Or, new institutionalism and the early American republic

Any political consultant worth their salt would see that John Quincy Adams had many liabilities, but the vision thing was not one of them. As the candidate who finished second in both the popular and electoral vote, Adams enlisted the aid of Henry Clay and a host of other allies to win the presidency after the election of 1824 was thrown to the House of Representatives. When the smoke cleared in February of the following year, Adams was president. One would think that a president elected by only 31 percent of the popular vote might ease into his first term. But this was John Quincy Adams. In his (in)famous first message to Congress in December of 1825, Adams forcefully outlined the philosophy of a group of like-minded politicians known to historians as the National Republicans. “The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established.” For Adams and his followers this meant a dramatic new role for the national government. Federal funding for an ambitious program of roads, canals, and river improvements, a national observatory, a national university, a new naval academy, tighter patent laws, and even a new marble monument to George Washington all stood on Adams’s to-do list. After outlining these grandiose plans, Adams veered into a rhetorical ditch. As the president with perhaps the least electoral support of any in the young nation’s history, Adams stood before Congress and wondered if we were “to slumber in indolence or fold up our arms and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not be to cast away the bounties of Providence and doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority?” With these ill-chosen words about the needs and wants of American voters, Adams offered his critics the choicest of political plums. Here was proof that the sixth president of the United States was out of touch with the nation’s increasingly expanded and fractious electorate.

Adams’s apparent misreading of the political winds not only contributed to the demise of the National Republican agenda, it also helped transform a former ally, General Andrew Jackson, into Adams’s greatest ideological opponent and political rival. Once in office, moreover, Jackson’s policies rolled back any attempt by his predecessor to expand the government by building the sorts of institutions Adams had described shortly after taking office. Old Hickory vetoed the Maysville Road, slew the Monster Bank, and took the motto of the Washington Globe, “The World Is Governed Too Much,” generally to heart. If there was to be a bureaucracy at work in public life, Jackson’s followers argued, it should be a well-oiled party apparatus devoted to electing good Democratic candidates to office, instead of state or federal bureaucrats devoted to some fuzzy notion of “improvement.” Jackson’s historical legacy continues to overshadow that of Adams. After all, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s classic book defined the period of Jackson’s political ascent as “The Age of Jackson,” and the general looms as the dominant figure in the work of such authorities on the period as Robert Remini, Sean Wilentz, Andrew Burstein, Harry Watson, and Charles Sellers. A quick perusal of the more specialized political history written on the period suggests that even when the general is not personally involved, the Jacksonian emphasis on party formation—as opposed to the formation of government institutions or the “state”—often dominates accounts of antebellum public life. Daniel Walker Howe’s recent Pulitzer Prize-winning survey of the early republic, What Hath God Wrought, is one important departure from this tradition—in fact Howe dedicates the book to Adams—but there is no mistaking the impact that Jackson and his followers left upon this pivotal period in American history. Andrew Jackson usually elicits a strong and divisive response among scholars; they admire or resent his strong personality and forceful policy decisions with only rare equivocation. Jackson’s hostile attitude toward public and private institutions, however, has been less a source of contention. Whether denouncing the antidemocratic tendencies of the business corporation or cataloguing the long history of unwanted and inefficient state regulation of the economy, Old Hickory’s ideological imprint still influences the way we Americans regard institutions, whether we admire Andrew Jackson or not.

Yet, as much as Americans of his time and ours might share Jackson’s deep suspicion of banks, corporations, and government itself, there is reason to doubt that—despite Jackson’s electoral victories—his anti-institutional vision has been as influential as is often assumed. Indeed, given its tendency toward antislavery, the preservation of Native American treaty rights, and expanded participation for women in American society, the perspective of Adams and his allies—a group that would coalesce as the Whig party—seems in many ways much closer to the values of modern-day Americans than, say, the proslavery and anti-Indian tendencies of many Jacksonian Democrats. Recognizing the persisting resonance of Adams’s institutional perspective, some historians of the early American republic, Howe being the best known, have begun rewriting that period’s history. In so doing, they have initiated a sweeping reassessment of American politics and their supposed anti-institutional bias.

What exactly are institutions? Many disciplines struggle with this question. Ask, for example, an economist to define a “firm” or a political scientist to explain “the state” and this quickly becomes clear. You’re much more likely to get a lengthy list of scholarly citations than a clear and distinct answer. Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. For the purposes of argument, let’s call an “institution” a formal set of rules within a prescribed boundary of authority. For historians, formal institutions like legislatures, corporations, banks, or political parties are visible remnants of political and economic tussles, cultural assumptions, and both formal and informal power arrangements. These institutions are also remade countless times over the course of their existence, adding a healthy dose of contingency to the mix. Internal actors constantly reinterpret the ways policies are made and enforced, while external actors can expand, contract, or ignore an institution’s capacity for enacting those policies. Rather than static entities, institutions often undergo a process not unlike the kind of “punctuated equilibrium” described by evolutionary biologists: rapid changes in their internal structure or environment trigger small changes that, with time, come to constitute dramatic institutional transformations.

When scholars began recognizing these evolutionary qualities, they put the “new” in “new institutionalism.” In place of an older view of institutions as static, conservative entities, they substituted a new perspective that recognized the contingent and dynamic nature of institutions. Now, instead of antiseptic and ahistorical entities, institutions became intensely historical and capable of dramatic and dynamic change. This perspective should complement, rather than counter, the many insights made by an earlier generation of historians more concerned with the social and cultural lives of ordinary people. For these scholars, institutions such as “the state,” “firms,” or “slavery” often assumed cardboard-like qualities, standing as crude extensions of the interests of a particular group—the ruling class, managers, or slaveholders, for example. Indeed, the institutions of the early republic did often reflect the needs and desires of elites, but reducing them to pure instruments of their collective will lacks historical accuracy and replaces the complexity of institutions with a simple straw man begging to be knocked down. By emphasizing the dynamic and contingent nature of institutions, the new institutionalism offers a way to avoid this sort of instrumental reductionism and, more importantly, to expand the scope of our vision as we reconstruct the political, social, and economic landscape of the early republic.

The early American state is perhaps the most obvious place to look for the impact of the new-institutionalist approach. Not so long ago, the prevailing scholarly view was that there was no early American state—the government was a regime composed largely of courts and parties with little power beyond the collection of tariffs and the raising (barely) of an army and navy. The first serious revision of concepts of the American state began with a group of political scientists interested in what they called “American political development” (APD). Inspired by the call of the Harvard social and political theorist Theda Skocpol and other social scientists to “bring the state back in” to political analysis, APD studies argued that political scientists needed to emphasize the ways legislatures, courts, government agencies, and other political institutions are essentially historical constructions with all the contingencies, paradoxes, false starts, and inefficiencies associated with other historical actors.

Armed with the theoretical tools of APD, a new generation of political historians sought to reconstruct the antebellum political landscape. More specifically, they examined the ways state institutions were critical to economic development. Colleen Dunlavy’s comparative study of American and Prussian railroads looked at the “structuring presence” of the state in economic development. Richard John demonstrated how the antebellum U.S. postal system helped usher in a communications revolution and, in turn, made the federal government a crucial agent for binding together national markets. John Lauritz Larson traced the republican roots of internal improvements in the early republic. In doing so, he showed that early American canals, roads, and other improvements were not the products of an anti-statist, liberal, and Jacksonian ideology but rather owed their existence to an early republican vision. What this and similar work has shown is that the old idea of the passive and barely present state of courts and parties is unable to account for, in Richard John’s words, “governmental institutions as agents of change.” This insight not only reconfigures the political landscape of the early republic. It has the ability, as John’s work on the postal service demonstrates, to alter our conceptions of historical space and time.

The study of economic institutions is another significant area of new-institutionalist scholarship. Here Jackson’s legacy persists in modern American life as well. It is quite common to hear denunciations of banks, calls for “sound” fiscal and monetary policy, and the condemnation of large concentrations of wealth and power among contemporary pundits. Old Hickory’s populism might sell advertising space or boost polling numbers in the short run, but it offers a severely limited perspective for the historical study of these things. Take, for example, an institution that is quite commonplace: the corporation. Modern Americans are likely to view corporations, past and present, as the paragons (good or bad) of private-sector initiative, but this is an ahistorical view. In the early republic, corporations existed in a much more ambiguous sphere—neither purely public, nor purely private. And promoters of incorporation adeptly exploited this ambiguity, arguing that potentially profitable enterprises such as bridges and toll roads were fundamentally matters of public necessity. Such insights are evident in the work of a broad array of historians. Andrew Schocket’s recent book argued that elites used the corporate form of organization to forge alliances that crossed civic, business, and philanthropic lines to create a new “corporate class” in antebellum Philadelphia. John Majewski’s excellent comparison of economic development in Virginia and Pennsylvania stressed regional differences in public and private investment. As it turns out, the rural residents of both states enthusiastically supported banks and railroad corporations within their district but counted upon urban capital to fuel these critical ventures.

New-institutionalist studies have also incorporated the insights of social and cultural historians into their research. Naomi Lamoreaux looked at insider lending in banks in antebellum New England, allowing us to understand how capital formation can owe as much to informal social networks as to the invisible hand of the market. Edward Balleisen took a seemingly narrow institutional topic—the Bankruptcy Act of 1841—and turned it into a fascinating case study of the culture of failure during a formative period of American capitalism. More specifically, he examined the ways the antebellum surge in personal bankruptcies redefined the morality of failure and helped pave the way for the acceptance of corporate employment among middle-class Americans. Rather than narrowly focus on the corporation’s inherent or emergent economic efficiency—as many traditional business and economic historians were wont to do—these studies all place that critical institution within a wider social and cultural context.

Emerging research on other corporate entities such as savings banks and life insurance companies by Dan Wadhwani and Sharon Murphy promises to transform those reputedly stodgy institutions into accessible ones that are integrated into the mainstream scholarship on the early republic. Wadhwani studies the ways early savings banks—created with both philanthropic and financial objectives in mind—transformed the family economy by offering small earners a place for their savings. By allowing opening deposits as low as one dollar, the creators of these savings institutions sought to draw customers from a broad socioeconomic base. And, it turns out, they succeeded. Working families used these accounts for various purposes: to provide liquidity, smooth out the rough edges of seasonal employment, stabilize their household economy, and, in the case of many working women, save for old age. Murphy’s work demonstrates the significance of early life insurance companies in the construction of American middle-class values during the nineteenth century. In a recent article in The Journal of the Early Republic, she examines the ways slaveholders increasingly adopted life insurance policies for their “property.” In some of these cases, life insurance policies even facilitated emancipation by serving as a collateral loan while hired-out slaves earned enough money to purchase their manumission.

Although the new institutionalism has its roots in studies of the state, the approach also offers insights into topics that are of central concern to social and cultural historians. Consider slavery. One early-twentieth-century historian of Virginia likened slavery to “the watch which in spite of everybody persisted in keeping wrong time till the magnet secreted near the mainspring had been discovered.” His point was that slavery’s impact was often barely perceptible, but like the punctuated equilibrium that reshaped so many institutions, its long-term impact is difficult to overstate. These unexpected effects, like the “magnet near the mainspring,” suggest that even institutions as seemingly familiar and well-studied as slavery can have counterintuitive or little known consequences. Sally Hadden’s study of the slave patrol in the Upper South, for example, shows that American law enforcement as we know it owed a great deal to the antebellum slave patrols and their task of enforcing strict racial hierarchies in the countryside of Virginia and North Carolina. “The history of police work in the South,” she argues, “grows out of this early fascination, by white patrollers, with what African-American slaves were doing.” My own research on the early American coal trade explains how the wider political impact of slavery affected corporate chartering, transportation, and even scientific policies in antebellum Virginia. When the new state of West Virginia attempted to start their coal trade in a post-Civil War environment, they found it difficult to shake inherited institutional constraints on industrial growth—constraints that had been shaped by slavery in antebellum Virginia. The rise and fall of interstate highway signs touting West Virginia’s former state slogan, “Open for Business,” suggests that state policymakers still struggle to capture the coal industry’s elusive prosperity in the twenty-first century.

An exemplar of new-institutionalist approaches to the political economy of slavery is Robin Einhorn’s recent book American Taxation, American Slavery. Einhorn’s work brings tax policy—once the province of financial historians and the posse comitatus—to the historical forefront. She shows that tax regimes in southern colonial and state governments privileged slave owners at the expense of less wealthy whites. Once this aspect of government had been co-opted by slaveholding interests, any attempt to achieve a more just tax code became nearly impossible. Southern planters used the institutions of governance to empower themselves and achieve the political and economic ascendancy that has become so familiar a part of antebellum southern history. The remnants of these policy regimes are evident in modern-day southern politics, and just as recent historians demonstrate the persistence of social and cultural dialogues concerning race, Einhorn traces the institutional impact of slavery into the twentieth century and beyond. For those who live, work, and raise children in low-tax and low-service states, tracing the origins of woeful funding mechanisms for education back to the antebellum era might offer little comfort, but it nonetheless serves as a powerful example of the contemporary significance of institutional history.

There is much more to the new institutionalism than simply finding a state where previous scholars claim one did not exist. William Novak’s book, The People’s Welfare, establishes the strong role that public institutions played in regulating the lives of everyday Americans in the early republic through “overt policies of government and law [and] not the invisible laws of supply and demand.” For example, we often think of consumer protection as a product of the Great Society of the 1960s, but Novak demonstrates that basic consumer goods such as beef and pork, butter, bread, alcoholic beverages, leather, and gunpowder were all monitored by state officials much, much earlier. Massachusetts, in fact, passed regulations governing the production and sale of no fewer than twenty-six categories of consumer products between 1780 and 1835. When they shopped for their daily meals, traveled to other cities, or even unwound with an ale or cider at the end of the day, Americans of the early republic negotiated the institutional boundaries of public regulatory authority as much as they encountered the invisible hand of the market. New-institutionalist perspectives can link seemingly antiseptic concepts like “regulatory capacity” and “institutional context” to the contours of everyday life in the early nineteenth century. More importantly, this kind of scholarship demonstrates that the significance of institutions in shaping American life never quite faded away as much as Jackson and his ideological devotees would have liked.

The post-presidency career of John Quincy Adams, to come full circle, is perhaps the best indication of the limitations of Jackson’s anti-institutional posture. When he struggled to remake national institutions in 1825, President Adams witnessed firsthand the political and cultural context in which institutions form. In that case, he read the potential reception for the National Republican agenda poorly and failed to see the growing power of the ideology of the “common man,” so skillfully exploited by Jackson and his allies. But when Congressman Adams later confronted the dominant slave power in the House of Representatives, he knew exactly how to combat a powerful institutional barrier to his goals. Perhaps the most notorious of these was the “gag rule” of 1836, which—on entirely dubious constitutional grounds—allowed Congress to agree not to consider antislavery petitions. This bold measure contradicted a constitutional mandate that allowed citizens to submit specific grievances to Congress via petitions. To its architects, however, the gag rule was a way to conveniently dispose of an enormously divisive issue.

Rather than wither in the face of this questionable tactic, Adams insisted upon forcing his opponents to invoke the gag rule time and again, thereby repeatedly reminding the public that its representatives were not fulfilling their constitutional duties. Perhaps Adams lost in the short run, for few antislavery petitions found their way into the Congressional Record. But in the long run, Adams’s actions provided an invaluable boost to the abolitionist cause by eroding the House’s practice of ignoring the slavery issue. Through these sorts of parliamentary struggles, Adams tested the formal and informal power relationships that constitute the lifeblood of a core political institution. For the new institutionalists, Adams’s fight serves as yet another reminder of how institutions and their histories can offer fresh perspectives on the forces that have shaped the United States.

The author would like to thank Robin Einhorn, Ed Gray, Richard John, and Jeff Pasley for their patience and helpful comments on this essay.

Further Reading:

For a much more extensive and inclusive account of new institutionalism and the early American republic than space allows here, please consult the essays in Richard R. John, ed., Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park, Pa., 2006), which originally appeared as a special edition of The Journal of Policy History 18:1 (2006). For a good brief overview of APD scholarship, see Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (New York, 2004) or Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, N.J., 2004). A recent forum in Polity 40:3 (July 2008), entitled “Politics, History, and the State of the State,” covers a wide range of new-institutionalist scholarship on the early American republic and beyond. Mark Wilson provides an excellent synthesis of antebellum institutional history in his recent essay entitled “Law and the American State, from the Revolution to the Civil War: Institutional Growth and Structural Change,” in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America, Volume II: The Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1920) (Cambridge; New York, 2008): 1-35.

Works cited in the essay as examples of the new institutionalism include: Colleen A. Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, N.J., 1992); Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001); Andrew M. Schocket, Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia (DeKalb, Ill., 2007); John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia, 1800-1860 (New York, 2000); Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (New York, 1994); Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001); R. Daniel Wadhwani, “Citizen Savers: Family Economy, Financial Institutions, and Public Policy in the Northeastern United States,” Enterprise & Society 5 (December 2004): 617-24; Sharon Ann Murphy, “Securing Human Property: Slavery, Life Insurance, and Industrialization in the Upper South,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Winter 2005): 615-652; Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Sean Patrick Adams, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2004); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006); William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Sean Patrick Adams is associate professor of history at the University of Florida and shares no relation (that he knows of) with John Quincy Adams. He is the author of Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America (2004) and is currently working on a study of domestic heating in nineteenth-century America and the history of an antebellum iron furnace community in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Institutions, of course, figure prominently in both projects.

“Making the right of citizenship identical with color, brings a stain upon the State, unmans the heart of an already injured people, and corrupts the purity of Republican Faith.”

(1841 Petition from the “Colored Citizens of Rhode Island to the Rhode Island Constitutional Convention”)

Early in the morning of May 18, 1842, Thomas Wilson Dorr, the “People’s Governor,” and a band of more than two hundred followers advanced on the state arsenal in Providence. The goal was simple: use the weapons within to seize power from Governor Samuel Ward King and forcibly establish the People’s Constitution. Having tried diplomacy and appeals to President John Tyler, the elite revolutionary Dorr turned to more drastic measures to achieve recognition as the legitimate governor of his native state. Rhode Island was now in a standoff between two men who each claimed to have been legally elected governor.

The 1842 standoff resulted from years of repeated attempts to revise the existing instrument of government, a charter granted by King Charles II in 1663. The charter had become outdated, and its restrictive suffrage requirements left many Rhode Islanders disenfranchised. After repeated attempts to redress the issue within the state legislature failed, reformers took matters into their own hands. For Dorr and his followers, the Declaration of Independence was “not merely designed to set forth a rhetorical enumeration of an abstract barrier to belligerent rights.” In late 1841, their Rhode Island Suffrage party sponsored its own popular convention to draft a new constitution. Delegates to the “People’s Convention” believed that they were acting on their constitutional right to alter or abolish an archaic government that no longer embodied the interests of the majority. The resulting constitution was subsequently promulgated and ratified in town meetings across the state. A government was then elected by universal, white, male suffrage under the new constitution. However, the Charter government was not about to go away quietly. On April 2, 1842, authorities issued an “Act in Relation to Offenses against the Sovereign Power of the State.” This act, which was derisively referred to by the suffrage supporters as the Algerine law, after the tyrannical Dey of Algiers, penalized anyone participating in elections under the People’s Constitution and declared that all who assumed office under the document were guilty of treason against the state.

Political observers recognized that the implications of the conflict extended well beyond Rhode Island’s idiosyncratic political history. James Simmons, Rhode Island’s Whig senator, remarked that if Dorr’s insistence on the right of the people to alter and abolish the government whenever they deemed necessary won out, it would place a powder “magazine beneath the fabric of civil society.” After the rebellion had been put down, the archconservative Francis Wayland, who was also serving as the president of Brown University, maintained that Dorr nearly plunged the nation “into the horrors of civil war.” In contrast, the aging Andrew Jackson maintained that the Dorrite movement was constitutionally legitimate, and represented the rightful exercise of the people’s power.

A lawyer by training, the 36-year-old Dorr (fig. 1), who idealized Jackson, was not cut out to lead a rebellion of the disenfranchised. Unskilled in military matters, Dorr’s attempt to fire on the arsenal with a 70-year-old cannon backfired in more ways than one. The cannons coughed up water, not lead balls. Even worse: many of his supporters deserted after the fiasco either because they feared arrest or because they disagreed with Dorr’s move from a war of words to armed conflict. One month later, Dorr and what was left of his followers reconvened at the village of Chepachet in northern Rhode Island. The primary purpose was to reconvene the People’s Legislature. However, when slightly more than 200 local supporters came to his aid and the hundreds he expected to arrive from New York City failed to make the journey, the disillusioned and disgraced People’s Governor fled the state.

Back in Rhode Island, forces loyal to Governor King, including some 200 black men from Providence, summarily arrested hundreds of suspected Dorrites. The Law and Order forces, a coalition of Whigs and conservative Democrats, needed all the troops they could get their hands on because many of the state militia units were loyal to Dorr. Black participation in squashing the rebellion made a deep impression on William Brown, the grandson of slaves who had once been owned by the famous merchant turned abolitionist Moses Brown. At numerous points in his memoir, William Brown pointed out that many blacks “turned out in defense” of the newly formed Law and Order party. The “colored people,” according to Brown, “organized two companies to assist in carrying out Law and Order in the State.” One Dorrite broadside viciously depicted blacks at a table with dogs eating and drinking like barbarians at the conclusion of the rebellion. Indeed, the Law and Order party was frequently referred to as the “nigger party” by the Dorrites (fig. 2).

Ironically, the disenfranchised black allies of the Law and Order party helped to put down a rebellion that claimed to speak on behalf of the disenfranchised. Indeed, the black men who made such an impression on Brown played a key role in suppressing a rebellion that they once had every intention of joining because of its egalitarian ethos. Just as ironically, blacks’ support for the Charter government, a relic of Rhode Island’s colonial past, helped secure their voting rights when the state approved a new constitution in 1843. The former slave and staunch abolitionist Frederick Douglass maintained in his autobiography that the efforts of black and white abolitionists “during the Dorr excitement did more to abolitionize the state than any previous or subsequent work.” One effect of the “labors,” according to Douglass, “was to induce the old law and order party, when it set about making its new constitution, to avoid the narrow folly of the Dorrites, and make a constitution which should not abridge any man’s rights on account of race or color.” This legal triumph, the only instance in antebellum history where blacks regained the franchise after having it revoked, was rooted both in the particular political and economic situations of Providence’s black community and in the Revolutionary rhetoric that was part and parcel of Dorr’s attempt at extralegal reform.

Rhode Island’s black population was small, less than three percent of a total population that numbered 108,837 in 1840. Blacks resided throughout the state, but the majority were concentrated in Providence; in 1842, the year of the rebellion, the Providence Directory listed 287 blacks as head of households. By 1830, roughly one-half of Providence’s black population owned their own homes while the other half lived in tenements; the majority were situated in Olney’s Lane, Snow Town, and the evocatively named Hard Scrabble—all black enclaves in the seedy areas of the town. Most of the occupations listed for the “colored population” were for menial types of employment. Because they were denied higher paying manufacturing jobs in Providence, many blacks were forced to make ends meet by opening restaurants and taverns catering to the large sailor population that streamed into the port of Providence or working as domestic servants. William Brown’s memoir testifies to the various forms of discrimination that confronted Providence’s black population. “The feeling against the colored people was very bitter,” Brown wrote. Mobs were “the order of the day, and the poor colored people were the sufferers.” At theaters and lecture halls in Rhode Island, as in those across the North, blacks could only enter if they agreed to sit in the balcony. Black children were often prohibited from attending public schools with white children; above the elementary level, few schools admitted blacks. The black minister Hosea Easton proclaimed in a Thanksgiving Day address in Providence in 1828 that black youth were “discouraged, disheartened, and grow up in ignorance” because of the racism they faced. Racism led to more than discouraged youth. In 1824 and again in 1831, Providence experienced major race riots.

Despite these difficulties, many members of the black community prospered and acquired sufficient wealth to meet the freehold requirement before they were legally disenfranchised in 1822. Arguing that they were already citizens because of past military service during the American Revolution, blacks quickly pushed back against the state’s white ruling elite. Black leaders understood that they needed to encourage their community to demonstrate self-reliance, virtue, and the capacity for improvement if they were to regain their voting privileges. Nathaniel Paul, pastor of the New African Union Church in Providence, told his congregation in 1822 to work hard to “convince” the white world that although their “complexion might differ,” they had “hearts susceptible of feelings, judgment capable of discerning, and prudence sufficient to maintain” their “affairs with discretion.” Whatever status an immigrant managed to attain, his son would automatically be a native-born white man, unconditionally entitled to full legal rights and privileges. Black leaders, on the other hand, had to demonstrate the worthiness of an entire group anew with every generation. After years of working to create an image of respectability, Providence’s African American community hoped that the Rhode Island Suffrage Association, which was formed in March 1840, would take up their call for equal rights and helped them regain the franchise. Their hopes were quickly dashed.

If Providence’s blacks were frustrated by the limited rights granted them by the state government, the Suffrage Association was angered by the government itself. Ironically, the first American colony to declare its independence from British rule and industrialize was the last to relinquish a system of government based on a royal charter. As Dorr and his followers pointed out, the colonial charter, while progressive by seventeenth-century standards, posed any number of problems for a nineteenth-century American state. Some of the most pressing problems centered on the franchise, which restricted suffrage to men owning $134 in land or paying $7 in rent. But the market revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries accelerated urban growth and contributed to the formation of a large landless class in and around the capital city of Providence. By 1840, Rhode Island had the highest proportion of manufacturing workers in the nation and was one of just two states in which more workers labored in manufacturing than they did in farming. However generous the charter may have seemed in the seventeenth century, by the 1840s, roughly 40 percent of the state’s white men, many of them Irish Catholic immigrants, were disenfranchised. Small wonder, then, that the attempt to reform the state constitution and expand the franchise attracted a large and enthusiastic following among white males. And small wonder that the extralegal attempt to draft a new constitution in 1841 received the support of a clear majority of Rhode Islanders. When the ballots were certified on January 13, 1842, the people of Rhode Island found themselves with two constitutions. A few months later, two men would run for governor under different constitutions.

As Rhode Island’s constitutional crisis unfolded, Providence’s African American community proved to be nimble political operators, despite the efforts of the Dorrites and the Charter authorities to use them as political fodder. Blacks managed to gain a measure of political power by supporting the Charter authorities, while at the same time helping to defend themselves against hostility from white suffrage reformers, who for the most part saw blacks and their abolitionist allies as a political liability and thus refused to remove the “white only” clause in the People’s Constitution. The conservative political satirist William Goddard, writing as “Town Born” in the pages of the Providence Journal, pointed out the Dorrites’ moral failings. Putting words into the mouths of a Dorrite speaking to blacks, “Town Born” wrote: “You may ride along in the same train of revolution with us if you please, but alas! It must be in the James Crow car.” “Town Born” asked the Dorrites that if “all men are born free and equal,” and if “the right to vote be a natural and inalienable right, why does the mere accident of color make a difference?” In reality, however, the Law and Order party saw blacks as a political and physical weapon that could be wielded against the Dorrites. As one female Dorrite said at the time, the Law and Order forces “made the colored men voters, not because it was their right, but because they needed their help.”

The Rhode Island Suffrage Association began gearing up for the 1841 constitutional convention months in advance. To mobilize supporters, the association advertised the convention in the press, stressing the need for universal turnout. “Let every man who is in favor of a Republican form of government go to the polls on the last Saturday in August, and vote for men good and true, to assemble in Convention,” proclaimed on announcement. The day before the vote, they exhorted citizens to go “TO THE POLLS TOMORROW: Let every American citizen in the State devote the day to his country.” Despite the inclusive language, the references to “every” American and “every” citizen, black voters were turned away on election day.

The Association’s refusal to recognize black voters in August turned out to be a portent of things to come. The deciding moment for black suffrage at the People’s Convention occurred on October 8, 1841. Just before the opening of the evening session, Dorr was presented with a memorial, a petition from members of the Providence black community, protesting the commitment of many of the delegates to universal white male suffrage.

At the start of the session, Dorr told the assembly that he had received the petition and asked that it be read by one of the secretaries of the convention. This request was challenged on the suspicion that the petition might have been written by a white person eager to discredit the suffrage cause. Dorr reassured his audience that the messenger who handed him the petition said that it was written by Alexander Crummell, the young black minister of Christ Church in Providence. Before coming to Providence, Crummell had fought an unsuccessful battle against New York Democrats in an attempt to abolish the $250 freehold for voting, which affected both whites and blacks. His tenure as pastor of Christ Church was riddled by controversy—he often disagreed with the parish officers. But as an educated minister Crummell often served as the de facto scribe and spokesman for the city’s black community. The memorial he drafted on the community’s behalf maintained that Rhode Island’s African American community was “unwilling” to let “this sore, grievous, and unwarrantable infliction” to be “made upon” their “already bruised hearts.” A white-only clause was regarded “as unwarrantable, anti-republican, and in tendency destructive; and, as such, we protest against it.”

The petition went on to explain that Providence’s blacks were mostly native born citizens; as a community, they had worked their way up to respectability and economic competence. As “citizens,” proclaimed the petition, they claimed an “equal participation in the rights and privileges of citizenship.” This was no different from the views of Aaron White Jr., one of Dorr’s close political allies, and a proponent of black suffrage. White would later argue that as “citizens of the Union” the “rights” of a majority of Rhode Islanders had been “in repeated instances most outrageously violated by the men in power beyond all question.” White hoped that “some way might be found that would at least restore” the rights “under the national Constitution.” Crummell’s petition went on to argue that as “native born citizens and not accustomed to a political creed repugnant to democratic principles and republican usage,” the signers were “members of the state of Rhode Island under the government of the United States.” The “repugnant” political creed was a reference to Catholicism, invoking common fear about the consequences of enfranchising the growing ranks of Irish immigrant laborers. The gist of the argument coming from the African American community, however, was that excluding them from the elective franchise was anti-republican, that it violated the cornerstone of Dorrite ideology. The petition was signed by Ichabod Northup, Samuel Rodman, James Hazard, George Smith and Ransom Parker, all leading members of the black community.

For a moment it seemed that the petition would be well received: Dorr himself openly favored it. He was afraid that the Suffrage party’s commitment to popular sovereignty would appear hollow if blacks were excluded from the franchise. Duttee J. Pearce, however, disagreed. Pearce, whom Dorr would later come to despise, argued that the People’s Constitution would never be ratified if it included a provision for black suffrage. Following the reading of the petition and after much discussion on the convention floor, the word “white” was retained by a vote of 46 to 18. Primarily to appease Dorr, a clause was inserted to submit the question of black suffrage to the people after the constitution had been adopted.

The race-based franchise endorsed by the People’s Constitution was a bitter disappointment to Rhode Island’s African American community and their abolitionist allies. Never mind that the Charter government, holding its own concurrent constitutional convention, had likewise excluded black participation. The Dorrites, who had dashed blacks’ expectations, attracted the greatest sanctions from anti-slavery activists—and in October of 1841 there was no shortage of abolitionists in Providence. Anti-slavery activists, sensitive to Rhode Island’s significance in the struggle for black civil rights, had scheduled their own convention to coincide with and influence the two competing constitutional conventions. A who’s who of New England abolitionism descended on Providence. William Lloyd Garrison, John A. Collins, Stephen S. Foster, Abby Kelley and Frederick Douglass were all in attendance. Kelley braved snowballs, rotten apples and eggs, jeers, and threats so “murderous” that she was long plagued by “troubled dreams.” This was nothing new for Kelley. In May 1838 she braved flying stones and brickbats in order to give an address at Pennsylvania Hall. Garrison had a sizeable number of admirers in Rhode Island through his marriage to Helen Benson, the daughter of one of the founding members of the state’s anti-slavery society.

The Dorrites and the abolitionists confronted each other in the middle of the anti-slavery convention’s deliberations, when Joseph Brown, president of the Rhode Island Suffrage Association, was allowed to address the assembly. Brown argued that the Suffrage Association was charged with advocating for the greatest good of the majority of citizens in the state, which was clearly composed of the white working class. Once universal suffrage was achieved for whites, Brown assured them, black suffrage would soon follow.

Garrison responded to Brown’s remarks in what one newspaper referred to as a “strain of epithets.” According to Garrison, the suffrage reformers “were engaged in a mean and contemptible business—the dastardly act of the Suffrage men show them to be possessed of mean and contemptible souls.” The anti-slavery convention concluded the following day with a number of resolutions, one of which was that no man who professes to be an abolitionist could consistently vote for a constitution with the word “white” in it.

The enmity between the two reform movements increased through the winter. Abolitionists cancelled their subscriptions to the New Age, the suffrage organ, attempting to bankrupt it. The state anti-slavery society also began publication of The Suffrage Examiner, a newspaper whose sole purpose was the defeat of the People’s Constitution. The tactics of the anti-slavery movement, ranging from barnstorming to press wars, proved ineffectual. In some instances, abolitionists were denied halls in which to hold their meetings; in other instances, speakers were harassed. Mobs of Dorrites broke up abolitionist meetings, made proslavery speeches, and derided the Charter government supporters as the “nigger party.” Although the mainstream press provided detailed accounts of these altercations, the suffrage papers paid hardly any notice.

As tension escalated, Dorrites who favored black suffrage could only ask for patience and promise action in the future. In a communication addressed “To the Abolitionists of Rhode Island,” Benjamin Arnold Jr., Samuel H. Wales and William Wentworth, who had voted in favor of black suffrage at the People’s constitutional convention, tried to reassure readers that the issue was not dead. They pointed out that the People’s Constitution mandated a referendum on black suffrage. The authors acknowledged the racism of many of the suffrage reformers, but pleaded with the abolitionists not to let this prevent them from supporting the People’s Constitution. The sentiments expressed by a friend of Dorr’s in Fall River, Massachusetts, are representative of many Suffrage party members. Expressing his disappointment that the People’s Constitution did not contain a provision for black suffrage, but also recognizing that the Charter government’s constitution was “still less liberal than the People’s in every other particular and absolutely and irretrievably shut the door against ever admitting the colored man to vote,” Louis Lapham maintained that he was “convinced” that the Suffrage party “had probably put that question in the most liberal shape that circumstances would at the time render successful.” According to Arnold, Wales, and Wentworth, the suffrage reformers were “bound to carry out” their “principles to every practicable, but not to every impracticable extent, because principle” would not permit them “to sacrifice a benevolent attainable object to a mere nominal and useless theoretical consistency.” In closing, the three authors reminded the abolitionists of the simple fact that the draft of the Charter government’s constitution contained neither provisions for black suffrage nor a clause for the future addition of it.

Following the ratification of the People’s Constitution, Dorr rallied his supporters to vote down the Charter constitution, with the precariously narrow margin of 8,689 to 8,013. The Charter government had gained ground among working class whites by removing the real estate requirement for native-born white men’s suffrage and by making effective use of nativist fear tactics. The Catholic bishop of Boston actually warned his flock in Providence to stay out of the Rhode Island dispute so as to avoid trouble. Support for Dorr and the People’s Constitution was eroding. As for Rhode Island’s African American community, despite its petitions and assistance from nationally renowned abolitionists, it was no better off than it had been before agitation for suffrage reform commenced.

During the early months of 1842, Dorr and his followers busied themselves setting up a new government under the People’s Constitution. Elections were held in April. Dorr and the other slate of candidates ran unopposed. With a throng of supporters winding their way through the streets of Providence, Dorr was inaugurated governor on May 3. That month it became evident that Rhode Island was on a collision course between the existing Charter government under Samuel Ward King and the People’s Government under Thomas Wilson Dorr. Even with all the disappointment created by the white-only clause in the People’s Constitution, blacks were slow to desert the People’s Government and were ready to take up arms to aid their cause. As late as May 17, the night before Dorr attempted to attack the arsenal (fig. 3), the members of Providence’s Christ’s Church seemed to favor supporting Dorr. The church’s record book noted that at the closing of the vestry meeting on the night of attempted attack, parishioners paid homage to the “People’s Governor.” But the fire bombing of their congregation on the evening of March 24 certainly made their decision to aid the Charter authorities easier. As historian Mark Schantz has noted, while it was unclear exactly who set fire to the church, “such an act fits the broader pattern of racial antagonism demonstrated by the suffrage reformers during the previous year.”

By June, when the Charter government called out its militia companies to put down the insurrection (fig. 4), Providence’s blacks were willing to cast their lot with the established government, the same government that had denied them the franchise for the past twenty years. More than 200 black men joined the nearly 3,500 men who comprised militia and volunteer companies. Like white volunteers, blacks policed city streets, manned fire companies, deployed throughout the state, and guarded Dorrite prisoners. William Brown recalled that blacks were integrated into the militia companies of the City Guard. A reporter for the Boston newspaper Emancipator and Free American noted that blacks in Rhode Island were “placed in the ranks according to their height and I saw no manifestation of disrespect toward either one of them, by any member of the company, but on the contrary all praised and honored them for their noble devotion to the interest of the great cause of regulated civil liberty which they were now called to defend.”

Such ready acceptance of black volunteers demonstrates the desperation of the Charter government. According to William Brown, Dorr supporters argued that “if it were not for the colored people, they would have whipped the Algerines, for their fortifications were so strong that they never could have been taken. Their guns commanded every road for a distance of five miles. Why then did you surrender your fort, I asked, if you had eleven hundred men to defend it? They said ‘Who do you suppose was going to stay there when the Algerines were coming up with four hundred bull niggers?'”

Regardless of the government’s motivation for incorporating black volunteers into its defense, Providence’s white community began to take notice. Just one day after the Charter government deployed its forces to Chepachet, the Journal noted approvingly:

THE COLORED POPULATION of our city, have come forward in the most honorable manner, and taken upon themselves the charge of the fire engines. They have pledged themselves to assist in the protection of property from fire and plunder, while the other inhabitants are engaged in the defense of the State.

The week following Dorr’s defeat at Chepachet, the city’s black community was represented in the July 4^th parade by its own marching band, complete with musical instruments supplied by the state from items confiscated at Chepachet.

As tensions caused by the rebellion diminished in the early fall of 1842, the Charter government convened yet another constitutional convention and asked Rhode Islanders to vote on yet another constitution. Although it eased suffrage requirements, the reform constitution was a far cry from Dorr’s vision. It mandated a one-year residency requirement for freeholders, a two-year residency requirement for the native born without real estate but owning $134 worth of personal property. Naturalized citizens were still required to own $134 worth of real estate. The rural Democrat Elisha Potter noted in a letter to former governor John Brown Francis that the Law and Order party “would rather have the Negroes vote than the damn Irish.”

When the constitution was put before the state, all citizens who were to be admitted to the franchise under the new suffrage requirements were allowed to vote. The constitution was approved by a lopsided margin of 7,024 to 51 and the provision for black suffrage passed with 4,031 votes in favor to 1,798 against, a two to one margin (fig. 5). Even Dorr, the ardent antislavery Whig politician in the 1830s and friend of black suffrage in 1841-42, complained later that “naturalized citizens are not allowed to vote … while the blacks are on the [same] basis of the native whites.”

In the spring of 1843, with Dorr living in exile in New Hampshire and then Massachusetts, the Rhode Island Suffrage party decided that their best course of action was no longer revolutionary reform, but rather registration under the new constitution. Their goal was to retake the reigns of government through the ballot box. Their hopes were quickly dashed, however, as the Law and Order party easily won the election. On April 13, 1843, one of Dorr’s political correspondents wrote to the erstwhile reformer, blaming the resounding political defeat on Rhode Island’s black population. “The colored people, had they voted with us,” said Samuel Ashley “would have given us” the “majority.” Ashley maintained that blacks living in Providence “were cajoled, treated, collected together in the arsenal” and “made to believe as some have themselves since told me, that if they voted with” the Dorrites, “the People’s constitution, which rejected them as voters” would have been adopted. Dorr’s close friend Catherine R. Williams said that blacks “were marched like slaves to the townhouses to vote” in Providence and in Bristol.

In a society resting, rhetorically at least, on the ideal of equality, the boundaries of Rhode Island’s political community took on extreme significance in 1842 and 1843. The Dorrites, abolitionists, and black leaders all understood the “privileges and immunities” clause of the Constitution to provide a broad protection for a range of rights, including suffrage. However, as historian David Roediger has argued, blacks “were seen as anti-citizens” by the Dorrites. They were viewed “as enemies rather than the members of a social compact.”

In the pages of The Wampanoag and Operatives’ Journal, the famous journalist and novelist Frances Whipple Green maintained that in “excluding their colored fellow citizens from the rights and privileges, which they were seeking for themselves,” the Dorrites “forfeited the esteem and confidence of all the true and consistent friends of freedom.” According to Green, “the word ‘WHITE'” in the People’s Constitution was “a black mark against” the suffrage reformers. Yet while her abolitionist sympathies initially provoked her to express outrage at the “odious ‘WHITE’ Constitution,” Green eventually supported the suffrage cause and the People’s Constitution. Even though she was well respected in the black community for penning the 1838 memoirs of the part-Narragansett Indian, part-black whitewasher Elleanor Elbridge, Green was able to put aside her feelings of outrage at the exclusion of black voters in the People’s Constitution in order to work for suffrage reform for white workers. Like most of the Dorrites, Green quickly backpedaled on her egalitarian principles.

In her pro-Dorrite tract, Might and Right, penned two years after Dorr’s rebellion had been put down, Green lamented the fact that the abolitionists, “the professed philanthropists of the North,” failed “to enter their protest” against the treatment of the Dorrite prisoners. In her description of the inhumane treatment of prisoners held in the Rhode Island capital city of Providence, the coastal town of Bristol, and the city of Newport in the summer of 1842, Green remarked that if “a band of colored men had been marched through the streets … under the same circumstances all New England would have been in a blaze. I have yet to learn, that black men are better than white men, or that their rights are any more sacred.” Green’s allusion to “colored men” being “marched through the streets” referred to the surrender of suspected fugitive slaves to southern slaveholders, a prospect that was the focus of widespread anxiety and fear through the North. Green’s lament in Might and Right about the lack of abolitionist support for the Dorrites’ version of suffrage reform was somewhat disingenuous. She knew perfectly well why abolitionists failed to come to the aid of the Dorrites. Green herself had supplied the answer two years before. But looking back on the rebellion’s failure, Green took aim at abolitionists, arguing that their single-minded opposition to disenfranchisement based on skin color prevented them from seeing other, deeply felt inequalities in the state’s voting laws.

Abolitionists like Abby Kelley and Frederick Douglass refused to see things this way. Douglass maintained in his memoirs that blacks in Rhode Island “cared nothing for the Dorr party on the one hand, nor the ‘law and order party’ on the other.” What Douglass wanted for the black community in Rhode Island “was a constitution free from the narrow, selfish, and senseless limitation of the word white.” In the end, Douglass and Rhode Island’s blacks prevailed.

The cruel irony of a movement that predicated itself on adherence to the Declaration of Independence only to abandon it for political expediency was not lost on the black community. The Dorrites sang praises to equality and democracy while denouncing those who cautioned the people to respect property rights and order. Yet most advocates for suffrage reform chose not to broaden their definition of democratic equality to include blacks. The Dorrites insisted that small groups within the polity, especially the abolitionists, could not be allowed to impose their particular moral vision upon the whole. Blacks ignored the pleas from the Dorrite supporters to defer their claims on the franchise until after the ratification of the People’s Constitution. Instead, leaders such as Alexander Crummell worked hard to negotiate favorable ties with white aristocrats in order to ensure that Rhode Island’s African Americans received the rights due to them as citizens. They understood that equating the rights of citizenship with skin color brings “a stain upon the state.”

Further Reading:

The best account of the rebellion remains one by Patrick T. Conley, Democracy in Decline: Rhode Island Constitutional Development, 1776-1841 (Providence, 1977), pp. 290-379. Robert Cottrol’s study of Providence’s black community is invaluable. See The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Santa Barbara, Calif, 1982). See also Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York, 2008). Mark Schantz’s chapter on the Dorr Rebellion in Piety in Providence: Class Dimensions of Religious Experience in Antebellum Rhode Island (Ithica, N.Y., 2000) is first rate. Ronald Formisano and Christian Fritz present engaging and thoroughly researched chapters on the Dorr Rebellion in their most recent works. See Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution through the 1850s (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007) and Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (Cambridge, 2008). Readers interested in race and antebellum politics should consult David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness (London, 2007) and Joanne Pope Melish’s introduction to the recent edition of The Life of William J. Brown of Providence, RI with Personal Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island (Concord, N.H. 2006).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Erik J. Chaput is a Ph.D. candidate in early American history at Syracuse University. He has forthcoming articles on the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island History and the Historical Journal of Massachusetts. Russell J. DeSimone, an independent scholar, is the compiler of The Broadsides of the Dorr Rebellion (1992) and the author of Rhode Island’s Rebellion (2009).

In 1876, during city-wide celebrations of the nation’s centennial, Philadelphia architect and carpenter William Eyre reminisced upon an unusual family heirloom: a carved portrait bust of William Penn, now at the Philadelphia History Museum (fig. 1). Standing twelve inches high, the bust depicts the rotund proprietor of the Pennsylvania colony sporting a tightly curled wig and cravat. The figure’s midsection rests upon a stack of books, papers, and a scroll unrolling to the lower right and his carved eyes gaze upward to the heavens. Thick layers of white paint, now traversed by a web of fine cracks, cover the surface of the sculpture. During the centennial, the bust was displayed “as an Ancient Relic” in Carpenters’ Hall, which hosted the First Continental Congress in 1774. In his diary, Eyre, then president of the Carpenters’ Company, which owned and maintained Carpenters’ Hall, recalled that the bust was made from the wood of the Treaty Elm, under which it was believed Penn made a peaceful agreement with the Lenape Indians in 1682 or 1683. Benjamin West’s widely reproduced painting, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (fig. 2), commissioned in late 1770 or early 1771 by Thomas Penn as a tribute to his late father, provided a visual narrative for this enigmatic event. While scholars still debate the treaty’s location, date, and content, history does record the expiration of the cherished Treaty Elm, which stood on the banks of the Delaware River in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia: It fell down in a storm on March 3, 1810. Newspapers from Vermont to South Carolina reported the ancient tree’s demise: “This celebrated tree, having stood the blast of more than a century since that memorable event, is at length prostrated to the dust!”

Following its fall, the elm’s wood was collected and preserved as fragments or converted into various artifacts—including boxes, chairs, and writing desks—that were disseminated throughout the nation and even across the Atlantic Ocean to England. William’s father, Isaac Eyre, a shipbuilder whose business abutted the land on which the Treaty Elm grew, secured a piece of a limb and brought it to a ship carver, James Leconey, to carve into the bust. According to William Eyre, upon “seeing the limb in my Fathers arms before giving it to the Carver, which limb as I remember was about twice the length of this figure and from a remark made at the time, the impression was made on my Young Mind, that the Carver received the one half of it as compensation for the work of Carving.” Here, Eyre paints a poignant picture of his father cradling a tree limb in his arms, a piece of wood so valuable to a group of men whose livelihoods depended upon the transformation of wood that Leconey accepted a portion of it as payment for his work.

Eyre’s account provides a compelling narrative for the object’s conception and names a maker, both rare occurrences for a Treaty Elm relic. This new information invites a fresh interpretation of an unstudied artifact, currently relegated to storage, and its environmental context in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. I recently connected William Eyre’s description in his diary, now in the Eyre Family Papers at the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, with the William Penn bust, donated by Henry R. Eyre, William’s grandson, to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1887 and later transferred to the Philadelphia History Museum.

Through its mythic participation in Penn’s Treaty, an episode that was iconic in local and even national constructed memory as symbolic of peace, virtue, and justice, the wood of the Treaty Elm became saturated with associated moral values and lessons. Quaker families like the Eyres were particularly invested in this history and would have treasured objects that broadcast the benefits of peaceful negotiation. I contend that the Eyre portrait bust and other relics like it, while inarguably invested in preserving and commemorating the memory of William Penn and his treaty, solidifying social networks, and reinforcing ideological and political values of the young United States, also imparted ideas about environmental change in the Philadelphia region. This change that would have been especially meaningful to shipbuilders, carpenters, and carvers whose procurement and consumption of trees had a significant impact on the region’s forests. The transformation of the elm from venerated tree to amputated limb to corporeal form amplified cognizant qualities long associated with the tree, which was celebrated as an ancient resident of past environments and a witness—and possible casualty—of their alteration. Carving the wood in the form of the state’s founder, complete with the refined trappings of books, scrolls, and the addition of a thick coat of cream-colored paint, however, visually domesticates the wood through the suppression of its material characteristics and obscures the role of other agents involved in Penn’s Treaty: the Lenape Indians.

Ships in Penn’s Woods

Why did Isaac Eyre commission such an object from James Leconey circa 1812? The answer lies in the historical—and I would argue, environmental—significance of the elm to nineteenth-century Kensington, where the tree originally grew. In their frontispiece to The City of Philadelphia, the first comprehensive visual representation of the city in 1800, the artists Thomas and William Russell Birch reproduced and updated the vantage point featured in West’s painting, prominently pairing the Treaty Elm with the city’s shipbuilding industry (fig. 3). At the turn of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was the most populous city in the United States, the nation’s capital, and an important shipbuilding center. The establishment of the United States Navy in 1792 precipitated a boom of ship construction, deploying craftsmen along the East coast to manufacture a fleet of frigates designed by the Philadelphia naval architect Joshua Humphreys. City directories reveal that Isaac Eyre was one of a number of shipbuilders—including three other Eyres, William Brown, John Delavean, Joseph Grice, Humphreys and his son Samuel, Charles Penrose, and Benjamin Phillips—working in Philadelphia around 1810. In the Birches’ engraving of the city port, the Treaty Elm’s branches and thick foliage shade and frame a variety of shipbuilding activities. Two foreground figures chop planks of wood and, to the immediate left of the elm’s trunk, two men are occupied repairing a boat’s hull, while a cauldron of pitch boils and smokes nearby. In the background, the bustling city and harbor—a rhythmic procession of brick buildings, steeples, and tall-masted ships—stretch along the horizon. The Birches introduced Philadelphia, the subject of their illustrated publication, with a view from the northeast that would have greeted people, goods, and large rafts of timber traveling down the Delaware River from the region’s hinterlands during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Indeed, the engraving’s subject matter, combined with its paper support, saturates the image with material and visual references to wood. The prominent inclusion of the Treaty Elm, the preparation of wood for shipbuilding, and the northern perspective delineated in the Birches’ engraving together underscore both the symbolic and economic importance of trees and timber to the city and Pennsylvania, its very name meaning “Penn’s Woods” in Latin.

The availability and consumption of wood supported a variety of industries in the Kensington area, including the building and carving of ships and their ornaments. There is no documentation of James Leconey, the bust’s maker, and his work beyond his listing in city directories as a ship, house, and cabinet carver toiling in Kensington, but in its appearance and place of origin, the bust is embedded in the local ship figurehead carving tradition. If Penn were simply turned ninety degrees to the left, one could imagine his visage adorning the prow of a ship, with the proprietor’s curls and unrolling scroll echoing the foaming waves below. For the portrait, Leconey followed conventions established by Silvanus Bevan, an apothecary and acquaintance of Penn, who created a popular bas-relief of the Pennsylvania founder after his death. This likeness was reproduced widely in print and adopted by West for his painting of Penn’s Treaty. The bust additionally recalls extant work by the sculptor William Rush, who also carved wooden ship figureheads and portrait busts in the city at the same time. In Rush’s figurehead of Benjamin Franklin (fig. 4), created for the first ship built at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1815, Franklin gazes straight ahead and perches on a scroll base, reminiscent of the scroll that supports Leconey’s Penn. Leconey or Isaac Eyre had undoubtedly seen Rush’s sculpture in his workshop, adorning ships in Philadelphia’s harbor, or on display in public spaces throughout the city in the early nineteenth century. Recent materials analysis of the bust’s paint layers reveals that, like Rush, Leconey painted the relic with two thick layers of lead-white based, cream-colored, oil-bound paint. Carvers frequently painted wooden sculpture cream or white in the early national period to emulate classical sculpture and imitate marble, a more sophisticated material that was more expensive and less practical to obtain and use.

Value through Disvalue

The Treaty Elm wood used to construct Leconey’s bust acquired its old age due to its perceived historical prominence and challenging material properties. Indeed, the elm may have generated its intimate association with Penn’s Treaty because low demand for elm wood had allowed it to become one of the few remaining trees from Penn’s lifetime by 1810. Philadelphia exported or used huge quantities of wood in shipbuilding, housing, construction, tanning, and fuel in the early nineteenth century, and timber in easy proximity to navigable waterways became scarce. Large forests of oak, chestnut, pine, and cedar in southwestern New Jersey, directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, almost completely disappeared due to agricultural clear-cutting and fuel consumption, prompting concern in particular for the continued growth and maintenance of the nation’s Navy. In the introduction to his 1817 English translation of Andre Michaux’s North American Sylva, Augustus Lucas Hillhouse lamented, “though three fourths of our soil are still veiled from the eye of day by primeval forests, the best materials for building are nearly exhausted: with all the projected improvements in our internal navigation, whence shall we procure supplies of timber, fifty years hence, for the continuance of our marine?” Anxieties about the scarcity of wood persisted well into the nineteenth century; William Eyre, for example, raised funds and distributed firewood to the city’s more destitute families who could not afford the high cost of fuel during the winter of 1840. Elms, however, were mostly spared from the axe because they were not particularly valuable commercially. Unsuitable for building, cabinet-making, or even carving, elm wood was tough and fibrous; it split easily and took a long time to dry, although craftsmen occasionally used the wood for wheel hubs, yokes, saddle trees, flooring, and barrels. The awkwardness of Leconey’s bust of Penn may in fact be due to the carver’s inability to achieve fine detail in the challenging wood.

Because American elms were so large and labor-intensive to cut down, lumbermen frequently passed them over. Over time, these tenacious and fast-growing trees became important boundary markers and landmarks, standing as reminders of the forests that once surrounded them. By allowing the elm to disappear among the other forest trees to the right in Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, Benjamin West may have expected knowledgeable eighteenth-century viewers to instead imagine the elm’s future revelation as testimony of the transformed landscape, heralded by the row of buildings shown under construction. A majestic tree standing alone would have anachronistically suggested the deforestation and development characterizing the region at the time of the painting’s commission.

In a poem composed for the 1825 meeting of the Penn Society, Judge Richard Peters celebrated the vitality and moral character of the Treaty Elm and its relics while also recognizing the elm’s lack of commercial value. In one stanza, Peters contrasted the stately yet impractical elm to oak, one of the most important woods for shipbuilding:

The Oak may be fam’d for its uses in war,
Or wafting wealth’s idols to regions afar:
But the Elm bears no part in such objects as these,
Its employment is solely in fabrics of peace.

Here Peters suggests that the elm’s association with the peace symbolized by Penn’s Treaty may be in part due to its impracticality as a commodity. Due to its large size and advanced age—especially considering the rapid deforestation of other arboreal species—the Treaty Elm therefore materially shaped Philadelphia’s creation myth, generating historical associations by virtue of its powerful agency as a kind of natural beacon in the rapidly changing landscape.

The elm, however, was not immune to regional development. In his Annals of Philadelphia, a history of the city’s “olden time” first published in 1830, the antiquarian John Fanning Watson—who collected and manufactured his own share of Treaty Elm relics—implied a connection between the elm’s fall in the aftermath of the 1810 storm and the dramatic alteration of the Kensington topography through razing and leveling:

Nothing could surpass the amenity of the whole scene as it once stood, before “improvement,” that effacive name of every thing rural or picturesque, destroyed its former charms, cut down its sloping verdant bank … and turned all into the leveled uniformity of a city street.

This local development and related erosion may have contributed to the elm’s ruin, as Watson admits that “the blow” from the storm to the tree “was not deemed generally prevalent, nor strong.” The tree had apparently been in danger for some time. One later nineteenth-century report recalled that, before its fall, the elm leaned so far in a southwesterly direction that goats could run up along the trunk and out onto the main limb. This precarity is also conveyed in an engraving based upon a 1794 drawing by the British landscape painter George Isham Parkyns (fig. 5). The tree, here viewed from the south, perches insecurely on an eroded bank next to the skeleton of a ship under construction, as if literally yielding before progress, here represented by the booming shipbuilding industry employing the Eyre family.

Muteness

When the elm finally succumbed to its eroding foundation, exacerbated by the 1810 storm, its relics were collected and transformed by many city inhabitants, including those living and working in Kensington. Several pieces of the elm were preserved in their original unworked form, and these amputated fragments inspired contemplation of the larger body of the tree, much like relics of saints in the Middle Ages. A large segment of the tree, for example, was sent across the Atlantic to William Penn’s grandson, John Penn, who proudly displayed it at his estate, Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire, England. An engraving published in an 1822 address of the Outinian Society, originally founded by John Penn to promote marriage reform, depicts a couple admiring the tree branch, or portion of the trunk, in an enclosed space on the Penn estate, as if they were viewing a classical sculpture within a museum (fig. 6). The anonymous author of the address, liberally employing botanical metaphors of growth, expressed his belief that the now “LIFELESS TRUNK” and “similar substances” sympathize with “their parent tree,” to “vegetate with that rapidly creative vigor, which must produce … the beautiful and fragrant flowers of UNIVERSAL AMITY, followed by the nutritious fruits of UNIVERSAL UTILITY.” Despite the fact that its wood possessed very little material value or utility, the Treaty Elm was believed to prove useful in other ways, inspiring uplift and amity—and presumably marital fidelity and harmony—in those contemplating its origins, like the couple admiring the fragment at Stoke Park.

Rather than preserving the integrity of the limb’s natural shape, as Stoke Park’s display foregrounded, Isaac Eyre instead chose to divide and rework his Treaty Elm fragment in order to evoke Penn more explicitly. By carving the severed tree limb into the similarly truncated but more refined body of Pennsylvania’s founder, Eyre and Leconey effectively obfuscated the relic’s visual connection to the original, larger tree. The application of cream paint further enhanced this disjuncture between bust and elm. While Penn’s verticality and his wider base may recall the form of a tapering branch, the elm’s characteristic grain patterning remains hidden under a layer of paint, even though it is the bust’s material that imbues it with meaning. Although the makers and owners of the bust were well aware of its material history, its significance was destined to become less and less accessible over time. Indeed, materials analysis uncovers eight generations of paint added to the bust over its lifetime. Several paint layers even disclose attempts to make the bust to appear more lifelike, with duotone or polychrome color schemes that included a red-brown or tan base, clothing, and wig and a cream- or white-colored cravat. This gradual accumulation of paints and colors—culminating in its current monochrome layer of white—further submerged the relic’s wood and obscured Leconey’s carving. Like most relics, it instead relies on a label to advertise its prestigious provenance. The underside of the portrait’s base—the only surface not obscured by paint—features the ghostly outline of a paper label (fig. 7), which possibly identified the wood and the bust’s owners in the early nineteenth century. To commemorate its donation to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Henry R. Eyre, or the society itself, commissioned a brass label inscribed, “A Relic of the Treaty Elm, Presented by Henry R. Eyre, Nov. 1887,” and nailed to the back of the wooden scroll (fig. 8). Although Leconey carved Eyre’s limb into a figure with the capacity of speech, Penn’s lips are tightly closed, and the wood’s origins are conveyed only by a supplementary textual label. Antiquarians frequently expressed their frustration with the muteness of historical objects and relics. In his Annals, J. F. Watson included a poem that imagined the elm as a silent witness to an irrecoverable history: “But thou, brod Elm! Canst thou tell us nought / Of forest Chieftains, and their vanish’d tribes?” Watson’s address—“Canst thou tell us nought”—animates trees as potentially articulate, although ultimately unspeaking.

By positioning trees as the nation’s conduits to the past, Anglo-Americans like Watson also elided the agency of the Lenape who originally inhabited the region. When Native Americans were referenced in the visualization and discourse regarding Treaty Elm relics, it was in terms of their status as a “vanish’d” race, emphasizing their decreasing significance as touchstones of American identity. By the late eighteenth century, both valuable forest trees and Native Americans receded from the Pennsylvania colony, as the Lenape moved north to the Susquehanna River and then west to Ohio. After 1750, the gradual withdrawal of French and British military from Indian affairs led to intensified land-grabbing and massacres by colonists. When Thomas Penn commissioned Benjamin West to paint his father’s treaty, he hoped the painting would reassert his hereditary claim to Pennsylvania and rewrite his own history of less-than-ethical dealings with the Lenape. While ostensibly depicting the Lenape in the act of peaceful negotiation, West’s painting decidedly placed Native Americans in the historical and environmental past. The placement of the Quakers and British merchants to the left clearly associates them with the mobility of the Delaware River and ocean behind them, the transformation of the landscape through development and construction, and the manufacture and dissemination of products of industry, represented by the crates and bolts of cloth. The Native Americans, however, are visually connected to the dark wilderness that recedes to the right of the scene, into which they will inevitably retreat, once the trade is complete. The central bolt of cloth, the focal object of discussion between the Lenape, Penn, and his agents, echoes the long scroll that Penn touches with his right hand; these unrolling items of cultural exchange may have inspired the carved scroll in Leconey’s Penn bust as a visual reference to the tools of the treaty. Later exhibitions of the bust further underscored its close association with Penn and his legacy; a stereographic view of “Penn’s Parlor” from the 1864 Great Central Fair (fig. 9) shows the pale visage of Leconey’s bust perched on top of a low chest with mirror in the bottom right corner, surrounded by other refined relics, paintings, and artifacts linked with the proprietor. By carving a limb of the Treaty Elm into a classically inspired portrait bust of Penn, Leconey and Eyre metaphorically reenacted the narrative of development and progress suggested by West’s painting and related engravings that celebrated Anglo-American consumption of wood and marginalized or ignored the regional presence of the Lenape.

The William Penn portrait bust therefore simultaneously embodies and elides a complicated history of cultural myth-making, wood consumption and regional deforestation, and Native American displacement. Material properties and environmental conditions, even if not explicitly acknowledged by the bust itself, contributed to the Treaty Elm’s prolonged life and refuge from the axe, its selection as a venerated tree, its eventual demise, and division and dissemination as relics. While the maker and owners of Penn’s portrait bust imagined such an object as a conduit through which to access and contemplate past events and environments, they ultimately suppressed the wilder origins of the relic during its transformation from tree to limb to painted carving. Instead, the Treaty Elm relic promotes a selective history of Philadelphia’s environmental and historical past, rendering it effectively mute regarding many of the nonhuman and human agents that were responsible for its creation.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Donna Rilling for alerting me to William Eyre’s reference to a Penn portrait bust in his diaries at the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College. Thank you also to Kristen Froehlich and Joshua Blay at the Philadelphia History Museum for facilitating access to the bust and other Treaty Elm relics and providing photographs. I am especially grateful to Jon Prown and the Chipstone Foundation for funding Susan Buck’s fascinating materials analysis of the bust’s paint layers. I would also like to thank Sarah Beetham, Sarah Carter, Ellery Foutch, and Catherine Holochwost for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. This research was conducted with the generous support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library.

Further Reading

William Eyre’s diaries are located in the Eyre Family Papers at the Friends Historical Society of Swarthmore College. Treaty Elm relics can be found in public collections at Arch Street Meeting House, the Germantown Historical Society, Haverford College Archives, Independence National Historical Park, Penn Treaty Museum, Philadelphia History Museum, the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Stenton, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, and Wyck, among other institutions.

For a sampling of newspapers that reported the Treaty Elm’s demise in 1810, see Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, March 8, 1810; Vermont Courier, March 28, 1810; Charleston Courier, March 10, 1810; New-York Gazette, March 12, 1810; Independent American, Washington, D.C., March 24, 1810. For early nineteenth-century accounts of Penn’s Treaty and the Treaty Elm, see Roberts Vaux, A Memoir on the Locality of the Great Treaty Between William Penn and the Indian Natives in 1682, Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 1, part 1 (Philadelphia, 1826); John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants (Philadelphia, 1830); Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, A Memoir on the History of the Celebrated Treaty Made by William Penn with the Indians Under the Elm Tree at Shackamaxon, in the Year 1682 (Philadelphia, 1836). For a more recent summary of debates regarding the time, place, and details of Penn’s Treaty, see Andrew Newman, On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (Lincoln, Neb., 2012), 110–20.

For other scholarship on nineteenth-century relics, see Yvette R Piggush, “Fancy History: John Fanning Watson’s Relic Box,” Common-place.org 10:1 (October 2009); Kenneth W. Milano, The History of Penn Treaty Park (Charleston, S.C., 2009); Whitney Anne Martinko, “Progress through Preservation: History on the American Landscape in an Age of Improvement, 1785-1860” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2012); Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2013). For American tree relics, specifically, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Liberty Tree: A Genealogy,” The New England Quarterly 25:4 (December 1952): 435–58; Robert Trent, “The Charter Oak Artifacts,” The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 49:3 (Summer 1984): 125–39; Gayle Brandow Samuels, Enduring Roots: Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape (New Brunswick, N.J, 1999).

For early nineteenth-century shipbuilding and ship carving in Philadelphia, see William Rush, American Sculptor (Philadelphia, 1982); Thomas R. Heinrich, Ships for the Seven Seas: Philadelphia Shipbuilding in the Age of Industrial Capitalism (Baltimore, 1997); Ralph Sessions, The Shipcarvers’ Art: Figureheads and Cigar-Store Indians in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J., 2005); Laura Turner Igoe, “‘Appropriate in a Sylvan State’: William Rush’s Self-Portrait and Environmental Transformation,” American Art 28:1 (Spring 2014): 78-103.

For an overview of wood usage and deforestation in early national Philadelphia and the United States, see Tench Coxe, A Statement of the Arts and Manufactures of the United States of America, for the Year 1810 (Philadelphia, 1814); François André Michaux, The North American Sylva, or A Description of the Forest Trees, of the United States, Canada and Nova Scotia, 3 vols. (Paris, 1817-1819); Donna J. Rilling, Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism: Builders in Philadelphia, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia, 2001); Harvey Green, Wood: Craft, Culture, History (New York, 2006); Thomas J. Campanella, Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (New Haven, 2003).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

Laura Turner Igoe is the Maher Curatorial Fellow of American Art at Harvard Art Museums. Her current book manuscript, Art and Ecology in the Early Republic, investigates the ways artists and architects negotiated changing environmental realities in the decades following the American Revolution.

Angry voices rising at the intersection of morality and politics. Boycotts of businesses, localities, and even whole states led by passionate supporters of one side of the issue. Talk of nullification as an acceptable tactic given the apocalyptic stakes involved. This could be the 1850s and the issues surrounding slavery. It is also the 2010s and issues surrounding hot-button topics like immigration and LGBT rights. As groups ranging in size from congregations to the nation grapple with how to preserve community as totalizing rhetoric flies around and within them, there are contrasts and parallels with the American sectional conflict that may prove instructive.

One moral of the story of attempted compromises in the past is that the path of the moderate is certainly not that of least resistance. In polarizing times, there is a price to be paid—at the polls and otherwise—for attempting to chart a middle path. The career of Edward Everett may prove an apt case study. A man of deep moral conviction who sought to chart a middle path on the tortuous issue of slavery across four decades at every level of American political life, Everett left his position as a Unitarian minister in the 1820s and served as a representative and senator in Congress, as Massachusetts’ governor, as U.S. minister to Great Britain, and as secretary of state. He pursued cultural and political means toward national reconciliation in this fractured era, notably by his nationwide speaking tour to hold up George Washington as a unifying figure while raising money to purchase Mount Vernon as a national shrine of Union. A confirmed Whig dedicated to the ethic of Improvement, he sought to balance his commitment to reform and to constitutional Union through a conservative antislavery position that at different moments emphasized “conservative” or “antislavery.” As such he rallied great masses, especially with his Mount Vernon campaign in the late 1850s, but he also exasperated hardcore antislavery and proslavery men and women. His career in formal politics thrived during times of relative sectional quietude, but his very health (alongside his political prospects) suffered greatly during times such as the sectional hurricane sweeping the nation while he was senator during the Kansas-Nebraska debates.

The crisis that produced and surrounded the Compromise of 1850 proved especially wrenching for Everett. Gathering as much information about debates in Washington as he could from his semi-private position as recently retired president of Harvard, Everett expressed unequivocal fear for the Union’s survival. But in March 1850, when his close friend and political ally Daniel Webster came out in favor of Southern-friendly compromise measures including a harsh new Fugitive Slave Act (FSA), Everett experienced wrenching indecision. When he received an incomplete early version of Webster’s highly anticipated Seventh of March speech explaining his position, Everett felt he could support its overall tenor. On March 11, he recorded in his diary that it was “an exposition of great ability, well calculated if moderate counsels prevail to pilot the country through the broken & stormy sea: – but _____.” The dissent with parts of the discourse that Everett could not bring himself to register even in his diary emerged slowly in the coming weeks. When he read a fuller version, he was mortified especially by its passage supporting the fugitive bill. To oppose Webster was no small step, so he initiated a confidential correspondence with friend and congressional leader Robert C. Winthrop to talk through how to deal with the matter. “I always support him at the expense of my own” judgment, Winthrop responded, “when my conscience will allow me.” But this was not such an occasion, in part because the FSA was so gratuitously pro-Southern. Everett responded that his own reaction had been precisely the same: “habitual deference” to Webster’s “authority” coming face to face with massive qualms about the FSA. The old law had been “against the feeling of the People,” and this new one was even worse. “I could not vote for it, were I a member of Congress; nor as a citizen would I perform the duty which it devolves ‘on all good citizens.’” By March 22, Everett decided he had to send Webster a modified retraction of his assent to the speech. He found he had “misgivings” about the new FSA, for two basic reasons. One was that it was manifestly inhumane. Another, stronger reason from a political point of view was because runaway slave renditions were “the incident of Slavery . . . which is most repugnant to the Public Sentiment of the Free States.” In this and a follow-up letter in April, Everett wished “it were possible to arrange some extradition bill that would be less likely to excite the North.” “Southern gentlemen, who wish the Union preserved, must make that allowance for Northern feeling, which they claim for Southern feeling.”

In anguished expressions such as this, Everett offered an insight that would benefit modern would-be moderates: for a compromise to take hold, it has to be a true compromise. Because the FSA did violence to the voluntary bonds of feeling that were essential to the Union, Everett severely doubted whether it would be the Union-saving measure its proponents advertised. “It is out of the question,” he informed a British friend, “to awaken any feeling in favor of such a law” in the Northern citizenry. It was thus the height of political madness for the South to demand the enforcement of a law that was sure “to make every man, woman & child in the Free States ready for Separation” of the Union. He agreed with Winthrop that the FSA “more resembles in some of its details” the draconian laws of ancient civilizations “than any American or European Code.”

Everett’s episode with Webster and the Compromise of 1850 was among the many in his life that made him an authority on the price of compromise. In future weeks and months, he would try to keep his dissent private because of the personal and political difficulties involved with differing from Webster. By the summer and fall of 1850, he would finally find this attempted silence on the matter unsustainable in light of attacks on Webster, and came out in favor of the Compromise of 1850. He would likewise support compromise measures in the secession winter of 1860-1861, just as he had in previous crises such as the one in the 1830s surrounding the tariff and South Carolina nullification. When Everett died in January 1865 after having delivered a plethora of speeches around the country (including most famously at the Gettysburg National Cemetery) in support of the Union war effort, some of his harshest antebellum critics thought carefully about Everett’s long-running attitude toward compromise.

The radical Republican man of letters Richard Henry Dana Jr. offered an especially nuanced assessment that took Everett’s prewar conservatism seriously while maintaining some distance from it. Dana still counted himself one “of the number of those who disapprove, nay, who condemn, the course of concession and compromise to which Mr. Everett inclined.” But that made him “feel the more bound to render to Mr. Everett, on this point, the justice that I think his due” by looking “at the subject . . . from his interior state.” Everett’s devotion to the Union, Dana posited, flowed from nothing less than “a solemn conviction that it was the one great experiment . . . for the widest and highest moral and intellectual development of human nature.” “Those who did not value the Union as he did,” he continued, “can hardly judge him in the price he would pay for its ransom,” or understand how difficult it was for the (conservatively) antislavery man Everett to pay it. His seriousness about what he gave up with compromise distinguished him from the Democrats, who had embraced sectional compromise “with alacrity” rather than reluctantly. After having “done what he could” to preserve the peace, when the Slave Power began the war, he threw himself into the Union cause at all hazards. On multiple occasions during his wartime career, Everett rather stunningly admitted that he had been in error to seek to conciliate Southern leaders who did not truly want to be conciliated. But that admission seems only to have increased his authority as a prowar speaker for most hearers.

Those who find anything ennobling in this sort of career may well take important cues from Everett’s life. He experienced secession and the Civil War as a failure of his and his kind’s antebellum nation-building projects, but that did not keep him from being a powerful contributor to the Civil War’s own nation-saving project. That was in large part because he had come to accept that the way of the moderate would not be short or easy. Everett as much as any in his generation illustrates how creative and persistent sectional moderates could be in the face of setbacks.        

One contrast between the antebellum debates and our own is that religious leaders today are among the most prominent voices calling for moderation. The enormously influential Pope Francis, for instance, has repeatedly sought to transcend the boundaries of the political right and left. As one columnist has written, “he seems to have no intention of collaborating with those in the U.S. or anywhere who are seeking, as he once put it, to ‘reduce culture to a battle field.’” He has taken this stance as a fiercely principled position. “If one has the answers to all the questions,” Francis has lectured, “that’s the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself.” Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka the Mormons) have sought to forge a middle way on LGBT issues in the context of Utah state politics. They were among the chief sponsors of the Utah Compromise, state legislation passed in 2015 that seeks to balance religious freedom with LGBT rights. Its main provisions include banning employers and property owners from discriminating on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, but exempting religious organizations and those affiliated with them from this proscription. “Although none of the parties achieved all they wanted,” trumpeted Mormon Apostle M. Russell Ballard, the Utah Compromise “lessened the divisiveness within our communities without compromising on key principles. We can love one another without compromising personal divine ideals,” he insisted. In October 2015, another Mormon apostle, Dallin H. Oaks, publicly criticized Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis for her refusal to issue same-sex marriage licenses. He urged both sides in this debate to seek balance rather than “total victory,” and declared “extreme voices” such as Davis’ unhelpful.

Time will tell whether people on either side of this issue will accept such a position as true compromise in the long term. Donald Trump’s February feud with Pope Francis over a wall on the Mexican border found the former calling the latter “a very political person” despite Francis’ studied nonpartisanship. In Utah, the broad principles of the Utah Compromise of the 2015 session were challenged in the 2016 session by bills testing its limits and specific applications. A Mormon Republican lawmaker’s bill protecting LGBT people from hate crimes found no traction. Neither did a bill proposed by an openly gay Democratic legislator that would have banned businesses from discriminating against LGBT customers for religious reasons. It also remains to be seen whether religious leaders like these will be able to exercise effective public leadership in the rapidly secularizing Western world. Indeed, it may well be that Mormon and Catholic leaders are taking such moderate stances from a position of defensiveness as public policy goes against them.

There are a few potential parallels between modern and antebellum religious leaders. Many modern religious leaders seemingly hope to set aside thorny issues such as LGBT rights and immigration so they can refocus on their core religious missions. That was also the motive for Georgia Methodist leaders’ attempts to preserve a neutrality on slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. And there were Northern religious leaders who taught sectional compromise as a moral duty, chief among them noted biblical scholar Moses Stuart. The very title of his pamphlet in favor of the Compromise of 1850 appealed to both “Conscience and the Constitution.” All the antislavery men staking proprietary claims to conscience, Stuart charged, in reality violated the “peaceful spirit” of the gospel, which guided “those who love their country, love peace, love their neighbor.”

But Stuart and other religious leaders who made a principled, biblical case for compromise have been treated in historical scholarship as they seem to have been treated then: as exceptions to the overall pattern of sectionalizing religion. Historians of antebellum religion and politics do not associate religious leaders or even overtly religious ideas with compromises over slavery. The most influential histories of religion and the Civil War era are almost entirely tales of religious groups and leaders splitting along sectional lines—indeed of them exacerbating the sectional divide. The treatment of the idea of compromise in these works ranges from cursory to non-existent.

The advocates of moderation amid the polarizing politics of slavery in antebellum America therefore received very little aid and comfort from their religious leaders. Nevertheless, many of them such as Everett soldiered on as seeming oxymorons: deeply committed, even passionate, moderates. Those who wish to shore up what seems in the presidential election of 2016 to be the eroding ground of political moderation may well take a page from these predecessors’ book. And they may find their hope nurtured by having some outspoken religious leaders at their side.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to Walt Woodward for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay; and to Randall Miller and Spencer Fluhman for helpful conversations and references as I was preparing to write it.

Further Reading

Richard Carwardine, “Methodists, Politics, and the Coming of the American Civil War,” in Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow, eds., Religion and American Politics From the Colonial Period to the Present (New York, 2007).

Matthew Mason, Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).

Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York, 1998).

Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006).

John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay, eds., Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery (Athens, Ga., 1998).

George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010)

Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York, 2006).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Matthew Mason is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is the author, most recently, of Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett (2016).

In 1825, David Brown, a young Cherokee leader, wrote to the editor of the Family Visitor in Richmond, Virginia. Brown was keen to demonstrate just how far his people had advanced in adopting “civilization,” and his letter, which was subsequently reprinted throughout the eastern United States, included a wealth of information about the Cherokee Nation. Among other things, Brown noted that there were 1,277 “African slaves” owned by Cherokee Indians, a figure he gleaned from a recent census. Concerned that some of his readers might be displeased to learn of Indian slaveholding, he offered the following explanation: “You perceive that there are some African slaves among us. They have been, from time to time, brought in and sold by white men; they are, however, generally well treated, and they much prefer living in the nation to a residence in the United States.” Even better: Brown assured antislavery readers that Cherokee slaveholders would soon “cooperate with the humane efforts of those who are liberating and sending this race to the land of their fathers.”

Abolitionists joined the Indian cause because they saw in removal the influence of the slaveholding South.

Three years after Brown’s letter was published, the Cherokee Nation faced a grave threat to its sovereignty and its landholdings. The election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 famously signaled a new era in U.S. Indian policy, one that had dire consequences for thousands of Native Americans. Once in office, Jackson urged Congress to pass federal legislation authorizing him to sign removal treaties with all Indians living east of the Mississippi River, thus freeing up millions of acres of land for white settlement. The states most eager for such legislation were in the South, not coincidentally a region that had offered Jackson significant support precisely because he promised to make Indian removal a top priority of his administration. Georgia was particularly eager for the federal government to make good on its 1802 promise to extinguish Indian land titles within its borders, which included a significant portion of the Cherokee Nation. But Jackson’s plan did not go unchallenged. In 1829, as both houses of Congress prepared their own version of what would become the Indian Removal Bill, reformers throughout the northern United States joined with Native Americans to fight its passage.

The antiremoval movement counted many prominent politicians and reformers among its ranks as well as thousands of ordinary men and women. A deeply sectional issue, Indian removal found little support in the northern United States, the region of the country where hostility to President Jackson and his policies was strongest. Antiremovalists were united in their conviction that removal was immoral, and they often lamented the international disapproval such a shameful act of oppression would bring upon the United States. They also insisted that Indians were sovereign and had a legal right to their homelands, a right repeatedly established through numerous treaties. Rather than support removal as Jackson did, the federal government was bound to defend Indians against the greed of those eager to dispossess them of their land. Most importantly, antiremovalists believed that Anglo-Americans had a moral duty to bring Christian civilization to Native Americans, a project that would be greatly hampered by removal. 

The fight over the Indian Removal Bill immediately preceded the radicalization of the antislavery movement in the early 1830s. This was no accident, as several historians have noted. Many reformers who supported the American Colonization Society and other moderate antislavery activities in the 1820s had been radicalized by their involvement with the antiremoval cause. Antiremoval activism convinced many antislavery reformers to reconsider the colonization of free blacks to Africa. They found themselves increasingly unable to justify their support for one policy (colonization) that bore such strong similarities to another (removal) which they strongly opposed. By 1831, leading abolitionists, including, most famously, William Lloyd Garrison, were denouncing the gradualism of colonization in favor of immediate emancipation, a crucial shift brought about, at least in part, by the debate over Indian removal in the late 1820s and early 1830s.

Abolitionists joined the Indian cause because they saw in removal the influence of the slaveholding South. “One would think that the guilt of African slavery was enough for the nation to bear,” one writer lamented in 1829, “without the additional crime of injustice to the aborigines.” Although the Indian Removal Bill applied to nearly all Indians living east of the Mississippi River, southern slaveowners were clearly the most eager to obtain fertile Indian land, and abolitionists feared that removal would hasten the westward expansion of slavery at the expense of national honor.

But abolitionist support was also driven by concern for the Indians themselves, particularly the Cherokees, whose highly publicized progress in civilization underscored for many Americans the cruelty of compulsory removal. Context was crucial for civilization, and antiremovalists lamented that removal to the West would have a deleterious effect on the Cherokees’ continued progress. “It appears to us that no situation could be more deplorable for those Indians who have made progress in civilization,” abolitionist editor David Lee Child wrote in his Massachusetts Journal in 1829, “than to be planted where they will have Indians untamed and untamable on the one side, and [unsavory white settlers] on the other.” The implementation of a federal removal policy, he suggested, would irreparably harm the process of civilizing the Indians by taking them beyond the reach of beneficial white influence and assistance. The environment of the West was an unsuitable place for civilization to flourish.

Making Indians “civilized” had been a central component of federal U.S. Indian policy since George Washington’s administration, but it was not formalized until the passage of the 1819 Civilization Act, which provided funds for missionary organizations eager to participate in the conversion of “savages.” “Civilization,” it was commonly understood, was the only way for Indians to avoid extinction—the inevitable fate of uncivilized peoples who came into contact with more advanced cultures. What exactly “civilization” entailed was a matter of debate in the nineteenth century, but most people agreed that to be civilized, Indians would have to be guided by Christian morality, live as settled farmers, and abide by a written system of laws and government. Most importantly, Indians needed to acknowledge and embrace private property, including individual landownership. In 1789, no less a figure than Henry Knox, Washington’s Secretary of War and the architect of early national Indian policy, argued that the key to civilizing Indians was “to introduce among [them] a love for exclusive property.”

By the late eighteenth century many southern Indians, including some Cherokees, had acquired a particular kind of private property: black slaves. Slaveholding among Indians, however, predated the arrival of Europeans, as Native Americans of the precontact Southeast had captured and enslaved one another for centuries. Southeastern Indians were also deeply involved in the lucrative colonial Indian slave trade, which gradually transitioned into primarily an African slave trade after the Yamasee War of 1715-18. As Theda Perdue argued in her classic study of the subject, Cherokees involved in this trade were initially only interested in selling slaves captured in warfare, but the capitalist model of individual wealth accumulation practiced by their European, and later Anglo-American, trading partners encouraged Indians to see these slaves as desirable property in their own right. Most Cherokees did not own slaves, nor did they radically alter their traditional ways of living to conform to the standards of American civilization, but those who did were part of a growing class of wealthy and politically powerful elites who lived on large plantations like their white neighbors. And it was this elite class with whom antiremovalists, including abolitionists, had the most contact in print and in person. 

On the face of it, Indian slaveholding was a potential liability during the fight against removal, for many of the Cherokees’ most loyal and vocal supporters were ardent opponents of slavery. In fact, one of the papers that reprinted Brown’s letter was the Genius of Universal Emancipation, edited by the antislavery Quaker Benjamin Lundy. From the late 1820s through the late 1830s, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic fought vigorously against Indian removal, attending meetings, signing their names to petitions, and writing editorials condemning the actions of those eager to violate the rights of Indians in the name of expansion and slavery. Why, then, did abolitionists support Indians who they knew owned slaves?

Throughout the debate over Indian removal in the 1830s, abolitionist support of the Cherokee cause was contingent upon a romanticized picture of Indian slaveholding. As part of their support for the Cherokee Nation’s fight against removal, abolitionists found themselves in the unusual position of acting as apologists for Indian slaveholding, mounting a defense that drew heavily from the testimony of Cherokee leaders. Abolitionists accepted such testimony as fact, even when they had good reason to doubt its truthfulness, because it reinforced their own ideas about Indians, slavery and civilization.

Such a rendering of Cherokee slaveholding was exemplified in the letter that Cherokee leader David Brown wrote to the Family Visitor. The basic outlines of Brown’s letter were already familiar to reformers, many of whom had read similar accounts in official missionary reports and travel narratives. First, he was careful to emphasize that white Americans bore the responsibility for introducing slavery to the Indians, whose lack of civilization had left them vulnerable to the adoption of such vices. Second, he asserted that Indians were more benevolent masters than their white counterparts and, consequently, that slaves preferred to live in the Cherokee Nation. Finally, he insisted that Indians were likely to emancipate their slaves in the near future (which, as he suggested, would be done through African colonization, still a radical enough antislavery position in 1825). Framing Cherokee slaveholding in this way was a successful rhetorical strategy used by Cherokee leaders during the removal crisis to reassure their antislavery supporters that although some Indians owned slaves, black chattel slavery was qualitatively different among Indians than among whites.

Indian leaders did not always feel compelled to explain either their acceptance of slavery or their ownership of slaves. Before the rise of the radical antislavery movement in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Cherokee slaveowners often proudly referred to their use of slave labor, which they deftly linked to their simultaneous progress in civilization. In 1826, John Ridge, a Cherokee political leader and wealthy slaveowner, responded to a query from Albert Gallatin about the progress of civilization in the Cherokee Nation. Using recent census data that indicated, among other things, a large and growing population of black slaves, Ridge stated proudly that Cherokee slaveowners lived as well as their white counterparts. Their houses and furniture were well made, he declared, and “[s]ervants attend at their meals, & the same rules and etiquette is observed at table as in the first families of the whites.” Though he did not explicitly defend slavery in his letter to Gallatin, John Ridge did not feel compelled to justify the Cherokees’ acceptance of black chattel slavery as David Brown had the year before. In Ridge’s estimation, Indian slaveholding did not need to be explained away, for it provided clear and indisputable evidence of the increasing prosperity and progress among the elite class of which he and his family were a part. It was also a testament to the Cherokees’ fundamental equality with whites. Though at present most Cherokees remained in a lower stage of civilization, antiremovalists argued that all Cherokees, and Indians more generally, possessed the inherent capacity for progress and eventually full civilization. The few Cherokees who had rapidly advanced in civilization were not anomalies, as pro-removalists often contended, but rather the vanguard who could serve as models for uncivilized Indians, Cherokee or not.

The Cherokees’ success in garnering the majority of the antiremoval movement’s attention, in casting themselves as the Indians who faced unjust removal, can be attributed in large part to the creation of their own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in 1828. Printed in both English and Cherokee under the editorship of John Ridge’s cousin, Elias Boudinot, the Phoenix uniquely enabled the Cherokees to communicate with their supporters on both sides of the Atlantic. Boudinot established exchanges with numerous other editors including many abolitionists because he was well aware that removal’s defeat depended upon the support of reformers who lived far beyond the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation. Boudinot used the Cherokee Phoenix to keep an international network of supporters apprised of the progress of civilization underway in the Cherokee Nation, for it was evidence of progress that revealed the true injustice of removal. Boudinot regularly published articles and editorials that illustrated the necessary improvement, occasionally including material that contained evidence of Indian slaveholding. For example, in 1828 Boudinot reprinted laws that had been passed by the Cherokee National Council four years earlier. Two of the laws pertained to slavery: one outlawed “intermarriages between Negro slaves and Indians, or whites,” while the other barred slaves from owning livestock. Because laws and formal government structures were considered fundamental to civilized society, they served as fine evidence for the Cherokees’ civilizing project even when those laws pertained to slavery. Given the growing opposition to slavery in the North and in England, Boudinot refrained from writing or printing articles that explicitly justified slavery. Still, careful readers of the Phoenix could clearly see that some Cherokees owned slaves, and that the laws of the Cherokee Nation protected the property rights of Indian slaveholders while restricting the rights of black slaves.

Surprisingly, evidence of Indian slaveholding did not diminish abolitionist support for the antiremoval movement. In fact, abolitionist involvement only increased as time passed. Even after passage of the Indian Removal Act in May 1830, abolitionists continued to support Indian rights, often folding the plight of Indians into their condemnation of black chattel slavery. When William Lloyd Garrison launched his radical antislavery newspaper The Liberator in 1831, for instance, he incorporated these interconnected issues into its second masthead, which debuted on April 23, 1831. The image included two pieces of paper printed with the words “INDIAN TREATIES” beneath the feet of bidders at a slave auction. In his introduction to the new masthead Garrison called attention to this part of the scene: “Down in the dust, our Indian Treaties are seen.”

It was not that abolitionists approved of Indian slaveholding so much as they saw it as an undesirable, but inevitable, part of progress. They understood that civilization was itself fraught with danger. If improperly tutored in its ways, Indians might unknowingly adopt the white man’s vices as well as his virtues. Abolitionists believed, as did most Americans, in the myth of the “noble savage,” whose innocence of civilization was the source of his virtuous purity, but also his greatest weakness, for it left him vulnerable to the introduction of unwanted vices, including, in this instance, slavery. In arguing that slavery was the result of white influence, David Brown had implicitly appealed to this myth in his letter. Moral responsibility could only be expected of fully civilized people, not partially civilized Indians. Antislavery reformers latched on to this theory, for it not only explained how Indians became slaveholders, but offered hope that with time and under the guidance of missionaries and reformers, they might progress enough to abandon civilization’s vices. Partially civilized Indians might be slaveowners; fully civilized Indians would become emancipators.

The antiremoval movement failed to stop the Indian Removal Act. Nonetheless, Principal Chief John Ross and the majority of the Cherokee Nation remained firm against removal, despite increasing pressure from Georgia to sign a removal treaty. In an attempt to harass the Cherokees into signing, Georgia passed laws in the 1820s and 1830s to extend its jurisdiction over the Cherokee Nation, a clear refutation of the Cherokees’ assertion of sovereignty. To prove the unjustness of Georgia’s actions, the Cherokees took their case before the U.S. Supreme Court twice, first in 1831 and again in 1832.

The second case, Worcester v. Georgia, was a crucial test of the Cherokees’ claim to sovereignty. It began in 1830 when Georgia passed a law requiring all whites living in the Cherokee Nation to take an oath of allegiance to the state. Missionaries who had been living and working among the Cherokees for many years and who supported the Indians in their rights, refused to take the oath (which had largely been implemented to reduce what Georgians perceived as undue missionary influence). In response, Georgia arrested eleven missionaries in the summer of 1831, convicted them of violating state law and sentenced them to four years of hard labor in the state penitentiary. All but two were eventually released. Samuel Worcester, a close personal friend of Elias Boudinot, and Elizur Butler, a doctor, willingly agreed to let themselves be martyrs for the antiremoval cause so that the Cherokee Nation could get a second hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. Cherokee leaders believed that a victory there would be sufficient to prove their right to retain their homelands.

As Worcester v. Georgia was being heard, Elias Boudinot and John Ridge undertook a speaking tour of the northeastern United States. Their purpose was two-fold. The Cherokee Nation was having financial difficulties and to keep the Cherokee Phoenix in print the men needed to solicit donations from supporters. They also wanted to ensure that reformers who had signed petitions and attended meetings in opposition to the Indian Removal Bill were still committed to antiremoval. Cherokee leaders like Ridge and Boudinot believed that favorable public opinion was crucial to the success of their continued resistance, which they hoped to garner with a series of public lectures in cities that had had significant antiremoval activity in the prior campaign.

In early January of 1832 Boudinot and Ridge left Washington for Philadelphia where they met with a number of prominent supporters. From there the two cousins travelled north to New York City, then on to New Haven, Hartford and finally Boston, in each city lecturing before large and enthusiastic crowds of supporters. They arrived in Boston in late February where they gave two public lectures, the first on February 29 at the Federal Street Church, and the second at the Old South Church on March 3. As with the other gatherings, these meetings were attended by many well-known ministers, reformers, politicians and intellectuals including Lyman Beecher, Leverett Saltonstall and Ralph Waldo Emerson. William Lloyd Garrison was in attendance at the second meeting, and he wrote in the next issue of the Liberator that John Ridge “rivetted the attention of the audience while he delineated the rise, progress and present condition of his nation.” Garrison found much to praise in Ridge’s speech, seeing it and Ridge himself as clear evidence of the Cherokees’ particular aptitude for and adoption of civilization. “He speaks the English language with singular precision, using no superfluous words and rarely violating the rules of grammar.” Garrison was so impressed by Ridge’s speech that he reprinted it in its entirety in a subsequent issue of the Liberator. Those in attendance at this meeting were also treated to the heartening news that the Supreme Court had, that very day, ruled in favor of Cherokee sovereignty and ordered that the missionaries be released.

Aware of the increasing radicalism of antislavery reformers, who continued to constitute a significant portion of the antiremoval movement, Ridge and Boudinot carefully avoided mentioning the ownership of slaves and plantations by Cherokees, choosing instead to highlight other accomplishments such as the invention of a Cherokee syllabary and the adoption of a written constitution. Despite their caution, an ill-timed advertisement in the Cherokee Phoenix turned slavery into a point of contention, threatening the carefully cultivated alliance of antislavery and antiremoval interests so crucial to the Cherokee cause. 

In January of 1832, a white slaveowner named Thomas Hollingsworth placed an advertisement offering a twenty-dollar reward for “a Negroe Woman by the name of Lucy.” In addition to offering a physical description, Hollingsworth noted that Lucy, “having been raised in the Cherokee Nation—speaks the Cherokee Language.” Lucy had ties to the Cherokee Nation as a consequence of once having lived there and Hollingsworth clearly believed she might have returned to be closer to friends or relatives. A second runaway slave advertisement was placed on February 4, 1832, by William Orr, who offered a twenty-dollar reward for a young man named Jack. It was not the first time evidence of Cherokee involvement in slavery had surfaced in print, nor were these the first or only advertisements for runaway slaves that were printed in the Cherokee Phoenix. What was different in 1832 was the unprecedented response the advertisements provoked in several eastern newspapers, which quickly ran articles noting their publication.

Several of the newspapers that responded to the slave advertisements used the opportunity to admonish abolitionists for their hypocritical support of slaveholding Indians. Two abolitionist editors also responded, perhaps in part to explain their continued support of the Cherokees in light of such glaring evidence of Indian involvement in slavery. On March 28, 1832, an article entitled “Cherokee Phoenix” appeared in the Christian Soldier, a Boston antislavery newspaper edited by Oliver Johnson. Johnson expressed his particular dismay with the advertisement for Jack, which he considered a betrayal of the antislavery movement’s unwavering support for the Indians’ antiremoval cause.

We sympathize deeply with the persecuted Cherokees, and admire the firmness with which they resist the attempts of their cruel oppressors to deprive them of their dearest rights. But, in the midst of their own sufferings, can they be indifferent to the wrongs of their brethren, of a still darker hue, who are groaning under the yoke of servile bondage? And will they, while making their appeal to us…and while we are extending to them the arm of protection, assist in tightening the chains of the negro slave?

Johnson’s article highlights the inevitable tension that arose from supporting slaveholding Indians. Like other abolitionists, Johnson was sympathetic to the Cherokees’ plight, but he was uncomfortable when confronted with direct evidence of their willingness to participate in the perpetuation of chattel slavery.

Johnson chastised the Cherokees for their participation in the capture and return of fugitive slaves in terms that reflected the paternalism characteristic of white-Indian relations since the colonial era. In official correspondence federal officials frequently rendered Indians as “children” in need of protection and parental guidance from their “Great White Father,” without which they would fall prey to the influence of unsavory whites. Johnson adopts this tone, directly questioning the Indians’ capacity to understand the moral implications of their actions. Here, the civilized Johnson gently scolds the partially civilized Boudinot for his choice to publish the advertisement in question: “Does not our Cherokee brother know, that by publishing this advertisement he becomes a participator in the guilt of man-stealing? And is he willing to countenance the wickedness of those who make merchandize of the bodies and souls of their fellow-men?”

Johnson’s commentary also reveals his rather naïve view that the Cherokees, though participants in the Southern labor system of chattel slavery, had not also adopted its racial attitudes. Johnson suggested that as nonwhite peoples being oppressed by southern whites, Indians should naturally feel empathy for enslaved Africans, “their brethren of a still darker hue.” But his suggestion would have greatly offended Cherokee leaders whose claim to civilization increasingly rested in part upon not being black. In 1829, Boudinot himself had denounced Georgia’s disregard for Cherokee rights by stating that “Indians…are red, not black, and therefore cannot be treated with gross injustice like negro slaves.” Rather than see their fates intertwined with African descended women and men, Cherokee leaders used an emerging racial hierarchy to distinguish themselves from blacks, whether free or enslaved.

Johnson did not directly condemn the ownership of slaves by Cherokee Indians; rather, he criticized their willingness to support the institution of slavery through the publication of runaway slave announcements in the Cherokee Phoenix. From Johnson’s perspective, the Cherokees had unwittingly been compelled to assist white slaveholders in their determination to capture fugitive slaves; that Indians themselves owned slaves was a fact that did not warrant his attention in this particular instance.

Although the Supreme Court’s decision in Worcester v. Georgia greatly encouraged the Cherokees and antiremovalists, their initial joy quickly turned to disappointment. Within a very short time it became clear that the state of Georgia would not heed the court’s ruling, nor did President Jackson have any intention of compelling it to do so. Unwilling to concede defeat, a Cherokee delegation that had been in Washington since late December continued to meet with supporters there. 

Following the lectures in Boston, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot parted ways. Ridge gave two more lectures in Worcester and South Lee, Massachusetts, and then returned to Washington to assist the Cherokee delegation in their increasingly futile efforts to have the Supreme Court’s ruling upheld. On April 3 he wrote from Washington to Chief John Ross to report on their successful tour, which had raised nearly $2700. Boudinot, meanwhile, traveled alone to Salem for a final lecture, and then returned to Boston for an important meeting: On March 28, he went to speak to fellow editor William Lloyd Garrison. But Boudinot had not come to talk about Indian removal or the Supreme Court case, as might be expected given the present circumstances. Boudinot and Garrison had another topic to discuss: the recently published runaway slave advertisement for Jack. Slavery, not removal, was the reason for their meeting.

Garrison included his account of the meeting with Elias Boudinot in the next issue of the Liberator, printing it beneath the Christian Soldier article. Ordering the two articles in this way provided concerned antislavery readers with an explanation for Cherokee slaveholding, straight from a representative of the Cherokee Nation. “In our interview with Mr. Boudinot, the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix,” Garrison wrote, “he stated that he was not the proprietor of the paper, and consequently not responsible for the insertion of the advertisement referred to above.” Furthermore, Boudinot “readily acknowledged the criminality of advertising human beings in this manner” which led Garrison to confidently declare that Boudinot would “immediately exert his influence” to end the practice of doing so in the Phoenix.

“We were not aware,” Garrison continued, “until [Boudinot] informed us of the fact, that although some of the Cherokees are owners of slaves, slavery is unknown to the constitution and laws of the Cherokee nation, and is sanctioned only by custom.” Finally, and most crucially, Boudinot asserted his own antipathy toward slavery, claiming that slavery was not universally accepted by the Cherokees and that it would soon be abolished among them. As Garrison happily reported to his readers, “[Boudinot] deprecated its existence, and joined with us in hoping that there might soon be moral power enough to overthrow it.”

What is immediately evident from Garrison’s account of their conversation is that Boudinot took the opportunity to construct a fable about slavery in the Cherokee Nation. Nearly everything he told Garrison at this meeting was untrue, or at best, a careful distortion of the truth. In an attempt to dodge responsibility for printing the advertisement in question, Boudinot asserted that he was not the proprietor of the Cherokee Phoenix. It was true that Boudinot did not oversee its publication at the time, but only because he was not in New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, where he edited and printed the paper. While in the East on the speaking tour, Boudinot had left the responsibility of editing the Cherokee Phoenix to his brother, Stand Watie, who was in charge when the advertisement in question was printed. But this one exception did not negate the many other times Boudinot had published similar material in the Cherokee Phoenix. He had presided over the insertion of such advertisements since 1828; not until Oliver Johnson and William Lloyd Garrison raised the issue did Boudinot feel compelled to explain their existence. Furthermore, while it was true that a minority of the Cherokees were slaveowners, those Indians who did own slaves were generally the most wealthy and politically influential citizens of the Nation, including Boudinot himself: Though Garrison did not know it, Boudinot and his family had been, until very recently, renting the services of a slave named July from his owner, a wealthy Cherokee slaveholder named George Lowrey.

Most outrageous of all was Boudinot’s claim that the legal system of the Cherokee Nation did not protect slavery. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In 1827 the Cherokee Nation had written its own constitution, which included numerous provisions protecting the interests of slaveholders, including barring slaves and their descendants, free or enslaved, from holding office or voting. Many other laws including those against interracial marriage attest to the legal and political institutionalization of black chattel slavery in the Cherokee Nation. In 1828 Elias Boudinot had printed the Cherokee Constitution in its entirety in three concurrent issues of the Cherokee Phoenix, so faithful readers such as William Lloyd Garrison were well aware that protection of private property, including slaves, was guaranteed by the Cherokees’ legal system.

Finally, Boudinot had to explain how the Cherokees had become slaveowners. Unlike David Brown, who had argued that the institution of slavery had been imposed upon the Cherokees by white outsiders, Boudinot took a different approach, putting the blame for their acceptance of black chattel slavery squarely on Indian “custom.” In a rare acknowledgement of an historical precedent for Indian slaveholding, Boudinot’s assertion that slavery was “sanctioned only by custom” suggested that it was a remnant from the Cherokees’ “savage” past. He continued by stating that the recently passed laws and constitution of the Cherokee Nation—which were part of the Cherokees’ “civilized” future—did not contain any provisions respecting slavery. By referring to slavery as a “custom,” Boudinot implied that it would eventually disappear like other “savage” practices that the Cherokees had successfully expunged through the process of civilization now underway. In many issues of the Cherokee Phoenix Boudinot had led his readers to draw a similar conclusion about the disappearance of older, “savage” Cherokee customs and their replacement with “civilized” practices.

Garrison was well aware that he was being misled. He had been an avid reader of the Phoenix for many years, often reprinting articles from it in the Liberator. He had had ample opportunity to read the laws of the Cherokee Nation that pertained to slavery as well as its proslavery constitution, all of which appeared in thePhoenix under Boudinot’s editorship, to say nothing of the many advertisements for runaway slaves and slave auctions that had been printed in the paper since its founding. He could not have missed the periodic references to Cherokee slaveholding.

American history is full of unlikely alliances, but this conversation reveals one of the most surprising of the antebellum era. William Garrison, a radical abolitionist not known for his willingness to compromise on the issue of slavery, was making common cause with Elias Boudinot, a representative of a slaveholding Indian nation. Furthermore, Garrison willingly played along as Boudinot spun an elaborate story about slavery among the Cherokees that both men knew to be almost entirely untrue. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Garrison nonetheless accepted Boudinot’s explanation without question, and lent it credibility by printing it in his paper. Subsequent issues of the Liberator fail to mention the controversial slave advertisement, and the abolitionist editor continued to express his support for the Cherokees throughout the 1830s, printing antiremoval editorials, memorials and petitions in his paper long after many antiremovalists and even Boudinot himself had given up the cause.

Boudinot’s motivation in creating such a fiction is not hard to surmise. Although his impression of the meeting in Boston is unknown, Boudinot’s responses to Garrison’s queries clearly show that he was all too aware of the Cherokees’ perilous situation in the spring of 1832. The recent resolution of Worcester v. Georgia had exhausted the tribe’s legal options and resulted in a weakening of support for the antiremoval movement. In light of Georgia’s refusal to follow the Supreme Court’s ruling, many antiremovalists began to see the futility of further resistance and they encouraged the Cherokees to negotiate the best possible removal treaty. Not long after they returned home in May, Elias Boudinot and John Ridge, deeply dismayed by the disintegration of the antiremoval movement, also concluded that removal, though undesirable, was inevitable. By the end of 1832 even the two imprisoned missionaries had conceded defeat, and they ended their legal case by asking for and receiving a pardon from the governor of Georgia. But in March of 1832, at his meeting with Garrison, Boudinot still believed that preventing removal was possible so long as the Cherokees had the continued support of northern reformers, particularly influential leaders of the radical antislavery movement. Fearful that the Cherokee Nation would lose a crucial remaining source of support, Boudinot rendered Indian slaveholding in a way that soothed abolitionist anxieties raised by the slave advertisement. 

Abolitionists accepted that Cherokee slaveholding—at least in the short term—was compatible with and even evidence of civilization. The Cherokees’ adoption of black chattel slavery, and the larger cultural, legal and political changes it wrought, proved their inherent capacity for progress. Because abolitionists did not believe slavery to be the basis of a civilized society, Indian slaveholding had to be merely an intermediary stage, not the end result of the process of civilization. But abolitionists needed reassurance that Indian slaveholding was different from white slaveholding, an assurance that Cherokee leaders happily provided. In the face of mounting evidence that slavery was growing in the Cherokee Nation and that the Cherokee elite was committed to its preservation, abolitionists like Garrison were willing co-conspirators in this charade. But their continued participation in this pretense was contingent upon what Elias Boudinot and other prominent Cherokees told them: that Indian slaveholding was marginal, different from that practiced by whites, the result of forces beyond their control, and, most crucially, temporary.

In their fight to end slavery, radical abolitionists found themselves in the strange position of not only allying with slaveholders, but even on occasion defending slaveholding, a feat made possible by the skillful rhetorical work of Cherokee leaders determined to retain their homelands and maintain their national sovereignty.

Further reading:

For more about the history of slavery among the Cherokees, a good place to begin is Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville, 1979), which traces the transition from indigenous forms of bondage to race-based chattel slavery. Another early study of black chattel slavery among the Cherokees is Rudi Halliburton, Red Over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians (Westport, Conn., 1977). Recent interest in the history of Indian slaveholding and the experiences of Indian-owned slaves has resulted in a proliferation of many excellent books. For those about the Cherokees in particular, see Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of An Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley, 2005), Fay Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2008), and Celia Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill, 2008). The most recent addition to this growing field is Christina Snyder’s fascinating study of the varieties of captivity and slavery among the Indians of the Southeast, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, 2010).

The first historian to explicitly link the rise of radical antislavery to the Indian removal debate is Mary Hershberger, in her excellent article, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” Journal of American History 86 (June 1999), 15-40. For another interesting perspective on the intersection of antislavery and antiremoval concern in the antebellum U.S., see Christine Bolt, “The Anti-Slavery Origins of Concern for the American Indians,” in Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Antsey, ed. Christine Bolt, and Seymour Drescher (Folkestone, UK, 1980), 233-253. For the particular role that women played in the intersection of these two movements, see Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, 2005). Finally, for how abolitionists thought about the interconnectedness of slavery and Indian removal, see Linda Kerber, “The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian,” Journal of American History, 62 (Sept. 1975), 271-295.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.4 (July, 2010).

Natalie Joy is completing a book manuscript that traces the fascinating and often perplexing relationship between antislavery and antiremoval in the antebellum United States. For the 2010-2011 academic year she will be the Postdoctoral Fellow in the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1791, Ottawa war leader Egushawa remarked that he would rather fight an American army than be prisoner to their Indian treaties, which he derided as “pen and ink witch-craft, which they can make speak things we never intended, or had any idea of, even an hundred years hence.” Egushawa’s prophetic words reflect the basic premise of Colin G. Calloway’s new book, in which he argues that treaties were the “primary instruments” by which indigenous peoples were deprived of their lands, autonomy, and sovereignty, more so than by simple violence and warfare (2). In fact, Calloway crafts an entire narrative of Native American history from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries predicated on the negotiation of Indian treaties between indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans. Through this narrative, he asserts treaties provide “a barometer of Indian-white relations in North America,” which demonstrates the “shifts in power, changing attitudes about the place of Indian peoples in American society, and contested ideas about indigenous rights in a modern constitutional democracy” (3).

While skeptics may cringe at the thought of orienting Native American history around treaty-making due to its potential connotations of the archaic “Indian-white relations,” Calloway presents several compelling reasons for why treaties offer a unique analytical lens into the interactions between Native peoples and Euro-Americans. First and foremost, Calloway depicts Indian treaties as “foundational documents in the nation’s history, alongside sacred texts like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” which “are open to interpretation by subsequent generations” (xi). As Calloway illustrates, indigenous peoples today still grapple with the repercussions of treaties negotiated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are continually reinterpreted and contested by tribal, state, and federal courts. Yet as Calloway proves, Native peoples adapted to, subverted, and even co-opted these treaties and their judicial interpretations to assert indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and economic independence today despite federal lethargy and hostility from non-Native communities. Simply put, Calloway supplies historical context for how treaties evolved from informal negotiations in the colonial past to the official “law of the land” that now defines the political and judicial relationship between Native peoples and the United States (241).

Calloway also states that Indian treaties and the process of treaty-making encapsulate the broader themes that resonate throughout Native American history, such as dispossession and resistance, indigenous agency and voice, non-Indian cultural attitudes toward Indians, and the evolution of modern Indian jurisprudence. Calloway’s book follows these themes throughout its three-part structure, which offers pairs of chapters on treaty-making in colonial America, the removal era, and the mid- to late-nineteenth century in the American west and on the Great Plains. In colonial America, Native peoples like the Iroquois still wielded great power in their interactions with Euro-Americans and asserted their own interests in treaty negotiations. As a consequence of such Indian power, Euro-Americans saw Native polities as sovereign entities and used treaties primarily as a way to resolve “issues of trade, war, peace … and criminal jurisdiction” with such autonomous groups (84). However, incessant Euro-American encroachments on Native lands, indigenous resistance and violent responses to settler invasions, and the inability to create fixed boundary lines combined to produce treaties like the one negotiated at Fort Stanwix in 1768 that became solely instruments of dispossession.

Treaties “increased dramatically in number and frequency” in Calloway’s second era of treaty-making between 1783-1838 as the United States used these documents to stake American claims to indigenous lands, deny any notions of Native American sovereignty, and complement international treaties with European powers that recognized the United States as a legitimate nation (113). In this process of defining the fledgling nation through treaties at home and abroad, the federal government deliberately excluded Native peoples from the new polity and created a vicious cycle of “recurrent dispossession of Indians as the United States pushed steadily westward” (114). This was nowhere more evident than in the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, which not only implemented and justified Indian removal, but also created crippling factionalism among the Cherokees and undermined Cherokee efforts to assert sovereignty in their political and legislative battles against the federal government.

Calloway further demonstrates that the continued use of the Indian treaty in the American West during the mid- to late-nineteenth century heralded the reservation and assimilation eras for Native Americans. At first, he illustrates how the indigenous peoples of the West like the Comanche, Lakota, Kiowas, and other groups in the southwest, Pacific Northwest, and Great Plains resisted federal efforts to pacify and relocate indigenous peoples on reservations. Despite such resistance, the federal government forced these Native polities to accept treaties of dispossession at sword-point, followed afterward by confinement to reservations and a coercive policy of assimilation to integrate indigenous peoples into American society and eradicate Native identity and culture. As Calloway concludes, assimilation rendered treaties obsolete as the United States abrogated any and all concessions to Indian power codified in those documents, instead turning Indians into Americans. Yet, contrary to this intent, indigenous communities not only survived as distinct peoples into the twentieth century, but turned treaties against the United States. Particularly during the mid- to late-twentieth century, political activists, Native rights organizations, tribal governments, and other Native Americans rallied around the treaties their ancestors had negotiated with Euro-Americans since the eighteenth century as part of a widespread effort by “Indian people in modern America [to] insist that the United States keep its word” encoded in those treaties (239). Through a Native resuscitation of treaties, Calloway determines that these documents evolved from a tool to pacify, segregate, and assimilate indigenous peoples to become a weapon for Native groups to assert the sovereignty denied to them by the United States since the turn of the nineteenth century.

To complement his narrative, Calloway provides case studies of a particular treaty during each era of treaty-making, specifically Fort Stanwix (1768), New Echota (1835), and Medicine Lodge (1867). As companion chapters to each period of treaty-making, these case studies exemplify the broader themes in Native American history for each era and illustrate how the negotiations that produced such treaties were highly complex and contingent affairs that deflate any sense of “the inevitable march of [American] empire” (6). According to Calloway, he wants to shift the “focus [to] the treaty negotiations as much as on the outcomes of those negotiations,” for “each treaty had its own story and its own cast of characters” who determined what unfolded at those conferences (6-7). Therefore, his narrative is littered with Native actors and voices like the Iroquois headman Conoghquieson, Cherokee leaders John Ridge and John Ross, and Kiowa warriors like Satanta and Satank, who influenced treaty negotiations and vacillated between strategies of violence and accommodation to confront Euro-American demands. As Calloway concludes, it was these individuals and their efforts in treaty councils in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that produced a definitive set of treaty rights that provided modern Native activists with the tools to articulate alternative and innovative understandings of indigenous autonomy and sovereignty encoded within Indian treaties.

However, the trouble with Calloway’s book is that by reconceptualizing a narrative of Native American history through Indian treaties and treaty-making, he is often forced to sacrifice complexity and diversity for brevity’s sake. Calloway admittedly confesses his story is centered “in the colonial Northeast, in the early national South, and on the Great Plains…[to] signpost the story of Indian relations and nation building in this country” (10). Calloway therefore deploys examples that are more illustrative of the points he is trying to make, which are hardly representative of the experiences of the great diversity of Native peoples who confronted Euro-American empires and negotiated treaties. For instance, Calloway uses the most familiar indigenous polity, the Iroquois Confederacy, in the colonial era to discuss themes of Native power and intra-Native conflict during treaty negotiations, as well as the transformation of treaties from contracts of peace to tools of dispossession. Yet when compared with Native peoples like the New England “Mission” Indians or Catawbas in the Piedmont region who were resettled on reservation-like lands as early as the eighteenth century, the Iroquois experience is far from representative. Similarly, the many peoples of the southeast like the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws confronted, subverted, and collaborated in treaty-making in far different ways than the Iroquois. In particular, southeastern indigenous peoples performed different diplomatic customs, ceremonies, and rituals with Euro-Americans during treaty councils, which are overlooked by Calloway in favor of Iroquoian ones, again likely for the sake of simplification. Despite this distraction, though, Calloway’s work is an insightful and revelatory look at the long and convoluted history of Indian treaties and treaty-making, which is made all the more relevant by the ongoing debates and conflicts over Indian treaty rights today.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Bryan C. Rindfleisch is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Oklahoma. His dissertation focuses on the expansive network of personal relationships that the Indian trader and merchant George Galphin created during the eighteenth century that connected the disparate peoples, families, communities, and places of Indian Country, North America, and the Atlantic World.