional conference. Indeed a petition to the Charleston city council of January 27, 1817, for permission to purchase a plot for a cemetery was submitted by a black “Independent Religious Congregation,” while an 1818 petition to the House of Representatives described the petitioners simply as “Methodists, in the City of Charleston.” An 1830 letter by a white observer, James Osgood Andrew, insisted that the majority of the breakaway black believers desired to remain Methodists albeit in a church with both black congregants and a black minister. In Andrew’s estimation, Brown initially hid his plan for an A.M.E. church from his followers.

There had been previous breakaway independent Methodist congregations in Charleston, such as the Primitive Methodists, so there were local models in place for the black congregants. In effect these were models of congregations with revivalistic devotion (possibly planned to be missionary devotion at some future date), theology culled from Methodists with whom Americans were familiar (Whitefield, the Wesleys, Coke, Asbury), and freedom from a superordinating conference that would have enforced discipline, provided itinerants or missionaries, collected its share of church donations, and possibly owned church buildings or grounds. It is at least as likely that the breakaway black Methodists followed local models as that they affiliated themselves to the A.M.E. Church. Indeed, another schism, involving breakaway white Methodists, occurred in 1834, when a Methodist Protestant Church was formed in Charleston by whites who objected to blacks sitting outside the galleries in the Bethel Church. In short, there was a history of independent Methodist congregations in Charleston before and after 1822.

It is also possible that between 1815 and 1822, Charleston black Methodists envisioned becoming the apex of black Protestantism. That would have implied a congregation independent of outside entities other than God. An 1820 petition to the South Carolina legislature, subscribed by twenty-six black Methodists (including Brown and Drayton) and by thirty-four whites, described the black church as “the African Episcopal Church, in Charleston, called Zion.” Only a later insertion in the petition—the only revision in the document—added a superscript word, “Methodist.” The clerk who received the petition and initiated an account of its procedural history never described the black subscribers as African Methodist Episcopal. His terminology was “certain free persons of color . . . praying to be permitted to worship in a building created by them in the suburbs of Charleston.” The petition was denied.

Had the breakaway black Methodists united into an A.M.E. congregation in Charleston around 1820, they would have instantly established the demographic center of the A.M.E. Church as Charleston, not Philadelphia. Based on membership figures given at the 1822 A.M.E. conference, if those who had hived off from the Charleston Methodist Episcopal Church had formed an A.M.E. congregation, they would have outnumbered Philadelphia A.M.E. congregants by thirty percent and they would have comprised forty-five percent of all A.M.E. members in North America. Even at the time of Richard Allen’s death in 1831, the reported membership of the A.M.E. denomination was about 10,000. It is impossible to know what would have happened had Charleston’s breakaway black Methodists joined the A.M.E. Church, but the figures suggest that they would have been between thirty and forty-five percent of the entire denomination. Furthermore, the word “Episcopal” in the name of the church could have implied a black bishop in Charleston—highly unlikely in the structure of the A.M.E. Church around 1820. Today the church historian might wonder how a black bishopric would sit in an ecclesiastical hierarchy, but it is possible that a black bishop implied independence and leadership in Charleston around 1820.

Connections between the Charleston African Church and the Philadelphia A.M.E. Conference were not strong around 1820. The only use of the phrase “African Methodist Episcopal” to describe the congregation derived from the emendation in the group’s petition. The reputable white ministers who signed the ex parte petition were local Congregationalists or Presbyterians, who were closer to the Calvinism of George Whitefield than to the Arminianism of the A.M.E. Church. Indeed, the presence of those white subscribers suggests that Charleston black Methodists were returning to their roots in Whitefield. Once again, Mood perceived an essential truth about Charleston Methodism. Despite the conflict with Wesley over free grace and predestination, Whitefield earned Mood’s praise because “it was, no doubt, of advantage to the future establishment of Methodism, that ‘justification by faith’ was fearlessly and powerfully proclaimed in Charleston.” Charleston black Methodists’ theological self-understanding around 1820 could have been Calvinist, not Arminian.

One tie between the Charleston black Methodists and the A.M.E. Church was the ordination of the two Charleston black men in Philadelphia. Moreover, Brown traveled to the 1819 and 1822 annual conferences. Richard Allen was qualified as a bishop to ordain other men—as he had been ordained by Asbury—but their ordination neither made them members of the A.M.E. Church nor created a congregation of the A.M.E. Church. For example, Asbury also ordained Allen’s friend Absalom Jones, who joined the Episcopal Church and then led the formation of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. When Brown reported Charleston black membership at the 1819 conference, he gave a figure of only 1,848—about forty percent of the black Methodists who had left the Methodist Episcopal Church and about thirty percent of Charleston blacks who identified as Methodists. The number Brown reported for Charleston in May 1822, a month before Denmark Vesey was arrested, was 1,400, seventy-five percent of what he had reported in 1819. Even these relatively low figures—only about thirty percent of the breakaway black Methodists—were never corroborated for a Charleston A.M.E. congregation after Brown’s attestation. Yet if we credit Brown’s figures, they mean that at most thirty percent of the breakaway black Methodists identified enough with the A.M.E. Church for him to count them.

The nineteenth-century source that was probably most likely to have mentioned an A.M.E. church in Charleston—had there been one—never did so. The leading historian of the A.M.E. Church, Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, who was himself born in Charleston in 1811, published an autobiography in 1888. One chapter treated his childhood and his experiences in the 1820s in the Charleston Cumberland Street Church. Another treated the formation of the A.M.E. Church. Neither mentioned a Charleston A.M.E. congregation. It is difficult to imagine that Payne’s autobiography would not have mentioned an A.M.E. congregation in Charleston around 1820 had there been one. However, another Charlestonian, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, scion of a local planter family, did believe by 1829 that some black members had “seceded from the regular Methodist Church in 1817, and formed a separate establishment, in connexion with the African Methodist Society, in Philadelphia: whose Bishop, a coloured man, named Allen, had assumed that Office, being himself a seceder from the Methodist Church of Pennsylvania.”

The available evidence does not lead to an indisputable conclusion, but a possible scenario of events between 1815 and 1822 can be constructed. Most Charleston black Methodists espoused Whitefieldian enthusiastic religion and kept it alive in their services. The A.M.E. Church was at the edge of their horizon. They yearned for independence, not subordination to other Charleston churches or to any larger denomination. Insofar as they seemed still to consider themselves Episcopal, they hankered for a local black bishop. Brown may have added “Methodist” after all subscribers had signed: this is unflattering in that Brown may have duped the subscribers. Unfortunately, Richard Allen himself was by 1820 notorious for high-handed tactics, which in the eyes of some of his congregation included deception and self-aggrandizement. Some, perhaps including Brown, might have had an inkling that Charleston could become the sun of black Protestantism, whether A.M.E. or another form—a central role that would have made Philadelphia a satellite. Ambition or a sense of mission or both seem to have been at high tide in Charleston around 1820. Until fissures broke open around 1820, the largest number and the densest concentration of black Protestants in the world were in Charleston Methodist churches. Indeed, almost from the end of the War of Independence, it was these black Protestants, not only the congregants of the African Church, that were magnets for mob violence. The African Church was harassed by city officials, beginning in June 1818, when 143 worshipers were arrested at Sunday services. That was the next step in the evolution of the mob violence that began in 1786.

Charleston black Methodists were crucially important apart from any connection (whether strong or weak) to the A.M.E. Church. It seems unlikely that believers this numerous were willing either to continue in a subservient role in the Methodist Episcopal Church or to affiliate themselves to a new black church in Philadelphia, some 700 miles away. In fact, in these very years, Allen’s Philadelphia A.M.E. Bethel congregation underwent a schism, and Allen himself was publicly reviled, even spat upon, by black worshipers who had left his church when he tried to force his way into their pulpit. Brown’s later ascent in the A.M.E. Church—he indeed was consecrated a bishop in 1828—should not be read backwards and should not be read as an endorsement by Charleston black Methodists of the A.M.E. Church. If Charleston’s black worshipers were envisioning that their church might become the sun in the galaxy of black Protestantism, that vision was based on growth in numbers and success in revivals that had run unabated since the end of the War of Independence. White Methodists may have taken all the credit for the post-Revolutionary victories, but it seems unlikely that Charleston black Methodists were fooled. Ironically, it seems unlikely that the part of white Charleston that harassed the Methodists was fooled either.

In 1822, however, a collision occurred between the continuing violence directed at Charleston black Methodists and the precipitate response to fears of a slave insurrection. A white mob destroyed the meeting house soon after Denmark Vesey was hanged. Their church destroyed, some members of the African Church returned to the Charleston Methodist Episcopal Church and others joined the Calvinist Scots Presbyterian Church. Unfortunately, no numbers are available, but Mood suggested the appeal of Calvinism among these believers by writing, “Large numbers connected themselves with the Scotch Presbyterian Church.” And “the rest were peeled and scattered.” Brown fled to Philadelphia with a number of followers before the year closed and he began his ascent in the A.M.E. Church. The “peeled and scattered” black believers could have created a small nucleus—probably with a fluid membership—that kept independent Charleston African Methodism spiritually alive in the coming decades. The first true A.M.E congregation in Charleston seems to have coalesced in 1865 and dedicated its first meeting house in 1872. The history of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church—as well as the history of violence against Charleston black Methodists—is more complicated than most modern commentators have imagined.

Our understanding of 1822 in Charleston as the culmination of a generation of violence directed against black Methodists, whether in the Methodist Episcopal Church or in an independent evangelical congregation, is vastly different from an understanding of an outburst of terror aimed at a new A.M.E. church and Vesey and his supposed co-conspirators. After 1822, attacks continued to plague the lives of black worshipers in Charleston Methodist Episcopal churches, but by the 1830s, violence was within congregations. Once again, young white men were the vanguard, forcing black churchgoers out of seats they had traditionally occupied. Thus 1822 was not an originating year for violence against Charleston Methodists—the origin was much earlier—but it was perhaps a pivotal year in which cruelty and abuse migrated from outside the meeting house door to the benches and aisles inside.

Acknowledgments

The author benefitted from the comments of several excellent colleagues as he wrote this essay in the summer and fall of 2015: Doug Egerton, Peter Hinks, Joanne Pope Melish, and Rich Newman. It was at the joint conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Society of Early Americanists, June 18-21, 2015, that Nathan Jérémie-Brink, Eric Slauter, and David Waldstreicher urged him to put his ideas on Charleston down on paper. Many thanks.

Further Reading

The handwritten petition registered as “Ex parte certain free persons of color praying to be permitted to worship in a building created by them in the suburbs of Charleston” is held at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. It shows that only an emendation in the document identifies the black church as African Methodist Episcopal. The 1817 and 1818 petitions are reprinted in, respectively, Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822, edited by Edward A. Pearson (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999) and Court of Death: A Documentary History of the Denmark Vesey Affair, edited by Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette (Gainesville, Fla., 2016). The latter reprints much crucial source material. A discussion of Methodist class papers (with a reproduction of one) appears in Jonathan Crowther, A True and Complete Portraiture of Methodism (New York, 1813). A succinct overview of early Antiguan Methodism, along with a comment that black or colored class leaders kept their own class papers, appears in Robert Glen, “The History of Early Methodism in Antigua: A Critique of Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood’s Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830,” The Journal of Caribbean History 35:2 (2001). Early histories of the African American Episcopal Church by its own adherents never described the African Church of Charleston as part of the A.M.E connection. An example is Christopher Rush, A Short Account of the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in America (New York, 1843). Another example is Daniel A. Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville, 1892), which assumed that any black Methodist in Charleston who wanted to join the A.M.E. Church after about 1815 had to migrate to Philadelphia. Payne also listed the numbers of the African Church that Morris Brown provided to the A.M.E. conference. Payne’s autobiography is Recollections of Seventy Years (Nashville, 1888). Wesley J. Gaines, in African Methodism in the South; Or Twenty-Five Years of Freedom (Atlanta, 1890) described the organization of the first A.M.E. church in Charleston in 1865. The same date for the first Charleston A.M.E. church was given in Richard R. Wright Jr., Centennial Encyclopaedia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Containing Principally the Biographies of the Men and Women, Both Ministers and Laymen, Whose Labors during a Hundred Years, Helped Make the A.M.E. Church What It Is (Philadelphia, 1916). Richard C. Wade, “The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration,” The Journal of Southern History 30:2 (May 1964), follows the nineteenth-century sources in describing the Charleston African Church as an independent Methodist church. The most detailed account of Charleston Methodists, black and white, before 1822 remains Francis Asbury Mood, Methodism in Charleston: A Narrative of the Chief Events Relating to the Rise and Progress of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. (Nashville, 1956). Albert Deems Betts, History of South Carolina Methodism (Columbia, S.C., 1952), is apparently the earliest to claim, without citing sources, that around 1815 the use of funds collected from black members to purchase slaves was objectionable to the standing white minister. Betts never mentions the existence of an A.M.E. church in Charleston, although he does mention Richard Allen and Morris Brown as A.M.E. bishops as well as schisms that occurred among Charleston white Methodists. James Osgood Andrew’s letter appeared in Methodist Magazine and Quarterly Review 12 (1830). John Marrant’s 1785 Narrative, which recorded his encounter with George Whitefield in Charleston, is available in “Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, edited by Joanna Brooks and John Saillant (Boston, 2002). Francis Asbury’s accounts of his visits to South Carolina are available in The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, edited by Elmer T. Clark, et al (Nashville, 1958; three volumes). Emma Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Charlottesville, 2009), describes black laborers and tradesmen in Charleston. Philip D. Morgan treats South Carolina Afro-Christianity in Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998). John Walsh, “‘Methodism’ and the Origins of English-Speaking Evangelicalism,” which emphasizes the missionary dimension of early Methodism, appears in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990, editors, Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (New York, 1994). Originally serialized in The Emancipator in 1838, the recollections by a runaway slave of the Charleston “Sugar House” are available in I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives, edited by Susanna Aston (Columbia, S.C., 2010). The most distinguished commentary on slavery in Charleston is Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 1999). Morris Brown’s and Richard Allen’s relationship is well described in Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2008). Both Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, and Carol V. R. George, Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840 (New York, 1973), describe discord within the Philadelphia Bethel A.M.E. church.

This essay has argued, in part, for the importance of Charleston black Methodists apart from any connection (whether strong or weak) to the A.M.E. Church. Some leading works have assumed a strong connection. The earliest to assume such a connection was apparently Marina Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1973). Although none of the primary sources cited in her book mention a Charleston A.M.E. church, she was followed by Kenneth K. Bailey, “Protestantism and Afro-Americans in the Old South: Another Look,” The Journal of Southern History 41:4 (November 1975), Robert L. Harris Jr., “Charleston’s Free Afro-American Elite: The Brown Fellowship Society and the Humane Brotherhood,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 82:4 (October 1981), Bernard E. Powers Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1865 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1994), and Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wis., 1999). Most scholarship since the mid-1990s repeats the claim that the Charleston African Church was A.M.E. A recent example, of many, is James O’Neil Spady, “Power and Confession: On the Credibility of the Earliest Reports of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy,” The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 68:2 (April 2011). An exception, which uses Methodist sources but avoids asserting that there was a Charleston A.M.E. church, is Robert L. Paquette, “Jacobins of the Low Country: The Vesey Plot on Trial,” The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 59:1 (January 2002).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

John Saillant is a professor of English and history at Western Michigan University. He was awarded degrees from Brown University in American Civilization. His recent and in-progress works concern the earliest black Baptists in North America and Jamaica and ways that early black-authored documents were revised by white handlers.

John Fea’s The Bible Cause is an ambitious bicentennial history of the American Bible Society, the evangelical benevolent organization founded in New York in 1816. The American Bible Society was massive. Fueled by a can-do millennial spirit, its leaders sought to place a Bible with every family in the country, and eventually, the world. New technologies allowed the society to produce Bibles at a scale never before seen: after installing steam-powered presses in the late 1820s, the publisher produced 600,000 Bibles a year (31). A vast network of auxiliaries worked to circulate the sacred texts across the expanding geography of the United States. The society continued to produce and distribute Bibles in such astronomical numbers that by the late twentieth century, leaders resorted to measuring their impact in “tonnage” (301).

The argument of The Bible Cause is that the American Bible Society was an eminently American institution that sought to build a Christian nation. Throughout its history the society worked to forge a country unified “around Protestantism and the social virtues that logically flowed from its teachings” (23). Like other voluntary associations of the antebellum era, the American Bible Society aspired to nonsectarianism and to universal appeal. The society’s leaders, though mostly belonging to Calvinist denominations, regarded themselves as doing the work of reinforcing a “Protestant consensus” that served both God and country (28).

Fea moves steadily through two centuries of the society’s religious activities and their relation to political events and cultural movements in American history. These include the society’s devotion to federalism at its founding; the spreading of Bibles abroad on the coattails of imperialism in the western Mediterranean and China; Reconstruction-era domestic missions to African Americans; patriotism and troop outreach during the World Wars; and the society’s alliance with the Protestant mainline and later embrace of the Christian right. Fea ends with an image of the society’s delivery of scripture booklets to Ground Zero in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. He vividly draws these and other sections by focusing on the individuals involved. For instance, he introduces us to S. Brooks McLane, affectionately known as “the Bible guy” to troops in Texas during the First World War, his Ford Roadster packed with Bibles. We learn of John Percy Wragg, the African American Methodist pastor who ran the society’s “Colored Agency” from 1901 and hired the society’s first black colporteurs.

The extent of the American Bible Society’s claims on national identity may be seen in one episode in 1818. That year the society administrator Samuel Bayard petitioned Congress for an exemption from domestic postage and import taxes on paper, on the basis that the society’s work was salutary for “national character” (24). If vaccinations were tax-exempt, then surely Bibles ought to be as well. Such an exemption would not violate the First Amendment, Bayard noted, which forbade a specific religious establishment—it was never meant to apply to the universal, nonsectarian doctrines of the Bible. After all, biblical principles were American principles. A greater availability of Bibles in fact promoted the exercise of religious liberty. Though Bayard’s petition did not succeed, the episode speaks to the society’s confidence in speaking as a religious, cultural, and political authority for the American people.

One minor quibble is that there are few physical bibles in The Bible Cause. Fea describes how Bibles were supposed to be simple and represent the pure word of God (who spoke most purely in the King James Version). We are told frequently that the society’s Bibles were published “without note or comment” (13). By design the society did not include “images, illustrations, or other curiosities” (32) and ignored the luxury market. But what did these millions of Bibles—whose production and distribution, Fea writes, was the “sole object” of the American Bible Society (22)—look and feel like? How were Bibles made and used? Fea is not a book historian or bibliographer, and certainly the methods of those fields are not the only gainful ways to examine the publisher’s archives. But where Fea does consider publishing activities and the Bibles themselves in greater detail, questions remain. In a discussion of its early production, Fea notes that the society sold three kinds of Bibles, which varied in price from 60 cents to $3, depending on the quality of paper (31). However, a $3 book was not cheap circa 1820, likely equivalent to about a week’s wages of one of the society’s female folders and stitchers who worked long hours in the bindery. What were the differences between these editions, and for whom were they designed?

This expansion of Bible formats continued throughout the antebellum period. Flipping open the society’s Thirty-Sixth Annual Report (1852) to its publication list, one finds that fifty-two editions of the Bible were available in the English language alone, ranging from 25 cents to $10. The most expensive of these was a large quarto, bound in gilded morocco. Even the policy of “without note or comment” seems to have been fluid when it came to these more elegant Bibles; it is noted that many Bibles contain “references.” The American Antiquarian Society preserves many of these finer sorts of American Bible Society Bibles in their collections. One example boasts silk headbands and registers, side references, and an embossed cover signed by Alexander C. Morin, the binder specializing in elegant gift books and albums. The absence of pictorial engravings in these Bibles does not indicate that the society was unconcerned with aesthetics, middle-class tastes, or the luxury market. Even though in its rhetoric the society professed to produce plain versions of the sacred word, in practice, by midcentury it was producing over fifty different media formats of the same text. Those formats were deliberately designed for different classes of consumers. With some humble editions, the society undersold the market. With its fine editions, the society entered the market boldly.

More Bibles appear in the later sections of the book devoted to the twentieth century, and many of these examples are fascinating. The society supplied khaki-covered Bibles picturing an American flag to troops in World War I. A 1960s-era new Bible translation called Good News for Modern Man featured line drawings and a cover designed to evoke newsprint. According to Fea, this cheap paperback was designed to be “used, marked, and scuffed up.” We hear the most from actual readers in this section: as Rick, a member of a “Jesus folk-rock” group in the late sixties put it, “Good News for Modern Man was never meant to look good on a bookshelf. It was at its best in disorderly stacks with its paperback cover bent and wrinkled” (259). The American Bible Society was attuned to the importance of the materiality of their Bibles in the twenty-first century as much as in the nineteenth. Leaders are now in the midst of developing a “wear-able Bible” for a watchband (314). The device will not only provide the Bible digitally on a small screen, but also will detect biometrics such as anxiety levels and offer the appropriate scriptural remedy. The Bible Cause is at its best in its telling of captivating granular details such as these.

Fea wrote The Bible Cause at the invitation of the American Bible Society. Other reviewers have suspected that their warm relationship explains the adulatory tone that crops up in the book. I wonder if an examination of the material record might have forced a more critical posture toward some of the textual sources as well. A material examination of the American Bible Society’s nineteenth-century Bibles would have shown that for all its professed emphasis on Bibles “without note or comment” and its promotional self-image as a Bible depository for the common people, the society was also intimately concerned with appealing to the tastes of the wealthy and the emerging middle class. Consumerism and class are part of the American story as well.

In the opening pages of The Bible Cause, Fea announces that he takes to heart the words of the retired general secretary of the American Bible Society: “The Bible Cause is about people” (1). Fea beautifully brings to life the people of this organization. It may be selfish to ask for more from a book replete with richly drawn portraits of individuals and careful accounting of their efforts. But surely for one of the country’s leading publishers—whose goal was to produce and distribute printed objects—the American Bible Society was about things as well as people.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2.5 (Winter, 2017).

Sonia Hazard received her PhD from Duke University in Religion.

In London on St. Valentine’s Day in 1945, the aspiring young novelist Patrick O’Brian, today regarded as one of the great twentieth-century writers of historical fiction, received as a gift an early volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Published in 1744, it briefly recounted the sensational ordeal of an orphaned child named James Annesley. The presumptive heir to five aristocratic titles and sprawling estates in Ireland, England, and Wales, Annesley was kidnapped from Dublin in 1728 at the age of twelve and shipped by his Uncle Richard to America. Only after twelve more years, as an indentured servant in the backwoods of northern Delaware, did he successfully escape, ultimately returning to Dublin to bring his blood rival, now the earl of Anglesea, to justice in one of the epic legal struggles of the eighteenth century. “Wicked uncle, kidnapped heir, bastards, sudden death. Very gratifying,” O’Brian later recorded in his diary.

No saga of personal hardship and aristocratic skullduggery so captivated the British public in the eighteenth century as Annesley’s turbulent life. Following his return from America, it quickly became the “common conversation” of coffeehouses and sitting-rooms on both sides of the Irish Sea. With slight exaggeration, a London writer later reflected, “Starting from the low and ignominious state of a slave, he…at once engrossed the attention of the three kingdoms, more, I believe, than any private man ever did.”

This extraordinary tale inspired as many as five nineteenth-century novels. Set either in Ireland or Scotland, each revolved around the dramatic kidnapping of a young heir for the purpose not of extorting ransom but of usurping the lad’s patrimony. Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) was the first to adopt this formula, but far and away the most famous novel to draw from Annesley’s life was the classic boy’s adventure, Kidnapped (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson, which recounted the abduction of young David Balfour by his greedy Uncle Ebenezer. Like Annesley, Balfour is consigned to servitude in the American colonies, though he manages to escape after his ship wrecks off the coast of western Scotland. In the end, after a series of adventures in the Highlands, he at last succeeds in obtaining his inheritance.

Although Stevenson never evidently acknowledged his indebtedness, he was a voracious reader, especially of history, literature, and the law, and, in fact, was intimately familiar with Thomas Bayly Howell’s Complete Collection of State Trials…(London 1809-28) that included the Dublin trial of 1743 in which Annesley attempted to reclaim his birthright. Stevenson was also well-acquainted with Scott’s Guy Mannering, of which he owned a personal copy; and he also would have been familiar with Charles Reade’s popular novel, The Wandering Heir (1873), based largely on Annesley’s life.

At the time of Kidnapped’s publication, a critic wrote in the Athenaeum, London’s prominent literary magazine, “Of both ‘Guy Mannering’ and ‘Kidnapped’ the main action was suggested by the Annesley case, that marvelous romance of real life which, in ‘The Wandering Heir’, not even Charles Reade could effectually vulgarize and spoil for future use. And no doubt it may be said that in Balfour’s struggle with old Ebenezer there is nothing so improbable as the real struggle of Annesley with his wicked uncle, and that Annesley’s adventures in the plantations…surpass in wonderfulness any of the chances, escapes, and disasters that befell Balfour. More recently, the legal scholar David Luban has written of Annesley’s life, “Surely this is melodrama and not history.” The truth is that it is both, as I discovered in the course of writing a book about James Annesley with the aid of trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, and nearly 400 legal depositions located in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin and the National Archives outside London.

Certainly no historian could wish for a more dramatic tale or a more remarkable set of characters, from the king of England, George II, to a brave Dublin butcher and a wily Scottish merchant, both of whom befriended James. If his supporting cast is more credible than the dramatis personae of a novel by Defoe or Fielding, the members are every bit as colorful. A personal favorite is an elderly widow named Anstace O’Connor, who in 1742 confronted the earl of Anglesea for having kidnapped his nephew. Years earlier she had peddled oysters at Dunmain, the countryseat in County Wexford, seventy miles southwest of Dublin, where James was born in 1715. “The people are moaning because a great many here say you transported him [overseas],” protested O’Connor. Startled, Anglesea snapped, “No, you fool…hold your tongue!” After regaining his composure, the earl offered £40 if she’d swear that Annesley was the illegitimate son of a servant maid, which O’Connor adamantly refused, adding that she would not “take such an oath for all the world.”

But, of course, center stage is occupied by members of the house of Annesley, an English family who during the course of the1600s achieved wealth and fame in Ireland on a grand scale. Apart from personal tenacity and ambition, their rise owed much to Ireland’s dramatically transformed social order. Following a new wave of Elizabethan conquest in the late sixteenth century, Protestant adventurers like Capt. Robert Annesley, the younger son of a gentry family in Buckinghamshire, laid claim to confiscated estates, displacing the native Irish with English and Scottish tenants in the years preceding England’s colonization of North America. Annesley’s grant in 1589 of 2,600 acres in County Limerick was considerably smaller than Sir Walter Raleigh’s, but for an ambitious squire, it was a promising start.

The Annesleys were charter members of an Anglo-Irish upper class that historians have labeled the Protestant Ascendancy. Subsequent members of the family included Robert’s son Francis, a favorite of James I, who became vice treasurer of Ireland in 1625, and a grandson, Arthur Annesley, whom Charles II in 1682 made the earl of Anglesea, one of two English peerages that he received to accompany a pair of Irish titles. Appointed lord privy seal in 1673, the earl was a figure of considerable learning and culture, adopting the motto, from Horace, of Virtutis Amore (With Love of Virtue) for the family’s coat of arms. An acquaintance of John Locke and patron of the poet Andrew Marvell, Anglesea boasted the largest private library in Britain, not to mention vast estates in Ireland and England by the time of his death in 1686.

By any measure—honor, wealth, power—the first generations of Annesleys laid a formidable foundation for the family’s future success. No aristocratic house at the end of the seventeenth century could have expected more from its forebears. Equally important, there was no apparent shortage of male heirs, at least, that is, until the fifth generation. High rates of infant mortality were common during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and noble houses like the Annesleys experienced their share of mourning and loss. This, in itself, did not threaten to disrupt the male line, which ordinarily would have descended to the eldest son of the fifth earl of Anglesea, a leading Tory politician who twice served as privy councilor, first to William and Mary and later to George I. But the inability of the earl and his wife to conceive children meant that the family’s honors and estates, rather than descending directly on the main stem, would instead fork sideways, upon his death, to a remote bough of the genealogical tree inhabited by a younger cousin, Arthur Lord Altham, an impoverished baron and the future father of James Annesley.

In 1708, at nineteen years of age, Altham had abandoned his wife, Mary, in London and absconded to Ireland, where he owned land in Wexford, including much of the town of New Ross. Politics was not his passion as it had been for earlier generations of the family. A short, homely man of slight build with gray eyes and black eyebrows, he delighted in low pleasures, best expressed perhaps upon offering a servant employment. “If you come to live with me,” promised the baron, “you shall never want a shilling in your pocket, a gun to fowl, a horse to ride, or a whore” (the offer was accepted).

In time, Altham reconciled with his wife, long enough, at least, to guarantee the birth of a male heir, James, in 1715. Less than three years later, the baron falsely charged Mary with consorting in their bedchamber at Dunmain with a young country squire. “It’s true she bore him [James], and that’s all the pleasure she shall have of him,” he later stormed, having sent her off in a coach, never again to return. After which, on taking a commoner named Sally Gregory for a mistress, the baron became deeply indebted to her among numerous other creditors. Not only was Altham shortly charged with corruption by the Irish House of Lords, but he turned James out at eight years of age to fend for himself in the streets of Dublin, which the youth successfully did for three years as a shoeblack and errand boy. When taken to task for abandoning his son, the baron blamed Miss Gregory: “That bitch,” he protested, “will not suffer me to do any thing for him.” Despite Altham’s sudden death in 1727 at age thirty-eight, no one felt sufficiently concerned to investigate the circumstances. No coroner’s jury convened, and no autopsy was performed on the corpse before it was interred on the night of his passing in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral.

The  protagonists of the saga, of course, are James, the orphaned son, and his Uncle Richard, Lord Altham’s estranged brother, who in addition to being a serial bigamist was if anything more rapacious, the consequence perhaps of being a younger son with neither rank nor financial security. As the brother of a lowly baron, he was not even permitted to use the coveted title of “Lord.” By one account, Richard was of middling height and had the “clumsy manner of a country farmer.” Unfortunately, no known portrait has survived, nor was he the sort to sit for one. Owing to both his appearance and character, a female acquaintance later volunteered, “I would not have had him if I was young, no, not [even] to be a countess.”

Just three weeks before Baron Altham’s death, Richard had paid James, or Jemmy as he was still called, a visit at the home of John Purcell, a warm-hearted butcher who, together with his wife, had taken the boy into their home just north of the River Liffey that bisected Dublin. Do you, Richard asked the butcher, have a boy in the house named James Annesley? Yes, replied Purcell, calling the lad, hesitantly, from the fireside, once and then a second time. Stricken with fright, his eyes beginning to moisten, Jemmy whispered to “Mammy,” Purcell’s wife, “That is my Uncle Dick.”

The boy’s fear was well founded. Following his mother’s banishment ten years earlier from Dunmain, Richard had cursed Altham for not turning out the boy as well. “Damn my blood,” he’d railed, “I would have let her have him, and she might carry him to the devil, for I would keep none of the breed of her.” Circumstantial evidence, in fact, strongly suggests that Richard had his brother poisoned, thereby leaving James as the final obstacle to Altham’s barony along with four more peerages that his nephew stood to inherit. On April 30, 1728, James was grabbed in Dublin’s Ormond Market, bundled into a coach, transported to George’s Quay alongside the Liffey, and carried aboard a vessel, brimming with servants, that was bound for Newcastle, Delaware. Unlike Balfour’s escape in Kidnapped, Annesley was less fortunate, ultimately being forced to toil for twelve years after being sold to a merchant-farmer in Newcastle County named Duncan Drummond.

That Annesley survived for such a length of time as an indentured servant in northern Delaware was a testament to his resilience. In contrast to immigrants who sought to make new lives in the colonies, he held fast to his identity. Not only did he proclaim his rightful origins in hopes of finding a sympathetic ear, but he was said to shun the company of other servants. During the boy’s early years, there had been flashes of pride in his lineage, even as a street waif in Dublin. At the same time, he had an outward ability to adapt to different settings and new hardships. Instability had long been a way of life for him; if anything, it may have eased his adjustment to the life of a servant, however punishing the ordeal or wrenching his separation from Ireland.

Upon James’s flight in 1740—successfully absconding on his third attempt to run away—first to Philadelphia, then to Jamaica, to London, and finally to Ireland, his Uncle Richard, now the sixth Earl of Anglesea, repeatedly tried to have him killed. In November 1743, the two commenced a titanic struggle at the Court of Exchequer in Dublin in what newspapers later declared the longest trial (nearly two weeks) ever heard by a British jury. A total of twenty-eight barristers participated. Never before had five peerages and such an immense estate been at the disposal of the legal system. By one account, the property was worth at least £50,000 a year.

No less momentous in the public mind at the time of the trial were allegations of aristocratic wrongdoing, which, for James’s following, had robbed a peer of the realm of his birthright and broken the chain of succession within the house of Annesley. Richard’s circle, by contrast, bewailed the prospect of elevating a false claimant to the family’s hereditary honors, not unlike Jacobite efforts to place a Stuart heir on the throne. Opponents commonly derided James as a “pretender,” the slur attached to successive generations of Jacobite claimants. Annesley’s contest, claimed Viscount Perceval in a letter to his father, was “perhaps of greater importance than any tryall ever known in this or any other kingdom.”

The jury found in Annesley’s favor, but his uncle’s appeal set the verdict aside for eight years, as yet new fronts opened in and out of court on both sides of the Irish Sea. As to whether the young claimant finally achieved justice, it is a tale full of unforeseen twists and turns that persisted well after the deaths of both James and his uncle in the early 1760s. “Revenge,” as the saying goes, “is a dish that is best served cold”—even, as events turned out, from the grave.

Although it might seem odd that historians have largely ignored the tribulations of James Annesley, reasons for scholarly indifference are not difficult to find. To begin with, the best-known source associated with Annesley’s abduction is a volume, first published in 1743, titled Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Return’d from a Thirteen Years Slavery in America, ‘Where he had been sent by the Wicked Contrivances of his Cruel Uncle. Reprinted innumerable times, it is easily dismissed as sentimental fiction, written at a time when overblown stories of high adventure were a popular literary genre. Were the protagonist, modeled loosely after Annesley, of humble origins and a roguish bent, the style might be labeled picaresque, similar to that of Moll Flanders (1722) and Tom Jones (1749).

I first encountered Annesley’s purported memoirs nearly thirty years ago when researching a book, Bound for America (1987), about the banishment of British convicts to North America during the 1700s. My instinctive reaction was much the same, I suspect, as that of most others: to dismiss the volume out of hand as fiction, and bad fiction at that. In 1975, in fact, a reprint had been put out as part of Garland Publishing’s “Flowering of the Novel” series.

In retrospect, like other eighteenth-century narratives set in British North America such as The Infortunate, written by the former servant William Moraley (1743), it is now clear that the Memoirs blended fact with fiction. Although Annesley himself was not the writer (the book’s florid style alone discounts that possibility), only he could have been the author’s principal source of information. Once stripped of their romantic hyperbole, events in the Memoirs for the most part ring true, and references to names and places usually prove accurate.

That James Annesley’s story has gone untold cannot, however, be attributed solely to the false scent left by a Georgian narrative—especially if we consider, beginning in the 1960s, the publication in academic journals of several short articles devoted to different aspects of Annesley’s life by the late Lillian de la Torre, a prolific mystery writer. Those articles notwithstanding, the larger story of James Annesley has invariably failed to draw scholarly attention.

A second explanation lies, perhaps, in the problematic nature of the legal evidence, particularly a transcript of the climactic trial in Dublin between James and his uncle that was published with a long introduction in 1912. The principal dilemma in using this document and, for that matter, other legal sources, including depositions, was the contradictory nature of much of the testimony. Perjury, I quickly realized, whether in court or in a sworn affidavit, was a persistent problem in eighteenth-century Ireland. In the historical novel Castle Rackrent (1800), Maria Edgeworth contrasts the “Englishman who expects justice” at court with the “Irishman who hopes for partiality.” The extent of perjury during the trial in 1743 was unusually flagrant. Although disagreements between witnesses arose over dates, places, and personalities, invariably the underlying point of contention was the same: whether or not James Annesley was the legitimate son of Lord and Lady Altham and, in turn, the rightful heir to the honors and property of the house of Annesley.

How, then, best to determine the facts of the controversy? As much as possible, I tried to shed any presuppositions, despite a natural inclination to sympathize with Annesley’s plight (bastard or not, he was abducted by his uncle). Grasping heirs and bogus claimants are common enough in British history, if rarely on the scale alleged by Annesley’s enemies. And there was always the chance, I recognized, that James himself, however sincere his protestations, might not have known the true details of his birth.

In the end, my task turned out to be less tortuous than I first imagined. Despite its inconsistencies, the totality of the evidence veered strongly in Annesley’s favor. Independent sources, when available, almost always corroborated the claims of James and his followers. With few exceptions, their statements were more apt to be accurate. Testimony favoring Annesley during the course of his lawsuits typically seemed more credible than that of his opponents. If his witnesses were less artful, their responses were less contrived.

The earl, of course, alone commanded the resources and authority to suborn legal testimony, particularly in County Wexford where he resided. Not only was he the most prominent member of the county’s landed class, but his assets dwarfed those of his nephew. In stark contrast, when James returned to Ireland in 1742, he enjoyed neither personal connections nor political influence, much less the wherewithal to sway witnesses. It was, I concluded, the merits of his cause that drew such large numbers of supporters, many of whom still recalled the young lord, Jemmy Annesley.

Finally, I decided that no explanation other than a desire to deny James’s birthright could account for Richard’s relentless persecution, which his legal counsel never successfully disputed. Neither Anglesea nor his lawyers ever offered a consistent explanation for Jemmy’s disappearance in 1728. Initially, Richard reported his nephew’s death from smallpox. Afterward, to a circle of intimates, he related “in an easy manner” that the boy “was gone.” Still later, he stated to a friend that Jemmy had died in the West Indies.

These very real methodological problems help to explain scholarly inattention to the Annelsey story. But the full answer, I suspect, also lies in the predilections of academic historians. For social historians, the principal appeal of Annesley’s saga would seem restricted to the backdrop of eighteenth-century Ireland. What might this tale have to say about Irish society, especially the roles played by class, gender, religion, and ethnicity? Meanwhile, cultural historians might be drawn, if at all, to Annesley’s representation in literature and the press. The sensational events of his life would have less appeal in their own right.

More surprising perhaps is that popular historians have not been attracted to a story peopled by larger-than-life figures, complete with a plot overflowing with venality and violence. After all, the tale was sufficiently dramatic to capture the interests of Scott and Stevenson, among others. How could five novelists be wrong, not to mention the studios of Walt Disney, which employed the same formula by pitting an orphaned lion cub, Simba, against his wicked uncle, Scar, in the enormously successful movie, “The Lion King,” followed soon by an even more successful Broadway production?

Alas, for most popular historians, Annesley’s ordeal possesses two fatal flaws. Not only are the antagonists lacking in intrinsic importance, but James’s life, however extraordinary, left little lasting imprint on the historical landscape. Although his abduction by Uncle Richard represented a breathtaking act of treachery in a family drama that unfolded on two continents over seven decades—to the rapt fascination of the British public—the fate of the house of Annesley had no enduring impact upon the past, unlike the aftershocks of revolutions, battlefield heroics, and presidential elections. Nor does this story throw new light on the momentous events of the era, be they wars for empire, scientific discoveries, or the origins of the Industrial Revolution.

Following the return of young Annesley to Dublin in 1743, the Irish Parliament did pass legislation designed to impede the kidnapping of paupers, but the bill was overruled at the behest of officials in London. Kidnapping was destined to remain for many years, under the common law, a misdemeanor, whereas horse theft, a felony, was punishable by death.

Other than providing fodder for novelists, the only other tangible legacy lies in Annesley’s courtroom contests—two trials in particular established legal landmarks, one in the pioneering use of forensic evidence, whereas the other all but gutted the principle of attorney client privilege, a ruling that would dominate British courts for another half century.

Such, then, is the thin gruel that these events offer two different sets of historians—those, on the one hand, who fill the shelves of Barnes and Noble, and others of a more academic bent, prone periodically to deriding popular historians for chronicling the deeds of “dead white men on horseback,” including presumably the shenanigans of British aristocrats.

Fourteen years ago, the novelist Margaret Atwood described her goals in writing historical fiction: “Such stories are not about this or that slice of the past, or this or that political or social event, or this or that city or country or nationality, although of course all of these may enter into the picture, and often do. They are about human nature, which usually means, they are about pride, envy, avarice, lust, sloth, gluttony, and anger”—but also such qualities as love, forgiveness, and charity. Not long afterward, John Demos urged fellow scholars to set a similar task in their own studies, albeit by drawing directly upon the hard evidence of the past—in short, to compose compelling narratives, enriched by a wealth of detail, that reveal human nature in all of its complexity. The critical difference between this and fiction is that for a majority of historians, the past still enjoys the virtue of being more authentic.

In truth, the strategy favored by Atwood and Demos incorporates the strengths of both popular and academic historians. To be sure, many of today’s scholars, in their efforts to analyze patterns of human behavior, more often look at bodies of people, be they ethnic groups, voting blocs, consumers, or social classes. By contrast, Demos and Atwood, in their desire to fathom “the foundations” of “the human condition,” are more concerned with individuals, a tact that may or may not involve the writing of a biography. But this difference in approach, while important, verges on being a subtle, dare one say academic, distinction. The broader point is that Atwood and Demos share with most scholarly historians a desire to plumb the depths of humanity in whatever guise or form. If their methodology adopts, in part, the apparatus of popular authors by favoring well-told stories, replete with memorable events and individuals, their objective, still and all, is to foster a deeper level of understanding.

One of my aims in resurrecting the saga of James Annesley was to illuminate eighteenth-century Irish society, thanks largely to the vast trove of legal documents that members of the Annesley family left in their wake. The sheer density of the depositions, many containing richly detailed recollections of rural Ireland, is stunning. They speak not only of the minutiae of everyday existence—the clothing, furnishings, and customs of lords and peasants—but also of the cadences of Irish life.

But I set out primarily to write a narrative, not unlike, in purpose at least, Atwood’s novels—a story that would hopefully capture the imagination of readers, much as James Annesley’s ordeal had drawn the attention of a young Patrick O’Brian and, sixty years earlier, had inspired Robert Louis Stevenson. Although the Annesleys were scarcely the only noble house in the British Isles racked by internal discord in the eighteenth century, they fought the bulk of their battles at uncommonly close quarters. The ferocity of the family’s clashes over rank and wealth cut to its very core, pitting husband against wife, father against son, and brother against brother. James’s abduction by his Uncle Richard was only the most brazen act of treachery, neither the first nor, surely, the final breach of trust in this violent family drama. Ultimately, then, besides whatever light it sheds on eighteenth-century Ireland, the ordeal of James Anneslsey is a tale of betrayal and loss—but also, I like to think, of endurance, survival, and redemption.

Further reading

For more on the Annesley family saga, see A. Roger Ekirch’s Birthright: The True Story that Inspired “Kidnapped” (New York, 2010) and “Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’. . . The True Story,” The Scotsman (Edinburgh), (March 6, 2010). Originally delivered as the Bronfman Lecture in November 1996 in Ottawa, Margaret Atwood’s remarks on historical fiction (“In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction”) were printed in the American Historical Review 103:5 (December 1998): 1503-1516 as was, in the same issue, John Demos’s essay, “In Search of Reasons for Historians to Read Novels” (1526-1529).

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

A. Roger Ekirch is a professor of history at Virginia Tech.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is a large rare book, manuscript, film, and photography collection. It is now best known as a superb repository of twentieth-century literary books and archives, although it contains many noteworthy collections of earlier books and manuscripts. It evolved from a rather modest rare book collection, and still retains some of the remnants of its humble origins. This is an account of one of them.

For many years we kept, near the reference desk, a small book truck full of treasures. These were to show to the casual visitor, who, it was hoped, would be intrigued, astounded, and delighted. There were locks of hair, a silver binding, first editions and manuscripts by authors known even to the imperfectly schooled, odd plates by Blake, and other bibliographic flotsam.

About ten years ago we decided to retire this truck and return its cargo to the stacks. Perhaps we had become too sophisticated; perhaps we no longer had very many casual visitors; or perhaps we thought that our vigorous exhibition program provided enough items to see–I doubt if much thought went into the retirement: it just happened. As the items were being put away, one caught the eye of a reference librarian who decided to investigate its claim to treasuredom: our Mayflower Bible.

Sez who? he harrumphed, and I’m sure that his suspicions arose from his perception that the book was too good to be true. Here was a Bible that had not only come over on the Mayflower in 1620, but had belonged to some of the most prominent early settlers, according to annotations on its pages. And there was nothing obscure about its claims: arrivals, marriages, births, and deaths were not only recorded, but were illustrated. There was a small full-length portrait of Peregrine White, the first white child born in New England; Indians with bows and arrows; the first houses; and even the Mayflower itself–all in pen-and-ink drawings in margins and other blank spaces. Could it be true?

Our skeptical librarian began an investigation, and I was soon enlisted to help. Where to begin? I decided to look at how we got it, its history as a Mayflower Bible, and its provenance in general. This information was obtained easily by looking at annotations in the book, and by reading newspaper clippings and exhibit labels found at the back of the book. The Bible had been unearthed in 1892 by Charles M. Taintor, a bookseller from Manchester, Connecticut, and was purchased the same year by S. W. Cowles of Hartford. The price was twelve dollars. Mr. Cowles allowed it to be written up and encouraged the curious to see it in his home. The Bible was inherited by a Mrs. S. W. Cowles, presumably his widow or daughter, who took it with her when she migrated to Los Angeles. There it was shown and concurrently ballyhooed, with reproductions of some of the drawings, in a 1912 newspaper article. Sometime between then and the mid-1920s Miriam Lutcher Stark, of Orange, Texas, bought it, and in the late 1920s it came to us, with the rest of Mrs. Stark’s library, as a gift.

Besides the early Mayflower-related inscriptions, and the later paraphernalia related to its New England and West Coast surfacings, there were a few annotations in the margins of the text that showed that the Bible had been in England during a portion of the eighteenth century. This was all of its history that the book itself was going to surrender. The gaps in its ownership and its three Atlantic crossings were troubling but did not disallow its authenticity.

I next looked for articles about any Mayflower Bible. I found a single citation–to a 1959 article in the Texas Quarterly–which turned out to be about our own copy, complete with the over-familiar illustrations.

I grew subtle. Maybe current scholarship demonstrated conclusively that some widely accepted fact about the Pilgrims was untrue–perhaps someone died a year earlier or a year later or a marriage may have never taken place. If our Bible had been tarted up in the nineteenth century there might be an irrefutable historical error, then believed to be true, incorporated into the process. Unfortunately, after carefully checking the events, dates, and historical figures found in the annotations against a great deal of current writing on the Pilgrims and the Mayflower, I was unable to find such an error.

My final sally captured the prize–certainty as to whether or not this Bible had actually come over on the Mayflower–although not at all in the way that I thought it would. I proceeded again to examine the book itself. What I was trying to see was whether or not this edition of Scripture was a likely one for a Pilgrim to take on this voyage, even though I knew that the answer would not be conclusive in determining whether or not we had a manufactured rarity among our treasures.

The Bible was the Geneva version of 1588, a satisfactory edition. Before it was bound a substantial fragment of a Book of Common Prayer. This was somewhat incongruent: why flee religious persecution with a Bible which was accompanied by a prayer book sanctioned by the official church of the country you were fleeing? But some Pilgrims may have considered themselves adherents of England’s established church even as they sought to reform it, and there was always the possibility that this Bible had been purchased without much thought given to the fragmentary material bound up with it. But I needed to know more to complete this final aspect of my investigation: which edition of the Book of Common Prayer was bound in?

As I said, the prayer book was a fragment, and was missing its title page. To even begin to establish the edition I would need to do a collation, so that I could identify it, based on its format, pagination, typography, and the like, by comparing it with Online and printed bibliographic sources. Actually, it had no pagination, and I could see right away that it was in black letter, two columns to a page. A brief inspection revealed that it was in a quarto format, gathered in eights. All signatures present were complete in eight leaves, except signature B, which had, no matter how many times I recounted, eleven leaves. Of course, it is not possible to have eleven leaves in one gathering of a quarto book. A very careful examination revealed how this came to be: the first eight leaves of gathering B were from one edition of the prayer book, and continued the text from the preceding A gathering; leaves nine through eleven of gathering B were actually the last three leaves of signature B of another quarto edition of the prayer book. That is, in what had been a seriously damaged book, two fragmentary texts of the Book of Common Prayer had been joined together to make the best possible whole. I knew that the only hope of identifying these fragments was to look at the state prayers they contained: the prayers for the head of the Church of England, the reigning king or queen at the time the fragments were printed. These prayers in the second fragment were for Queen Elizabeth. I was unable to date this edition with certainty, but it is one of five or six printed between 1587 and 1601, which fits in nicely with the 1588 date of the Bible.

The first fragment also had a section of state prayers. To my great surprise, these were for King Charles, who ascended the throne in 1625; Queen Mary; and Prince Charles, who was born in 1630. Since significant early inscriptions–notably, “William White his booke 1619” and “This booke to Mr. William Brewster his booke from Susana White 1623”–appear in this first fragment which I later established as a 1634 edition, our Mayflower Bible is a fake.

I did not have mixed feelings when I made this discovery. I was elated. It is very seldom that you can prove that something is a fake–usually even strong suspicions remain in mental coffins without the final nail. But I was sorry that we had shown off this clever pastiche, as the real thing, to generations of school children and other awed visitors, and sorry too that we had lost one of the most intriguing out-of-scope artifacts in our collections.

In wondering how so many could have been fooled for so long, I came up with the moral for my tale:

LOOK AT WHAT’S IN FRONT OF YOU.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.3 (March, 2001).

John B. Thomas III is the curator of the Pforzheimer Library of Early English Literature, and Chief, Rare Book Cataloguing, at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. In private life he is an avid gardener and collector of books on atomic energy.

Don’t look now, but the country’s money is changing. Really changing. After decades of consistency, the greenback has begun a startling metamorphosis in its appearance. It all began in 1996. Out went the modest busts of the dead, replaced by enormous heads with impossibly high foreheads and hair straight out of an advertisement for Rogaine. The new notes made a fetish of asymmetry. The presidential portraits sidled leftward, and strange and shiny numbers made their appearance on the lower right-hand side of several of the high-denomination bills, printed in a green—or is it black?—ink. And no sooner had we come to terms with the fresh look than the Bureau of Engraving and Printing let loose a new twenty-dollar bill that featured, of all things, a light-blue eagle floating to the left of Andrew Jackson’s head. A pale peach stripe now runs through the center of the bill, and the little iridescent “20” has changed from green to gold. Even the back of the note, which had up until then been left unchanged, was given a sprinkle of tiny yellow “20s,” making the White House look as though it has been encircled by a swarm of angry bees. Any user of the once-staid United States currency would be entitled to ask: What’s going on here?

While it is tempting to ascribe our money’s makeover to American envy about the new Euro notes, the threat of counterfeiting was the real impetus for the change. After some seventy years in which the look of the greenback changed very little if at all, the country is adopting a novel look for its currency in the hopes it will deter a new and technologically savvy generation of criminals. But if history is any guide, the Treasury Department has an uphill fight ahead of it; counterfeiters have a knack for circumventing almost any obstacle put in their way. That said, the challenges the government now faces pale in comparison to the monetary misery of an earlier epoch, when counterfeiting assumed epidemic proportions, eventually becoming symbolic of a crisis of confidence in the nation’s currency, and perhaps in its emerging economic culture as well.

It has been called the “golden age of counterfeiting” by one historian. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, counterfeiters operated with impunity throughout the United States. Many became folk heroes for their exploits, and more than a few observers in the fledging republic feared that the economy would drown in a flood of bogus currency. Newspapers of the day published breathless warnings of counterfeits circulating throughout the country. An issue of Niles’ Weekly Register from 1818 warned of a single fraudulent emission of notes, telling its readers that “more, much more, perhaps, than a million of dollars in counterfeit and altered notes, have very recently been manufactured.” The warnings only intensified as the decades passed, and by the early 1860s, the New York Times concluded that “there are very few persons, if any, in the United States, who can truthfully declare their ability to detect at a glance any fraudulent paper money . . . In spite of all precautions,” the paper observed, “every merchant has his pile of counterfeit money, and his hourly fear of having it increased.”

The antebellum era’s counterfeiting problem was a consequence of the nature of the money supply at this time. There is a tendency to assume that the greenback is a timeless creation, that the nation-state has always taken the lead in issuing and safeguarding the currency. Nothing could be further from the truth. Prior to the Civil War, the United States exercised little control over the money that circulated within its borders, having abdicated that responsibility decades earlier. 

In fact, the roots of the problem date back at least to the previous century, when the colonists began issuing paper money contrary to the wishes of the imperial authorities. They had good reasons: in a specie-poor economy, it was absolutely necessary to have some circulating medium with which one could transact business. The British passed laws banning the practice, but to no avail. And a curious North American tradition of monetary democracy—the right to “make money,” literally—was born, one that reached its apotheosis during the American Revolution, when the fledgling nation financed its independence with a flood of paper money.

Constitution marked an attempt to reverse this trend in that it forbade individual states from issuing “bills of credit.” Yet at the time, those three words had a very specific meaning: the paper debt of governments (and occasionally individuals) issued as legal tender. Paper money issued by state-chartered banks, or “bank notes,” did not have the same pretensions, being nothing more than surrogates of money, slips of paper that could, in theory, be converted to real money (specie) when presented at the counter of the issuing bank. Within a few years of the ratification of the Constitution, a growing number of states had chartered banks and other corporations that could issue their own money. The upshot was not, perhaps, what the framers of that document had in mind when they attempted to “shut and bar the door against paper money,” in the words of one delegate. While only a handful of corporations issued their own notes in the 1790s, approximately 250 did by 1815, and by 1830, the number climbed to 330. Ten years later that number jumped again to 901, dipped in the early 1840s, and then skyrocketed again in the 1850s. By 1860, some 1,562 banks, or “rag manufactories,” as one critic called them, churned out a dizzying stream of colorful bits of paper.

Banks, left to their own devices, did not issue their notes in concert, nor did they subscribe to a uniform design. As a consequence, the look of an individual bank’s notes depended on criteria as disparate as the personal preferences of a corporation’s board of directors, the regional or commercial allegiances of the institution, and the relative cost of engraving the pictures, or vignettes, on the bills. Antebellum bank notes thus portrayed a bewildering array of individuals and events drawn from history, mythology, and fiction: Lafayette, Martha Washington, Saint George and the Dragon, Poseidon, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, Archimedes, Santa Claus—even contemporary figures like P. T. Barnum, Lord Byron, Jenny Lind, Daniel Webster, and yes, Andrew Jackson. Other notes depicted allegorical figures representing commerce and industry, or stock figures such as slaves, farmers, tradesmen, and sailors. Still others showed ships, railroads, canals, wharves, shops, and other symbols of commerce. With every bank commissioning money of its own design (and in denominations, sizes, and colors of its choosing) more than ten thousand different kinds of notes bobbed up and down in the streams of commerce by the late 1850s, continually changing hands and baffling the uninitiated. Even the phrenologist George Coombe, no stranger to reading appearances, marveled in 1841 that “it has become a science nearly as extensive and difficult as Entomology or Conchology, to know the value of the currency.”

As Coombe recognized, the simple act of reading these notes posed a substantial challenge, one that grew more acute with every passing year. Early on, when only a few banks issued notes, it was relatively easy to remember the different designs, which made detecting counterfeits—or at least poorly rendered counterfeits —a relatively simple task. But as the decades passed, the market economy took root in the most remote corners of the new nation. Where the market went, banks and bank notes followed. And within the widening compass of capitalist relations, these monetary hieroglyphs drifted ever further from the institutions that issued them, making it increasingly difficult to keep track of the currencies in circulation, much less spot a fake.

It staggers the imagination to comprehend the extent and ubiquity of counterfeiting during the antebellum years. One estimate in 1862 observed that “out of 1,300 bank note issues, but 100 are not counterfeited,” and counted some 5,902 different kinds of bogus bills. Others claimed that fraudulent bills accounted for upward of a tenth, a quarter, or even a half of the paper money in circulation. Many of these fakes went beyond simple imitations. Instead, counterfeiters exploited people’s unfamiliarity with the currency by issuing notes that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the genuine article (spurious notes). Others produced notes with their title, locality, or denomination extracted and a new one put in its place (altered or raised notes). Still others dropped all pretense of authenticity, and arrogated the banking function, producing notes that sounded plausible (from the Merchants’ Bank of Utica, for instance), but which had no parallel outside the counterfeit economy. Such notes, while deemed counterfeit, blurred imperceptibly into yet another category of fraud, the notes of so-called “wild-cat” banks—institutions founded by unscrupulous financiers in remote areas for the express purpose of making it difficult, if not impossible, for the notes to be exchanged for gold and silver. Counterfeiting thus existed on a continuum of fraud where the dividing line between the solid and the sham vanished upon close examination.

While the problem of counterfeiting at this time grew out of the diversity of the money supply (something that is no longer an issue), there are more than a few echoes of the past in the present battle against counterfeiting. Take, for example, the growing availability of technologies that can be turned to the counterfeiters’ ends. In the early nineteenth century, new engraving and printing techniques enabled bank-note engravers to produce infinite copies of the plates and dies used in the manufacture of notes, a process known in the bank-note engraving trade as siderography. All the elements of a bank note—the border, the pictures, or vignettes, and the denominations of the bills or names of the banks—could be copied endlessly with perfect fidelity. More than a few counterfeiters never went to the bother of engraving imitations—they could often get copies of the real thing. Add to that the discovery of chemicals and compounds capable of erasing and altering notes, and perhaps most important of all, the invention of photography in 1847, and the ease with which notes could be copied, altered, and otherwise forged grew exponentially between 1800 and 1850.

And now? A similar wave of cheap and easy-to-use computer hardware and software—color photocopiers and printers, digital scanners, and image manipulation software such as Photoshop—has flooded the market, enabling anyone with a bit of computer expertise and a criminal mindset to make their own money. Like the technological innovations of the past century, this equipment does not require extensive training to use, and is cheap and widely available for use at home, schools, printers’ shops, and a host of other venues.

The government’s response has been swift, if predictable. Seeing the writing on the wall—and fearing the printing in the wallet—the Treasury Department funded a National Research Council study in 1993 to investigate possible counterfeiting deterrents. The research team put safety features through countless tests, probing for weaknesses, trying to find ways to outwit the latest technology. The ongoing makeover of our money is a product of that first study, and will add about two cents to the cost of producing each note, a cost, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing assures us, that is to be defrayed by interest on government bonds held by the Federal Reserve. Fear not, taxpayers!

While the new designs may seem exotic and strange, there is nothing particularly new about any of them. The use of special inks, complicated watermarks, complex designs, and denomination-specific safeguards (such as printing “20” dozens of times on a bill) has a long and illustrious history. In the early republic, bank-note engravers and mechanics filed scores of patents designed to frustrate counterfeiters using precisely these devices. Want some anticounterfeiting paper? A proposal from 1822 that calls for the use of paper dyed with blue indigo might be of help. Or would special inks be of interest? Any of the different two-toned black and green inks developed in the 1850s would be of use. Watermarks? They went into widespread use in the early nineteenth century, with the manufacturers of bank note paper taking the lead. All of these anticounterfeiting measures have a history, and a rather long one at that. And in the past, counterfeiters have always managed to circumvent these obstacles. Indeed, they have an incentive to do so. The most dangerous counterfeit—and the one that is most likely to pass without much trouble—is one that perfectly imitates some safeguard the public believes to be inimitable.

It does not bode well for the Treasury Department. Yet one thing our government has going for it is that it need only protect a limited number of designs. Indeed, the strength of today’s money supply lies not with its diversity, but with its simplicity. With only six different types of bills in circulation, it is relatively easy to remember what face goes with what denomination, though more than a few people will struggle to remember when posed that question. Their amnesia is less a function a cultural illiteracy (or poverty) than a testament to just how secure they feel about the currency and how little they need to question the underlying value of these scraps of paper. We do not much read money any more. The bill is in our hands, it is green, and it has a number on it: that is all we need to know. Its virtue is its familiarity. Which is why the government has introduced the new anticounterfeiting measures over the space of close to decade, and in a series of very slow, staged steps. “The currency still has a familiar American look,” states the Bureau of Engraving and Printing on its Website. “The size of the notes, basic colors, historical figures and national symbols are not changing,” the Bureau notes reassuringly. “New features were evaluated for their compatibility with the traditional design of U.S. currency.”

That is debatable, given how they have tarted up Andrew Jackson. But the intent is clear: do not make radical changes or you risk shaking people’s faith in the paper in their wallets. The greenback has become so synonymous with the financial strength of the United States both at home and abroad that radically altering the design is dangerous. Such changes are only welcome when a nation wants a new start (Iraq, for example), or in the case of the European Union, when an entire region wants to carve out a new identity. But in general, preventing a few counterfeits is not worth the erosion of confidence that accompanies the wholesale revision of the symbols and signs that give our money its meaning. After all, in the absence of a gold standard, it is all based on confidence.

By contrast, the banks that issued notes prior to the Civil War worried little about what a change in the design of their notes would mean. If anything, a more expensive and artfully engraved note was taken to be symptomatic of the bank’s financial well being, while a poorly engraved or simple note could indicate a lack of resources and commitment. Individual banks and other note-issuing corporations did not have to shoulder the burden of national sovereignty; they had only to worry about their own interests and their own profit.

Despite all the counterfeiting, that system worked relatively well: the nation had a sufficient circulating medium to meets its insatiable need for credit. And while the system collapsed with some regularity—in 1818 and 1837 most dramatically—resulting in the suspension of specie payments if not national bankruptcy, it does not appear to have slowed down the pace of growth. Indeed, if anything, the sprawling system of state-chartered banks and the money they issued contributed to the nation’s economic ascent. The federal government played little role in any of this in the early nineteenth century, minting some coins and chartering the Bank of the United States, but otherwise steering clear of direct involvement in the monetary system. That process of disengagement only intensified after Jackson’s “Bank War” in 1832-33, which effectively transferred control of the money supply from the Bank of the United States to corporations chartered by the individual states. What prevailed in the early United States was not the most dignified monetary system, but it did work, in part because so many people were willing to suspend disbelief and accept otherwise worthless pieces of paper in the course of business. It was an era in which the distinctions between the real and the counterfeit had yet to coalesce.

But eventually they did coalesce, which brings us full circle back to the efforts of the federal government to protect the currency from counterfeiters. Short of funds during the Civil War, the North turned to the printing presses to finance the war, issuing the money that quickly became known as the greenbacks. Within a few short years, the convergence of the country and the currency was complete, and the older system of the state-chartered banks and their notes was swept away in a flurry of nationalist legislation, replaced by a uniform currency issued by the federal government and a select number of so-called “national banks.” The nation-state now had a vested interest in protecting the currency, and a new national policing agency was established to prosecute counterfeiters to the fullest extent of the law. Indeed, before the Secret Service began protecting the president, its members spent most of their time protecting the money supply from fraud, imposture, and insult. There is something telling about the fact that the greenback was considered a national symbol more deserving of protection than the head of state through much of the Gilded Age. That eventually changed, but even today, the job of protecting the money supply is central to the mission of the Secret Service.

By the early twentieth century, the Secret Service had largely succeeded in eradicating counterfeiting, and an era of almost unquestioned confidence in the greenback began. Little could those officers have imagined the present crisis of authenticity triggered by the proliferation of digital imaging. And so now the government has apparently come to the conclusion that a police force alone cannot protect the currency. It must harness technology as well. Today, as in the early republic, there is the hope that a splash of color, some watermarks, and a new look will frustrate the counterfeiting community. Perhaps, but as the bankers of the early republic could attest, it is one thing to make money more difficult to copy; it is altogether another matter to make it impossible to imitate.

Further Reading:

There is no serious history of counterfeiting in the United States, though Lynn Glaser, Counterfeiting in America: The History of an American Way to Wealth (New York, 1968) is not without its merits. Also helpful, if a bit earlier in focus, is Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America (New York, 1957). On counterfeiting and the rise of the Secret Service, see David R. Johnson, Illegal Tender: Counterfeiting and the Secret Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C., 1995). For more on the rise of national monetary systems, consult Eric Helleiner, The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective (Ithaca, 2003).

This article originally appeared in issue 4.4 (July, 2004).

Stephen Mihm is an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is presently writing a book about counterfeiting and capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States.

A. B. Macdonald, who should have known better, fell for the homesick veteran’s tale of woe. A self-described collector of Americana, Macdonald was a feature writer for the Kansas City Star, where Ernest Hemingway had learned to hard-boil his prose. On a stormy Sunday morning in October 1932, a man calling himself Captain E. Newman Bradley knocked on his door with an offer to sell a rare document at a bargain price. Bradley, Macdonald recalled, was “a tall, slim man, with sunken cheeks and an expression of sorrow and weariness in his face,” wearing a thin brown overcoat and holding a well-worn cap in his hand. “I have not washed, nor combed my hair, nor eaten for fifteen hours,” he said. “I have been too much troubled to do so. I have come to tell you the hardest hard-luck story you ever heard.” He told Macdonald that he was from Houston, a veteran of the World War, “formerly of the air service, U.S.A.” (where, he claimed, he had taught Lindbergh to fly), showed him his discharge papers (specially signed by “General Pershing” in recognition of his bravery as “a flying ace”), and opened his coat to give Macdonald “a glimpse of a shiny metal shield pinned to the breast of his flannel shirt.” He had been an antiques dealer, “ruined” by the Depression. The promise of a job in Kansas City was “a life-saver, for my wife was sick.” He loaded some rare books and documents into his jalopy, “to sell in case of emergency,” and drove north, but he arrived to find that the job had been given to someone else.  “[D]ropping his voice to a monotone, filled with sadness,” he read Macdonald a telegram he had just received “that has broken my heart.” The telegram informed him that his wife was dead.

It would be an act of charity, as well as a shrewd investment, if Macdonald could find it in his heart to buy the death warrant of Elizabeth How, hanged as a witch at Salem in 1692, that Bradley had in his car. “Let me tell you how this excessively rare document came into my possession,” he explained. “Five years ago, in my prosperous days, I bought the furniture, books, pictures and other things in a very ancient mansion on a large plantation in Mississippi and shipped them to my store in Houston. Among the things was a very old Bible. One day, as I turned its leaves, I found this old document, folded between its pages where it had probably lain for a century or two.” The “yellowed old document, the ink faded, its edges gnawed by the tooth of time,” was accompanied by an official certificate of authenticity from the South Carolina Historical Society in Columbia, bearing a file number and the signature of curator J. A. Skaggs, who attested that the Massachusetts Historical Society and an expert firm in New York joined him in pronouncing it genuine. And Bradley wanted only twenty dollars for it. “That will take my car to Houston,” he said. “Do me this favor, please, and you may have whatever profit is in it for you.”

Macdonald immediately tried to parlay his good deed into a small fortune. He offered to sell the warrant to Charles Tuttle, a Rutland, Vermont, collector of “Americana,” “First Editions,” and “Vermontiana,” who enthusiastically responded that before the crash, such a rare document would have fetched $10,000, and even in these hard times ought to go for $5,000 ($65,000 today). Tuttle was not willing to buy it himself but tried to sell it, “at a small commission,” to Howard Corning, secretary of the Essex Institute in Salem. “The Document is faded and foxed a little,” Tuttle told Corning, and the “bottom edge . . . is worn off so that a name signed there is illegible,” but “[t]he balance is as plain as the day it was written.” He sent Corning a typewritten copy of the warrant and followed up ten days later with the “real” thing.

“The thing is a fake from beginning to end,” Corning replied. The modern ink alone was “enough to discredit it,” and the stains on the paper obviously came from a forger rather than age. He advised Tuttle to take a look at the facsimile of the only known Salem death warrant—for Bridget Bishop—in Charles Upham’s 1867 history of the witchcraft affair; “[Y]ou will see that [the] wording and the writing are entirely different.” Tuttle was embarrassed. “I confess at first glance it fooled me. Not so much from the looks of it, but from the fact I did not see how the guaranty got on there.” Of course the ink and the stains were suspect, but the South Carolina Historical Society’s authentication seemed authentic. They ought to look into this Macdonald character, though Tuttle’s hunch was that he was “an innocent party”; it seemed unlikely that a forger would be on Tuttle’s mailing list as a collector.

In their embarrassment, Tuttle and Macdonald reassured each other that the forgery had been “cleverly executed.” Corning tactfully agreed, but after Macdonald had confirmed his innocence and decided to write an article about the scam, Corning suggested that the warrant really was not very clever at all. Besides the “suspiciously modern” ink, paper, and handwriting, and the “clumsy” staining, he explained, “the internal evidence was also damning.” The forgery was “signed” by a panoply of Puritan celebrities, including Increase and Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, and Samuel Sewall. The Bishop death warrant was signed only by William Stoughton, the chief justice of the court of oyer and terminer at Salem. Governor William Phips never spelled his name with two p’s; he was “William Phipps” on the forgery. Corning neglected to point out to Macdonald the document’s most obviously faked signature: the “mark” of the Wampanoag leader “King Philip.” J. A. Skaggs noted the “famous mark” on his certification of authenticity. But Philip had been killed in 1676. Skaggs, it turned out, did not exist, and there was a state historical commission in Columbia, but the South Carolina Historical Society was in Charleston.

Macdonald was not alone in getting played for a sap by “Captain Bradley.” Bradley had taken several other Kansas City collectors for as much as $100 ($1300 today) before he “nicked” Macdonald, and he got the city’s Grolier Society for $50 just after. Corning first learned of the forgeries in August, when the editor of the local newspaper in Whitewater, Wisconsin, wrote the Essex Institute on behalf of his fellow villager S. Hoyum, a schoolteacher who had quite remarkably come into possession of a death warrant for the accused witch Sarah Good. As the Whitewater Register breathlessly reported it, “A few days ago a man from Tulsa, Okla., drove into Whitewater. He was a combination interior decorator and collector of antiques. More than that, he was broke. Hunting up a local resident who he figured might be interested he offered to pawn a valuable relic he carried for a loan sufficient to get him home. He said he would repay the loan because he wanted the relic and insisted on an agreement to that effect in writing.” The editor requested a letter from the Essex Institute certifying the document’s authenticity. Since Hoyum was holding the document as security for a loan, he was not yet prepared to offer it for sale—”although the period of the loan has expired and the manuscript is obviously his.” The poor traveler must have been so badly off that he could not come up with the cash to reclaim his beloved relic. He had told Hoyum that he needed the loan to get home to his sick wife. Maybe she had taken a turn for the worse, and the money for repayment had gone instead to her doctors in Tulsa. Meanwhile, the Register boasted, “Whitewater houses an antique which historical museums throughout the country would covet.”

Quincy, Illinois, was equally proud of its new antique: the death warrant of Rebekah Nurse, who, according to the Quincy Herald-Whig, “was sentenced to hang by Phillip, king of the Indians,” on June 10, 1692. (A curious elision of “villains” here, as if Philip, even if he had still been alive, could have shared legal authority with Puritan judges.) The “rare” document, “valuable, both from a monetary and historic standpoint,” was now in the proud possession of Mrs. Don Hoover. Mrs. Hoover had generously allowed it to be put on display in the window of Odell’s department store.

The “original” Nurse death warrant was simultaneously in the possession of W. A. Thompson, an antiques collector in Greensboro, North Carolina, who offered to sell it to the Smithsonian in September, and of Mrs. J. E. Eckdall of Emporia, Kansas. Mrs. Eckdall, reported her nephew Joseph Kellogg, “is a member of patriotic societies and is interested in such things.” Kellogg, a professor of architecture at the University of Kansas, was highly dubious about his aunt’s document. “What on earth could King Philip have to do with Salem witchcraft matters, twenty years or so after his death!” he asked Corning in February 1933. Corning still took no notice of the strange Philip business when he replied to Kellogg to confirm that Bradley had sold his patriotic aunt a “rank forgery.” Corning also fielded inquiries from Sandwich, Illinois, (about a Martha Corey death warrant), and Marshall, Texas.

By November 1932, Corning had seen enough of the forgeries to launch a public effort to warn collectors. “Beware of a faker who is traversing the Southern and Western states endeavoring to sell some skillfully forged death warrants for female witches of Salem, Mass., 1692,” advised the Boston Evening Transcript’s antiques column. “The warrants are cleverly and convincingly authenticated.” Publisher’s Weekly’s warnings were not so delicate in sparing the feelings of those who were swindled; the forgeries were “obvious.” In January 1933, PW carried an item reporting that a “person calling himself ‘Bradley’” had been “canvassing the middle western libraries” with his fakes: “This person usually represents himself as ill and stranded and attempting to get home to Texas.” The South Carolina Historical Society issued its own warning through the Charleston News and Courier.

Why did Bradley choose to forge Salem death warrants? Why not, say, letters from obscure signers of the Declaration of Independence? (A November 1932 article in the American Book Collector on “fakes, forgeries, and frauds” mentioned fishy Button Gwinnett documents as the kind of thing collectors might encounter.) Corning speculated that it had to do with geography. “Apparently the man has been working almost entirely in the Middle West and South,” he reasoned to Macdonald. “I suppose on the principle that the people out there are not likely to be quite so familiar with this type of document as we would be here in the East.” But if midwesterners and southerners were unfamiliar with the documents of Puritan New England, they were all too familiar with the contemporary discourse of Puritanism. Eastern critics and intellectuals—H. L. Mencken most conspicuously and nastily—had lambasted the Midwest and South throughout the 1920s for their superstitiousness, repressiveness, narrow-mindedness, and general benightedness. Mencken railed against “the Puritan’s utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution”—all of which were revealed in the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. With beautifully controlled irony, Esther Forbes’s 1928 historical novel A Mirror for Witches located Salem’s “lust” for persecuting the bewitching heroine Doll Bilby in sexual repression.

When Bradley, in the guise of the South Carolina curator J. A. Skaggs, “authenticated” his forged death warrants by observing, “This is the only shameful delusion in early Americana [sic] history,” was he suggesting to his midwestern and southern collectors that Puritanism was not that bad after all? (“The only shameful delusion,” “only 22 executions in Mass.,” he wrote.) Reminding them that the site of a truly relentless and barbarous persecution was Massachusetts? Exploiting their desire to deflect the charge of benightedness back in time and toward the East and North?

Or maybe Bradley had in mind a much more recent instance of persecution and scapegoating by rigid authorities. He gave his victims a false name, but his age and appearance made it likely that he really was a veteran of the World War. Whether or not he had a sick wife or wanted to get home to Oklahoma or Texas, his hard luck was probably genuine. He certainly would have heard and read about the World War vets who hitched, rode the rails, or walked to Washington in the late spring and summer of 1932 to demand early payment of their bonuses to relieve some of the burdens of unemployment. The Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF)—Bonus Army, as it came to be known—started out as about 250 men from Portland, Oregon, in May, and swelled to 25,000 from across the country in June and July. Camped for a time in twenty-three spots in Washington, and later gathered in one main camp on Anacostia Flats, the BEF included a Texas unit of about thirteen hundred, “headed by a woman—‘a Joan of Arc in overalls,’ the press called her, and with picturesque livestock—a burro named Patman (after the Texas congressman who sponsored early payment) and a goat named Hoover.” On July 28, recalled the BEF’s leader, “a military column moved down Pennsylvania Avenue,” under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. “Here were tanks and cavalry, the men wearing gas masks and carrying drawn sabers. In open trucks machine guns were stripped for action.” After clearing the remaining BEF billets in the city proper, they crossed the bridge to Anacostia, set fire to the tents and shacks in the encampment there, and drove the veterans and their families out of the capital. The routed Bonus marchers, vilified now by the Hoover administration as “communists and persons with criminal records,” straggled through Maryland, reassembled briefly in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and then dispersed back to the roads and box cars. Maybe Bradley was even among them. Maybe he had passed the long periods of boredom on Anacostia Flats, the chances of getting his bonus increasingly remote, scrawling and staining Salem death warrants. From the torched bivouac at Anacostia, he could have made his way to the upper Midwest in time to start peddling his wares by the middle of August.

Or maybe Bradley was a con man, pure and simple, who shrewdly exploited a burgeoning desire for authentic Americana. Surveying popular attitudes toward the nation’s past, the historian Michael Kammen lists several impulses behind Americana collecting in this period: patriotism; antimodernism; the excitements of bargain hunting; the collegiality of a shared hobby; the internalization of a craft-based “American aesthetic.” It is hard to imagine death warrants tapping directly into love of country or nostalgia, and Bradley’s work did not share much with “the solid, simple, dignified and lovingly wrought craftsmanship” of early American tools, textiles, pottery, or furniture. But for a moment in the worst year of the Depression, A. B. Macdonald, S. Hoyum, Mrs. Don Hoover, W. A. Thompson, Mrs. J. E. Eckdall, and Bradley’s other marks experienced the thrill of possessing something unique (“very rare,” said Skaggs’s certificate), “real” (“pronounced genuine by Mass. Historical Society”), and “valuable.” Bradley’s cleverness was to recognize that the more “honestly” he performed his desperation, the more certain his marks would be that his bargain price signified real worth.

Further Reading:

A. B. Macdonald told the story of how he was bilked by Bradley in “Texas Collector is Forced to Part with a Rare Document,” Kansas City Star, February 19, 1933, 3C. Correspondence and clippings related to the forgeries can be found in Witchcraft Documents, Family Mss., Box 2, Folder 1, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. I am indebted to Bryan F. LeBeau’s article on the Carey document, a forged Salem death warrant from Nebraska that its owners tried to sell in the 1980s, for pointing me to many of my sources. See Bryan F. LeBeau, “The Carey Document: On the Trail of a Salem Death Warrant,” Early America Review (Summer 1997). The Mencken quotation, which originally appeared in “Puritanism as a Literary Force” (1917), is from Fred Hobson, Mencken: A Life (New York, 1994), 192. For the Bonus March discussion, I drew on Roger Daniels, The Bonus March: An Episode of the Great Depression (Westport, Conn., 1971), 82, 84; and W. W. Waters as told to William C. White, B.E.F.: The Complete Story of the Bonus Army (New York, 1933), 222-23, 257. Michael Kammen’s discussion of Americana collecting is in Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 322-25.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.3 (April, 2005).

Steven Biel is director of the history and literature program at Harvard University and the author of American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting, which will be published by W.W. Norton in June.

An antebellum museum in cyberspace

On July 13, 1865, one of the most celebrated institutions in the United States, the American Museum, burned to the ground. But thanks to the wonders of technology, it has been rebuilt—sort of—on a Website called The Lost Museum, sponsored by the American Social History Project of the CUNY Graduate Center, in collaboration with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. As it was managed by Phineas T. Barnum, the original American Museum was located in lower Manhattan and presented an ever-growing collection of wonders across five floors, ranging from “cosmoramas” and wax figures, to aquariums and live-animal specimens, to “moral representations” in the Lecture Room.

This new virtual version uses the resources of the Web to present artifacts relating to Barnum’s establishment and to recreate historically particular spaces of an antebellum dime museum. Here, we have a central room linked to three “floors,” containing “Barnum’s Office,” which houses, among other items, a desk adorned with a photograph of Barnum with Tom Thumb, an 1850 Illustrated Guide Book to the Museum, an 1844 image of Bowery B’hoys, and a handwritten letter expressing concern over cruelty to animals. The second floor contains a portrait gallery, while “The Lecture Room” on the third floor contains a screen, framed by a theatrical proscenium, on which the viewer can see magic-lantern slide shows about great fires or nineteenth-century etiquette. Perhaps in deference to the shorter attention span of today’s technology-saturated museum goers, the designers have made a selective version of Barnum’s museum. If antebellum visitors made an entire day of their trips to the real thing, you can be in and out of “The Lost Museum” in about half an hour.

Despite the verisimilitude with which it is portrayed, “The Lost Museum” does not exist in the physical world; it is, rather, an ingenious visual hoax. A virtual museum of oddities and artifacts, it offers a wide-ranging, interactive encounter with the cultural history of nineteenth-century America. In addition to electronic reproductions of historical objects and sources—daguerreotypes, illustrations, broadsides, printed books, manuscripts, and the other detritus that would have filled Barnum’s collections—the site includes a series of illuminating short essays on the museum’s social and cultural contexts. Unlike other pioneering virtual archives, such as the ground-breaking American Memory project of the Library of Congress, “The Lost Museum” recreates the experience of a museum from another era, encouraging us to get lost in the artifice of history. For here we are not just viewing a series of documents. We are exploring the particular, sometimes arbitrary ways institutions and scholars link artifacts to larger stories. More than a historical resource, “The Lost Museum” invites us, then, to ponder the narratives with which we stage authenticity, the material objects and practices with which every generation reimagines the kinship of truth and fiction.

Public Leisure and the Print Medium

Barnum remains our most reliable reference point for understanding the struggle between commerce and philanthropy in nineteenth-century America. In her 1997 study of dime museums, for example, the scholar Andrea Dennett baldly asserts, “The answer is clear: Barnum conceived his extraordinary museum for the purpose of entertainment—not education—and with profit as his central concern.” Dennett asserts that “education” and “entertainment” are timeless, discrete categories of experience, rather than concepts developed in the later nineteenth century to justify the mission of civic philanthropy and the modern university. She likewise holds pursuit of profit to be antithetical to a disinterested acquisition of knowledge. Like so many scholars of the American Museum, Dennett makes the outsized personality of Barnum himself—the very image that he so carefully cultivated in print media, in order to market and brand his exhibitions—exhibit A for achieving clarity about the past. In the nineteenth century, however, both producers and consumers of popular knowledge spoke about forms of “rational amusement” in ways that defy simple distinctions between education and entertainment. If Barnum’s name is now synonymous with the tricks of modern advertising, his entertainment succeeded by combining commerce and culture, challenging the simplistic meanings (passive vs. active, imagination vs. utility) that moralists—conservative politicians and evangelical ministers of the early nineteenth century, no less than cultural critics of the twentieth century—would attribute to these concepts.

So how did Barnum fashion American taste? As Neil Harris famously argued, Barnum developed an “operational aesthetic” that made learning about how he pulled off his stunts, hoaxes, and humbugs a major part of their appeal. Amidst rising scientific literacy and populist skepticism of expert learning, Barnum “trained Americans to absorb knowledge” by marketing his museum as an experience of “process,” of problem solving, and of information gathering. Or as another historian, Miles Orvell, puts it, “Learning to tell the true from the false, the lie from the truth, learning trust and mistrust, was part of a process of an acculturation” in a rapidly commercializing America. Another way to think about the value of Barnum’s museum, however, is as an introduction to mass communication, which engaged patrons in a distinctive kind of collective imagination. The latter was being made possible by the confluence of cheap print technology and novel spaces of urban leisure.

To further understand Barnum’s innovations, it is worth attending to his own aesthetic and moral design. To begin with, as he explained in his second autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs, Barnum wanted to attract the largest crowds possible by giving “them abundant and wholesome attractions for a small sum of money.” Like the huge theaters, concert halls, and hotels that competed for antebellum pleasure seekers and tourists, the American Museum sold recreation to “truly mass audiences” that numbered in the thousands. These were, as Harris notes, “heterogeneous groups of men willing to take off their hats and open their pocketbooks for art, but demanding entertainment at the same time.” Although scholars have tended to romanticize these audiences for their raucous, lowbrow, and socially varied character, Barnum suggested that there was no more “truly popular place of amusement” because it was “wholesome” and “attractive” to diverse customers. He “abolished all vulgarity and profanity from the stage,” for example, so that “parents and children could attend the dramatic performances in the so-called Lecture Room, and not be shocked or offended by anything they might see or hear.” And unlike most museums and concert halls, he banned the sale and consumption of alcohol from his galleries. He even hired private detectives to eject men who were drunk or women suspected of prostitution. Barnum made urban leisure safe for everyone.

Using print in innovative ways, Barnum’s promotions turned a visit to his museum into a new kind of imaginative experience. Barnum’s own repeated avowal of a profit motive—so often used to impugn techniques of modern advertising as amoral—underscores the fact that the ends of publicity were more instrumental than symbolic: to mobilize the actions of large groups of people. With commercial signage, broadsides, sandwich boards, and printed money, “a vast spectacle of writing and print [became] part of everyday life in the city by the 1840s and 50s,” the historian David Henkin writes, and Barnum’s “bold lettering and eye-catching graphics” made him, “quite literally, an urban man of letters.” Barnum understood that he owed his success to the “means of printer’s ink, which I have always used freely,” and that advertising was integral to the museum spectacle. Like modern marketing gurus, Barnum understood that he was not just selling particular goods or services. He was selling stories that heightened expectations and speculations about those goods and services. In short, Barnum beat his competitors by telling much better stories about his attractions. “My ‘puffing’ was more persistent, my advertising more audacious, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my flags more patriotic and my transparencies [or illuminated banners] more brilliant.”

Barnum repeatedly justified any particular fabrication that he advertised by pointing to the cumulative experience afforded by the museum. While extending the museum walls outward into the heterogeneous social and physical urban environment, the images and words of his printed advertising and planted “news” were always linked to a collection of bona fide objects and attractions, “a wilderness of wonderful, instructive and amusing realities.” Customers always got their money’s worth because they were only paying twenty-five cents, and there was always more to see. In his first autobiography, published in 1855, Barnum declared, “If a sight of my ‘Niagara Falls’ was not worth twenty-five cents, the privilege of seeing the most extensive and valuable museum on this continent was worth double that sum to any one who was enticed into seeing it by the advertisements.” If the exhibits fell short of what was promised, how much would you pay for another chance to trade in incredulity and wonder? Barnum shrewdly perceived the value of irrationality in a country that, as he put it, was overwhelmed by “a severe and drudging practicalness . . . [that] concentrates itself on dry and technical ideas of duty, and upon a sordid love of acquisition—leaving entirely out of view all those needful and proper relaxations and enjoyments which are interwoven through even the most humble conditions in other countries.” Barnum made sure his customers saw past the objects themselves to become participants in his public theater of the imagination.

Imagination and Virtual Experience

No less than Barnum’s museum, contemporary Web design entails the management of crowds. Because it is interactive and open ended, the user-friendly desktop computer has made our encounter with virtual space a matter of the hand-eye coordination we bring to moving cursors and clicking mice. For the rising generation of digerati, weaned on the ever-more seamless simulacrum of live-action and video animation, the intensive manipulation of on-screen images can itself seem awkward, an oddly old-fashioned way of encountering the past through artifacts that challenge the sophistication and flexibility one complacently assumes in the seemingly personal control of technology. For those unused to the rapid-response demands of Gameboys or the hair-trigger sensitivity of Xbox toggle sticks (or who can barely handle the remote control for home video and audio systems), what one finds in “The Lost Museum” often entails getting lost on the Internet. Accidentally pushing the wrong button or scrolling too haphazardly will—like following the strategic (mis)direction of Barnum’s famous “To the Egress” sign, which led some of his less literate (often Irish) visitors out a back door in search of a potential curiosity—land you on the sidewalk.

As with “The Lost Museum,” the navigation of Barnum’s collection in the nineteenth century assumed literacy in modern rituals and modern communication forms. Consider, for example, a broadside reprinted in the 1850s from a newspaper called the Eastonian, taken from the work of the American folk humorist Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber. The broadside narrates a visit to Barnum’s traveling museum in the voice of a censorious older woman, Mrs. Partington, who in a series of books had become a popular comic figure known for malapropisms and homespun wisdom. Throughout the first half of the text, this woman’s approach to the museum is clothed in elaborate, if not fanciful, words and phrases—”retrocession into the place,” “reproaching the tent,” “money I’d given him to pay his dismission”—that strain the particularly spoken coherence of common sense and the simple poetry of marketplace doggerel. But once inside the museum, Mrs. Partington is seduced by the visual wonder of the collection: “I truly declare, I was all struck in a heap with what I saw there.” These awkward verbal formulations give way to what Miles Orvell calls the “omnibus form” of descriptive detail, in which the arbitrary juxtaposition of objects is made natural by the merely rhythmic cadence of nouns and names:

Suits of armor, coats of mail
Together with the end of a comet’s tail,—
An Indian canoe, with a curious paddle,
A Mexican uniform, bridle and saddle,
The Point of an argument, wonderful shells,
And a Chinese pagoder all covered with bells.

If Partington’s entrance in the broadside, like her approach to the collection, is skeptical—”‘Whoever hear the like of that!’/Said Mrs. P . . .”—she leaves it in silent reverie:

The old lady, lost in admiration
Here cut the thread of her narration,
And spreading her handkerchief over her face,
And replacing her needles, in her tin netting case,
Settled to sleep, and to dream of Tom Thumb
And the wonders of Barnum’s great museum.

As a byproduct of the notoriety Barnum’s showmanship had achieved, the broadside suggests how fully Barnum’s exhibitions were already touring an information highway. Partington’s visit begins with her “gazing at a bill, which showed in letters bold the wonders Barnum would unfold . . .” Here, as in so much of the publicity that surrounded the American Museum, Barnum’s own reputation for promotion—and especially his facility with the “bold letters” of printer’s ink—is literally built into one’s encounter with the museum, providing the printed frame within which the retailing of goods and leisure “unfold” as “wonders.” But by animating its depiction of Barnum’s museum with extended quotation of Mrs. Partington, the broadside situates our understanding within the local networks of vernacular speech. What one knows in such a world is always filtered through the homely, colloquial social matrices of gossip, conversation, controversy, and argument that spread the popular taste for antebellum entertainment (no less than politics and literary sentiment) by word of mouth. As Barnum himself so often put it, the key to success in the business of culture was “to make people talk and wonder.”

What separates Mrs. Partington’s virtual experience of imagination from our own are the material frameworks through which audiences see and interpret objects. As recent scholarship by Benjamin Reiss, James Cook, and Bluford Adams has demonstrated, nineteenth-century audiences made sense of exhibitions such as the elderly former slave Joice Heth (billed as “Washington’s Nurse”) and other curiosities both living and dead by drawing on contemporary narratives about race, politics, and the exotic. But situated within the motley collection of the American Museum, objects continued to appeal to the traditional cult of the marvelous. As the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt has characterized that pervasive phenomenon, it is the “power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.” Much like its ancestor, the Renaissance cabinet of curiosity, the American Museum made the beautiful and the strange kindred forms. In doing so, it affirmed the power of man, nature, or the divine to defy the routine patterns and familiar assumptions of reality.

Objects displayed in museums today, by contrast, evoke the original contexts from which they were taken: the church wall, the royal burial chamber, the archeological dig, the vanished habitat, the ceremonial rituals of pre-modern tribes. They carry a resonance of otherness, differences of context and use that can only be partially recovered by catalogue descriptions and exhibition labels, whose very muteness endow objects with transcendent value as historical and aesthetic artifacts. We are expected to know their meaning mainly by silencing the informal narratives within which untrained viewers such as Mrs. Partington unfolded and circulated the social sense of Barnum’s wonders. Narrated within galleries organized by historical period, national context, artistic provenance, or stylistic tradition, objects became artifacts, whose authenticity and value are framed by omniscient scholarly narratives. As they came to be lit by boutique lighting pioneered in shop windows and department stores, these objects demanded the viewer’s deference to symbolic, immanent values, which—whether animated by the spirit of civilization, history, or an emerging anthropological sense of “culture”—divorced an artifact’s meaning from the vernacular networks through which Mrs. Partington would have grasped Barnum’s wonders.

The modern infrastructure of public culture thus gives us wonder without talk, specialized kinds of historical and aesthetic education mediated less by the operations of vernacular speech and popular taste than the methods and institutions of professional expertise. Museums of natural history, for example, introduced formal taxonomies into the preservation and display of collections. “It is not the objects placed in a museum” that constitute its value, as William Henry Flowers, a director of the British Museum argued. It is “the method in which they are displayed and the use made of them for the purpose of instruction.” Similarly, as historians and librarians, such as Harvard’s Justin Winsor, imported German methods to the American academy, a new “scientific history” displaced romantic narratives with documentary evidence that, as historian Steven Cohn notes in his intellectual history of late nineteenth-century American museums, “emphasized detail over values, facts over ultimate meanings.”

Converted into such documentary evidence, objects not only present arguments about the past, but become totems of professional authority, offerings at the alter of positivist objectivity, licensed and guarded by professionals and institutions of higher education. Throughout much of the twentieth century, ordinary people thus learned to see objects not through the screaming letters of broadsides but through the silent reading of books, exhibit labels, collection catalogues, and the like. The apparatus of professional expertise promoted textual truth over the merely antiquarian, the spiritual, and the just plain popular.

Digital Humbug

Seeking “to startle, to make people talk and wonder,” Barnum transformed the marketplace for leisure into a stage for “wonderful, instructive, and amusing realities.” The door of the museum, no less than the two dimensional broadsides that kept it before a mass reading public, was a portal to “realities” that engaged viewers in multiple processes of representation—visual, verbal, architectural, and performative. The speculations that Barnum puffed in print were only consummated when people were motivated to pay the price of admission—the visit by which otherwise standard offerings of mass leisure were made into personal experience. Countless people would leave the museum to write about what they saw in their diaries or letters or simply to talk about their visit with friends and strangers. No matter what they saw, patrons took self-conscious pleasure in the entrepreneurial making and unmaking of meaning.

The digital age has allowed countless museums and libraries to mount exhibitions that travel the information highway but in ways that make the event of a “visit” increasingly passive. Where “The Lost Museum” offers Internet access to a virtual environment, Mrs. Partington traveled to a place:

To see it, and wondered, and marveled
From the first to the last—from morning to night,
And vowed for no money would have missed the great sight.

Today, we can have experiences without actually going anywhere, through increasingly inert and imaginary forms of mobility pioneered in Barnum’s broadsides. Indeed, a New York Timesarticle from July 1, 2000, described “The Lost Museum” as “A Museum to Visit from an Arm Chair.”

Much like the cacophonous nineteenth-century city, every Website assumes the viewer’s ability to navigate particular symbolic codes. In place of the typographic carnival of nineteenth-century broadsides, they trade in the contemporary conventions of the home page, arrayed with icons and lists. They also assume—as does “The Lost Museum”—our facility with the visual and verbal clichés of movies and broadcasting; the faint sound of horses and carriage wheels on cobblestones tells us that we are deep into “history” (any time and place before the automobile), while black darkness signals its vaguely sinister elusiveness (can we ever fully see the past with clarity and objectivity?). Like Caleb Carr’s historical fiction The Alienist (New York, 1994) or Patricia Cline Cohen’s non-fictional history The Murder of Helen Jewett (New York, 1998), the site seeks to popularize the taste for nineteenth-century America by framing its cultural insights and artifacts in the narrative devices of an unsolved mystery: who might have burned down Barnum’s museum? The viewer is encouraged to navigate the documents and artifacts “housed” on the site by gathering clues, which suitably enough are indicated when the screen cursor becomes a question mark. In a clever touch, a notepad, done-up in the antiquated guise of nineteenth-century stationary, is furnished for viewers to record and store their clues, creating a personal narrative about what might have happened and why. With these tools in hand, the viewer becomes his or her own historian. For students, the device offers an elegant education in scholarly method. If the virtual realities of mass communication have removed the social dimension from leisure, Internet technology has, in such inspired sites as “The Lost Museum,” allowed us to regain the sense of wonder that once accompanied a trip to the museum. The site insists that we confront artifacts not as disembodied texts and images—the transcription of handwritten documents or photographic reproductions—but as three-dimensional objects. By moving their cursors across the screen, viewers can reproduce for themselves the increasingly old-fashioned optical effects of walking through a gallery, scanning a wall or room crowded with stuff, zeroing in on a particular object or image, focusing one’s attention on a detail. So too, even in its radically reduced number of artifacts, it recreates the eclectic visual experience of collection, the wonder that Partington attaches to the omnibus form of Barnum’s museum—the sheer quantity of objects linked to one another by the seemingly arbitrary logic of physical proximity, commercial expedience, and connoisseurship.

By blurring the line between entertainment and education, “The Lost Museum” allows us to recover an innovative space in the history of public leisure and popular taste. Ironically, the interactive breakthroughs developed for the Internet have given visitors new tools that succeed as education precisely because they trade in tricks of “rational amusement,” adapting the narrative frameworks and media literacy of modern commercial entertainment. If Barnum’s museum was lost to history, its spirit moves again in the humbugs of digital technology.

Further Reading:

Barnum’s comments can be found in his two autobiographies: P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, written by Himself (Buffalo, [1876] 1883) and P.T. Barnum, The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York, 1855). For scholarly assessments of Barnum in American culture, see Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York, 1997); Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston, 1973); Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill, 1989); David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York, 1998); Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 1997). On museum history, see Ivan Karp and Steven Levine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, 1991) and Steven Cohn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.1 (October, 2001).

Thomas Augst is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2003) and is currently writing a book about temperance reform and mass culture

Highly anticipated among scholars of American art and American cultural history alike, Wendy Bellion’s Citizen Spectator is among the most significant book-length studies of early American art to appear in print during the past decade. Derived from Bellion’s 2001 Northwestern University dissertation, it is indispensable, as ambitious and important as Margaretta M. Lovell’s Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (2005) and Michael Gaudio’s Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (2008).

Philadelphia was at once a “thriving intellectual, social, and commercial hub,” a “hothouse of political inquiry,” and a “laboratory for looking, a place where the visual ideologies of the early republic could be put to the test of objects and experiences”

As the dust jacket indicates, Citizen Spectator is the “first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States.” Unlike the much-studied optical devices, hoaxes, and trompe l’oeil paintings of the later nineteenth century, Bellion’s world of illusion has received only passing mention or fragmentary treatment. She makes a case for its importance by underlining the relations between “early national cultures of art and politics” (11). Citizen Spectator “contends that illusions functioned to exercise and hone skills of looking” (5). “During an era in which the senses were politicized as agents of knowledge and action,” Bellion writes, “public exhibitions of illusions challenged Americans to demonstrate their perceptual aptitude. Thresholds for the practice and performance of discernment, deceptions made exhibition rooms into spaces of citizen formation” (ibid.). To see clearly, to live “undeceived,” Bellion argues, were primary concerns for Americans in the earliest years of the United States. Although she occasionally ventures north to Boston, south to Washington, D.C., and across the Atlantic, she focuses on early national Philadelphia and the well-known Peale family of artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs. As the “second-largest city in the British Atlantic world,” the “site of the Revolutionary and Continental congresses of the 1770s and 1780s [and] the seat of the federal government during the 1790s,” Philadelphia was at once a “thriving intellectual, social, and commercial hub,” a “hothouse of political inquiry,” and a “laboratory for looking, a place where the visual ideologies of the early republic could be put to the test of objects and experiences” (8).

Bellion builds her argument about the interdependency of deception and discernment in early national America by attending to objects as diverse as optical instruments, public exhibits and museum displays, paintings both large and small, printed matter of many different sorts, drawings, maps, as well as the built environment, which she has in many cases painstakingly re-imagined or reconstructed. Obviously, much of the documentation is visual, and the book is generously and appropriately illustrated with 12 color plates and more than 80 black-and-white illustrations. Although the black-and-white illustrations are very good, the color plates, grouped near the center of the volume, are too dark in tonality. Of the works I have seen in person that Bellion is describing and analyzing, virtually all are impressive, indeed wonderfully subtle. In the main the color plates do not do the original objects justice.

Chapter 1, “Theaters of Visuality,” introduces the “late-eighteenth-century culture of visual curiosity” in Philadelphia that preceded and primed the populace for later trompe l’oeil paintings (17). Perpetual motion machines, an anamorphic print of a horse, solar microscopes, and phantasmagorias, for example, fostered the capacious perceptual capacity that was the cornerstone of a discerning citizenry. In the second chapter, “The Politics of Discernment,” Bellion offers a dense and impressive reading of Charles Willson Peale’s Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle and Titian Ramsay Peale) of 1795, contextualizing the work in relation to its production for and siting in the Columbianum exhibition in the Pennsylvania State House. As Bellion points out, “[T]he Columbianum exhibition transformed a chamber designed for political deliberation into a space for looking” (65). A virtuosic display of illusionism, the painting takes the shape of a doorway and pictures two of Charles Willson Peale’s sons at the threshold of a sharply turning and upwardly winding staircase. Period debates about representation and transparency in government between Federalists and Antifederalists are as critical for Bellion’s case here as is the contemporaneous development in Philadelphia of the nation’s first art academy, museum, and then current aesthetics and art theory. Whereas Federalists favored a big government led by a “natural aristocracy,” which inevitably led to accusations of monarchism, Antifederalists argued for more radical, democratic values, and they were particularly mistrustful of representation (73). During 1795, at the very moment when the Staircase Group was first publicly displayed, Antifederalists vigilantly attacked governmental secrecy at the State House, epitomized by closed-door deliberations in the Senate concerning the controversial Jay’s Treaty.

In Chapter 3, “Sight and the City,” Bellion deals with a group of twenty-eight engravings by William and Thomas Birch. Dating to 1798-1800, the prints picture sites around the city of Philadelphia. Bellion reads the engravings’ formal peculiarities, including their imperfect perspective, not as flawed draftsmanship but as signs of the Birches’ complex engagement with Enlightenment values in their lived experience of the urban environment. While “[t]o a certain extent,” she writes, “the prints reproduce [the] crucial paradigms of order” that are “the grid and the market,” “the views undermine the presumed logic and transparency of these systems through their distortions of scale, their fracturing of perspectival space, and their fixation on certain types of material objects” (122). The engravings, she suggests, “help illuminate the dialectical nature of perception—its capacity for judgment and susceptibility to deception—that was a central political and cultural concern of the early republic” (ibid.). “Imitations and Originals” focuses on the paired display in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia of trompe l’oeil rack pictures and corresponding originals by one Samuel Lewis. This chapter functions as a brilliant extension of the analysis of the Birches’ engravings. Bellion shows us how Lewis’s trompe l’oeil pictures relate to his work not only as a writing master, but also as a cartographer. Depicting motley collections of paper—from pieces of newspaper and tickets for the theater and exhibitions, to small books and pamphlets, playing cards and business cards—tacked between diagonally organized ribbons in a shallow picture plane, Lewis’s pictures are themselves works on paper, composed in graphite, ink, and watercolor. If, to this point in the volume, there were any doubt in the reader’s mind as to the intelligence of early American trompe l’oeil representation, here it is dispelled. Lewis is as witty as he is technically proficient. Ultimately, the display together of Lewis’s trompe l’oeil renderings and their models encouraged the development of “judgment” in the early national populace—it showed viewers how “to distinguish image from object, copy from original” (210).

In Chapter 5 Bellion considers an amusement popular in the early nineteenth century—the “Invisible Lady.” This “rational recreation” challenged audiences to explain the source of a woman’s voice in a room possessed of various displays of speaking trumpets, but no visible human body. As Bellion notes, “[P]rint helped generate an audience for aural illusion outside the actual space of the exhibition hall,” thus broadening access to this and other similar amusements (239). These amusements also mark a transition toward Romanticism. Although “sensory discernment was still critical to maintaining civic order,” as time went on a cultural fascination with irrationality became hitched to late Enlightenment cultural practices (245). At the peak of its popularity (during Jefferson’s presidency) the Invisible Lady prompted audience experiences that resonated with renewed criticism of governmental secrecy. The chapter closes with ruminations on the Invisible Lady and debates circa 1800 about women’s voices. In the “reactionary” environment of the turn of the century—following the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)—”the Invisible Lady put female orality on display…function[ing] to reflect the emerging limits on female speech” (275). “Even as it modeled the range of female vision and voice,” writes Bellion, “the exhibition occasioned a symbolic containment of female authority” (280). “[A]ttempts to bring the Invisible Lady into visibility reveal the extent to which discernment itself was a gendered construction” (ibid.). The final chapter, Chapter 6, deals with a new type of illusionistic painting that developed in the United States in the 1820s. Modeled on François-Marius Granet’s The Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome (1814-1815), first displayed in a Philadelphia gallery in 1820, such pictures were all about absorption in art over and against discernment. Rembrandt Peale’s Patriae Pater (ca. 1824)—the so-called “porthole” portrait of George Washington—is Bellion’s central example of this new kind of painting. Explicated in light of the waxing culture of Romanticism, including phantasmagoria shows, as well as the Second Great Awakening, such images celebrated visual fantasy, memory, and escapism, placing them at odds with the earlier culture of discernment.

The contributions of Citizen Spectator are manifold. Bellion shows the merits of careful study and contextualization of topics in a period of the history of American art that is still very much overlooked, if not demonized, for its seeming lack of aesthetic and intellectual value. By looking with patience at a type of painting that has been disparaged historically by critics and aesthetic theorists (i.e. trompe l’oeil), Bellion demonstrates why we ought to take this sort of representation more seriously than we often have: if such pictures are playful, their play is a form of considerable pictorial intelligence. The creativity and skill with which Bellion analyzes the interrelatedness of art and politics offer a model for anyone interested in expansive thinking about the interactions of these two topics. Throughout I admired the ways in which she thought long and hard about contingencies of display, whether working out in detail the locations for which specific trompe l’oeil paintings were designed, or considering how idiosyncrasies of period exhibition practices contributed to surprising juxtapositions of art objects and spaces with what we have come to think of as non-art objects and spaces. For anyone who holds out hope that the history of early American art can be productively separated from the history of early American culture more generally, this book sounds a death knell. And against those who would oppose cultural spectacle and the cultivation of self-awareness, Bellion tenders this provocation.

Race, gender, and class are mentioned here and there throughout the volume, though it is only in the fifth chapter that Bellion addresses one of these categories of difference—gender—at length. Given the limited access many people had to the artworks and exhibits she describes, Bellion emphasizes that the “citizen spectator” of her book is, generally speaking, raced (white), gendered (male), and classed (not very poor). Although there are additional ways in which Bellion could have dealt with difference in the book—I was surprised, for instance, that she did not talk more in Chapter 6 about the forcefully marginalized black servant figures around which Henry Sargent’s dinner and tea party paintings of the 1820s are organized—she is overall quite self-conscious in explaining how forms of social and cultural bias informed ideas about and access to technologies for the development of discernment or judgment in the early United States. Her claim at the end of Chapter 5 that “[a]gainst the rhetorics of discernment and judgment that pervaded cultural constructions of citizenship, the [Invisible Lady] demonstrated that not all Americans had equal access to visuality” made me wonder what it means to cultivate self-awareness in the absence of an egalitarian society or citizenry (280). Bellion suggests that the culture of illusionism functioned ideologically to naturalize the bonds between white male privilege, seeing, and self-awareness. In this sense, the objects and displays she analyzes deceived even in undeceiving.

Despite the many bold moves one finds throughout Citizen Spectator, the book’s conclusion focuses rather predictably on the later history of trompe l’oeil in the nineteenth-century United States. I would have preferred to read here about how the subject of Bellion’s book resonates today. Indeed, I was struck by how much early American illusionistic artworks could resemble contemporary illusionistic artworks. Consider the “trompe l’oeil grotto” in the Peale Museum, which calls to mind the Space Division Pieces (beginning 1976) of the Light and Space artist James Turrell. Like Peale’s grotto, Turrell’s installations confront the viewer with a heightened sense of perceptual self-awareness; Turrell achieves this by presenting what appears at first to be a large-scale abstract canvas hanging in a dimly lit gallery, but which upon further inspection turns out to be a rectangular recess cut into the gallery wall.

The closest parallels in contemporary art for Bellion’s politically engaged works promoting discernment or judgment are what the art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has called “parafictions.” A global phenomenon, exemplified in the production of Michael Blum, 01.ORG, The Yes Men, and The Atlas Group, such works constitute spectacular ruses that conflate fact and fiction; they are characterized by “purposeful deception.” Whether what Lambert-Beatty writes of this art could be said of the artworks and exhibitions Bellion describes in Citizen Spectator is an open question: “Parafictions train us in skepticism and doubt, but also, oddly, in belief.” Parafictions help to “work facts alive.” For Lambert-Beatty what separates the contemporary culture of parafictional art from earlier cultures of trompe l’oeil is the work it does to resuscitate conceptions of truth, knowledge, and factuality, all laid low in postmodernity. We might say that in the early United States no such resuscitation was yet necessary. Whatever the differences between illusionistic art in the early republic and illusionistic art today, the continued aesthetic and political importance of deceiving and discerning suggests that Citizen Spectator should enjoy a wide readership. We will want to think more about its relevance to and implications for art and life in the present.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.4.5 (September, 2011).

Jason D. LaFountain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University.

American cultural history is full of disappearing acts. But no act has ever disappeared–or been expunged–as thoroughly as the popular anatomical museum. Its kissing cousins, the dime museum, the freak show, the medicine show, leave behind a nostalgic afterglow; the museum of anatomy is roadkill. The collective memory retains almost nothing and there are few traces for historians to kick over. Yet the museum was a part of American urban life for almost a hundred years. The nation’s first popular anatomical museum appeared in the 1840s; the last closed its doors around 1930. In the three decades following the end of the Civil War, museums of anatomy could be found in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans, and some smaller cities too.

The popular anatomical museum didn’t disappear from an excess of modesty. Back in the day, it was known (by patrons and critics alike) for the lurid visibility of its curiosities. The anatomical museum was not just a transgressor of public morality, it was a notorious, flagrant transgressor, a public institution devoted to the display of things that should not be displayed. The popular anatomical museum affronted public decency (if the public had any decency to affront).

And how did it do that? In every way possible. An 1871 article in the New York Times on downtown entertainments described it this way:

Out . . . upon the thoroughfare, and following the crowd, we journey on to a “museum of anatomy.” To it, gentlemen only can obtain admission on presentation of twenty-five cents. You hand your quarter, and receiving your pasteboard, step into the store. Facing you, with spear and tomahawk in hand, and an ominous grin upon his leather visage, stands the famous body of a savage of the Islands of Senegambia, killed in battle by a certain doughty Captain, who followed the customs of the savages, and prepared the body of his fallen adversary as a trophy. Next, have you any desire to study obstetrics, or equally improving surgery?–you can gratify it so far as viewing waxen models of operations and abnormal monstrosities will permit. Among all the curiosities of wax are the most revolting specimens of cutaneous disorders, and other things instructive no doubt, but very disgusting to the ordinary spectator. People come and go to this place from morning until night, putting money in the proprietor’s purse, and after a stay of perhaps ten minutes, depart, as we did, with a lurking suspicion of having been sold twice in half an hour in Chatham-street.

The popular anatomical museum was a museum among dime museums. It inhabited the Bowery and other plebeian entertainment districts, places where novelty acts and freak shows proliferated alongside houses of prostitution, gambling, and all kinds of petty and not so petty crimes. And amidst the displays of oddities and curiosities, the museum of anatomy was in some ways the oddest and most curious. It specialized in persons and conditions that lacked, or exceeded, the boundaries provided by aesthetics, morality, physiology, race, or the law. Its province, in other words, was pathology and grotesquery, sex and impulsive desire, savagery and murder, death and decay. The anatomy museum–a mix of real specimens and models–blurred those categories, and staged them as a theater of the body. What was exhibited was the Body with a capital B, separated from, deprived of, punished by, or in rebellion against, a moralizing, rationalizing, disciplining Spirit. The result was an orderly arrangement of souvenirs of embodied life run amok. The museum piled on an excess of body parts. An excess of meaning. An excess of everything.

And if Spirit disciplined the Body, with criminal and physiological and moral laws, that too was excessive. Alongside “anatomical and surgical,” “pathological,” and “obstetrical and monstrosity” departments–and plenty of models and specimens of vaginas, penises, breasts, and partly dissected (and therefore unclothed) females–the museum featured displays of gruesome crimes and gruesome punishments. Dr. Baskette’s Free Museum of Anatomy, in Chicago, contained “historical collections” displaying the guillotine and its victims (and also an “extra Mormon cabinet” detailing the massacres and polygamous practices of the Mormons). Philadelphia’s European Museum of Anatomy, Pathology and Ethnology featured a special display on the Spanish Inquisition and antique European torture devices. The 1867 New York Museum of Anatomy displayed executed murderer Anton Probst’s head and right arm (which struck the fatal blows). Exhibitions of punished bodies–dissected, diseased, dismembered–commingled with exhibitions of punished criminals and criminal punishments. The museum crowd had plenty to gawk at.

Professional versus Popular

But the popular anatomy museum was also a museum among medical museums. In the nineteenth century, any medical college worth its salt had an anatomical museum and pathological cabinet. There was a pedagogical circle of life: medical students and colleagues were expected to study specimens and also to produce them. Membership in the profession was consolidated by a common culture of collectorship. In formal medical discourse the specimen was accounted as an educational aid or as a record of a typical or unusual anatomical feature or pathological condition. Informally, there was the pleasure of acquisition and possession and a connoisseur’s appreciation of the artistry of the preparation. The professional anatomical museum was a repository of medical souvenirs. In other words: stuff in jars, skeletons, dried preparations, casts and models in wax, plaster, papier mâché, and wood. Some of them were typical, others were oddities, still others were records of a historical event, the skull of a man who had been shot at Waterloo or a relic of a notorious criminal who was hanged and then given over to the surgeons for dissection.

Such items were common to both the professional and popular anatomical museum. Their differences had to do with proportion, quality, audience, and legitimacy: popular museums tended to have more sex- and crime-related material; the professional museum tended to have more “natural” specimens, and fewer models. The popular museum was open to a “for-gentlemen-only” public that was predominantly working class, with a large admixture of immigrants. The professional museum was generally open only to doctors and medical students, although respectable members of the laity were sometimes granted access. There was also a different ideological valence. The objects of the professional museum represented the triumph of medical knowledge, the conquest of reason and the law over the body. Doctors were known to keep a few specimens or a cabinet of material on display in their offices as trophies and, more broadly, as objects that advertised a medical vocation (as did diplomas, weighty medical tomes, medicines, and instruments). The specimens served as a credential, proof that the doctor had dissected and had special knowledge of the interior of the body.

In the Company of Men

The displays of the popular anatomical museum also advertised a medical practice. The museum was a clinic of a peculiar sort, catering entirely to men. Its proprietor typically described himself as a physician (but was suspiciously silent as to where he obtained his medical degree). The museum also featured a resident “lecturer” who transfixed customers with a pitch on the medico-moral-sexual maladies man was heir to. This was a long list that included syphilis, gonorrhea, chancre, impotence, incontinence (a category that included bedwetting, premature ejaculation, and nocturnal emissions), infertility, but also masturbation, promiscuity, sexual obsession, horniness, or a lack of libido. The lecturer’s litany of woes (symptoms of a larger malaise denoted as “nervous exhaustion,” “nervous debility,” or “neurasthenia”) was designed to produce a state of anxiety in the clientele–a worried frame of mind that was heightened by the surrounding displays of syphilitic faces and diseased genitalia. The marks could then be easily persuaded to buy a book or patent medicine, or even better have a consultation with the doctor–who for an extra charge might perform a microscopic or chemical analysis of the patient’s urine. The nightmarish displays of anatomy and pathology (read: death and disease) functioned as a kind of moral shock therapy and, from the business end, helped to overcome sales resistance. The microscope and chemical apparatus, like the displays of specimens, bolstered the museum’s claims to be scientific and modern.

Popular museums varied in size and pretension (most were at the low end of the spectrum), but that was the format. A Boston Medical and Surgical Journal editorial of July 24, 1873, denounced a museum that was “a type of its class,” Dr. Jourdain’s Gallery of Anatomy: “It was a collection of anatomical models and dissections, with representations of skin and venereal diseases, most improper for public exhibition, and calculated to excite the morbid curiosity of the young together with it peculiar forms of hypochondria. Vile pamphlets were on hand to induce those having or fearing disease to consult the proprietor. The harm which this single establishment must have done cannot be calculated.”

Such warnings had a long shelf life, perhaps even outlasting the museums themselves. In the teens or early 1920s, the United States Public Health Service mounted a lantern slideshow against the “quack trickery” of doctors who practiced at anatomical museums. Medical establishments had a vested interest in drawing the lines between legitimate and illegitimate practitioners–and suppressing competition.

The claim, by the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal and other medical critics, was that the museum fostered a “morbid curiosity” that killed the cat. But did it really? We can only speculate as to how the anatomical museum affected its patrons, medically or morally. Some men must have come to the museum already panicked over visible signs of syphilis, gonorrhea, or other diseases they might be reluctant to speak about to the family doctor: the museum was their VD clinic; they came for treatment. (What was in the ointments and tonics they purchased is unknown to us, as it was to them, but museum pamphlets typically condemned mercury-based medications, which were then the standard treatment for syphilis. Mercury’s effectiveness in arresting the progress of syphilis is debatable, but clearly it had terrible side effects. If the museum doctor’s prescription was more benign, patients may actually have been protected from harm.) Other men, susceptible to suggestion, fretted all the way to the museum doctor’s consulting room without having anything physically wrong with them. But still other men–the majority?–must have visited the museum purely for fun. Maybe they defined themselves in opposition to pathology–or maybe they perversely embraced it. Maybe they resisted the blandishments of the lecturer, or maybe they laughed all the way to the doctor. Maybe the doctor and the fretting were part of the entertainment, like a roller coaster ride that makes you scared and a bit nauseous.

It was a man’s world. Women were denied the pleasures of viewing the displays, which were rife with “Florentine Venuses” and models of sexual anatomy and obstetrics that featured unobscured vaginas, adorned by realistic thatches of pubic hair. We don’t know who exactly visited the museum of anatomy–how many middle- and upper-class men condescended to enter?–but it was a place where things that can’t be said or seen in mixed company get said and seen. And such places, by definition, mixed men of different classes, especially younger men who used the museum to satisfy a morbid curiosity about sex and death and disease, and also the urban demimonde in which the museum was situated. The museum was not quite a refuge from the parlor–it provoked too much anxiety for that–but, like the men’s club and the fraternity, it catered to a shared male voyeurism. It was a place where men could be men.

Down by Law

Given all that, it comes as no surprise that the museum of anatomy was not well respected. A stigma attached itself to institutions that trucked in death and desire, emotions and appetites, corpses and body parts. The museum claimed to serve the cause of moral reformation, but it really worked on base emotions and bodily appetites. Then, as now, there was a cultural hierarchy that placed reason and spirit at the top and the body at the bottom. The museum engineered sensations in the museum goer–the sensation of revulsion was continually cited in contemporary commentaries–and a worrying, tickling obsession with sex and sexual pathology, a condition that both burdened and pleasured patrons. Like pornography, the museum was a technology of incitement, of arousal. The displays of tertiary syphilis, freakery, criminality, savagery, and dissected bodies and body parts combined to produce a kind of nightmare eroticism that simultaneously reinforced and subverted the museum’s self-proclaimed mission to uphold sexual morality (a modus operandi not unlike that of present-day teen slasher movies, which also pair sexual desire and pleasure with pain, mutilation, dismemberment, and death).

And this brings us to the popular anatomical museum’s relation to the Law (capital L). The museum of anatomy presented a jurisprudential interpretation of disease and desire. The penalty for sexual crimes and misdemeanors, and by extension sexual desire and all the other appetites, was written on the body and body parts. The specimens of the museum made moral transgression manifest. There was no escape: spirit was incarcerated inside flesh. Such notions, we should remember, had profound resonance in a society in which a considerable portion of the population suffered from syphilis, gonorrhea, and other diseases (with few effective treatments) and the visible signs of the harm of sexual desire were displayed for all to see on their faces and bodies.

The popular anatomical museum’s displays and justifications dramatized the Law. The museum made sense to its patrons because the Law was their cultural logic, the cultural logic of their performance of sexuality, selfhood, social class, gender, race, and a bunch of other things. The Law was inside the museum (and inside the patrons). But the Law–in this case literally the governmental structure of penal codes, police departments, and courts and trials–was also outside the museum. And the museum was outside the Law. It was a pariah institution, to its many critics a moral pathology: sexually transmitted disease staged as a burlesque, as an incitement to pleasure.

Decline and Fall

The museum of anatomy was robust. As a flower of evil it was a hardy perennial, a crowd pleaser. So why did it die? Well for one thing, there was no shortage of people who wanted to kill it. From the outset, popular anatomical museums attracted enemies who objected to its displays of partially and wholly undressed (and partially and wholly skinned) bodies, with females far outnumbering males. In 1850, the district attorney indicted the proprietors of the New York Anatomical Gallery–the nation’s very first popular anatomical museum and then only three years old–for “exhibiting . . . figures of men and women naked in lewd, lascivious, wicked indecent, disgusting and obscene groups attitudes and positions to the manifest corruption of morals in open violation of decency and good order.” Similar attacks on the museum occurred at intervals. Police in Rochester, New York, shut down the European Anatomical, Pathological and Ethnological Museum and seized its “obscene representations” in 1874; the proprietors moved on to Buffalo, Philadelphia, and Chicago. In 1888, Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice and the New York City police conducted a campaign against the city’s four anatomical museums, confiscated and destroyed most of their objects, and put three of them out of business. A jury refused to shut down Kahn’s Museum of Anatomy, the oldest and most substantial of the four. The trial transcript hasn’t survived, but in his notes, Comstock complained that he wasn’t permitted to destroy some “wax figures of females life size, some pregnant & some otherwise & 37 cases of filthy penises.” Comstock didn’t give up: in 1896 he lobbied for an amendment to the state penal code that outlawed all museums of anatomy save those “designed for physicians or medical students when kept to their lawful uses or purposes” (along with a ban on performances by women wearing tights). This effort failed: at least two anatomical museums operated in New York City in the first two decades of the twentieth century. A similar prohibition was successfully enacted into law in Chicago in 1922, as part of a reorganization of the penal code (progressives often used this stratagem to push through rafts of minor reforms).

These turn-of-the-century efforts at suppression made life difficult for museum operators. But the museum of anatomy was probably already history. A New York Times article of 1895 used it as a marker of a bygone era, “the darkest days” of the city, “the period of the dance halls, cellar dives, and ‘anatomical museums’ after the [Civil War],” even though a museum or two still lingered on the Bowery. By 1911, the Times was waxing nostalgic for “the smaller, less sophisticated, less civilized town of the era of pump water, blue omnibuses, cobblestone pavements, black mud, oyster shells and orange peel, Dew Drop inns and anatomical museums.” So even as reformers continued efforts to ban museums of anatomy, in many places the museums had already disappeared or were declining into decrepitude, obscurity, or quaintness.

And why was that? We don’t really know, but here are some factors to consider. The decline and fall of the popular anatomical museum coincided with decline and fall of the dime museum, a fate that most observers attributed to the rise of competing entertainments, most notably the movies, vaudeville, and amusement parks. It also coincided with the decline of the professional anatomical museum, as the glass slide, the photograph, photomicrograph, stereograph, film, and statistical table became the media in which anatomy and pathology were documented. And this coincided with changing models of disease causation–germ theory began to supersede environmental explanations of disease; and microbiology and radiography began to supersede anatomy as emblems and methods of medical science. In other words, if the anatomy museum’s claim to be scientific and modern legitimated its medical treatments and its displays of the sexual body and the grotesque, then by the turn of the century that claim was looking kind of tattered. From the time of Vesalius onward, anatomy fellow-traveled with modernity. It was a good run, but after four centuries, the anatomical museum, both professional and popular, seemed like a dusty antique.

There is also the issue of shelf life, the longevity of curiosity. The museum of anatomy was a collection of novelties and curiosities; the proprietor’s capital investment was in a stock of objects. But after several decades such pieces could no longer be regarded as novelties. American popular culture is notoriously a careening, accelerating, succession of attention-deficit trends, fads, and fashions. While the rate of change in the early twentieth century nowhere approached the supersonic speed of the music-video-cable-ready-Internet generation, it exceeded the capacity of the anatomical museum, a low-profit, low-rent operation, which utterly failed to reinvent itself.

Whatever the case, we know that the popular anatomical museum lost its public and lost its lease. Part of the museum’s appeal was that the anatomical specimen was a mirror. People saw themselves in the objects, and they saw double: the museum was a carnival of self and other. But over time the museum of anatomy became so identified with the body and desire that its outlaw valence simply outweighed the disciplinary valence. To put it another way, the museum’s representations of a body ruled and punished by anatomical boundaries and physiological law became so invested with eroticism and desire that its claims to teach science and morality no longer served, even as a fig leaf.

Or maybe the museum lost its salience because more supple, more dynamic, and more friendly modes of erotic representation came around to supersede the scary jurisprudential model that was the museum’s thematic. If so then, in the final analysis, the museum lost its mojo. Compared to the engaging, sexy, kinetic offerings of the cinema, the burlesque, and the peep show, the anatomical museum was devoid of eroticism and vitality, and had nothing new to offer. By the 1920s and ’30s, it was regarded as something of a joke, if it was regarded at all. In its final days, before its total disappearance, the museum of anatomy lingered on, not as a collection of curiosities, but as itself a curiosity.

Further Reading:

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century popular anatomical catalogues and pamphlets can be found at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the American Antiquarian Society, and other historical collections. The first scholarly treatment of popular anatomical museums appeared in George Odell’s massive fifteen-volume compendium, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1931). More recently, popular anatomical museums are discussed in Brooks McNamara, Step Right Up (rev. ed.; Jackson, Miss., 1995), a history of the medicine show, and in Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America (Princeton, 2002), as part of a larger discussion about the role of anatomy in American culture. English popular anatomical museums are discussed in Richard D. Altick’s The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).

This article originally appeared in issue 4.2 (January, 2004).

Michael Sappol is curator-historian at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America (Princeton, 2002). His most recent exhibition, Dream Anatomy, was on the history of anatomical representation. He is currently preparing an exhibition on the history of forensic medicine.

Generally speaking, the New England Journal of Medicine is not a publication of much interest for scholars of early America. However, scholars of the Antinomian Controversy occasionally cite a 1959 article titled “New England’s First Recorded Hydatidiform Mole” (note: fee required to access full article). This article–or note, more precisely–offers a medical diagnosis for the “monstrous birth” alleged to have issued from Anne Hutchinson. “Monstrous birth” was the name Hutchinson’s opponents gave to the miscarriage she suffered shortly after she was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the wake of what scholars term the Antinomian Controversy, a collection of religious, political, and social conflicts in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. The religious valences of the conflict can seem to modern readers to revolve around relatively abstruse theological questions, but the social and political stakes are clearer. Shortly after her arrival in Boston, Hutchinson began leading a lay discussion of that day’s sermon, which quickly attracted a large following. Evidently, the popularity of this lay group threatened some of the ministers and magistrates of the Bay Colony theocracy, and Hutchinson found herself accused of various heresies. After a civil and ecclesiastical trial, Hutchinson, and some of her followers–termed “Antinomians” because of their insistence on the primacy of grace over works–were banished. Hutchinson settled in Rhode Island, where she miscarried, and later departed for present-day Westchester County, New York, where she and her family were massacred by Indians.

“New England’s First Recorded Hydatidiform Mole” allows its authors, writing in a scientific age, to offer a scientific explanation for what Hutchinson’s antagonists called “30 monstrous births or thereabouts, at once; some of them bigger, some lesser … few of any perfect shape, not at all of them, (as farre as I could evern learne) of humane shape.” In the New England Journal of Medicine, we can see science displace fear and superstition as explanations for Anne Hutchinson’s miscarriage. In the historiography of the Antinomian Controversy, this article offers a name and an explanation we can use in place of the slanderous maledictions of Hutchinson’s enemies. As scholars, we are moved to exclaim “what a difference an Enlightenment makes” or words to that effect.

And yet. My interest in the historiography of Anne Hutchinson led me to track down the article, and what I found was less informative, but more interesting, than I might have hoped. The NEJM does take Hutchinson’s miscarriage out of the realm of divine judgment, and into the realm of medical science, but reading a 1959 article about a 1639 miscarriage in 2011 reveals how little the discourse about women’s bodies evolves over 320 years. The subject of the NEJM article is Anne Hutchinson, or more precisely, a growth inside of Anne Hutchinson. Briefly reviewing the antagonism between Hutchinson and Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop may help explain why he was so keen to investigate and publicize Hutchinson’s obstetrical woes.

Anne Hutchinson is the most prominent figure in a theological dispute that erupted in the newly settled Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late 1630s. In the summer of 1634, Anne Hutchinson and her family arrived in Boston from England, having followed the famous Puritan minister John Cotton from Lincolnshire. At some point in the next two years, Anne Hutchinson began to hold meetings in her house to discuss the previous week’s sermons. The only records of these gatherings come from Hutchinson’s opponents. Initially, they attracted a small circle of predominately female friends, but over time they grew and came to include more men. As these discussions grew in popularity, Hutchinson evidently took more liberties in her analyses, and identified shortcomings in the theology of the Bay Colony ministers who were not Cotton, in terms of the respective relation of justification and sanctification in the process of an individual’s salvation. The distinction between these terms constitute a whole field of Christian apologetics unto themselves, but basically, justification is the manifestation of God’s grace in the heart of a sinner, while sanctification is living a life that shows evidence of God’s grace. As Calvinists, the orthodox ministers of the Bay Colony believed in the inherent wicked and sinful nature of each human being. These wretched souls could be saved only by a free gift of God’s grace, according to Calvinist doctrine. At the same time, there was nothing an individual could do to deserve to be saved, because of his or her inherently wicked nature.

To a contemporary audience, these may seem like technical quibbles on the road to heaven, but the inference Hutchinson and her followers drew was that many of the Bay Colony’s ministers preached a covenant of works, against the Calvinist orthodoxy of a covenant of grace. One way to interpret Hutchinson’s teaching is that she was claiming the vast majority of Bay Colony clergy were preaching a false doctrine. To staunch the flow of heresy, in October 1636, Bay Colony ministers convened a “conference in private” with Hutchinson, Cotton, and John Wheelwright, Hutchinson’s brother-in-law. This meeting served to address Hutchinson’s unorthodox ideas, but also to consider if John Cotton was their source. The ministers were able to settle these questions, but parishioners of the Boston church loyal to Hutchinson proposed that Wheelwright take the place of John Wilson, a Hutchinson opponent, as the second minister of the Boston church. Winthrop resolved this confrontation in favor of Wilson, but it led to a second meeting of ministers with Cotton and Hutchinson. In the meantime, on December 7, Hutchinson sympathizer Henry Vane resigned as governor, and then withdrew his resignation, but returned to England.

The next gubernatorial election, on May 17, 1637, was moved to Newtown (Cambridge) in an effort to temper the influence of Hutchinson’s followers over the proceedings. This effort was successful, and Winthrop carried the election. After this attempt to address the civil threat posed by Hutchinson’s followers, called Antinomians by their opponents, the Bay Colony clergy convened a synod, beginning on August 30. Tensions continued, and on November 2 the General Court voted to disenfranchise and banish the leaders of the Antinomian party, and to impose lesser penalties on the other colonists who had signed a petition in favor of Wheelwright. Hutchinson’s civil and ecclesiastical trials followed, which culminated in her excommunication on March 22, 1638.

Hutchinson, her family, and some of her followers, both legal and voluntary exiles, followed her south to Aquidneck, or the Island of Rhode Island, where they settled the town of Portsmouth. After settling in Portsmouth, Hutchinson found herself pregnant for the sixteenth time, an unusual but not exceptional situation for a woman in colonial New England. At some point in 1639, she miscarried. Rather than a recognizable fetus, she delivered an indistinct mass of some 30 globules. Word of this misfortune reached John Winthrop, who wrote to request details. John Clarke, a physician of Rhode Island, obliged. His report was transcribed in Winthrop’s journal:

“I beheld … several lumps, every one of them greatly confused … without form … not much unlike the swims of some fish.” Following up in search of more information, the governor learns that “The lumps were twenty-six or twenty-seven, distinct and not joined together; there were no secundine after them; six of them were as great as his fist, and one as great as two fists, rest each less than the other, and the smallest about the bigness of the top of his thumb. The globes were round things, included in the lumps, about the bigness of a small Indian Bean, and like the pearl in a man’s eye. The two lumps, which differed from the rest, were like liver or congealed blood, and had no small globes in them, as the rest had.”

This is rather more information than it might today seem appropriate for a doctor to disclose about a subject he has examined, especially to one of his patient’s chief political antagonists. It is also worth noting that Winthrop recorded it in his journal, which was a quasipublic document. But Winthrop was not done. In 1644, Winthrop wrote Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines in an effort to assure Londoners who were concerned that the colony and its independent Congregational, rather than Presbyterian, churches, were fostering a nursery of error. As part of this narrative, Winthrop relates, “Then God was pleased to step in with his casting voice, and bring his owne vote and suffrage from heaven, by testifying his displeasure against their opinions and practices, as clearely as if he had pointed with his finger, in causing the two fomenting women in the time of the height of the Opinions to produce out of their wombs, as before they had out of their braines, such monstrous births as no Chronicle (I thinke) hardly ever recorded the like …” (Mary Dyer, Hutchinson’s supporter, also miscarried a badly malformed fetus, also described by Winthrop in detail.) “Mistriss Hutchinson, being big with child, and growing towards the time of her labour… she brought forth not one… but (which was more strange to amazement) 30 monstrous births or thereabouts, at once; some of them bigger, some lesser, some of one shape, some of another; few of any perfect shape, none at all of them (as farre as I could ever learne) of humane shape.”

A forty-six-year-old woman suffers a miscarriage of her sixteenth pregnancy. Sad and unfortunate, but not remarkable. It is hard to imagine it being worth inquiring from Boston to Portsmouth for details, let alone recording these details in a public place, and publishing these details in London. The pathology that seems salient here is the pathology in the minds of the men who were so keen to exchange and publicize details of this event, rather than the pathology of a weary woman’s body. The key to understanding Winthrop’s interest in a middle-aged woman’s obstetrical travails lies in his providential understanding of the world–the cringe-inducing details are unpleasant to read, but politically, the salient portion of the passage lies in Winthrop’s insistence that God was “testifying his displeasure against their opinions and practices, as clearely as if he had pointed with his finger.”

This willingness to take political advantage by publicizing an adversary’s miscarriage as evidence of God’s will, we might imagine, is a function of a long-ago and unenlightened time. However, Anne Hutchinson arrives in contemporary medical discourse in a way that is not appreciably different from Winthrop’s treatment of her. In 1959, Margaret V. Richardson, B.A., M.T., and Arthur T. Hertig, M.D., published a brief article in the New England Journal of Medicine, titled “New England’s First Recorded Hydatidiform Mole.” This article by the senior research assistant, and the Shattuck Professor of Pathological Anatomy, of the Department of Pathology, at Harvard Medical School analyzes the various descriptions of Hutchinson’s travail, and determines that she suffered from a hydatidiform mole, a condition where a fertilized embryo does not develop, but instead becomes a mass of placental tissue, like a bunch of grapes in its form. Richardson and Hertig conclude the article with a long quotation from Winthrop’s journal, where he transcribes the account of the Rhode Island physician who examined Hutchinson.

The NEJM article offers an account of the pathology that afflicted Hutchinson’s pregnancy, but not the pathology that pervades the discourse surrounding it. It is a short piece, subtitled “A Historical Note.” The first three paragraphs offer an overview of the literature on hydatidiform moles, dating back to the third century B.C. An F. Mauriceau, writing in 1664, represents the closest contemporary to Hutchinson, and “considered the main factor for molar formation to be too frequent coitus.” Richardson and Hertig then cite more recent scholarship, including Hertig’s own entry on the hydatidiform mole in the Atlas of Tumor Pathology from 1956.

Richardson and Hertig learn of Hutchinson’s case from an unusual source: “The present case, that of Anne Hutchinson, was mentioned in the book The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton.” Seton was a popular writer of historical novels, and in this one, she turns her hand to colonial New England, telling the story of John Winthrop’s niece. Seton was popular in her day–this novel was the eighth-best-selling novel of 1958–behind Dr. Zhivago and Lolita, as it happened. Thus, it seems likely that Hertig, or Richardson, or an associate, came across the account of Hutchinson’s travail, and decided to do some ex post facto pathologizing. The authors conclude that “It is our belief that this was the first hydatidiform mole to be recorded in New England.” This sentence offers a peculiar intersection of chronology, geography, and pathology. This is the New England journal of medicine, but the relevance of this particular geographic scope is hard to understand. Moreover, firstness seems interesting and relevant when documenting instances of human achievement–the first school, or hospital, or synagogue in a given region seem worth commemorating, but the first New England instance of a complaint that was familiar in Europe? Attaching significance to Hutchinson’s condition in these terms suggests a preoccupation with firstness–and New Englandness–that extends well beyond this article. It is hard to travel very far in New England, or in New England historiography, without encountering a reference to the first or the oldest of something–iron works, printing press, university. There does, however, seem to be a difference between monuments of human achievement like these, and the case of the first instance of a specific uterine tumor identified in New England.

Surprisingly, Richardson and Hertig leave the pathologizing to their seventeenth-century investigators. The rest of the article offers a brief sketch of Hutchinson’s life, then excerpts Cotton’s stated belief that “a mole was ‘several lumps of a man’s seed, without any alteration or mixture of any thing from the woman’.” The article concludes by describing Winthrop’s zeal to know more, and ends by quoting Clarke at great length, and without comment, as he describes the sizes and shapes of the various components of the mole.

The pathology of this pathologizing of Anne Hutchinson, I argue, is as present in 1959 as it is in 1644. Boston was, in many ways, a more tolerant place in 1959 than it was three centuries previously. However, these representatives of a leading medical school–affiliated, as it happens, with a college founded to produce the ministers needed to combat the errors issuing forth from the likes of Hutchinson–publishing in a prestigious journal, do little more than perpetuate the grotesque lack of regard for Hutchinson’s privacy by failing to consider how we know what we know about her.

A diagnosis, a name for the illness of what the article calls “the case,” creates the sense that with this diagnosis, Hutchinson’s case is closed. In this respect “God’s casting voice” and “hydatidiform mole” are structurally equivalent in their function as names for a symptom. The larger question of why Hutchinson’s political opponents were allowed to examine the contents of her womb, and why they wanted to, remain unasked. In failing to ask these questions, this article perpetuates the notion that women really speak when their bodies yield up evidence to an examining physician.

Reading a document like “New England’s first recorded Hydatidiform Mole” points to divergent ways one can read such a text. It is history, in the literal sense that it provides information about the past. Developments in medicine between the 1640s and 1950s permit us to give a name, a diagnosis to Hutchinson’s misfortune, taking it out of the realm of divine judgments, and into the realm of science. Rather than note the approximate homology between the number of lumps her body produced, and the number of errors her brain produced, we can call this a “hydatidiform mole,” and look it up in the Atlas of Tumor Pathology. We have, in this respect, come a long way, baby.

But we can also read an article like this as a historical document in itself, as a marker of the lack of progress in Boston between 1643 and 1959. It’s not hard to find scholars who have commented on the creepy and callous nature of the Bay Colony’s leaders’ interest in the Hutchinson and Dyer monstrous births. But it is worth noting that a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal could print an article in 1959 that shares Winthrop and Clarke’s total indifference to the humanity of the owner of the womb it discusses.

It may be perverse, or self serving, for a scholar of the humanities to read an article in a scientific journal and insist on a more humane approach. There is potential heuristic value in post-facto diagnoses, and fields like forensic anthropology address these kinds of questions with this kind of evidence regularly. Nevertheless I do think there is some benefit to considering the case of Winthrop and Clarke and the case of Richardson and Hertig together. We recognize the chilling detachment of Winthrop’s account, the delight he took in making political propaganda from it, and the lack of regard for the humanity of his antagonist. However, that same lack of regard is as present in 1959 as it was in the 1630s and 1640s. Richardson and Hertig consider the firstness and even the New Englandness of the growths within Hutchinson’s body, but not the body that contained these growths. The sum of the progress in the discourse about Anne Hutchinson from the 1630s to the 1950s is essentially a change of name from “monstrous birth” to “hydatidiform mole.” Either we have come a very long way since 1959, or we have not, in fact, come as far as we would like to think.

Three hundred and sixty-six years separate us from Hutchinson’s life. Enlightenment virtues like empirical observation and the scientific method emerged in the interval. Hutchinson lived in an early modern world; we live in a postmodern one. Moving forward from Hutchinson’s time to our own, we were 86 percent of the way to the present day when Richardson and Hertig wrote their article. The treatment that Hutchinson suffered is unimaginable today. It is (one hopes at least) hard to imagine a sitting governor prodding an associate in a neighboring state for details of a political opponent’s miscarriage, then publicizing the results for propaganda purposes. And yet it’s hard to shake the sense that we have not entirely escaped a culture where what really matters about women is the matter that comes out of their vaginas, rather than the words that come out of their mouths.

Further reading:

I had the opportunity to present a version of this article at the History of Women’s Health Conference at Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, in 2009. I am grateful to conference organizer Stacey Peeples and to the conference attendees for their questions.

This article is part of my ongoing interest in the history of the historiography of Anne Hutchinson’s life, and part of a book project still in its early stages titled Antinomian Idol: Anne Hutchinson and American History. I lay out a statement of my approach in “The Antinomian Controversy Did Not Take Place,” Early American Studies 6.2 (2008). My interest in Hutchinson is in the persistent and enduring interest her story has held for generations of writers, from John Winthrop to the present. Her story is compelling, but relatively light on detail, and provides a narrative that is malleable enough to be reworked in any number of forms–she is variously figured as a proto-Quaker, a proto-Transcendentalist, and a proto-feminist, to name only a few. Engaging with the mutability of Hutchinson’s story, I will develop a literary analysis of this body of historiography, with the broader goal of offering some insights about how we write about the past. As such, this forthcoming book will be the full-length version of the bibliographical essay accompanyingCommon-Place articles, but in the meantime, here are a few salient texts:

We can start with David Hall’s The Antinomian Controversy, 1636—1638: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C., 1990). David Hall has done more for Hutchinson scholarship than anyone since John Winthrop. I strongly suspect that his effort to put many of the salient documents of the Antinomian Controversy in such accessible form has shaped the field of early American studies by making work on this topic easier to pursue than others–it is hard to find a monograph on early New England published since Hall’s collection that does not include an Antinomian Controversy chapter. I am debating whether it is overstating the case to call this the “Hall Effect.”

Eve LaPlante’s American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans (New York, 2004) is written for a general audience. It suffers a bit from the kind of ancestor worship that characterized an older generation of New England historiography, but is a decent introduction to Hutchinson’s story.

Readers specifically interested in the obstetrical dimensions of the story should consult Anne Jacobson Schutte’s “‘Such Monstrous Births’: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy” Renaissance Quarterly, 38.1 (Spring, 1985): 85-106. It does an excellent job of putting Hutchinson’s alleged experience in the broader cultural context of early modern scientific thought.

Readers interested in the theological dimensions of the controversy will profit from Michael P. Winship’s Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (Princeton, 2002), a serious effort to engage with the controversy on its own terms. A companion text is Winship’s The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided (Lawrence, Kansas, 2005), which considers the legal case against Anne Hutchinson.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.2 (January, 2011).

Jonathan Beecher Field is an associate professor of English at Clemson University. In 2009, he published Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London; this article is part of a new project titled Antinomian Idol.