“Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them.” These were the words of Jedidiah Morse, preached before a Massachusetts congregation in 1799. It is hard to find language that is more histrionic in the American religio-political landscape. At first glance, Morse’s statement clearly reflected the confusion and anxiety that coalesced around the concepts of religion, secularization, Christianity, clerical authority, Protestantism, atheism, government, partisan politics, and international affairs in the last decade of the eighteenth century. It is therefore easy to view Morse’s shrillness simply as a symptom of changing times, specifically of the rapid and well-known process of disestablishment in the early republic. But I would like to come to Morse not from his own era, but from the one that preceded it, the American Revolution. From that vantage point, Morse’s words are a bit more puzzling, and I’d like to suggest that they can prompt new methodological and chronological questions, not just about the 1790s, but also about the Age of Revolution. In short, what had really changed to make Morse so nervous, and when was it?

This question ultimately derives from the difficulty of connecting the historiography of religion in the early republic to that of religion during the revolutionary era, as well as to theoretical work on the development of the “secular” across a roughly similar time period. Jedidiah Morse is the center of this inquiry because, as an alarmist and a controversialist, he loudly announced a moment of crisis through his sermons on the Bavarian Illuminati, a particularly hysterical episode in the religio-politics of the early republic. He has also been showing up like a bad penny in my research into this period, suggesting that he might be an effective figure through which to think about the questions suggested above. The Illuminati were a dreaded but nonexistent group of powerful atheists that Morse, Timothy Dwight, and some fellow Federalists feared were conspiring to undermine Christian institutions, as evidenced both by the dangerous turn of the French Revolution and also by the decline of respect for traditional clerical authority in the United States. At its height in the 1790s, this moment of conspiracy-theory panic may have been of short duration, but Morse did live in an era of great transition, and his expressions of anxiety are revealing.

In an effort to understand the relationship between the historical course of the American Revolution and the transformation of “religion” in the same period, this essay draws attention to two very different kinds of historical ruptures evident in Morse’s writings in the 1790s. The first break involves division within the intellectual, cultural, social and political realm of religion, leading to the emergence of the religious and the secular as separate intellectual categories. The second rift is chronological: the upheaval caused by the political events of the American Revolution, a historical transformation so comprehensive (we often assume) that historians of all arenas are forced to question how, rather than if, their subjects experienced the change. In other words, it is a period where change, rather than continuity, was the norm.

The question, ultimately, is whether, and in what ways, should we follow Morse’s lead by disconnecting the threats to religion from historical events before 1790?

In 1798 and 1799 Morse believed that his religion, a public and Protestant form of that concept in which he enjoyed a privileged position, was endangered by events in the civil realm that threatened the new nation of the United States. Identifying that threat meant operating within a very new historical moment. Though the Federalist clergy had overwhelmingly embraced the legitimacy of the new nation, as Morse reminded his readers, historians will note that when he connected the foundations of his “religion” to the institutions of the United States, he did not connect them to, for example, the Protestantism that had animated the British empire of his youth, to an evangelical Kingdom of God, or even to Massachusetts, all of which, in different contexts, were viable religio-political constructs during the late colonial and revolutionary periods of his youth. When Morse linked the foundations of his religion to a government that was only a decade old, he distracted attention from the political events of the preceding era and from polities other than the United States. His political posturing thus served to situate his anxieties in a remarkably short time frame. What happened before 1790 stayed before 1790, as it were. The question, ultimately, is whether, and in what ways, should we follow Morse’s lead by disconnecting the threats to religion from historical events before 1790?

I will ask this question in three stages. First, it is necessary to locate what Morse meant when he discussed religion, a phenomenon he identified largely in terms of its public manifestations. Second, I will look at what threats he identified to his religion. Both of these discussions focus, as one would expect, on the 1790s. In the third section below, I seek to place the Illuminati controversy and the religion in the 1790s in a wider context, and finally return to the question at hand—what do religion and politics in the 1790s have to do with the American Revolution?

Morse’s Religion

Most historians know Morse for his widely circulated geographies and for the activities of his even more famous son, artist and telegrapher Samuel F. B. Morse. Jedidiah was born in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1761, in the waning days of the Seven Years’ War. He came of age in the midst of the Revolutionary War. Too infirm to serve in the defining conflict of his youth, he spent the war years in New Haven, and he studied with Jonathan Edwards, fils. By all accounts, as a young man he was not particularly drawn to the theological questions that animated his New Divinity peers. Thus, after graduation he worked and traveled for a few years as an adjunct scholar and minister, and it was during this time that he researched and wrote his American Geography, the genre (in a variety of forms and editions) for which he became most known. On his travels he made the most of the clerical and political networks to which his position as a member of the religio-intellectual elite gave him access. He finally took up a pulpit in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1789, a prominent post from which he both lamented and hastened (through his anti-Unitarian machinations) the decline of New England’s “Standing Order” over the next several decades. He later published more geographies, histories, periodicals, and a few sermons, and he helped found some of the major religious reform societies of the day, including the American Bible Society. But he never held major office or ascended to the upper echelons of literary fame, and by all accounts his shrill and contentious personality limited his influence.

"Rev. Jedediah [Jedidiah] Morse, D.D." lithograph by James Kidder and Thomas Edwards, published by Senefelder Lithograph Company (Boston, 1831). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “Rev. Jedediah [Jedidiah] Morse, D.D.” lithograph by James Kidder and Thomas Edwards, published by Senefelder Lithograph Company (Boston, 1831). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Though Morse did not rise to the pinnacles of the intellectual, theological, or political elites of his day, his writings are still widely cited in a variety of contexts. His polemics, his role as a historian (for which he corresponded with figures such as John Adams), and his contributions to the project of crafting national identity through his geographies have made his corpus of work a useful source for understanding cultural and intellectual trends in the early republic. In addition, Morse is also something of a darling of the twenty-first century Christian political right. In those circles, he is sometimes a “Founding Father” and sometimes an important historical observer of the nation’s birth. Christian nationalist David Barton has numerous references to Morse on his Wallbuilders website, and quotations from his sermons continue to circulate in ways that suggest the enduring importance of the anxiety about religion in the United States that he articulated. Morse was, these modern interpreters suggest, a witness to history, a well-qualified observer of a moment of greatness, as well as someone who issued an early clarion call to the citizens of the nation for the essential and foundational role of religion in government. Morse noticed great change around him.

Academic historians have agreed with at least that assessment: something was rapidly changing about what Morse referred to as religion in the 1790s and in the early modern era more generally. My discomfort with this paradigm comes not from any essential disagreement with historical assessments of the Illuminati event, but with the relationship of this micro-moment of pivotal change in the category of religion (the 1790s) to that which came before it, the period of the Revolutionary War. Before turning to that subject, however, we should know what Morse referred to as religion. This matters because if we are slippery about what we mean by a term as amorphous as “religious decline,” we can easily lose our capacity to locate cause and effect. Religious decline in a vague sense can be seen merely because something new is on the scene, a new mode of intellectual inquiry, or a new political system. But the arrival of something new does not always signal the decline of something old. To see the decline of religion, we have to know what religion (in a particular given context) is.

In his 1799 Illuminati sermon, Morse built a workable, clergy-driven (and defined) iteration of a public institution that he called “religion.” The religion he discussed had little to do with the individual soul or personal spiritual experience. In the context of the Illuminati, Morse was primarily concerned with religion as an institutional, cultural, and political system. He started from his text, Psalm 11, verse 3: “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” He then made the assertion that the nation’s “dangers are of two kinds, those which affect our religion, and those which affect our government.” The two are “so closely allied,” he explained, “that they cannot, with propriety, be separated.” Religion (he slipped quickly to the more precise “Christianity”) and governmental stability were, for Morse, integrally linked. Christianity, he went on to explain, provided the “kindly influence” requisite for “that degree of civil freedom, and political and social happiness which mankind now enjoy.” He continued:

In proportion as the genuine effects of Christianity are diminished in any nation, either through unbelief, or the corruption of its doctrines, or the neglect of its institutions; in the same proportion will the people of that nation recede from the blessings of genuine freedom, and approximate the miseries of complete despotism. I hold this to be a truth confirmed by experience. If so, it follows, that all efforts made to destroy the foundations of our holy religion, ultimately tend to the subversion of our political freedom and happiness. Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them.

In this rendering, the “pillars of Christianity,” according to Morse’s statement, were belief, pure doctrines, and attention to the institutions of Christianity (presumably churches, sacraments, public worship, and the clergy). This, according to Morse, was the “holy religion” that the nation must protect.

For many purposes, it would be reductionist to define “religion” as public versions of belief, doctrine, and institutions, but the definition is a useful one for this context—that articulated by a Protestant minister in a fast day sermon in an established church at the tail end of the eighteenth century. Moreover, each of the elements Morse articulated was, from the perspective of the clergy, quite expansive. Belief, the opposite of unbelief, was not merely the intellectual predilection of an individual or even many individuals, as it might be in a modern, secular world, but rather the broad-based piety of the populace, the presumption that a divine order was paramount and true. Doctrine, the second element, was probably the easiest of the three for clergy to define and endorse, as it was the one that they had historically had the most control over. By including it in the list, Morse implicitly asserted the importance of theological education and the possibility that corrupted doctrine would not be considered religion. This let him exclude, for example, any non-Protestant religion, be that Catholicism or the superstitious practices of native peoples, as well as any Protestants whose doctrine he thought had slipped too far. It was a category that enhanced his own authority. Thus, though he recognized and used the intellectually expansive word “religion” in some contexts, in the world around him the government and freedom for which he advocated relied on an institutional Protestantism overseen by an educated clergy capable of adjudicating doctrine and acceptable boundaries of dissent.

Most important, Morse referred to the institutions of religion. This included both the apparatus of clergy and congregation, and also the presence of the clergy on the public, political stage. It included, for example, the events at which he preached about the Illuminati. President John Adams had called for a fast day a few weeks before the 1798 sermon, asking the nation to spend the day in “solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer” because “the United States of America are at present placed in a hazardous and afflictive situation by the unfriendly disposition, conduct, and demands of a foreign power,” and thus “the duty of imploring the mercy and benediction of Heaven on our country demands at this time a special attention from its inhabitants.” Public sermons on nationally ordained fast days were an important ritual of institutional Christianity in the early modern era. Occasional sermons, those preached at such events, represented an agreement between established clergy and the government that at pivotal moments, the population should pause to reflect on its situation in the divine order. The most widely quoted sermons of the Revolutionary period, such as Ezra Stiles’s “The United States Elevated,” and John Witherspoon’s “Dominion of Providence,” were preached at these rituals of mutual endorsement between the institutions of Christianity and the state. Morse’s sermon thus stood in a long tradition of political preaching. The 1798 sermon’s text was a blend of familiar tropes in addition to its outcry for defense against the Illuminati, such as a lament for the general state of present affairs, a call for greater piety, devotion, and unity in a time of national crisis.

The public practice of Protestantism—like any institutional system—required significant resources, both in terms of physical buildings and personnel, and this system was, to read Morse, on the defensive in 1798. One can presume here that Morse referred to the health of those institutions as a core part of “religion.” If public worship were neglected, if clergy were not respected as natural moral, political, and intellectual leaders, or if churches were not a part of the infrastructure of towns, the laity, even those who resisted unbelief, would have no regular opportunity to engage “religion,” by hearing sermons preached by an educated clergy in a sacred time and space. “If the Clergy fall,” he asked in 1798, “what will become of your religious institutions? Undoubtedly they must share the same fate. And are they of no value?” Indeed one of the greatest threats of the Illuminati, as he articulated it again in 1799, was to the clergy, as the devious French interlopers were engaged in “apparently systematic endeavours made to destroy, not only the influence and support, but the official existence of the Clergy.”

Morse’s definition of religion was fairly conventional for his moment, particularly from the perspective of the clergy and the government. It encompassed formal Protestantism; it admitted acceptable division among denominations about such questions as religious experience, the sacraments, and salvation; and it excluded anything the clergy determined to be corrupted. It was the religion that framers of the Constitution principally imagined when they thought of both religion and establishments. It was the religion that skeptics decried as “priestcraft.” This is the version of religion Morse believed to be in decline in his day.

The Threat Posed

If we accept, for sake of argument, what Morse meant when he discussed religion, and also the idea that the 1790s was an era of intense religious redefinition, the next task is to sort out why, both in Morse’s view and in the view of scholars today. My main concern, as mentioned above, is chronological: what relationship did Morse (and his interpreters) perceive between the decline of Morse’s form of religion and the American Revolution, the phase of dramatic political change that preceded the 1790s? To start with Morse, he discussed two main threats: 1) attacks on the clergy, such as threats to the public support they received and attempts to thwart them in their duty to speak to public issues, and 2) the great danger of unbelief. The first cause has obvious ties to the historical moment of Morse’s writing in the political process of disestablishment, and he referenced that process. The first amendment of 1791 guaranteed that there would be no federal establishment; most colonial establishments had been already been eliminated; and of the states without origins as British colonies, only Vermont created a religious establishment, and it did not long survive. The establishments in Connecticut and Massachusetts were facing increasing scrutiny, and the complex system that sustained the Standing Order faced a series of legal challenges that led to its dismantling. That this process was not concluded until well into the nineteenth century does not mean that ministers like Morse did not resist its progress. In the heat of the Illuminati crisis, however, Morse did not blame the problems on the American political system, for which he protested his profound support, or even on the American Revolution, but rather to a backlash caused by the clergy’s opposition to the French.

"North West View of Charlestown Meeting House," drawn in 1799, lithograph by Ephraim W. Bouvé for Frothingham's History of Charlestown in 1846 (Boston, 1846). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “North West View of Charlestown Meeting House,” drawn in 1799, lithograph by Ephraim W. Bouvé for Frothingham’s History of Charlestown in 1846 (Boston, 1846). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Even beyond the attacks on institutional religion, irreligion—unbelief in Morse’s terms—was the great threat to “religion” in the last years of the eighteenth century, and France was to blame. In the May 1798 sermon, Morse drew a connection between the words of his biblical text, “This is a day of troubling, or reviling, and blasphemy. Wherefore lift up thy prayer for the remnant that are left,” and Adams’s words in declaring the fast, the “hazardous and afflictive situation.” He articulated the parallels between the trials of King Hezekiah with the Assyrians, on the one hand, and the perilous situation the Americans then faced with the French. Morse then mixed the dangers from abroad with dangers at home. “The astonishing increase of irreligion” that he perceived around him also harkened back to his text, as it pointed to a day of “blasphemy.” Helpfully, Morse explained what he meant by “irreligion.” “I use this word in a comprehensive sense, and would be understood to mean by it, contempt of all religion and moral obligation, impiety, and everything that opposeth itself to pure Christianity.” The irreligion, “disorganizing opinions, and that atheistical philosophy” that had started in Europe had spread. “To this plan,” Morse wrote, “as to its source, we may trace that torrent of irreligion and abuse of every thing good and praise-worthy, which, at the present time, threatens to overwhelm the world.” The overall argument of the Illuminati sermons was an outcry over the terrible events unfolding in Revolutionary France, their spread to the United States through the “plan” of the Illuminati, and the resulting decline of “religion” in what could have been a great nation. The agent of these changes was the insidious conspiracy.

As he articulated his conspiracy theory, Morse explained religious change through the political, historical process, and he did so in a very short time frame, the same post-revolutionary framework that included the process of disestablishment. In short, the 1790s. When he blamed the “secret societies under the direction of France” that were endangering the fabric of American society, he suggested the core institutions of his society were in the hands of human, political actors. For example, the Illuminati did their damage through false diplomacy—attempting to raise a black army in St. Domingo that would attempt to foment slave revolt in the South, for example—and also through the more banal crimes of encouraging disrespect and dissent against the Godly rulers of the United States. It is significant that the threat was being furthered by “subtil and secret assistants” who were “increasing in number,” and “multiplying, varying, and arranging their means of attack,” because the largely unseen danger required Morse, as an important representative of public “religion,” to raise the alarm, and also because the danger might result in threats in myriad unknown places, such as in newspaper attacks on Adams, or in democratic societies that advocated for the United States to support the French. The damage had already begun. In addition to the persistent attacks on the place of the clergy, Morse ascribed the “unceasing abuse of our wise and faithful rulers; the virulent opposition to some of the laws of our country, and the measures of the Supreme Executive,” and the Whiskey Rebellion to the machinations of the insidious agitators.

From Conspiracy to Theoretical Puzzle

Historians, those practiced in the careful art of teasing out change over time, have largely concurred with Morse in his chronological framing, if not in his assessment of the threat posed by the Illuminati. Unfortunately, this tacit acceptance has begged an important question about precisely how the Revolution shaped religion, whether one refers to Morse’s public Protestantism or to a different version of the phenomenon then viable in the public discourse. The essence of the problem, historically, reads like a GRE logic problem. Only one of the following should be true: 1) If the decline in religion Morse perceived was real, and it came from causes outside of the realm of religion, those causes—presumably occurring in the preceding decades or centuries—and their impact should be identifiable. If we cannot identify the source, then we (historians of religion) have misunderstood an essential aspect of how religion fit into the nexus of history or how we understand religion, so much so that what is being studied was capable of being fundamentally compromised without our observing it. 2) If the decline in religion was true, but came only from causes native to the category of religion, then the political events of the preceding decades (non-religion events) would have had very little impact on religion itself. In this context, there would be little reason to study religion and the American Revolution at all, though it would presumably still be necessary to track religious developments across those decades if only to avoid a chronological gap in our studies. (I think this is effectively what most historians of religion have been doing.) 3) If there was no decline in religion in an era of great anxiety about the subject (as evidenced by the Illuminati crisis), one should nonetheless be able to track the ways that religious categories and debates shifted in the new political environment. But implicitly, since the larger category itself was stable, one should also be able to track those shifting debates and categories in earlier eras, and also link them to the political narrative, given that scholars on both sides of the divide of the revolution do just that.

Historians looking at the Illuminati episode have largely followed one of the first two explanations above, assuming a decline to Morse’s public religion and locating the cause either in politics or in changes to religion itself. The problem is the very short time frame involved. Coming just before the election of 1800, the outcry has been presented as an example of Federalist resistance to Democratic political strategies and as a moment in transatlantic anti-Jacobinism. It has been used as evidence of the New England clergy’s eroding support for the French cause. Each of these represents important and fine-grained analysis of the politics of a tumultuous decade. The 1790s were marked by the stresses of the emerging political system of the United States, stresses that were rooted in the still new federal Constitution. The problems caused by relations with revolutionary France were also novel in the 1790s. That does not lessen the significance of these arguments, but historians’ focus on a quite short chronology here suggests that the rupture between the ancien régime (including pre-1789 and thus revolutionary America) and the 1790s was so great as to make longer-term explanations merely deep background.

The second frame for the Illuminati crisis emphasizes the kind of public religion Morse embraced and thus suggests explanations that stem from a broad cultural shift in the authority granted to that religion. Yet these explanations for the Illuminati moment remain similarly tight in chronological terms. Jonathan Sassi sees the episode as part of the Standing Order’s engagement with politics, a conscious fusing of religion and government that reflected the clergy’s effort to maintain its position. Amanda Porterfield has emphasized the incident’s partisan context in the process of highlighting the partisan content of religious anxiety in the era. Christopher Grasso integrates the episode into a longer span of history, but he too places the concerns of Morse and his colleague, Timothy Dwight, in the context of those divines’ desire to create a moral order for a newly rearranged society, emphasizing, again, the rupture of the 1790s. Taken together, Morse’s observers, like Morse, place critical importance on the radical rupture of the creation of the United States in the form of the federal Constitution as the definitive moment for his religion.

Title page, A Sermon, Preached at Charlestown, November 29, 1798, on the Anniversary Thanksgiving in Massachusetts: With an Appendix, Designed to Illustrate Some Parts of the Discourse; Exhibiting Proofs of the Early Existence, Progress, and Deleterious Effects of French Intrigue and Influence in the United States, by Jedidiah Morse, D.D. Pastor of the Church in Charlestown (Boston, 1798). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

In both political and religious framings, historians have found a decline in Morse’s public form of religion, and their chronological framing implicitly endorses the first of our three explanations listed above, that of a political cause for the decline in religion. But what did the 1790s turn on? The elephantine Revolution in the room is obvious, and it hangs over the historical analysis in such a way as to justify a sense that a great deal was unstable in this difficult decade, certainly enough to explain away Morse’s hysterical anxiety. But the connections are perhaps less clear than they might be. Indulge me for a moment in a brief counterfactual: if the colonies had joined together in a new nation under the federal Constitution with the blessing of the British authorities in 1789, peacefully gaining independence and launching fully formed as a new nation, would we need to rethink any of the causes suggested above for explaining the Illuminati crisis? Without the long run up to the American Revolution, the controversies over an Anglican bishop and over the Quebec Act, without the bloody years of warfare, the clergy of the Standing Order in New England might still have been nervous about the intellectual developments of atheists like Paine, the French Revolution would still have been frightening and destabilizing, the new nation (born whole and without blood) would still be struggling to define a new political order including the religious terms of citizenship, and, to put a fine point on the matter, “religion” as Morse defined it would still be largely unchanged from what it had been under the colonial regime. At the time of the Illuminati crisis—though there were clear causes to worry about future trends that were rooted in very recent events—the institutions of Christianity and the institutional practice of theology (though not necessarily the beliefs of the theologians) were in many ways quite similar to what they had been in 1770 or 1760. These perspectives reflect Jon Bulter’s oft-quoted observation that the American Revolution was “a profoundly secular event,” as well as his persuasive argument that the eighteenth century saw a long increase of institutional Christianity.

In this counterfactual framing, our first explanation, religious decline caused by recent politics, is deeply unsatisfying. It suggests a too-rapid collapse of too powerful a system. Thus we glide to the second explanation: the system was decaying from the inside. Morse’s anxiety was the result of the rise of the secular. Here we have a different body of scholarship. Theoretically, at least, once “religion” developed as an intellectual category, it spawned its opposite, secularity. In the words of Charles Taylor, “the shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” John Lardas Modern suggests that “secularism names a conceptual environment—emergent since at least the Protestant Reformation and early Enlightenment—that has made ‘religion’ a recognizable and vital thing in the world.” Indeed, Bryan Waterman recently made a related version of this argument with respect to the Illuminati crisis quite eloquently, linking it (and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland) to contests for control of the public sphere.

It is important to note, however, that historians of the secular do not posit the decline of religion as a general category, but rather push us to identify the gradual metamorphosis that occurred as an older body of cultural beliefs and practices were first identified as religion and then began to divide into a series of different institutions and practices that we might today recognize in everything from civil religion to moral reform to the effort to spread human rights. In other words, historians of the secular advise us to be very wary of narratives of religious decline and call our attention to the power politics involved in the categorization of some cultural elements as religious and others as secular. Their version of history works much more comfortably with the many versions of dynamic religion from the early republic that do not match Morse’s. Here, therefore, is our third explanation: “religion” in the early republic was a dynamic category, encompassing a mixture of different things, populist revivalism, clerical voices, a new form of “secular” culture, and also traditional forms of Christianity. Because this is not a history of categorical religious decline and disappearance, but a proper history, a series of developments linked to moments of specific historical transition, it should be possible to chronicle it and show how it either registered the significant changes of the Revolutionary period or resisted them.

Unfortunately, historians of the secular have left us wondering about the role of the American Revolution in the story, and also the integration of this broader version of religion into the stream of time. Discussions of religion’s decline and the rise of the secular tend to focus on generalized versions of the cultural and political developments that occurred in the eighteenth century and all of the transformations that tend to be associated with the Age of Revolutions—the rise of a public sphere, the development of individualism, and a new embrace of popular sovereignty. They assume, even assert, the importance of historical contingency and change over time, but they avoid the dirty work such an assertion demands.

Without concrete links to the past, this version of scholarship slips dangerously close to becoming the doppelganger of our second explanation above, in which the course of history outside of religion is nearly irrelevant. The secular was born of elite non-religious (in Morse’s definition) intellectual trends before the political crises at the end of the eighteenth century, trends that were then made manifest in those broad-based political changes. (Note Modern’s vast and indistinct timing cited above.) Charles Taylor gives great causal weight to a broad phenomenon of deism, and he locates the development of his modern “social imaginary” in the eighteenth-century polite society. But, as Jon Butler has pointed out, Taylor’s “history is not for historians,” in other words, it lacks the specificity in detail and human action that historians require for effective argument. The upshot of these discussions for those concerned with secularity is that whatever changed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, afterwards people of faith moved in a world where unbelief and belief coexisted, as did religion, secularity, and various modes of public discourse that did or did not value the trained and authorized voice of the clergy. This changed “religion” from a part of the institutional fabric of public life (Morse’s “foundations” and “religion”) into a realm of thought, self definition, and anxiety in which people individually and collectively articulated their concerns about the new world order. These articulations are extremely useful for understanding the modern era, but unsatisfying for explaining its formation.

Title page, A Sermon, Delivered at the New North Church in Boston, in the Morning, and in the Afternoon at Charlestown, May 9th, 1798: Being the Day Recommended by John Adams, President of the United States of America, for Solemn Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer, by Jedidiah Morse, D.D. Minister of the Congregation in Charlestown (Boston, 1798). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Nonetheless, these powerful intellectual narratives about religion and secularity have transformed how we understand religion and politics in the modern world. So much so that as historians we are certainly capable of recognizing the coexistence of Morse’s more narrow version of religion and the broader theoretical category which has secularity as its opposite. Yet our problem remains. For both the close chronological readings proposed by historians that find a meaningful transformation at the close of the American Revolution, and for the expansive readings of theorists, something significant happened during the American Revolution, or the Age of Revolution more generally. This matches an agreement in most other aspects of history, not to mention public discourse, that somehow the era was one of definitive change with lasting importance. We just have no real idea what it was when writing about religion.

Connecting the events of the Revolutionary chronology to religion, specifically to the religion that Morse identified, is not simple. Did the political changes of the Age of Revolution (or, more parochially, the American Revolution) matter to religion? If so, which changes and where? Did the stresses to Morse’s religion caused by the Age of Revolution and the long rise of secularism simply build in some sort of historical waiting area until they were able to burst onto the scene in the early republic? Did they matter to anyone along the way? Did listeners to public sermons in 1788, such as Ezra Stiles’s oft-cited “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor,” know that they would shortly discard the tired ceremony of public religion for the appeals of secularism, perhaps including new and secular celebrations of what will now be termed civil religion? Were they looking forward to it? If the great wave of secularism and unbelief identified by historians of the secular was slowly growing and being furthered by the development of new modes of public speech, action, and organization during the decades of revolution, why did most of the clergy on both sides of the Atlantic side with their governments in the crisis?

This plodding insistence on timing and immediate causality may coexist uneasily with the great sweep of theory, but granting the broad historical significance of theoretical developments is not the same as explaining how and when that influence was felt. In eras of profound transition—revolutions—such matters become even more important, precisely because the divisions between historical periods often elide them. For historians of religion in the Age of Revolution, a great deal is at stake methodologically in this discussion, because it is ultimately the question of not just how but whether the political events of the era had any demonstrable impact on religion, whatever we mean by that term. If so, how, when, and where? If not, how do we account for such dramatic change in the period immediately following it?

Hence the persistent urge for the specific and the connection between the before and the after. This is, in essence, a plea for a full realization of the implications in the third logical proposition above. If religion and its nouveau riche cousin, secularity, have not declined in history but are concepts that can be used to track a moving conceptual frame, then this frame should have a history that can be integrated into that of the Age of Revolution. When was Morse’s “religion,” a limited but identifiable version of the concept, destabilized? The focus on public religion is demanded by the political events implicated. 1750 seems too early. Linda Colley, J.C.D. Clark, and many others have offered interpretations of the ancien régime Atlantic world that rely on religious prejudices—those between Protestants and Catholics and also those between various denominations of Protestants—to explain the American crisis. So when was the influence of the rising tide of secularism, of the strength of new, non-religious public spheres felt as a threat by religious communities? 1776? 1787? 1789? 1791? Or do we need a different timeline, one that draws from “religious” history? Was it 1770, when George Whitefield died? 1788, when the General Synod of the Presbyterian Church created a self-consciously national organization? 1798, when Jedidiah Morse and Timothy Dwight insisted that the Illuminati were undermining American society? If the issue is not framed by a narrow insistence on date, what of causality? Were the changes to the idea and place of religion in society in the early nineteenth century brought about by legal disestablishment (an uneven process by any count)? Were they caused by the rise of republican political ideology and its consequent impact on theology? (This argument suggests a sort of suicide for culturally influential religion, as the causal energy comes from within religious thought itself.) Were they caused by the political power of skepticism and atheism (a more diffuse causality, far harder to date and trace)?

In all of these intellectual constructions, the ties between the specific historical process of revolution (or revolutions) and the anxieties to be perceived in Morse’s writing are vague at best. For historians, the chronological rupture of the Revolution is too great. For theorists, the process is too broad to be attached to specific events. Both reflect the kind of generalized sense of change that Morse articulated, but neither integrate it into the era of change that preceded it. The enormity of the transformation posited by theorists of the secular demands historical investigation; the tendency of historians to separate the 1790s from the era before it sidesteps the kind of investigation that would be needed.

This discussion also raises the very intriguing possibility that the cultural and political upheavals of the American Revolution were only coincidental to the profound changes in the place of religion (by any definition) in public life in the new nation in the 1790s. Could the development of as important a concept as secularity be only coincidentally adjacent and attached only by remote evolutionary ties to the crises of the Age of Revolution? Here, by our long wandering path, is the question posed by the inescapable Jedidiah Morse’s histrionics. A positive answer to that question would invite a significant redefinition of the American Revolution as something minor enough to have had little impact on a remarkably resilient form of religion. Indeed, it would suggest that the political alignments our historical actors cared so much about were all merely noise. This is a proposition that is worthy of more investigation.

One final thought, more political than historical: I have noted that Jedidiah Morse is the darling of conservative Christian nationalists, those who protest too loudly of the orthodox (by which they mean evangelical) Christianity of the “Founding Fathers.” The inability of historians, or theorists, to grapple in the macro sense with the historical relationship between religion and the political process in the creation of the United States is, I suspect, one source of the difficulty academic historians have in offering a counter narrative to that of religious decline from the nation’s holy founding, a narrative that Morse both helped create and is regularly used to prove. The Christian nationalist narrative is profoundly bad history, and by letting Morse speak for us, and by failing to clarify the history he experienced in more concrete ways, we are left sputtering and ineffectual. A more solid understanding of what we mean by religion, and when and where it responded to a complex political era that preceded the pivotal 1790s, may be useful in that highly charged conversation.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Amanda Porterfield and Kathryn Lofton for their helpful feedback.

The most recent field manual for COIN operations is Department of the Army, Counterinsurgency, Field Manual 3-24 (Washington D.C., December 2006). For an example of the use of the word “insurgent” in the time of Gage, see Joseph Galloway, The Speech of Joseph Galloway, Esq.; one of the members for Philadelphia County: in answer to the speech of John Dickenson (Philadelphia, 1764), particularly pages 37-39. The most comprehensive published edition of Gage’s own papers is Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage, 1763-1775, 2 vols. (Hamden, Conn., 1969).

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

Philip Mead is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Harvard University. His dissertation examines interactions between civilians and soldiers in the Continental Army.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

For more than a decade Bostonians have watched the progress of the Big Dig, described on the project’s official Website as a public works challenge on the scale of the Panama Canal, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and the English Channel Tunnel (Chunnel). Thanks to an infusion of federal highway dollars, an unsightly elevated highway that has long separated the city’s North End from its commercial and civic core is about to be replaced with an eight-to-ten-lane underground highway. To create the massive tunnel, contractors removed sixteen million cubic yards of soil and underground debris.

Fewer people know about the little digs that preceded Boston’s Big Dig. Following federal guidelines, the Central Artery project allotted roughly four million dollars in the early 1990s for archaeological explorations in areas thought to be rich in early history and likely to be destroyed by construction. Ultimately four sites were chosen. One of the four, a patch of asphalt shaded by the old elevated highway, became known as the Cross Street back lot. Here archaeologists uncovered a seventeenth-century privy and in the privy an astonishing treasure–an artifact identified in Massachusetts’ new Commonwealth Museum as “North America’s Oldest Bowling Ball.”

Fig. 1. North America’s Oldest Bowling Ball, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Commission, Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Cross Street back lot site, Boston.

Unlike the sleek balls used in modern candlepin bowling, seventeenth-century “lawn bowles” were flattened on two sides creating a profile more like a squished bun than a ball. The lathe-turned bowle found in the privy has a perforation on one side where a leaden weight was inserted to give it more play when rolled. When new, the hole would have been covered with a now-lost disc made from mother-of-pearl or ivory. Archaeologists found the bowle just below the collapsed floor of the privy in a layer of artifacts dating from the last decades of the seventeenth century. There is no way of knowing the exact date when the privy was built, though its size and construction generally conform to Boston regulations of 1652 requiring that any “house of office” (a euphemism for what contemporaries called a “shit house”) be no less than twelve feet from a neighboring house or street, be vaulted, and be at least six feet deep.

The careful construction of the privy shows town government at work in a period of urban expansion. Fifty years after the great Puritan migration of the 1630s, Boston had grown from a frontier settlement to a maritime and commercial center of forty-five hundred inhabitants. Although still a village by modern standards, it was the center of an expanding economy that linked the agriculture of its hinterland and the fishing and lumbering outposts of Maine and New Hampshire to a larger Atlantic economy. In the Cross Street privy, archaeologists found Caribbean shells, shards of Venetian glass, fragments of Iberian storage jars, broken bits of German, Dutch, and Italian tableware, and one oak lawn bowle.

Did the bowling ball accidentally fall in during the period when the “house of office” was in active use? Or was it part of the fill added about 1700 when the privy was altered? Either way, its presence suggests an underground Boston lurking beneath a presumably Puritan past.

Massachusetts’ earliest laws were hostile to bowling. A 1646 statute forbidding “the use of the Games of Shuffle-board and Bowling, in and about Houses of Common-entertainment,” was still in effect in the 1670s. (The same statute forbade dancing and the observance of Christmas and other English feast days.) Puritan lawmakers disliked bowling not only because it squandered “precious time” but because, in the language of the statute, it caused “much waste of Wine and Beer.” A certain amount of alcohol seemed essential to life, but when people began to hang around taverns playing at sports, they drank more than they needed. Bowling, then, went hand-in-ball with a series of what Englishmen and women would have known as urban vices: drunkenness, idleness, gambling.

By the early eighteenth century, however, the concept of recreation had replaced earlier anxieties about time wasting. In 1714, an enterprising Boston businessman advertised the opening of a bowling green “at the British Coffee House in Queen Street . . . where all gentlemen, merchants and others that have a mind to recreate themselves can be accomodated.” Boston’s bowle can be fitted, then, into a familiar story about secularization and the decline of Puritan piety.

But that interpretation is too simple. Puritan fathers would have had no need to pass laws against bowling unless some inhabitants of the town, even in the 1670s, found the pastime appealing. North America’s Oldest Bowling Ball doesn’t represent the transformation of a Puritan village into a provincial English town so much as it reveals contradictions present in Boston from its beginnings. In the 1630s as well as the 1670s, Boston was inhabited by libertines as well as orthodox Puritans, but in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, town leaders feared that they were losing control.

The city struggled for the survival of its body as well as its soul. On its streets and in its houses, luxury goods coexisted with infested food and infectious organisms. The city had long since lost any possibility of sustaining itself. Dependent on both international commerce and internal trade, it was an entrepôt for meandering males and desperate women as well as goods. People as well as things moved back and forth from Boston to the rude fishing and lumbering settlements in what are now Maine and New Hampshire, places that offered anonymity and the possibility of escape. Facing war with the Dutch and quarreling congregations at home, Boston’s sober merchants struggled with problems as remote as Algerine pirates and as immediate as unexplained fires in their own lofts and warehouses. As if droughts, torrential storms, and failed harvests weren’t punishment enough, the sins of avarice and lust were rampant. Ships from Barbados carried vice as well as sugar.

On January 30, 1671, Boston silversmith and mint master John Hull summarized the worst of the news emanating from the latest quarterly court: “This County Court three or four young men were convicted of several burglaries in breaking open warehouse, ketches, and cellars; Marry Moor and several, of fornication; some suspect for re-iterated whoredom; and also one Alice Thomas, of great suspicion to keep a brothel-house.” He closed the entry with what was for him an unusual outburst of emotion, praying that “[t]he good Lord give check to such wickedness, and grant it be not a punishment judicial!” The scriptural reference that follows the entry, Hos. 4:13-14, explains Hull’s fear. For the Old Testament prophet as well as the Puritan merchant, the real fear was that God would punish the entire community for spiritual as much as for literal whoredom. Alice Thomas’s brothel and Mary Moor’s fornication were merely signs of a larger infidelity.

From a modern perspective it is hard to imagine how a sport like lawn bowling could threaten social order. In the seventeenth century, it was a case of guilt by association. The sort of men enraptured by bowling might also linger in taverns, patronize lewd women, or speak profanely. In one of his emblem books, the English poet Francis Quarles imagined a game of bowles between Mammon and Cupid on a lawn controlled by the Devil. Quarles was obviously fascinated by the rules of the game and the posture and habits of the players. He imagined the two bowlers standing at one end of the lawn, bluffing and bragging:

One raps an oath, another deals a curse; He never better bowl’d; this never worse: One rubs his itchless elbow, shrugs and laughs, The other bends his beetle brows, and chafes.

Although the play is intense, in this contest there is no winner: “the bowls / Are sinful thoughts; the prize, a crown for fools.”

Lawn bowling required four bowles for each player and a jack for a goal. The bowle in the privy must once have belonged to such a set. One can only imagine when and where it was used. But the history of the family who owned the privy provides plenty of evidence for an emblematic interpretation of the bowle. In the 1670s, Mammon and Cupid were running riot in Boston’s North End.

Fig. 2. "The Town of Boston in New England by Capt. John Bonner, 1722." Facsimile, engraved and published by George G. Smith, Boston, 1835. MHS image number 2. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. — Fig. 2. “The Town of Boston in New England by Capt. John Bonner, 1722.” Facsimile, engraved and published by George G. Smith, Boston, 1835. MHS image number 2. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The lot where the privy stood originally fronted on Ann Street, an extension of the colonial “Fish Street” that meandered along the eastern shore of the peninsula toward Boston neck. All of the seventeenth-century owners of the lot were merchants and mariners. The man who built the privy was probably Robert Nanny, a London goldsmith and Barbadian planter who dabbled in the Maine fur trade. His wife Katherine was the daughter of John Wheelwright, the dissenting minister who was banned from Boston in the 1630s with his sister-in-law Anne Hutchinson. After Nanny’s death in 1663, his wife married Edward Naylor, another far-ranging merchant.

The food waste, textile fragments, and micro-organisms excavated from the privy document the wealth of the Nanny-Naylor family. Archaeologists found abundant evidence of imported as well as local foods: olive pits alongside the stones of plums, cherries, and peaches; and seeds from imported raisins, coriander, and peppers as well as from local plants like blueberry, huckleberry, strawberry, and elderberry. There were remnants of English walnuts as well as hickory, and abundant evidence that the family purchased flour rather than whole grain. That flour, though, was infested with weevils, some of it so severely that it was simply dumped in the privy.

Katherine Naylor, like other Bostonians in the last decades of the seventeenth century, was still making pies from the passenger pigeons that had so impressed early explorers. But deer were gone, and the codfish that sustained the local economy was mostly salted for export. Most of the animal bones thrown into the privy came from cows and sheep, though there is also evidence of pork consumption. Pigs still scavenged in Boston’s streets, and though they consumed waste, they also carried disease. Parasitological analysis shows that members of the Nanny-Naylor family suffered from whipworms and roundworms. A suckling pig whose skeleton was found in the privy suffered from a bone infection.

Although illness and death haunted the household (only two of the eight children survived childhood), the family was well dressed. Fragments of textiles that fell or were tossed into the privy suggest the full range of elite apparel, from gowns of silk lustring to sleeves and garters trimmed with multicolored ribbons. There is evidence of the sheer silk called “tiffany” often used for women’s hoods, and of bone or bobbin lace, forbidden to common people in sumptuary laws, but displayed lavishly on the waistcoats and petticoats of merchant families. The textiles in the privy, unraveled and degraded, offer a mute Jeremiad against the ostentation displayed in portraits of Katherine Naylor’s neighbors, the Freake family with their little baby, Mary, and the lushly dressed Elisabeth Paddy Wensley.

Fig. 3. Elizabeth Paddy Wensley, anonymous, ca. 1670-80. Courtesy Pilgrim Hall Museum.

One can imagine Katherine Naylor dressed much like the woman in the painting. Despite her luxurious clothing, however, she lived a life of agony after her marriage to Naylor. The whispered stories about her husband’s misbehavior emerged into the public record bit by bit, after a house maid named Mary Read became pregnant. Although Edward Naylor helped his maidservant flee to Hampton, New Hampshire, hoping she would give birth in secret, Read succumbed to the entreaties of her midwife and, in the “Extremity of paine,” blurted out the truth, begging her attendants to “keep itt privatt unless it were forsed from them by Authorety.”

“Authorety” did intervene. In January 1671/2, a jury found Naylor guilty of fornication with Mary Read, “uncivil Cariage with mary Morse” (the woman whom the county court suspected of “reiterated whoredom”), and “inhumane Carieje [Carriage] & severe Cruelty in Abuseing his wife and Children.” A few months later, the court forwarded to the court of assistants Katherine Naylor’s petition for divorce. Colonial Massachusetts was one jurisdiction where such a legal remedy was possible, and in this case it seems to have worked.

The depositions in the divorce case show both the power and the limitations of neighborly surveillance in a densely settled but stratified town. Much of the information came from household servants, young women who knew a lot about the inner workings of households but could not risk their own livelihoods by becoming common gossips. Once summoned, however, they showed little restraint in documenting their own suspicions. A woman who lived in the same house as Mary Moor said that she saw Naylor go into Moor’s chamber. Following him up the stairs, she peered “through a crevis betwixt the dore & the post,” through which she saw “him slip downe his britches & goe to bed.” Other witnesses were washerwomen, tavern keepers, or dockworkers. A housewife who washed a lodger’s linen with her own, found “such tokkens” on the man’s shirt that she feared he “had had to do” with Mary Moor. She heard him say that “he would lye with any woman that would let him.”

These depositions suggest that ordinary women, as well as the magistrates, participated in the enforcement of social norms in early Boston. Surprisingly, however, there are no depositions in the surviving court records from Katherine Naylor’s extended family or from women who were her peers economically or socially. Out of shame or fear, she seems to have kept her husband’s secrets. Little wonder that in the divorce petition, she described her life with Naylor as “an intolerable bondage.”

Stories told in court reveal the spatial and social arrangements of seventeenth-century Boston houses, and suggest uses of the kinds of artifacts found in inventories and, in their shattered form, in archaeological digs. A maid who had lived with the family for a year testified that Naylor would come in after midnight and expect his wife to serve him. One night, “she haveing drest him some meate and kept it hot for him over a chafing dish of coles,” he threw it down on the floor demanding butter. When the ever dutiful wife fetched the butter “in an other erthen plater . . . he threw down it also & broke the plater.” Perhaps the fragments wound up in the privy.

Naylor delighted in dragging people from their sleep. One maid testified that he came home drunk and called her out of her bed, asking her to “Kisse him quickly.” Another servant said that when she was slow to respond to his nocturnal summons, he “fired 2 or 3 pistols in the garet” so that she “was almost choked with the smoke of the powder.” Worse, he pulled his five-year-old daughter out of bed in the depths of winter and forced her to “stand naked al but her shift about an hower.” When the child cried, he “whipt her 2 or 3 times, & then set her downe in ye flore.” In the light of these stories, a fashionable child’s shoe lifted out of the muck in the privy acquires new meaning. Naylor terrorized those he should have protected, kicking one child down the garret stairs and forcing his wife to get up out of childbed on a rainy day to walk with him to a neighbor’s. He bragged that though he hadn’t killed her yet, he soon would.

The bones, shells, and fruit pits found in the privy suggest a household well supplied with food and drink. The court records tell a darker story. When a neighbor asked Mary Read “the Reason why it was reported mr Nailer & his wife lay not to gether, & that the vittels and aney thing should be locked up from hr mistris . . . she said because her mistris was wastfull, & her master order they should be lockt up.” Mary Jackson said that more than once she loaned her mistress money “to buy Bred & butter & cheese or such like to keep us & ye children alive.”

Naylor humiliated his wife before her servants and neighbors by denying her the authority to manage her own affairs. During washing week, he dragged her sheets into the dirt. Finding her at prayer, he railed against her, saying “he would have no such thing done in his house.” Such “fitts” so distressed Jackson that she threatened to leave, explaining “that I was not able to live this life.” Mistress Naylor responded, “If you can not indure it a moment how shal i indure it al my life.”

Witnesses to the goings on in the Naylor household describe a world of opposites, of grandiose sinners and submissive saints. In their accounts, Mistress Naylor is a long-suffering and dutiful wife, bearing blows to body and spirit without slacking her own responsibilities. In contrast, the women involved with Naylor are as contemptuous of authority as he. Mary Moor borrowed a pair of pattens to walk to the waterside, pretending to visit her grandmother. Instead she kept a rendezvous in Salem with Naylor, sitting on his lap in taverns and at every stop implying that she was his wife. Mary Read, some believed, not only slept with her master but tried to poison her mistress by adding henbane to her beer.

Naylor was perhaps more surprised than anyone when his wife finally decided to speak out. Perhaps he had grown accustomed to her steady piety, believing that she would never violate her own vows even if he repeatedly abandoned his. A few months after the divorce case went to the court of assistants, he wrote her from Pemaquid in Maine, proposing reconciliation. Adopting penitential language, he admitted that his “wicked hart” had deprived him of the company of his wife, and he prayed that “Through our Lord Jesus Christ” they might once again “love in union one with Another: as wee ought to.” In a second letter, he begged her to send him clothing, “Espeshially Lenen & Shoues.” For once, she refused to comply.

With the support of the same magistrates who punished fornicators and disdained bowling, Katherine Naylor rid herself of an abusive husband. He eventually fled the colony. She remained in the house on Ann Street. About 1690, she began filling in the privy, depositing heaps of household trash and an old bowling ball that three hundred years later would emerge from beneath a strip of asphalt under an elevated expressway to reveal a lost history of seventeenth-century Boston.

Digging Further:

To see the location of the site in relation to present-day Boston, go to the “Beyond the Big Dig” Website. Click on “History” at the top of the map, then use the “thermometer” time-line at the right to see the evolution of the Boston peninsula in relation to the project. The so-called Cross Street back lot is under the pink ribbon in the once narrow neck of land connecting the North End from the present downtown area. For an online exhibit of Big Dig archaeology, see the Commonwealth Museum Website.

For a sprightly summary of the archaeology, see Norma Jane Langford, “Colonial Boston Unearthed,” Archaeology, September 26, 1997.

This essay includes colored photos of redware and white salt-glazed stoneware from the Cross Street back lot privies and earthen and glassware from the Three Cranes Tavern site as well as a photo of a reinstallation in Charlestown Square of posts from John Winthrop’s great house and foundation stones from the Three Cranes Tavern.

For a more detailed and technical analysis, see a special issue of Historical Archaeology 32 (1998), which includes: Lauren J. Cook, “Katherine Nanny, alias Naylor”: A Life in Puritan Boston,” 15-19; Dana B. Heck and Joseph Balicki, “Katherine Naylor’s “House of Office’: A Seventeenth-Century Privy,” 24-37; Allison Bain, “A Seventeenth-Century Beetle Fauna from Colonial Boston,” 38-48; Gerald K. Kelso, “Pollen Analysis of the Feature 4 Privy at the Cross Street Back Lot Site, Boston, Massachusetts,” 49-62; Martin G. Dudek, Lawrence Kaplan, and Marie Mansfield King, “Botanical Remains from a Seventeenth-Century Privy at the Cross Street Back Lot Site,” 63-71; Gregory J. Brown and Joanne Bowen, “Animal Bones from the Cross Street Back Lot Privy,” 72-80; Margaret T. Ordonez and Linda Welters, “Textiles from the Seventeenth-Century Privy at the Cross Street Back Lot Site,” 81-90; and Jeffrey A. Butterworth, “Forming the Past,” 91-98.

The primary sources on the Edward Naylor-Katharine Naylor divorce can be found in Suffolk County Files, #1148, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston. (I wish to thank Michelle Morris, who is writing a Ph.D. dissertation on family life in early Massachusetts, for sharing her transcriptions.)

For colored images of Catherine Naylor’s neighbors John and Elizabeth Freake, click here. To trace early inhabitants of Boston, see a new resource produced jointly by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New England Historic Genealogical Society: Annie Haven Thwing, Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630-1800 and The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 1630-1822, CD-ROM, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2001. For the rules of lawn bowling, click here.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. Her latest book is The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001).

On October 1, 1768, the American Revolution began for Mercy Otis Warren. On that day, a “hostile parade” of British soldiers marched through the streets of Boston in a time of peace. The result of the city’s seventeen-month military occupation was a confrontation on King Street in 1770 that became known as the Boston Massacre. John Adams would later comment, “on that night the Foundation of American Independence was laid.” The connection made by both Warren and Adams between the presence of British soldiers and the course of American independence highlights the influence the occupation had on Bostonians’ perceptions of their British identity. It is a theme that Richard Archer elaborates in As If an Enemy’s Country, which argues that the period between the “parade” and the massacre fractured Bostonians’ British identity and laid the foundation for the emergence of a new, American identity.

Archer’s narration of events leading to the massacre is not new. His contribution resides in his interpretation of how these events shaped Bostonians’ concepts of their status within the British Empire. He argues that upon the regiments’ arrival, Boston became an “enemy’s country” in the citizens’ mind because the action challenged their status as equal British subjects. The occupation initiated a permanent shift in Bostonian identity. He prefaces this argument by affirming that neither the massacre nor the revolution was inevitable, but both resulted from a series of compounding choices made by colonists and the British government. Archer’s goal is to demonstrate that as the relationship between Bostonians and enforcers of parliamentary policy (soldiers and officials) broke down so did the colonists’ concept of their status within the empire.

He begins by laying out colonial resistance to Parliamentary taxation, particularly the Stamp Act. By tracing the reactions of royal officials, Whig leaders, and the actions of Boston’s mob, Archer argues that by the spring of 1766, Bostonians had shown their willingness to resort to “extralegal measures” in the name of preserving their rights as British citizens (39). He contends Parliament encouraged this behavior by ignoring “the plight of the colonists” and refusing to read the petitions sent in protest (45). This “marked the beginning of an opposition movement” (39) which encompassed a wide cross-section of the population. No single group—not merchants, town officials, consumers, ministers, or the mob—could resist Parliamentary taxation on their own. He argues an unintended consequence of the Stamp Act was that the collective resistance to the legislation brought Bostonians together by “giving them a common cause and an emerging identity” (47).

Archer identifies the interim period between the repeal of the Stamp Act and the arrival of troops as a series of blunders and poor decisions on the part of royal officials, both in Boston and London. The intent was to affirm Britain’s authority over the colonies, but the resistance to the Townshend program left Great Britain with only two options. They could repeal the taxes, as they had with the Stamp Act, or send the military to enforce the legislation. The improper seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty was a further extension of the governing officials desire to enforce British regulations. Archer contrasts Britain’s increasing authoritative actions and the final decision to send troops with Bostonians’ increased efforts to remain loyal subjects. On the eve of the arrival of the two regiments, the Massachusetts Convention proved this by not reaffirming the need to resist government policy by any means, but instead confirming, “almost all citizens were genuinely loyal to Great Britain” (103).

The period between the arrival of troops in the fall 1768 and the massacre in March 1770 convinced Bostonians of the government’s intent to deny them their rights as British citizens. Archer argues that the presence and actions of the troops increased the citizens’ consciousness of their subjugation. He cites the soldiers’ encouragement of slave uprisings, assaults on women, disruptions of the Sabbath, and theft, among other social transgressions, as constant reminders of the city’s occupation. As a result, Bostonians of all political and economic factions came to identify themselves in opposition to the soldiers. The troops, however, limited their options for resistance. Archer argues Bostonians understood that violent mob action would validate Britain’s decision to occupy the city and therefore, they searched for an alternative form of recourse. Non-importation remained the strongest form of resistance and proved to unite merchants across political lines.

A stream of conflicts, including the disapproval and scaring-off of John Mein and the death of Christopher Seider, heightened the agitation of the colonists at their continued occupation. The massacre on March 5 was the culmination of the colonists’ frustration over their occupation and, as Archer points out, their victory. In the aftermath, the removal of troops from Boston and the repealing of most of the Townshend duties (except for the one on tea), gave citizens a sense that the course of resistance they pursued was the appropriate one. Following these perceived victories, particularly the removal of the troops, the non-importation movement began to fracture. According to Archer, the consensus among the citizens was a desired return to “normalcy”—a city unoccupied by soldiers and no longer burdened with taxation. Despite a partial regaining of the “quasi-autonomy that had existed prior to the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War,” the sense of alienation within the empire was permanent (226). Bostonians’ opinions radicalized during the occupation and confirmed that the colonists were “not a subordinate but a separate people” (228).

By focusing attention on the shift in Bostonians’ identity, Archer’s work is an overdue advancement on the dominant interpretation espoused in Hiller Zobel’s The Boston Massacre (1970). His detailed account examines the events as an erosion of authority led by manipulative Whig leaders and dealt with by frustrated officials. Archer elaborates on Zobel’s assertion that the massacre resulted from a breakdown in law and order, but argues that Bostonians’ collective trust of British authority dissolved as their perception of oppression increased. By expanding on the legal ramifications of the events surrounding the massacre, Archer focuses needed attention on the how the economic and social strains created by occupation had permanent consequences for colonial identity.

Though Archer is able to show the formation of a separate identity in Boston, he mirrors Zobel’s narrative of the events and does not engage the implications of the massacre’s commemoration. Archer does not, as Zobel does, write off the anniversary orations of the massacre as “naive rhetoric,” but claims that the commemorations between 1771-1783 signified “a political and psychological need for the citizens to remember” (229).

This “need” is vital, but remains unexplored in Archer’s historical narrative. It’s obvious that the annual celebration of March 5 promoted cultural cohesion in Boston by harnessing the massacre’s memory to remind citizens of the shared struggle to preserve liberty and prevent tyranny represented by a standing army. Unfortunately, despite his assertion that the orations were an annual reminder of “the existence of Bostonians and other colonists as a people apart, a population with unraveling ties to the British Empire,” Archer does not take the next step to connect the massacre to its memory (229). By limiting himself to the standard narrative of events, Archer misses an opportunity to examine the subsequent legacy of March 5 and the evolution of a non-British identity after 1770. Archer succeeds in arguing that Boston’s occupation in the years prior to the massacre fractured their British identity; but what is missing is a full examination of how citizens maintained that identity in the following years leading to independence. Only by examining the meaning of the massacre, and its origins in conjunction with its commemoration, can historians develop an understanding of its significance to Bostonians in terms of collective memory, identity formation, and its broader relationship to the revolution.

Archer’s As If an Enemy’s Country contributes to the ongoing debate over the formation of American identity. His persuasive argument focuses on when and how Bostonians started to question their understanding of themselves as British and leads to his conclusion that, “the first American revolution was in Bostonians’ sense of their identity” (228).

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

Nichole George is a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame and is currently researching Boston’s Pope Day gangs, the spread of colonial unity through processional rituals, and the transformation from English to an American identity.

Whale consumption in the lives of Plymouth colonists

Whales have always been big in New England. They were big and plentiful off of Cape Cod when the Mayflower arrived; they were big money in the nineteenth century when New Bedford lit the world with whale oil; and they are big tourist attractions today, drawing thousands of whale watchers out to Stellwagen Bank every summer, where the world’s largest mammals can be seen grazing on tiny sea foods, throwing their flukes skyward, and breaching into the sunset. Though now fully committed to whale saving, New Englanders are eerily proud of their whaling past. From Nantucket to Provincetown, sperm-whale weathervanes and sea captains’ houses turned bed-and-breakfasts crowd the landscape, and the tools used in the chase and the slaughter stand boldly on display at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum, the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, the Nantucket Historical Association’s newly renovated whaling museum, and countless other small, local historical societies, public libraries, and historic houses. Local newspapers do their part to keep this history alive by periodically publishing articles, such as “A Century Ago, Cape Codders Hunted Whales,” that marvel at the region’s transformation from a land of prosperous whale killers to a land of prosperous whale watchers.

The tedium of our daily lives makes it easy for us to watch whales for pleasure. Standing in the oil aisle of the grocery store trying to decide between extra-virgin olive oil, pure golden olive oil, corn oil, peanut oil, or canola oil; carting home jugs of laundry detergent; turning bright electric lights on with a twitch of a finger; squeezing into and out of spandex in fitting rooms and then paying for our purchases with a small slice of plastic—we forget that there is more one could do with a whale besides capturing it with our cameras.

No one in seventeenth-century New England watched whales for pleasure. Even in 1620, two centuries before New Bedford began sending out fifty whaleships a year, the religious Separatists who founded Plymouth Colony knew that whales meant big money. As the first permanent English settlement in New England, the Plymouth colonists garnered a privileged place in American history as the “Pilgrims.” To historians of the American whaling industry, they appear as founding fathers of a very different sort, important for being the first among the English to advertise the bounty of whales off the coast of southern New England. In the anonymous memoir of their first year in New England, known as Mourt’s Relation (1622), they reported that while lying at anchor in what is now Provincetown Harbor, they saw large whales, “the best kind for oil and bone,” swim about the Mayflower every day and that the Mayflower‘s “master and his mate, and others experienced in fishing, professed we might have made three or four thousands pounds’ worth of oil. They preferred it before Greenland whale-fishing, and purpose the next winter to fish for whale here.” But without the “instruments and means to take them,” the Separatists had to forsake a “very rich return.”

Cape Cod's shallow bays and shifting sands are partly to blame for the region's frequent whale strandings. Samuel de Champlain's map of Malle Barre (Nauset Harbor), based on soundings taken during his 1605 voyage around Cape Cod, graphically portrays the dangers Cape Cod's shoreline posed to ships and whales alike. From H. H. Langton and W. F. Ganong, trans., The Works of Samuel de Champlain . . . (Vol. 1) Reprinted, Translated and Annotated by Six Canadian Scholars under the General Editorship of H. P. Biggar (1922). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. Click image for enlargement — Cape Cod’s shallow bays and shifting sands are partly to blame for the region’s frequent whale strandings. Samuel de Champlain’s map of Malle Barre (Nauset Harbor), based on soundings taken during his 1605 voyage around Cape Cod, graphically portrays the dangers Cape Cod’s shoreline posed to ships and whales alike. From H. H. Langton and W. F. Ganong, trans., The Works of Samuel de Champlain . . . (Vol. 1) Reprinted, Translated and Annotated by Six Canadian Scholars under the General Editorship of H. P. Biggar (1922). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. Click image for enlargement

The Separatists later saw more whales while searching Cape Cod for the perfect settlement site, and with Mourt’s Relation they became the first to describe in print what a typical New England whale stranding looked like. A small scouting party sent to investigate Cape Cod Bay came across “a great fish, called a grampus, dead on the sands” and then two more lying dead in the shallows. They next saw from a distance a group of Indians on the beach “very busy about a black thing.” The Indians ran off when they saw the Separatists but took something away with them. When the English arrived at that spot, they discovered that the black thing was also “a grampus,” or what would be called a blackfish in subsequent centuries and a long-finned pilot whale in today’s nomenclature. Small whales, technically large dolphins, measuring only fifteen to twenty feet, pilot whales are notorious mass stranders, rushing crazily toward land in certain predictable hotspots around the world, from New Zealand to the inside elbow of Cape Cod. The dead grampuses saddened the Separatists, not for sentimental reasons, not from wonder at this brutal surprise wrought by God or Nature, but because this was another lost profit opportunity. The grampuses were “some five or six paces long, and about two inches thick of fat, and fleshed like a swine” and “would have yielded a great deal of oil if there had been time and means to have taken it.”

The Indians no doubt regretted the Separatists’ inopportune appearance for much the same reason. They would have been accustomed to the sea sporadically throwing up whales onto the beach—not just pilot whales but also behemoth right whales, fin whales, humpbacks, and maybe even an occasional sperm whale—and they would have learned to watch the shore in anticipation whenever the seasons changed or right after a nor’easter storm.

The Separatists described how the Indians had butchered the “black thing” into long strips, which is what the Separatists had seen the Indians carrying away as they fled. These strips were no doubt the blubber, the several-inch-thick layer of fat that helps marine mammals withstand cold ocean temperatures and which could be rendered into oil over a hot fire. Back then and still today, oil is a miracle elixir. Indians probably used whale oil like any other animal fat. They could cook with it, rub it into the body to keep the bugs from biting, or tan deer hides with it. If the pilot whale was still fresh, the Indians would likely have consumed its flesh. Once they had stripped the carcass of meat and blubber, the Indians then would have made fish hooks, scrapers, and other tools from the bones.

Pilot whales (the Separatists' grampuses, later called blackfish) strand frequently on the inside elbow of Cape Cod. By the eighteenth century, the Separatists' descendants had also learned how to drive pilot whales to shore, where they were slaughtered and sold for their oil. This 1910 postcard appears to depict a natural stranding, much larger in scale than that witnessed by the Separatists in 1620. From the Postcard Collection at the American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — Pilot whales (the Separatists’ grampuses, later called blackfish) strand frequently on the inside elbow of Cape Cod. By the eighteenth century, the Separatists’ descendants had also learned how to drive pilot whales to shore, where they were slaughtered and sold for their oil. This 1910 postcard appears to depict a natural stranding, much larger in scale than that witnessed by the Separatists in 1620. From the Postcard Collection at the American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

The Separatists wanted those grampuses for themselves but for a different purpose. They wanted to sell them in the global marketplace. Each of their whale sightings prompted visions of the entire industrial whaling process, from the gathering of the raw material, to the manufacturing of it into “oil and bone” (bone referred not to the skeleton but to “whalebone,” now called baleen), and finally to the sale of these commodities at market for great profit. The Separatists’ readiness to see living, swimming whales as cash, as four thousand pounds worth of oil and baleen, tells us that they were already familiar with the existing whaling industry in Europe and that they knew exactly which parts of whales European consumers desired and were most likely to purchase.

The Separatists dropped clues as to where their knowledge about whales came from. The captain, mate, and others of the crew “experienced in fishing” said they “preferred it before Greenland whale-fishing.” In 1620, the English whaling industry at Spitsbergen, or “Greenland,” was only nine years old. The Muscovy Company sent the first English whaleship, the Mary-Margaret, to Spitsbergen in 1611, fully stocked with harpoons, shallops, winches, cutting knives, large copper kettles for boiling blubber into oil, and most importantly half-a-dozen Basque whalemen from the town of St. Jean de Luz, France. Up until that point, French and Spanish Basques had dominated Europe’s whaling industry. Basques had hunted right whales in the Bay of Biscay for several centuries and then sometime in the mid-sixteenth century expanded their whaling operations across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Before the English took up whaling for themselves, they envied and poached on Basque whaling. Whenever English ships explored the northeastern coast of North America or fished for cod around Newfoundland, they kept a lookout for wounded whales along the beaches, pillaged Basque shore-whaling stations, and occasionally sacked Basque whaling vessels, taking the whale oil and baleen as booty.

Finback whales have also stranded on Cape Cod, but usually only one at a time. Postcard in the Postcard Collection at the American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

The odds are against any of the Mayflower‘s crew having served on the Mary-Margaret, but very likely one or more of them had been to Spitsbergen. In the nine years between the start of the English whaling industry and the Mayflower‘s sailing for New England, the Muscovy Company sent ever-larger whaling expeditions to Spitsbergen every summer. Other English whalers, mainly from Hull, left for Spitsbergen, too, despite James I’s royal patent of 1613, which awarded the Muscovy Company exclusive rights to Spitsbergen’s whales. There is even some speculation that the Mayflower itself went whaling in Spitsbergen sometime between 1616 and 1619, when its whereabouts are unknown. Previous to 1616, the Mayflower had carried wine, prunes, herring, tar, and other trade between Britain and continental Europe. Since master and part-owner of the Mayflower Christopher Jones had among his Harwich and London connections some family and acquaintances known to have invested in whaling, he may have been tempted to try his hand at it himself. If the Mayflower had been whaling in Spitsbergen in the years immediately before its transatlantic crossing, its violation of the Muscovy Company’s monopoly helps explain why it briefly disappears from the documentary record.

A voyage or two to Spitsbergen did not automatically transform English sailors and fishermen into whalemen, however. During the nine years after the opening up of the Spitsbergen whaling grounds, the English whale fishery remained wholly dependent on Basque expertise. Whoever it was among the Mayflower‘s crew who turned to the Separatists and said of the right whales off of Cape Cod, these are “the best kind for oil and bone,” owed that piece of wisdom to the Basques at Spitsbergen who less than a decade before had pointed to the right whales’ near relative, the bowhead, and said to their English employers, these are “the best kind of Whales.”

Whales and walruses ("Seamorses") drew the English to Spitsbergen, depicted on this map as "Greneland," in the early 1600s. The drawings around the edges of this map probably were derived from Robert Fotherby's watercolors. Map by Edward Pellam, from Adam White, Esq., ed., A Collection of Documents on Spitzbergen & Greenland . . . God's Power and Providence; Shewed, in the Miracvlous Preservation and Deliverance of Eight Englishmen, Left by Mischance in Green-land, Anno 1630, Nine Moneths and Twelve Dayes (London, 1855). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. Click image for enlargement — Whales and walruses (“Seamorses”) drew the English to Spitsbergen, depicted on this map as “Greneland,” in the early 1600s. The drawings around the edges of this map probably were derived from Robert Fotherby’s watercolors. Map by Edward Pellam, from Adam White, Esq., ed., A Collection of Documents on Spitzbergen & Greenland . . . God’s Power and Providence; Shewed, in the Miracvlous Preservation and Deliverance of Eight Englishmen, Left by Mischance in Green-land, Anno 1630, Nine Moneths and Twelve Dayes (London, 1855). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. Click image for enlargement

If there were veterans of Spitsbergen aboard the Mayflower, we can reconstruct some of what they saw and experienced from the detailed reports produced by the Muscovy Company. Determined to acquire Basque expertise as quickly as possible, one of the company’s officers, Robert Fotherby, made a particularly close study of Basque practices in 1613. With twenty-four Basques along, this expedition gave Fotherby plenty of opportunities to see them in action. In “The Manner of Killing the Whale, and of the whole Proceedings for performeing of the Voyage,” he put together an instruction manual of sorts, which illustrated in words and watercolors each step of the whaling process, from the initial chase to the final stowing of bundled whalebone and casks of oil for transport back to England. His manual depicts three Basque shallops each holding five men, four at oars and one man standing at the bow with harpoon in hand, bearing down on a ferocious looking whale. The “whale-striker” throws his harpoon, to which “is made fast a rope.” Pinioned like a fish on a fishhook, the whale swims off “wth an uncontrowled force and swiftnes; hurrying the shallop after him.” After a mile or more, when the whale comes spouting up to the surface to breathe, the men row their shallop in close to “strike him wth long launces, wch are made purposelie for that vse,” aiming deeply into the whale near its “swimming finne” to tear at its vital organs. Upon the whale’s death, the three shallops tow it to the ship, where workmen begin cutting off large chunks of blubber. Sent to shore to be chopped into smaller pieces, the blubber then goes to the coppers to be boiled into oil and eventually casked. Meanwhile, the head of the whale is towed to shore, where a group of workmen take hatchets to it, cutting out strips of baleen from the whale’s mouth. Laying each strip of baleen on a board at waist level, one man scrapes away its hairy, fibrous fringe. They then rub each piece of baleen with sand to rid it of any lingering oil, sort the strips into five different grades, and bundle them together, writing on each bundle a number and the company’s mark. Fully processed, the whale has now been turned into products ready for sale to consumers.

Given the ruthless competition between the English and Dutch for Spitsbergen’s whales, those Separatists who emigrated directly from England and those who had just left Leyden, Holland, would have been equals in their ability to recognize that whaling could be an immensely profitable business. Surprisingly, however, they seemed oblivious to whaling’s risks. The Mayflower crew fed the Separatists’ fantasy of easy money. They did not mention all they knew of Spitsbergen whaling, neither the fierce international competition nor the vagaries of the market. Even with its monopoly privileges, the Muscovy Company’s whaling experiences made for a sorry history. In its first year of operation, 1611, the company sent two ships, both of which wrecked at Spitsbergen. Both ships’ crews had to beg for passage home on a vessel from Hull. In 1612, they met “with much difficultie; as not being experimented in the businesse.” Company employees then spent the entire summer of 1613 wrangling with the Spanish, French, and Dutch, resulting in a colossal three- to four-thousand-pound loss. In 1614 and 1615 they had to return “halfe laden” with oil before the ice set in for the winter. Finally, in 1616 and 1617, the company had two profitable years, and its ships returned home fully loaded with whale oil, baleen, and walrus teeth, only to face their two worst years yet, 1618 and 1619. Outgunned by the Dutch and Danes, the company’s whaling convoy suffered an “exceeding great losse” in both years, made worse by the success of the Dutch who flooded the market with their whale oil. Burdened by such weighty losses, the Muscovy Company got out of the whaling business in 1619.

These are some of the watercolors attributed to Muscovy Company operative Robert Fotherby on his 1613 voyage to Spitsbergen. These three paintings show whalemen harpooning a whale and cutting off the blubber to process it into oil. From A Voyage to Greenland, 1613—A Journal 1613. A Journal taken from the Manuscript/Folio Materials at the American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. Fig. 5: Whale being harpooned.

Fig.7: Whale blubber in sections for processing.

That the Separatists thought they might be able to do what the Muscovy Company could not was optimism born of desperation. Successful whaling required special tools and expertise, which the Mayflower on its 1620 voyage lacked. The ship had aboard only a big and clumsy shallop, no harpoons, no lances, and no Basques. There is no evidence that the Mayflower, Master Christopher Jones, or any of the rest of the crew returned to Cape Cod Bay in later years to catch the whales they had remarked upon in 1620. Nor did the Separatists themselves turn to whaling immediately. They tried their hand at fishing only to encounter setbacks. So, they then directed their energies to the one activity primed to turn an immediate profit, the Indian fur trade.

Although the Mayflower crew and the Separatists fell short as producers of manufactured whale products, they would have been savvy whale consumers, probably having grown up around whale oil and baleen purchased from Basque manufacturers. As the first Europeans to develop large-scale industrial whaling, the Basques were also the first to market their whale products throughout Western Europe. By the time the Basque whale fishery in North America reached its peak, in the mid- to late sixteenth century, whale oil and baleen had become the most valued by-products of whales among European consumers. The Basques sold oil and baleen in Spain, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Basque whale oil lit churches and municipal buildings and was, along with vegetable and fish oils, used in soapmaking, candle making, leather tanning, and the production of woolen textiles. As simply another kind of oil, whale oil’s utility was immediately obvious in contrast to baleen, a distinctive material for which new applications had to be invented. A cartilage-like substance often compared to human fingernails or modern-day plastic, baleen’s firmness made it a good substitute for animal horn or wood, but it was also more pliable. When heated, baleen could be molded into various shapes, and in the seventeenth century it was increasingly to be found in a multitude of handy objects from riding whips to fishing rods.

In its most common use, baleen gave structure to women’s underclothes. The Basques were probably the first to insert baleen into clothes. Words for some of these undergarments, “busk” and “basque,” hint at Basque origins. The “busk” was a thin, decorative plate made of baleen, horn, wood, or metal, which women wore at the front of the chest to keep their torsos straight and rigid. The “basque,” or “farthingale” in England, anticipated the hoop skirt and pushed skirts out at the hips. Legend has it that Catherine of Aragon imported the fashionable cone-shaped torso and big hips look to England in the mid-sixteenth century when she married King Henry VIII. If so, then we know where her underclothes came from. They began with a Newfoundland whale, which Spanish Basques had captured, butchered, reduced to whale oil and baleen, and stored in the hold of a ship as it crossed the Atlantic to a Basque port. There the baleen would have been sold to a whalebone merchant, sold again to a dressmaker or tailor, eventually ending up in the Queen of England’s undergarments.

By 1620, what had once been elite, foreign fashions had trickled down to become standard women’s wear among Europe’s middling classes, including English Puritans, whose bodice—or as the Separatist women would have said, “pair of bodies”—consisted of two pieces of linen laced together and, if they could afford it, stiffened with whalebone stays stitched into the garment. Some of the Mayflower women may have been wearing a pair of bodies with whalebone stays as the ship crossed the Atlantic. Perhaps Dorothy Bradford, wife of Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford, did not commit suicide by jumping off the Mayflower when anchored in Provincetown Harbor as some have speculated but, made dizzy and breathless by whalebone bodies bound too tight, lost her balance to fall among the whales swimming in the water below.

It was not just the Mayflower women who had an intimate connection to whales. The Separatists’ boots, shoes, gloves, and other leather apparel might well have been tanned in whale oil. The woolen cloth of their pantaloons, skirts, coats, and blankets may have been dressed with whale oil when on the loom or washed in soap made from whale oil. And the many weavers, cloth makers, tailors, leather tanners, and glove makers among the Separatist men residing in Leyden, Holland, probably used whale oil in the course of their work. Like other ordinary English or Dutch people in the early seventeenth century, the Separatists knew that whales meant money because the tedium of their daily lives tied them to the consumption of whale products in the same humdrum sorts of ways that we are connected to the animal, vegetable, and petroleum oils that, in some manufactured form, we use to enrich our food, keep ourselves clean, and decorate our bodies.

Whalebone stiffened women's undergarments through the nineteenth century. The rigid, cone-shaped torso of this eighteenth-century New England woman suggests that she is likely wearing a corset with whalebone stays. Portrait of Hannah Ackley Bush, by M'Kay, 1791. From the Portrait Collections at the American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — Whalebone stiffened women’s undergarments through the nineteenth century. The rigid, cone-shaped torso of this eighteenth-century New England woman suggests that she is likely wearing a corset with whalebone stays. Portrait of Hannah Ackley Bush, by M’Kay, 1791. From the Portrait Collections at the American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

In the first few decades after their 1620 arrival, the Plymouth colonists probably suffered from a shortage of whale products. Initially ill-equipped to catch New England’s whales, they had to depend on the occasional whale stranding. In the 1650s, Southampton and East Hampton, English towns on the eastern end of Long Island, initiated the first successful shore-whaling operations in the northeast. Cape Cod followed a decade or two later and then the island of Nantucket shortly after that. In the nineteenth century, New Englanders dominated the global whaling industry and could be found trolling for whales in all the world’s oceans from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific to the Arctic. Americans would continue to consume whale products well into the twentieth century, right up until 1972, when the Marine Mammal Protection Act outlawed whaling and the importation of whale products to the United States.

For whaling history, see Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (New York, 2007) and Richard Ellis, Men and Whales (New York, 1991). For the history of Plymouth Colony, I recommend the Separatists’ own story as told in Dwight B. Heath, ed., Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (1622; Bedford, Mass., 1963) along with James F. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, 1977) and James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York, 2001).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Nancy Shoemaker teaches history at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (2004) and other books in American Indian history. Her current research is on New England Indians and the American whaling industry.

Signed with a flourish across the top by Captain Joseph (José) Vidal (1797-1869), this little-known printed notice was distributed by the Natchez office of the Mississippi Herald in late October 1802 (fig. 1). While measuring only 6.8 x 11.2 in. (17.5 x 28.5 cm.), “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” is in keeping, in terms of its size, with many eighteenth and early nineteenth-century broadsides. Broadsides are defined as separately published and unfolded pages, created and sold for public display.

1. "Port of New-Orleans SHUT." Published by Andrew Marschalk (Natchez, Miss., October 28, 1802), 6.8 x 11.2 in. (17.5 x 28.5 cm.) Courtesy of the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain. — 1. “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” Published by Andrew Marschalk (Natchez, Miss., October 28, 1802), 6.8 x 11.2 in. (17.5 x 28.5 cm.) AGI, Cuba 95, 523a, fol.1084 — “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” España. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Archivo General de Indias. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain.

The sole extant print of multiple originals, today “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” remains in the collection of the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain. The ephemerality of the original series, whose existence was nearly forgotten forever save this single example, contrasts with the indelible event it announced: Spain’s final closure of the port of New Orleans to Americans, which revoked their “right of deposit,” re-activated by Intendant Juan Ventura Morales (1756-1819) in April 1798. The following paragraphs explore this rare document, its origin, and the meaning of Vidal’s signature.

Nueva Orleans and “Right of Deposit”

Established in 1718, New Orleans was the capital of France’s vast Louisiana Territory. Yet, by the Treaty of Fontainebleau (1762) following the French and Indian War, France ceded Louisiana to Spain, for whom the territory functioned as a bulwark against British incursions into New Spain. Later, Spain, under constant threat of Anglo-American invasion, endeavored to strengthen political ties with United States via the Treaty of San Lorenzo (July 1795). Amidst the resolution of various border disputes for this agreement, Thomas Pinckney, the United States’ minister in Great Britain, also successfully negotiated with Spain for free navigation of the Mississippi River and tax-free export via Nueva Orleans. By “right of deposit,” established by Article 22 of the San Lorenzo treaty (or Pinckney’s Treaty), American agents were permitted to store and export their goods through Spanish New Orleans duty free.

However, by order of this printed decree, originally published by Juan Morales on October 16, 1802, the Intendant rescinded the right of deposit: “I order that from this date shall cease the privilege which the Americans had of bringing and depositing their goods in this capitol. And that the foregoing may be publicly known, and that no body may plead ignorance, I order it to be published in the accustomed places, copies to be posted up in public . . .” Morales’ controversial order is generally thought to have originated with Miguel Cayetano Soyer, Spain’s minister of the Treasury, though historian Arthur Whitaker cites pressure from France to thwart American commerce, and the topic remains debated. It is noteworthy that Louisiana, via the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800), was, in fact a possession of France in 1802. As Whitaker notes, Pierre-Clement de Laussat, sent by Napoleon to serve as colonial prefect at New Orleans observed the following: “The Anglo-American flag eclipses by its number here those of France and Spain. . . . They (Americans) are poisoning these countries with English goods, with which French goods cannot compete.” Whatever its precise cause, Morales’ order provoked immediate outrage among merchants, who challenged its authenticity and legality.

2. Mississippi Herald, published by Andrew Marschalk (Natchez, Miss., August 10, 1802). Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society. — 2. *Mississippi Herald*, published by Andrew Marschalk (Natchez, Miss., August 10, 1802). Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.

Numerous American newspaper editorials decried the embargo and demanded Louisiana’s cessation or purchase, though the matter had been under consideration for some time. In 1798, a petition by the people of Kentucky to Congress demanded navigation rights.

The Mississippi is ours by the law of nature; it belongs to us by our numbers, and by the labour which we have bestowed on those spots which before our arrival, were desert and barren. Our innumerable rivers swell it, and flow with it into the Gulf of Mexico. Its mouth is the only issue which nature has given to our waters, and we wish to use it for our vessels. We do not prevent the Spanish and French from ascending the river to our towns and villages. We wish, in our turn to descend it without any interruption to its mouth, to ascend it again, and to exercise our privilege of trading on it and navigating it at our pleasure. If our most entire liberty in this matter is disputed, nothing will prevent our taking possession of the capital (of Louisiana), and when we are once masters of it, we will know how to maintain ourselves there. If Congress refuses us effectual protection, if it forsakes us, we will adopt the measures that our safety requires, even if they endanger the Peace of the Union and our connection with other States. No protection, no allegiance.

Morales’ 1802 embargo realized the American merchants’ simmering concerns.

The broadside resurfaces

We likely owe the rediscovery of this broadside at the Archivo General de Indias to Douglas Crawford McMurtrie (1888-1944), whose posthumous Bibliography of Mississippi Imprints, 1798-1830 includes a description and photostatic copy kept in the Library of Congress. It is not known precisely how “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” entered the Archivo General collection, though it was likely among the papers of Spanish Louisiana officials who returned to Spain via Havana during the late nineteenth century. Following the Louisiana Purchase, administrators such as Morales were dispatched to Pensacola and retained many records pertinent to their administration. Captain Vidal, then secretary to the Mississippi Territory’s Spanish Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, may have directed the notice to his associates in Spain in 1802.

For nearly two centuries, the notice remained bound together with a handwritten Spanish translation of its contents. Prolonged direct contact with that manuscript resulted in the imprint of that handwriting on its surface. According to Guillermo José Morán Dauchez of AGI, the ink used for the translation was a common one of that era called “metalogallic,” made of iron dust and gallic acid. Such ink acquires a characteristic sepia tone as it effectively rusts, causing the aforementioned imprint. Recently conservators isolated the sheet from other materials to prevent further acidification.

The printer

A notation at the bottom of the page reads, “Herald Office, Natchez, Thursday Night, October 28, 1802.” This line indicates that the broadside was printed at the offices of the Mississippi Herald, founded in June 1802 by New York-born Andrew Marschalk (1767-1838), though his name does not appear on the document. Marschalk learned the printing trade in London, where he acquired a mahogany printing press in 1790 and shipped it to America. While serving in the United States Army, Marschalk was commissioned to print the new laws of the Territory in Natchez, which he accomplished with a second press that he crafted himself to accommodate larger pages.

The Mississippi Herald ran under various names, including the Mississippi Herald, and Natchez Repository, until 1807. Its earliest surviving editions of August 10 and 17, 1802, remain in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, though no issues exist in any collection from the month of October 1802 (fig. 2). The dimensions of the earliest editions of 1802-3 (at the New-York Historical Society, Harvard, and the Library Company of Philadelphia) are consistent at 16.1 x 27.2 in. (41 x 69 cm.), indicating that “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” was a separate broadside commission independent from the regular newspaper. However, other newspapers such as Philadelphia’s Aurora general advertiser of Nov. 24, 1802, printed similar advice in their pages (fig. 3).

Documents such as “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” and the Aurora notice, “New Orleans Shut” remind us of the slower pace at which news travelled during the early nineteenth century. For example, an interval of nearly two weeks took place between Morales’s declaration and its translation and printing in Natchez for an American audience. (For travel upriver from New Orleans to Natchez, this amount of time for news to travel was then quite efficient.) Further, another month passed before this news hit the Philadelphia papers. Certainly, a well-developed American military presence poised at Fort McHenry near Natchez expedited the shift in power at New Orleans following the Louisiana Purchase (1803). However, letters in the collection of Tulane University from Miguel Cayetano Soyer to Juan Morales as late as May 1805 describe James Monroe’s recent appearance in Spain and resolutely dismiss Monroe and Thomas Pinckney’s entreaty that the United States be compensated for the enormous loss of goods as hundreds of ships languished at the New Orleans docks two years prior.

3. “New-Orleans Shut,” Aurora General Advertiser (Philadelphia, November 24, 1802). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — 3. “New-Orleans Shut,” *Aurora* *General Advertiser* (Philadelphia, November 24, 1802). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

A “Letter from a gentleman”

Future examination of the Archivo General de Indias documents originally bound with Captain Vidal’s copy of “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” may reveal more evidence. However, the purpose of his signature is explained in F. Baily’s “Description of Louisiana,” published in Sir Richard Phillips’ Monthly Magazine, or, British Register (Vol. XV), for January-July 1803. Having visited Louisiana between 1796 and 1797, Baily explains:

The present dispute between America and Spain respecting the shutting of the port of New Orleans, having engrossed considerable attention in the political world, I have taken the liberty of sending you a description of that city . . . extracted principally from a journal which I kept during my travels.

Among his many observations, he took note of a local printer:

There is but one printing-press in this town, and that is for the use of the Government only. The Spaniards are too jealous to suffer the inhabitants to have the free exercise of it; and however strange it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that you cannot stick a paper against the wall (either to recover anything lost, or to advertise anything for sale) unless it has the signature of the Governor or his Secretary attached to it.

In the years following the death of Governor Gayoso in 1799 and prior to the Louisiana Purchase, José Vidal served as the Spanish Commandant of the Post of Concordia in Natchez. His imprimatur legitimized Marschalk’s broadsides displayed in the Mississippi Territory at Morales’ request and which showed “intelligence” provided by an anonymous (and potentially unreliable) source in the form of an “Extract of a Letter from a gentleman in New-Orleans to his friend in this place.”

Vidal’s signature, required to authorize this document’s display and contents, implies the complexity of power relations in the lower Mississippi River Valley as French, Spanish, and American officials operated neck-and-neck. While it made its way, probably among a Spanish official’s papers, into the Archivo General de Indias, it is an American broadside, printed in English, by an American press, and relaying a message for an American audience that was entrenched in the Mississippi Territory, militarily and otherwise. While it explicitly relays Morales’ message, “Port of New-Orleans SHUT.” just as boldly implies the inevitability of Anglo-American hegemony in the Gulf South.

Money, Money, Money: The Seventeenth-Century Effort to Get an Intellectual Grasp on this Slippery Medium of Trade

The seventeenth-century effort to get an intellectual grasp on this slippery medium of trade

The early colonization of British North America coincided with England’s break-away century of economic development. Annual harvests had freed the English from famines, and by the 1690s, a market that encompassed the whole British Empire had taken shape. An ever-expanding network of trade tied the English economy to the staple colonies of the New World, the subcontinent of India, and the slave trade along the West Coast of Africa.

The market itself was a dislocating force not unlike an invading army. People were torn from customary relations and ways of working. Alien values intruded upon well-established mores. Customary explanations of behavior, human purpose, and social organization were challenged. Employment followed the new ups and downs of trade cycles; gluts produced depressions. These developments sharpened people’s perceptions of their pecuniary interests and at the same time encouraged close observations of the expanding system of private exchange.

But of all the novel elements in the new world of enterprise and exchange, none caused more headaches than money. A lot of diverse meanings crowded into that word. Money had always been a store of wealth, but it became the lubricator of a new economic order. It was now possible to buy and sell over longer distances and to preserve value farther into the future than had ever before been the case. Money had also become cash—the means of instant gratification. And money was—well—money, that is gold and silver minted to use as legal tender with the imprimatur of a monarch’s guarantee of amount and purity.

In England the mint ratio, the face value or denomination put on a certain quantity of silver, was too low. English currency, that is, was undervalued by the Crown. As a consequence, opportunistic Englishmen began melting down silver coin and exporting it to Europe as bullion where it could be sold for profit. The trade was illegal, but it was widely recognized as a common, if felonious, practice that created a shortage of coin. The enhanced value of silver abroad promoted a further fraud. Enterprising Englishmen and women discovered that they could clip off the edges of their hammered silver shillings and melt down the clippings for profitable export as silver.

All this illegal silver trade added to an economic problem England had been struggling with for a century or more: silver coin was in short supply relative to England’s needs for currency. By the last decade of the seventeenth century, the situation was becoming dire. The outbreak of war with France in 1689 had forced the government to send regular shipments of money to the continent to pay soldiers’ wages and to supply England’s allies abroad. As the shortage became more severe, attention focused upon the money mechanism itself.

How was this slippery medium of exchange to be corralled?

In 1695, when the king’s ministers finally addressed themselves to the twin problems of the shortage of coin and the battered condition of silver money, the situation was acute. The Privy Council sought the advice of Treasury Secretary William Lowndes who composed a report that was a model of monetary analysis. As long as bullion was worth more by weight than coin, Lowndes explained, silver in bulk would never be brought to the mint for coining. Rather, the opposite would take place: coin—already in short supply—would be melted down and shipped out as bullion, illegalities notwithstanding.

After detailing why the divergence of the prices of bullion and coin promoted the melting down of silver coins, Lowndes recommended that the clipped coin be called in and reminted with a devaluation of 25 percent (that is, with 25 percent less silver than the standard five shillings per ounce of silver). Such a recoinage would have mirrored the actual value of most shillings in circulation. And a new milling process, which produced sharp edges, would prevent the clipping that had been so easy with hammered coins.

The governing party was not altogether happy with Lowndes’s recommendation for a devaluation of the shilling. Above all, they feared it would lead to inflation or a rise in prices commensurate with the expansion of the money supply. In search of alternate solutions, they sought advice from the political philosopher John Locke. Locke responded with a refutation of Lowndes that followed the argument of his earlier treatise against statutory limits on usury: legislation cannot ultimately influence the value of loan rates or monetary exchange because these are determined by the market. The market, in turn, is governed by the interests of individuals. But Locke went further and claimed that silver had a natural value, which legislators and kings were unable to change, just as they were unable to set interest rates by statute.

As anyone familiar with his Second Treatise of Government will remember, Locke had a great deal at stake in this debate, for he had written that the use of gold and silver in exchange had arisen because in the state of nature, people had given an imaginary value to these precious metals. This consensual, imaginary value enabled them to get around the “perishable limitation” of foodstuffs, the original media of barter economies. Money also allowed some people to accumulate wealth, thus accounting for the apparent material inequalities in a world given by God to all his children.

As Locke explained, through money, people changed their labor into property and freed themselves from that hand-to-mouth existence that characterized societies without a nonperishable means to store wealth. And all this took place in the state of nature, a strictly conceptual notion Locke used to explain why governments came into existence. Locke argued in the Second Treatisethat the essential factors for commerce existed in the state of nature. Humans created government to protect their natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Government couldn’t create property; it only protected it.

There was only one source of value in coin, Locke was saying, and that was its silver content. Thus any change of denomination would be fruitless, and its perpetration by government, a fraud. Shillings were silver in another guise, and that guise was totally irrelevant to the actual value of the coin. This being the case, there was no possible way to detach value from silver content, as Lowndes’s plan had presumed.

Over three hundred pamphleteers, including Isaac Newton and Daniel DeFoe, entered the recoinage debate that ensued. Sharply divided on whether or not the clipped coins should be reminted at the old standard or the silver content lowered to match the devaluation by chisel, the antagonists carried the conceptualization of money to a new level of sophistication.

Attention concentrated on the definition of money. Had Locke based his recommendation upon preferences rather than eternal truths, the dispute would have been less portentous. Locke’s opponents—for the most part merchants and entrepreneurs—started with the evidence that coining added value. It turned silver into legal tender, which created its own demand in the marketplace.

Practical rather than philosophical, these writers broke free of Locke’s dogmatic position. They accepted the definition of money as a medium of exchange, separable from precious metals. Reversing Locke’s cause-and-effect explanation for the rise of money, they said that the utility of having a medium of exchange prompted the use of gold and silver. Money was valued because it was useful, not because humans in the state of nature had given it an imaginary value.

One writer, recognizing Locke’s effort to make the value of silver coin fixed in nature, got to the heart of the matter. Locke, he wrote dismissively, pretended “that the Government had no more power in Politicks than they have in Naturals [or the natural world].”

Locke had the worst argument in this controversy but the greatest influence. When Parliament acted in 1696, it determined that the clipped coins would be brought in and reminted at the old standard. Lowndes had argued that changing the mint ratio would be the least disruptive policy since the denomination he suggested reflected the average silver content of the coins passing at face value at the time. Landlords and creditors would receive less value but no less than in the present currency. The country’s leaders, however, preferred deflation to inflation and voted for recoinage at the old value, drastically reducing the shillings in circulation.

The folly and disaster predicted by Locke’s critics was realized in full. The reminted silver did not provide England with a good currency; much of it was quickly melted down and sent abroad as bullion. The halving of the value of silver coin caused a drastic deflation. Prices fell, and landlords and creditors reaped the benefits that had been expected. The shortage of money pressed particularly hard on the poor who rioted in some towns. Even the government had difficulty paying its soldiers

The debate over recoinage had concentrated attention on the fundamental relationships in the economy. Ambitions, conflicting interests, and the direction of national economic policies swirled around questions of the extrinsic and intrinsic value of coins and the proper role of government in the economy.

To some, the fact that the clipped silver coins passed at face value even with half their silver clipped away suggested the possibility of using other things as money. A few pump primers had urged changes in the mint ratio to artificially stimulate the economy. “Money is but a medium of Commerce, a Security which we part with, to enjoy the like in value,” an anonymous pamphleteer explained.

Writers had already begun to tout various schemes to increase currency through land banks. William Potter, whose 1650 pamphlet The Key of Wealth was also published in Boston, observed that “the effect of all Trading is but the parting with Commodities for such Money, Credit, or valuable Consideration, as procures other Commodities or Necessaries,” an observation that undermined the case for silver and gold’s uniqueness.

The recognition of the interchangeability of goods through money opened up the whole prospect of finding money substitutes to promote exchanges. Sellable goods began to look like alternatives to wealth in the well-being of an economy. One bank promoter asserted that “there is no doubt, that the Consumption of the People is not so much as the Product of their Labours, which is the real Riches and Strength of the Nation, and the more the merrier, like Bees in a Hive.”

For the American colonists who used bookkeeping bargaining to settle their accounts, money was mainly notional—a figure to put down to weigh against the stated value of another recorded item. Even the accounts of the great transatlantic merchants relied more on the settling of annual accounts than the regular exchange of actual money.

The media of exchange in the colonies was a true hodgepodge of coins issued by various monarchs, private bills of exchange, and bank notes. It was hard to be doctrinaire about their utility. While Locke’s ideas about the immutable value of gold and silver became orthodoxy in England, several colonies showed their freedom from such dogmatism by issuing paper money, suggesting an as yet unexplored resonance from the great English recoinage debate of the 1690s.

Of course money is no less a vexed subject now than it was in seventeenth-century England. Only in the twenty-first century we’re worried about who is stashing away our dollars or how nations control the exchange of their currency. Now, as then, the value and flow of money responds to vested interests, rumors, and irreducible psychological factors. John Locke’s belief in an immutable value of gold and silver seems quaint, but monetary theorists still make large claims about what they can achieve by manipulating that ever-fascinating chameleon called money.

Triangulating Religion and the American Revolution through Jedidiah Morse

Morse’s Religion

The Threat Posed

From Conspiracy to Theoretical Puzzle

Acknowledgments

Further reading:

Lobsters on the Walls

Walking the Freedom Trail

Further Reading:

Big Dig, Little Dig, Hidden Worlds: Boston

Boston’s revolution

Oil and Bone: Whale Consumption in the Lives of Plymouth Colonists

Further Reading:

“Port of New-Orleans SHUT.”: A Natchez Broadside at Archivo General de Indias

Nueva Orleans and “Right of Deposit”

The broadside resurfaces

The printer

Further Reading

Market Manipulation, the 1780s Way: What a Letter to a Flour Dealer Tells Us About the Early Modern Political Economy

Further Reading

How Sweden Went Global and Carolina Got its Hoes

Money, Money, Money: The Seventeenth-Century Effort to Get an Intellectual Grasp on this Slippery Medium of Trade

Further Reading: