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

Whale consumption in the lives of Plymouth colonists

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

These are some of the watercolors attributed to Muscovy Company operative Robert Fotherby on his 1613 voyage to Spitsbergen. These three paintings show whalemen harpooning a whale and cutting off the blubber to process it into oil. From A Voyage to Greenland, 1613—A Journal 1613. A Journal taken from the Manuscript/Folio Materials at the American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. Fig. 5: Whale being harpooned.
These are some of the watercolors attributed to Muscovy Company operative Robert Fotherby on his 1613 voyage to Spitsbergen. These three paintings show whalemen harpooning a whale and cutting off the blubber to process it into oil. From A Voyage to Greenland, 1613—A Journal 1613. A Journal taken from the Manuscript/Folio Materials at the American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. Fig. 5: Whale being harpooned.
Fig. 6: Whale being caught and cut.
Fig. 6: Whale being caught and cut.
Fig.7: Whale blubber in sections for processing.
Fig.7: Whale blubber in sections for processing.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Further Reading:

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

 

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


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




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

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

 

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

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

Nueva Orleans and “Right of Deposit”

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

The broadside resurfaces

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

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

The printer

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

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

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

 

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

A “Letter from a gentleman”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

For further information about New Orleans under Spanish administration see: David Narrett, Adventurism and Empire, The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803; Cécile Vidal, Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2014), and Ralph Lee Woodward, “Spanish Commercial Policy in Louisiana, 1763-1803,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, 44:2 (Spring 2003): 133-164.

For discussion about Spain and the American right of deposit see: C. Richard Arena, “Philadelphia-Mississippi Valley Trade and the Deposit Closure of 1802,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 30:1 (January 1963): 28-45 and Arthur P. Whitaker, “France and the American Deposit at New Orleans,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 11:4 (November 1931): 485-502.

Pertinent literature about the Louisiana Purchase (1803) includes: Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York, 1976), Patricia L. Dooley, ed., Jon Kukla, A Wilderness so immense: the Louisiana Purchase and the destiny of America (New York, 2003), and Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., The Louisiana Purchase, A Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, 2002).

Source material on early Gulf South printing for this article is derived from: Douglas C. McMurtrie, A Bibliography of Mississippi Imprints, 1798-1830 (Beauvoir Community, Miss., 1945); Douglas C. McMurtrie, “The Pioneer Printer of New Orleans,” The Southern Printer (Chicago, 1930; Chapel Hill, N.C., 2015).

 

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


Cybèle T. Gontar is a PhD candidate at the the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she is completing her dissertation “José Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza and Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans: Portraiture, Identity, and Plantation Society in New Orleans, 1790-1890.” She currently teaches Global New Orleans: Art and Material Culture in the Gulf South, 1718-present at Tulane University.




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

Commercial correspondence rarely qualifies as an exciting read, as I learned while going through the correspondence of an eighteenth-century flour merchant from Philadelphia, Levi Hollingsworth. His letters are kept at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and I was using them as part of a larger, quantitative project on commercial profit in the early modern era. I was working from digital copies acquired by my Paris research unit, and my primary task was to compile all the information the letters contained on the suppliers and customers listed in an account book for 1786. I read each letter carefully, looking for names. This was not always easy: Hollingsworth sold flour on commission on behalf of a number of countryside farmers, millers, and storekeepers from eastern Pennsylvania or northern Delaware, who also bought exotic products from him, such as molasses, rum, or tobacco. Some letters were written in barely legible English, sometimes mixed with words in Dutch or German. Even in more legible correspondence, abbreviations were ubiquitous, and a lot of sentences were too allusive to determine who the person mentioned actually was.

The contents were also rather repetitive. Rural customers and suppliers usually mentioned goods sent and received, and apologized for delayed payment, with the requisite reference to the lack of metallic currency—but next month, surely, things would look up. Merchants sent similar information, but their payments were more timely as a rule, and there were added elements: details of complex transactions including personal IOU’s (“bills” or “notes of hand”) endorsed, accepted, or discounted, considerations on the “dearness of money,” i.e. the level of interest rates (always too high), and information on the state of the market in which they operated—this last, a gesture of goodwill toward their correspondent. Hollingsworth’s agent downriver from Philadelphia along the Delaware, Solomon Maxwell, reported news of cargo sent, of Jamaican captains buying foodstuffs, and helped link his principal to the network of local economic actors supplying him with the flour he would resell, for a fee—usually the customary 2.5 percent.

 

 Philadelphia seen from the Delaware, 1778, “An East Perspective View of the City of Philadelphia, in the Province of Pensylvania in North America; taken from the Jersey Shore,” engraved from a drawing, printed for and sold by Carington Bowles (London, 1778). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Philadelphia seen from the Delaware, 1778, “An East Perspective View of the City of Philadelphia, in the Province of Pensylvania in North America; taken from the Jersey Shore,” engraved from a drawing, printed for and sold by Carington Bowles (London, 1778). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

I quickly determined what Maxwell’s role was, and would have neglected the rest of his letters, with their humdrum news given in between the repetitive formulas of “Dear Sir” and “Your obedt servant,” had I not been on the lookout for any information I could find on any other people the correspondence would mention. There was a Mr. Potts, for instance, appearing in a letter from Maxwell dated December 22, 1786, and written in Port Penn, a landing below Wilmington, on the west bank of the Delaware river. Hollingsworth’s emissary wrote that “W.M.&Swanwick’s Mr. Potts is here & says T Canby has sold them 500 bbs @ 40/- & he expects remainder at that price but I shall engage all near this place early tomorrow & they must call on us for remandr.”

Translated into today’s English, this meant that a Mr. Potts, working for the firm Willing, Morris & Swanwick, with whom Hollingsworth also had dealings (and which belonged in part to Robert Morris of Revolutionary War fame), had bought 500 barrels (“bbs”) of flour, since the letter spoke of nothing else, from one Thomas Canby, to whom Hollingsworth occasionally sold tobacco and rum. The Canby family owned a mill in Wilmington, Delaware, and Thomas Canby (not to be confused with a homonymous earlier member of the Colonial Assembly of Pennsylvania who may have been his grandfather) may have run a store next to it. The price Potts paid was 40 shillings a barrel, that is, two (Pennsylvania) pounds, an amount which fit with similar sales recorded in Holligsworth’s account books the month before.

It turned out that Potts did not appear anywhere in Hollingsworth’s accounts, and in and of itself the particular transaction between he and Canby that the letter reported was unremarkable. But the sentence was striking in another respect. Was Maxwell really explaining that he would buy off the entire supply in the area, so that the unfortunate Potts would have to come to him to get more flour, and presumably be forced to pay a higher price? Could we assume that this lowly agent of a midsize flour dealer on the lower Delaware was behaving like Jay Gould a hundred years later? Apparently, yes. A few minutes later, I stumbled upon a second letter from Maxwell, this time sent on December 27, five days later, from Christiana Bridge, a key transportation hub on the road to Maryland, inland to the northwest of Port Penn and a few miles southwest of Wilmington. Maxwell wrote that “Mr Potts is down for W.M.&Swanwick can’t get their load as yet & in consequence of Mr Emblen coming & applying to R. Tuckness & others to load him before I saw him thought best to take in sundry Millers at Back Creek & Bohemia & Keep what was in Shallops.”

 

Letter of Solomon Maxwell to Levi Hollingsworth, December 22, 1786. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Hollingsworth Family Papers (collection 289), Series 1.a, Incoming Correspondence, Box 32, Letters Dec. 1, 1786-March 31, 1787. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Letter of Solomon Maxwell to Levi Hollingsworth, December 22, 1786. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Hollingsworth Family Papers (collection 289), Series 1.a, Incoming Correspondence, Box 32, Letters Dec. 1, 1786-March 31, 1787. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

There was only one possible interpretation of these two sentences, as far as I could see: Maxwell was running a very efficient, very ruthless market-cornering operation. He was tracking closely not only Potts, but anybody willing to give Potts a hand—Emblen, who appears elsewhere in the correspondence as a Hollingsworth ally, had unwittingly stepped in on the wrong side of Maxwell’s speculation, offering to help the newcomer, whereupon our monopolist made sure to take off the market not only his own flour held on sloops along the Delaware, but also whatever flour held by neighboring millers would have been obtainable through the would-be Good Samaritan, who was probably also told to stop interfering.

So the meaning of the original sentence was indeed that of a large-scale, successful market manipulation, freezing out an interloper by refusing to sell. This, in turn, had major implications for the structure and functioning of this market. Both letters could be written only in a universe in which a whole population of farmers, storekeepers, and millers was networked efficiently enough to be turned into a market-controlling, unified whole across an area of maybe twenty or thirty square miles around Wilmington, at least for a few days, by one individual. In other words, each and every local flour provider in the region had accepted to act in concert with Maxwell, as a member of a disciplined group.

This was an amazing feat of coordination. Large firms such as the various European East India companies did achieve at least partial control of the markets in high-value, exotic products—tea comes to mind; but their monopoly was legally sanctioned. And by studying large colonial merchants in France, I had myself found out that they were able to create similar informal monopolies on niche markets in colonial products at the level of large Atlantic ports, as with sugar from the West Indies in Bordeaux. But flour was not a rare commodity, and the flour markets of the early republic were very open, with many actors both on the buying and the selling side. How could monopoly control possibly be achieved in such markets? There was no mention of coercion, and no basis in what I knew of Delaware in 1786 to imagine jackbooted agents of a flour dealer going door to door to enforce the will of their boss. So what economic sociologist Avner Greif has called “weak ties”—informal personal relationships between actors based on socially accepted behavioral standards—must have been enough to enforce the unity Maxwell’s plan required.

I knew that Hollingsworth had personal relationships with many people in the area, whether through business dealings or family ties. He was an agent for dozens of farmers and millers around Wilmington—his “flour book” for the year 1784-86, in which he listed all the people whose flour he sold on commission, contained hundreds of accounts. Anyone relying on him to access the flour markets in Philadelphia or on the Delaware would enter a continuous, long-term cooperative process, extending over years. In many cases, the letters I had read also revealed the routine exchange of small services and favors, letters and small parcels passed on, common acquaintances taken care of. Credit was also an issue; Hollingsworth often allowed his customers to overdraft their accounts, acting as a bank making small loans. When he drew up his balance sheet in 1788, our Philadelphia merchant listed no fewer than 389 names of people owing him money on their account. And there was also the fact that he was a very good agent, as proved by his success at winning over such a large clientele: one’s flour would be in good hands with him, and would be sold at a good price.

 

A page from Levi Hollingsworth's account book. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Hollingsworth Family Papers (collection 289), vol. 86, Journal L (February 20, 1786-January 31, 1788), p. 215. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A page from Levi Hollingsworth’s account book. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Hollingsworth Family Papers (collection 289), vol. 86, Journal L (February 20, 1786-January 31, 1788), p. 215. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Being frozen out of Hollingsworth’s network thus meant losing access to a range of services, to easy credit, and potentially losing money by having to use a less savvy agent. And there were other, more local considerations. Hollingsworth’s family owned large holdings in both Delaware and Maryland around neighboring Head of Elk (today’s Elktown), and breaking with him could lead to a tarnished local reputation and loss of standing. Overall, it would have been both financially and socially irrational to cross a powerful and influential figure such as Hollingsworth just to help a complete unknown such as Potts. This is why, if the Philadelphia merchant was willing to draw on the goodwill he had gained over the years in order to block Potts’ entry into the local flour market, local storekeepers and millers would certainly oblige. Indeed, Maxwell did not seem to find the whole operation exceptional or difficult, and mentioned it only in passing.

The consequence of all this was also that these “market” operations did not take place on what we would call an actual “free market.” Maxwell’s letters proved that he had succeeded in building what economists call barriers to entry, preventing outsiders from coming in and becoming competing market actors. And these barriers were impressively strong; Robert Morris was one of the most powerful men in the United States in 1786, and yet his power evaporated around Wilmington, a mere forty miles south of his residence. One key element was the self-reinforcing network of mutual cooperation that Maxwell’s letters implied, which prevented people like Potts from entering the local market. Another element was information. Potts does not seem to have been even aware of who his opponent was. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which he might discover Maxwell’s shenanigans, short of sheer luck, such as sitting in a tavern next to some drunk who would brag that he had refused to sell flour to an interloper on orders from Mr. Hollingsworth. Maxwell, on the other hand, could apparently follow Potts’s every move on an almost hourly basis. Insider information was a key to market manipulation, then as now.

Wilmington was not the end of the story, either. The fact that Hollingsworth held a dominant position as a flour buyer also meant that he could try to turn it into a dominant position as a flour seller. With such a stranglehold on flour movements toward Philadelphia between the Delaware and the Chesapeake, he must have had a huge comparative advantage within Philadelphia itself, if only because he benefitted from a steady supply from secure and nearby sources. If the area under his control is any indication, it may well have turned out that only a handful of operators in the Quaker city and along the lower Delaware effectively controlled most of the flour supply there. They could easily strike illicit agreements, just as the sugar importers in Bordeaux were doing, in order to freeze out newcomers on the endpoint market as well. And there were other possible comparative advantages, not implied by the letter, such as the ease with which large operators could afford to engage in dumping wars, or the superior knowledge of the product and better ability to guarantee quality which came with being a long-established, strongly positioned dealer.

 

Map of Maxwell's area of activity in the lower Delaware Valley. "Delaware from the Best Authorities" (1796). Accessed on November 23, 2015, at ARTStor Commons/UD Historic Maps Collection, No. 0035, map No. 03248. Courtesy of the University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.
Map of Maxwell’s area of activity in the lower Delaware Valley. “Delaware from the Best Authorities” (1796). Accessed on November 23, 2015, at ARTStor Commons/UD Historic Maps Collection, No. 0035, map No. 03248. Courtesy of the University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.

In the end, this one short sentence I caught almost by accident turned out to be very significant in the research program I was helping implement. Once I had unpacked all its meanings and implications, I could use it as proof of the existence of a self-reinforcing system of market control and manipulation by a circle of insiders, a technique I had already come to suspect to be generalized and constitutive of the early modern political economy. If such an environment as the flour markets in the lower Delaware valley in the 1780s could leave open the possibility of monopolistic control and market manipulation through insider information and informal price-fixing agreements, then any market at the time could be similarly controlled. The fact that the letter’s reference to such monopoly control was so casual also spoke to the breadth and depth of the economic power locally wielded by merchants. All in all, the sentence helped validate our project by confirming that the free, open, transparent market of the economists is not necessarily a fitting model for early modern market mechanisms.

But the main lesson I would take away from this experience was one of method, not of content. In most cases reported here in Tales from the Vault, the process of historical discovery entailed piecing together numerous minute or novel bits of evidence to rebuild a lost picture. The preceding story is different in one respect: the picture I found myself facing was captured in thumbnail form in a lone sentence, which was all the evidence I could find in the batch of letters I ended up reading. Other smoking guns may be buried deep elsewhere, in letters from or to Hollingsworth dating from other years, but I never got around to them. How can I argue then that one sentence could be enough to reach the broad conclusions I present above?

Of course, these conclusions fit our knowledge of merchant practice at the time. But I would go further: the evidence contained in the sentence, however minute, is still hard to gainsay. I have never been able to come up with any other plausible narrative which would explain away its contents—though readers are more than welcome to propose their own interpretation, and prove my lack of imagination by the same token; I promise full acknowledgement in the paper I would have to publish to recant my earlier erronous ways. In the meantime, though, I will stick to the idea that this group of 17 words offered a window onto a whole economic universe, and also that as historians we should be more willing to engage in “microreadings,” focused on drawing large amounts of information from a few highly significant words. This is what Carlo Ginzburg called the “scholarly apprehension of singularity,” crossed with what Natalie Zemon Davis taught us long ago about the necessity of close, anthropological readings sensitive to historical differences, but applied here to a single sentence in a single text. For one single sentence can tell us a lot sometimes, maybe even enough for a whole story, once we are prepared to dig deep into its many implicit meanings.

Further Reading

For Levi Hollingsworth and the Willing, Morris & Swanwick firm of Philadelphia see the archival presentations here and here.

On merchant practice and merchant networks, beyond the seminal article of Avner Greif, “Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders’ Coalition,” American Economic Review 83:3 (June 1993): 525–548, classic descriptions are provided by Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, 1986); David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, 2009); Cathy D. Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore, 1998); and Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009).

For recent research on merchant practice, including monopoly and market manipulation, see Manuel Covo, “I, François B.: Merchant, Protestant and Refugee—a Tale of Failure in the Atlantic World,” French History 25:1 (January 2011): 69– 88; Pierre Gervais, “Neither imperial, nor Atlantic: a merchant perspective on international trade in the eighteenth century,” History of European Ideas 34:4 (December 2008): 465–473; Pierre Gervais, “Crédit et filières marchandes au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales ESC 67:4 (October-December 2012): 1011-1048 (a translated English version is also available); and Silvia Marzagalli, “Establishing Transatlantic Trade Networks in Time of War: Bordeaux and the United States, 1793-1815,” Business History Review 79:4 (Winter 2005): 811-844.

Lastly, the idea of micro-readings is not new, nor does it come from history. One of the first theoretical expositions of it came from Jean-Pierre Richard, Microlectures (Paris, 1979). A historian’s version can be found in Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20:1 (October 1993): 10-35.

 

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


Pierre Gervais is professor of American history and civilization at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University in Paris. A graduate of ENS Ulm, École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Princeton University, he studied the Industrial Revolution at first; his 2004 book, Les origines de la révolution industrielle aux États-Unis, received the Willi Paul Adams prize for best foreign book from the OAH in 2006. He turned then to the merchant economy, as head of the research project MARPROF, which led him to the Hollingsworth fund. The results of this project were published in Pierre Gervais, Lemarchand Yannick et Margairaz Dominique (dirs.), Merchants and Profit in the Age of Commerce, 1680–1830 (2014).




How Sweden Went Global and Carolina Got its Hoes

An Atlantic tale

In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht ended what the English called the War of Spanish Succession and what the English in America called Queen Anne’s War. With the coming of peace, English ships flocked to colonial ports, anxious to renew the trading links that had been strained during the long years of conflict. Among the ports that received the influx of English shipping was Charleston, South Carolina, whose exports vaulted upwards in the 1710s. And among the vessels that tied up at Charleston—or Charles Town as it was known to its colonial inhabitants—was the Crowley of London, new-built in 1715. The Ambrose, launched in 1716, was quick to follow.

Both ships were owned by John Crowley, Britain’s largest metalware manufacturer. Together they commemorated John Crowley’s father, Ambrose, who had died in 1713, shortly after the end of hostilities that had wracked western and central Europe, with only a short intermission, since 1689. The wars that had pitted an Anglo-Dutch alliance against Louis XIV’s France had brought misery to much of Europe’s population. For Ambrose Crowley, however, the generation-long conflict had been a time of opportunity. From small beginnings in the 1680s, he had established a metal-working empire that turned out a profusion of nails, fittings, fixtures, cast wares, anchors, and edge tools. By the time of his death, Sir Ambrose Crowley (he was knighted in 1707) controlled three factories of unparalleled size in the northeast of England and a set of warehouses in the English midlands that supplied rod iron to a swarm of out-workers. The latter, working in their own homes, hammered the rods into nails—thousands each day.

Crowley’s success was attributable in part to his indomitable disposition. He was a man of unquenchable ambition and energy. But Sir Ambrose was also fortunate in his timing. His business career coincided with an epoch of near-continuous war, and it was the demands of the wartime state that sustained the Crowley firm’s growth. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had turned Britain, a peripheral actor in European affairs in the 1670s, into a key antagonist of France. King William’s War (1689-1697) and Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713), fought to thwart Bourbon expansionism, brought about a major overhaul of the British state. Naval and military expenditure grew stupendously, and it was as a naval contractor that Crowley grew rich. Sir Ambrose’s main depot was at Greenwich on the Thames, hard by the Royal Navy’s principal dockyards. At the time of his death he was owed over £50,000 sterling by the Navy Board—the government agency responsible for fitting out the fleet. For the Crowleys, then, the prospect of peace was troubling indeed.

 

An Exact Prospect of Charlestown, the Metropolis of the Province of South Carolina, engraved for the London Magazine (1762). Charleston’s quayside is seen from across the Cooper River. On the left, a battery defends the town against attack from the sea. Upriver, piers jut out into the stream to allow ocean-going ships to load up with rice. Back from the wharves and warehouses were the principal streets of the "Metropolis of the Province," where the great planters resided for most of the year. "An European at his first arrival must be greatly surprised when he sees the elegance of their houses, their sumptuous furniture, as well as the magnificence of their tables; can he imagine himself in a country, the establishment of which is so recent?" Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, U.S. Views Collection.
An Exact Prospect of Charlestown, the Metropolis of the Province of South Carolina, engraved for the London Magazine (1762). Charleston’s quayside is seen from across the Cooper River. On the left, a battery defends the town against attack from the sea. Upriver, piers jut out into the stream to allow ocean-going ships to load up with rice. Back from the wharves and warehouses were the principal streets of the “Metropolis of the Province,” where the great planters resided for most of the year. “An European at his first arrival must be greatly surprised when he sees the elegance of their houses, their sumptuous furniture, as well as the magnificence of their tables; can he imagine himself in a country, the establishment of which is so recent?” Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, U.S. Views Collection.

The appearance of the Crowley and the Ambrose at Charleston’s quayside signaled a reorientation of the business that John Crowley had inherited from his father. Naval contracting remained an important activity, but it was much reduced in scale after the peace of Utrecht. New sources of revenue had to be sought out: hence the priority now given to transatlantic markets. John Crowley, deprived of the naval orders that had been so lucrative in his father’s time, turned to the West Indies and to that portion of mainland North America that most closely resembled the plantation complex of the Caribbean: South Carolina. These distant colonies formed a substantial market for agricultural tools—a civilian substitute for the lost military orders.

The Caribbean sugar islands represented the largest single source of transatlantic demand for the Crowleys’ hardware, but South Carolina showed the most rapid growth. “The Inhabitants,” trumpeted one of the province’s early boosters, “by their wise Management and Industry, have much improv’d the Country, which is in as thriving Circumstances at this Time, as any Colony on the Continent of English America.” Economic improvement there had been, but it was born of violence and ruthless expropriation rather than “wise Management.”

The years following the foundation of South Carolina in 1670 were years of carnage. Many of the earliest English settlers had come to the area from Barbados. Conscious of the spread of a sugar monoculture in the West Indies and the demand that it generated for labor, the English were soon encouraging the Native Americans with whom they traded to raid neighboring communities for slaves. This triggered a long series of Indian wars that furnished a steady supply of captives for the plantations of the Caribbean and resulted in a massive depletion of the indigenous population. A growing trade in deerskin made these bloody developments all the bloodier. Native traders exchanged the skins, much sought after by European leather workers, for muskets, shot, and knives, as well as other less lethal goods.

As the coastal lowcountry was emptied of its native residents it was repopulated with a new racial group and rededicated to the production of a new commodity. Rice, cultivated by African slaves, replaced animal skins and native captives as the region’s chief export. Experiments in the growing of rice had begun in the 1690s as local planters sought a staple crop that would bring them the kind of fabulous wealth that sugar had brought their counterparts in the West Indies. Climatic and environmental conditions made it impossible for Carolina growers to compete directly with their wealthier West Indian counterparts (or with Chesapeake tobacco growers, for that matter), but the lowcountry’s abundant swamps lent themselves to the planting of rice. By the 1710s the crop was the critical element in the local economy. Rice revolutionized life in Carolina, making the colony the richest in British North America. South Carolina also became home to the American mainland’s most brutal slave regime. It was no coincidence.

Rice cultivation was enormously labor intensive. The conversion of marshes into rice fields could only be accomplished through an injection of African labor, for white servants were in short supply. English migrants found life in the Chesapeake, harsh though it often was, much preferable to the exhausting routine of planting, harvesting, and processing that rice imposed on its growers. Field hands were condemned to endless labor with the hoe, breaking up the soil and clearing weeds. The work was “peculiarly unwholesome, and even fatal to health.” Slaves had to stand “ancle, and even mid-leg deep in water . . . exposed all the while to a burning sun, which makes the very air they breathe hotter than the human blood; these poor wretches are then in a furnace of stinking putrid effluvia.” Coercion, and nothing less, was the basis of planters’ fortunes.

The province that had once been an exporter of Amerindian captives was now an importer of African slaves on a massive scale. It helped that some Africans, unlike north Europeans, were experienced cultivators of rice. At first, Africans were obtained through Caribbean slave markets, but by 1714 a direct trade with the Guinea coast was underway. Soon imports began to spiral upwards, culminating in 1738 when 3,658 slaves disembarked in the Carolinas. Rice brought about an Africanization of South Carolina. Blacks had formed a minor part of the province’s nonindigenous population in its early days, just two hundred individuals out of twelve hundred in 1680. By 1700, as rice exports began to climb, blacks made up 43 percent of South Carolina’s inhabitants. By 1720 they accounted for 70 percent of a population that now topped eighteen thousand. Carolina, a Swiss migrant remarked in 1737, “looks more like a negro country than a country settled by white people.”

Rice exports from Charleston averaged 1.8 million pounds in the last five years of Queen Anne’s War; in the five years between 1728 and 1732 they averaged 16.9 million pounds. This massive extension of rice cultivation through the lowcountry called for a wholesale reshaping of the landscape. This, in turn, rested upon an infusion of European-made matériel: hoes by the thousand, axes, spades, ox chains, and the like. It was this requirement that attracted the attention of metalware manufacturers in Britain and this that brought the Crowley and the Ambrose to anchor in the Cooper river, with the Theodosia (named to honor John Crowley’s wife in 1718) and the John (registered in 1721) arriving in their wake.

The inventory of John Crowley’s factories and depots, made after his death in 1728, reveals the full extent of his firm’s reliance on plantation agriculture. It listed “Barbados Hoes” (in eight different types) and “Virginia hoes” (another eight types). Then there were “Carolina Hoes” and “Carolina Axes.” There were also, lying oiled and wrapped in the shuttered darkness of the Greenwich warehouse, padlocks “for Negroes Necks.” Goods like these were regularly consigned to Charleston in the 1720s and 1730s. When one Carolina merchant advised a London correspondent on the assortment of goods most likely to fetch handsome profits in the Charleston market, he stipulated “Crowleys best Broad Hoes & Narrow Hoes”—eighteen dozen of the former and twelve dozen of the latter. That Crowley hoes and hardware were sent to Charleston in bulk is evident from the scale of the debts incurred by the town’s merchants. The biggest debtor, Joseph Wragg, whose brother Samuel was the colony’s agent in London and a major metropolitan slave merchant, owed £3,914 sterling.

Visitors to the Crowleys’ northern factories were quick to notice how many of the articles manufactured at Swalwell or Winlaton Mill were designed specifically for transatlantic markets. The Swede Johan Robsahm who visited the enormous Swalwell plant in 1761 walked through numerous smiths’ shops “where shovels, mattocks, and hoes were made.” Hoes and mattocks, Robsahm noted to himself, “are implements used in America for cultivating the ground instead of ploughs.” Another Swede, Reinhold Angerstein, who toured Swalwell in 1754, counted twenty-two workshops, each with three workers, devoted to turning out hoes. He also watched the making of a “certain kind of axe, 1 inch long, ground and polished all over,” which was intended for the Indian trade. The axes, Angerstein noted, were intended for ceremonial rather than practical purposes, so the edge was not “ground really sharp but left dull.” (Were these the “Carolina Axes,” over a thousand of which were boxed ready for shipment in the Greenwich warehouse in 1728?)

Robsahm and Angerstein were not the first Swedes to visit the Crowley works in the eighteenth century. The Swalwell-Winlaton complex was, in fact, an almost obligatory port of call for those Swedes, mainly state officials, who crisscrossed central and western Europe from the late seventeenth century onwards as “industrial tourists.” Mines, furnaces, factories, and warehouses rather than the architectural remains of classical antiquity drew these gentleman travelers abroad. They were not, as might be assumed, engaged in industrial espionage. Swedish travelers, it is true, were keenly interested in the new mechanical devices they encountered in Britain’s industrial districts but not with a view to transplanting them in Sweden. Angerstein and his ilk were far more concerned with western Europe as a market for Swedish iron than as a source of technological novelty.

Although there was plenty of iron ore in England, there was very little wood to fuel the smelting process. In Sweden, abundant forests provided a cheap source of charcoal fuel. Only in the 1790s, with the broad adoption of coal-based smelting methods, was the British iron industry able to free itself from dependence on foreign iron.

Sweden had emerged as a great European power in the seventeenth century on the basis of mining and metal processing. Iron exports, which had averaged little more than three thousand tons per annum in the late 1620s, leapt to eleven thousand tons in 1640, then to eighteen thousand tons in 1650, and twenty-seven thousand tons in 1680. This startling escalation was a matter of policy. The Swedish state entertained territorial ambitions, but these could only be fulfilled if the poor and sparsely populated kingdom of the warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus could exploit its latent mineral wealth.

It so happened that iron was needed in the capital-rich Netherlands and capital was needed in iron-rich Sweden. In the 1620s, a group of opportunistic Dutch merchants capitalized on these needs, heralding a transformation of Sweden’s industries. The Dutchmen were awarded wide-ranging privileges by the Swedish state, allowing them to establish a network of processing plants. The newcomers were able to take control of Sweden’s copper resources (which were Europe’s richest), set up cannon foundries at a time when endemic warfare made the gun trade especially lucrative, and redirect Swedish iron exports westwards. The greatly increased export revenues enabled Gustavus Adolphus to make his sensational entry into the Thirty Years’ War, the immense dynastic and religious struggle that convulsed Europe in the 1620s and 1630s. It was this twin military-industrial initiative that ushered in Sweden’s “Age of Greatness” (stormaktstiden).

This was Sweden’s era of imperial success, when her provinces stretched all around the Baltic, from Finland to Pomerania. Riga and Bremen were Swedish cities; the marshy delta on which St. Petersburg would one day be built was an as yet insignificant corner of the Swedish province of Ingermanland. Yet Swedish power, for all its martial lustre, was insecure. Despite a considerable increase in numbers during the seventeenth century, Sweden remained thinly populated. Sweden’s enemies, on the other hand, were numerous. Were they to combine—as the Russians, the Poles, and the Danes did in 1699—the consequences would be severe. The Swedish crown lacked the manpower to compensate for battlefield losses, so when Sweden’s principal field army was annihilated at Poltava in the Ukraine in 1709, the curtain fell on stormaktstiden. The Baltic empire was lost, ceded for the most part to Peter the Great’s Russia.

Iron exports had laid the basis for Sweden’s imperial experience in the seventeenth century. For Swedish officials in the eighteenth century it thus stood to reason that success in the iron trade would be the foundation of national renewal. This explains the avidity with which Swedes visited Britain, the destination for most Swedish iron exports. They were anxious to check that the bar iron manufactured in Bergslagen, the mining district that extended in a broad arc to the north and west of Stockholm, met with the approval of users in Europe’s most dynamic iron market.

Reinhold Angerstein made a rough calculation of the annual consumption of iron at the Crowleys’ Swalwell and Winlaton works. It amounted to 2,350 tons, to which the two in-house forges contributed no more than 400 tons. The remaining 1,950 tons were imported, largely from Sweden. Travelers like Angerstein were able to monitor the use of Swedish iron quite closely because every bar bore, by state edict, a stamp that identified the forge from which it came. Thus, Robsahm was able to note with satisfaction that the hoes and mattocks being made at Swalwell in 1761 for the American market were hammered out of iron bearing “the stamp ‘C and Crown’ from Älvkarleö.” Robsahm had further reason for satisfaction as he described the manufacturing process. The hoes were forged for the most part from malleable iron, but the cutting edge that was to slice into the soil of the lowcountry was steel. And this steel, as Robsahm well knew, was made from the elite brands of Swedish iron, converted to steely hardness in the cementation furnaces of the northeast of England. Swalwell was just one node in a commodity chain that originated in the ore pits of Bergslagen and that snaked onwards into the Atlantic.

 

Ambrose Crowley’s plant at Swalwell was built in the first decade of the eighteenth century, a mile downstream from Winlaton Mill, his existing factory in the Derwent Valley. When inventoried in 1728, which may have been the occasion for the drawing up of this plan, the Swalwell works included two steel furnaces (although only one, "No. 4," with its conical chimney, is shown here), associated forge hammers, a slitting mill, a blade mill, four anchor shops, air furnaces valued at £100, three warehouses, five hoe makers’ shops, and shops for the making of frying pans, patten rings, and nails. Courtesy of the Tyne and Wear Archives Service, DX104/1. Not to be reproduced without permission.
Ambrose Crowley’s plant at Swalwell was built in the first decade of the eighteenth century, a mile downstream from Winlaton Mill, his existing factory in the Derwent Valley. When inventoried in 1728, which may have been the occasion for the drawing up of this plan, the Swalwell works included two steel furnaces (although only one, “No. 4,” with its conical chimney, is shown here), associated forge hammers, a slitting mill, a blade mill, four anchor shops, air furnaces valued at £100, three warehouses, five hoe makers’ shops, and shops for the making of frying pans, patten rings, and nails. Courtesy of the Tyne and Wear Archives Service, DX104/1. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Few in the lowcountry were aware of it at the time, but South Carolina’s economy in the first decades of the eighteenth century was developing in dialectical tension with events in the Baltic region. The Great Northern War (1699-1721), the grinding conflict that brought about Sweden’s eclipse as a major power, afforded Carolina’s rice planters their point of entry into world markets. By disrupting the outflow of Polish wheat—the dietary mainstay of western Europe’s urban poor for two centuries—the war encouraged grain merchants to look further afield for alternatives.

They found one such alternative in Carolina rice. The seemingly endless cycle of European war, which was echoed distantly in the assaults that South Carolina’s colonists launched against Spanish settlements in Florida in 1702, 1703, and 1708, drove up the demand for Swedish iron, especially in Britain, where the consumption of iron and steel surged far ahead of local supply. This was a matter of some anxiety to the British authorities who fretted at their inability to command secure supplies of so strategic a material. Worse, from a strategic point of view, was the reliance of the Royal Navy on Russian hemp or Swedish tar. It was this that prompted the British Parliament to identify South Carolina as a counterpoise to the Baltic. Given adequate encouragement, could not tar and pitch be obtained from the pine forests of Carolina? That was the aim of legislation passed in 1705 to award a bounty on imports of naval stores from the American colonies.

This was the context in which John Crowley’s ships sailed for Carolina with their cargoes of hardware. On their return they would carry rice, deerskins, and naval stores. When the Crowley cleared Charleston in November 1723, for example, she was loaded with 222 barrels of rice, 5 chests of deerskins, 457 barrels of pitch, and 267 barrels of tar. Others were quick to recognize the opportunities that Crowley had spotted. A Quaker merchant who traded out of Bristol, the premier port in western Britain, was one of them. He had the singular name of Graffin Prankard. Prankard’s main business was with Stockholm, whence he imported large volumes of iron, but his ship the Parham, launched in 1722, also sailed for Charleston every winter. Her cargo would include metalwares, such as hoes and chains, and nails by the hundred thousand. Lead shot and gunpowder, staples of the Indian trade, also featured prominently. The return cargo from Charleston was of course rice, augmented by naval stores and dyestuffs. It was a flourishing trade, for Prankard soon built a new, far-larger ship to join the 100-ton Parham. The 226-ton Baltick Merchant, registered at Bristol in 1732, was capable of carrying over thirteen hundred barrels of rice.

There was no paradox in a ship named the Baltick Merchant engaging in transatlantic trade, for Graffin Prankard, even more than John Crowley, was seeking to capitalize on a potential symmetry between Baltic commerce and the passage of goods to and from Charleston. There was a complementarity between Swedish iron and Carolina rice that would allow Prankard to employ his shipping in a continual, year-round circuit. He dispatched the Baltick Merchant to Charleston in the autumn, just as ice was closing the more-northerly Baltic ports to shipping. While the Baltick Merchant struggled across a rough, wintry Atlantic, the Carolina rice crop, planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, was being prepared for shipment. Slaves were engaged in laboriously “pounding out” the rice in order to separate the husk from the grain. At the year’s end, when the Baltick Merchant tied up at Charleston, hundreds of barrels of rice were ready to be stowed on board. Graffin Prankard’s ships usually cleared Charleston in February or March, just as bar iron was on the move from forges in Bergslagen to Stockholm. Sledges carried the iron over the frozen lakes and snowy roads of the Swedish midlands to the thawing Baltic ports.

The successful completion of the circuit Prankard had initiated the previous autumn required careful synchronization among his agents across northern Europe. The cargo of rice would be delivered to Hamburg or Bremen in April or May. At the end of May, just as thousands of Africans were spreading out across the rice fields of Carolina to plant the new season’s crop, the Baltick Merchant would pass east through the Sound en route to Stockholm. The cargo of iron and timber that awaited her would be loaded without delay, for the ship was to return to Bristol in time for St James’s fair in July, the highpoint of the city’s commercial calendar. St James’s fair attracted buyers and sellers from across the southwest of England and the Midlands. And it was here that Graffin Prankard met the ironmongers and manufacturers who bought his iron and who supplied him with the exportable iron wares that would allow the transatlantic cycle to begin anew.

This pattern of trade thrived through the 1730s. The Baltick Merchant made the trip to Charleston every year. But the headlong development of South Carolina’s rice economy was about to undergo a sharp deceleration. The outbreak of war between Britain and Spain in 1739 brought a general disruption to Atlantic traffic; the slave rebellion at Stono, near Charleston, delivered an abrupt check to the Carolina trade in particular. The Stono uprising was, in fact, facilitated by Anglo-Spanish antagonism. The armed slaves who gathered at Stono on September 9, 1739, had heard of an edict issued by the Spanish governor of Florida promising freedom to refugee English slaves. The rebels who marched south, intent on reaching Spanish territory, were for the most part Angolans and in all likelihood Catholics. As they headed toward the hoped-for Spanish sanctuary, the conspirators killed the Europeans they encountered. (Their first victim, a storekeeper named Robert Bathurst, provided a ghoulish demonstration of the cutting quality of English steel: his head was severed and left on the steps of his shop.) The rebels were surrounded by militia forces before the day was out, but the brevity of the rebellion could not disguise its seriousness. Nearly two dozen slaveholders had died in an enterprise that clearly suggested concerted planning among the rebels. The colony’s rulers were seized by panic.

The 1730s was also a time of mounting slave resistance on the Caribbean islands whose economies were so closely connected with Carolina’s. The British authorities in Jamaica were engaged in a bitter war of suppression against the “Maroons,” the runaway slaves who defied their erstwhile masters from mountain hideouts in the interior of the island, while a major revolt was only just thwarted in Antigua in 1736. Rebellious outbreaks sprouted across the Caribbean whether the islands were claimed by the English, the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, or the Danish. These insurrections reverberated in the Carolinas. Slave conspiracies were detected in 1730, 1733, 1734, 1737, and 1738. Amid such tensions South Carolina’s rulers were inescapably drawn to the question of the province’s racial imbalance. Steps were needed, it was decided, to curb the continuing inflow of African labor. Unless this was done, blacks would reach such a numerical preponderance that the Europeans would lose the coercive critical mass upon which their security rested. Moreover, the government set out to reduce the ratio of African-born slaves in the unfree population. Africans, officials increasingly feared, were intransigently wedded to memories of their former freedom, whereas American-born blacks, knowing nothing but servitude, were more biddable. Accordingly, the “Negro duty bill,” enacted in April 1740, placed a prohibitively high tax on the importation of slaves. The effect was instantaneous. Slave sales collapsed: in the 1730s, 22,215 slaves had been landed in the Carolinas, but just 2,841 were disembarked in the 1740s. Nearly twenty years would pass before slave imports returned to their former level, and so the Carolina economy lost the ebullience that had attracted first John Crowley, then Graffin Prankard in the aftermath of Queen Anne’s War.

The downturn in Carolina’s fortunes coincided with the collapse of Graffin Prankard’s. The Baltick Merchant sailed from Charleston for the last time in May 1740 with her usual cargo of rice and logwood. All was well until the ship was within sight of the Scilly Isles, off the southwest tip of England. But there she encountered a Spanish privateer. Being so close to home, the men of the Baltick Merchant resolved to make a fight of it. A four-hour pursuit ensued. The two ships were well matched in terms of cannon, but the Spanish vessel carried a larger crew, and as soon as the ships came within musket range, this numerical superiority began to tell: “we had,” said Nathaniel Alloway, the Baltick Merchant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How was this slippery medium of exchange to be corralled?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

See Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978); this article is drawn from chapter nine of this study. See also Peter Laslett, “John Locke, The Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade, 1665-98,” William and Mary Quarterly, 14 (1957), 378-85; C. R. Fay, “Locke versus Lowndes,” Cambridge Historical Journal, 4 (1939), 149-55; and Sir Albert Feaveryear, The Pound Sterling, Oxford, 1963.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).


Joyce Appleby, UCLA professor emerita, has studied the political and social responses to economic changes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America. Her recent works include Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000) and A Restless Past: History and the American Public, a collection of essays and addresses (Lanham, Md., 2005).




According to Custom: Building a Nation on Negotiation

Gautham Rao, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 272 pp., $45.

Founding a nation was one thing. Footing the bill was a different matter entirely. Gautham Rao’s brilliant National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State analyzes America’s fiscal founding—its precedent and its product—through its most effective means of income: the custom house. George Washington and his administration—especially Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton—knew that the federal government would have to tread lightly concerning matters of taxation given that the Revolution was inspired in large part by questions over Parliament’s right to tax. Hamilton found the solution in tariffs, a method of indirect taxation that would not likely draw the ire of tax-phobic revolutionaries. However, customs officials were tasked with implementing on the docks the laws in the rough-and-tumble world of Atlantic capitalism. Indeed, it is on the waterfront that Rao’s argument really unfolds. He asserts that in practice, customs officials frequently negotiated federal laws with local merchants and sailors: “They decided which laws to apply, and which laws to ignore; when to make an example out of a lawbreaker, and when to sweep transgressions under the rug. Most often, they used their discretion to align federal revenue and regulatory law with local commercial communities’ expectations about how governance should work” (12). Surprisingly, these waterfront negotiations funneled an abundance of wealth into the Treasury. However, by the War of 1812, it became apparent that this system was difficult to restrict during wartime and potentially dangerous for American diplomacy in general. Ultimately, it disappeared by the end of Andrew Jackson’s presidency.

Rao structures National Duties chronologically, prefacing each section with an anecdote about a customs official dealing with the realities of his position. The first section details the colonial precedents of tariff negotiations. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the British Empire exercised a policy that scholars have often termed “salutary neglect”: so long as British colonies offered their loyalty to the mother country, imperial governance—including tariff enforcement—remained lax. In fact, it was actually beneficial to allow colonial merchants to expand into French and Spanish markets, undercutting Britain’s competition without resorting to war. With the beginning of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, however, Britain tightened its enforcement of mercantile policy, restricting the colonial tradition of negotiation. Thus, the American Revolution was not an outright rejection of Britain’s right to tax; rather, it was an outcry against a perceived violation of colonial rights to negotiation.

The second section details the United States’ implementation of its own tariff system in the 1790s. Both Washington and Hamilton were keenly aware of the risks of taxing too heavily. However, Hamilton’s well-documented Anglophilia inspired him to look to Britain’s financial model for the new United States. After pushing a series of bills through Congress to establish the custom house system, Washington appointed more than 130 officials to enforce the laws. However, as Rao illustrates, these men were selected not for their party loyalty, but for their standing in the community, with the expectation that they would be better able to inspire the confidence of their neighbors. This worked splendidly, and “by 1793 the custom houses were the federal government’s sole reliable and significant stream of revenue” (75). Much to Hamilton’s initial chagrin, a side effect of this success was waterfront negotiation: customs officials might take a captain at his word on a suspicious manifest, payments might be indefinitely postponed, and violations might be prosecuted only selectively. Failing these concessions, non-compliant customs officials might find themselves harassed, sued, and even assaulted should they refuse to work with their neighbors. It was, it seemed, in everyone’s best interests to maintain the status quo.

As Rao notes in the third section, the system’s success in the 1790s would prove its undoing. As the Napoleonic Wars engulfed Europe, it became increasingly dangerous for American merchants to violate agreements with France and Britain. Even when President Thomas Jefferson signed legislation to stop illicit trade, “customs officials were simply unable to muster enough authority” to enforce them (104). Despite his reputation as a de-centralizer, Jefferson cracked down on these violations at the docks, as he feared that unregulated trade with either France or Britain could provoke the belligerents and drag the United States into a war. The failure of the 1808 Embargo Act and the subsequent War of 1812 under James Madison proved Jefferson right. Many customs officials largely ignored smuggling during the embargo and war—and others actively aided renegade merchants. It grew so problematic that Madison deployed the navy during the War of 1812 to stop American smugglers. Rao considers this period the turning point for waterfront negotiations, writing, “This arrangement of power that had enabled empires past now seemed poised to enfeeble the republic” (162). The federal government was tired of a rebellious waterfront, and they would soon put a stop to it.

Rao’s final section details the government crackdown that put an end to the old ways. As a new generation of politicians committed to nationalist financial policies emerged after the War of 1812, James Madison’s administration began the daunting task of reforming custom houses. The Panic of 1819 saw the government take stock of its assets, and it became clear that customs officials had intentionally overlooked millions of dollars in unpaid tariffs. Understandably, the federal government was not pleased, and a renewed commitment to prosecutions followed. Further, the return of relative peace to the Atlantic meant that merchants had less to gain from violating laws, so they could not rally widespread support from disgruntled sailors. These reforms were completed by the end of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, and the waterfront negotiations that had defined Atlantic trade for over a century disappeared with it.

Rao’s methodology reflects his difficult task of connecting federal policy with its implementation. The core of his research comes from custom house records at the National Archives. Aside from (impressive) statistical analysis, Rao thoroughly explores the personal relationship between customs officials and their waterborne neighbors. Further, his footnotes evidence a thorough grasp of the scholarship on empire, nation, finance, and capitalism during the period in question.

This book joins the voluminous ranks of scholarship on cultural economy in the early republic. Rao’s story is less about federal financial policy than about how these laws worked on a daily basis. What develops is a story about the culture of Atlantic capitalism on the waterfront. Indeed, the text is populated by a wide cast of characters: the Hamiltons and Jeffersons are there, but so are shady merchants, disgruntled sailors, and mobs to persuade overly zealous officials to bend to local pressure. However, this book is primarily about the customs officials themselves. They are portrayed neither as faceless extensions of the government nor as sycophants who did not dare refuse local demands. While there were several different kinds of people who filled these offices, most were pragmatists who understood the law but also fully grasped the situation on the waterfront. One such example that Rao uses is James McCulloch. Initially selected by Jefferson for his post as a customs official in Baltimore due to his party loyalty, McCulloch came to sympathize with the local community during the financially disastrous Embargo Act of 1808, allowing illicit trade to leave the struggling port. When Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin confronted the wavering official, he was doubtless dumbfounded when he received McCulloch’s reply. While McCulloch knew the rules, he described someone in his position as “generally connected with those around him by common if not special ties . . . and liable to bias from confidence in acquaintances accompanied with good will” (quoted in Rao, 102). In other words, McCulloch told Gallatin that he knew the law. He simply did not care. Trade would continue to flow.

 It is difficult to overstate the quality of Rao’s work in National Duties. Well-researched, well-written, and well-executed, this book offers a new look into the dialectic of fiscal nation building. Compromise was not restricted to the legislative halls; it was an integral part of life on the waterfront. Further, this work will contribute to a sizeable body of literature on the culture of capitalism in the young United States. Refreshingly, this book looks also to the Federalist years of the 1790s as an important part of this development. Since Charles Sellers’ controversial thesis on the “market revolution” in 1991, scholars have been inclined to look to post-War of 1812 America for the rise of markets. Without rejecting the validity of this focus on the 1800s, scholarship can only benefit from looking to eighteenth-century precedents for later economic developments. National Duties is an important work in the study of capitalism and nation-building in the early republic. Rao reminds the reader that, contrary to a teleological view of history, both of these processes were open to negotiation in that era.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3.5 (Summer, 2017).


Aaron L. Chin is a graduate student in history at the University of New Hampshire. He studies partisanship and economics in the early American republic.




“Reading” Portrait Prints

New ways of seeing old faces

After George Washington’s death on December 14, 1799, pictorial tributes poured from the presses. During his life, engravings had established Washington’s face and his symbolic role among contemporaries. But the historic death of the first president and former commander in chief fed a growing appetite for inexpensive printed portraits, which would persist for the rest of the century. Though their popularity suggests that these portraits somehow spoke to Americans, an important question remains: exactly what did they say?

How can we know what an individual print communicated to its audience at the time? With paltry written evidence about reception or audience reaction, can we responsibly use these prints as historic documents? As we review a range of nineteenth-century printed portraiture, let us consider several techniques that will help us sharpen our perceptions of what these images really meant.

 

Fig. 1. Apotheosis of Washington, by David Edwin. NPG.77.108. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 1. Apotheosis of Washington, by David Edwin. NPG.77.108. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

The engravings published after Washington’s funeral encompassed various approaches to death, grief, and glorification. Some printmakers delivered recognizable, bust-length portraits of Washington, based on paintings by Gilbert Stuart, Edward Savage, and other artists. Some enhanced the portrait with elements of neoclassical mourning art, including urns, obelisks, willow trees, and weeping Indians or female goddesses representing Columbia. Others heroicized the portrait with symbolic attributes such as eagles, seals, liberty caps, laurel wreaths, and allegorical figures of fame. A few popular examples granted Washington full-scale apotheosis with classical, religious, or Masonic imagery (fig. 1). Russian visitor Paul Svinin, traveling in America from 1811 to 1813, commented that “every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have images of God’s saints.”

No other figure, even Benjamin Franklin, had occasioned this much pictorial output from the American press. Through the rest of the nineteenth century, artists, audiences, and public figures all assumed that relatively inexpensive and easily reproduced portraiture was a necessary fact of American life. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison complained in 1833 that “this sticking up of one’s face in print-shops, to be the ‘observed of all observers,’ is hardly consistent with genuine modesty.” Nonetheless, he sat for his portrait, so that it could be engraved.

 

Fig. 2. Thomas Jefferson, by David Edwin. NPG.80.45. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 2. Thomas Jefferson, by David Edwin. NPG.80.45. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

So how do we interpret such pictures? It is crucial to start by understanding the physical object and its medium, questioning how, why, and by whom it is made and disseminated. Even the length of time it took to produce an image can change its significance. Political elections, for instance, always provided an opportunity for print sellers. But because the engraving process was slow, printed pictures rarely had any real impact on electioneering, at least until later in the century when new technologies sped the reproduction process. Neither of the rival publishers who announced ambitious full-length engravings of Thomas Jefferson during the 1800 presidential campaign had them ready until months after the inauguration. But even if they were not utilized as campaign material, these portraits still had a political element. We know from newspaper advertisements, for example, that Philadelphia publisher George Hembold Jr. sold his image of Jefferson, engraved by David Edwin, in sixteen other cities as well; often his agents were the publishers of partisan Republican newspapers that had supported Jefferson all along (fig. 2).

 

Fig. 3. Abraham Lincoln, by John Sartain. NPG.79.73. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 3. Abraham Lincoln, by John Sartain. NPG.79.73. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Understanding the conventions of the genre is also important. Political portraits heroicized their subjects, often utilizing a traditional “grand manner” pose in front of a background column and drapery. The books, documents, writing implements, and elegant table and chair in the Jefferson engraving were also features of Gilbert Stuart’s famous “Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington, well known through printed copies. Although Jefferson’s head was copied from a painting by Rembrandt Peale, other details of the print were conventions, not artistic choices inspired by the man. Such images must be approached, therefore, with a degree of skepticism about the accuracy of details. A print of Abraham Lincoln by John Sartain, to pick an egregious example, was actually printed from a plate depicting Martin Van Buren, originally engraved about twenty-five years previously (fig. 3). By changing the head, the coat, and the background building, the publisher could quickly produce a dignified presidential image with all the expected components of high office.

In order to understand the genre, it is helpful to consider prints in the aggregate. If we question poses and interior details or wonder what emblematic, allegorical, or thematic iconography really meant to its audience, looking at a whole body of contemporary imagery and seeing how such elements are applied and repeated can help us deduce meaning. That is, when considered collectively rather than individually, prints may actually reveal more of a message.

Any print published in a book or in a series garners significance from the presence of other images or texts and should not be read alone. A relatively modest bust-length engraving of Daniel Webster by James Barton Longacre, for example, represents more than just a small, rather formulaic likeness of a prominent statesman. It was published in Longacre’s and James Herring’s ambitious, multivolume work, The National Portrait Gallery. The early nineteenth century was a golden age of collected, illustrated biographies, whose publishers risked financial ruin to assemble or commission accurate paintings, engravings, and biographical manuscripts. Within this context, the modest Webster print is part of an American pantheon, a collective grouping of statesmen and heroes that satisfied nationalistic impulses by revealing a narrative of American greatness.

In the late 1820s, the advent of lithography—the technique of drawing directly on a heavy stone, which could then be inked and printed—transformed the commercial world of printed portraiture. More than ever before, the public could demand an inexpensive, immediately available image of a newly famous minister, spokesman, singer, dancer, hero, or martyr. Lithography’s tonal qualities were especially appropriate for delineating features, and it could provide an infinite number of copies. Portraits were a staple of every lithography firm. Sometimes lithographic portraits were commissioned by painters or photographers wishing to reproduce their own work. More often they were commercial ventures on the part of publishers or lithography companies and produced in large quantities for public sale. The copyright line on the bottom of most of these prints is a useful source of information, indicating who took financial responsibility for their publication.

 

Fig. 4. Francis Johnson, by Alfred M. Hoffy. NPG.84.206. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 4. Francis Johnson, by Alfred M. Hoffy. NPG.84.206. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Pondering what a piece says biographically about its subject at the precise moment it was published is always a useful exercise. Since printmaking, for much of the century, was a commercial enterprise as much as an artistic one, the purpose of the print was often related to an event that would attract buyers. Was the subject newly deceased? retiring from the ministry? running for office? performing at a local venue? Biographical understanding also explains unusual details. The Frank Johnson of Alfred Hoffy’s compelling lithograph turns out to be a renowned Philadelphia band leader, acknowledged as the most accomplished bugle player in America (fig. 4). Johnson’s all-black band was a sensational success and, while on tour in England, was even awarded a silver bugle by an admiring Queen Victoria. But Johnson was also a composer, and the music manuscripts and inkstand on the table imply his contribution not just as performer but as a creator of the popular music of his day.

Biographical research on the makers of the picture can be equally revealing. Nineteenth-century portrait prints were typically copied from paintings, daguerreotypes, or photographs. If a painter’s name is included in the inscription, it is worth pursuing publications on the artist who painted the “source” portrait. Monographs or collection catalogues often provide detailed information about the original painting upon which the print is based. In the case of Frank Johnson, the inscription tells us the lithograph was based on a daguerreotype by R. Douglass Jr. and was “[p]ublished at the Arch Street Gallery of the Daguerreotype Philadelphia.” In the literature on photography, one discovers that Douglass was also African American. The inscription implies that he commissioned the lithograph as a way to advertise his skills in the daguerreian business. The print thus becomes a rich testament to the creative roles of free, black professionals in Philadelphia in the 1840s.

 

Fig. 5. Robert Edward Lee, by unidentified artist. NPG.84.95. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 5. Robert Edward Lee, by unidentified artist. NPG.84.95. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Since the prints were so often copied from other sources, reading psychological attitudes into images that were not made “from life” can be dangerous. First of all, a certain formality in posing and expression was the norm, so nineteenth-century audiences were not accustomed to extrapolating much emotional information even from the original painting or photograph. In addition, since the printmaker often had not met or seen the subject, his copy almost inevitably diminished the subtle understanding between sitter and portraitist. Starting in the 1850s, newspapers began to illustrate the news with wood engravings—relief blocks, which could be quickly produced and printed along with the text. Through such images, newspapers brought the public pictorial news of the Civil War’s recent battles as well as its emerging heroes and martyrs. But the viewer of a Harper’s Weekly picture of Robert E. Lee was one step removed from the perspective of the original photographers, Minnis and Cowell (fig. 5). The wood-engraved copy of that picture could convey a good deal of information, but subtle nuances were inevitably lost. Sometimes, for a large wood engraving, the block was even broken apart and cut by a team of wood engravers to shorten the production time. Another newspaper might copy the same photographic portrait and to our eyes it may seem gentler, less stiff, or more aggressive. But such emotional subtleties were not intended, and one should be wary of drawing from them much meaning.

The speed of production for both wood engraving and lithography increased the importance of prints in the political process. In 1849, a Hartford newspaper reported that the Kellogg Company lithography presses “run off daily from 3000 to 4000 copies of various popular prints . . . More than 100,000 copies have been sold from a single design.” Given such quantities, promotional portraits may well have come to influence the electorate.

 

Fig. 6. "Progressive Democracy—Prospect of a Smash Up," by Courier & Ives Lithography Company. NPG.83.237. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 6. “Progressive Democracy—Prospect of a Smash Up,” by Courier & Ives Lithography Company. NPG.83.237. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

The single sheet lithographic cartoon, however, also became an expected element of political discourse and electioneering. By midcentury, some of these satiric broadsheets were printed in quantities from fifty to one hundred thousand and distributed to party headquarters or sold from newspaper offices. The prolific Currier and Ives Lithography company issued numerous cartoons in the election of 1860, for instance, targeting all factions. Instead of the caricatural distortion of features typical of later satiric portraits, these images featured easily recognizable, photographically derived faces. “Progressive Democracy,” for instance, features the dilemma of a bitterly divided Democratic Party (fig. 6). Stephen Douglas and running mate Hershel V. Johnson pull the “platform” one way while southerners John C. Breckinridge and Joseph Lane, driven by James Buchanan, strain in the other direction; Republican candidates Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin gleefully anticipate the “prospect of smash up.” Widely available photographic and printed sources made each face immediately recognizable. The wood-engraved newspaper cartoons by Thomas Nast provided another form of visual campaigning: his iconic donkey and elephant symbols for the Democratic and Republican parties were as important as his satiric caricatures.

 

Fig. 7. Death of Harrison, by Nathaniel Currier. NPG.81.49. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 7. Death of Harrison, by Nathaniel Currier. NPG.81.49. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Sometimes portraiture appeared in guises unfamiliar to modern sensibilities. The allegorical, memorial, and apotheosis prints of the early part of the century gave way to deathbed scenes for prominent individuals. Clustered around the bed of a public figure would be grieving widows and children but also cabinet members or other notables. Inevitably such scenes as Nathaniel Currier’s Death of [William Henry] Harrison bore no resemblance to the actual circumstances of the final hours but reflected instead a public acknowledgement of death and grief that related to mourning clothes, black bunting, and other funereal customs of the day (fig. 7). Understanding those customs helps us to see that the death of a prominent individual was often considered a public act. George Washington’s stoicism, for instance, in the painful waning hours of his life was widely reported and remarked upon in orations and eulogies.

 

Fig. 8. George McClellan and Family, by Tholey Lithography Company. NPG.82.31. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 8. George McClellan and Family, by Tholey Lithography Company. NPG.82.31. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

The family portrait of a public figure is another category of portrayal that seems unusual to us today. With the exception of Edward Savage’s painting and engraving of the Washington family (1798), the genre seems to have started with the death of Abraham Lincoln. William Sartain’s engraving of Lincoln’s family provided the prototype for these images. Including a bust of Washington and a portrait of the deceased child Willie, it appeared in 1866 after Lincoln’s own death and spawned many copies. Such prints don’t tell an accurate story of the Lincolns’ domestic life before he died; many of them resurrect Willie and most include the older son Robert who at that point was rarely home. But images of public men within their family circle reinforced that division in the Victorian mind between male and female spheres of influence. Military figures such as George B. McClellan, Stonewall Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant were all depicted with their families (fig. 8). The man’s return to the feminine sphere of the parlor—filled with pictures, sculpture, books, furnishings, and children—recharged him with moral rectitude and emotional sympathy. Every president from Lincoln through William McKinley was depicted in a “first family” domestic picture until printmakers finally gave up with Teddy Roosevelt, whose sprawling White House entourage of children, pets, and a glamorous debutante daughter required more regular updating in the rotogravure sections of the newspapers.

 

Fig. 9. Jenny Lind, by J. H. Bufford Lithography Company. NPG.98.18. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 9. Jenny Lind, by J. H. Bufford Lithography Company. NPG.98.18. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Just as topical—and saleable—as images of presidents and generals were the portraits of theatrical figures. While lithographic music sheets of the early nineteenth century sometimes featured military heroes to whom the “grand march” could be dedicated, they most frequently depicted famous composers or touring actors, dancers, and singers. The importance of the piano as a social nexus in every well-appointed parlor adds to the significance of these often modest pictorial embellishments for the latest popular song sheet. Romantic tunes, stirring lyrics, and the frequent repetition of performance added to the appreciation of the subject, more than compensating for the artistic deficiencies of such boneless, weightless figures as singer Jenny Lind in the J. H. Bufford Company’s portrayal (fig. 9).

 

Fig. 10. Malvina Pray Florence, by John L. Magee. NPG.94.1. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 10. Malvina Pray Florence, by John L. Magee. NPG.94.1. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Theatrical portraits in differing mediums and varying quality were produced throughout the century. The strikingly photographic quality of the lithograph of actress Malvina Florence in her role as Peg Ann Higgenfluter in The Yankee Gal suggests that it might have been copied from a daguerreotype (fig. 10). The specificity of her features and expression, the extraordinary detail of the costume, and the clarity of the atmosphere all imply a daguerreian source. The lithographers of the time were proud of their ability to replicate the daguerreotype’s minute detail and startling, lifelike qualities; they strove for the same precision. Unlike other genres of printed portraiture, one can assume accuracy in these extraordinary prints after daguerreotypes. Malvina Florence may not have actually said, “How de dew Fellar,” to the photographer, as the inscription implies, but this is undoubtedly how she presented herself in character to his camera.

Eventually theatrical portraiture came in the form of posters. Are they reliable historical documents? Do the inevitable exaggerations of their advertising mission disqualify them as historical documents, or can we learn history lessons from their loud ballyhoo?

 

Fig. 11. Thomas Alva Edison, by Alfred S. Seer, engraver. NPG.87.225. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 11. Thomas Alva Edison, by Alfred S. Seer, engraver. NPG.87.225. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Consider a large wood-engraved poster of Thomas Edison, which on the surface doesn’t seem to have anything to do with theatrical traditions (fig. 11). In 1878, when Edison came to Washington to demonstrate his newly patented phonograph for the president, the Academy of Sciences, and Congress, he had his picture taken with his new invention. The same year, Edison had five hundred of his “talking machines” manufactured for exhibition around the country under the auspices of a lyceum, an organization that booked edifying and uplifting programs. This piece is, in essence, a show poster advertising the demonstrations of Edison’s machine. The blank space left purposefully at the top provided local promoters the opportunity to fill in the particulars of time and place. Edison did not accompany his machines on the circuit, but he appears prominently in this nearly seven-foot-tall poster. At the bottom, circus poster rhetoric informs the viewer about this extraordinary machine: “It Talks! It Sings! It Laughs! IT PLAYS CORNET SONGS.” This image and the man it represents would have been seen within the context of both the lyceum and the circus: a conflation of notions about education, entertainment, and pride in American invention. The poster reminds us that Edison, far from being that lone genius of American fantasy, was very much a public figure.

 

Fig. 12. Lillian Russell, by the Strobridge Lithography Company. NPG.77.329. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 12. Lillian Russell, by the Strobridge Lithography Company. NPG.77.329. Photograph © 2007 Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Posters were insistent, unsolicited visual statements, meant to be seen, as print historian A. Hyatt Mayor has suggested, “by people who did not mean to see them.” In order to capture attention, they were necessarily simple, graphically bold, and often large. Late nineteenth-century theatrical posters were more typically printed as brightly colored chromolithographs. In one sense the portrait is secondary in these images: the poster’s primary purpose is to advertise the arrival of the circus, the opening of the play, or the publication of a magazine. But because of their effective and dramatic combination of words and images, they communicate powerful messages about the subjects portrayed. The face in the Strobridge Company’s poster of singer Lillian Russell could advertise any of the sweet and youthful heroines of her many light opera roles (fig. 12). But the elaborate frame and the subtle color stippling of the background suggest the influence of the artistic poster craze on the large commercial printing firms. Strobridge’s unidentified artist posed Russell’s face against a marbleized wallpaper design and constructed an elegant frame, inspired by contemporary stained glass and ornamented with bamboo. The aestheticizing approach added more luster to this perennially popular performer whose beauty and flair for publicity had as much to do with her success as did her voice and her acting ability.

With the etching revival of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, prints became works of art, prized for beauty, rarity, and originality. But portraiture was never a major component of the etching revival. In this medium, prints simply could not compete with photography when it came to replicating the face.

In the end, printed portraits from the nineteenth century can be considered in commercial terms: pictures produced in quantity for a broad range of consumers. These portraits emphasized the public image rather than subtler, less well-known personality traits. They established or solidified fame, focusing consumers’ attention on the most commonly known and popular characteristics of famous Americans. By learning to read and understand these pictures, we can gain considerable insight into historical figures and how they were perceived in their own day.

Further Reading:

For several articles on these prints, see Wendy Wick Reaves, ed., American Portrait Prints (Charlottesville, 1984). Constance Harris, in Portraiture in Prints (Jefferson, N.C., 1987), covers a broad history of printed portraits in Europe and America from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. Joshua Brown, in Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Los Angeles, 2002), discusses nineteenth-century illustrated journalism. Bernard Reilly, in American Political Prints, 1766-1876 (Boston, 1991), surveys political prints and cartoons while Nobel Cunningham, in Popular Images of the Presidency (Columbia, Mo., 1991) focuses on the presidency from Washington to Lincoln. For other specialized studies, see Harold Holzer, Gabor Borritt, and Mark Neely, The Lincoln Image (New York, 1984); Wendy Wick, George Washington, An American Icon (Charlottesville, 1982); and Wendy Wick Reaves and Sally Pierce, “Translations from the Plate: the Marketplace of Public Portraiture,” in Young America: the Daugerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes (New York, 2005).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 7.3 (April, 2007).


Wendy Wick Reaves is the curator of prints and drawings at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery where she has focused her exhibitions, publications, and collecting activities on American visual culture and the relationship between portraiture and fame. Her most recent books are Celebrity Caricature in America (New Haven, 1998) and Eye Contact: Modern American Portrait Drawings (Washington, D.C., 2002).




Decoding Lincoln: Middle-school students examine the developing statesman

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. That every man may receive at least, a moderate education, and thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of our free institutions, appears to be an object of vital importance.

–Abraham Lincoln, 1832 

The goal of teaching history is to develop and nurture our students’ ability to interpret history for themselves. In my senior year of college at the State University at Stony Brook, Professor John Pratt enlightened me about the richness of learning exclusively by examining primary sources in “Lincoln’s Statesmanship,” a course devoted to the writings of Abraham Lincoln.

As an ambitious new teacher a little more than a decade ago, I set out to design a unit for my eighth-grade American history class modeled after my favorite college course. When I threw out my enthusiastic proposal, “Today you are all going to become historians,” my proclamation was met with an unanticipated groan. As I soon learned, the prospect of learning as a historian is not as exciting to a thirteen-year-old as it is to a college history major. Looking back, it is easy to see where I went wrong, and how my students’ criticism improved my teaching. 

I decided to introduce my Lincoln’s Statesmanship thread during our study of the causes of the Civil War. The students were already familiar with some Lincoln rhetoric; we touched briefly on his “House Divided” speech and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. I compiled a worksheet packet containing excerpts of what I believe are defining speeches: Address before the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum (1838), Address before the Springfield Temperance Society (1842), Accepting the Republican Senatorial Nomination (“House Divided,” 1858), Address at the Cooper Union (1860), the Gettysburg Address (1863), the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), and the Second Inaugural Address (1865). I placed the students in groups of four, each armed with a dictionary, fully expecting that cooperatively they would be able to digest the speech, dissect it, and draw parallels among them that revealed Lincoln the developing statesman. (Samples from the original Lincoln’s Statesmanship Lesson Plan packet are linked here).

 

Fig. 1. Standing Lincoln, monument in Lincoln Park, Chicago: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, sculptor; Stanford White, architect. Photograph by Albert Gardner Robinson in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural (Boston, 1927). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Fig. 1. Standing Lincoln, monument in Lincoln Park, Chicago: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, sculptor; Stanford White, architect. Photograph by Albert Gardner Robinson in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural (Boston, 1927). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

After some toiling, the students voiced their opinion of the assignment, “This is too hard,” “Is this Old English because I don’t understand it at all?” and, of course, “I just don’t get it!” Frazzled, I ran from group to group trying to help, but realized that I was really just telling them the answers. That evening, reflecting on the failure of my lesson, I tried to think of what my professor did that made my learning experience so different. 

Recalling the early days of the course, I remembered that Professor Pratt guided us through the speeches, engaging us in discussions of Lincoln’s motives and recurring themes. We were assigned a passage to read before the next session. Although I had prepared for class by pouring over the assigned passage on my own, underlining and defining every word, I ultimately left each class with a much greater understanding of the work. Cooperatively, we went through each piece, line by line. Professor Pratt would ask for our interpretation, and spark the dialogue by posing questions and offering suggestions of his own theories. Looking back, Professor Pratt’s questions always connected to the theme of the course: Lincoln’s statesmanship. Although we did a fairly competent job interpreting the speech, Professor Pratt’s inquiries would help us orient to the “big picture,” namely Lincoln’s goals and a vision of the future for himself and the nation. 

Keeping this in mind, and still determined not to give up on my idea, I reworked a part of the lesson and presented it a few weeks later: an examination of the Gettysburg Address using more of a mastery learning approach, modeling the desired skills and then progressing to student demonstrations of this new knowledge. I began by presenting the students with the Gettysburg Address, which we collaboratively dissected line by line. I encouraged them to mark up their copies, underlining and obtaining a definition for every word they did not know. 

To motivate the group, I began with a simple math problem:

A score = 20 years
Four score = 4 x 20 = 80
80 + 7 = 87
Four score and seven years ago = 87 years ago
1863 – 87 = 1776

The math revealed to them that the Gettysburg Address could have just as easily started with “In 1776” rather than “Four score and seven years ago.” The students had no idea that “Four score and seven years ago” meant anything, even though about a quarter of them knew the address by heart from memorizing it in fifth grade. A light went on that day. “Oh my God,” they chuckled, “If he meant in 1776, why didn’t he just say that?” O.K., I thought, a teachable moment here. “Why do you think he chose to say ‘Four score’ instead?” They thought, and agreed that Lincoln’s words sound much more official and important even though they were sure a lot of people did not “get it” the way that they do now. The math problem proved to be the key. It demonstrated that there was something to be unlocked in these words and we carried on. Collectively, we went through each passage, putting Lincoln’s words into our own and by the end, they really understood the meaning of the address. 

After finishing the speech, I sent them to their groups to rewrite the speeches in their own words. When they were finished, one student from each group came up to share their version of the Gettysburg Address. Here is a sample:

In 1776 very important men made this country and put “all men are created equal” in their directions for how we should run this country. Now in 1863, we are fighting over it. We are gathered here today to dedicate this graveyard for all the people who died at Gettysburg because they believed that slaves should be free. This ground is special because of all the people who fought here. It is important not to forget that all these people died here and that we have to finish what they started. We have to fight harder than ever because they gave their lives for it. When we are finished, and the war is over, they will have died for a good reason because our country will be truly free and our government will be the way it was always supposed to be.

 

Fig. 2. Copy of the first draft of the Gettysburg Address, in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Fig. 2. Copy of the first draft of the Gettysburg Address, in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Completing the Gettysburg Address provided a springboard for studying the speeches I presented to them earlier. When we reviewed my earlier assignment together, the answers seemed much plainer to them once they understood the deeper meaning of many of Lincoln’s addresses. They had a much better understanding about the Civil War at this point. Assuredly, that was another component they were missing that I had in my college course: a prior understanding of the time period. In successive years, I have introduced my Lincoln’s Statesmanship theme later in the course and have found the results much more satisfying. 

When introducing new documents, I try to follow this example and make it a mystery to uncover and unlock. For some, it is truly enlightening to see the growth of Lincoln as a leader who was a savvy politician, carefully tailoring his speeches to capture his audience and further his political aspirations. At the very least, rather than refer to Lincoln’s words as “Old English,” my middle schoolers have an understanding of epic language and why someone would wish to use it. 

 

 

Lincoln’s Statesmanship Lesson Plan

Name

Social Studies 8 

“The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”

–Address before the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum, 1838

“It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And when they do, they will naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others?”

1. What is Lincoln predicting about the future of democracy?

“They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbed away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.”

2. Do you think Lincoln sees himself as one of those “other pillars”? Who are the pillars?

“When There Shall Be Neither a Slave Nor a Drunkard”

–Address before the Springfield Temperance Society, 1842

“And when the victory shall be complete–when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth–how proud the title of that Land, which may truly claim to be their birth-place and the cradle of both those revolutions, that shall have ended in that victory. How nobly distinguished that People shall have planted, and nurtured to maturity, both the political and moral freedom of their species.”

3. What issue does Lincoln bring into the Temperance debate?

4. What do we learn about Lincoln’s vision for the future of this nation?

“A House Divided Against Itself”

Speech Accepting the Republican Senatorial Nomination, 1858

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

5. What is the “house” Lincoln is referring to?

“Our cause, then, must be intrusted to, and conducted by its own undoubted friends–those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work–who do care for the result . . . Wise councils may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later the victory is sure to come.”

6. What political party does Lincoln believe must the work be entrusted to?

7. What is the “cause”?

 

This article originally appeared in issue 5.1 (October, 2004).


Tracey Melandro taught seventh- and eighth-grade social studies for twelve years at East Northport Middle School in Long Island, New York. She now teaches early American history at Suffolk County Community College in Brentwood, Long Island.




“Unquestionably the Choicest Collection of Books in the U.S.”: The 1815 Sale of Thomas Jefferson’s Library to the Nation

When British troops invaded the city of Washington on August 24, 1814, their orders were to capture the city, and “complete the destruction of the public buildings with the least possible delay.” In perhaps the most memorable event of the War of 1812, they set ablaze the interior of the United States Capitol, the president’s house, and the public offices, in retaliation for the looting and burning of the capital city of York in Upper Canada (present-day Toronto) by American troops the previous year.

 

1. "U.S. Capitol After Burning by British," by George Munger (1814). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
1. “U.S. Capitol After Burning by British,” by George Munger (1814). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

At the Capitol building, the British forces used the books from the 3,000-volume congressional library to kindle the fire that reduced the north wing to charred timbers (fig. 1). Lovers of literature and learning, even the British press, denounced the destruction of the library. The editor of a Nottingham newspaper called it “an act without example in modern wars or in any other war since the inroads of the barbarians who conflagrated Rome and overthrew the Roman Empire.” British Major-General Robert Ross, who ordered the burning of public buildings, was reported to have said, “Had I known in time, the books most certainly should have been saved.”

Retired president Thomas Jefferson got wind of the burning of Washington from Monticello, his residence in the Virginia Piedmont, sometime around August 28, 1814, most likely via reports published in the Richmond Enquirer newspaper. Four weeks later, the deeply indebted Jefferson offered to sell his library to Congress to replace the one that was destroyed. What was the motivation behind this move? Jefferson biographers and historians have typically portrayed his offer and later the sale as purely opportunistic, and have characterized his motive in primarily financial terms. Even Jefferson descendant Sarah N. Randolph asserted in her 1871 biography, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, that it was her great-grandfather’s financial situation that led to the sale of his library. Writing about Jefferson’s pecuniary pressures, which grew more urgent with the war, she stated, “There was then nothing to be made from farming; but while his income was thus cut short, his company and his debts continued to increase. In this emergency something had to be done; and the only thing which offered itself involved a sacrifice which none but his own family, who witnessed the struggle it cost him, could ever fully appreciate.”

While Jefferson certainly benefited from and used the proceeds from the sale of his library to settle some of his debts, might his motives have been more multifaceted than previously understood? This article examines this question against the backdrop of the partisan politics surrounding the 1815 sale, while shedding light on the lesser-known and elaborate preparations Jefferson undertook to ensure that his prized collection would be installed in the nation’s capital “very perfectly in the order” he had envisaged.

On September 15, a week before Jefferson offered his library for sale, he received a letter sent from Philadelphia by Boston publisher Thomas B. Wait & Sons. They were in the midst of publishing a collection of State Papers and Publick Documents of the United States, for the use of Congress and the general public, to fill a need they perceived had been amplified by the war with Great Britain and tangled relations with other European powers. Their efforts were now in jeopardy because of the destruction of the documents they needed for the publication that had been housed in the congressional library in Washington. They turned to Jefferson as a last resort and wrote, “In our dilemma, the idea occurred, that you sir, would more probably have in your possession a complete series of Amer. State Papers, than any man in the country; and the remarks of many of our friends strengthened us in the hope that the desired papers might be found in your hands.” This request likely served to underline for Jefferson Congress’s dire need for a reference library in order to function effectively. Might this realization have played a part in, and even been the impetus for, Jefferson’s move a week later to offer his personal library to the nation? Jefferson had a close personal connection to the congressional library. During his tenure as president of the United States from 1801 to 1809, Jefferson had maintained a keen interest in the library and its development. Most notably, in 1802, he drew up a list of recommended books for Congress, which helped shape the library’s acquisitions at least until 1806. He was keenly aware of the resources the legislative body needed. Congress was now without a library, and Jefferson was uniquely positioned to fill this need.

On September 21, 1814, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his longtime friend in Washington and federal commissioner of the revenue, Samuel Harrison Smith. He expressed his indignation at the “vandalism of our enemy,” declaring the British acts of aggression and barbarism as tyranny of the strong over the weak and unbecoming of a European power in a civilized age. He then offered to sell his personal library to Congress as a replacement. “I have been 50. years making it, & have spared no pains, opportunity or expence to make it what it is,” wrote Jefferson of his collection that had “no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”

Jefferson offered to sell his library at whatever valuation and payment terms Congress should decide upon, on the condition that it be purchased in its entirety or not at all. Jefferson believed that no other collection of its kind existed in terms of its comprehensiveness and depth, which made it ideal to meet the immediate reference needs of the members of Congress. He wrote, “While residing in Paris I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hands, and putting by every thing which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare & valuable in every science. besides this, I had standing orders, during the whole time I was in Europe, in it’s principal book-marts, particularly Amsterdam, Frankfort, Madrid and London, for such works relating to America as could be found in Paris. so that, in that department, particularly, such a collection was made as probably can never again be effected; because it is hardly probable that the same opportunities, the same time, industry, perseverance, and expence, with some knolege of the bibliography of the subject will again happen to be in concurrence.” He continued, “after my return to America, I was led to procure also whatever related to the duties of those in the high concerns of the nation … in the diplomatic and Parliamentary branches, it is particularly full.”

Having detailed the efforts he took to acquire such a useful collection for matters of state, Jefferson noted that he had long been thinking of Congress as the site of its ultimate disposition. “It is long since I have been sensible it ought not to continue private property, and had provided that, at my death, Congress should have the refusal of it, at their own price.” Now with Congress’s devastating loss, he felt that the present was the proper time to offer to place the library at their service, even if that meant the seventy-one-year-old Jefferson would give up its use for the remainder of his life.

In separate correspondence describing this offer to President James Madison and also Secretary of State and later Secretary of War, James Monroe, Jefferson reiterated his willingness to accept any valuation determined by persons appointed by Congress and any other terms decided by them. On the subject of purchase price, Jefferson balked at assigning a value to his library, on the grounds that he was not sufficiently familiar with current prices, and that he was not willing to trust himself in a case where “motives of interest” might subject him to bias, or the suspicion of it. His hope was that Congress would appoint an agent, someone knowledgeable like a bookseller, to arrive at an independent volume count and a maximum ceiling price for the entire collection. Congress could then decide to approve or reduce the proposed price. He wrote, “In all this I wish myself to be entirely passive, and to abide absolutely by the estimate thus formed.” To Monroe, he stated his readiness to accept payment even after the war, “at such epoch as they may chuse after the days of peace & prosperity shall have returned.”

If Jefferson’s chief goal in offering his library to Congress was to raise funds to help pay his personal debts and alleviate his financial woes, two questions arise. How would attempting to sell his library to a wartime government under financial duress and intense public scrutiny, at a price it alone set, achieve this end? The Madison administration faced a banking crisis, widespread economic uncertainty and enormous pressure to raise taxes. Furthermore, if Jefferson was selling his prized collection expressly to pay off pressing debts, how would accepting payment at some indeterminate date in the future, also of Congress’s own choosing, accomplish this goal? If debt relief was indeed Jefferson’s primary motive, one might have expected him to try, at least subtly, to maximize his proceeds from the sale. Yet, there is a glaring absence in surviving correspondence of any attempt by Jefferson to allude to a preferred purchase price or valuation. Nor did he place any emphasis on the most valuable and rare items in the collection. For example, an edition of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation was selling for the equivalent of nearly $140 on the London book market, fourteen times more than the $10 Jefferson eventually received for his 1589 folio edition. Similarly, Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands was selling for more than $115, over five times the $20 he received for his two-volume folio set published in 1771. Instead, he encouraged Smith to come up with a figure he himself deemed reasonable for the entire collection, and suggested that he do so by applying an average price for each volume based upon size. “Whatever sum you should name shall be binding on me as a maximum,” he wrote Smith.

 

2. Thomas Jefferson, by Thomas Sully, 1856 copy by Edward Owen after the 1821 original.  © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
2. Thomas Jefferson, by Thomas Sully, 1856 copy by Edward Owen after the 1821 original.
© Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.

Jefferson’s emphasis on Congress’s acquiring his library in its entirety or not at all suggests the operation of a motive even more important than financial gain: Jefferson saw his carefully curated assemblage of literary treasures, many irreplaceable, as a reflection of who he was, the values he believed in, and how he wanted to be regarded by his fellow countrymen and by posterity—as the champion of a nation of enlightened and free men (fig. 2). The library was to be kept intact. He would not suffer it to be broken up or sold piecemeal. Parting with the collection he had painstakingly assembled over five decades was no small decision for Jefferson. Sarah N. Randolph described his library as “the books which in every change in the tide of his eventful life had ever remained to him as old friends with unchanged faces, and whose silent companionship had afforded him—next to the love of his friends—the sweetest and purest joys of life.” Yet parting with the library at this time was warranted because Jefferson strongly felt that in order for Congress to govern effectively, it needed access to a working library of books and documents relating to all aspects of human knowledge.

It would, of course, overstate the case to say that Jefferson’s sale of his library to Congress was a completely altruistic gesture. He could, one might argue, simply have donated the library to Congress, which we have no evidence that he considered doing. The reality was that Jefferson was deeply in debt and had built up his library at considerable personal expense. Even if he had wanted to, he could not at this time have afforded to give the library away. There is evidence that years earlier, Jefferson had considered donating his scientific books through his will to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, of which he was president. That consideration was now subsumed in the greater mission of leaving his library intact as a personal and republican legacy of greater usefulness to Congress while addressing pressing financial exigencies.

Jefferson may also have come to believe that selling the library to Congress at a fair price was a demonstration of the superiority of private property rights over collective ownership, a core idea of the Scottish Enlightenment and influential thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, promoted by George Washington, Madison, and Jefferson himself. “The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person, & property, & in their management,” Jefferson wrote. By offering to sell, rather than donate, his library, he was acting in accordance with his republican ideals, and exercising his ownership rights by having Congress provide adequate compensation to him for ceding his library to it.

The politics of purchasing the ex-president’s books

Samuel Harrison Smith, who had expressed optimism early on about Congress’s approval of the library acquisition, underestimated partisan reactions to the offer. He forwarded Jefferson’s offer on October 3 to Senator Robert H. Goldsborough, the chairman of the congressional Joint Library Committee, who introduced a resolution four days later authorizing the committee to enter into negotiations with Jefferson for the purchase of his library. The resolution passed in the Democratic-Republican-dominated Senate without any debate on October 10. However, on October 19 the House of Representatives followed suit adding an amendment that Congress retain the right to accept or reject the final contract. This came after failed attempts by opponents of the proposal to exclude certain books and to impose a price ceiling. Voting in the House, which was two-thirds Democratic-Republican, was largely along partisan lines.

The Library Committee met with Smith on October 21, and decided that they would submit for congressional approval whatever valuation Smith proposed to be a fair sum. Smith sought Jefferson’s input, but the latter refused to stipulate a price, reiterating his desire that Congress appoint an independent party to arrive at a valuation. To assist Smith, Jefferson requested his Georgetown bookseller and bookbinder, Joseph Milligan, who was familiar with Jefferson’s library and its condition, to obtain a count of the volumes on each page of the library catalogue Jefferson kept, arrive at an average price for each volume, and report them to Smith. Milligan was a trusted associate of Jefferson’s, and an individual known to Smith. The final count presented to the Library Committee was 6,487 volumes valued at $23,950, based on Milligan’s formula of $10 for a folio, $6 for a quarto, $3 for an octavo, and $1 per duodecimo. Jefferson did not contest or attempt to raise the prices fixed by Milligan. Nor did he express any dismay or dissatisfaction at Milligan’s valuation, despite the final estimate amounting to only a fraction of what he had spent in total on individual volumes. He wrote to Milligan, “I am contented … with your estimate of price, if the committee should be so, or that they should send on valuers, fixing on your estimate.” In fact, Jefferson sold his library at a significant loss. Superintendent of the Patent Office William Thornton had advised members of Congress to offer $50,000, “for I have seen the Books, & knew them to be very valuable: that they ought not therefore to value them as Books in a common Library; for beside the learning & ability it would require to select the Books, they were not to be obtained but at very great trouble, great expense, great risk, & many of them not to be had at all.”

The Library Bill to purchase Jefferson’s library had its supporters and its detractors on both sides of the political aisle. Senator Goldsborough presented it to the Senate on November 28, which passed without amendment on December 3. After some delay, it finally passed the House of Representatives on January 26, but barely, with 47 percent of the House opposing the sale. Federalists in the House attempted to derail the bill. Motions to postpone the vote failed by a handful of votes. The proposal by Cyrus King, the representative from Massachusetts, that the Library Committee be authorized to sell the portion of the books that were, in their opinion, not useful or necessary for Congress, also failed. King, who had been reported by the National Intelligencer as being opposed to the general dissemination of Jefferson’s “infidel philosophy,” charged that Jefferson’s library “contained irreligious and immoral books, works of the French philosophers, who caused and influenced the volcano of the French Revolution.” He characterized the collection as “good, bad, and indifferent, old, new, and worthless, in languages which many can not read, and most ought not.” Echoing Federalist accusations that American imperialism and expansionism into British Canada were behind the Madison administration’s reasons for going to war, he charged that the transaction was a scheme in “true Jeffersonian, Madisonian philosophy, to bankrupt the Treasury, beggar the people, and disgrace the nation.”

Members of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia—who had at one time expected to inherit Jefferson’s scientific books—also expressed regret on hearing the news of the sale of Jefferson’s library to Congress. Jonathan Williams, representing the disappointed members and friends of Jefferson, wrote, “It can hardly be supposed, that in this Room surrounded by a Library consisting almost wholly of donations, with your almost animated Bust looking full in our faces, we could avoid expressing our regret that the rich collection of so many years of scientific research should be devoted to a political Body, where it cannot produce any benefit to them or to the World … Books as would adorn our Library and aid this Society in ‘the promotion of useful knowledge’ must there become motheaten upon the Shelves.” As far as we know, Jefferson, who had served as president of the society since 1797, did not respond directly to Williams’ letter. Instead, perhaps to avoid conflict (which would be characteristic of Jefferson), he wrote to the secretary, Robert Patterson, a week later to tender his resignation from the presidency. He argued that his longtime inability to travel to preside over the society’s meetings in Philadelphia was reason enough for him to vacate the position in favor of a successor, now that elections for office holders were imminent. He wrote, “Nothing is more incumbent on the old than to know when they should get out of the way, and relinquish to younger successors the honors they can no longer earn, and the duties they can no longer perform.” The society reluctantly accepted his resignation.

Moving the library to Congress

On January 30, 1815, Madison signed into law “An Act to authorize the purchase of the library of Thomas Jefferson, late President of the United States.” On February 5, while entertaining George Ticknor and Francis C. Gray, two gentlemen who had traveled from Boston carrying letters of recommendation from John Adams to “see Monticello, its Library and its Sage,” Jefferson received official notice of the purchase. Back in 1812, Adams and Jefferson had reconciled, and since then, they corresponded regularly. On hearing of the impending sale, Adams wrote, “I envy you that immortal honour: but I cannot enter into competition with you for my books are not half the number of yours.” Adams owned over 3,500 volumes, which are today preserved at the Boston Public Library.

 

3. After receiving news that the bill to purchase his library had been signed into law, Jefferson compiled a detailed tally sheet of the number of volumes he had on his shelves in his library at Monticello. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
3. After receiving news that the bill to purchase his library had been signed into law, Jefferson compiled a detailed tally sheet of the number of volumes he had on his shelves in his library at Monticello. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Smith wrote to inform Jefferson that the Secretary of the Treasury had been authorized to issue Jefferson with the sale proceeds of $23,950 in the form of Treasury notes bearing an interest rate of 5 and two-thirds percent. Jefferson, however, declined to receive any payment until his library had been delivered to Congress. He went to great lengths to ensure that everything associated with the sale was seen to be transparent and above-board at each stage of the transaction. He wrote to friends to collect the books he had loaned them, and carried out a detailed inventory of the books on his shelves at Monticello. He compiled a detailed tally for each chapter in his catalogue, along with a list of books that were missing from the shelf and another list of added titles that he had inadvertently omitted from his catalogue (fig. 3). The almost 72-year-old Jefferson informed Smith, “I will set about revising and arranging the books. this can be done only by myself … In doing it I must be constantly on my legs, and I must ask indulgence therefore to proceed only as my strength will admit.” Insisting that an agent verify that all was in order, he wrote to Madison, “I should wish a competent agent … with the catalogue in his hand, see that every book is on the shelves, and have their lids nailed on, one by one, as he proceeds … this is necessary for my safety and your satisfaction as a just caution for the public. you know there are persons both in and out of the public councils, who will seize every occasion of imputation on either of us …” He was not going to supply their political enemies with any fodder to accuse the sitting president or himself of wrongdoing.

Following a rigorous review of his library, Jefferson arrived at a physical count of 6,707 volumes, 220 more than Milligan’s original count of 6,487 volumes. Despite missing 83 volumes, this was more than offset by an additional 194 and a half volumes that had been omitted in Milligan’s count. Jefferson arranged for Milligan to procure some of the missing volumes at Jefferson’s own expense. Satisfied that there was no shortfall in the number of volumes due to Congress, Jefferson informed Treasury Secretary Alexander J. Dallas on April 18 that the books were ready for delivery and that he was ready to accept payment for them. Three and a half months would pass before Milligan realized that Jefferson had actually made a computational error in his tally sheet. While unpacking the books in Washington, Milligan discovered that Jefferson had inadvertently counted volumes twice, ending up with 251 more volumes than there actually were. Therefore the number of books delivered was over 6,500 volumes, which still exceeded the contracted figure of 6,487 volumes.

 

4.
4. “Blodget’s Hotel, Washington, D.C.,” published circa 1860-1880. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Uppermost in Jefferson’s mind was for Congress to have ready and convenient access to his library. His plan was to leave his books in the pine bookcases they were already housed in, and to simply have boards nailed over the bookcases to cover them. This way, his books could be transported to Washington, set up on end, and together with his catalogue as a guide, be immediately accessible for use by members of Congress. He calculated that his books and bookcases would weigh 27,000 pounds, and fill an estimated eleven wagons. Concerned that his fine bindings not be scuffed and rubbed excessively by the “joultings of the wagons,” Jefferson lobbied Madison to appoint Joseph Milligan to oversee their “careful and skilful packing,” and wagoner Joseph Dougherty, Jefferson’s former coachman during his presidency, to transport the books to Washington. These were the two men he felt would exercise the utmost care in the handling of his prized books. After spending nearly three weeks laboriously ordering his books, he proceeded to label each of them. According to overseer Edmund Bacon, Jefferson had Monticello slave John Hemmings make additional boxes, while his butler Burwell Colbert and Bacon packed the books up. Bacon recalled that James Dinsmore, who worked for Jefferson as a joiner, also helped, while Jefferson’s granddaughters, Ellen, Cornelia, and Virginia Randolph (then aged 18, 15 and 13 respectively) helped sort the books.

Between May 2 and May 8, ten wagons loaded with Jefferson’s books and bookcases set off from Monticello for their 125-mile journey northeast to Washington. As the last wagonload of his books left Monticello, Jefferson remarked with pride to Samuel Harrison Smith, “ … an interesting treasure is added to your city, now become the depository of unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the US, and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country.” Two hundred years after the sale, Jefferson’s legacy is still celebrated as the founding collection of the Library of Congress.

The books arrived in Washington six days later. They were set up on the third floor of Blodget’s Hotel at Seventh and E Streets, which served as the temporary Capitol for members of Congress (fig. 4). Due to illness, Milligan did not begin unpacking the library till the second week of July. When he finally completed the task on July 24, he happily reported to an anxious Jefferson a week later that the books had arrived without suffering any damage.

 

Organizing knowledge, structuring a legacy

5. Chapter 1 from the 1823 Catalogue at the Library of Congress. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
5. Chapter 1 from the 1823 Catalogue at the Library of Congress. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

In the way Jefferson organized his library and ordered it for use, we see a man who sought to shape his legacy, and who viewed the library he sent to Washington as a statement of the values he had espoused throughout his life as a politician and statesman. In briefing the newly appointed Librarian of Congress, George Watterston, Jefferson described the immense effort he had expended to order and document his collection exactly the way he intended Congress to have it. He stipulated, “You will receive my library arranged very perfectly in the order observed in the Catalogue.” Jefferson organized his library by subject, based upon a scheme he had adapted from Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and Jean Lerond D’Alembert in the Encyclopédie, as well as chronologically. He divided human knowledge into three major groups, namely history, philosophy, and fine arts, in accordance with Bacon’s “faculties of the human mind,” namely memory, reason, and imagination. These were in turn subdivided into forty-four chapters or subjects. He enjoyed the “peculiar satisfaction” of seeing at a glance all the books he possessed on a particular topic. Books were arranged on the shelf by size, while the arrangement in his manuscript catalogue was “sometimes analytical, sometimes chronological, & sometimes a combination of both.”

Jefferson’s manuscript catalogue was sent to Washington along with the books. It ended up being retained by Watterston as his personal property, and unfortunately is lost. In 1823, Jefferson had his personal secretary and future grandson-in-law, Nicholas Philip Trist, recreate his catalogue. This 1823 catalogue, which survives today at the Library of Congress, is the closest surrogate we have for Jefferson’s original listing of the books he sold to Congress (fig. 5). From Jefferson’s manuscript catalogue, Watterston produced a print catalogue entitled Catalogue of the Library of the United States, which turned out to be a disaster in Jefferson’s eyes. Watterston had taken the liberty of alphabetizing the titles within each chapter, thereby upsetting Jefferson’s carefully ordered entries (fig. 6). His arrangement reflected his understanding and particular method of organizing what enlightened individuals of his time regarded as “useful knowledge.” When Jefferson eventually received copies of Watterston’s print catalogue in late January 1816, he complained to Joseph C. Cabell: “The form of the catalogue has been much injured in the publication: for altho they have preserved my division into chapters, they have reduced the books in each chapter to Alphabetical order, instead of the Chronological or Analytical arrangements I had given them.” An entire month passed before Jefferson wrote to Watterston to acknowledge his receipt of the catalogues. He gave no hint of his displeasure, except to remark in passing, “you ask how I like the arrangement within the chapters? of course, you know, not so well as my own;” and then with a hint of sarcasm added, “yet I think it possible the alphabetical arrangement may be more convenient to readers generally, than mine …”

 

6. Chapter 1 from The Catalogue of the Library of the United States: To Which is Annexed, a Copious Index, Alphabetically Arranged, printed by Jonathan Elliot (Washington, 1815). Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
6. Chapter 1 from The Catalogue of the Library of the United States: To Which is Annexed, a Copious Index, Alphabetically Arranged, printed by Jonathan Elliot (Washington, 1815). Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

In December 1818, the Library of Congress moved from Blodget’s Hotel back to the north wing of the Capitol building. Jefferson heard news of the move from Joseph Milligan, who had been engaged in the move. In the attic story on the west side of the north wing, conditions were cramped. Later, in August 1824, the library moved to new, spacious quarters in the central portion of the restored Capitol building designed by Charles Bulfinch. Jefferson continued to take an interest in the Library of Congress after the sale. In early September 1820, he forwarded to Watterston and the congressional library committee a catalogue of books relating to America that he thought might be useful in further expanding their collection. He even took the trouble to mark the books he knew they already had so it would be clear to them which ones they did not yet have.

Congratulating Jefferson after the sale of his library had been finalized, William Short expressed relief that Jefferson’s library was going to stay intact as a collection. He wrote, “It gave me great pleasure to see that your valuable Library was to be secured & forever kept together.” Little would he know that thirty-five years later, on Christmas Eve in 1851, a fire that began in a faulty chimney flue in the Capitol would destroy much of the Library of Congress’s 55,000-volume collection. Two-thirds of Jefferson’s books were lost. Today, Jefferson’s library has been recreated in a permanent exhibit in the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress, consisting of the more than 2,400 surviving original volumes, along with replacement copies.

Money for debts, money for books

Of the sale proceeds of $23,950 he received in the form of treasury notes, Jefferson designated $10,500 to William Short, $4,870 to John Barnes to settle Jefferson’s outstanding debt to General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and the remaining $8,580 to himself. Short had been Jefferson’s private secretary in Paris when Jefferson was minister plenipotentiary and then minister to France from 1784 to 1789. The $10,500 was to pay off three bonds totaling $10,000 and the accumulated interest Jefferson owed Short. In 1798, Kosciuszko had granted Jefferson power of attorney over his American assets. The $4,870 was a loan of $4,500 with interest that Jefferson had loaned himself from the general’s assets to pay off notes he owed to the Bank of the United States in 1809. In settling his obligations, he chose to clear these two outstanding debts and a number of other smaller ones. Yet he did not settle others but chose instead to buy books for his replacement library at Monticello.

Even as he was organizing the transfer to Washington, Jefferson had begun planning a replacement library. In late February 1815, he wrote to the American consul in Paris, David Bailie Warden, “I have now to make up again a collection for my self of such as may amuse my hours of reading.” He wrote to John Vaughan to enquire after depositing funds in London, Liverpool, Paris, and Philadelphia to fund his anticipated book purchases. In June, after his books had left Monticello, Jefferson declared to John Adams, “I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”

In this abbreviated account of the 1815 sale, we see how Jefferson used the library he sold to Congress as a self-fashioning project to shape his legacy and the way he wished to be viewed by posterity. Like the papers and personal correspondence he left behind, Jefferson considered his library—its collection scope, the individual titles and editions, its meticulous organization, and its breadth and depth of “useful knowledge,” as a reflection of what he stood for, a symbol of how he wanted to be perceived by his peers, his political opponents, and the public. In offering the library to the nation at significant financial loss, Jefferson was acting in a manner he perceived as consistent with republican virtue and self-sacrifice. He viewed the transfer of his library as crucial in ensuring the survival of the American experiment and its democratic government, and an important step in building the nation. It was also an opportunity to profoundly shape the country’s intellectual, social, and political future, while shaping his own public legacy.

How, then, do we explain family descendant Sarah N. Randolph’s assertion over fifty years after the sale of the library, in her 1871 biography, that Jefferson sold his library solely out of dire financial necessity? It is useful to realize that Randolph’s statement was part of a consistent narrative, promulgated by Jefferson descendants shortly after Jefferson’s death in 1826, that long years of dedicated public service had essentially impoverished the Founding Father and his family. Randolph’s account of the 1815 sale was effectively a continuation and reflection of this family narrative, one in which losing the library was a pointed symbol of the terrible personal cost of Jefferson’s public service, and more important to highlight than the public legacy he sought to shape while meeting pressing financial needs.

Further Reading

The Jefferson letters cited are published in volumes 7-9 of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series (Princeton, N.J., 2010-2012), and available online via Founders Online. Sarah N. Randolph’s biography of Jefferson is The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1871).

For more on the 1815 sale, see Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 2008); Carl Ostrowski, Books, Maps, and Politics: A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783-1861 (Amherst, Mass., 2004); James Conaway, America’s Library: The Story of the Library of Congress, 1800-2000 (New Haven, Conn., 2000); Lucy Salamanca, Fortress of Freedom: The Story of the Library of Congress (Philadelphia, 1942); and William Dawson Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, Volume 1, 1800-1864 (Washington, 1904).

 

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


Endrina Tay is associate foundation librarian for technical services in the Jefferson Library at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. She heads the Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries Project, based at Monticello.

 




Jefferson’s Mystery Woman Identified

1. Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, January 13, 1807, in Library of Congress, The Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1, General Correspondence, 1651-1827 (accessed at American Memory Website).
1. Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, January 13, 1807, in Library of Congress, The Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1, General Correspondence, 1651-1827. Accessed at American Memory, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Historians have long wondered what prompted President Thomas Jefferson’s cryptic sentence in a note dated January 13, 1807, to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin: “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.” Given Jefferson’s opinion explicitly expressed elsewhere that women were best suited to domestic roles, not to boisterous public political forums, and not as actors in the halls and offices of government, scholars of the early republic and popular authors alike, since at least 1920, have tried to reconstruct the specific context in which the president made this comment. For the last twenty years, the consensus explanation has been that Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, unable to find enough qualified men to fill federal government jobs, proposed hiring women for those positions. However, while Jefferson’s statement may reflect his thoughts on women as office holders in general, my recent research in federal records proves that Jefferson wrote the sentence in reaction to Gallatin’s proposal to appoint a specific woman to a specific job.

Previous scholars’ attempts to explain Jefferson’s statement were foiled by the fact that Gallatin’s letter to Jefferson, which provoked the presidential response, has apparently not survived. Arsonists burned the Treasury Department offices on March 31, 1833, incinerating much of the department’s records, including letters to and from the collectors of customs. Despite the Treasury Secretary’s efforts to reconstruct the files with duplicate copies from elsewhere, most correspondence with the Collector of the Port (customs collector) at Wilmington, North Carolina, remains lost—and the Collector of the Port at Wilmington turns out to have been the key correspondent in this issue of appointing a woman to public office.

Clues to solving the mystery lie in the next sentence of Jefferson’s note: “Shall we appoint Springs, or wait the further recommendations spoken of by Bloodworth?” Timothy Bloodworth (1736-1814) was Collector of the Port of Wilmington, appointed by Jefferson in 1802. One of Bloodworth’s collateral duties as collector was to superintend the Cape Fear Lighthouse on Bald Head Island at the entrance to the port of Wilmington. As Superintendent of Lights, he nominated candidates for light-keeper to the Treasury Secretary, Gallatin. Probably due to the fire, documents of Bloodworth’s efforts to find nominees for the light-keeper appointment are largely lost to us, except four pieces of correspondence that escaped the flames and are now in three separate record series at the National Archives.

There was, indeed, a vacancy at the Cape Fear Lighthouse. The Wilmington Gazette of October 21, 1806, reported that five days earlier, a man named Joseph Swain, hunting deer and wild hogs on Bald Head Island, fired at a noise he heard in the bushes—only to find that he had killed his father-in-law, light-keeper Henry Long. This tragedy did not necessarily interrupt the function of the lighthouse, because light-keepers’ wives routinely helped their husbands tend the lights, and would operate them single-handedly in their husbands’ absence. In the intervening months between Henry Long’s death and President Jefferson’s appointment of a replacement keeper, it was most likely Rebecca Long, Henry’s widow, who kept the Bald Head lighthouse lamp clean, trimmed, and lit.

Collector of the Wilmington port, Timothy Bloodworth, wrote a letter (now lost) to Secretary Gallatin, on October 27, 1806. We can guess much of its content from Gallatin’s reply on November 10, preserved among “Lighthouse Letters” at the National Archives:

Your letter of 27th ulto has been duly received. You are authorized to cause the necessary repairs to be made to the Lantern of the Light House. Whether the President will appoint the widow of the late Keeper of the Cape Fear Light House I have not yet ascertained; but it will be necessary that you should inform me of her christian name; and also transmit the other recommendations with your opinion thereon, in order that he may select the most proper person.

 

2. Albert Gallatin to Timothy Bloodworth, November 10, 1806, in NARA, National Archives Publication M63, Treasury Department, Lighthouse Letters, 1792-1809, Vol. 3, 353.
2. Albert Gallatin to Timothy Bloodworth, November 10, 1806, in NARA, National Archives Publication M63, Treasury Department, Lighthouse Letters, 1792-1809, Vol. 3, 353.

Bloodworth delayed replying to Gallatin until almost two months later, on New Year’s Day 1807. His reply forwarded the only other nomination for the vacancy, Sedgwick Springs, a Revolutionary War veteran and the Long family’s near-neighbor on Bald Head Island:

In answer to your honored favor of the 10th November last, I have to inform the christian name of the widow of Henry Long late keeper of the Light House is Rebecca. Several others had applied to me for the appointment and I have waited some time to give opportunity to send in Recommendations from those applicants. None have yet been handed in but the one herewith sent and I am fully in the knowledge of the truth of said recommendation[.] Should the widow be thought unfit, I believe him to be the most proper Person that has yet applied for that appointment.

 

3. Timothy Bloodworth to Albert Gallatin, January 1, 1807, in NARA, Record Group 26, Correspondence Relating to Early Lighthouses, 1785 -1853, Entry 17C (NC-31), Letters Received from Superintendents of Lights, 1803-1852, Wilmington, N.C. 1803-1817 (box 35). (The petition originally enclosed with this letter is filed elsewhere.)
3. Timothy Bloodworth to Albert Gallatin, January 1, 1807, in NARA, Record Group 26, Correspondence Relating to Early Lighthouses, 1785 -1853, Entry 17C (NC-31), Letters Received from Superintendents of Lights, 1803-1852, Wilmington, N.C. 1803-1817 (box 35). (The petition originally enclosed with this letter is filed elsewhere in Record Group 26.)

When searching through this correspondence, I did not find the application “herewith sent” with Bloodworth’s letter. I suspected that, separated from the letter, it had perished in the Treasury Department fire. But about a year later, Thomas M. Downey, associate editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, sent me a copy of the missing enclosure, found elsewhere in the National Archives by a researcher for the Papers. The document is a recommendation from twelve Wilmington citizens, all men, dated December 1806, addressed to the President of the United States. It reads:

We the subscribers resident Citizens in the District and town of Wilmington being informed that Sedgwick Springs wishes to become a Keeper of the Light House on Bald Head (provided it should be thought the widow of the late Henry Long, inadequate to the safe keeping thereof) beg leave Hereby to Recommend the said Sedgwick Springs as a fit and proper Person to take charge and keep up the said Light—He being an old Inhabitant of the town of Wilmington a Sober Industrious Citizen having been employed for these eight Years last past and now is an Inspector of the Revenue in which Office he has ever behaved himself as a dilligent and Carefull Officer and to our knowledge conducted himself as a truly honest man in all his dealings—With great Respect We are Sir Your most Obedient Servants [signed Jno Walker and eleven others]

When Gallatin forwarded Bloodworth’s letter, with its enclosure, to the president, Jefferson promptly wrote the now often-cited reply to Gallatin, “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I. Shall we appoint Springs, or wait the further recommendations spoken of by Bloodworth?” Jefferson’s consultation with Gallatin was brief and his decision swift. Two days later, on January 15, 1807, Gallatin replied to Bloodworth: “Your letter of the 1st Inst. has been received. The President of the United States has appointed Sedgwick Springs to be the Keeper of the Cape Fear Light House, of which you will be pleased to give him notice.”

We know something of the woman, Rebecca Long, whose nomination Jefferson rejected, from public records and newspapers. According to a family historian, she was born Rebecca Hand about 1755 and married Henry Long in 1774 in Smithville District, North Carolina. The Wilmington Gazette of February 13, 1800, reported that Rebecca and her husband marched in a large procession of military and civilian mourners to attend a local funeral service for George Washington, who had died the previous December at his home in Mount Vernon. From the 1790 census we know that she employed the labor of at least one slave and from a newspaper advertisement we know she managed one indentured servant in her own household. She placed an ad in the Wilmington Gazette of September 13, 1803, seeking the apprehension and return of “an indented girl servant” named Elizabeth Clary. Long administered her husband’s estate after his death in 1806, taking out a notice to his creditors in the March 3, 1807, issue of the Wilmington Gazette. Rebecca Long reportedly died May 2, 1815, in Smithville, North Carolina.

 

4. Wilmington Gazette, September 13, 1803. Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
4. Wilmington Gazette, September 13, 1803. Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
5. Wilmington Gazette, March 3, 1807. Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
5. Wilmington Gazette, March 3, 1807. Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.

Jefferson’s declaration that he and his public were “not prepared” for a woman to hold federal appointed office may have surprised his two long-time, politically astute associates, Timothy Bloodworth and Albert Gallatin. In the months after Henry Long’s death, they were willing to support his widow as his replacement (or they would not have forwarded the suggestion)—and the twelve Wilmington men who petitioned Jefferson on behalf of Sedgwick Springs explicitly made their recommendation contingent on the unfitness of Rebecca Long. Why did they all or any of them not foresee Jefferson’s adverse reaction, if indeed the general public was so averse to the notion of a female light-keeper?

For his part, Jefferson saw no place in public life for women, arguing that nature had “marked infants and the weaker sex for the protection rather than the direction of government.” But, unlike some appointed officials actively engaged in public life and policy decisions, a light-keeper was a civil servant ensconced within the thick walls of a remote lighthouse, far removed, practically and geographically, from the administration of government. What was more, the work of a light-keeper (cleaning the light, trimming the wick, and fueling the lamp) was quite similar to the kinds of work that women already did in their own houses. Indeed, people in the early republic saw light-keeping as domestic work requiring no manly skill or masculine strength. Therefore, according to historian Virginia Neal Thomas, “many keeper positions were filled by veterans, debilitated men, [and] unskilled political appointees.” Women performing such work were not the “innovation” that Jefferson feared.

Jefferson might have been unaware that, prior to his administration, at least three women had served the public quite satisfactorily as postmasters in the United States. The postmaster job required business competence, financial accountability, and daily personal interaction with the public, making his claim that women in federal office were “an innovation for which the public is not prepared” seem, at best, uninformed. Perhaps Jefferson was less concerned with the suitability of a woman to the work than with possible political objections to Rebecca Long’s nomination; the federal government at the time had less than 3,000 civilian employees (including forty working in lighthouses and navigation), most of them appointed by the president. People of Wilmington who had advocated for Long’s worthiness might have applauded her appointment, but since Revolutionary War veterans were still a numerous voting constituency who benefited from light-keeper appointments, perhaps Jefferson meant that women appointees as light-keepers were an innovation that opportunistic veterans might resent.

In 1826, almost twenty years after Jefferson had rejected Rebecca Long’s nomination, President John Quincy Adams appointed the first federally employed female light-keeper. By then, politicians’ need to place veterans in these posts likely had grown less pressing as the Revolutionary generation died out. From 1826 to 1859, the federal government appointed fifty-three women—about five percent of all principal light-keepers appointed during that time; most (81 percent) were widows who succeeded their deceased husbands. They not only knew the job—which they learned, like many women in other trades, from helping their husbands—but, as widows, benefitted from the earnings lighthouse-keeping generated. Perhaps if Jefferson had seen—as Bloodworth, Gallatin, and twelve petitioners from Wilmington did—that presidential appointments could work as beneficially for worthy, disadvantaged women as they did for men, Rebecca Long might have been first in that long line of light-keepers’ widows to a receive federal appointment. 

 

6. The only known image of the original lighthouse on Bald Head Island, North Carolina. Pen and ink drawing, “A View of a Waterspout Seen at the Entrance of Cape Fear River July 24, 1806,” artist unknown. Courtesy of Old Baldy Foundation, Inc., Bald Head Island, N.C.
6. The only known image of the original lighthouse on Bald Head Island, North Carolina. Pen and ink drawing, “A View of a Waterspout Seen at the Entrance of Cape Fear River July 24, 1806,” artist unknown. Courtesy of Old Baldy Foundation, Inc., Bald Head Island, N.C.

Further Reading:

Jon Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women (New York, 2007).

Virginia Neal Thomas, “Woman’s Work: Female Lighthouse Keepers in the early Republic, 1820-1859” (MA thesis, Old Dominion University, 2010).

Information about Rebecca (Hand) Long’s birth, marriage, and death were gleaned from Jean Hirsch, comp., “Family of Winifred Mae Taylor Mayo.

Sedgwick Springs’ application for a Revolutionary War pension, published in NARA, National Archives Publication M804, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files, roll 2262, is conveniently transcribed online at “Southern Campaigns Revolutionary War Pension Statements & Rosters.”

A U.S. Postal Service history of women postmasters is here.

Previous published explanations of Jefferson’s remark include: James Morgan, “Women in Politics,” Journal of Education 92:17 (November 11, 1920): 461, claiming Gallatin proposed “a woman clerk in the treasury”; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 2007), who asserted that Jefferson vetoed a proposed “postmistress”; William K. Bottorf, Thomas Jefferson (Boston, 1979), who stated that Jefferson wrote this famous line to Abigail Adams; and Jay C. Heinlein, “Albert Gallatin: A Pioneer in Public Administration,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 7:1 (January 1950): 69-70, suggesting that Gallatin considered women a “possible source of talent” to fill underpaid federal jobs.

Probably building on Heinlein’s suggestion, Joyce Appleby propounded the most influential theory to explain Jefferson’s statement, beginning with her article, “Introduction: Jefferson and His Complex Legacy,” in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville, 1993). Appleby stated, “Worried about the pressing shortage of first-rate talents for government office, Gallatin suggested naming women to certain posts.” Appleby reiterated the same explanation in  Jefferson: Political Writings, eds. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball (Cambridge, England, 1999); Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Joyce Appleby, “Thomas Jefferson: 1801-1809,” in Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer, eds., Reader’s Companion to the American Presidency (Boston, 2000); Joyce Appleby, Arthur M. Schlesinger, general editor, Thomas Jefferson: The American Presidents Series: The 3rd President, 1801-1809 (New York, 2003); and Joyce Appleby, “Thomas Jefferson,” in Alan Brinkley and Davis Dyer, eds., The American Presidency (New York, 2004).

For Appleby’s influence in popular history, see Cokie Roberts, Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation (New York, 2008). Writers who cite no source for their elaborations on the Appleby thesis include: Susan Dunn, ed., Something that will Surprise the World: The Essential Writings of the Founding Fathers (New York, 2006); and Christopher Phillips, Constitution Cafe: Jefferson’s Brew for a True Revolution (New York, 2011).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).


Public historian David E. Paterson studies Upson County, Georgia, especially the local history of slavery and Reconstruction. A civilian employee of the US Navy by day, he spends his leisure hours researching and writing history—especially mini-biographies of enslaved Upson County residents—and managing the Slave Research Forum at AfriGeneas.com. He is the author of A Frontier Link with the World, Upson County’s Railroad (1998), and editor of the autobiography of Houston Hartsfield Holloway, In His Own Words: Houston Hartsfield Holloway’s Slavery, Emancipation, and Ministry in Georgia (forthcoming from Mercer University Press, November 2015). Paterson lives in Norfolk, Virginia.