Men of Small Property

On a day in 1835, a young man named Harry Franco leaves his father’s house and sets out for New York from his native village, “a quiet little out-of-the-way place, about a day’s ride from one of the steamboat landings on the Hudson.” Harry’s father is a former merchant, ruined by the trade embargo imposed by Thomas Jefferson in the period of the Napoleonic Wars. He has therefore grown up in an impoverished backwater, his small “stock of knowledge” gleaned from reading his mother’s collection of novels. But Harry is spurred into leaving home by the sight of his wealthy cousin wearing a handsome coat with a fur collar. His plan is to find a position as a clerk in a New York counting house as the first step in his own social rise. After a series of picaresque escapades involving mint juleps, phrenologists, oyster-cellars, and a soiree at a Fire Engine Company which culminates in a “race with the machine,” Harry finally turns to the more mundane business of gaining employment. But when he applies for the post of clerk at a clothing store he is told that there are precisely “six hundred and eighty-three” other applicants.

Tocqueville’s men of small property belong to an antebellum lower middle class that lived in a state of gnawing anxiety and permanent suspense.

Harry is the hero of Charles F. Briggs’s novel, The Adventures of Harry Franco (1839), a popular morality tale about the perils of the financial world—perils which took multiple forms. Competition for places combined with the extreme volatility of financial markets to make it difficult for country boys like Harry Franco to be sure of their “prospects.” Just as unsettling was the pervasiveness of speculation, both as an economic practice and as a habit of mind, which made the telling of fact from fiction a tricky business. When Harry ventures into the financial district of Wall Street he finds the “walls of houses, the trunks of trees, the fences, and the lamp posts” plastered with “innumerable plans of lithographed towns and cities”—adverts for the so-called “imaginary cities” which were springing up in the fevered imaginations of property speculators and developers across the land. He then meets Mr. D. Wellington Worhoss, an impoverished congressman’s son, unemployed clerk, and aspiring author, who tells him that “getting rich fast” means “speculating in fast property.” As an example of “fast property,” Worhoss shows Harry a plan for the as yet unbuilt Gowannus City.

Harry jumps in, lending his entire savings of $1000 to Mr. Dooit, a commission agent for a New England hook and eye concern now, he says, “worth millions.” Dooit offers Harry “some endorsed paper as collateral security” which will pay one quarter per cent interest per day. Convinced of his credit—worthiness, Harry accepts instead Dooit’s own note, without “the collaterals.” Harry then promises to buy one hundred lots in the city of Communipaw, at one hundred dollars each, from Worhoss, with money he no longer has. They are, he is informed, “water lots,” consisting of divisions of the river, which “require nothing but merely to be filled up.” When Dooit fails to repay the loan, Harry is informed by a lawyer that his note “isn’t worth two straws.” Harry’s $1000 has dissolved into water and become as intangible as his prospects. “I was always hoping for something,” he tells us, mournfully, “I hardly knew what; a dim form, like the shadow of a desire, was ever before me.”

"Henry Ward Beecher," engraved by W.L. Ormsby, from a daguerreotype by Beckers & Piard, in The Christian Diadem & Family Keepsake, Vol. 3, No. 3 (New York, March 1852). Courtesy of the American Portrait Print Collection at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “Henry Ward Beecher,” engraved by W.L. Ormsby, from a daguerreotype by Beckers & Piard, in The Christian Diadem & Family Keepsake, Vol. 3, No. 3 (New York, March 1852). Courtesy of the American Portrait Print Collection at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Set in the period leading up to the 1837 Panic, Harry’s story resonates beyond its immediate historical moment and speaks to recurring concerns about the tendency of the financial market to establish its own characteristics of constant exchange, insecurity, and risk as the normal conditions of everyday life. Briggs’s novel shows that a market society is inherently unstable: economically, socially, spatially, and psychologically. One response by free, white men of modest means, disoriented—like the fictional Harry Franco—by the market’s instability, was to formulate new ideas about masculinity. Young men were urged by authors of a burgeoning advice literature to embrace market disequilibrium: to recast constant flux as an opportunity for both increased self-control and enhanced possibilities of self-realization.

Just how disoriented antebellum men were is brought out by Alexis de Tocqueville in his account of his travels through America in the 1830s. Tocqueville noticed “an innumerable multitude” of men like Harry Franco who were driven by equal amounts of anxiety and aspiration. Matching affect, or emotional register, to economic standing, Tocqueville described them as the “eager and apprehensive men of small property,” a “class” that is “constantly increased” by the “equality of conditions” he sees prevailing in America. Still “within the reach of poverty,” they “see its privations near at hand and dread them,” since “between poverty and themselves there is nothing but a scanty fortune.” This precarious position ensures that “[n]o one is fully contented with his present fortune; all are perpetually striving, in a thousand ways, to improve it.” All of these men are in a state of “ceaseless excitement,” like atoms in a constant, Brownian motion, “but each of them stands alone, independent and weak.”

Like Harry, Tocqueville’s men of small property belong to an antebellum lower middle class that lived in a state of gnawing anxiety and permanent suspense. Subordinate clerks in white collar occupations hoped to be elevated to the status of partner, while dreading the bureaucratic dead-end faced by Melville’s character, Bartleby the Scrivener, who is placed by his employer by a lightless window and made to copy endless reams of legal documents. Clerks performed a multitude of commercial tasks. They worked in the wholesale warehouses and dry goods stores which brought the new world of manufactured goods to customers. They filed, copied, and kept the accounts of the nation’s developing financial system in credit agencies, banks, insurance brokerages, auction firms, and merchant houses. Their handwriting skills were required to produce the multiple copies of the legal documents needed to maintain the market’s ceaseless circulation and exchange of goods, money, and property. Clerks were, in Scott Sandage’s words, the “shock troops of American capitalism.” But by the 1840s, some journalists and commentators were expressing concerns about the financial and emotional hardships endured by young men far from home in capitalism’s new, white collar world.

In August of 1846, Walt Whitman was visited in his office at the Brooklyn Eagle by “a young gentleman” who had just found himself “out of a ‘situation'” after a rise in the tariff provoked his wealthy employer to cut costs. Clerks, Whitman tells his readers, “receive the most miserable pittance for working like dray-horses,” receiving from $50 to $150 a year, “out of which they are expected to pay their board, and clothe themselves neatly.” Whitman is particularly concerned by “how rarely the employer enters with anything like friendly interest into the personal hopes, aims, and schemes of those who work for him.” These are young men of “spirit and ambition,” but their employer seldom “condescends to aid them, even by the cheap assistance of kind inquiry, or a word of sympathy and companionship!” There are no father figures in this harsh, commercial world. As Harry Franco finds, the “clerk market” is “overstocked,” leaving clerks to suffer the effects of competition: poor pay, unstable employment, and precious little emotional support in the workplace. These socioeconomic structures produce their own ontology, their own forms of knowledge and textures of lived experience, which it is the business of Briggs’s novel to represent.

"Charles F. Briggs," engraved by Capewell & Kimmel. Courtesy of the American Portrait Print Collection at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “Charles F. Briggs,” engraved by Capewell & Kimmel. Courtesy of the American Portrait Print Collection at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The key features of this world of relentless competition and exchange are instability and immateriality. When Harry returns to his boarding house after a period at sea he finds that “no house stood there now: a street had been cut through the very spot, and towering high brick stores, with square granite pillars, had sprung up all around it.” The entire social order is founded on a kind of generalized precariousness, in which all that is solid threatens—quite literally—to melt at any moment into air. But Harry’s sense of self is also curiously unanchored. If Harry is the classic ingénue or rural innocent, then Briggs draws attention to the ways in which he is both under-capitalized and dangerously adrift, “afloat on the wide world, ignorant of its ways, with no definite object of pursuit, and with but slender means of support.” Harry’s sense of self is linked to his economic status: a lack of solid capital and firm connections creates a peculiarly unmoored subjectivity. Harry is open to an experience which remains diffuse and cloudy, an experience which he cannot quite grasp.

Cultural and moral signposts were hard to discern in a society undergoing the transition to capitalism, which gradually replaced the rural household economy with the impersonal mechanisms of the market. In the mythos rehearsed in Briggs’s story, the young man leaves the farm for the city and leaves the father behind. He leaves behind a lifeworld based on simplicity, permanence, and patriarchal authority for an urban landscape which is complex and shifting, one in which the sources of authority are not so readily found. The father becomes a kind of revenant: an ashen, eclipsed figure. He still warms the abandoned hearth, but his version of manhood, based on the traditional republican virtues of honest industry and frugality, has, it seems, become redundant. In a metropolitan society based on buying and selling, on self-promotion and the search for a quick return, a new kind of masculine identity has to be fashioned. This issue is particularly pressing for Harry Franco, since he arrives in a New York City about to suffer the shocks of the 1837 financial panic.

In a pattern which was, as the Wall Street historian Steve Fraser observes, “so often repeated as to suggest some underlying pathology,” the long speculative boom of the 1830s turned suddenly and catastrophically into bust, triggered by the collapse of the brokerage house of J. & L. Joseph & Company. By April 8, New York City had witnessed the failures of banks and mercantile houses with combined debts exceeding $60 million. Propertied Americans watched helplessly as the value of their assets was eaten away by the savage deflation that followed hard on the heels of the panic. Money literally disappeared as panicked patrons rushed to the banks to exchange banknotes for specie, draining them of reserves. “[I]mmense fortunes,” the merchant Phillip Hone lamented, simply “melted away like snows before an April sun.” But the Panic also spurred a number of journalists, lecturers, and preachers to formulate a new ethic of masculine independence, one capable of meeting the challenges of the market. Prominent among these “apostles of the self-made man” was Henry Ward Beecher.

The financial crisis came at a particularly inopportune moment in Beecher’s career. Twenty-four years old, Beecher had just taken the post of pastor to the First Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, and married his fiancée, Eunice Bullard, of Massachusetts. Their first home together is described by Beecher’s biographer, Debby Applegate, as “two filthy rooms above a warehouse near the wharf, overlooking a backyard filled with old junk and sewage.” Beecher had been given a salary of $300 which, Applegate observes, amounted to little more than the seventy-five cents a day earned by laborers on the nearby Whitewater Canal. Anticipating a raise, Beecher bought furnishings to make his shabby home tolerable, in the process running up debts all over the town. When the shock-waves of the Panic reached Lawrenceburgh, Beecher’s no-nonsense parishioners began to accuse him of “fine living,” and complained that he spent more time fishing or loafing around the cracker barrel than on pastoral visits. Suitably chastened, Beecher told his journal that he would mend his ways and try to “diminish self-estimation.” By 1840, he had begun a new ministry at the Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis. In December 1843, Beecher began a series of weekly lectures on the vices menacing the youth of the city which were published as book the following year. Seven Lectures to Young Men sold an impressive 3000 copies in its year of publication, and went into forty editions over the next fifty years.

"Title Page" from Seven Lectures To Young Men, On Various Important Subjects…, by Henry Ward Beecher (Indianapolis, Indiana, 1844). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “Title Page” from Seven Lectures To Young Men, On Various Important Subjects…, by Henry Ward Beecher (Indianapolis, Indiana, 1844). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The Panic forms the omnipresent background to Beecher’s lectures. Beecher invites his readers to feel that they are playing a major role in an apocalyptic drama, one in which their own moral integrity will be tested. “The violent fluctuations of business,” he declares, have covered the ground with “rubbish over which men stumble; and fill the air with dust, in which all the shapes of honesty appear distorted.” “The scheming speculations of the last ten years,” Beecher thunders, “have produced an aversion among the young to the slow accumulations of ordinary Industry,” meaning that now, “manhood seems debilitated.” Americans’ ties to home have been broken by the new commercial order: they have become “a migratory, restless people,” with almost every young man making “annual, or biennial visits to famous cities; conveying produce to market, or purchasing wares and goods.” Young men have become addicted to “gadding, gazing, lounging, mere pleasure-mongering,” with their moral and physical character severely vitiated as a result. Impatient for wealth, they have learnt to become proficient in “gambling stakes, and madmen’s ventures.”

Beecher sees gambling everywhere: it produces a constant background hum. The “clatter of dice and cards” can be heard on river boats and in hotels, as well as in stores and in artisans’ workshops, while at night the “secreted lamp dimly lights the apprentices to their game.” Clerks are particularly vulnerable to gambling’s delusive spell—men such as the “young cashier,” who cannot “pay the drafts of his illicit pleasures” from his “narrow salary,” and so is tempted into “brilliant speculations” which, “vampire-like,” haunt him in dreams. He embezzles money from his employer, until, worn down by shame, he “slinks out of life a frantic suicide.” Speculation, formerly a specialized vice, has become a normal part of everyday life, the defining activity of an expanding market society, and a chief corrupter of young men.

Honest labor, by contrast, polishes the faculties “[a]s use polishes metals,” so that the body “performs its unimpeded functions with elastic cheerfulness,” knowing the “manly joy of usefulness.” Industry “gives character and credit to the young,” no small matter in a commercial society where creditors use a man’s reputation to determine whether he will be a safe investment. Traditional virtues of “veracity, frugality, and modesty,” Beecher insists, can still serve a young man in a modern economy. In a world of indolent sluggards addicted to idle amusements and surface impressions, it still pays to be early-rising, hard-working, and prudent. Better to be a patient plodder than a conceited loafer, or a burnt-out case.

But beyond the enumeration of these virtues, the essence of manhood remains elusive. It’s as though, for Beecher, manhood is something known negatively, by what it is not, rather than what it might actually be. In all the reversals and the derangements of commerce there is no more terrible spectacle than a man “wrecked with his fortune.” Manhood is something intangible and precious, a quality that must be preserved, saved from the wreckage wrought by financial panics. “Can anything be more poignant in anticipation,” Beecher asks, “than one’s ownself, unnerved, cowed down and slackened to utter pliancy, and helplessly drifting and driven down the troubled sea of life?” Instead, he urges his reader to “stand composedly in the storm, amidst its rage and wildest devastations,” and “let it beat over you, and roar around you, and pass by you, and leave you undismayed.” Simply to do this is “to be a MAN,” since “[a]dversity is the mint in which God stamps upon us his image and superscription.”

Beecher confronts head-on the problem in all injunctions to virtue: that the picture they paint of vice is more compelling and attractive than the staid, dutiful path of righteousness. In towns and cities, the young man continually comes into contact with “a very flash class of men,” “swol[le]n,” or puffed up clerks, “crack sportsmen, epicures, and rich, green youth.” His vivid experiences at the theatre, the circus, and the race track cause him to loathe “industry and didactic reading.” Beecher combats this threat by offering a point of anchorage for market culture’s unmoored subjectivity. In the floating world of antebellum capitalism, reality is one densely woven veil of illusion: speculative schemes, fictitious capital, paper promises, counterfeit notes. The young man treads his perilous way amid a “mimic glow,” a painted Paradise. The devilish serpent in this garden of illusory delights is the Tempter, the “dangerous m[a]n” who lies in wait to snare the young man “by lying, by slander, by over-reaching and plundering him.” The commercial world is one in which copies proliferate: the young man, seeing the brilliant wit, is “smitten with the itch of imitation,” driven to emulate “the smooth smile, the roguish twinkle, the sly look.”

Faced with this threat, Beecher reiterates his message: take the plunge and enter the market’s storm, but, having done so, buckle down, shun the superficial, the illusory, and the transient; seek the enduring and the real by patient endeavour. This is a lower-middle-class ethics of scarcity: the self’s resources must be guarded, husbanded, nurtured, and preserved in a society in which all is deceitful appearance, and constantly slipping away. To turn away from plain and prudent habits, to deck oneself with “[c]opper-rings, huge blotches of breastpins, wild streaming handkerchiefs, jaunty hats, odd clothes, superfluous walking-sticks, ill-uttered oaths, stupid jokes, and blundering pleasantries,” is to violate the essential integrity of the self, to corrupt its innermost sanctity and leave it vulnerable to further losses.

In valuing the self so passionately, Beecher supplies the affective or personal bonds Whitman found to be missing in the white collar world of the new commercial order. He fills the paternal space left empty by the eclipse of the household economy, providing a moral compass for young men in the post-patriarchal world of the market. “I stood by your side when you awoke in the dark valley of conviction, and owned yourselves lost,” Beecher tells the young man. The kind of virtual fellowship he offers, achieved through the medium of print, is “not commercial, not fluctuating.” Father figures and human fellowship have been swept away by the market’s atomizing force: in their place are the popular lecture and the mass market book.

But what is striking, finally, about Seven Lectures is its panicky emphasis on failure rather than success. Why, as historian Clifford Clark asked more than thirty years ago, should something as innocuous as “idleness or inactivity” appear to be so threatening? Why should an interest in recreation or the pursuit of leisure create such a sense of fear and foreboding? The answer, I think, is that Beecher’s appeal was to Tocqueville’s men of small property: precarious, lower-middle-class individuals, whose economic, moral, and cultural capital needed to be jealously guarded and preserved against the vicissitudes of the market, just to ensure that a life in the market might be possible at all.

If Beecher offers to treat lower-middle-class precariousness in an ethical and affective register, then The Adventures of Harry Franco addresses that precariousness by offering a fantasy resolution to its hero’s predicament. Harry eventually finds employment at the counting house of Mr. Marisett. As personal assistant to Marisett, Harry learns the value of “industry and punctuality,” and of “shrewdness and honorable dealing.” Finding that “[c]opying mercantile letters is a dull business,” Harry nevertheless sits up half the night writing in his room. He also falls in love with Marisett’s niece, Georgiana De Lancey, and attends prayer meetings with her. At a social gathering, he comes across his sneering cousin, now a speculator who has made a fortune by selling his own father’s land for building lots. This time, though, Harry is able to resist the lure of emulation.

Speculation, formerly a specialized vice, has become a normal part of everyday life, the defining activity of an expanding market society, and a chief corrupter of young men.

On a business trip to New Orleans to buy up cotton, Harry is tested by the stresses and confusions of the approaching Panic, almost succumbing to the city’s atmosphere of “strange, daring recklessness,” which is strangely “mixed up” with “despondency and apprehension.” Tempted by the option of gambling with the firm’s remaining money at the faro table, he overhears a preacher intoning a sermon from the Book of Revelation, makes his conversion to Christianity, and returns to New York. There, he finds Marisett a broken man, who “couldn’t survive the loss of his credit.” Even surrogate fathers cannot preserve their manhood in a world this unstable; the task of self-preservation must be assumed by sons, who must learn to survive by their own unaided efforts.

Searching for news of Georgiana in the Five Points, Harry comes across another discredited familial figure, his cousin, who has also been ruined by the Panic, his clothes now “shabby,” his face “pale and haggard,” with a “wild and desperate look.” Later, we learn that he has committed suicide. Harry is destined for better things. He marries Georgiana, who inherits property from her rich uncle, together with a “considerable estate” from her mother. They move back to Harry’s hometown—now called Franco Ville, since his father’s modest and shrewd real estate dealings have helped to create a new prosperity—and live happily in the restored homestead, “in the enjoyment of blessings innumerable.”

Briggs’s resort to the fail-safe of fantasy reveals wider cultural tensions. Clerks were encouraged by advisors like Beecher to experience economic structures as avenues for agency, to see the playing out of market forces as so many opportunities to pull up one’s bootstraps. In an anonymous, impermanent world, one had to take what historian Michael Zakim identifies as “ethical responsibility towards one’s own well-being.” Faced with life on the roller coaster ride of the market, the antebellum lower middle class developed a preference for sentiment and sympathy, for inspiring sermons and uplifting lectures, rather than socio-economic analysis. But the need simply to survive, to retool the self in line with marketplace contingency, generated an abiding paradox. It was the market which set young men adrift to re-make themselves, while the intense preoccupation with self that drift engendered prevented the market’s shaping, determining role from being grasped. It is the market which both offers the possibility of a life of power and purpose for the privileged and the lucky, and, for the rest, takes that possibility away. While men of small property pursue the arduous, incremental gains of self-improvement, it is Worhoss the speculator who thrives on Wall Street.

Insurance in Colonial America

The birth of an underwriting society

Part I

In early June of 1721, near Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia, John Copson became the first American to open an insurance office. Strictly speaking, Copson was a broker of marine policies, decreasing the costs of bringing buyers and sellers of insurance (also called “assurances”) together. The role meant that he was responsible for a more complex and more historically revealing array of services than one might suppose. Like other perceptive businessmen of his time, Copson was adept at capitalizing on new arenas of self-promotion—particularly pubs, coffee and tea houses, and the newspaper. Moving from these venues, Copson became a clearinghouse of social assurances, representing as he says, the “integrity” and “reputation” of the underwriters “in this city and province” to prospective policyholders.

In so doing, he marketed a product that helped to define and broaden what it meant to be both civic-minded and self-interested. This was because Copson’s market can be seen, depending on how one chooses to analyze it, as a function of the republican world of public service or as a product of the growing world of self-aggrandizing commerce. And it can be viewed in both these ways because of the conceptual peculiarities of insurance itself. Insurance—as we see played out in post-Katrina debates about public responsibilities versus private capabilities—has always resisted its formulation as an exclusively private or public method of improvement and safety. It is of service to neither individuals nor to society, but rather to both. Insurance may protect the distinct interests of property owners; but at the same time, it saves society from the costs of failure and destitution. Copson implied as much in an advertisement from the May 25, 1721, American Weekly Merchant.

Assurances from Losses happening at Sea ect. [sic] being found to be very much for the Ease and benefit of the Merchants and Traders in general, and whereas the merchants of this city of Philadelphia and other parts, have been obliged to send to London for such Assurance, which has not only been tedious and troublesome, but even very precarious. For remedying of which, An Office of Publick Insurance on Vessels, Goods and Merchandizes, will, on Monday next, be Opened, and Books kept by John Copson of this City, at this House in the High Street, where all Persons willing to be Insured may apply: And Care shall be taken by the said J. Copson That the Assurors or Underwriters be Persons of undoubted Worth and reputation and of considerable Interest in this City and Province.

One is struck by the term “public insurance.” To the contemporary ear, the phrase might sound contradictory, suggesting a quaint and outmoded notion of common welfare. But it does the important work of bridging private interests and public virtue in a way that seemed quite natural to Copson and his customers.

That customary connection fostered significant changes to many social and cultural practices of colonial America. For instance, the discourse of safety pioneered by the insurance industry brought about important transformations in urban design, architecture, and public health. The assurances of underwriting derived from forms of public knowledge (from actuarial statistics to commercial news) and law (from contract theory to municipal fire codes) that contributed in turn to the conservation of private property. With the impetus of insurance and its private methods of managing property, government saw fit to promote public infrastructure projects that provided shipping and trade amenities—roads, harbors, and wharves—all of which made cargo shipping and early industrial equipment safer and more efficient.

Part II

Like the story of John Copson’s waterfront office, the broader history of the insurance business in colonial America appears deceptively informal. But beneath that informality, so typical of early modern business, lies the rise of an effective and powerful industry that would shape America’s national finances.

Insurance underwriting began its colony-wide rise in the northeast as a result of the growth of transatlantic shipping. While Copson was the first to open a marine insurance office, he was soon followed by others including Francis Rawle, Joseph Saunders, and John Kidd. Kidd was one of six members of the partnership agreement of the first American marine insurance company with “surviving bylaws,” drawn up in Philadelphia toward the end of the 1750s. That company included in its list of partners Thomas Willing, who would go on to be president of the Bank of North America and the First Bank of the United States, and Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance for the Continental Congress.

At midcentury, the hub of underwriting in Philadelphia had become the London Coffee House on the banks of the Delaware River, close to Penn’s Landing. “By 1758,” historian Mary Ruwell notes, “the Insurance Office at the Coffee House had two clerks on duty every day from noon to one and from six to eight at night to take care of writing out policies of insurance and securing underwriting signatures . . . [B]y the end of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia merchants had used the services of at least 150 private underwriters subscribing in about 15 insurance brokerage offices.”

Boston’s marine insurance scene began not long after Philadelphia’s. Joseph Marion, a notary, opened an agency in 1724, thereby breaking free of the coffee house “office.” In the beverage-free office, Marion retained the relatively low-pressure method of linking underwriters with vessel owners: the policy was left on a table for underwriters to pursue as they wished. What Marion pioneered was a kind of full-service emporium where insurance buyers and underwriters could meet and do business.

Marion was still in business as late as 1745, though there is scant evidence to establish just how substantial his business was. Benjamin Pollard opened an office in Boston in 1739 with the innovative practice of systematically procuring the underwriters and their capital in advance, rather than waiting for the random connections that happen in the coffee-house or pub settings. Pollard’s unique service was to forge commercially branded intellectual and civic connections, demonstrating just how powerfully knowledge and social capital became the foundation of insurance underwriting.

Perhaps the most successful Boston underwriter in the pre-Revolutionary period was Ezekiel Price. A notary like Pollard and Marion, Price is described by historian William Fowler as “the archetypal insurance man—he knew everyone and everything.” In colonial New York City, it was the Beekman family that pioneered marine insurance. Already important merchants, the Beekmans saw marine underwriting as a profitable and somewhat logical diversification. Their prior mercantile activities meant that they were comfortable in all aspects of the business, acting as brokers, consumers, and underwriters.

Colonial American fire insurance is a newer phenomenon, beginning its development in the mid-eighteenth century. Part of the reason the business took longer to evolve was the longevity requirements of a credible fire insurance business. Unlike ship underwriting, which could be sustained by loose networks of underwriters and which insured ships that could complete their voyages in weeks or months and thus complete the term of the policy, fire insurers underwrote houses and buildings, which could ride out the terms of a policy over the course of decades. Firms needed to be well capitalized and less partner driven, which is why mutuals (in which the policyholders are also the owners of the company) were often the best form for fire-insurance concerns.

The first mutual society in the colonies was established in Charleston in 1735 and was called the Friendly Society. The private underwriters were unable to build adequate reserves, and in 1741, a large fire wiped out the firm. The first truly successful fire-insurance company was Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Contributionship, begun in 1751 and, by 1781, responsible for about two thousand policies worth almost $2 million. Fire insurance companies were more likely than banks to have substantial cash reserves, allowing them to play a vital role as lending institutions, funding both private and public enterprise.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, American insurance underwriting was becoming a relatively prosperous industry. But, despite the growth of the underwriting business in Philadelphia, and indeed the colonies at large, the bulk of the colonial underwriting business continued to go to London’s better-financed companies. Monetary capital, in the form of the numerous individual underwriters to be found in a place like Lloyd’s Coffeehouse, was just too scarce in the colonies.

This changed by the 1790s for a number of macro- and microeconomic reasons. The essential components of thriving underwriting communities, what Fowler refers to as “information, capital, and men willing to act as underwriters,” reached critical mass in the 1790s. This development was of a piece with Alexander Hamilton’s successful efforts to establish national capital markets through the Bank of the United States, the extension of new forms of credit, and the first steps in centralizing the national monetary system. Insurance companies were no less important than banks in this nationalizing of capital markets and the building up of a healthy belief in solid credit instruments.

In short, insurance underwriting gained influence in the political and cultural development of the new nation because it became a primary source of finance capital. Once capital markets began depending on the business for credit, insurance companies were able to write riskier policies and expand into new insurance markets.

If there was an easy congruence between the needs of capital markets and the inherent fundraising capacities of fire and marine insurance, life insurance was a different matter. The main reason for this was moral. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the boundary between life insurance and mere gambling had been unclear. This was most obvious in the widespread practice in England of buying a life insurance policy on somebody other than one’s self—a soldier, a sea captain, a prominent statesman. By the end of the eighteenth century, the British had outlawed this practice; Americans soon followed suit. With this prohibition on third-party life insurance policies, the cloud of immorality that had hung over life insurance was lifted. Moralizers could no longer claim that the practice encouraged a macabre disregard for life, and underwriters could defend life insurance for its obvious humanitarian value. Now, the beneficiaries were not simply gamblers but women, children—the dependents of the deceased. With these large moral shifts, the business began to flourish.

Taken together, the rise of marine, fire, and life insurance is the story of a massive but intricately articulated industry. It spread its influence across the vast geography of America and into the most intimate spaces of American lives. Insurance came to dominate not only the planning and decisions made by cities, towns, and individuals but also the deeper structural fates of various components of the American economy—from slavery to pension funds to public welfare. What that meant as a social phenomenon is manifest for an alert pedestrian looking upward in any major American city—insurance company buildings are among a modern city’s tallest, signifying in their opaque reflections a monumental bureaucratic success.

But what insurance underwriting meant in other ways, as both artifact and method, is not so obvious. How did Copson’s new marketplace of personal assurances and public insurance affect other areas of American cultural and social life? How and why did we become an underwriting nation? What cultural logic and political stratagems were at work? And what does it mean to say we are an “underwriting society”?

Part III

When one takes seriously the word “underwriting,” a more developed cultural analysis that helps to explain the power of insurance in American life becomes possible.

I want to end this brief essay with some speculative conceptualizations, using the idea of “underwriting” as a kind of poetics. I hope such abstract descriptions help to explain a little better the less tangible effects of America’s insurance history. First, I think it’s necessary to ask: what concepts might be said to underwrite the underwriters? To answer this question it is crucial to look to the early use of money as a practical symbol in the transatlantic sphere. Indeed, the emergence of not only new forms of money and new methods of accounting but also the concepts that made possible these monetary instruments and commercial practices reveal the complexity of value—as represented by paper, coin, credit, and assorted other instruments of worth. Literary critic Marc Shell, in Money, Language, and Thought, notes that when the uniform use of paper money as national currency began in the United States, it sparked a discussion of the critical symbolic functions of coinage and printed money. He goes on to show how historical conceptualizations of literature and money have been strangely similar. Shell’s point is equally true for insurance, a manifestation of the conceptual workings of property, text, and value.

To describe both the emergence of paper currency and the growth of insurance underwriting is to delineate in all its tenacity the determination of monetary capital to harness unreliable experience, to once and for all channel risk and instability into material (or at least textual) certainties. A major part of that delineation involves the very notion of the imaginative text. Shell posits (and indeed it is a major premise of not only Marxist and classical economic thinking about specie, commodities, and paper money but also much older theological theories of money) that the history of language and money revolve around a common problem: the creation of symbolic value (what we’ve come to call “meaning”) out of an irreducible absence.

Historian of mathematics Brian Rotman, in Signifying Nothing, shows how modern forms of money have been primed in crucial ways by the arithmetic evolution of the symbol for nothing, zero. As a concept that can be traced back to an absence in the signifying chain, money (whether coin or paper) bases its power on the introduction of the concept of zero into Western modes of economic thinking.

Money, in whatever form, presupposes a conservationist dynamic that promises an assurance of value. Economic actors—those who, in the most basic sense, are counters—form relationships with numerical hypotheses. The counting subject, John Copson’s customer for instance, must be comfortable with the idea of both wealth and debt; but, in a critical development, he does not have to accept the inevitability of loss and absence. This is where insurance appears as an important episode in the story of money’s conceptual relation to the manufacture of real values from what might seem like nothing at all.

But insurance does this in the opposite way from circulating currency. By force of artifice, printed money extracts worth from that creative idea of nothing, without which Western modes of capitalism might never have developed as powerfully as they have. Underwritten property (a form of fiduciary or entrusted money) represents, however, the obverse of this creative circuit. Insurance underwriting seeks to efface zero from the realm of material property, thus placing an artificial stabilizer on property. Rather than creating value out of nothing, it preserves value (or meaning or property). Insurance underwriting is a crucial means of assuring that money’s numbers refer to countable values that will not—indeed cannot—disappear. Copson’s customers, it would seem, got more than liability insurance or a new profit possibility—they found a new kind of stability in an increasingly doubtful world.

Because it is in essence a “writing business,” insurance invites comparisons and critical connections with the methods and genres of nonbusiness writing—whether dictionaries or grammars or poetic elegies, whether autobiography or advertisements for public financing or fictional responses to accidents. Thus, the questions that circulate through the history of insurance are wrought in critically productive ways in the literature of Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, as well as the textual projects of Noah Webster and, of course, Benjamin Franklin. Here the echoes of commercial life are located in tropes of loss and possession, themes of anxiety and risk, and the evolving and intricately cross-calibrated mechanics of self-mastery and genius. These authors are but strong cases in a wider cultural logic in which business discourses persistently challenge and assist literary conventions. As a practice that translates material commodities and their fate as underwriter’s contracts into real value, insurance asks us to grasp what ownership, in all its senses, might mean for American writers as well as American businessmen.

After all, when we go deeper into the cultural methods of John Copson’s economic milieu, we find not only novel ways of turning profits. Maybe more important, we find original ways of thinking about the individuals and groups that were able to realize those material gains. Here, in the underwritten colonial world, are newly visible texts of self-identity, imaginative possibility, and public expression.

Time, Trust and Exchange in the American Pawnshop

Surrounded on all sides by predatory lenders, rapid refund tax shops, and multinational credit card companies “charging interest on interest,” we might stop to notice the lowly pawnbroker. Unlike those other firms, “pawnbrokers provide clear information about loan terms;” they are explicit on “the interest rate and any additional fees being charged, when the loan will come due, and how much money in total is required to retrieve collateral” (186). Nonetheless, the corporate entities which dominate the current landscape of lending and credit enjoy far more social legitimacy than the maligned and stigmatized pawnbroker. In In Hock, Wendy A. Woloson forces us to abandon our misconceptions about the world of pawnbroking, as she provides us with a fully realized and nuanced account of a profession and a set of practices that have “occasionally intersected with, sometimes subverted, and often circumvented wholesale and retail exchange” (3).

Woloson’s well-written book, complete with fascinating image reproductions, is both an economic and a social history of the pawnshop that contains running threads of the history of crime, policing and anti-Semitism in the United States. Both the pawnbroker and the pawner are given the benefit of three-dimensionality, to erase the flat stereotype of the pawnshop as the location where the vice-ridden and the gullible are taken advantage of by the heartless and the parasitic. It is the dismantling and replacement of the crude caricature of the world of pawning and brokering that is the principle ambition of In Hock. Ultimately, Woloson leaves her reader with the understanding that, far from being antagonistic and exploitative transactions, exchanges of objects for short term loans have often been cooperative interactions, rooted in trust between the working poor who were trying to meet their needs, and pawnbrokers who were trying to make a living.

Woloson argues that the negative stereotypes associated with pawnbrokers originated with anti-Semitic attitudes and prejudices. The history of ideas related to loaning money at interest, and the development of money-lending as a Jewish profession, culminate in the despised character of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. This “most famous and notorious Jewish character” first appeared on an American stage in 1752 in Virginia. The vulgar depiction of the Jewish money-lender quickly fused with the depiction of the pawnbroker, and throughout the nineteenth century, the pawnbroker was portrayed in novels, newspapers and cartoons as a hook-nosed opportunist. “Works of popular culture had largely succeeded in creating a coherent, seemingly logical stereotype: the pawnbroker had become implicitly the Jewish pawnbroker—the Jew broker—and as Jews and pawnbrokers became increasingly stigmatized, the stereotypes reinforced each other” (37). Despite the popular conception of the pawnbroker as Jewish, Woloson shows that the profession actually included significant numbers of Irish Americans, as well as American-born Protestants.

Regardless of who was engaged in the business, the very nature of the business seemed to contradict the United States’s conception of itself, and thus the broker and the pawner were to remain objects of a derision that went beyond ethnic prejudice. “Pawnbrokers were aliens in a commercial world populated by supposedly moral and upright Christian entrepreneurs, and the very nature of the business set it apart from ‘normal’ economic dealings. The antithesis of merchants, pawnbrokers doled out money instead of taking it in, profiting from customers who lacked capital rather than possessed it” (29). In contrast to the optimism embedded in the purchase of an item from a normal retail store, pawning was viewed as an “aberrant act.” In the world of pawning, “Items that were once indicators of hope, economic vitality, and physical comfort became, as collateral, markers of a downward fall, loss of prospects, alienation” (30). Yet despite the common view of the pawnshop as a perversion of normal economic activity within capitalism, Woloson steadily argues that the pawnshop was a necessary outgrowth of capitalism, and should be “understood as a manifestation of capitalism’s inherent inequalities” (53).

Throughout the book, Woloson offers examples of people who turned to pawning as a means of survival in an economic system that left the working poor unable to meet basic needs such as food and shelter. A material item could be exchanged for cash and a pawn ticket. The loans themselves carried interest rates lower than that which we might encounter with a contemporary credit card company. If the loan along with the interest was repaid on schedule, then the item was “redeemed” to its original owner. If the pawner could not pay the entire loan amount on schedule, then he or she could pay the interest in order to extend the loan and prevent the item from being resold. The pawnbroker’s intention in the transaction was for the item to be redeemed, rather than resold. Woloson argues that pawning was often a rational, manageable transaction, rather than an effort to prolong a gambling or drinking binge, or some other act of desperation. A person might pawn an item to engage in a new business venture, to meet a payroll, or to provide for a family until a crop comes in. According to Woloson, “Artisans’ collateral yielded relatively high loans,” as “Carpenters’ saws, masons’ trowels, and leather workers’ punches found easy conversion into capital during periodic lulls in work, often yielding enough money to tide families over entire seasons of unemployment” (90).

Pawning practices were often seasonal or rhythmic in nature. Customers pawned and redeemed in regular patterns. “Often, women ‘put in’ the family’s Sunday best on Monday morning in order to cover the week’s food and rent, redeeming the clothes Saturday night for the next day’s church services” (94). The pawnbrokers, many of them having been in the business for multiple generations, often built up relationships of trust with their customers, choosing to extend loans even when the items offered for collateral were nearly worthless. Items that went unredeemed were usually funneled by the brokers into secondary and tertiary markets for used goods, ultimately serving to meet the needs of the same poor communities in which the items were originally pawned. “Although pawnbroking played a crucial role in the development of capitalism, it harked back to earlier economies in which economic and social relationships were interlinked” (85).

Perhaps the most commonly pawned item of the nineteenth century was the timepiece. Countless Americans, including Ulysses S. Grant, traded one for a short-term loan at one point or another. Woloson’s writing on the pawning of timepieces, and the interplay between the emergence of the need for keeping track of time under capitalism, together with her characterizations of pawning as a means of “buying time,” amounts to some of the finest and most insightful writing in the book. Less illuminating is Woloson’s exploration of pawnbroking and criminal activity. Nonetheless, she accomplishes her goal of establishing that the pawnbroker was rarely embedded in the criminal economy, and more often than not, the pawnbroker was likely to be the victim of crime, or to be of assistance to the authorities in solving crimes.

The book maintains a focus on the nineteenth century, and in the end, does not explore how pawning changed with the rise of “throwaway culture” in the twentieth century (192). In her conclusion, Woloson leaps to our own time, when ubiquitous credit card companies offer products that are “slick, convenient and wholly anonymous,” and thus “enable a form of borrowing that is pawning’s mirror opposite” (182).

Although Woloson takes the credit card companies and large rent-to-own chains to task, the book stops short of a full-throated critique of capitalism, much less pawnbrokers. At one point Woloson writes of the pawnbrokers’ abilities to appraise items: “Appraising was as much an art as a skill.” Later on the page she defines this “art” as “assigning monetary value to material goods to be used as collateral for loans” (168). Perhaps in this case, Woloson is leaning on a cliché, but the statement indicates a larger ambivalence in the book. At times capitalism is critiqued in defense of pawnbrokers, and at times pawnbrokers are defended as good capitalists.

In all fairness, at no point does Woloson proclaim that she has set out to bring down capitalism by the weight of its own contradictions. Rather she defends a profession and a historical practice that she clearly respects, and she has succeeded in debunking numerous myths and misunderstandings. In Hock will prove to be a useful book for instructors and researchers working in areas such as the history of American material culture, the history of urban poverty and the coping mechanisms of the poor, as well as the history of American anti-Semitism. The book will no doubt also offer some measure of consolation to anybody working in or depending upon the much maligned industry, which Woloson has so thoroughly explored.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3.5 (May, 2010).

Matthew Vaz is Lecturer of American History at The City College of New York, City University of New York.

Cross-Stitched History: Artistry and ambition in Christina Arcularius’s Tree of Knowledge sampler

In March 1792, fifteen-year-old Christina Arcularius put the finishing touches on her Tree of Knowledge sampler, a precocious display of needlework prowess and genteel accomplishment. Celebrated by decorative arts scholars as one of the most ambitious examples of New York’s Biblical sampler style, Christina’s needlework picture has been published and periodically exhibited in recent years. Nevertheless, her life and the circumstances surrounding the sampler’s creation have remained largely obscure. In 2003, Christina’s masterpiece was featured in the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition “Home Sewn: Three Centuries of Stitching History” as one of many hand-stitched items mined for the stories they could tell about their individual makers and the milieu in which they were produced. Considered in a broad cultural context, Christina’s sampler yields rich insights into female education and cultural aspirations in federal-era New York.

Fig 1. Christina Arcularius (Mrs. Samuel Barker Harper, 1777-1860), Tree of Knowledge Sampler, New York City, 1792. Silk on linen, 16 1/2 x 22 1/4 in. The New-York Historical Society, bequest of Mrs. Lathrop C. Harper, 1957.208. Courtesy of the collection of the New-York Historical Society.

Christina’s delightful, if bewildering composition is brimming with Biblical and secular motifs organized in three tiers, all centered on a bird-filled Tree of Knowledge with a beguiling serpent coiled around its trunk. Worked mostly in cross-stitch using silk threads on a linen ground of twenty-four warps and wefts per inch, the 16-x-22-inch sampler contains more than 200,000 stitches. Created under the tutelage of a teacher who outlined the design, the sampler incorporates prescribed images intended to impart religious and moral values combined with creative flourishes from Christina’s own imagination. The Biblical imagery—the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve, Jesus preparing to feed the multitude loaves and fishes, Jacob’s Ladder rising into heaven (lower band); the Spies of Canaan (middle band, right); and Zacchaeus in the tree (middle and top bands, left)—closely resembles that found on other New York samplers as well as on Dutch, German, and English prototypes. Christina industriously stitched her requisite Bible stories. But she also embellished them with numerous whimsical elements that were likely of her own creation. Over forty birds, symbolic of domesticity and marriage, flock to her Tree of Knowledge and perch throughout her Biblical land. Dogs, emblematic of faithfulness, stand beneath the trees. Many human figures—including at least four couples—populate the sampler, suggesting that the adolescent Christina may have been somewhat distracted by ruminations on courtship and love. The single building in the upper right, representing a church, house, or school, is illustrative of the comfortable intermingling of religious and secular instruction that pervades this sampler and also characterized elementary education in 1790s New York.

Christina’s Tree of Knowledge sampler is one of the finest extant examples from a group of Biblical samplers produced in the colony and later state of New York between the 1740s and the 1830s. These elusive embroideries, as yet not linked to any specific teacher or school, are thought to have originated in one of the elite French girls’ schools in New Rochelle, New York. Christina’s picture bears all the hallmarks of New York Biblical samplers: a solid ground worked in cross-stitch, with some decorative borders in Queen’s stitch; a profusion of Biblical motifs; and division into horizontal bands. The plethora of Biblical motifs seems to suggest that these samplers were produced in the context of religious instruction, and Christina did indeed come from a devout family of Lutherans-turned-Methodists. However, extant samplers reveal that the girls who stitched these exercises came from a range of Protestant religions, including Dutch Reform, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Methodist. In addition, the Biblical motifs are linked to a long tradition of such imagery in European schoolgirl samplers, particularly those originating in Holland and northern Germany. Christina’s sampler is less significant as an artifact of religious instruction than as a document of the values and aspirations of the Arcularius family, particularly those of her father, Philip Arcularius.

Born in Marburg, Germany, around 1748, Philip Jacob Arcularius immigrated to New York prior to the Revolution and engaged in the baking business with his brothers. According to family legend, Arcularius volunteered to supply the city’s soldiers with bread during the Revolutionary War. By the 1790s he had left the baker’s trade to become a tanner and evidently prospered as a master artisan. Philip married Elizabeth Grim in New York City’s Lutheran Church in 1775, and the couple settled into a home on Frankfort Street. There they became parents to eleven children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Christina, the eldest, was born in 1777.

Christina undoubtedly executed her sampler while attending a New York City school, likely within walking distance from her parents’ home in the city’s North Ward. In 1790s Gotham, most children were educated within an informal system of “pay schools” presided over by independent schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. For the average price of sixteen shillings or two dollars a quarter, students received instruction in reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and morality. These schools generally enrolled both sexes, though boys typically outnumbered girls two to one. Unfortunately no documentation of Christina’s education survives, but we know that Christina’s siblings attended coeducational pay schools in lower Manhattan, where they mingled with children from a wide range of economic and religious backgrounds. In January 1803, Philip Arcularius paid Widow Catherine Mott of William Street two pounds for three quarters of teaching, as well as an additional sixteen shillings toward wood to heat the schoolroom. Ten months later, he again paid an installment for wood. Though the bill provides no specific details suggesting the focus of Widow Mott’s instruction (such as a charge for silk thread), it is possible that she taught needlework to girls in her care, including Christina’s younger sisters Margaret and Maria.

Bills also reveal that the Arcularius boys and girls received at least some of their education together. Schoolmaster Samuel Rudd charged Arcularius four dollars in August 1805 for the quarterly tuition of Margaret, two dollars for half a quarter’s tuition for Peter, and 37 1/2 cents for ink and quills. Rudd, whose schoolroom was located at 18 George Street, had been teaching in the city since the 1790s. His income of 200 pounds for the 1795-96 school year placed him among the city’s highest paid schoolteachers. More telling details are known about the school that the younger Arcularius girls attended the following year. In July 1806, Philip Arcularius was billed $6 by Ephraim Conrad for “education of daughters,” and another 50 cents for ink and quills. Conrad ran a coeducational school at the back of 32 Nassau Street and counted Maria and Margaret Arcularius among his pupils. A broadside announcing the school exercises—an evening showcasing student talent, open to the public for the admission price of two shillings—records presentations by the Arcularius sisters. Maria, along with classmate Margaret Tonnelle, delivered a “Dialogue on good behaviour,” while Margaret, with Mary Alstine, presented a dialogue on female education. The program’s subjects ranged from religious to literary to patriotic, indicating that a broad spectrum of students—sons and daughters of grocers, tailors, and merchants alike—were receiving a solid liberal education, designed to outfit them as citizens of the young republic.

It is clear that Philip Arcularius valued education, sought out well-respected teachers for his children, and viewed their schooling as a ticket to securing a solid future. While the Arcularius sons were being prepared for apprenticeships that would launch their careers as master artisans or merchants, the daughters were being groomed as domestic matrons, capable of managing the household of a respectable middle-class family. Like other parents of his era, Arcularius educated Christina in genteel pursuits with the aspiration that she would marry well and lead a comfortable life. Philip Arcularius was himself prospering during these years, rising as a successful master artisan to mingle with the ranks of the city’s mercantile and cultural elite. He played an active role in the religious and civic life of New York, holding positions generally reserved for citizens of higher status. He was elected to the state’s General Assembly five times between 1798 and 1805, serving as a Democratic-Republican. At the local level, he served as assistant alderman for New York City’s Fifth Ward from 1796 to 1800. In 1805, the Common Council appointed Arcularius superintendent of the almshouse, a prominent post implying credentials worthy of public trust.

Philip Arcularius’s rising star peaked in late 1805, when he became embroiled in a scandal at the almshouse. By early 1806, he had been removed from his position in disgrace. The incident had occurred on November 27, 1805, when Omey Kirk, a free black woman in labor, presented herself at the almshouse and was turned away for not having the required permit from a magistrate. She subsequently gave birth to a mulatto boy in a nearby yard and abandoned the baby there. Kirk was later discovered and committed to Bridewell Prison for abandoning her infant. William Coleman, Federalist editor of the New-York Evening Post, published an account of the incident in his paper two days later, laying the blame at the hands of the almshouse superintendent. Despite Arcularius’s protests that he was unaware of her condition, Coleman effectively destroyed his reputation. Two months later the Common Council passed a resolution removing him from his position as almshouse superintendent. Arcularius never recovered from the humiliation. After the incident, he never again held a publicly elected position.

Considered within this rich context, Christina’s Tree of Knowledge becomes a powerful artifact. As the eldest child of immigrant parents, Christina embodied the hopes of a family striving to make its mark in a new country and play an active role in the formation of the young republic. As an adult, Christina is reported to have regaled her children with stories of the new nation’s early struggles and triumphs, and according to her daughter “never tired of telling what she had witnessed in old New York.” She recalled the dramatic British evacuation of New York in 1783, which she experienced as an eight-year-old, and witnessed George Washington’s inauguration as first president of the United States on the balcony of Federal Hall in 1789. She claimed to have vivid memories of the gallows, pillory, and whipping post that stood not far from her Frankfort Street home, recalling that “hanging day was a general holiday and schools were dismissed that the children might witness the horrible sight.” While primly stitching Eve’s fall from innocence on her canvas, Christina likely reflected on the brutal consequences suffered by those who succumbed to temptation in her everyday world. The sampler’s cross-stitched Eden conveys a bountiful optimism that parallels the Arcularius family’s rising status in 1792; however, Christina’s towering Tree of Knowledge, weighty with moralistic overtones and avian overabundance, suggests potential threats to Christina’s imagined idyll and domestic reality. One wonders whether Christina sensed the dangers that lay ahead as her father ascended New York’s perilous social ladder.

At age twenty-two Christina married New York City grocer Samuel Barker Harper and assumed the conventional domestic role of wife and mother, likely fulfilling the expectations of her ambitious father. On the occasion of her marriage in 1799, Philip Arcularius presented her with a collection of silver dollars that soon thereafter were melted down to make a fashionable silver tea set. Following their marriage, Christina and Samuel Harper set up their own household and raised five children to adulthood.

Fig. 2. Unidentified artist, Mrs. Samuel Barker Harper (Christina Arcularius, 1777-1860), c. 1830. Oil on canvas, 36 x 29 in. The New-York Historical Society, bequest of Mrs. Lathrop C. Harper, 1957.211. Courtesy of the collection of the New-York Historical Society.

The couple had formal portraits painted of themselves around 1830: Christina was portrayed as a conservatively attired matron with searching brown eyes, an intent gaze, and a face set with determination. As Harper’s grocery business prospered, the family moved to ever more fashionable neighborhoods, eventually building their own home on St. Mark’s Place in 1842. The Harper and Arcularius families, both devoutly Methodist, became progressively intertwined as Christina’s younger sister Maria married Samuel’s nephew James Harper (later the mayor of New York City), and Samuel took on Christina’s brother Andrew as a business partner.

Christina’s Tree of Knowledge sampler probably remained in her home on St. Mark’s Place until her death in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. It likely passed to her eldest daughter Amanda, whose own New York sampler of c. 1815 (which survives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) speaks to the continuing tradition of educating Arcularius/Harper daughters in needlework. Christina’s grandchildren recognized a perfect home for her needlework picture in the vast collection of European and American samplers gathered by Mrs. Lathrop C. Harper (Mabel Herbert Urner), wife of Christina’s grandson. Mrs. Harper collected over six hundred examples by 1924 and more than eight hundred by the time of her death in 1957, probably the largest sampler collection in America, mostly gathered on annual buying sprees in Europe. An article on her collection in the March 1924 issue of The House Beautiful illustrates some of these treasures displayed in her gracious home amidst Harper family heirlooms. Fittingly, the oil portrait of Christina Arcularius Harper hangs in one corner of the drawing room, surrounded by a sea of exquisitely crafted samplers.

Mrs. Harper bequeathed her extensive collection of samplers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1957. Interestingly, she singled out only one piece from her vast holdings—Christina’s Tree of Knowledge sampler—for donation to the New-York Historical Society, recognizing its greater value as a historical document than as a work of art. Presumably she realized that Christina’s sampler represents more than a schoolgirl exercise or a display of needlework talent: it is a potent cultural artifact that opens a window into young women’s education and the social fabric of 1790s New York.

Further Reading:

Primary documents in the library of the New-York Historical Society provided the starting point for unearthing Christina’s personal and family history. The extensive Lathrop Colgate Harper family papers—including correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, and financial records—span four generations of this quintessential New York City family. Numerous photographs of Christina’s children, grandchildren, and their residences can be found in the Lathrop C. and Mabel H. Urner Harper photograph collection. A printed pamphlet, “A Faithful Report of the Trial of the Cause of Philip I. Arcularius, and William Coleman, Gent.,” provides fascinating details about the almshouse incident that disgraced the Arcularius family.

The Biblical samplers of colonial and federal New York are analyzed in the second volume of Betty Ring’s major work, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850 (New York, 1993), to date the only significant published analysis of this important group. For the social history of American needlework, see Susan Burrows Swan’s Plain & Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1700-1850 (New York, 1977). The inspiration to weave a story from one seemingly ordinary needlework picture is owed to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001).

The cultural environment of Christina’s New York was reconstructed with the aid of city directories, census records, and the Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, as well as Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), Paul A. Gilje and Howard B. Rock, eds. Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic (Ithaca, 1992), and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984). Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s comprehensive Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999) offers a richly detailed account of everyday life in 1790s New York City.

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

Margaret K. Hofer is curator of decorative arts at the New-York Historical Society, where she organized the exhibition “Home Sewn: Three Centuries of Stitching History,” on view from November 18, 2003, to April 18, 2004. She is the author of The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games (New York, 2003) and co-author of Seat of Empire (New York, 2002).

What’s “Sacred” about Violence in Early America?

Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World

One of the most chilling images in early American history is the deliberate firing of Fort Mystic during the Pequot War of 1637. Five hundred Indian men, women, and children died that day, burned alive along with their homes and possessions by a vengeful Puritan militia intent on doing God’s will. “We must burn them!” the militia captain famously insisted to his troops on the eve of the massacre, in words that echo the classic early modern response to heretics. Just five months before, the Puritan minister at Salem had exhorted his congregation in strikingly similar terms to destroy a more familiar enemy, Satan; “We must burne him,” John Wheelwright told his parishioners. Indians and devils may have been scarcely distinguishable to many a Puritan, but their rhetorical conflation in these two calls to arms raises a question: Was the burning of Fort Mystic a racial or a religious killing?

The simple, and no doubt right, answer is that it was both. In early modern Europe, people were defined as much by what they believed as by how they looked. The line between Christian and non-Christian was the one fundamental divide that separated people, communities, and kingdoms into hostile camps, and it certainly does not surprise us to see seventeenth-century Christians (not to mention latter-day ones) justifying bloodshed in the name of God. In the British North American colonies, where the “sacred” had a more tenuous material and institutional existence and where legitimacy of any kind was harder to come by, it is nearly impossible to disentangle religious violence from other forms of aggression. One could easily say that all actions undertaken by European settlers to defend themselves and their communities in the vast missionary field that was the New World bespoke religious anxieties and aspirations. But having said this, it is still possible to place some phenomenological and interpretive boundaries around the problem of “religious violence.” What forms of violence should we categorize as “sacred” violence, and how do we know when notions of the sacred are at stake in acts of violence, whatever form they might take? (I should note that, though I am using the terms sacred and religious interchangeably, there is a difference: as I’ve come to understand the terms, the sacred refers to all that which exists outside or transcends the human sphere, whereas religion refers to those practices and institutions that defend the sacred within the human sphere. Sacred is the more encompassing term and the less definable.)

A survey of the myriad ways Europe’s Christians found to kill and maim one another in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the age of the wars of religion—would uncover formal and rhetorical similarities in narratives of martyrdom, massacre, iconoclasm, judicial torture, and orchestrated assaults (both popular and state-sponsored) on dissenting communities. The colonial Indian wars of the seventeenth century fit very comfortably in this historical landscape; in numerous ways, these wars may best be understood as continuations and extensions of Europe’s wars of religion. Nearly identical forms of violence marked all these events (burning of innocents, dismembering of combatants and posthumous violations, destruction of sacred objects such as Bibles, cannibalism and other ritualized acts of consumption of one’s enemies, and a central preoccupation with blood and its purgative and purifying properties). And, perhaps more tellingly, these atrocities were often described in identical language from one genre to the next; the tortures endured by martyrs at the stake in the Old World, so meticulously and lovingly described by Reformation and Counter-Reformation propagandists, are exactly replicated in narrative detail in the graphic accounts of the Indian wars published by sympathetic missionaries in the New World. (The parallels are even more pronounced in Spain’s conquest of its Indian population.)

"Various Methods of Massacreing the Protestants in the Vallies of Piedmont in Italy." This and subsequent illustrations are taken from The New and Complete Book of Martyrs, by Rev. Mr. John Foxe and revised by Paul Wright, DD (New York, 1794). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — “Various Methods of Massacreing the Protestants in the Vallies of Piedmont in Italy.” This and subsequent illustrations are taken from The New and Complete Book of Martyrs, by Rev. Mr. John Foxe and revised by Paul Wright, DD (New York, 1794). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

This is grim reading. And I will spare you the gory details. My point is simply that there are striking similarities between New World violence against indigenous peoples, perhaps the exemplary form of colonial violence, and the European wars of religion, which many historians consider the apex of human savagery in the early modern era. The formal and rhetorical similarities only take us so far, however, in understanding the role of the sacred in colonial violence. Ultimately, what seems to distinguish sacred violence from other acts of aggression is not its form but its intensity. Certain thresholds (emotional, ideological, and perceptual) had to be crossed in order for violence to be interpreted and sanctioned as serving religious ends rather than secular ones. Religious wars, by definition, seem to be more brutal, more zealous, and less tempered by regret or remorse than other forms of warfare. This is not a new or very interesting insight; we’re reminded daily of the ferocity and single-mindedness by which people defend their faith in the face of perceived threats. But it may be useful to explore just how, and where, thresholds of legitimacy come to be established in different cultures and why and how the sacred is invoked.

Many gifted thinkers have devoted considerable energy and creativity to decoding the relationship of violence to the sacred. Some have suggested that all violence is in some sense sacred, that it is rooted in the deepest human desire to defend what is most precious and transcendent. Others have reminded us just how central acts of violence (the crucifixion, for example) are to the core principles and symbols of the world’s great religions. From René Girard’s classic anthropological theory of sacrificial rites to Elaine Scarry’s imaginative reading of the imagery of wounds and wounding in the Old and New Testaments to Ariel Glucklich’s much more recent theory of the psychological roots of “sacred pain,” scholars from across the disciplines have tackled the ubiquitous association of religion with violence.

For the historian of colonial America, the question is not the ubiquity of religious violence but the apparent scarcity of it. The starkest and most brutal forms of persecution—the burning of heretics, wholesale destruction of sacred places and objects, the forced expulsion and enslavement of outsiders such as Jews and Huguenots—were noticeably absent from the British colonies. But the European periphery produced new and sometimes bizarre forms of sacred violence: the ritualized assaults by Puritans on witches and Indians, which some scholars consider a peculiar form of iconoclasm; the proliferation of martyr tales within the context of slavery and Indian captivity; and the emergence of a hyperbolic rhetoric of suffering and redemption that traveled easily from religious to secular genres. Colonial Americans seemed (in good Protestant fashion) particularly adept at vicarious forms of violence. Words and objects, not people, were their main targets.

Top, "St. Lawrence Burnt on a Gridiron by order of the Emperor Valerianus in the 8th Roman Persecution of the Christian Church"; Bottom, "Two Primitive Martyrs put into Copper of Boiling Oil by order of the Proconsul of Ephesus during the Reign of Nero. AD 69." Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — Top, “St. Lawrence Burnt on a Gridiron by order of the Emperor Valerianus in the 8th Roman Persecution of the Christian Church”; Bottom, “Two Primitive Martyrs put into Copper of Boiling Oil by order of the Proconsul of Ephesus during the Reign of Nero. AD 69.” Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

There is one obvious answer to this puzzling lack of traditional religious violence: the absence of the traditional targets of such violence—cathedrals, religious art, shrines, and, above all, significant urban concentrations of “outsiders” like Catholics and Jews. Furthermore, the structural weaknesses of the colonial governments meant that the religious disaffected had neither the resources nor the institutional backing to mount a serious assault on the objects of their rage. It is no coincidence that the only instance of official martyrdom (the execution of four Quaker missionaries in Massachusetts in the 1650s) occurred in a colony that boasted both a strong established church and a powerful magistracy. When we consider that the era of mass execution of heretics had largely ended by the time the British colonies were settled (the last Englishman burned at the stake for heresy was Edward Wightman in 1611), it is perhaps not surprising that so few colonists died for their beliefs. Moreover, the spectrum of popular sacred violence in Europe—which included such acts as cursing, blasphemous songs and jokes, and carnivalesque gestures aimed at reinforcing popular morality—also narrowed noticeably in the American colonies. The ecclesiastical landscape in North America simply didn’t offer the same opportunities for expressing sacred rage as the Old World, even if that rage continued to simmer in the hearts of European settlers who had so recently endured so much pain and suffering on account of their own religious beliefs.

A significant proportion if not an outright majority of immigrants throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were driven to the colonies by religious persecution at home—the Puritans, of course, but also the Quakers, Huguenots, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, German Pietists, Moravians, Shakers, and a smattering of minor sectaries such as the Dunkards and Muggletonians. For some of these migrants, the experience of persecution was a fresh wound, still bloody and raw, not a theological abstraction. (Some, most famously the Moravians, managed to ground both their collective historical memory and their theology in the image of blood and wounds.) And yet, the colonial settlements that mushroomed along the Atlantic coast in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, by and large, safe (or at least, non-lethal) environments for new generations of religious dissenters.

So much inflamed passion, so little actual persecution: such is the conventional story of colonial America’s religious history. Take martyrdom, for example. Martyrdom was the paradigmatic experience of sacred violence in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras—the ultimate expression of a community’s willingness to kill, and die, in the name of God. What immediately strikes the colonial historian is how few people were martyred for their faith in British North America. To provide some background: the most recent survey of early modern European martyrdom concludes that, as a conservative estimate, some 5000 people were judicially executed for religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, customarily by burning at the stake. If we expand this figure to include those whose deaths were the indirect result of legal prosecution or popular protest (those who died while imprisoned, for example, or who perished in religious riots), the number quickly climbs into the tens of thousands. Not every death produced a martyr, of course—martyrdom is an interpretive as well as a judicial category, the product of a particular believer’s conviction and a particular community’s need for heroes—and Europe’s Christians were assisted in the task of identifying and promoting martyrs by a well-oiled literary machine that poured thousands of martyr pamphlets from its presses. Post-reformation Europe was, in historian Brad Gregory’s words, “awash in martyrological literature.”

"The Burning of Mr. Julius Palmer (Fellow of the Magdalen College Oxford), Mr. John Givin, and Mr. Tho(ma)s Askiw at the Sandpits near Newbery Berks." Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — “The Burning of Mr. Julius Palmer (Fellow of the Magdalen College Oxford), Mr. John Givin, and Mr. Tho(ma)s Askiw at the Sandpits near Newbery Berks.” Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Protestants proved, somewhat surprisingly, to be as adept at promoting the cult of martyrdom as the late medieval church had been—this despite their opposition to cults of any kind. The Protestant martyr was, in many respects, the successor to the Catholic saint: an exemplary figure whose spiritual heroics helped close the immense gulf separating God from man. Unlike saints, martyrs had no supernatural or intercessory powers, but, at the moment of a martyr’s death, believing witnesses could see the face of God shining through the flames. Martyrs’ lives and, especially, their deaths were told and retold, compiled into massive compendiums that served as important textual supplements to the Bible for a new generation of reformers. The most influential of these martyrologies was John Foxe’s eight-volume Acts and Monuments (known colloquially as the Book of Martyrs), first published in English in 1563 and widely available throughout the Anglophone world, including the American colonies. Colonial children were introduced to Foxe’s martyrs from an early age in the pages of the New England Primer, and the town of Concord helpfully purchased its own copy to be made available to all residents.

From the very beginning, then, narratives of martyrdom were as important as the experience of the stake itself in shaping the devotional style and religious subjectivity of English Protestants. Those who did not have to face the prospect of actual death could read about the deaths of others just like them. Martyrologies like Foxe’s were thus instructional manuals as well as commemorative histories: they showed faith to be an act of constant sacrifice, and they told ordinary believers how to defend their faith in the face of terrible pressures. The Protestant martyr was, first and foremost, a humble lay man or woman, not a religious superhero. The Quakers, formally the Society of Friends, best exemplify this ethos of universal martyrdom: a self-designated “suffering people,” Quakers understood suffering to be a collective not an individual experience and so made no distinction in their official records between the heroics of a select few and the more mundane deprivations endured by the many. All Friends were, in some sense, martyrs. “Narratives of suffering” were collected and published by the Society in the thousands to celebrate the whippings, imprisonments, financial hardships, and innumerable indignities inflicted on Friends by a tyrannical and unmerciful government. One such pamphlet “promiscuously” recorded the sufferings “as they were promiscuously inflicted,” and proceeded in an incantatory tone to enumerate “all the sufferings therein: the blood of those whom you had put to death, and the Earsthat you had cut, and the Backs that youhad torn, and the Limbs that you had endeavoured to starve, and the Bellies that you had kept empty, and the Houses and Estates that you have laid waste and devoured, and the necessities and straitsyou had put and exposed the People of the Lord unto . . . for their Conscience to God.”

The title page of volume I of The New and Complete Book of Martyrs. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

In the Quaker literature, martyrdom came perilously close to meaning persecution of anykind, no matter how mild or unspectacular. Other Protestants, especially their sectarian opponents, did not go this far, but all Reformers participated in this project to conflate suffering and death and to make narratives of suffering central to the community’s understanding of itself. There is a basic paradox here. Protestants came to experience martyrdom as both a normative category and an exemplary one: something that everyone might—even should—aspire to but that most would experience only vicariously as readers. As the historian of print David Hall points out, “to read about the martyrs was not the same thing as becoming one.” Protestants, it seems, wanted to have it both ways.

This was especially true in the colonies. If European settlers were relatively unfamiliar with the spectacle of executions for heresy, they proved avid consumers and producers of martyr tales—both imported and homegrown. Turning from legal records to pamphlet literature, we find martyrs everywhere in colonial America: Indian captives such as Mary Rowlandson who saw their ordeal as a testing of faith; Puritan and Anglican missionaries who loved to recount the hardships and deprivations they endured in their pursuit of souls in America’s wild backcountry; colonial soldiers in the many wars of empire fought on American soil in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who believed they were redeeming the continent for God and King; long-suffering colonial magistrates and governors who felt persecuted by the ungrateful and importunate masses they were supposed to be governing.

Such martyr tales did not cease with the eighteenth-century dissemination of Enlightenment ideas about a rational and self-regulating universe that presumably demanded little heroic sacrifice and self-denial from its human subjects. As long as new sectarians continued to arrive from bloody Europe, as long as martyr tales continued to sell briskly, as long as the Protestant impulse to glorify suffering remained intact, the image of the martyr continued to exert a powerful pull on the colonial mind.

The British colonies were thus “awash” in martyr literature, a fact that returns us once again to the central paradox of colonial martyrdom: colonial martyrs were everywhere, religious violence (of the kind recognizable to early modern Christians or to historians of the Reformation era), in short supply. What, then, are we to make of this oversized colonial martyr complex? Was this just a rhetorical hangover from a European past, or was it a symptom of deep-seated anxieties about the precarious nature of the “sacred” in a dangerous and alien land? And does it matter, or rather, howdoes it matter that martyrdom was primarily a textual experience in colonial America?

"A Bookseller Burnt at Avignon in France for selling Bibles in the French Tongue, with some of them tied around his Neck." Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — “A Bookseller Burnt at Avignon in France for selling Bibles in the French Tongue, with some of them tied around his Neck.” Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

This question, among others, has been at the heart of recent efforts to apply the insights of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias to the historical experiences of Anglo-Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period which saw enlightenment but also savagery: corporal punishment began to disappear from the judicial landscape, but the disciplining of slaves reached new heights of terror; blood feuds and shaming rituals were discredited by new generations of civil and political leaders, but successful new evangelical and pietistic movements restored the language of blood and sacrifice to religious practice; the sentimental novel captured the hearts of Anglo-America’s middle classes, but quasi-pornographic tales of sadistic cruelty and sexual violation moved the souls of abolitionists and other middle-class reformers. At the heart of this conundrum is the printed word’s capacity to (re)-create bodily experience—to capture for readers the physical sensations associated with a given activity (torture, enslavement, death, sex, birth).

The boldest interpretations of the early modern print revolution argue that texts and their readers became the predominant model for theories of human society: actors became spectators as the chaos of lived experience was sorted into clean and coherent linear narratives in which the particular was supplanted by the universal. In this interpretation, the stories people tell themselves about their lives in a modern world are truer, more consequential, than life itself. More cautious interpretations stress the circular, limiting quality of print, in which stories, however visceral and compelling, remain just that—stories. One conclusion is clear from all this: bodies and texts bear an imperfect and unstable semiotic relationship to one another. Neither can be a substitute for the other, yet, in a certain sense, neither exists without the other.

This is a pretty long-winded way of saying what David Hall said much more succinctly—reading about martyrs is not the same thing as becoming one. Still, I think we can make a case that something of the dread, terror, and ecstasy of martyrdom was available to readers. An interesting comparison is the literature of Indian-hating, which colonists produced in large quantities during the eighteenth century, especially during the French and Indian War. Though horrific in tone and graphic in content, much of this literature was written by men and women who had never encountered a real Indian or faced a real tomahawk. What the historian Peter Silver has called “the agreeable horror of Indian-hating,” nicely captures the potent mixture of pain and pleasure such narratives produced in their readers. Reading about horror, after all, is never an entirely passive experience. It can have real emotional and ideological consequences: in the case of Silver’s war stories, hardened racial animosities and ethnic paranoia. In similar fashion, reading martyr tales may have been such a pervasive practice in the colonies precisely because of the absence of Old World sectarian persecution. Colonists had to find other, less immediate ways to fuel their faith. When we consider how quickly and vehemently anti-Catholic prejudices surfaced in the wake of the French and Indian War—at a time when the number of Catholics in the colonies was vanishingly small, and their institutional presence, entirely benign—we can see the political utility of keeping the memory of religious persecution alive in the form of martyr tales.

Of course, the ultimate irony is that, while the colonists were busy envisioning their own sufferings as a form of martyrdom, safe from the flames of religious hatred that still engulfed much of Europe, people were dying for their faith (or the faith of others) in the Americas. These people were not Europeans; many were not Christians or members of any faith recognized by Europeans. But they were clearly the victims of violence perpetrated in the name of God.

Should we extend the concept of martyrdom to include those who did not use or recognize the term? Should the five hundred Pequots who perished in the Fort Mystic massacre be considered “martyrs”? What about the Praying Indians who were herded onto a pestilential island in Boston Harbor during King Philip’s War and left to die while the Puritan militias burned Indian villages from Maine to Massachusetts? Or the peaceful Indians of the Moravian mission town of Gnadenhutten who were slaughtered by vengeful Scots-Irish farmers a century later in the Pennsylvania backcountry? We know that the German Moravians considered their Indian brethren at Gnadenhutten to be martyrs to the cause, and I suspect that New England’s Christian Indians had their own martyr tales to tell of King Philip’s War, even if they left almost no written accounts of their ordeal. To move further into the dark borderlands of the colonial “violence frontier,” how about the thousands of Africans who suffered (in Jon Butler’s provocative phrase) a “spiritual holocaust” when they were torn from their native villages and cosmologies and forced into slavery in the American South? Should the violence of renaming, the loss of African genealogical and spiritual roots, be compared to the violence of burning at the stake? And what of those slaves who were burned at the stake—the unfortunate men and women who fell victim to the southern slaveholders’ paranoia about fire and poison throughout the eighteenth century or, on a larger scale, the “conspirators” in the 1741 New York arson scare who formed a human bonfire at the hands of the city’s terrified citizens? How much of the ideological complex of European heresy hunting was recreated in the spectacle of slave malefactors or Indian villages being put to the flames?

These are questions not easily answered. And the answers depend in part on which perspective we wish to adopt—that of the victims or that of the aggressors. As Europe’s Protestants knew all too well, one person’s martyr was another’s heretic. From the perspective of the historian of the European colonial experience, it seems reasonable to suggest that the act of burning alive was an expression of religious anathema, whether reserved for heretics or racial others, and that those who suffered (and perpetrated) this horror were understood to be fulfilling religious roles. Whether construed as heathens, infidels, apostates, or devil worshippers, Indians and Africans occupied a position of spiritual significance for their European neighbors, and acts of violence directed against these religious and racial outsiders were, I would argue, always acts of sacred violence. In this sense, the terrible wars of religion that destroyed so much of Europe did not end in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, or in 1689 with the Act of Toleration in Great Britain, or in 1710 with the final defeat of the Camisard Revolt in France but continued to gather victims well into the Age of Reason.

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

Susan Juster is professor of history at the University of Michigan. Her recent publications include Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (1994) and Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (2003). She is currently working on a cultural history of religious violence in the American colonies.

“Feed on Humane Flesh and Blood? Strang mess!”: A Puritan Communion Cup

Silver beaker by John Dixwell, 4 5/8 in. x 2 3/8 in. (c. 1715), Henry Needham Flynt Silver and Metalware Collection. Courtesy of Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts.

This silver communion cup, made around 1715 by English silversmith John Dixwell for the First Church of Deerfield, Massachusetts, was likely used in a Puritan communion service.

Communion in Deerfield would have looked something like this: the congregation gathered in the meetinghouse, sitting in pews facing the minister at the center of the room. Stepping down from the pulpit to the communion table, the minister blessed a flagon of wine, symbolizing the blood of Christ, and poured its contents into an array of silver vessels, including this two-handled cup. Deacons carried the cups of wine to the ends of the pews. One by one, those members of the congregation who had been declared fit to take communion passed the cup along the pews. They drank and meditated on the body of Jesus Christ and on the body of the congregation.

Behind this ritual lurked the shadow of another, the Catholic mass, in which a priest consecrated wafers and wine, transforming them into the body and blood of Christ. In the Puritan communion service, the substance that communicants ingested was merely a metaphor; in the Catholic Mass, communicants consumed the product of a miracle called transubstantiation. Although Puritans designed their service in direct opposition to the mass (and similar Anglican practices back in England), its practitioners’ version of the Lord’s Supper had more in common with the mass than Puritans wanted to admit. The silver communion cup embodied the tensions that Puritans faced in their religious experiment in New England. The cup fostered community as it enabled bodily contact between communicants and Christ. At the same time, however, communion ritualistically excluded outsiders. These tensions took on a fierce urgency as the Puritans warred with their French Catholic neighbors to the north in Canada.

Taking Communion

The Dixwell communion cup forged ties between the bodies of communicants and the body of Christ. It fit easily in the hand, with two handles that allowed communicants to pass it along the pew. Other Puritan vessels of the time would have been more difficult to hand down the pew, as they had only one handle or none at all. The Dixwell cup was designed to be handled by large groups of people, without any spilling of wine; however, the sheer delicacy of the handles (likely replaced at a later date) still encouraged users to grasp it carefully. In the Catholic mass, the priest placed consecrated wafers on the tongues of believers. By contrast, the Puritan communion service, in a manifestation of the priesthood of all believers, granted the communicant direct contact with the blood of Christ: communicants raised the lip of the cup to their own lips and drank.

Made to be touched, the communion cup both facilitated contact between bodies and formed a body of its own. Bodies are vessels, containers of viscera, and the communion cup enclosed a substance that purported to be the essence of life itself. As a metal, silver warms in contact with heat. Puritan communicants would have warmed the communion cup, and maybe the wine within, with their hands as they passed the cup down the pew. The cup and the wine sloshing within might have felt like a pulsing, living thing. Even so, the handles of the Dixwell cup prevented users from touching the body of the cup, much less the precious wine within; the contact between the body of the consumed and the body of the consumer was well-regulated.

Defining Communities

Just as the cup regulated contact between the body of the communicant and the body of the consumed, Puritans and Catholics drew different boundaries around their communities of communicants. In order to take communion at mass, Catholic communicants needed to have made confession of sins, fasted since midnight the night before, and expressed faith in the miracle of transubstantiation. By contrast, many Puritan congregations “fenced” the communion table, allowing only certain laypeople to take part. Potential members had to complete an extensive devotional regimen before the congregation deemed them ready to take part in the Lord’s Supper. Early in the seventeenth century, only those who had publicly declared their conversion experiences were allowed be baptized and take communion. By the late seventeenth century, church authorities began to allow people who had not announced their conversion but who lived godly lives to participate in the sacraments. A sometimes uneasy compromise, this Halfway Covenant lasted into the eighteenth century. Puritans and Catholics defined their bodies of communicants differently, with Puritans taking pride in their more restrictive Lord’s Supper.

Debating Communion and Cannibalism

Like the cup itself, the wine within held complex meanings for Puritans, who rejected the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. The most important division between the two religions was the question of what communicants ingested during the communion service—blood or wine, flesh or wafer. The resulting arguments—miracle versus metaphor—played out over and over again in Catholic and Protestant writing and practice.

The Catholic doctrine of the miracle of transubstantiation relied upon a literal interpretation of Jesus’s words in 1 Corinthians 24-25: “This is my body … This cup is the new testament in my blood.” A priest’s blessing transformed sacramental wafers and wine into Jesus’s actual flesh and blood. According to the Douay catechism, the Eucharist was “the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ … under the forms or appearances of Bread and Wine.” John Gother, an English convert to Catholicism, placed belief in transubstantiation at the forefront of Catholic faith. “My Saviour Jesus Christ,” he wrote, “I firmly believe Thou art really present in the Blessed Sacrament; I believe that it contains thy Body and Blood, accompanied with thy Soul and Divinity.”

Protestants disagreed, insisting that Christ’s words should be interpreted only as a metaphor. The Westminster catechism specified that communicants partook of Christ’s flesh and blood “not after a corporal and carnal manner, but by faith” alone. Nevertheless, Puritan devotional writings contained a hunger for communion that seemed to transcend figures of speech. Cotton Mather expounded upon the life-sustaining qualities of bread and wine, declaring that Christ’s love similarly fed the soul: “If Bread nourish & strengthen the Body, much more will the Lord Jesus do so, to the Souls of them, who draw near unto Him,” he wrote. Though Protestants were not consuming actual flesh and blood, Mather argued that a true believer would nevertheless be able to “Discern the Lords Body in the Lords Supper.” But the importance of the Lord’s Supper went beyond discerning the holy in the seemingly mundane. Communion satisfied a particular kind of spiritual appetite. Another Puritan minister, Thomas Doolittle, asked of communicants, “Do you love him, would you not desire to eat and drink at his Table, yea, to feast upon him? … Did you hunger after him, and thirst for him …?”

Edward Taylor certainly did. The Westfield, Massachusetts, minister wrote reams of devotional poetry, including several “Meditations” on John 6:53, “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have no Life in you.” Unlike Mather, Taylor did not belabor the distinction between wine and blood. He described the Lord’s Supper in literal, visceral terms: “Thou, Lord, Envit’st me thus to eat thy Flesh / And drinke thy blood more Spiritfull than wine.” Communion provided a special kind of nourishment that secular food could not, nourishment without which believers would starve: “I must eate or be a witherd stem,” Taylor declared.

In spite of hungers like Taylor’s, most Puritans interpreted transubstantiation as no less than lust for human flesh. The idea that Catholics consumed Christ’s real body and blood made them “so much worse than Canabals,” Mather declared. Taylor therefore recognized the tricky balance he had to strike, between venerating the body of Christ, and being a metaphorically minded Puritan. One of his meditations posed these very questions about communion: “What feed on Humane Flesh and Blood? Strang mess! / Nature exclaims. What Barbarousness is here?” Like a good Protestant, Taylor answered himself by arguing that Christ’s words were symbolic: “This Sense of this blesst Phrase is nonsense thus. / Some other Sense makes this a metaphor.”

Spilling Blood

The consequences of the debates between miracle and metaphor would be literally bloody, leading to centuries of religious warfare after the Reformation, in the Old World and the New. As New England’s Puritans defined their own beliefs and communities, they did so with an anxious eye toward the French Catholics in Canada just to their north. Between 1690 and 1763, New France and New England were at war more often than at peace.

The intimate act of communion incorporated the body of Christ into one’s own. Those Puritans who drank from the silver cup hungered after communion, a hunger that in many ways resembled the Catholic hunger for the host in the mass, though Puritans were loath to admit it. The body of the communion cup helped to bridge the space between the believer and God, but it also divided believers from one another. Puritans and Catholics drew the boundaries of their communities in blood, then went out to draw the blood of their enemies.

Holy Man, Holy Head: John Wesley’s Busts in the Atlantic World

Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation

Busts are odd things. Heads free of their bodies, severed at the shoulders, often at the neck, and plopped on architectural bases. They emerge from the sides of buildings, arise from monuments, line libraries, occupy museums, attend grave markers, and greet us from dreary governmental buildings. Busts are, in essence, decapitated heads. And perhaps, in that sense, it isn’t a surprise that the Romans were the first to pioneer the form, as they slashed their way across the Mediterranean world. Most cultures have fixated on the head in their efforts to represent people. After all, the head is where we do our thinking, speaking, listening, and where our emotions reveal themselves—the whole self in a small compass, as it were. But there is always a whiff of destruction in the desire to capture the body in stony substance. The body is not above decay, but in order to set it in stone, humans must cut, chisel, smother, cast, even fire—enact a series of small deaths to represent the body in perpetuity.

At the center of Protestant devotion to eminent divines is mimesis—an urge to be cast in the mold of their preeminent saint.

Despite the ambivalence, sometimes verging on antagonism, among Protestants towards the sacred image, this essay tracks a fixation on the severed head of a prominent Protestant divine, even saint: John Wesley, the preeminent founder and leader of the evangelical movement known as Methodism (fig. 1). Wesley’s head was not chiseled out of fine marble, but almost exclusively cast in pottery. Efforts to capture Wesley’s body and possess a part of his “true nature” participated in a mid- to late-eighteenth-century obsession with highly realistic portraiture, in sculpture as much as painting. But instead of a block of stone from whence a head emerged, a modeled clay depiction of the holy man from “life” was made into a mold and mass-produced in a dizzying array of pottery forms across the Atlantic world. These countless molds were filled and fired with the clay of the small landlocked county of Staffordshire, England. In so doing, Wesley’s presence was transferred in ways that transcended his printed words and transferred not only his bodily image, but the actual land and labor of an area of England that held him in special regard.

At the center of Protestant devotion to eminent divines is mimesis—an urge to be cast in the mold of their preeminent saint. But it would be eighteenth-century Staffordshire potters who would do this work first. Through their massive production they were able to assert their “great man” as a means of connecting a rapidly expanding but scattered Methodist tradition, and as a means of applying the firm pressure of the past upon their tumultuous present.

1. A selection of "Wesleyana." Courtesy Wesleyan University Library, Special Collections & Archives. Photo by the author. — 1. A selection of “Wesleyana.” Courtesy Wesleyan University Library, Special Collections & Archives. Photo by the author.

2. John Wesley figurine, mid-19th century. Painted lead glazed pearlware. Possibly Minton (Minton design books contain similar designs). Molds were often copied and shared among Staffordshire potteries. Courtesy Wesleyan University Library, Special Collections & Archives. Photo by the author.

Objects are prone to legend. They have a tendency to accrue more myth than history, and more hearsay than labels. The material culture of this Protestant saint is no exception. In an unknown location in England, at an unknown time, an artist, Mr. Culy, invited a friend over for evening tea. After initial pleasantries, the two were soon circumnavigating the artists’ home gallery of portrait busts. One bust stood out to his visitor. Who is this, the friend asked? Why, it is a bust of the “Rev. John Wesley,” the artist replied. His visitor was enamored, and he was not alone. Culy told his visitor that it “struck Lord Shelburne in the same manner as it does you.” But when Lord Shelburne learned that it was John Wesley, he was aghast: “He—that race of fanatics!” Culy had assured Shelburne that Wesley was a very humble man, and had always refused to have his likeness taken, thinking it “nothing but vanity.” But after offering Wesley “10 Guineas” for every ten minutes he would sit for him—”knowing you value money for the means of doing good”—Wesley amazingly assented. So Wesley removed his coat, lay on the couch, and the artist prepared the plaster, and laid the wet, cold substance on Wesley’s bare face. After eight minutes, Culy “had the most perfect bust” he had “ever taken.” Wesley washed his face, “counted the ten guineas in his hand,” and said, “I never till now earned money so speedily—but what shall we do with it?” For Wesley, it turns out, this wasn’t hard. On the way home he encountered the suffering dregs of British society: “a poor woman crying bitterly,” “a poor wretch who was greedily eating some potato skins,” a “man, or rather a skeleton,” a “young woman in the last stage of consumption,” an “infant, quite dead,” and a heavily indebted lawyer. Soon Wesley’s 10 guineas were consumed in his efforts to alleviate this deluge of suffering. After hearing this story, Lord Shelburne’s heart was softened against the leader of the “race of fanatics,” and in response, he “immediately ordered a dozen of the busts to embellish the grounds of his beautiful residence.” Shelburne’s transformation, from indignation to devotion, was a powerful story of how the bodily representation of John Wesley could overcome anti-evangelical prejudice and transform it to devotion, all with the help of a story attached to a thing.

This legend about the origin story of John Wesley’s bust and its power was reprinted widely in America in nineteenth-century religious and secular periodicals. One reason for the dissemination of the story was the growing presence of John Wesley, not only in prints that could be tacked to walls, or on copper engravings printed in the frontispiece of books, or on the name of institutions, but in the growing ubiquity of his representation in pottery form. “Wesleyana” flooded middling and lower domestic spaces across the British Isles and North America from the late eighteenth century on. This has led some experts to claim, perhaps in a moment of exaggeration, that Wesley was the most represented British person in ceramics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, probably only surpassed by Queen Victoria. Another reason for the popularity of the story was a desire that the prized busts of Wesley were directly related to his actual face, an indexical portrait that circumvented the mediation of an artist. It wasn’t simply an image of Wesley, open to exaggeration or enhancement. Through the direct contact of plaster on his living face, it wasWesley, more than any other image of the man. This alleviated a lingering Protestant unease with the sacred image, by promising a representation “from nature,” of which God was the undisputed artist.

3. “The Founders and Pioneers of Methodism,” collotype print, original by Charles C. Goss (and Theodosia C. Goss, attributed), engraved (albertype process) by Edward Bierstadt (New York, 1873). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click for larger image and more information.

Wesley appeared not only in busts, but also on plates, teapots, clocks, medallions, intaglio presses, door knockers, wax profiles, walking sticks and figurines (fig. 2). Nearly all of this pottery came from Staffordshire. These objects were like action figures in a period when Methodism was exhibiting its otherworldly strength. In America, this strength was on full display. On the eve of the Declaration of Independence, there were only 69 Methodist congregations in the American Colonies. By 1850, there were almost 200,000. Whereas in the eighteenth century Methodists trailed nearly every other sect, by the Civil War they claimed a third of American church members (church attendance was even higher). This led President Ulysses S. Grant to quip in 1868 that “there were three great parties in the United States: The Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church.” This expansive growth, forged on reaches of the Atlantic world, has led one prominent historian to call Methodism an “empire of the Spirit.” In Methodism’s rapidly expanding solar system, John Wesley was its burning sun (fig. 3). Wesley chose the songs that Methodists sang; he selected (and mercilessly edited) the books Methodists read; he dictated Methodist religious practices; he expressed their first ethical positions; he set their theological doctrines; he established their organizational structure—he was the movement’s most powerful religious force.

Staffordshire potteries were clustered in the small towns of Burslem, Tunstall, Stoke, Hanley, Longton, and Fenton (fig. 4). These pottery factories maintained a stranglehold on the middling Atlantic pottery market from the late eighteenth century on. Most of the firms persist to this day—familiar names such as Wedgwood, Minton, and Spode—and enjoy avid collecting communities. The five major pottery towns were landlocked, but they laid beside a turnpike that led to the ports in Liverpool. The completion of the Trent and Mersey Canal in 1771 gave the potteries port access to the world, and this accelerated north Staffordshire’s already well-established pottery industry. They had a near-perfect situation for Atlantic dominance. The towns’ historic reputation for pottery drew skilled artisans from across England. Coal and clay were abundant in the rolling hills, often at the very same sites. Transportation became easier and cheaper by the year. Many shrewd businessmen led the pottery firms, combining a razor-sharp sensitivity to shifts in “taste,” along with a tendency to embrace mechanical and scientific innovation. Living in the intimidating shadow of Chinese porcelain, Staffordshire potters discovered new methods of expression—from glossy glazes to colored enamels, and from elegant white creamwares to dark, durable redwares. The resulting products varied widely as well, from whimsical “toby jugs” to classical sculptures, from jasperware (a colored, mock porcelain) totransfer prints (a method of transferring inky text and design onto fired clay). By the nineteenth century, most middling Americans enjoyed their dinners and took their tea from ceramics made from the clay, thrown by the potters, and fired from the coal of Staffordshire.

John Wesley first came to the North Staffordshire town of Burslem in March of 1760, and he described it as a “scattered town on top of a hill, inhabited almost entirely by potters.” Methodism thrived in Staffordshire. Wesley stopped there annually, in his wide circuit of Methodist societies and chapels. Looking backward in 1784, he called Burslem “the first [Methodist] society in the country, and it is still the largest and the most in earnest.” In the years after Wesley began visiting Staffordshire regularly, the potters had begun to make portrait medallions of the great leader, a representational tradition that would be greatly expanded and perfected by Josiah Wedgwood (fig. 5). These small likenesses of the preacher were often given as gifts, from one Methodist to another. This practice inaugurated a long tradition of giving little Wesleys to establish bonds between Methodists near and far. This appears to be the way the first potted Wesleys made their way to American shores—gifts from traveling Staffordshire potters on business trips to their American sisters and brothers. Over this particular body, bonds could be made. The other means of American collecting was pilgrimage. As many prominent American Methodists traveled to their English holy land, they often brought Wesley relics back with them—pressed flowers from his childhood home, personal relics, like his glasses, or the velvet from his chair, and most commonly, pottery. They were souvenirs, for sure, but it was often more—a desire to possess the material of a very particular, venerated life. The busts thus often earned the title of “relic,” not only for being old, but also for their purported “exact representation” of the elderly religious leader. This was not simply a “likeness” of Wesley, but somehow carried a part of him. The legend of “Mr. Culy” making a bust from a life-mask became too enticing to deny. Despite the legendary tale with which this essay opened, it was not “Mr. Culy,” but rather Enoch Wood, who would sculpt with his fingers—rather than a life mask—the standard Wesley bust in 1781.

4. The pottery towns of Burslem, Tunstall, Stoke, Hanley, Longton, and Fenton were clustered in the north of Staffordshire. A New Physical, Historical & Political Map of England and Wales, by John Andrews. (London, 1786). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image for enlargement (with cities marked) in new window.

5. Jasperware cameo portrait medallion of John Wesley in gilt frame. Wedgwood Manufactory (late 18th century). Courtesy Wesleyan University Library, Special Collections & Archives. Photo by the author.

Enoch Wood grew up among the distinctive bottle kilns of Burslem, in a potter’s family that specialized in modeled figurines. Young Enoch demonstrated considerable talent, using spare pieces of abandoned clay to try his hand at sculpting. When Enoch was fourteen, some traveling artists came to town, with a box in tow. Beneath the mahogany encasing and a velvet lining was a wax crucifix. Wood watched his fellow townspeoples’ astonishment in seeing the crucifix, “how it seemed to soften their hearts and open their purses.” He knew he could do better. So he endeavored to make a bigger, better crucifix, hoping to take it on the road, and with his earnings, see the world. Four years later, he amazed his fellow potters with an even more impressive production of a three dimensional, basso relief of John David Rubens’ Descent from the Cross, made in the famous blue and white of jasperware. It is unclear if these early artistic efforts helped Enoch see the world (he at least made it to Liverpool to study art and anatomy), but his pottery would travel far. And he never forgot the lesson of marshalling his talent for economic gain. He became a master potter in his early twenties and led a long career of pottery production that specialized in ceramic products for the American market. If Josiah Wedgwood was the recognized “prince” of the Staffordshire potteries, Enoch Wood, by the end of his life, would be remembered as their “father.”

In 1781, at the age of twenty-two, Enoch Wood had the sculpting opportunity of his lifetime. Through a fellow potter, he arranged to “take” Wesley’s head. In five separate sittings, Wood used modeling clay to sculpt the holy man as he was hunched over, catching up on correspondence. Enoch’s wife, Ann, tried to help, attempting to divert Mr. Wesley with some polite conversation. But she couldn’t get him to look up from his letters for long. As a result, Enoch’s sculpture “from life” was a bit too accurate. Wesley was impressed, saying it was the best likeness that had ever been taken of him, but Wood had copied the concentration on his brow with a bit too much fidelity. He looked stern and harsh. And Wood had embarrassed Wesley’s manservant by copying his rumpled clerical gowns, which had been crushed in his travel bags. So Wesley sat back down for a few minutes, and Wood gave him a lift (though his clothes would remain crushed in the early editions of the bust) (fig. 6). Wesley was pleased and told Wood not to touch it, lest he “mar” it. Wood had a tradition of placing small medallions on the rear of his busts that gave the name, age of the sitter, and an additional note about the person’s life—”any remarkable occurrence.” Without the “smallest hesitation,” Wesley told Wood his remarkable moment. For Wesley it was the story of being saved from the flames of his family home in Epworth as a child, and that Wood should write on the medallion, “Is not this a brand plucked from the fire.”

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

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

1. Cumberland Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina. Also known as the Blue Meeting House, this was the first church built by Charleston Methodists, almost certainly with some black laborers. It stood from 1787 to 1839, with an initial cost of 1,300 pounds. Page 36, F. A. Mood, Methodism in Charleston: A Narrative (Nashville, 1856). — 1. Cumberland Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina. Also known as the Blue Meeting House, this was the first church built by Charleston Methodists, almost certainly with some black laborers. It stood from 1787 to 1839, with an initial cost of 1,300 pounds. Page 36, F. A. Mood, *Methodism in Charleston: A Narrative* (Nashville, 1856).

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Old Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina. A cutaway engraving shows the galleries, where black worshipers sat. This church was preferred by black Methodists because its less central location in Charleston made it less prone to attack by white mobs. Page 82, F. A. Mood, Methodism in Charleston: A Narrative (Nashville, 1856). — 2. Old Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina. A cutaway engraving shows the galleries, where black worshipers sat. This church was preferred by black Methodists because its less central location in Charleston made it less prone to attack by white mobs. Page 82, F. A. Mood, Methodism in *Charleston: A Narrative* (Nashville, 1856).

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. A poppy bud, apparently an emblem of the church, engraved to emphasize black and white. The poppy is a traditional symbol of Christ. In 1856, Mood placed this illustration after a passage describing the mixed-race membership of Charleston Methodist congregations, projecting the colors of two races onto Christ. Page 124, F. A. Mood, Methodism in Charleston: A Narrative (Nashville, 1856). — 3. A poppy bud, apparently an emblem of the church, engraved to emphasize black and white. The poppy is a traditional symbol of Christ’s passion. In 1856, Mood placed this illustration after a passage describing the mixed-race membership of Charleston Methodist congregations, projecting the colors of two races onto the Passion. Page 124, F. A. Mood, *Methodism in Charleston: A Narrative* (Nashville, 1856).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. This illustration of a class paper, kept by a Methodist class leader, appeared in Jonathan Crowther, A true and complete portraiture of Methodism: or, The history of the Wesleyan Methodists: including their rise, progress, and present state: the lives and characters of divers of their ministers: the doctrines the Methodists believe and teach, fully and explicitly stated: with the whole plan of their discipline. The different collections made among them, and the application of the monies raised thereby; and a description of class-meetings, bands, love-feasts, &c. Also, a defence of Methodism, &c. Published by Daniel Hitt and Thomas Ware, for the Methodist connexion in the United States, J. C. Totten, printer (New York, 1813). — 4. This illustration of a class paper, kept by a Methodist class leader, appeared on page 225 in Jonathan Crowther, A true and complete portraiture of Methodism: or, The history of the Wesleyan Methodists: including their rise, progress, and present state: the lives and characters of divers of their ministers: the doctrines the Methodists believe and teach, fully and explicitly stated: with the whole plan of their discipline. The different collections made among them, and the application of the monies raised thereby; and a description of class-meetings, bands, love-feasts, &c. Also, a defence of Methodism, &c. Published by Daniel Hitt and Thomas Ware, for the Methodist connexion in the United States, J. C. Totten, printer (New York, 1813).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. A reenactment of an emblem of the Charleston Methodist Episcopal Church, with a poppy pod, made by Joanne Pope Melish and Clémence, Théophile, and John Saillant, July 2015, Wakefield, Rhode Island. Courtesy of John Saillant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acknowledgments

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