Early Spanish entradas took note of these and other salt resources. In 1540, when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition attacked and occupied the Zuni village of Hawikku, the colonizers “found what [they] had more need of that gold silver,” as one account put it, “that is, a great quantity of corn, beans, [. . .] and the best and whitest salt I have seen in my whole life.” The invaders soon found the salt’s source, the Zuni Salt Lake. Coronado himself felt the lake—and its superior salt—worthy enough to bring to New Spain’s first viceroy Antonio de Mendoza’s attention. After seizing control of the pueblo, Coronado wrote to the viceroy of the Zuni’s “finest order and cleanliness” in their preparation of food and the “excellent granular salt that they bring from a lake one day’s journey” from the village. Still in search of gold, Coronado pushed northeastward, past Tiguex and onto the high plains. In the summer of 1542, led by Teyas guides, expeditioners reported that “neither gold nor silver was seen among those people, nor [was there] news of it,” but there “were many salt lakes which had [salt] in great quantity.” Exposed to the summer sun and heat, evaporated salt lakes and flats yielded slabs of salt “four and five fingers thick and larger and table-tops.”

By the start of the seventeenth century, Spanish colonizers accumulated and appropriated much knowledge about the location and abundance of salt resources north of Mexico. After becoming governor of New Mexico in 1598, Juan de Oñate leveraged this information to legitimize his effort to colonize and control local peoples and resources. “The wealth of the abundant salines,” Oñate reported in 1599, was among a few “very great treasures”—including some silver mines, Native laborers, and their material tribute payments—that might fill royal coffers. To verify salt’s abundance and its commercial viability, Oñate explained to imperial officials that “salt is the universal article of traffic of all these barbarians.” “Indian herdsmen” from the Salinas district often travelled northwest to Taos and Picuris, “where they sell meat, hides, tallow, suit, and salt in exchange for cotton blankets, pottery, maize, and some small green stones.” The sellers most certainly provisioned their salt from the lakes in the Estancia Valley, which according to Oñate “consist of white salt [and] . . . are seven or eight leagues in circumference.” Salt harvesting could be strenuous, but labor would be no issue; Oñate assured the viceroy that “the said pueblos of the salines and Xumanas [Jumanos] all rendered obedience to his majesty.”

Through the seventeenth century, Spanish officials mobilized the Spanish crown’s absolute sovereignty to incorporate salt resources into the imperial economy. To work these resources, officials used the encomienda, a system of land and labor redistribution that extracted tribute from Native peoples. Between 1659 and 1660, New Mexico governor Bernardo Lόpez de Mendizábal ordered Tewas and Tompiros living in the Salinas district to haul salt from the Estancia Valley’s lakes to the Rio Grande and eventually to northern Mexico—shipments and labor that went uncompensated by the Spanish state, presumably by virtue of the legalities surrounding mineral resources within Spanish territorial claims. Harvesting and hauling salt—especially commercial quantities—demanded long hours of physical labor, often conducted during warmer, dryer months when salt lakes and flats reached peak evaporation. Even after Lόpez’s especially exploitative tenure ended, salt trafficking between the Estancia Valley and northern Mexico seemed to have continued through at least 1668. In Parral and at other silver manufactories across northern Mexico, New Mexican salt was used as one of several chemical additives to refine silver ores. 

The introduction of livestock to the northern Mexican borderlands further expanded colonial exploitation of salt resources. This was because animals, too, need salt to survive. Sheep flocks in Cerralvo, Neuvo Leόn (near the present-day Texas-Mexico border) strayed from haciendas and “in the midst of the indigenous nations of those frontiers,” where “fine water holes, springs, pastures, and salt licks” were apparently more abundant. That Spanish flocks drifted toward Native-controlled resources concerned some colonial administrators. To manage and secure settler property, Don Antonio Ladrόn de Guevara recommended that provincial officials “distribute the land and water rights to the settlers, and [. . .] gather each Indian nation under the direct of the settlers;” Ladrόn further advised that “the salt produced on the lands of the heathen tribes [. . .] be used to support” settler commerce, the construction of presidios, and the provisioning of Spanish livestock. To administrators like Ladrόn, the management of salt resources and the animals that depended on them hinged upon “[luring] these Indian nations [. . .] to reduction and quietude.”

But Native peoples proved resistant to reduction. Consequently, salt resources became sites where Indigenous nations and agents of the Spanish state asserted increasingly competitive sovereignties. This was especially true in New Mexico’s Salinas district, where the salt flats of the Estancia Valley attracted contention among local salt collectors, expanding Apaches, and exploitative missionaries. By the early 1670s, mounting tensions between Apaches and Spaniards jeopardized saline commerce in and beyond the valley. Tewa salt collectors allegedly complained to missionaries that Apache combatants attacked people travelling to and from the valley’s salt marshes. Apaches also held up southbound Spanish salt shipments as early as 1670. Rather than offering increased protection to Salinas residents, the missions increased tribute demands to ensure their own survival. Overburdened and under protected by Spanish rulers, Piro, Tompiro, and Tewa salt collectors abandoned the valley. Missionaries soon followed, and the salt flats fell out of regular use for the first time in seven centuries.

The abandonment of the Salinas district signaled a potential end to Spanish rule over the Puebloan world. The 1680 rebellion rocked the upper Rio Grande and the southwestern borderlands at large. At stake was Puebloan religious, political, economic, and territorial autonomy. The participating pueblos made clear that cooperation—not conquest—would dictate Spain’s place in New Mexico. In the years following the Pueblo Revolt, Spanish officials attempted to re-establish some authority by overhauling the tribute system, transferring greater administrative power to alcalde mayors, and issuing new land grants. Yet Spain remained reluctant to relinquish royal control over New Mexico’s few mineral resources. A 1689 grant attributed to Governor Domingo Jironza Pétriz de Cruzate established minimal boundaries formally enclosing the Pueblo of Zuni. The grant did not include the Zuni Salt Lake, the home of the Salt Woman and several shrines and sites central to Zuni subsistence. This omission precipitated several legal struggles by Zunis to protect the lake from repeat colonial encroachments, the most recent of which concluded in 2003 when the Pueblo successfully shut down a strip-mining project that would have disrupted the lake’s aquifer and killed the Salt Woman. 

Spain could—and did—dispossess Puebloan peoples of salt resources by claiming those resources as crown property. But claiming salt did not easily equate to controlling it. Through the early eighteenth century, Spanish officials struggled to establish security along the Camino Real del Tierra Adentro; this primary commercial corridor linked remote resources, colonial commerce, and Spanish settlements to Mexican industries and enclaves. But the rise of Comanche and Apache power suffocated Spanish expectations on all sides. Following the abandonment of the Salinas pueblos, Apaches controlled the valley, its resources, and its roadways, definitively foreclosing future colonial efforts to revive the export of salt to Parral. Apache control over salt resources also stymied Spanish survival at El Paso del Norte, where salt flats at the base of the Guadalupe Mountains supplied the small settler enclave. In April 1692, New Mexico Governor Diego de Vargas reported to Viceroy Gaspar de la Cerda that Apaches had taken possession of a local saline, a freshwater well, and the roads that connected both resources to the settlement at El Paso. “The saline,” Vargas explained, was “much needed in this neighborhood”; nearby settlers seemingly depended upon it to store food through the winter, sustain livestock, and more. The flats north of El Paso del Norte were indeed well suited to settler sustenance. After an Apache prisoner-of-war led Vargas and a party of scouts to the flats earlier in 1692 for inspection and assessment, Vargas reported that the salt crusts reproduced themselves only a few days after mining. But settlers were reluctant to make the journey into Apache territory. In the spring of 1709, Spanish administrators at El Paso del Norte reported that 35 “friendly Indians”—escorted by local presidio soldiers—were the sole volunteers for a salt gathering expedition bound for the Hueco Mountains.

Civilian populations and soldiers shared a reliance on salt as a primary preservative. And like civilians, presidios in the Indigenous borderlands found themselves beholden to local Native power and distant Spanish authority alike. Martín de Alarcόn, Governor of Coahuila and Texas, established the presidio at San Antonio de Béxar in the spring of 1718, but the presidio struggled for several years to secure access to salt for provisions. In the fall of 1720, Native informants told Texas officials that the closest exploitable salt flats lay over 300 kilometers south of San Antonio. But to trek that distance was not worth the danger. According to one report, “many tribes of very warlike Indians” controlled the salt flats, “Indians who have repeatedly prevented fifty, and even sixty, armed men from the Nuevo Reino de Leon from taking the salt.” Further east, in the heart of Caddoan lands, Native informants proved equally significant in providing Spanish soldiers with access to salt. “The Indians” near the Spanish settlement of Los Adaes on the lower Sabine River in far eastern Texas “affirmed [. . .] that there were some salt beds nearby.” The governor promptly “dispatched a lieutenant with a party of twenty soldiers and twenty-five mules.” Fifteen leagues from the presidio, the party “brought back loads of a salt earth so fine that when worked it yields 50 percent salt.” Military officers did not always treat so directly with Native peoples who knew where to find salt. In June 1731, Captain Gabriel Costales, commanding officer at Bahía del Espíritu Santo, requested a license from Viceroy Juan de Acuña to mine salt from Indian lands for the presidio’s use. Brigadier General Pedro de Rivera advised against it, explaining to the viceroy that doing so would only incite rebellion among local indios.

In the heart of New Mexico, too, Spanish officials struggled to secure control over and access to salt well into the eighteenth century. In 1716, New Mexico governor Felix Martinez requested guards and guides to escort an expedition from Santa Cruz to “las salinas atraenzal” near Tiguas villages beyond the southern Estancia Valley. Guarded salt collecting expeditions to the Estancia Valley and nearby saline enclaves persisted through the 1730s and 1740s. For five consecutive summers starting in 1744, Governor Joachín Codallos y Rabal instructed alcalde mayors at Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Santo Domingo, Santa Ana, Laguna, Pecos, and elsewhere to solicit volunteers for salt gathering expeditions into the previously abandoned Estancia Valley. According to Rabal’s orders, the volunteers would be guarded by Spanish soldiers. Over half a century following Spain’s so-called reconquest of New Mexico, salt resources remained situated squarely within Indigenous borderlands, in spaces where Spanish authority still paled in comparison to powerful Native polities. 

Once highly valuable, salt affords a new look at life, environment, and sovereignty in the southwest borderlands. Though Spanish entradas claimed to “discover” potentially productive salt flats and lakes, Indigenous—especially Puebloan—peoples possessed deep knowledge about and attachments to life-giving salt resources. Spanish colonialism did, however, alter many Indigenous peoples’ existing relationships to salt resources in their homelands. Exploiting law, labor, and land, Spanish colonizers tried to control salt resources and harness the profits of their products to stabilize Spanish sovereignty. But rarely did dependence ensure domination. Through much of the Spanish colonial period in the region, Indigenous pasts, peoples, and power dictated Spanish access to salt resources and, therefore, the future and failures of Spanish colonization. And while veritably ancient, the history of salt in the southwest is kept alive by Zuni, Hopi, and other Native peoples today. Thanks to them, Ma’lokyattsik’i lives on.

 

Further Reading

This essay is partly based on the following archival materials:

Baughman Folklore Collection, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Manuel Lujan Congressional Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Ward Alan Minge Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Sophie Aberle Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Edith Cherry Historic Preservation Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

John L. Kessell Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Documents from the Archivo General de las Indias, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Documents from the Archivo General de la Naciόn, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Lorin W. Brown, “The Salt Traffic from the Estancia Salt Lakes to Mexico,” July 17, 1939, New Mexico Works Progress Administration, Fray Angelico Chávez History Library, Santa Fe, NM.

Documentary Relations of the Southwest, Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.

Spanish Archives of New Mexico, Series Two, via Ancestry.com.

 

For published primary sources and relevant secondary sources, see:

Teresa Pijoan, Myths of Magical Native American Women: Including Salt Woman Stories (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2019).

Herbert Eugene Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1916).

Ashley A. Dumas and Paul N. Eubanks, eds., Salt in Eastern North America and the Caribbean: History and Archaeology (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021).

Maxine Oland, Siobhan Hart, and Liam Frink, eds., Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020).

Kent G. Lightfoot, “Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology,” American Antiquity 60, no. 2 (1995): 199-217.

Juliana Barr, “There’s No Such Thing as “Prehistory”: What the Longue Durée of Caddo and Pueblo History Tells Us About Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2017): 202-42.

Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn,” William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2018): 207-36.

Jean M. O’Brien, “Historical Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies: Touching the Past, Looking to the Future,” in Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien, eds., Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (New York: Routledge, 2017), 12-20.

Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, eds., Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539-1542: “They Were Not Familiar with His Majesty, Nor Did They Wish to Be His Subjects (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).

Andrew I. Duff, T. J. Ferguson, Susan Bruning, and Peter Whiteley, “Collaborative Research in a Living Landscape: Pueblo Land, Culture, and History in Central New Mexico,” Archaeology Southwest 22, no. 1 (2008): 1-24.

Gary Huckleberry and Andrew I. Duff, “Alluvial Cycles, Climate, and Puebloan Settlement Shifts near Zuni Salt Lake, New Mexico, USA,” Geoarchaeology: An International Journal 23, no. 1 (2008): 107-30.

Stuart James Baldwin, “Tompiro Culture, Subsistence and Trade,” PhD thesis, University of Calgary, 1988.

Paul M. Kraemer, “New Mexico’s Ancient Salt Trade,” El Palacio 82, no. 1 (Spring 1976).

Ursula Ewald, The Mexican Salt Industry, 1560-1980: A Study in Change (New York: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1985).

Manuel P. Servin, “The Legal Basis for Spanish Colonial Sovereignty: The Act of Possession,” New Mexico Historical Review 53, no. 4 (1978): 295-303.

H. Allen Anderson, “The Encomienda in New Mexico, 1598-1680,” New Mexico Historical Review 60, no. 4 (1985): 353-77.

Ramon A. Gutierrez, “Dona Teresa de Aguilera y Roche before the Inquisition: The Travails of a Seventeenth-Century Aristocratic Woman in New Mexico,” in Jennifer L. Morgan, Carol Berkin, and Thomas A. Foster, eds., Women in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 7-42.

John L. Kessell, Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).

Joe E. Sando and Herman Agoyo, eds., Po’Pay: Leader of the First American Revolution (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2005).

Frances V. Scholes, Marc Simmons, and Jose Antonio Esquibel, eds., and Eleanor B. Adams, trans., Juan Dominguez de Mendoza: Soldier and Frontiersman of the Spanish Southwest, 1627-1693 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012).

Diana Hadley, Thomas H. Naylor, and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, eds., The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History – Volume Two, Part Two: The Central Corridor and the Texas Corridor, 1770-1765 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021).

Tatiana Seijas, “The Royal Road of the Interior in New Spain: Indigenous Commerce and Political Action,” in Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 294-313.

“Testimony of Malcom B. Bowekaty, Governor of the Zuni Tribe, to the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs,” July 17, 2002, Washington, D.C. (via Sacred Land Film Project).

 

This article originally appeared in July 2023.

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Annabel LaBrecque is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines the significance of inland salt resources to Indigenous prosperity and settler colonization. She has previously published her research on salt and power in the sixteenth-century Lower Mississippi River Valley for the Scottish Centre for Global History and on salt’s deep history in the Ohio Country for Common-place.

This research was made possible through the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Fund for Native American Research Grant. The author would like to thank Julia Frankenbach, Noah Ramage, and the participants of the 2023 New and Emerging Studies of the Spanish Colonial Borderlands Workshop for editorial feedback.

In 1888, George S. Parker & Co. created a new version, Ye Peculiar Game of Ye Yankee Peddler. Parker had invented his first game, Banking, in 1883 as a rejection of games as moral education. He preferred to emphasize a different value: competition. In Parker’s 1888 rendition, the Yankee Peddler served as gamemaster. The rules warned that the peddler should not be a player as he was favored to win. Instead, farmers competed against each other to get the best deals. The game below extrapolates from Parker to enliven lessons on the Market Revolution. 

The game sets key historical dynamics in motion. How did distribution channels, including new transportation options, shape manufacturing and consumption? What did money look like and how did people spend it? When scholars discuss market anxieties of this age, what do they mean? This game offers a flexible format that allows students from middle school to college to jump in and actively contribute to the lesson.

 

Contextualizing the Game

In introducing the game, a variety of lessons can provide context: early industrialization, infrastructure, bankruptcy, banking and the Bank War, global trade, and American expansion and imperialism. But the game must start with the Yankee peddler. To David Jaffee, Yankee peddlers were more than distributors of goods, they were agents of capitalist enthusiasm. Largely young men in their early twenties, itinerant peddlers loaded up packs or wagons after the fall harvest and carried commodities to far-flung consumers. Local shopkeepers and regional factors advocated licensing laws to tax and stymie the competition. Nevertheless, these migrating merchants abounded through the 1850s. The US census counted 16,594 peddlers in 1860, most from New England, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. They thus contributed to an increasingly integrated market economy. But peddlers were especially notable as cultural icons.

Yankee peddlers appeared in folklore as well as paintings, songs, and, of course, games. In Washington Irving’s classic tale Rip Van Winkle (1819), Mrs. Van Winkle died from a burst blood vessel. How? Arguing with a Yankee peddler. In one yarn shared in Constance O’Rourke’s American Humor, a Southern innkeeper clamors to see a “Yankee trick,” only to have the man sell his wife the coverlet off his bed. T. Jackson Lears writes that after the 1830s, with growing German Jewish immigration, the folkloric Yankee peddler intersected with antisemitic iconography. These tales fed into trickster lore of confidence men, from Herman Melville’s Confidence Man to Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Sam Slick or even Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, to the fantastic spectacles of P. T. Barnum.

Images of Yankee peddlers proliferated because they epitomized both the exuberance and the anxiety of the age. Board game covers and pieces can be found in collections held by the American Antiquarian Society, the New York Historical Society, the Strong Museum of National Play in Rochester, New York, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Paintings include Asher Brown Durand’s The Peddler Displaying His Wares of 1836, The Yankee Peddler by William Tolman Carleton, circa 1851, John Whetten Ehninger’s 1853 Yankee Peddler, and Thomas Waterman Wood’s 1872 Yankee Pedlar. 

Artistic representations of market transactions are themselves useful for discussions of social meanings of commerce. Gender, race, class, and regional identities are often visually striking in paintings and lithographs. Women gather round The Image Pedlar to examine shiny baubles in Francis William Edmonds’ circa 1844 painting. Lilly Martin Spencer modeled the adorably awkward 1854 Young Husband, First Marketing on her own husband. Comparing the two can spark a rich conversation about how society genders market agency. African Americans appear as subjects and objects, as bargainers, commodities, and status symbols. Art itself was a frequent medium of protest against slave dealing, as with Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1868 The Price of Blood. 

“Yankee” itself is not always self-evident. For my California students, Yankees are either Union soldiers or New York baseball players. Norman Rockwell’s 1937 mural, Yankee Doodle, offers a familiar visual of the Revolutionary Yankee re-inscribing the lampooned “doodle” and proclaiming his feathered hat “macaroni.” Here, American Jonathan rebelled against older brother John (Britain). Globally, Yankee and Jonathan were interchangeable. Within the United States, however, the regionalism of the Yankee was important. This is perhaps best encapsulated in a poem attributed to E.B. White:

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.

To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.

To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.

To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.

To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.

And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

The Yankee Doodle notwithstanding, Yankees were usually depicted as unassuming but clever, shading into unscrupulous. Yankee peddlers brought the message and the means for a farm family’s rise in status through conspicuous consumption. But peddlers tested a consumer’s mettle. The quality or value of goods was a question that might not have an answer until after the peddler was long gone. The family could rise in status, but they could also fall. 

What did the new goods look like? In 1802, Eli Terry transformed the manufacturing of clocks. A stately grandfather clock signified craftsmanship and status for a family, but Terry used cutting saws, waterpower, and wooden parts to make the process faster and cheaper. By 1816, he produced a smaller version. Shelf clocks using the Terry method took the rural market by storm, sold via itinerant peddler distribution networks as signs of status. Innovations in publishing and lithographs enabled a wider variety of books and prints. Novels, biographies, and classics were popular, but perennial best sellers included bibles and almanacs. Peddlers themselves enabled publishers to diversify and even to distribute clandestine books like John Cleland’s Fanny Hill; or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

Portraits proved especially popular. Inventor Rufus Porter traveled New England selling silhouettes (black profiles) and quick portraits enabled by use of a camera obscura. A camera obscura used a dark box, lens, and mirror to cast a shadow that transformed portraits, like clocks, from luxury items to mass produced goods. This practice kicked up in the 1820s and by the 1830s, standardized “correct likenesses” found widespread buyers in hinterland communities. Peddlers brought the potential for renewal through news, fashion, and technology, with the goods to back it up—for a price.

 

Paper Money (is weird)

In practice, customers paid for goods with cash, bartered goods, or, for a higher price, credit. In the game, teams/families of students barter and buy using commodity cards and cash.  Money merits explanation. In early America, money was complex. Colonial American efforts to rely solely on book credit (local vendors maintaining a running tab) combined with specie (silver) had never been terribly successful, as repeat efforts by British Parliament to crack down on colonial currencies testify. To have a commercial society, currency created liquidity that helped employers pay wages and consumers purchase goods and services. Cash facilitated market transactions and thus greased the economy.

In the early US, the dollar was the legal unit of currency, but it was not a standard paper currency or legal tender designation until the Civil War. The First and Second Bank of the United States (BUS) printed bank notes and oversaw money markets, but they only provided a fraction of the nation’s currency supply. As Joshua Greenberg writes in Bank Notes and Shinplasters, at the height of its issue in the mid-1830s, the BUS only had $17 million in circulation at a time when the American economy was using approximately $100 million in paper currency. Where did the rest come from? It came from state-chartered banks and, also, non-bank institutions like private companies and hotels.

Market transactions in antebellum America required monetary literacy. New financial textbooks discussed paper currency, but described what goods should cost. They taught the federal monetary structure of dollars and cents. But the Bank of the United States provided the only currency accepted at face value, or par, throughout the country. Paper currency could be discounted based on perceived value, geographic circulation, or information gathered from bank note tables in newspapers. Peddlers themselves could benefit from arbitrage—carrying notes to markets where they might be exchanged more profitably. Using currency required savvy and experience. Newspapers carried stories of trial and error, from changing regulations and business upheaval to confidence men and counterfeiting. In one anecdote, a French tourist couldn’t pay a turnpike toll for his carriage because the 25 cent note he obtained from a steamship captain wasn’t good past the brook about 100 yards back.

The value of paper currency also depended on who wielded it. Being vulnerable left individuals open to exploitation. US Indian agents owed the Cherokee Nation $10,000, but the form of payment was left to the agents. Charles Hicks, Cherokee treasurer, recognized that accepting notes offered by Return J. Meigs meant a compromise in payment value, but had little recourse. This was not an isolated problem. Workers needed to pay attention to more than their stated wage, but also the form of wage. Some employers paid workers in out-of-town, devalued currency obtained from literal money markets because it cost them less and they had the power to get away with it.

Monetary literacy showed that you belonged in the marketplace on several levels. For escaped slaves to pass as free, familiarity with market transactions could prove vital. Women, despite savviness as consumers and retailers, were often depicted as spendthrift and easily bamboozled by flirty clerks. In Horatio Alger stories, being a keen consumer marked characters as worthy of rising from rags to riches. Ragged Dick, Or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks showcases Dick’s savvy recognition of the swindler shops of lower Manhattan. In The Peculiar Game of the Yankee Peddler, students face this very gamble. Are they worthy consumers?

 

Playing the Game

• Object: To get the best deals for your produce in market exchanges with the Yankee Peddler.
• Players:
  • Yankee Peddler (the teacher) to oversee the auction.
  • For large classes, a “clerk” or two might accept & tally the bids.
  • Cluster students in “farm families” of 4-5 to decide upon their family’s bid for each item.
• Equipment:
  • Playing Cards: Print all cards single-sided.
    • Commodity Cards. These cards list an item of produce and a market value. Produce includes local crops or commodities: a bale of cotton, a bushel of potatoes or corn, a peck of turnips, a bag of feathers, a keg of whisky, dinner for the peddler and his horse. 
    • Bank Notes. Include a discussion of antebellum paper money with currency cards as well. Use images of antebellum currency with a discounted value underneath for each card. Make sure students understand the difference between par and discounted values before the bidding starts, but these visuals are great fun. If a group asks if you can provide change, rip a bill and return half.
    • Bid Cards. Include as many bid cards as you have items so that families can submit a bid card for each item. The card should have a place to list family name and their bid. 
  • White or Chalk Board space to list items and purchasing family.
  • Images of 6-8 commodities for purchase. Commodities might include Eli Terry clocks (~$6.75 cash, $8-9/credit), paintings ($.20 for a Rufus Porter likeness), books, a patented mouse trap, a scale, porcelain or ceramics, textiles like blankets, calicos, linens, and more. Create your own price list. The University of Missouri Library has a 19th century price guide by decade.

• Game Play:
  • Distribute cards to families, face down. All families should have the same number of commodity and cash cards (but not the same cards).
  • The Yankee Peddler introduces himself, the number of items he has for sale, and the bidding process. He then introduces the first object. Sell it! As the Yankee Peddler, you want the highest price possible. Go ahead and give details about production, distribution, and social value of commodities. Do NOT reveal prices. Anxiety over how much the item is “worth” is a feature, not a bug, of the game.
  • Families submit bids, face down.
  • After collecting all bids, the family who has submitted the highest bid buys the item. The peddler can refuse to sell an item. Students often bid very low at the beginning and then very high toward the end of the game.
• To Win: when all commodities have been sold, tally up a final profit and loss for the peddler. Which family got the best deals for their produce relative to the cost? That family wins the game.

 

Conclusion

In drawing the game to a close, circle back to the discussions of market-based anxieties.

How do you know if you got a good deal? How do you know how much an item was “worth”?

What shapes prices? Is it just supply and demand? Is it the costs to bring an item to market? Discussing the social value of the goods and what went into their own evaluation of their bidding process can be worthwhile. How did competition shape the game? How might it have played out differently with open bidding? Do these capitalist market transactions feel like gambling?

Many other subjects can be incorporated into the game or its surrounding lesson plan. I started this game for my History of US Capitalism course, with a day on the reorganization of labor, industrialization, and child labor and another on banking controversies. I include yarns that reveal the “Yankee peddler” to be a global figure and connect him to foreign trade. Part of the utility of the game is how many intersections can be addressed, a Choose Your Own Adventure of lesson planning. Find any favorites in your own classroom? Please share!

 

Further Reading

On the history of game production, see Philip Orbanes, The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers, from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003). On a provocative essay on those earlier games and morality, see introduction of Jill Lepore, Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (New York: Knopf, 2012).

While textbooks still frequently refer to the Market Revolution, rooted in books like Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), this game is not contingent upon that concept. More recent work, like Jonathan Levy’s Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021) and Eli Cook, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) favor a focus on infrastructure per George Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1951).

On Yankee peddlers, see David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-1860,” Journal of American History 78 (Sept. 1991): 511-35; Joseph T. Rainer, “The ‘Sharper’ Image: Yankee Peddlers, Southern Consumers, and the Market Revolution,” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 27-44; T. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance:  A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); J. R. Dolan, The Yankee Peddlers of Early America: An Affectionate History of Life and Commerce in the Developing Colonies and the Early Republic (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1964). For more on folklore, see Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931) and Chaim M. Rosenberg, Yankee Colonies Across America: Cities upon the Hills (New York: Lexington Books, 2015). For art history, see Terrence H. Witkowski, “Farmers Bargaining: Buying and Selling as a Subject in American Genre Painting, 1835-1868,” Journal of Macromarketing 16 (no. 2, 1996): 84-101.

A few classic works on capitalism as a game, see Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops:  Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Routledge, 1999); Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008); Karen Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Ladies: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

On the history of money, see Joshua Greenberg, Bank Notes & Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); John McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1680-1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

On the global Yankee trader, see, for example, Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India and the Making of Britain and America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Kariann Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); James Fichter, So Great a Profitt: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Susan Bean, Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 1784-1860 (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001).

 

This article originally appeared in July 2023.

 

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Rachel Tamar Van teaches early American history, the history of US capitalism, and family and genealogical history at Cal Poly Pomona in southern California. She has articles you might use to expand on the US China trade in Diplomatic History, the Pacific Historical Review, and the Routledge History of US Foreign Relations.

Mainly written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (with a few by John Jay), the Federalist essays are the most famous arguments supporting the ratification of the proposed Constitution drafted by the constitutional convention in 1787. Although often praised for their contribution to political theory, the essays were first and foremost designed to blunt opposition to the proposed Constitution and to secure the Constitution’s ratification by the states.

The main objection to the Constitution was that its distribution of powers undermined the authority of states and would inevitably lead to their extinction by a too powerful federal government. Sensitive to that charge, Hamilton and Madison sought to allay such fears by stressing how states could preserve their authority and check potential overreaching by the national government with a variety of political options, including the use of interposition. 

Hamilton and Madison believed that instead of giving the national government too much power, the proposed Constitution had not given it enough power. Madison was bitterly disappointed that the constitutional convention had not included a provision in the proposed Constitution giving Congress a veto over any proposed state legislation. During the ratification debates, Hamilton and Madison argued that the principal danger of governmental overreaching came from the states, who were likely to undermine the authority of a weak national government.

Nonetheless, Hamilton and Madison responded to Anti-Federalists who opposed the proposed Constitution by stressing the power retained by the states. In a series of Federalist essays, they described the powerful role that state legislatures would play as “sentinels” or “guardians” of the balance of authority between the two levels of government. If the national government unduly expanded its constitutional authority, state legislatures would, in their words, “sound the alarm.” Although never using the word “interposition,” what Hamilton and Madison described in their essays precisely foreshadowed the steps that became a common practice among state legislatures soon after the Constitution’s ratification.­

Sounding the alarm (hereafter, interposition) was not simply a mechanism for individual states to take immediate political action, but a means of stimulating a nationwide conversation through interstate cooperation. When states joined together to focus their attention on the national government’s constitutional overreaching, the resulting political pressure had the potential of producing a correction or reversal of such overreaching. That pressure might induce the federal branches involved to reverse course and in the case of Supreme Court rulings deemed wrongheaded, to create support for constitutional amendments to reverse such rulings.

In describing interposition as a tool that state legislatures could use to maintain federalism, Hamilton and Madison made a rhetorical argument in the heat of the debate. At that time, neither Hamilton nor Madison wanted to see state legislatures act with greater vigor under the Constitution particularly since they lamented how much authority those legislatures had wielded under the Articles of Confederation.

Hamilton and Madison wrote what they did to persuade states to ratify the proposed Constitution and their words—as they soon discovered—took on a life of their own. With the success of ratification, Hamilton may well have wished to put the interposition arguments he had made in The Federalist behind him. But his description of interposition came back to haunt him—and far sooner than he imagined.

As President Washington’s first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton was the architect of an ambitious scheme for the nation’s economic development. The national sweep of Hamilton’s plans immediately aroused suspicions. One point of contention was his desire to assume the Revolutionary War debt of the states, in effect nationalizing that debt. The governor of North Carolina considered the congressional act assuming state debts an “extraordinary measure” that would diminish “the independence and internal sovereignty of the state.” David Stuart, Washington’s close friend, warned the President that Virginians viewed assumption as a seizure of power by “unwarrantable constructions of the Constitution.”

When Virginia’s legislature joined North Carolina’s governor in protest in 1790 about the assumption plan and questioned its constitutionality, Hamilton was furious. He vented to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Jay: “This is the first symptom of a spirit which must either be killed or will kill the constitution of the United States.” Hamilton ignored the fact that state legislators were behaving precisely as he and Madison had outlined in The Federalist whenever legislators perceived constitutional overreaching by the federal government. Indeed, just a few years later in 1793, the Supreme Court decided Chisholm v. Georgia, holding that individuals could sue states in federal court. That decision generated widespread interposition by state legislatures throughout the country and ultimately resulted in Chisholm’s effective reversal with the passage of the Eleventh Amendment.

In contrast to Hamilton’s hostile reaction to interposition, his co-author of the concept, James Madison warmed up to the idea. While both had been worried about the lack of national power during the ratification debates, Madison relatively quickly developed concerns about what he perceived as excessive claims for national powers. In particular, he identified a dangerous shift undercutting a balance between state and national powers in the financial schemes Hamilton advanced for Washington’s administration. If national powers needed to be enhanced, Madison wanted those changes to occur through formal constitutional amendment. By 1792, Madison thought that if Hamilton’s broad construction of implied powers for the national government prevailed, the Constitution “had better be thrown into the fire at once.”

In 1798 Madison, along with Jefferson, produced the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, protests by those two state legislatures about the unconstitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Act empowered the President to deport any aliens he deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety” of the nation or suspected of “treasonable or secret machinations” without due process. The Sedition Act criminalized any conspiracy “to oppose any measure” of the national government and prohibited the “writing, printing, uttering or publishing” of any “false, slanderous, and malicious writing” tending to bring the national government into “contempt or disrepute.” Even Hamilton, after reading the bill that became the Sedition Act, thought that some of its provisions were “highly exceptionable.” Both acts sought to stifle political opposition, constrain free speech, and especially targeted newspapers not friendly to the Federalists or President Adams.

Although those Resolutions introduced confusion about interposition and would be relied on to advance the dangerous doctrine of nullification, they were, in fact, classic statements of states using interposition. Misconceptions surrounding the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions stem from thinking that they were independent creations of Madison and Jefferson and not part of an earlier pattern of interposition that traced its roots to The Federalist. The Resolutions are incorrectly viewed as originating the idea that John C. Calhoun would develop into his theory of nullification or an individual state veto.

In Virginia’s Resolutions, Madison neither described what became the theory of nullification nor did he allude to the natural law right of revolution. Instead, he described two distinct types of interposition, each resting on a different basis and calling for vastly different political action. Failing to appreciate that distinction misled Madison’s contemporaries as well as later generations who continued to invoke what they called the “Principles of ’98.”

When Madison described a right to “interpose” in Virginia’s Third resolution, he referred to the theoretical right of the collective people who were the sovereign foundation of the Constitution to serve as the ultimate arbiter of the existence of egregious constitutional overreaching by the national government in the final resort. When Madison wrote that the people as the parties to the constitutional compact retained a theoretical right to “interpose,” he was not talking about the preexisting practice of sounding the alarm interposition. This theoretical right contained in the third resolution was different from what he described in Virginia’s seventh resolution as the right of state legislatures to interpose by sounding the alarm when faced with they believed were ordinary, unconstitutional acts of the national government.

In his Report of 1800 explaining his resolutions, Madison defended sounding the alarm interposition in explicit terms by citing his and Hamilton’s language in The Federalist describing such a role for state legislatures and the practice of interposition after ratification. Nonetheless, Madison bore the responsibility for not clearly distinguishing the theoretical right of the people from the right of legislatures to sound the alarm in his original resolutions.

Identifying the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions as part of a preexisting practice of interposition is complicated because both Madison and Jefferson were sometimes ambiguous and because Madison repeatedly restated his complex views. The wording of Jefferson’s draft of the Kentucky Resolutions also prompted ominous speculation. While neither “nullification” nor “null” appeared in Kentucky’s 1798 Resolutions, the fact that Jefferson included those words in his draft has led many scholars to assume that he, and by association Madison, anticipated and provided support for the nullification doctrine later advanced by Calhoun. Indeed, Jefferson’s formulations eventually resonated with a sovereign states’ rights tradition that merged the two sets of resolutions under the slogan, the “Principles of ’98.”

As finally adopted, both sets of resolutions served to sound the alarm about the Alien and Sedition Acts. Virginia’s legislature declared the acts “unconstitutional” while Kentucky’s described them as “not law” but “altogether void” and “of no force” and “effect.” Despite the different wording, both sets of resolutions offered the same judgment: that the acts exceeded the constitutional authority of the federal government. Virginia’s and Kentucky’s legislatures, like previous legislatures invoking interposition, asked the state’s governor to share the resolutions with other state governors and with the state’s congressional delegation.

The interposition directed at the Alien and Sedition Acts galvanized political support that helped elect Thomas Jefferson President. His election ushered in the so called “Revolution of 1800” that displaced Federalist control of the presidency with the first of several Republican administrations. Given Jefferson’s and Madison’s role in drafting the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, it might seem ironic that their administrations confronted interposition during their presidencies as well. However, given the inherent fluidity of federalism, interposition inevitably came to be used by all parties to resist policies of the national government whenever it might be said that the party in power had thrown the federal system out of constitutional balance.

In Jefferson’s second term, his embargo policy, beginning with the Embargo Act of 1807, prompted an interposition movement by Federalist state legislatures in New England. Although the embargo was repealed by the time of James Madison’s inauguration in March 1809, other decisions of Madison’s administration—many related to the War of 1812—stimulated additional instances of interposition as state legislatures challenged the constitutionality of various acts of his administration.

The culmination of resistance to Madison’s policies related to the war was the assembly of delegates from five Federalist-dominated New England states on December 15, 1814 in Hartford, Connecticut. After meeting behind closed doors, the convention adopted a report accusing Madison’s administration of misconstruing the Constitution and exceeding its constitutional authority. Given “a total disregard for the Constitution,” the report stated that it was appropriate for individual states to offer their “decided opposition.”

In justification, the report paraphrased Madison’s third Virginia resolution, but in a manner that allowed state legislatures to act in ways that Madison had limited to “the states,” by which he meant only the people of the states in their highest sovereign capacity. The report asserted that “in cases of deliberate, dangerous, and palpable infractions of the Constitution, affecting the sovereignty of a State, and liberties of the people; it is not only the right but the duty of such a State to interpose its authority for their protection.”

Despite the Hartford Report’s claims, nullifying national laws deemed unconstitutional far exceeded the role of state legislatures to use interposition to challenge the unconstitutionality of laws that Madison had endorsed in Virginia’s seventh resolution. Moreover, nullifying acts of the federal government and assuming the authority to decide in the last resort was not up to individual state legislatures. Nonetheless, Federalist newspapers supporting the Hartford Convention’s report also mistakenly claimed that Madison had endorsed resistance by individual states.

But it would be in the hands of Calhoun and other nullifiers in the 1830s, however, that the so-called “Principles of ‘98” were twisted into a doctrine of individual state veto and would forever cloud the original function of interposition. In Calhoun’s draft of what became the “South Carolina Exposition” of 1828 he explicitly drew selectively and incorrectly upon Madison’s authority in the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and his Report of 1800 to assert that every state had a right to veto (what Calhoun called an interposition) when the national government acted unconstitutionally. Eventually, South Carolina would invoke Calhoun’s doctrine in 1832, passing an ordinance that supposedly nullified national tariffs the state deemed unconstitutional.

Madison adamantly denied that he had provided any authority for nullification. From Calhoun’s advancement of a theory of nullification in 1828 until Madison’s death in 1836, Madison sought to distinguish interposition from nullification. Before he died, Madison called secession a “twin” to the “heresy” of nullification with both doctrines springing “from the same poisonous root.” He rightly predicted that growth from this evil source would bring “disastrous consequences” such as when Southern states seceded from the Union. Despite Madison’s prediction, interposition developed as a political practice regularly used by state legislatures from the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 until the 1870s. The Civil War marked the high point of state interposition resistance. During the war, sounding the alarm interposition occurred whenever states believed their national government—Union or Confederate—had exceeded its powers, particularly with the use of martial law, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and mandatory wartime conscription.

After the Civil War, Northern and Southern state legislatures opposed Reconstruction laws and policies, racial equality, and enhanced national power using the tool of sounding the alarm interposition. However, those who denied the outcome of the Civil War and who were advocates of white supremacy adopted the slogan of states’ rights and did not embrace the brand of interposition explained in The Federalist Papers. Thus, use of interposition essentially died out, tainted with the Civil War and the discredited notions of nullification and secession, and lay dormant before its re-emergence in the twentieth century.

When the explicit re-invocation of the term “interposition” surfaced in the 1950s, it did so in the hands of those who sought a constitutional basis for white supremacy and racial inequality in opposing the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Although segregationists used the term interposition, their actions were clearly intended to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling and invoked the discredited doctrine of nullification.

*  *  *  *

As originally conceived, interposition rested on the idea that state legislatures were essential monitors of the equilibrium of federalism—and a state legislature’s declaration that acts of the federal government were misguided and even unconstitutional was a legitimate form of political resistance. Nullification, however, whether of a Supreme Court’s decision or an act of Congress was never contemplated by the framers as a power enjoyed by any single state.

At various times in our history state legislative interposition has been misused and mangled into the unconstitutional doctrine of nullification. Even so, interposition has functioned as a powerful tool to express popular discontent and to help us reframe and affirm our constitutional values.

Interposition’s use by states offers the important insight that the national government cannot do whatever it wants and ride roughshod over the states. And, at the same time, interposition reinforces the obligation that states and elected officials owe to the Constitution—and that states lack any legitimate power to nullify national laws. What remains a question is whether state legislative interposition continues to serve a useful purpose today.

Crucially, the history of interposition demonstrates that the preservation of constitutional democracy is a shared obligation among many parties and not merely the task of the Supreme Court. The nation’s history and practice of interposition illuminates how many constitutional settlements were achieved not by a Supreme Court decision, but by a broader discussion among non-judicial participants.

Every elected official—whether at the state or federal level—is obligated to uphold the Constitution. That obligation cannot be abdicated and demands an allegiance to maintain constitutional faith above loyalty to a political party or person.

Interposition offers the important reminder of the necessity of the people’s involvement in America’s constitutional democracy. Just as elected officials cannot abdicate their responsibility to uphold the Constitution, voters cannot abdicate their responsibility to scrutinize the operation of government acting under their authority. Widespread civic engagement of citizens in political issues is the only hope for the survival of the constitutional system that Americans took a chance on in 1787. After all, our republic was based on the idea of the sovereignty of the American people.

 

Further Reading

This article is drawn from Christian G. Fritz, Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

 

This article originally appeared in June 2023.

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Christian G. Fritz is Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law. He is also the author of American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Why is this a source of pride for the small town? The sign echoes in some ways the mythologized view of rural New England’s role in abolishing slavery, especially the idea that many of the farmhouses owned by the region’s elite white citizens were “stations” on the Underground Railroad. While there were a few of these, including in Uxbridge, historians of the Underground Railroad understand that the interconnected webs of safehouses were centered in majority-Black communities in cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, New Bedford, Rochester, and Syracuse. When we dig deeper, however, there is an important part that rural New England played in the abolitionist movement—mainly that the number of people in the region willing to engage with the movement helped to tip the social and national political scales against slavery. This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, its leadup and aftermath, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region. 

The weather and scenery matched the Practical Christian reporter’s optimism, and abolitionists could certainly have used a dose of optimism by the summer of 1845. National developments had only made the slave’s cause more dire, despite the rapid spread of abolitionist sentiment around the country’s northern half since the late 1820s. In particular, the dormant issue of Texas annexation had roared back into the abolitionists’ consciousness during the 1844 election season. Enslavers’ designs on expanding their territory into the former Mexican province brought out a host of abolitionist fears—among them, the prospect of reintroducing protection for slavery where it had been legally abolished (by Mexico), and the possibility that the sheer size of the state meant that as many as five new slave states could be carved out of it, flooding Congress with proslavery representatives and Senators to do enslavers’ bidding. Perhaps we can attribute the writer’s optimism to two factors. First, Uxbridge had already become a leader in rural abolitionism in New England, as we will see. Second, Frederick Douglass, famous now in New England, but soon to be the world’s most famous abolitionist, had arrived in town.

The abolitionist movement that radiated out from Black leadership in urban hubs in the 1830s had roots in rural New England, too. Black New Englanders from the countryside had signed up in large numbers to serve the American cause in the Revolutionary War. Enslaved people in rural Massachusetts, most notably Quock Walker and Elizabeth Freeman, held the state to its Revolutionary professions of liberty by suing for their freedom, winning it for themselves and all others enslaved in the state. The ideological makeup of rural Massachusetts towns in the early republic also created conditions favorable for the flowering of abolitionism. Small farming towns promoted personal independence, commitment to the prosperity of all in the community, and the notion that success should derive from the work of one’s own hands or enterprise. The way the system of slavery created dependent classes, funneled prosperity into the hands of few, and generated wealth from the forced labor of others were all antithetical to traditional rural New England values. While these professed values and the region’s Puritan disposition also paradoxically buttressed white supremacy, they nevertheless created a sizeable population amenable to abolitionist organizers who combed the state in the early 1830s, laying the groundwork for a robust movement.

Uxbridge was one such rural town that offered a sympathetic ear to the plight of the enslaved. There is no doubt that this was in large part because of its small Black population (30 people in 1830), which included refugees from slavery like Nancy Adams and entrepreneurs like Cato Willard. But Uxbridge’s churches also played a part. In rural New England, churches (especially Congregational churches) were often the only spaces in town that could hold large audiences, were located on town squares, and provided excellent venues for meetings at which to discuss the intersecting moral, spiritual, and secular matters of the day. The town in the early 1830s was dominated by two Congregational denominations located on opposite sides of the town square—the liberal and humanistic Unitarians, who were by nature inclined toward abolition, and the Evangelical group who, before 1842, had an anti-slavery pastor. Further, the southern part of the town was home to a Quaker meeting whose house was the only one in the region until the late 1830s. The Society of Friends had been the first predominantly white organization to embrace abolition, warming to the cause through its pacifist tenets and abhorrence of the violence that propped up slavery—and the Quakers counted among their adherents the town’s leading civic couple, Lydia and Effingham Capron, who would play an important role throughout the movement’s life.

On July 30, 1832, Arnold Buffum, a hatter by trade, a Quaker in belief, and a fiery speaker and organizer against slavery, gave an anti-slavery and anti-colonizationist speech to the “respectable . . . country village.” He was astonished when nearly all in the audience “cast their mite” and donated money to the New England Anti-Slavery Society. A year later, he found the town still interested in the plight of the “oppressed descendants of Africa,” and then on February 18, 1834, “THREE HUNDRED AND TEN” people signed on to the founding of the Uxbridge Anti-Slavery Society in the Evangelical Congregational church. Five months later, that core had grown to 450. Almost twenty percent of the town had joined!

The second reason for the optimism of the person reporting on the 1845 meeting was that a refugee from slavery, Frederick Douglass, would be in attendance. Douglass was a studied and experienced orator, and had spent the past half-decade on the lecture circuit, employing the type of retail politics abolitionists were famous for—rousing small towns to action not only in the cause of the slave but also the cause of Black Northerners. Douglass had made many friends and endured many mobs (notably in the fight for Black suffrage in nearby Rhode Island). He had some experience with the Worcester County Anti-Slavery Society’s Southern Division, having attended at least a few of its meetings in the past. In early 1844, Douglass made a name for himself as a featured speaker on the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Massachusetts Hundred Conventions tour. However famous that made him, it was nothing compared to what he was on the verge of becoming: Douglass was now a man on the cusp of international stardom. In May of 1845, the autobiography he had been writing since the previous November went to press, and his astonishing story, the fierce denunciations of enslavers, the insightful critique of American hypocrisy, and the dazzling wit that had earned him renown in abolitionist circles could now be consumed in every library and parlor in the North. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was “the most thrilling work which the American press ever issued—and the most important,” proclaimed the Lynn Pioneer, a “lifting of the veil,” according to the Liberator, “better evidence [of ‘the unspeakable wretchedness of the American slave’] than that of a walk around the plantation after dinner with its proprietor,” according to the Boston Courier. It “should be sold as fast as it can be printed,” proclaimed the National Anti-Slavery Standard.  And it was.

With his Narrative flying off bookshelves in anti-slavery headquarters and elsewhere, Douglass appeared at the Unitarian meeting house in Uxbridge knowing that, despite being a now-famous fugitive, he would find a welcoming audience. Douglass addressed Reverend Austin Robbins’s Baptist congregation in Rogerson village, on the north side of town, on Tuesday evening, June 24, 1845, the night before the Worcester County’s subdivision’s meeting. The next day, that beautiful early summer sun bathed the Unitarian church about a mile south as Effingham Capron gaveled the meeting to order in front of a “large crowd.” Some of the most famous white and Black abolitionists were there: William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel J. May, Stephen S. Foster, and Charles Lenox Remond, to name a few. 

Douglass rose that evening to “represent the slave,” speaking “as no one can, who has not felt the cold steel of oppression piercing the soul.” Alluding to his status as a fugitive, he referred to himself as “an outcast, without protection, living in the midst of monuments reared to liberty.”  American steeples, he said, towered to heaven, and yet the country held him and millions of others as slaves—an image “touching beyond description.”

He reserved especial ire for Uxbridge’s Evangelical Congregationalist minister, John Orcutt. Unlike the previous minister who had lent his church to the founding meeting of the Uxbridge Anti-Slavery Society, Reverend Orcutt was a colonizationist—someone despised by abolitionists and one who argued for the “speedy removal” of Black Americans to Africa. The week before the meeting, Orcutt had warned his parishioners against attending the meeting across the town square in the Unitarian church. “If I go bleeding and panting,” Douglass said, “fugitive as I am, to yonder Orthodox church, I am bolted out by your Rev. Mr. Orcutt.” “Shame,” said one of the other ministers, a shout that was echoed through the church “with becoming indignation.” This was a pressing reminder that in Uxbridge, as elsewhere in rural New England, abolitionist sentiment, though predominant in many places, was certainly not universal.

Later that evening, the meeting was addressed by Charles Lenox Remond, a staunch activist who embodied the “hard core” of abolitionism’s twin goals: the immediate end of slavery and civil and political rights for Black Americans. Not yet given the scholarly attention he deserves, Remond came from a family steeped in anti-slavery activism and had been, according to historian Manisha Sinha, the first Black lecturer in favor of immediate abolition. He also spoke against racism and segregation, which were prevalent in the North despite the end of slavery, and in favor of equal rights for women. He, along with Garrison, protested the fact that women were not seated as delegates at the World’s Anti-Slavery Fair in London in 1840 by sitting with the women in the galleries to which they were relegated. In Uxbridge, the commentator covering the meeting wrote that Remond spoke with “eloquence and power,” recounting the “historical facts of the political aggressions of the tyrant South upon our rights as men, regardless of complexion.” Remond spoke twice more the next evening, closing the meeting with “a feeling testimony to the kind treatment which he, as a colored man, had received in Uxbridge.”

Summing it up, the Practical Christian writer called it “one of the happiest and most profitable Anti-Slavery gatherings I ever attended.” The writer also took the time to excoriate John Orcutt, the Congregationalist minister, labeling him a cajoling, “designing priest” who, “by the aid of garbled extracts from the doings and writings of Abolitionists . . . endeavoured to sustain his charge” that abolitionists were infidels. “Such craven conduct will not always close the ear against us,” and that appeared to be the truth: “ . . . among the numerous multitude in constant attendance at our meeting, the testimony was, it is good to be here.”

The writer then ended with a few telling lines. “Uxbridge,” the Practical Christian trumpeted, “is destined to be a green spot in the Anti-Slavery enterprize. Again will the Liberty Ball be rolled through this village; and as auxiliary to this, I predict this successful Convention will realise our highest anticipation.” The “Liberty Ball” is a clear allusion to the abolitionist Liberty Party, a political party which, though still small even by third-party standards, had made quite a name for itself in the most recent national election—possibly even denying Henry Clay the presidency. Just weeks after the meeting discussed here, another abolitionist meeting came to Uxbridge, this one organized by the Liberty Party, and again, Uxbridge residents showed up “en masse.” It was the “best meeting of the kind—some say the very best—they ever attended.” The meeting passed resolutions declaring it “obligatory” that abolitionists exercise their rights at the ballot box, and withdraw their support from political parties and churches who in any way supported the system of slavery. Tellingly, these passed over the opposition of John Orcutt, who attended the meeting presumably to disrupt it. 

In subsequent years, Uxbridge saw other refugees from slavery speak out publicly against the institution. In 1848, John S. Jacobs and another unnamed man originally enslaved in Virginia discussed their escapes from the “prison-house” of the US South. In October 1849, Henry “Box” Brown described to an Uxbridge audience his harrowing, if creative, escape just over six months earlier—he had concealed himself in a box and had himself shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to an anti-slavery office in Philadelphia. Famous orator Sojourner Truth came to the Unitarian church the following year, “a lot of thanks” being “cordially given” to the church and town by Truth.

What does Frederick Douglass’s speech to Uxbridge’s “faithful little band of Abolitionists” teach us? The first thing is that Uxbridge, like other rural New England towns, was perhaps naturally inclined toward growing the abolitionist movement once it came because of the region’s cornerstone ideals of independence, morality, and communal nature. Douglass found fertile ground there, as evidenced by both his willingness to visit despite his legal status as a fugitive, and the tangible effect he had on the town. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, despite rural New England being overwhelmingly white, the influence of Black New Englanders—by circumstance like Frederick Douglass and other refugees from slavery, and by birth like Charles Lenox Remond—is clear and should be centered if we are to tell the full story of the contribution of rural New England, and small towns like Uxbridge, to the movement to abolish slavery. A large red sign facing the town square and the preservation of such an important space are good first steps. But the way we remember the stories like these needs further fleshing out if we are to recognize the true meaning and impact of abolition in rural New England.

 

Further Reading

Secondary Sources

David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism:  Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

Mary Babson Fuhrer, A Crisis of Community:  The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815-1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

James and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time:  Abby Kelley and the Politics of Anti-Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991).

Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

Unitarian Congregation of Uxbridge and Mendon, “Church History from 1668-1994” (https://ucmu.org/history).

 

Primary Sources

Henry Chapin, Address Delivered at the Unitarian Church, in Uxbridge, Mass., in 1864 (Worcester, MA: Press of Charles Hamilton, 1881).

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (Boston: Published at the Anti-Slavery Office, 1845).

Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855).

Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Boston, MA:  De Wolfe & Fiske Co., 1892).

The Emancipator (newspaper).

The Liberator (newspaper).

The Practical Christian (newspaper).

 

This article originally appeared in June 2023.

 

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C. J. Martin is a research historian at Old Sturbridge Village and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Emerson College, and the Rhode Island School of Design. His forthcoming book is entitled Our Earnest Remonstrance: Race, Citizenship and Voting Rights in New England, 1770-1843. His research more broadly examines the voices of Black New Englanders in the Early Republic, and the role they and abolitionists played in shaping the politics of the era.

Many people have guessed that Wheatley wrote this ode for the woman who had raised her from childhood as a slave, Susannah Wheatley. Yet Susannah Wheatley never crossed the Atlantic. The poet addressed her mistress in another poem titled “A Farewel to America. To Mrs. S. W,” but that was in May 1773 when Phillis was about to sail to London while Susannah stayed behind in Boston.

Other identifications of “Mrs. W—” are based on early notes in a copy of Wheatley’s 1773 book at the American Antiquarian Society. Beside “A Farewel to America” someone penned, “Mrs. Susannah Wright,” and then a different someone penciled, “eminent for her Wax Works etc.” Since the “Farewel” poem is addressed to Susannah Wheatley, some scholars guessed that those notes were actually intended for “Ode to Neptune.” However, no one has found a “Susannah Wright” who traveled to England in late 1772, and the eminent waxworks artist was named Patience Wright.

The key to identifying “Mrs. W—” lies in its connection to three other texts linked to Wheatley and also dated October 10, 1772. Those are her poem “To the Earl of Dartmouth,” the secretary of state overseeing the North American colonies; her letter to that peer; and a short biography of her, all transmitted to Lord Dartmouth by a British merchant and officeholder named Thomas Wooldridge. In a November 24 letter Wooldridge described his interaction with the young poet:

While in Boston, I heard of a very extraordinary female slave, who had made some verses on our mutually dear deceased Friend [Rev. George Whitefield]; I visited her mistress, and found by conversing with the African, that she was no Impostor: I asked if she could write on any Subject; she said Yes; we had just heard of your Lordship’s appointment; I gave her your name, which she was acquainted with. She immediately wrote a rough Copy of the inclosed Address & Letter, which I promised to convey or deliver.

I was astonish’d, and could hardly believe my own Eyes. I was present while she wrote and can attest that it is her own production; she shew’d me her Letter to Lady Huntingdon, which I daresay, Your Lordship has seen; I send you an account signed by her master of her Importation, Education &c. they are all wrote in her own hand.

Another description of Wooldridge’s meeting with Wheatley appeared in the June 3, 1773, New-York Journal, clearly either based on a conversation with the merchant or written by him:

A Gentleman who had seen several of the Pieces ascribed to her, thought them so much superior to her Situation, and Opportunities of Knowledge, that he doubted their being genuine—And in order to be satisfied, went to her Master’s House, told his Doubts, and to remove them, desired that she would write something before him. She told him she was then busy and engaged for the Day, but if he would propose a Subject, and call in the Morning, she would endeavour to satisfy him. Accordingly, he gave for a Subject, The Earl of Dartmouth, and calling the next Morning, she wrote in his Presence, as follows . . .

The newspaper then printed Wheatley’s October 10, 1772, letter to Lord Dartmouth, followed by her poem for him. 

Thomas Wooldridge’s wife was named Susanna. On July 12, 1773, the New-York Gazette reported that “Thomas Woolridge, Esq; and his Lady” had embarked for England, just as the poem’s “Mrs. W—” had been preparing to do. We can therefore conclude that Susanna Wooldridge was the inspiration for “Ode to Neptune.” It is not clear whether Mrs. Wooldridge was present in Boston. Wheatley may well have written this poem for a lady she had never met as a unique souvenir for her husband to bring home from his Massachusetts trip.

In October 1772, the Wooldridges had been married a little over a year. Susanna, Thomas’s second wife, was a daughter of the merchant William Kelly, then living in the newly fashionable London neighborhood of Crutched Friars. Kelly did a lot of business back in New York as a landowner and mercantile partner of Abraham Lott, treasurer of the colony. In his will, Kelly promised his new son-in-law “£3,000 in lands in the Provinces of New York and New Jersey” while setting aside £2,000 for his daughter “free from the debts and control of her husband.”

Thomas Wooldridge was rising through British government ranks by attaching himself to men of influence, particularly the Earl of Dartmouth. At the time of his marriage he held multiple posts in the colonial administration—“Provost Marshal General, and Receiver General of his Majesty’s province of East-Florida, also Fort Adjutant and Barrack-master of Fort St. Marks”—and was involved in multiple disputes with his colleagues. Those appointments gave him the prestige to win a London heiress’s hand and fortune. After that wedding Wooldridge returned to America, currying further favor with Lord Dartmouth by sending back letters on what he saw in various ports. 

Wooldridge’s efforts paid off in August 1772 when Dartmouth became secretary of state for North America. The merchant continued to send reports to the earl, adding such fawning phrases as “your precious time may be very ill bestowed in reading my scrawls.” As part of that campaign for favor, Wooldridge sought out the celebrated Phillis Wheatley at the house of “her mistress” in Boston and challenged her to compose a poem about his patron, which he “promised to convey or deliver.” The merchant probably also arranged for the letter and poem Wheatley then wrote to be printed in the New-York Journal, calculating that publication would both promote and please the secretary of state.

“Ode to Neptune” was thus not Phillis Wheatley’s private plea for smooth sailing for her beloved mistress or for an artistic colleague. She wrote it while contributing to Thomas Wooldridge’s effort to impress the Earl of Dartmouth, who she knew had become one of the highest-ranking officials in the British Empire. Providing this visitor with an extra poem for his wife was a way to win Wooldridge’s favor, just as he was angling for Dartmouth’s favor. “Ode to Neptune” also demonstrated Wheatley’s range, as it was a Horatian ode with four metrical feet in most lines rather than her usual rhymed pentameter.

When Wooldridge visited Wheatley, the young poet was starting to seek patronage in Britain instead of relying on local support. In February 1772 she and the Boston printer Ezekiel Russell had tried to collect enough subscriptions to publish a collection of her poetry, but by May the orders had proved disappointing. Wheatley had already sent her tribute to Whitefield to that minister’s patron, the Countess of Huntingdon. In 1772 the wealthy countess sponsored the publication of A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, one of the first memoirs from someone enslaved within the British Empire. The countess also wrote to the New England merchant Richard Cary for information about Boston’s enslaved young poet, and word of that inquiry almost certainly reached the Wheatley household. Thus, Lady Huntingdon came to seem like a promising source of funds for Wheatley’s collection.

Wooldridge wrote that Wheatley “shew’d me her Letter to Lady Huntingdon,” suggesting she thought that would impress him. And he was impressed. As the merchant’s letter noted, Lord Dartmouth and the countess were close, part of the same aristocratic evangelical circle. Thus, in meeting with Wooldridge, demonstrating her writing ability, and giving him poems addressed to his patron and his wife, Wheatley made the most of an unexpected chance to win over potential supporters in the top ranks of British society.

In November 1772, the month after she met Wooldridge, Wheatley sent her manuscript, the selection of verses retailored for a British audience, to London. The printer Archibald Bell “waited upon the Countess of Huntingdon with the Poems” and gained her conditional support for publishing the book. Money and praise from a wealthy British aristocrat thus secured for Wheatley what crowdfunding in her hometown of Boston could not.

Both Wheatley and Wooldridge sailed from America to Britain in mid-1773. In fact, Wheatley embarked two months before the Wooldridges left New York, even though they had been thinking of that voyage back in October. It is possible their paths crossed again in London, but there is no record of a second meeting. Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects was printed in London that fall, dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon. It included both her lines to the Earl of Dartmouth and “Ode to Neptune.” 

After that, Wheatley and Wooldridge’s lives followed surprisingly parallel courses. Both experienced a rise in status, boosted by aristocratic patrons within British imperial society, only to suffer from the disruption of the American Revolution. Wheatley became a published author, gained her freedom, married John Peters, and had children, but could not finance a second collection of poetry in the straitened economy of wartime America. Phillis Peters died young in 1784.

As for Thomas Wooldridge, after his father-in-law William Kelly died in 1774, he became the business partner of Susanna’s brother Henry and assumed her father’s role as a leader among the London merchants doing business in America. Wooldridge met with such prominent advocates for the colonies as Edmund Burke and Josiah Quincy Jr. and testified to Parliament about shipping losses. In November 1775 the Earl of Dartmouth was replaced as Secretary of State, but Wooldridge no longer needed his patronage. London property-owners elected him as an alderman in 1776, and then he was chosen sheriff of London and Middlesex.

By that time, however, the war with America and the death of Henry Kelly in 1776 had forced the firm of Wooldridge and Kelly into bankruptcy. Wooldridge kept his seat as an alderman and the sympathy of the London press through the war—evidently people accepted that the business failure was not his fault. But peace brought an end to that stasis. Citizens now complained that the alderman was corruptly squeezing money from his office. Wooldridge was locked in debtors’ prison in 1783 and had to declare bankruptcy again, this time to a much less understanding response. The other aldermen took the unprecedented step of stripping Wooldridge of his seat. A 1799 publication looked back on him and declared: “Impudence made him, and caused him to be unmade, an Alderman.” Nonetheless, the city continued to provide Susanna Wooldridge with substantial sums, “independent of her husband, for the support of herself and her children.” This pension helped support her through the lawsuits over the Wooldridge and Kelly debts, which lasted for years on both sides of the Atlantic.

Financially broken, Thomas Wooldridge made his way back to America alone. In January 1794, at the age of fifty-four, he died in Boston, ten years after Phillis Wheatley had died in the same town.

 

Further Reading

Vincent Carretta wrote the first thorough biography of Phillis Wheatley, published in 2011 under the title Phillis Wheatley and republished with new material as Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2023). David Waldstreicher’s The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023) analyzes her poetry in the context of specific moments in her life, including a detailed discussion of her response to Wooldridge’s challenge in 1772.

Carretta also edited Wheatley’s Complete Writings for Penguin Classics (2001), building on John Shields’s The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (1988). However, possible new poems continue to be identified, most recently by Waldstreicher (“Anonymous Wheatley and the Archive in Plain Sight: A Tentative Attribution of Nine Published Poems, 1773-1775,” Early American Literature 57, no. 3 (2022): 873-910) and Wendy Raphael Roberts (“‘On the Death of Love Rotch,’ a New Poem Attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters): And a Speculative Attribution,” Early American Literature 58, no. 1 (2023): 155-84.

There are many interesting literary studies of Wheatley’s poetry and explorations of her significance in African American culture. Some discussions of Wheatley are based on myths or misunderstandings, however, and analyses of “Ode to Neptune” based on identifying its “Mrs. W—” as Susannah Wheatley or Patience Wright are among them. James Rawley explored the importance of Wheatley’s entry into the evangelical circle of the Countess of Huntingdon and the Earl of Dartmouth in James A. Rawley, “The World of Phillis Wheatley,” New England Quarterly 50, no. 4 (Dec. 1977): 666-67.

Thomas Wooldridge’s upward career can be tracked through his correspondence in The Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, vol. 2: American Papers (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1895); Charles Loch Mowat, East Florida as a British Province, 1763-1784 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943); and “Debates of a Political Society” in the London Magazine and Monthly Intelligencer, vol. 44 (1775), 333-41. His downward career is evident in The Swindler Detected: or Cautions to the Public (London: G. Kearsly, M. Follingsby, J. Stockdale, 1781); City Biography, Containing Anecdotes and Memoirs of the Rise, Progress, Situation, & Character, of the Aldermen and Other Conspicuous Personages of the Corporation and City of London (London: W. West and C. Chapple, 1799); and a death notice in the Boston Columbian Centinel, January 4, 1794. Ben Saunders has collected material for “The Thomas Wooldridge Biography Project.”

 

This article originally appeared in May 2023.

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J. L. Bell is the proprietor of the Boston1775.net website, offering daily helpings of unabashed gossip about the people of Revolutionary New England. He is the author of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary Warand the study Gen. George Washington’s Home and Headquarters—Cambridge, Massachusetts for the National Park Service.

It is easy to understand why such a narrative took hold. The Confederacy did, after all, resort to far-reaching measures to address its population disadvantage. In April 1862 it adopted a policy of universal conscription, and in February 1864 it lowered the age of mandatory service from eighteen to seventeen. Additionally, some Confederate states enrolled boys as young as sixteen for service in state-controlled units. In contrast, the United States Congress passed a law in February 1862 barring the enlistment of youths below age eighteen, except as musicians, and the draft that it enacted in March 1863 applied only to men ages twenty to forty-five. The supposition that the Confederacy employed young soldiers more willingly and extensively than the United States has been reinforced by historical scholarship based on military records. For instance, in his classic studies of Civil War soldiers (The Life of Johnny Reb and The Life of Billy Yank), Bell Irvin Wiley used such sources to conclude that enlistees below age eighteen made up around 5 percent of the Confederate army, but just 1.6 percent of Union army.

A more critical approach to military records, however, reveals a very different picture. While it remains difficult to calculate the percentage of underage Confederate soldiers, it is possible to arrive at a reasonably accurate estimate in the U.S. case, and the results are eye-opening. Our book, Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era, shows that around ten percent of Union soldiers—some 200,000 enlistees—were below age eighteen when they joined the army. In other words, Union military records conceal an epidemic of lying. Although many Confederate boys also gave false ages, they were less likely to do so, because the Confederacy never legally banned underage youths from enlisting, provided they had parental consent, and because minimum age limits were less likely to be enforced.

Historians have not only underestimated the sheer number of underage soldiers who fought for the Union, they have also overlooked the significance of the legal, political, and administrative battles these youths provoked. U.S. officials fought tooth and nail to retain underage enlistees. By late 1861, the War Department was routinely blocking parents’ attempts to recover minor sons, informing them that their requests were at odds with “the interests of the service.” In February 1862, the same law that barred the military from accepting youths below age eighteen decreed that whatever age an enlistee swore to upon enlistment would be considered “conclusive.” Designed to stem the tide of parents petitioning for the release of underage sons, the practical implications of this stipulation were stunning: minors now had the ability to make themselves “of age” simply by swearing a false oath. Then, in September 1863, the Lincoln administration suspended habeas corpus across the nation, preventing state and local judges from hearing cases that alleged wrongful detention by the military. This meant that both paths for recovering underage enlistees—the administrative and the judicial—were now closed.

Convinced that the federal government surely did not intend to bar parents from promptly recovering underage sons, some political figures proposed alternative means for dealing with such cases, only to be stymied. For instance, the New Hampshire Governor Joseph A. Gilmore wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in November 1863, requesting that the military commander who oversaw his state’s volunteers be authorized to discharge underage youths, provided they repaid any bounty money they had received. But Stanton denied the request, insisting that such cases, “if there be any, should be reported, with evidence and facts,” to a federal office—that of the newly created Provost Marshal General. Even U.S. congressmen, who were answerable to local constituents and often heard directly from distraught parents, hesitated to take steps that might deprive the Union army of manpower. Although Congress enacted laws in 1864 and 1865 to stiffen penalties on lax and corrupt recruiters, such measures applied only to those who signed up boys below age sixteen, not the legal minimum of eighteen.

As the United States tightened its vise on underage enlistees, the Confederate response to youth enlistment remained inconsistent. Many thousands of boys and youths entered the ranks, but Confederate leaders at the highest levels repeatedly railed against underage enlistment, warning that it would be foolhardy to “grind the seed corn”—a line of argument rarely if ever advanced by Union politicians. On the whole, Confederate parents had more success than their Union counterparts in recovering underage sons. And while the Confederacy did ultimately lower its conscription age, the seventeen-year-olds were placed in junior reserve units in their home states, which typically entailed less onerous and dangerous duties than service in the Confederate army. Even near the war’s bitter end, when the government accepted the once-unthinkable notion of arming slaves, Confederate leaders declined to conscript boys below eighteen into the regular army. 

 

These differences speak to the broader significance that underage enlistment held for each side. Due to the comprehensive nature of Confederate conscription, civilians’ appeals for the release of soldiers were more likely to focus on absent husbands and fathers—adult male providers—than underage sons. As a result, in the Confederacy, the issue of minority enlistment did not become a conduit for broader disputes over the centralization of power. But in the U.S., underage enlistees were often at the heart of such debates, as contests over their fate compelled the federal government to expand its reach. It was in the face of massive parental resistance that the U.S. Congress rewrote militia laws, extending federal control over military forces, and that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, defanging the ability of state courts to check military abuses.

Even in the realm of popular culture, boy soldiers and drummer boys assumed greater importance in the United States than the Confederacy. Unionists embraced the generic boy soldier or drummer—youthful, incorruptible, and forward looking—as the personification of the nation. Often represented as the “Spirit of the North,” this figure echoed an artistic tradition dating back to the French Revolution that associated child soldiers with revolution and republican governance. Such a symbol was ill suited to represent the kind of nation that the leaders of the Confederacy hoped to build—one that prized hierarchy, tradition, and bloodline over youthful ardor. To be sure, Confederates celebrated particularly heroic youths as evidence of their people’s unconquerable spirit, but they did not envision boy soldiers and drummer boys as the embodiment of the nation. 

In the late nineteenth century, however, celebrations of Confederate “boy heroes” overwrote the earlier ambivalence toward youth enlistment. This partly reflected the nationwide embrace of a new model of boyhood—one that that rejected Victorian sentimentalism in favor rugged masculinity and martial virtues. At the same time, the construction of the Confederate boy hero was also a regionally distinctive development—one that proved central to the Lost Cause mythology created by former Confederates and their sympathizers. Rewriting the war’s history and casting white southerners as victims, adherents of the Lost Cause repeatedly stressed their side’s population disadvantage: even the mobilization of young boys and old men, the argument went, could not stave off a more numerous and remorseless enemy.

Those who lionized Confederate boy heroes often played fast and loose with the facts when it came to actual ages. Susan R. Hull’s Boy Soldiers of the Confederacy, published in 1905, was advertised as featuring youths who “bled and suffered that the South might be triumphant,” some mere “babies who left their cradles to shoulder muskets.” Yet many of the “boys” she profiled had enlisted after turning eighteen. Similarly, the veritable cult that emerged around Tennessean Sam Davis exaggerated his youth. An accused spy, Davis had calmly faced the gallows rather than naming names, reputedly declaring, “I would rather die a thousand deaths than betray a friend or be false to duty.” In 1906, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a marble statue commemorating this “Boy Hero of the Confederacy” in Pulaski, Tennessee, where he had been executed. Three years later, a bronze statue of Davis was unveiled on the statehouse grounds in Nashville. Both monuments portray a soldier who appears to be in his mid-teens; the Pulaski version in particular depicts a boy whose soft facial features are offset by his determined stance. The real Sam Davis, however, was eighteen when he enlisted and had turned twenty-one by time he was put to death. 

Confederate apologists similarly burnished into legend the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) cadets who fought at the Battle of New Market, skirting the fact that the cadets’ ages ranged from fifteen to twenty-five. Of the ten who died, six were eighteen or older, meaning they were old enough to be conscripted. Most of these youths had been sent to VMI by parents who hoped to prevent or delay their sons’ enlistment in the Confederate army—a strategy not lost on the cadets themselves. Jaqueline B. Stanard, who died in the Battle of New Market at the age of nineteen, had earlier inquired of his sister, “Do you not candidly think I ought to be in the Army. I am over 18. I think I have been very obedient in remaining here as long as I have.” To his mother, he wrote imploringly, “Remember I will be 19 on the 27th of this month and ought to be ashamed of myself to be here. . . . You should be more firm and patriotic and want me to be in the army, but this is an unnatural feeling for an affectionate Mother like yourself.” Though celebrated as “mere boys” who were ordered into the fray only due to sheer necessity, many of the New Market cadets were military-age youths who until then had been shielded from hardships that their same-age peers were enduring. 

Such inconvenient details, however, did not stop white southerners from embellishing stories about boy heroes in the late nineteenth century. Lost Cause mythologists insisted that Confederates had been willing to sacrifice everything for their independence, including their boys. Evidence of the power of this narrative appears in the most unlikely of sources—U.S. Grant’s memoirs, written in 1884-85. Here, Grant mistakenly asserted that, beginning in 1864, the Confederacy had required “boys from fourteen to eighteen” to serve in the junior reserves (and men “from forty-five to sixty” in the senior reserves). Grant had no doubt observed many boys and old men performing military service for the Confederacy, especially in the war’s final year—a social reality that he had highlighted in his 1864 letter to Washburne for political purposes. But by the time he wrote his memoir some twenty years later, he appears to have swallowed his own line about “cradles and graves.”

As a nation, we are still trying to see through the fog of Lost Cause ideology that for so long shaped not just regional but national histories of the Civil War and its aftermath. Part of this historical excavation requires us to dispel myths about boy soldiers, allowing for a more accurate view of both sides’ attitudes, policies, and practices toward underage enlistment. Such a reassessment paves the way for a clearer understanding of the surprisingly pivotal role that conflicts over underage soldiers played in shaping larger disputes concerning the organization and oversight of U.S. military forces. As the federal government contended with clamoring parents, it laid the legal groundwork for a modern army that could operate unencumbered by the constraints on centralized military power that the nation’s founders had seen fit to impose.

 

Further reading

We elaborate on these arguments in Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023). Although there are many popular books on boy soldiers, the subject has drawn relatively little scholarly attention. Exceptions include Edmund Drago, Confederate Phoenix: Rebel Children and Their Families in South Carolina (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); and Kathleen Shaw, “‘Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier’: Youth Enlistment in a Northern County,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History 135, no. 4 (October 2001): 419-46. Mark E. Neely Jr. addresses the legal aspects of underage enlistment in “Legalities in Wartime: The Myth of the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” in The War Worth Fighting: Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency and Civil War America, ed. Stephen D. Engle (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2015), 110-26. James G. Mendez, A Great Sacrifice: Northern Black Soldiers, Their Families, and the Experience of Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 121-29, discusses cases in which Black parents sought the discharge of underage sons. On the VMI cadets, see Sarah Kay Bierle, Call out the Cadets: The Battle of New Market (El Dorado, CA: Savas Beatie, 2019); and Charles R. Knight, Valley Thunder: The Battle of New Market and the Opening of the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, May 1864 (El Dorado, CA: Savas Beatie, 2010). On Sam Davis, see, Edward John Harcourt, “‘The Boys Will Have to Fight the Battles Without Me’: The Making of Sam David, ‘Boy Hero of the Confederacy,’” Southern Cultures 12, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 29-54.

 

This article originally appeared in May 2023.

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Rebecca Jo Plant is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America. Frances M. Clarke is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney and the author of War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North, which jointly won the Australia Historical Association’s biennial Hancock prize for the best first book in any field of history. Their  coauthored book Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era, was recently published by Oxford University Press.

It is rare for a young, ambitious politician to step back from a national office to take a seat representing a county in a state legislature. In his Autobiography, Jefferson plainly stated that though his place in Congress had been renewed for the coming year, he thought he could do more important work back home: “I knew that our legislation under the regal government had many very vicious points which urgently required reformation, and I thought I could be of more use in forwarding that work.” What legislative issues were so urgent that they drew Jefferson away from the largest city in America, back to sleepy Williamsburg, and kept him there even when offered the ambassadorship to France?

Less than a month into Virginia’s legislative session of 1776, Jefferson revealed the true scope of his ambition, the project that he perceived as giving him the largest scope of action, the greatest possibility of doing what every philosopher dreamed, reforming not just one law or policy, but them all: “When I left Congress, in 76. it was in the persuasion that our whole code must be reviewed, adapted to our republican form of government, and, now that we had no negatives of Councils, Governors & Kings to restrain us from doing right, that it should be corrected, in all it’s parts, with a single eye to reason, & the good of those for whose government it was framed.”

Historians have tended to overlook how eager Jefferson was to be the architect of a new comprehensive legal code. Jefferson is described as simply “being appointed” to the Committee of Revisors charged with this task. In fact, Jefferson introduced the legislation to create the committee, ensuring that when it passed he would sit upon it. Knowing that his fellow lawmakers would balk at empowering him to redesign 169 years of the basic laws of Virginia from scratch, Jefferson obscured what he planned and claimed that the committee’s charge was just to reorganize the existing laws from their present haphazard chronological arrangement into an organized “digest” of the law.

As chief “revisor,” Jefferson was able to draft more legislative bills in his three-year term than any other member of the General Assembly, but he often hid his authorship by having colleagues introduce bills, or inserting them within other pieces of pending legislation when they were in committee. In this way, Jefferson concealed the way in which he was designing a complete structure of some 128 new laws and not just smoothing out the rougher corners of the legal code. Because Jefferson and his collaborators never submitted the full revision as a single piece of legislation, his accomplishment was not appreciated until a few scholars in the mid-twentieth century dedicated most of their careers to collecting everything Jefferson ever wrote or read. The editor of Jefferson’s voluminous papers at one point realized the true scale of Jefferson’s work on Virginia’s laws: “In the variety of subjects touched upon, in the quantity of bills drafted, and in the unity of purpose behind all this legislative activity, his accomplishment in this period was astounding. He was in himself a veritable legislative drafting bureau.”

A decade after Jefferson had begun remaking the world of Virginia, many laws he had authored years before still knocked around the Virginia Assembly. Jefferson still camouflaged his work as mere legal housekeeping, writing to a curious Dutchman who asked about his legal project, “It contains not more than three or four laws which could strike the attention of a foreigner . . . . The only merit of this work is that it may remove from our book shelves about twenty folio volumes of statutes, retaining all the parts of them which either their own merit or the established system of laws required.”

Jefferson contributed to ongoing misunderstanding of his project by highlighting a few notable pieces of the whole in his Notes on the State of Virginia rather than revealing the way in which many of the laws worked together to refashion society. Historians rightly point to his Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, or his bills reforming the system of education or eliminating aristocratic systems of inheritance and land rents as landmarks in the establishment of republican institutions. Some fragments of the language Jefferson used in his early legal revisions circuitously made their way into other charters, such as the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, an unsurprising traverse given that George Mason was probably Jefferson’s closest co-worker on the revisor’s committee.

Besides purging Virginia’s laws of monarchical remnants, the way the revised legal code constituted a set of gears working together to engineer a new social order is most clearly seen in Jefferson’s attempt to phase out what he saw as the towering evils of his nation: slavery and the black presence in America.

Looking backward from the present day, through the prisms of modern sensibilities, most people assume that those who fought against slavery did so as they would, out of moral revulsion at the institution and empathy for people denied the most basic human rights. Similarly, our present values lead us to understand slavery and racism as being closely connected, thus prejudging that those who opposed slavery did so out of concern for those shackled, whipped, and trafficked. But the reality of the eighteenth century was that the outlooks of those opposed to slavery and those defending it overlapped where they both agreed that the numbers of Africans and the descendants of Africans had grown too large and needed to be dramatically reduced. Eighteenth-century abolitionists hoped that ending slavery itself would accomplish this. Eighteenth-century enslavers looked in the short term to ending the international slave trade and in the long run to encouraging the mass immigration of whites which they expected would drive slavery gradually into its natural grave. In the meantime, both poles of this political spectrum agreed that black people, enslaved or free, needed to be more completely policed and disciplined.

Connecting the dots in the bills Jefferson and the other revisors wrote, a master plan for both ending slavery and whitening Virginia emerges from the haze of legalisms. Decades later in his Autobiography, Jefferson insincerely claimed that the laws dealing with slavery that he authored in the course of Virginia’s revision did not constitute a system: “The bill on the subject of slaves was a mere digest of the existing laws respecting them, without any intimation of a plan for a future & general emancipation.” But when all the pieces of Jefferson’s legal revisions are gathered together, they can be seen to form an interlocking whole that followed a consistent and novel strategy. Laws dealing with the slave trade, migration of free people of color into the state, punishments for petty crimes, and procedures for manumission, all worked seamlessly together to achieve a common purpose—weakening slavery and diminishing the black population.

Jefferson’s system depended on shoring up the bulwarks of race and basing the law on a theory of government that withdrew the protection of government from unfavored groups. But its aim was not simply to construct a segregationist state, one in which the descendants of Africans and enslaved people would exist as a permanent subordinate caste, but rather to use these powers and distinctions to purge people of color entirely from society. Jefferson’s preferred tool for accomplishing this was the ancient legal device of banishment and he set about incorporating it throughout the legal code of Virginia, adding it to laws banning the importation of slaves, laws governing the migration of free people of color, laws of interracial bastardy, criminal statutes, manumission, and ultimately, slavery itself.

The Sage of Monticello’s preoccupation with banishment was not without precedent. Virginia had once before in its past attempted to curtail its rising black population by ordering freed people to leave the colony. As early as 1691, legislators grew alarmed at the rising numbers of free people of color, proclaiming that “great inconveniences may happen to this country by the setting of negroes and mulattoes service free, by their either entertaining negro slaves from their masters service, or receiveing stolen goods, or being grown old bringing a charge upon the country.” Lawmakers then limited manumissions by requiring that masters transport manumitted persons out of the colony within six months or pay a fine of ten pounds. The requirement that manumitted women and men be banished from the colony was rescinded in 1748 and replaced by a ban on all manumissions unless permission was granted by the governor and council and, then, only upon grounds of “some meritorious services.”

Early in the eighteenth century banishment was also set as the penalty for any white man or woman intermarrying with a “negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free.” However, in such cases, it was the white person who was exiled, not the person of color. A revision of this law in 1753 eliminated the punishment of exile and substituted jailing for six months and a fine of ten pounds for the white offender. But by the time Jefferson himself sat in the House of Burgesses in 1769, such policies were a receding memory and no laws expelled free or enslaved black people from the colony.

However, in the 1770s, some European empires began experimenting with ethnic cleansing regimes of their own. France required all “negroes and mulattoes” to register with the Office of Admiralty in 1762 which was the first step toward their ordered deportation in 1777. Portugal closed its borders to black immigrants in 1773. England’s high court’s 1772 Somerset v. Stewart decision effectively abolishing slavery on the mainland was motivated by fears of a growing black population.

Jefferson’s new legal code revived the banishment of any white woman who had a child with a black or mixed-race man from the state (though black women who bore the children of white men were exempt because their offspring was the property of their white fathers). But unlike the ancient precedent Jefferson copied, his measure was aimed more at policing the borders of race than morality, for his proposed law exiled both mother and her free mixed-parentage child. In those earlier times when the upholding of public morals was a higher concern and whites having children with people of color was always considered to be fornication leading to bastardy because interracial marriage itself was illegal, it was a crime punishable by whipping (with harsher beatings prescribed for the darker-skinned partner). Jefferson, obviously not one to be troubled by such rules of conduct, exploited this crime of morality to achieve his larger goal of diminishing the black population.

More directly, Jefferson’s proposed law to choke off the international trafficking of slaves shifted from a traditional reliance on tariffs and stiff fines for violators to a simplified ban on bringing into the state any people of color on a permanent basis. This law can be (and has been) mistakenly read as one encouraging the freeing of enslaved people by its language that apparently encourages freedom: “Negroes and mulattoes which shall hereafter be brought into this commonwealth and kept therein one whole year, together, or so long at different times as shall amount to one year, shall be free.” But what appears on its surface to be a measure freeing illegally imported slaves is actually just a means of enforcing a much broader ban on the importation or migration of any people of color, free or enslaved. This is made abundantly clear in the succeeding passage that requires any people freed in this way to either leave the state or become outlaws: “But if they shall not depart the commonwealth within one year thereafter they shall be out of the protection of the laws.”

The phrase “out of the protection of the laws” had serious but different implications for enslavers, the enslaved, and free people of color. For slave merchants, the sanction of rendering their human chattel unprotected by the state’s legal code and courts essentially destroyed its value as property. For enslaved people, being “out of the protection of the laws” legally entitled any Virginian to seize, beat, maim, or kill them with abandon. Free people of color “out of the protection of the laws” could be killed, or they could be seized and claimed as property.

As this law referred not to “slaves” but to “Negroes and mulattoes” it served as a prohibition on the entry into Virginia of any free person of color. This feature of the law was made clear in a subsequent passage that made an exception for black “seafaring persons,” who were commonly not enslaved, and were allowed one day in port before being subject to being seized and claimed by any Virginian as their legal property.

Having closed off the avenues of entry of black people, Jefferson turned his attention to finding other parts of the legal code that could be turned to expel black Virginians from their home. Buried away in a different bill was a provision whose intent was to continually push people of color out of the state. Any enslaved person who committed an offense “punishable . . . by labor”, which in the jargon of the day meant serious felonies such as manslaughter, arson, robbery, and horse-stealing, but also lesser offenses such as housebreaking and larceny, were to be “transported to such parts in the West Indies, S. America or Africa, as the Governor shall direct, there to be continued in slavery.” 

Slavery itself was attacked by easing restrictions on manumission, which technically was not simply setting someone free, but was the complicated legal ability of an enslaver to convey his ownership of a person to the person themself. Jefferson’s system encouraged manumissions by eliminating the longstanding requirement that only an act of the assembly could legally transform an enslaved person into a free one. The catch, and it was a catch upon which rested much of Jefferson’s racial architecture, was that all manumitted persons were required to leave Virginia forever, or face re-enslavement.

In the end, Jefferson’s racial architecture for his native state proved incomplete because he failed to mortise in the keystone of his plan. Since he first sat in the colonial House of Burgesses in 1769, Jefferson had been eager to introduce a plan for the gradual ending of slavery. Older and more politically astute colleagues convinced him to shelve his ideas then and decades later, being more experienced and politically savvy himself, he felt even more headwinds and never offered his plan for gradual emancipation to the legislative docket. Tellingly, no text of it survives and the only barest outline exists in Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia. There, in introducing his lengthy section detailing the racial differences of blacks, whites, and Indians, Jefferson recounts the features of the bill that he regretted did not see the light of day:

To emancipate all slaves born after passing the act . . . and further directing, that they should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniuses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. to declare them a free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they have acquired strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants; to induce whom to migrate hither, proper encouragements were to be proposed.

Later, as he parsed out the elements of his comprehensive plan to end slavery and diminish the black presence in his state, Jefferson again contemplated introducing a gradual emancipation act to the assembly, but was dissuaded, again, by his estimation that he could not garner enough support to pass such a bill.

In discussing this episode in his Autobiography, Jefferson reveals much about how his opposition to slavery and his opposition to the presence of black people were intertwined. He connects his plan of emancipation to his belief, stated even more robustly in Notes on Virginia, that white and black people could not possibly live together in a single republican nation. Moreover, in discussing what should happen to freed men and women, Jefferson does not use the term “colonization” that had the benevolent connotations of aiding people to be self-sufficient and to flourish on their own, but the term “deportation” which not only was legally a form of punishment, but also identified those “deported” as not being members of the body politic in any way. Only those who were not included within the community of citizens could be “deported”:

The principles of the amendment however were agreed on, that is to say, the freedom of all born after a certain day, and deportation at a proper age. But it was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition, nor will it bear it even at this day. Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free white laborers.

Though he felt the bill for general emancipation was politically premature, Jefferson did author a bill to quicken the pace of white immigration and replace people of color. Jefferson’s fellow revisor Edmund Pendleton sketched out a first draft of a law that encouraged immigration and naturalization of Protestants, even titling the bill, “Bill for the Naturalization of Foreign Protestts.” The bill offered easy terms of naturalization, a twenty-dollar payment “for the purpose of defraying his passage hither over sea” and a bounty of “fifty acres of unappropriated lands wherever he shall chuse.” Jefferson edited Pendeleton’s draft, excising all references to Protestants, thereby broadening the potential pool of white foreigners that might be enticed to immigrate. 

Jefferson’s master plan to end slavery and remove all black people from Virginia was never fully implemented. His fellow legislators, most of whom were enslavers themselves, chose not to restrict their own freedom to dispose of their human property as they saw fit and in 1782 passed a manumission law without Jefferson’s requirement that freed men and women be banished. But when this law was revised in 1806, Jefferson’s original requirement that all freed men and women leave Virginia within one year or face re-enslavement “for the benefit of the poor” was restored.

Jefferson’s last effort to revive his vision of a Virginia without slavery or black people came in 1783 as he was preparing to return to Congress. That year he sent to James Madison, who was just then about to make the opposite journey from Congress back to Virginia, a confidential draft Constitution for the state. Jefferson included in his charter a deceptively brief antislavery clause that barred the state’s legislature “to permit the introduction of any more slaves to reside in this state, or the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the 31st. day of December 1800; all persons born after that day being hereby declared free.” Though it didn’t pass, it proved influential to Madison and others who a few years later would hammer out a new constitution for both Virginia and the United States.

As some historians have pointed out, the fifteen- or sixteen-year gap between when this Constitution could have been ratified and the deadline for freedom in 1800, would have stimulated a vast outflow of African Americans as masters sold enslaved people to eager buyers in other states. Absent some sort of prohibition on such sales, this simple device of setting a future date for emancipation would have worked to achieve both of Jefferson’s longstanding goals—the ending of slavery and the expulsion of all people of color from the state.

 

Further Reading

Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson 1743-1790, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914).

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2, January 1777 to June 1779, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton University Press, 1951), esp. 306-308.

The Statutes at Large of Virginia, from October Session 1792, to December Session 1806, vol. 3, ed. Samuel Shepherd (Richmond: Samuel Shepherd, 1836), esp. 251–53.

William Cohen, “Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery,” Journal of American History, 56, no. 3 (Dec. 1969): 503-26.

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).

Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd ed., (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2001).

Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: Free Press, 1977).

Sue Peabody, There are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

 

This article originally appeared in April 2023.

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Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University and author of The Patriots’ Dilemma: White Abolitionism and Black Banishment in the Founding of the United States of America, forthcoming from Pluto Press.

The Hutchinsons, a family of merchants, left Boston with the banished Anne in 1638. Soon after, Anne’s son Edward returned to Boston. In 1641, his first son was born. The boy was named Elisha after a biblical prophet and miracle worker. The name, meaning “my God’s salvation,” was popular among Puritans and separatists. Young Elisha was never able to hide. First, his grandmother’s legacy was still fresh in memory. Second, he grew to the very unusual height of six feet, two inches (a visiting Londoner would remark he was “the tallest man that I ever beheld”). As the eldest son of a merchant, his career was foretold. He joined his father’s mercantile and real estate business and married a merchant’s daughter named Hannah Hawkins. Through a Rhode Island cousin of the Sanford family, the Hutchinsons sent livestock and food to Barbados. Horses sent to that richest English island operated mills that squeezed sugarcane, extracting the sweet juice and leaving out the slaves’ blood, sweat, and tears. To their credit, Edward and Elisha were brave enough, in spite of Anne’s heretical legacy, to protest Massachusetts’ persecution of Baptists.

King Philip’s War was a turning point in Elisha’s life. As it began in 1675, Edward Hutchinson was sent on diplomatic missions to secure peace with several tribes. On one such journey the delegation was ambushed and Edward was wounded. He died of his wounds in Marlborough, where his body inaugurated the cemetery. It was probably Elisha, his heir as patriarch of the Hutchinsons, who penned the tombstone’s text: “Captin Edward Hvtchinson aged 62 yeares was shot by treacherovs Indians Avgvst 2 1675 dyed 19 Avgvst 1675.” In line with Puritan tradition, Boston pastor Increase Mather “knew” that Edward died because of a recent church dispute. 

Elisha submitted Edward’s account with the colony in a chilling, formal document: “The country is debitor to Capt. Edward Hutchinson for his service,” including “To a journey to Quabauge where he received his death’s wounds, being 3 weeks before he died.” At the wage of two pounds a week for diplomats, his painful endurance was worth six pounds. Fourteen months later, Elisha lost his wife, Hannah. Like so many other women before the modern age, she died in her seventh childbirth within a decade. This annus horribilis left Elisha alone in charge of both the family and its businesses. As was common, he quickly remarried—a merchant’s daughter again. His new wife, Elizabeth, was recently widowed when her husband, merchant John Freake, was killed in a freak accident: a Virginia ship exploded in Boston harbor.

Boston and the colony soon bombarded the new Hutchinson patriarch with public offices. By 1680 Elisha became a deputy at the legislature (General Court), town councilor, judge in a merchants’ court, sealer of weights and measures, fire officer, and militia captain. The king’s agent Edward Randolph, who led the effort to bring down the chartered government of the Massachusetts Bay Company, identified Elisha as one of the few “great opposers” to the king, and almost had a duel with him. In 1684, Elisha was elected a councilor and continued until a new regime—the Dominion of New England—was imposed in 1686 by England.

Elisha took his offices seriously. The Boston Athenaeum holds a book that belonged to him, a collection of the colony’s laws that he used as a judge and legislator. It is full of notes that he added to make his work accurate and efficient. Bound with the laws is a handwritten copy of Massachusetts’ 1641 Body of Liberties—the only surviving copy of the first English code of laws in America.

During the dictatorial Dominion period, Hutchinson joined a local bank project, but then he left for England to lobby against Governor Edmund Andros’s dismissal of all local land titles. He was soon joined by Harvard president Increase Mather and later by his close friend Samuel Sewall (he appears often in Sewall’s famous diary). In the winter of 1688–1689, Elisha saw the Glorious Revolution in England, but missed a later imitation revolution in Boston, which toppled the Dominion. 

Hutchinson and Sewall returned to Boston in December 1689, bringing King William’s tentative approval of the return of General Court rule in Massachusetts. They retook their councilor positions and Hutchinson was appointed militia major as King William’s War worsened. Hutchinson became the leading man on war finance, participating in all the committees that planned the invasions of Acadia and Canada. He wrote about expectations of “plunder enough taken [in Canada] to defray all the charges.” As Boston’s new tax commissioner, he soon reckoned with the failure of these expectations.

In November 1690, soldiers and sailors returned from Canada defeated and demanding pay, but the government had nothing to give them. Taxes were raised to unprecedented levels to collect funds to pay them, but collecting taxes in a difficult winter, not only in coins but also in grains, would have taken a very long time. The soldiers and sailors became “mutinous,” and so in December 1690 the government resorted to issuing paper money. Those “bills of credit” are commonly known as the first American paper money (which is correct only if “American” refers to the area of the future United States; Dutch Brazil, Antigua, and Canada had already had paper money). But the real significance of the 1690 money was its unique legal status. Unlike all previous paper moneys in (greater) America, Europe, and China, it was not forced on all sellers under threat of penalty and there was no credible promise to convert it into precious metal coins or other valuable commodities. Its only legal support was the government’s commitment to accept it in tax payments (legal tender for taxes in modern terms). This is very similar to our modern currency (which is also legal tender for debts).

The reason for the invention was that England prohibited Massachusetts from creating money. Massachusetts was not among the few colonies whose charter permitted independent coinage. The royal coinage monopoly in England therefore implied that Massachusetts was not allowed to produce coins. However, in 1649 Parliament executed the king and abolished royalty. Therefore, in 1652 Massachusetts opened a mint and made its coins legal tender for debts and taxes. After the Restoration, in the late 1670s, the mint became the key symbolic flashpoint between king and colony and was viewed by English officials as treasonous. Eventually, the mint closed in 1682 and the colony’s charter was revoked in 1684. The issue resurfaced in 1689 as Hutchinson and Sewall helped Increase Mather negotiate with the new monarchs William and Mary about the charter’s renewal.

With such unpleasant recent history, and while still awaiting charter restoration, 1690 Massachusetts could not afford to create formal money, of whatever material. Therefore the colony only made “bills,” which happened to have small, round denominations convenient for shopping, and forced neither soldiers nor sellers to use them as money. Only tax collectors were forced to accept these bills. This was supposed to induce sellers (who were all also taxpayers) to voluntarily accept bills from soldiers.

The government appointed a committee of merchants to issue the bills, granting them much discretion regarding quantity, denominations, and timing. The committee was led by Hutchinson, while Treasurer John Phillips was listed second. In the sixty-year history of hundreds of Massachusetts committees, this was very unusual and thus significant. That the Treasurer was listed second in the colony’s most important financial operation ever, implies that, in modern terms, Elisha sponsored the bill. He either invented the new currency or he supported and promoted it more than others. His experience in trade, war finance, banking, military, tax collection, and diplomacy prepared him to understand that this new money could work: it would be accepted by soldiers, and then by sellers, and England would not mind. Much risk was involved in this unprecedented experiment, but the lives of Anne and Thomas Hutchinson prove that Elisha’s dynasty was fearless to the point of recklessness.

This is not a Great Man story. Hutchinson’s diverse background was representative of his class of legislators. His friend Samuel Sewall, who wrote the draft of the novel paper money, was less experienced as a merchant, diplomat, and militia officer, but he was the owner of the closed mint, a former manager of Boston’s printing press, and a Harvard graduate who might have read relevant monetary ideas by Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes.

By leading the risky but eventually successful financial operation, Elisha justified his name. He performed a financial miracle and brought salvation to the godly colony. He may have also explicitly prophesized the future of money, but the only recorded prophecy—and an incredibly accurate one—came from pastor Cotton Mather, Increase’s son, who is best known today for the Salem witch trials and early inoculation. Cotton wrote in 1697: “In this extremity they presently found out an expedient, which may serve as an example, for any people in other parts of the world, whose distresses may call for a sudden supply of money to carry them through any important expedition.” As the colony’s founder John Winthrop famously said in 1630 with a different intention, indeed the “eyes of all people” were eventually upon them.

A year and a half later, Elisha was involved in the arrests of elite suspects in the Salem witch trials, and he advised the judges “to see if they could not whip the Devil out of the afflicted.” The colony had recently been rechartered as the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, and Elisha was reelected as a councilor every year. He was never governor or treasurer, but he kept leading paper money committees for the rest of his life.

Grandson Thomas, the renowned historian, wrote that Elisha “seems never to have been successful in business, apt to involve himself in debt upon plans of payment which did not succeed according to expectation.” Thomas specifically noted a later business venture that hurt Elisha so badly he ended up living off his wife’s property. But as the foremost anti-paper money activist in 1740s Massachusetts, Thomas probably also hinted at the events of 1690—Elisha’s reckless plunder forecast that culminated in the beginning of paper money.

When Elisha’s second wife, Elizabeth, died in 1711, she was buried with her first husband, John Freake, surely at her request. Elisha did not give up on her and when he died in 1717, he was buried with them. He continues to fight Freake for her love in the afterlife, forever, under a slab in Boston’s Granary cemetery. He lies just a few feet from the Boston Athenaeum, where his law book is buried. 

Elisha Hutchinson, quietly standing in his family tree between a famous grandmother and a famous grandson, was a key figure in a revolutionary moment in the global history of money. He led the first-ever use of money that relied neither on intrinsic value like gold nor on totalitarian forced acceptance in all transactions, but merely on money’s circulation into and out of the treasury of the emerging modern fiscal-military state. In this sense, today we all use Massachusetts money. In spite of its flimsy appearance, this money has been a double-edged sword of immense power, second perhaps only to nuclear weapons: it has performed miracles in wars and recessions but has created nightmarish episodes of inflation worldwide.

 

Further Reading

The article is based on parts of the author’s book Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023. Specifically, Hutchinson’s first-ever biography (covering his life until the Glorious Revolution) is detailed there in Chapter 11 and is mostly based on records of the City of Boston, Suffolk County, and the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and Samuel Sewall’s diary, as listed in the book’s Notes and References. Chapters 12 and 13 cover the background for the 1690 invention and the invention itself; most of the relevant facts for the episode appear in: Robert E. Moody and Richard C. Simmons, eds. The Glorious Revolution in Massachusetts, Selected Documents, 1689–1692 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1988). A general account of the Hutchinson dynasty, as written by Governor Thomas Hutchinson, was published in: Peter Orlando Hutchinson, ed. The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq., vol. 2 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886). All these sources are freely available online at the Internet Archive, except for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts volume which is available on the Society’s website.

 

This article originally appeared in April 2023.

 

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Dror Goldberg is a senior faculty member in the Department of Management and Economics at the Open University of Israel. Before publishing the abovementioned book, his research on the theory, history and law of money was published in academic journals in economics, legal history, and economic history.

This essay discusses the authors’ thematic focus on interconnectivity—the relationship between women’s economic, legal, social, political, and cultural work within emergent capitalism and state power—and (in)dependence—the extent to which early American and British imperial state development depended on women’s work advancing their own material conditions, resisting encroachment by the state, and adapting to changing economic, political, and social conditions in daily life. Contrary to popular misconception, coverture and disenfranchisement did not eradicate women’s economic agency. Women’s economic labor was essential to state function, the economic survival and social standing of middling urbanites and landowning elites, and the economic plasticity of communities during recession. 

Each book reflects important differences in how eighteenth-century women wielded economic influence from up and down the socioeconomic ladder. Sometimes, women pursued their own economic goals in tandem with state interests. At other times, women defied the state’s ambitious, organized effort to demonize and weaponize their central role as economic powerbrokers. What’s more, other women continuously tapped their own legal and economic resources and circumvented social expectations regardless of larger political changes underway. Nevertheless, women’s economic work linked to and independent of slavery, great power/imperial competition, and an impossible-to-overstate transformation of the natural and material worlds created nothing short of modernity.

Sleeper-Smith’s Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest shows Indian women in the Ohio River Valley at the nexus of the state and society during times of increasing prosperity, agricultural bounty, and foreign invasion by the newly independent United States. They maintained control, if not deep influence, over the lands they cultivated and the communities they guarded. Corn fields stretching for miles, orchards of European fruit trees planted before sustained contact with the Anglo-Atlantic east, and kinship-based trading networks (as well as control over the fur trade) reflected a deep knowledge of ecosystems that connected them to cultural practices and markets within and beyond their communities. They also integrated French traders as dependent community members and commercial partners while circumventing French control of the Ohio River Valley and of the trading hub at Detroit in particular. Heightened antagonism between British, French, and American groups beginning in the 1750s ran up against Indian women’s orchestration of economy and politics in the region. In everyday life, Indian women’s clothing continuously influenced trade and style across the region, a process resembling an economic and cultural renaissance independent of inter-European competition.

Reliant on Indian women’s agrarian system and economic influence, Indian military abilities expanded and became part of a broader system that Washington and other British and (later) American commanders eventually viewed as a significant challenge to their imperial visions. Such resistance and the women’s continued economic activity, Sleeper-Smith writes, “were more than minor obstacles to western expansion. They constituted a viable alternative to it . . .” (12). Indian women continued to influence treaty negotiations through likeminded diplomats. In spite of their attempts to preserve the independent world they built, President Washington sidestepped peacemaking for plunder. He saw the interconnected strands of economy and agriculture that fueled indigenous prosperity and supported resistance as a reason to kidnap Wabash women and children and establish and maintain a standing army, one that could fight to realize the vision that Hamilton instituted and that could aid Jefferson’s articulation of American sovereignty and potential abroad.

Wabash and other Indian women of the Ohio River Valley resisted French, British, and American state building because empire-making gave no quarter to those seeking an independent co-existence. Those women were Europe’s antithesis. In Jamaica, free and freed women engaged in exactly the opposite effort. The women featured in Walker’s Jamaica Ladies wielded slaveholding as a tool for self-enrichment and to reinforce that system from which the state benefitted hand over fist. Free and freed women, who Walker calls “handmaidens of empire,” sought financial independence and social status and in turn rendered the growing British commercial empire dependent on them as indispensable providers of enslaved people’s labor (5). The British state and slaveholding women in Jamaica were therefore co-beneficiaries of slavery.

This remained true from Britain’s earliest efforts to expand its economic footprint in the Caribbean. Three generations of women, some moderately wealthy, took advantage of England’s desire to increase Jamaica’s population and ensure British control of the island. Once there, those women enslaved other women and men, began commercial enterprises of their own to grow their personal wealth and status, and inherited enslaved people which maintained their wealth. These practices deepened their connections to profitable enterprise and the construction of the British imperial state. Even those enslaved people who free women manumitted sometimes continued the cycle, enslaving others to establish good economic and social standing of their own. The second and third generations, concentrated mostly in Kingston, ensured the long-term survival of British trade and manufacturing. In short, slaveholding women in Jamaica shielded Britain’s empire, supported its grand commercial ambitions, and advanced their own commercial and social interests while stripping the freedom and commercial prospects of those they enslaved. 

The colonial New England women in Damiano’s To Her Credit were not the antithesis to American state building, nor did they stand to gain alongside the state like slaveholding women in Jamaica. Rather, their own financial independence waned as New England’s political economy changed between 1730 and the American Revolution. Damiano’s social and gendered political economic history of Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island, argues that free white urban women managed family, business, and community financial ties vital to the political economic function of colonial governments. In this period, urban women wielded significant power over men’s economic lives and through them over the state and private enterprise. That began to change mid-century. The Revolution as well as changes in legal regimes and political and economic culture diminished women’s financial “authority” (4). That said, at no time did women cease to exert considerable financial power through their use of credit and in turn created “both financial networks and the state” (4). 

Women in these settings were highly skilled economic agents, as well as financial and legal strategists. Indeed, their economic labor acted as a bulwark against economic upheaval and shocks such as war and the deaths of men who engaged in notoriously dangerous maritime work. This was especially true for Mary Prince, who maintained her family’s good credit by managing their retail shop while Joseph, her husband, was at sea. In one instance, Mary paid a £96 debt in full that her husband incurred a year prior. British North America was especially prone to economic shock. Materially, the colonies suffered from a lack of circulating coinage and inefficient lawmaking and enforcement power to regulate the value of paper currency emissions. Women were economic first responders during periods of severe price inflation. Finally, and similarly to Jamaican women who inherited enslaved people as generational wealth, women’s central place in the New England family ingrained inextricable links between New England industries and commerce. The American state and society never stopped depending on New England’s women even as their labor was devalued through the tumult of rising capitalism. So too did women’s connectedness to the state-building enterprise remain despite their general loss of financial power.

Wealth, unrivaled social status, and an extraordinary capacity for management made Eliza Lucas Pinckney, the main subject of Glover’s book, unlikely to ever fit the stereotypical mold of mother-as-nurturer to statesmen and social beauties. “Eliza,” Glover writes, “reflected the eighteenth century even when she refracted it” (6). Independent to her core and from an early age, Pinckney gradually acquired control of her family’s commercial affairs and became “a consummate planter-patriarch” (5). For example, she overcame unscrupulous sabotage from an expert dye maker to turn South Carolina into a major exporter and source of revenue for the British empire. She also circumvented her father’s preference that she relinquish agriculture and her “commercial schemes” and submit to being a wife and mother. She occupied the planter-patriarch role so effectively that her status alone made her two sons eligible to reach rarified political heights and allowed her daughter to further solidify the Pinckneys as an estimable family. She claimed her own life as a woman in a world favorable to free-born white men to create a life “for Posterity” “adeptly, proudly, and independently” (2, 6).

With all of this said, she was far from self-made. Women like Pinckney, though successful in reigning over the social and economic life of South Carolina’s elite society, relied on enslaved labor to acquire that sort of wealth and prestige. Quash, who took the name John Williams just before his emancipation, built the vats necessary for indigo production. Pinckney led her family into American patriotism, folding South Carolina further into the Revolution and preserving slavery for the nation. “After the Revolution, the Pinckney family, like Lowcountry elites generally, retained an unshakable commitment to slavery” (218). Charles, Eliza’s husband and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, supported provisions that would uphold slavery in South Carolina and the country as a whole as it had been under British rule. Like Britain before 1776 and South Carolina after 1787, she retained her dependence on slavery to live a life of self-satisfaction. She was of and an outlier in her society, ancillary to the American state and among a privileged few who conducted her affairs the same before the founding as she did after it. Perhaps, as Glover writes, “it seemed as if the Revolution had never happened” with the Pinckneys’ ties to slavery unbroken after the war (218).

Individually, these books reveal important differences in how women’s labor intersected with state-building while standing apart from it. Read together, they also demonstrate that whatever the state stood to gain always was secondary to the world these women never stopped making for themselves. Walker puts it best regarding the free and freed women of Jamaica. “Recognizing women as powerful agents of slavery and colonialism calls into question the extent to which normative European gender ideologies were imported and adopted across the Atlantic” (9). Powerful agents. Not just agents. Continuous focus on the state’s strengths and inadequacies risks further erasure of women’s power as economic agents, some of whom helped decide the economic future of entire colonies through slavery, while others’ day-to-day business and legal acumen supported their husband’s credit. With this new knowledge at our disposal, history that shows women possessing only agency and exercising free will, likewise borders on disingenuous. It ignores their historical power. All four books show that moving past agency, past a state’s strengths and weaknesses, and towards “everyday practices” (Damiano 5) can further restore women as historical forces in future scholarship on the rise and development of the American state.

Let us not be mistaken that these books are more about the state than the women or societies discussed. In the case of Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, for example, comprehending the political economy of Indian resistance in spite of removal is as much about recovering the societies that it destroyed as it is about the state’s preference for force over co-existence. In Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Glover presents one woman’s life against the equally important backdrop of American independence, self-government, and the work of managing any elite family’s financial empire. These authors remind readers to see subjects for who they were as well as what they made possible. 

For everyone, not just historians, Sleeper-Smith, Walker, Damiano, and Glover’s books arrived on shelves at an especially important moment. People today have their minds eye set on a new era, one defined yet again by interconnectedness and (in)dependence. Presidential prerogative, divisive politics over government spending and federal debt, the disproportionate drop in women’s labor force participation during the pandemic, and Supreme Court rulings of the last decade have led many to question the historical purpose of government, its development through the present, and the state and economy’s acute dependence on women who do not always enjoy equal protection from either. Sleeper-Smith, Walker, Damiano, and Glover have made it impossible to imagine that women’s economic work was not also inextricably linked to the rise of banking and commercial law, regulatory institutions and law enforcement, international trade and investment, and immigration policy, to name a few. Their research methods and innovative use of source material also provide models for future articles, monographs, and dissertations. Consequently, history and the work historians do, as well as the aspects of our daily lives informed by scholarship, may all be better off.

 

Further Reading

Amy Dru Stanley, “Histories of Capitalism and Sex Difference,” Journal of the Early Republic 36 (Summer 2016): 343-50.

Max M. Edling, Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783-1867 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Laura F. Edwards, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Riv-Ellen Prell, “The Economic Turn in American Jewish History: When Women (Mostly) Disappeared,” American Jewish History 103 (October 2019): 485-512.

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Ties that Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, “Gender’s Value in the History of Capitalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 36 (Winter 2016): 613-35.

William J. Novak, “The ‘Myth’ of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 752-72.

Michael John Witgen, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Williamsburg and Chapel Hill: The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and The University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

 

This article originally appeared in March 2023.

 

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Jonah Estess is a Ph.D. candidate in the American University (AU) Department of History. His research explores the history of American political economy, capitalism, and money in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His research has been supported through fellowships and grants from the Library Company of Philadelphia, American Society for Legal History, the American Numismatic Society, and the AU history department. Jonah’s other publications have appeared in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, the Society for US Intellectual History Blog, H-Net, and The Washington Post.

As part of the Compromise of 1850, the new Fugitive Slave Law, a much more stringent version of its 1793 cousin, permitted African Americans in the North to be seized solely based on the affidavit of anyone claiming to be his or her owner or working on the owner’s behalf. It was without question the most intrusive enactment of federal authority prior to the Civil War. Black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas, who hailed from Cuyahoga Falls not far from where I teach at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, declared at the Columbus gathering that after nine months of debate about how to settle the vexing question of slavery in the territories, Congress, with the Fugitive Slave Act, ended up striking “down the writ of Habeas Corpus and Trial by Jury—those great bulwarks of human freedom.” It was a law, according to Douglas, “unequalled in the worst days of Roman despotism.” Western Reserve Academy has a rich history in the abolitionist movement in northeast Ohio. By the late 1840s, a prominent group of young Black activists, including John Mercer, Charles Langston, William Day, and H. Ford Douglas were well-known figures in the area. 

Ironically, it was a call for federal power by white Southerners who had steadfastly opposed for decades the aggrandizement of the federal government out of fear that it would threaten their hold on the slave system. President Millard Fillmore, who had taken office after the death of Zachary Taylor, signed the act into law on September 18, 1850, creating a panic in African American communities across the North. Just days after the law was enacted, James Hamlet, a fugitive from Maryland living in New York City, was captured and brought to a jail in Baltimore. Abolitionists eventually secured Hamlet’s freedom by purchasing him for eight hundred dollars. Others were not so fortunate. Throughout the 1850s, thousands of African Americans fled the United States to Canada.  

Blacks, both enslaved escapees and long-term free residents, were now placed in considerable danger. A Black convention in Cincinnati opened with a harsh indictment against a nation that “hunted” slaves “like beasts from city to city, and dragged [them] back to the hell from which they fled—the Government which should protect them,” was instead “prostituting its powers to aid the villains who hunt them.” Personal liberty laws on the statute books in almost all northern states were set to be ripped away by the new federal business of slave hunting. “This enactment—unworthy of the name of law—reverses” the presumption of innocence by “prohibiting what is right, and commanding what is wrong,” declared John Mercer Langston at the 1851 Columbus convention. On a motion of John’s older brother Charles, a petition was drafted and sent to the U.S. Congress calling for the repeal of the “unconstitutional” law.

Black conventions in the early 1850s hosted a wide-ranging conversation about the crisis of constitutionalism that stemmed from the passage of the draconian Fugitive Slave Act. As legal scholar James Fox has persuasively argued, these Conventions “provided Black leaders and activists a forum to share ideas, debate strategies, and engage as a community in forming and reforming their identities as Black American citizens.” National Conventions met over a dozen times before the Civil War in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. The first Ohio convention was in 1837, with ten more prior to the Civil War. Ohio actually served as the catalyst for the first national Black Convention in Philadelphia in 1830 which stemmed from outrage over the attempt of Cincinnati officials to physically remove African Americans.

Over my many years in the high school classroom, I’ve spent considerable time on the story of obstructions to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, covering dramatic rescues in Boston, Massachusetts, and Syracuse, New York, along with abolitionists’ armed resistance against slavecatchers at Christiana, Pennsylvania. These cases were often referenced at Black conventions, including one held in Cincinnati in 1852 at the Union Baptist Church:

We Sympathize deeply with man Shadrach, of Boston, who fled from the American Fiery Furnace, to its contrast—the snows of Canada, with Jerry, who at Syracuse was transported from the American “Babylon” . . . with the men at Christiana who so honored a Christian name, by protecting their homes, and refusing to be made slaves; and have learned from their example that liberty is dearer than life, and eternal vigilance its only guarantee.

At the Cincinnati 1852 convention, a resolution was passed declaring the “law of God” over “human enactments” and the “duty to obey God rather than man” paramount. Several of my students recognized that this ideological position stood in stark contrast to the message in President George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address which we had spent time on when covering the political drama of the 1790s. Washington’s address set up the debate over the “duty of every individual to obey the established government.”

The formation of northern vigilance committees and committees of safety, which pledged to sound the alarm should slavecatchers appear, always provided ample opportunity for discussion in the classroom. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850, slavery was no longer an abstraction, limited in scope to the southern states, but was now a major local concern from New England to the Midwest. Captures and rescues under the Fugitive Slave Act provided real-life drama on northern city streets for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The political significance of rescues, along with federal trials for those who aided fugitives, contributed in substantive ways to the political crisis that severed the United States. For African Americans in the North the law, which provided the federal government with authority to reach into the states in unprecedented ways, made them more vulnerable than ever to kidnappers who were now aided by draconian provisions that removed rights to due process.

While white antislavery leaders attacked the legal apparatus protecting the rights of slaveholders to reclaim property, fidelity to the legal process and protections for African Americans was often not extended to the realm of civil rights and the complete removal of the odious Black laws passed by numerous northern legislatures. Ohio’s Black Laws, enacted in the early nineteenth century, required a certificate of freedom and bond for African Americans migrating into Ohio and forbade “black or mulatto” testimony in court cases where a white person was a party. They were largely repealed in 1849, thanks to the advocacy of Black leaders. As historian Kate Masur has noted, in Ohio “Black activists had persistently and creatively demanded repeal, and growing numbers of white people had become persuaded that racist laws were unacceptable and un-American.” But restrictions on Black voting remained, along with limitations and prohibitions on other aspects of life. Blacks enjoyed some ordinary rights and privileges but faced high levels of statutory discrimination in major areas of life, including marriage laws, housing, jobs, schools, and access to the ballot. 

The hardening of racist sentiment in the North corresponded with the rise of the two-party system. By the mid-1830s, a clear majority of white northerners began to perceive the nation’s basic problem as not just slavery but also the presence of Blacks in the country, free as well as enslaved. This is where the pathbreaking Colored Conventions Project served to open new doors for me as a teacher.

It was not until I read about P. Gabrielle Forman’s pathbreaking work on the Colored Conventions Project that I began to see a deeper history than high-flying rescues or dramatic courtroom dramas. The story that I now sought to present to my students centered on how the Fugitive Slave Act overruled a presumption of citizenship for free Blacks in the North. However, it was more than simply access to the writ of habeas corpus. Black abolitionists offered a profound re-reading of the text of the Constitution and the power of the Declaration of Independence that had far reaching implications. In the 1850s, the Fugitive Slave Act certainly raised questions relating to resistance, but it also helped to bring attention to the powers and prerogatives of the states when it came to the privileges and immunities of citizenship. State-level agitation in Ohio for civil rights mirrored state-level opposition to implementation of the law.

In reading the Ohio Black convention debates, my students began to see how the words of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the 1787 Constitution were turned into a new political creed by Black reformers. Southern white leaders, as historian William Wiecek noted long ago, were on record opposing Jefferson’s Declaration as rhetorical flourish in a political manifesto as early as 1821. But for Ohio’s William Howard Day, an Oberlin graduate and the editor of The Aliened American, Cleveland’s first Black newspaper, the Declaration and the Constitution were the “foundation of liberties” with coequal status.

What became clear to my students as our classroom examination developed was that “privileges or immunities,” “due process,” “equal protection,” and rights of citizens of the United States was something that Black activists had been talking about for decades. I was able to do an overview with my students of the free Black opposition to the American Colonization Society in the early 1830s that helped to illustrate this. It was clearly not something that first arose during the post-Civil War period. 

Across the northern free states, according to Kate Masur, Black “activists forcefully insisted that laws that made explicit race-based distinctions had no place in American life.” These activists “pressed new ideas about citizenship, individual rights and the proper scope of state power.” The discourse on the Constitution at Black conventions clearly demonstrated that the process of creating constitutional law involved more than lawyers in the courtroom. Ohio Black leaders declared that they would “continue to agitate” before “the people, to circulate petitions among the people, and memorialize” the state legislature. They would not stop until Ohio became a “true democracy, conservator of equal and impartial liberty.” By making claims to citizenship and invoking the founding documents, Black leaders expanded the reading of the constitutional text. Jefferson’s Declaration was viewed as having a direct link to the Constitution and creating an obligation for civic and political equality.

By the early 1850s, the privileges and immunities clause in the Constitution had an important place within antislavery constitutional ideology. The vast majority of Black abolitionists insisted that the privileges and immunities of citizenship in the Constitution were general and were enjoyed by all citizens. In a previous Commonplace article that I wrote about the 1842 Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island, I encountered Black abolitionists, including Ichabod Northup, who challenged both the Dorrites and their “People’s Constitution,” along with the Rhode Island government to allow Blacks into the body politic by eliminating an 1822 statute that barred them from the polls. Black northerners were free but far from equal. Black leaders petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly for an end of “that odious feature of the statute, which in making the right of citizenship identical with color, brings a stain upon the state, unmans the heart of an already injured people and corrupts the purity of republican faith.” I was able to draw connections between Black leaders in Rhode Island and Ohio since they both worked towards the removal of “white-only” clauses embedded into state laws. Rhode Island Black leaders made clear that it was through “birthright” that they deserved civil and political rights, a clear conception that the privileges and immunities of citizenship were also tied to being born on “native soil.” 

 William Yates’ remarkable 1838 pamphlet “The Right of the Colored Man to Suffrage, Citizenship and Trial by Jury” proved to be a great teaching tool and one that students enjoyed exploring in the classroom. Yates’ writings covered citizenship in a manner that would later guide radical Republicans after the Civil War, especially questions relating to birthright citizenship. “We are human beings, and we are Americans; we are entitled to the same rights as white Americans,” wrote Yates. “Free persons of color are human beings, natives of the country—for such of we speak—and owe the same obligations to the State, and to its government as white citizens.” They have an “equal right to liberty—to the enjoyment and security of home and family—and of a good name and character as white men; so, to all the rights of conscience—to read, write, and print—to speak, teach, and debate—to preach, and worship God according to its dictates—their title as the same as that of white men.” In the 1840s and 1850s, northern Blacks gained rights through agitation, legislation, and court decisions.

At the end of the 1851 Columbus convention, calls for removal of the Fugitive Slave Law did not come at the top of the list for the delegates as they assembled their resolves. The first resolution adopted was a clarion call for the elective franchise and a removal of the remnants of Black Laws from the statute books. The year before, at another state convention in Columbus, delegates decried how Blacks in the North were “only nominally free.” The right to vote was labeled a “birthright.” This was the focal point of William Day’s and Charles Langston’s powerful closing address at the following year’s Convention: “Those of us, therefore, who were born in the United States, and reside in Ohio, are citizens of Ohio. If citizens of this state, entitled by the United States Constitution, to all the rights and immunities of citizens of the several states. The elective franchise being among these rights.” In 1852, in Cincinnati, the “rights and immunities of American citizens,” in particular, “native born American citizens,” were on the table for discussion. Black activists were constantly trying to reshape the national debate.

My classroom is just a stone’s throw from the courtyard of our historic chapel where Frederick Douglass delivered a commencement address at what was then Western Reserve College. Douglass’ 1854 address, later published as a pamphlet and sold widely in the North and Europe, was his first address on a college campus. Douglass chose not to provide the students and families in attendance with a jeremiad on the constitutional crises that was gripping the nation with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act just weeks before, or the ongoing controversy over fugitive slaves. Douglass had actually written widely on the Anthony Burns affair in Boston and had openly defended the killing of a deputy U.S. marshal in the city during a confrontation with abolitionists attempting to prevent Burns from being returned to slavery in Virginia. He was on record encouraging free Blacks to move to Kansas to help prevent the territory from becoming a slave state. Rather, at Reserve, Douglass focused on “Human rights,” to get the young audience to understand how the corrupting influence of slavery spread in the North through racist sentiments and laws that led to the belief in the innate inferiority of Black Americans. Douglass reminded the audience that all Americans stood “upon a common basis.” All “mankind” has the “same wants,” arising out a “common nature,” proclaimed Douglass. God “has no children whose rights may be safely trampled upon.” Douglass’ speech was a clarion call to the student body—all white at the time—to not become caught up in the standard racial prejudices of the day. Douglass emphatically declared that he was a “citizen” of the United States, but nonetheless, a citizen “rolling in the sin and shame of Slavery,” a reference to racial discrimination in the North.

Douglass’ invocation of citizenship at Western Reserve College, along with the wide-ranging discussion of the meanings and prerogatives of birthright citizenship at Black conventions throughout the 1850s, helped students see the long and complex story of the public meaning of section one of the Fourteenth Amendment. By the end of the decade, after the notorious Dred Scott decision was handed down in 1857, Ohio’s Black leaders, including John Mercer Langston, continued to hammer home the importance of birthright citizenship. In the “name of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the ancient policy of the Fathers of the Republic, the well-established doctrine that nativity gives citizenship” is what Black leaders wanted to keep in the forefront of people’s minds. “We are here, and here we intend to remain,” proclaimed Langston in closing his Cincinnati address. Black abolitionists kept the citizenship question at the forefront of politics in the late 1850s. 

As a teacher, the Black convention movement in the 1850s has helped me to broaden my story of the origins of the Civil War, especially the pitfalls to avoid when it comes to focusing too heavily on the controversy over slavery in the territories. The demand of antislavery activists for accused fugitives to be guaranteed a jury trial was an implicit recognition of Black citizenship. In addition, delegates to Black conventions throughout the decade pushed for more than mere due process rights in the face of attempts to enforce southern law in northern states. Just as there was a militant obstruction of the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law on northern soil, Black leaders were militant in their call for fuller measures of equality. They helped to develop the concept of birthright citizenship, a later hallmark of the Fourteenth Amendment, and passionately promoted the understanding that African Americans had a fundamental right to the equal protection of their natural rights by the government. There was nothing the white South feared more.

 

Further Reading

My students and I benefitted greatly from engaging with historian Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021). It is a must read for any teacher trying to bring the long history of civil rights into the classroom. Masur’s chapters on Ohio worked well in the classroom in conjunction with documents from Black conventions in the 1850s in Ohio that can be found on the Colored Conventions Project website. With my students I focused on the following gathering of Black abolitionists: 1849 Columbus, 1850 Columbus, 1851 Columbus, 1852 Cincinnati, and 1858 Cincinnati. 

Selections from Manisha Sinha’s comprehensive account of the abolitionist movement, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), provided much needed context for the students. I learned a great deal from legal scholar James W. Fox’s superb lengthy article, “The Constitution of Black Abolitionism.” Fox’s underappreciated scholarship fills a large hole in the discussion of antislavery constitutionalism. Historian H. Robert Baker’s article, “The Fugitive Slave Clause and the Antebellum Constitution,” Law and History Review 30 (no. 4, 2012) helped my students understand the operation of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Paul Finkelman’s article, “The Strange Career of Race Discrimination in Antebellum Ohio,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 55 (no. 2, 2004) was very helpful. See also Paul Finkelman, “Prelude to the Fourteenth Amendment: Black Legal Rights in the Antebellum North,” Rutgers Law Review 17 (no. 1, 1985-1986).

Eric Foner’s Gateway To Freedom: The Hidden History Of The Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), provided my students with an engaging overview of clandestine efforts in the antebellum period to escape from slavery. Selections from R. J. M. Blackett’s The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), Steven Lubet’s Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), and H. Robert Baker’s The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006) were also utilized.

In preparing to teach the class over the summer, I benefited from reading Van Gosse’s The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), along with Christopher James Bonner’s, Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). For a number of years now, James Oakes’ scholarship has informed my thinking about a host of topics, including issues of race and citizenship, antislavery politics, and the antislavery constitutionalism. Teachers should read Oakes’ The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021) along with The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). Oakes’ groundbreaking scholarship builds upon arguments first introduced by William Wiecek in his classic work, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

 

This article originally appeared in March 2023.

 

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Erik J. Chaput, Ph.D., teaches at Western Reserve Academy in Ohio and in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College. He received his doctorate in early American History from Syracuse University. He is the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (2013) and has edited multiple letter collections with historian Russell J. DeSimone on the Dorr Rebellion Project website. This is his fourth teaching article for Commonplace. His previous articles, including a piece on the 1864 Black Convention in Syracuse, can be found in the archive section.