Follow the tabloid pages of the National Police Gazette of the 1890s as they move from right to left across the screen of the microfilm reader until your neck is sore, past the vaudeville pinups with their substantial thighs (“girls in tights!”), past the tales of murder, hangings, deadly stampedes, train wrecks, floods, whippings, and factory yard brawls; women acting out, smoking cigars, or dressing as men; past the dudes, dandies, slims, sports, and cranks. Before the classified ads for marked cards, restored manhood, rubber goods, cabinet photos of couples In the Act, counterfeit greenbacks, loaded dice, photographs of fighting cocks (choose between Billy of Missouri, Big Jim, Old Katie, or Billy of California), opium habit cures, remedies for sexual weakness and shrunken organs (“O Weak Man Do Not Despair!”) there is a relatively new and novel feature of journalism: the sports pages. And though the tabloid would cover baseball, cycling, pedestrians, even strong men (and women) contests, even yachting, and would publish challenges from checkers players and glass eaters and pie eaters (“Dear Sir—I Joseph McGivney, having defeated all pie-eaters in Harlem, am looking for greater fame . . .”) and solo guitar players, sports truly meant one thing to the Police Gazette: the world of boxing.

It was boxing, and also Fistiana, and Pugilistica. The fights were bouts, but also battles, mills, and set-tos. A pugilist might be knocked out or “put to sleep.” They all had nicknames. The Nonpareil, the Corkscrew Kid, Little Chocolate, many Youngs and many Kids, and, of course, the Boston Strong Boy.

The country of Fistiana was large then: it was bounded by England and South Africa and Australia, with the United States as its center. Depending on varying degrees of legality and local support, the American scene was continually shifting as the decade progressed, and the fighters were on the move, riding the rails to box, or second, or witness bouts. But this scattered fight scene once had a hub, the first true center of the vortex: the city of New Orleans. To travel to this stretch of boxing history is to go south, and catch a glimpse of the sport’s modern version as it struggles to emerge. Here in New Orleans, bourgeois Victorian men preoccupied with virtue, order, and “scientific” sport will openly adopt and attempt to legitimize an unforgiving, lower-class pastime. They will briefly succeed in shedding pugilism’s seamy stigma, but the move from saloon backroom to refined athletic club to consumer spectacle will prove to be risky and tumultuous.

I. The Fistic Carnival

Start at the top: New Orleans, in its palmiest boxing days, circa 1892. It is the last night of the Fistic Carnival, three nights of championship bouts in stagnant early September, culminating in the Sullivan-Corbett heavyweight title fight. The host Olympic Club stands like a four-story ship with banners strung from gables, filling a long bywater block, bounded by Chartres and Royal, Montegut and Clouet. Every window is lit. Streetcars arrive constantly from Canal—the Levee and Barrack cars—and the streets around the club are clogged with hacks. There is the threat of rain, as always. Inside, in the rare quiet moments before the fight, is the clatter of telegraphs, and the sixty electric lights boasted of are spitting noise. When the referee, “Professor” John Duffy, steps into the ring, he receives a “deafening” ovation; he receives an ovation, in fact, before every bout. Duffy is presented with a silver punch bowl, in appreciation of his skill and rectitude. “Gentlemen, I am completely knocked out, or I would say something,” he replies.

The Fistic Carnival has driven the upcoming presidential election and Lizzie Borden and cholera from the front pages, and not only in the city of New Orleans. Instead this is news: trains have been arriving all week, specially booked Pullman cars, from as far away as Buffalo. The Illinois Central has advertised its special “Green Room” excursion from Chicago, a “solid vestibule train of sleepers” including “a special commissary car . . . serving lunches, wet goods, and cigars.” Twenty-five dollars roundtrip. The papers are full of minutiae. So this is also news: referee Duffy’s cousin Arthur has come to town. The gloves, ordered from New York, weigh five ounces each, and will be tan.

This night, September 7, 1892, is the pinnacle of the New Orleans fight scene, a scene that epitomized the struggles and the extremes of the sport during its four-and-a-half year reign. It is also a historic night, for the champion is dethroned. John L. Sullivan has reigned for ten years, but the younger James Corbett emerges victorious after twenty-one rounds. When the Boston Strong Boy goes down, referee Duffy is forced to pantomime the count, and the declaration of victory, amid the uproar. Corbett later recalled that belts, coats, hats, and canes, and flowers from buttonholes—the accoutrements of gentlemen—are all flung his way. A spectator wrote that the sound is louder than “a whole herd of Kansas cyclones.” A “hoarse roar,” is what another witness remembered. Despite the tumult, Duffy is able to quiet the crowd, and Sullivan staggers to the ropes and says:

Gentlemen, all I have got to say is this. I stayed once too long. I met a younger man, who proved too good for me, and I am done.

Or something like that.

 

Fights were reported in what John Kouwenhoven called the “syntax of momentum,” a peculiarly American and dynamic style of writing he found in an early transcontinental railroad guide. The headings will not slow you down; they are part of the rush. As the Sullivan-Corbett bout reels to its conclusion, here is how the New Orleans Times-Democrat titles its rounds:

SULLIVAN WAS SO THOROUGHLY SURPRISED CORBETT NOW BEGAN TO FORCE THE PACE CORBETT WAS THE AGGRESSOR HE FOUGHT WILDLY SULLIVAN STAGGERED BACK SULLIVAN STAGGERED BACK STORM OF BLOWS.

This is boxing as relentless progress, as the myth of late-nineteenth-century American life.

But no matter how progressive, or how much it seemed to reflect a vibrant spirit of competition, of Darwinian triumph and bootstrap optimism, boxing still suffered from an image problem. Though middle- and upper-class Victorian men took up the sport with enthusiasm in the era of rugged “manliness,” as both spectators and recreational participants, many still considered fistiana a “bloody and brutal” world. New Orleans, long a sporting city of “moral laxity” and leisure that worshipped the “gospel of play” (even on Sundays), was an ideal setting for boxing to thrive illegally in the years after the Civil War. The city would ultimately become the first in the country to attempt to truly legitimize pugilism by sanctioning it in 1890. Boxing’s proponents wanted more than mere legal acceptance, however; they sought respect, and hoped to sell the sport to civic leaders and to its myriad of local opponents (including the clergy and the Louisiana attorney general), and to rise above the sordid, illicit image that it evoked. Here in New Orleans is the knotty shift in boxing’s history from bareknuckled fighting (the London Prize Rules) to gloved fists (the Marquis of Queensberry Rules); from illegal rings furtively pitched by pine trees to reserved seating under electric lights in elegant athletic clubs.

It was these athletic clubs—a recent, nationwide phenomenon—that gave boxing its new veneer of credibility, and the Fistic Carnival’s Olympic Club epitomized the trend. “The Olympic Club is creating a respect for manly sports, a respect for honest, unafraid muscle,” the carnival program declared. Its officers moved in the city’s commercial elite: lumber, coal, cotton, real estate, insurance, “levee interests,” “capitalists.” President Charles Noel, for example, was a partner in a sawmill and sat on the city council, serving as committee chairman for streets and landings. The Olympic’s “renaissance style” clubhouse (costing $30,000) included a library and reading rooms, decorated with objects of art. Finances seemed unlimited—more improvements were planned, and purses were high. The club put $25,000 (the equivalent of nearly $500,000 today) toward the total $45,000 purse in Sullivan vs. Corbett.

New Orleans would support pugilism so long as its participants adhered to a number of conditions: professional fights must be held in chartered athletic clubs and conducted under police watch, $50 from each match goes to charity, there is no Sunday fighting, and no drinking among the spectators. And, of course, all fighters must now wear gloves. The image desired was one of order (a recurring word) and uprightness, of hatted men with canes calmly witnessing a “scientific” fight unfold. Boxing taught “manly, honest, straight up and down lessons on the right side of patriotism, of health, of decency and morality,” the Fistic Carnival program proclaimed.

Even the carnival’s heavyweight title fighters fit boxing’s redefinition scheme. The defeated John L. Sullivan, the bareknuckled champion of the sport’s illegal days, is a drunk; he has been arrested, he is a slugger of unlawful and hidden fields. James Corbett, the victor, is a bank clerk who appeals to the ladies with his pompadour, a “scientific” fighter, and a “gentleman.” “James J. Corbett lifted boxing out of the barroom slough,” Nat Fleischer later claimed. Corbett’s triumph in New Orleans seemed to seal the lofty claims of boxing’s proponents, and reflected the sport’s grand ascent.

 

To remain legal, though, boxing would need to sustain the support and esteem of the “better classes of people” who were patronizing the fights—the “doctors, lawyers, state and municipal officials and representative prominent business men, bankers and even public educators” who packed the stands at the Fistic Carnival. This precarious situation was exemplified by the attitude of the Daily Picayune, one of the city’s leading newspapers. Though its pre-carnival coverage enthusiastically filled nearly 20 percent of its Sunday content, an editorial that ran the next day made it clear the paper’s support of boxing was highly qualified. “The Picayune is by no means an advocate of prize fighting,” it began. But since the upcoming fights were “the most prolific and absorbing subject of conversation in this country,” no newspaper could “ignore their importance.” Only if the sport could maintain a sense of order and decorum, the editorial implied, would it retain the patronage of “men of culture, wealth and high social standing.”

New Orleans, perhaps, had something at stake as well. Successful boxing events like the carnival brought hoards of visitors, money, and much favorable national publicity to a city known to many as a haven of disease and debauchery. Strangely enough, in 1892, it appeared a sport long considered “bloody and brutal” would become respectable in the so-called “city of sin.”

II. Duffy’s Arena

The ubiquitous Professor John Duffy, the referee of the Fistic Carnival, becomes the hero of pugilism’s palatable new image. Duffy, who participated in every capacity within the New Orleans boxing world—as a fighter, instructor, saloon and arena keeper, matchmaker, and money holder—reached his fame as a leading referee, known for his unfailing honesty and skill; Duffy, in all reportage about him, is the pure embodiment of probity. An entire page of the Fistic Carnival program was devoted to his character, to his “reputation for ‘fair and square’ decisions.” The pro-boxing press, particularly the Police Gazette, promoted the figure of the “universally respected,” upright referee (others included Bat Masterson and “Honest John” Kelly) in its effort to sell the sport. Duffy’s sketched likeness appeared often, representing the new order of things.

 

He was the youngest son of Irish parents. An early fighting gig found Duffy as a warm-up act for John L. Sullivan’s touring vaudeville routine in 1884. At the age of twenty, at the St. Charles Theater, he sparred three rounds with Peter Burns: “toward the last, they warmed to their work,” the Daily Picayune reported, “and pounded each other’s faces until the gallery gods howled with joy.” Duffy continued to fight and spar (once against a fighter known as the Big Gas Man), then became an instructor of pugilism for the Southern Athletic Club, on the corner of Prytania and Washington. One of the new breed of athletic clubs, the Southern, like the Olympic, catered to an upscale crowd, boasting of its decorum and equipment, all dumbbells and horizontal bars and “lofty tumbling,” and athletic exhibitions for the ladies.

Duffy, “popular with the better element” and possessing “a host of friends,” soon opened his own boxing establishment: Duffy’s Arena, at 96 St. Charles Street. As the venture was not a chartered athletic club, fights could only be held there as exhibitions, with no prize money involved. The arena was also a saloon. Duffy often tended bar there, and boxing devotees from around the country, in town for the Fistic Carnival and other big events, congregated at his arena, “the ‘Mecca’ of all lovers of sport.”

In February 1893, six months after the carnival, Duffy arranged a routine, amateur glove contest. George Goodrich (a.k.a. Ed. Williams, as said his tattoo) was a mulatto steamboatman from Tennessee who purportedly frequented the Franklin Street dives. This was his first public ring fight; he had sparred before. Duffy matched him with his protégé, Joe Green, a bricklayer. The Daily Picayune would later describe the room where the fight was held as dark and dirty and little and close and bad smelling. Though both white and black spectators were allowed to view the matches they were admitted separately, and black patrons were relegated to the “dressing room,” the “unfinished space behind the stage, which had been separated from the stage by a flat of canvas, upon which had been painted rude pictures of Sullivan and Corbett,” through which a hole had been torn for viewing the fights. The Master of Ceremonies was George Queen (née McQuinn), the brother of a minstrel. A quartet’s singing began the night.

At some point in the second round, George Goodrich slipped on a patch of water (though the New York World reported it to be blood) while struggling to avoid a blow, fell, and broke his neck. No one yet realized that he was dead, though the rumors that he might be caused many patrons to quickly leave. Some of the men carried him to the dressing room and laid him on a pile of rags. Duffy was summoned, and he thought the man was fine and said so, adding that he would come around. “A crowd of bewildered and half frightened negroes and white men and boys crowded about the body of the fighter, and simply gazed at the prostrate man . . .” Then they tried to revive him. An ambulance arrived, the attendants held a candle over the body and declared the boxer dead while wax dripped onto his face.

“The grim reaper had played the part of time keeper and had counted the pugilist out,” the Times-Democrat melodramatically concluded.

SLIPPERY FOR MEN IN BOXING. HIS LEGS PARTED WIDELY, AN INERT PIECE OF HUMANITY. ENTERTAINMENT WAS RESUMED.

John Duffy, Joe Green, five accessories, and seven witnesses were booked at the First Precinct police station at 1:15 a.m. According to the record of arrests for the New Orleans Police Department, written in a fat scrawl and found at the city archives, Joe Green resided at 125 1/2 Perdido St., was colored, aged twenty, a slater, was single, and could read. He was charged with the murder of one Geo. Williams or Goodrich and remanded into custody without bail. The five additional accessories, whose occupations included laborer, porter, electrician, slater, and none, and the seven witnesses (all colored, ages fifteen to twenty-five) were held on a $250 bond each.

All pled not guilty at the arraignment. The Times-Democrat reported that when the Professor appeared before the judge, “his lips quivered visibly, and his cheeks assumed a fiery color foreign to them for many years. The hideous word ‘murderer’ was too much for John Duffy’s equanimity.” But the death was ruled an accident and all involved were acquitted of their charges in a well-attended hearing on February 8. “The prisoners were allowed to go and left the courtroom in cheerful spirits.” The dead pugilist, of whom “nothing was known” except that “he came from Nashville, and possessed a good voice,” was buried in potter’s field when no family came down from Tennessee to claim him.

Although Goodrich’s fatal bout was widely reported in New Orleans, the death of an unknown, black pugilist did not touch off any public clamor against boxing. Still, Duffy’s good name had been tainted, and the reportedly sordid conditions of his arena exposed. Complaints raised against his establishment by his landlady, Mrs. Bidwell, were divulged by the newspapers, complaints that included “exhibitions of his kids and other small boys.” Whether these were boxing exhibitions is not altogether clear; Duffy told his landlady that “it was an attraction by which he was enabled to sell a few drinks.” In addition, Mrs. Bidwell objected to the tobacco smoke and the noise and the “class of people attracted to the place.” Duffy survived all of this negative publicity, though he eventually moved his saloon, with his reputation more or less intact. He was, after all, acquitted.

III. The Death of Andy Bowen

The former lightweight champion of the South, Andy Bowen, was a local boxer who had worked as a blacksmith, and in cotton yards; he sparred on the levee in his early days, in between handling bananas; he worked the fruiters to Honduras. He was the unofficial champion of Annunciation Square. A “suspected mulatto,” in historian Jeffrey Sammons’s words, Bowen passed for white, was said to be of Irish-Spanish extraction, and purportedly denied all charges of colored blood, a denial that was accepted by the boxing community. To fight or witness bouts in the sanctioned, upper-class athletic clubs of New Orleans, which usually adhered to segregation practices soon to be institutionalized, one would have to be white. Reading the coverage of the local fight scene, it also becomes clear that the consummate boxer is implicitly Caucasian—note, for example, a description of heavyweight champion James Corbett: “CORBETT, TALL, BROAD-SHOULDERED and whiter in the pale rays of the electric light than a statue of ivory, looked an ideal athlete.”

Indeed, New Orleans’ athletic clubs became exclusively white after George “Little Chocolate” Dixon’s victory over the white boxer Jack Skelly for the bantamweight title, on the second night of the 1892 Fistic Carnival. This was the only night the host Olympic Club allowed black spectators, setting aside seven hundred seats in the upper gallery. Reaction to this interracial bout, and Dixon’s victory, made news. “The colored people on the levees are so triumphant over the victory of the negro (Dixon) last night that they are loudly proclaiming the superiority of their race, to the great scandal of the whites, who declare that they should not be encouraged to entertain even feelings of equality, much less of superiority,” the New York Herald opined. “They will become brutally insolent, and frequent and fatal collisions will be inevitable,” the Daily States (a local paper founded by a zealous Confederate major) editorialized. But hints of racial unrest are few in the coverage of the carnival and its aftermath; they do not conform to boxing’s claims to orderliness, and are generally missing from news accounts. Nevertheless, no black boxers would fight at the Olympic Club after that night.

Andy Bowen was a fixture of the New Orleans fight scene since its inception, and John Duffy often served as his referee. On December 14, 1894, Bowen lost an eighteen-round bout at the Auditorium Athletic Club to Kid Lavigne, the “Saginaw Kid.” Duffy, once again the referee, would later say that Bowen was not himself before his match, that he did not pay close attention to the usual details, and his enthusiasm was uncharacteristically low. The fight itself was increasingly one sided. In the first round, “Bowen’s left found a way to the nose, but failed to create much damage,” a harbinger of his weak showing; later “when he began working his arms like windmills his friends knew that he was gone.” In the last rounds of the fight “Lavigne did almost as he pleased with Bowen, though the latter would rally occasionally and land a rib-roaster. He had a habit of grunting pretty loud during the latter part of the fight, each time Lavigne landed a telling blow in the stomach, which he did pretty often, and the crowd laughed, which of course rattled him all the more.” In the eighteenth round, Bowen “staggered around like a drunken man,” clinched continually to save himself, and tried to avoid Lavigne’s blows. A right caught him in the jaw, though, and Bowen fell back and “his head hit the wooden floor with a thud which could have been heard a block away.” The ring, as it turned out, was not padded; it was simply wooden planks, with a canvas tarp stretched across the top.

In the early coverage of the fight, Bowen’s condition was reported to be improving, though he had not regained consciousness and “since the knock-out [had] not spoken a word.” Pokorny’s shoes ran their usual ad, in which the winning fighter was revealed to be wearing the local manufacturer’s boxing footwear (made from “the finest kangaroo”): “They stood him in good stead and carried him bravely to victory.”

 

No one seemed to anticipate that Bowen might die. His fall was compared to Jim Hall’s (who happened to be seconding Lavigne this night) the previous year, from which the fighter recovered. It was recollected that the Australian Young Griffo was once unconscious for four hours following a bout. Bowen showed signs of life in his dressing room—his hands continued to work, as if fending off opponents or delivering blows, and this was seen as a “favorable omen.” He vomited up undigested peas. Doctors administered whiskey, which raised his pulse rate from thirty-two to seventy. An ambulance was summoned, but fears that a hospital admittance might create negative publicity for the sport kept him from there. In one report, Bowen was passed through a hospital on his way home; in another, the unconscious pugilist was dispatched straight to his small house on Thalia Street; in both, his wife, Mathilde, waited anxiously.

Bowen lingered for several hours while a crowd gathered outside his gate. His wife implored him to speak to her, but he died close to dawn without having regained consciousness. “There was no further need of time-keeping for poor Andy,” the Picayune declared.

“PUT TO SLEEP” FOR ALL TIME THE FIGHT WAS TO A FINISH

The principal fight participants were brought in to the Tenth Precinct station while Bowen was still unconscious. Confident that the boxer would recover, “the prisoners took their arrest lightly, singing, joking and laughing over the style of work they would be put to if sent to the penitentiary.” At 2:45 a.m. Duffy was added to the group. After Bowen’s death became known, George “Kid” Lavigne was charged with his murder at 8:30 a.m., and held on a $10,000 bond; Duffy and six others were booked as accessories and held on $5,000 bonds. The group sent a telegram of condolence to Bowen’s wife, proclaiming that “no one regrets this fatal termination more than we do, and we hearby extend you our deepest sympathy in your bereavement.” They also made it clear they believed the wooden floor to be the culprit, not Lavigne’s fist. Indeed, the city coroner determined that Bowen’s death was accidental, caused by a concussion of the brain, and blamed on the hard floor; local newspapers published detailed autopsy accounts. Bowen’s autopsy is entered in the Coroner’s Office:—Record of Views (“Occupation: pugilist . . . Time in the City: Life”). The prisoners were eventually released.

There was no shortage of opinion over the cause of Andy Bowen’s death. Most held the unpadded floor responsible. (It was reported that Bowen had passed the club on a day prior to the fight and noted the lack of padding and thought it insignificant.) Some blamed Duffy for not stopping the one-sided affair, particularly the Daily Item: “[T]he referee and not the other principal is the person responsible to God and man for Andy Bowen’s death.” Duffy agreed that the fight should have ended sooner, but stated that Bowen’s seconds should have “thrown up the sponge,” and that he had no power to tell them to do so.

Duffy (among many) felt that Bowen was out of sorts from the get-go, and the fact that he vomited up undigested peas pointed to indigestion, thus causing his lackluster performance in the ring. This was a common argument that followed many boxing deaths at the time; one pugilist’s death, for example, was blamed on the “hearty dinner [eaten] shortly before he entered the ring” and its “resultant indigestion.” In another, a fighter’s “meningeal hemorrhage” was “occasioned by undue mental excitement and over exertion.” The ultimate failure of medical science to save lives within the pretense of a “scientific” sport threatened boxing’s progressive image.

Proponents of late-nineteenth-century boxing often found themselves defending their sport by blaming deaths on external causes, by citing the numerous accidents in the newer sport of football, and, though it contradicted a penchant for order, by pointing to the inherently accidental nature of their world at large. “Don’t men die by drowning and falling off of housetops every day?” Duffy asked. “A man at the opera, or dancing with his sweetheart, might fall and meet the same fate if the same combination of circumstances arose . . . Accidents are a part of the world, and death is waiting for all men as surely in one place as in another.” But Duffy was also a pallbearer, and despite his practical philosophy, lamented, “[N]ow I’m awful blue about this. Really I don’t think I could find words to say just how badly I feel, first for Andy and then for the women he leaves down here behind him.” He was also reported to remark, “[E]ver since the said affair happened I am literally all broke up.”

Despite his random and senseless death, Victorian visions of order still persisted in the press coverage of Bowen: his tidy cottage, where pictures hung neatly on the wall. That he was a family man, and lived an upright life, never drinking or gambling to excess; all these were published facts. But boxing’s image in New Orleans was decimated. Even at its height, the sport’s opponents had continued their crusade, particularly in the courts. Now the outcry over the popular Bowen’s death was enough to undo boxing in the city. “The killing of Andrew Bowen in a prize fight in this city Friday night should sound the death knell here of that bloody brutality misnamed ‘sport,'” the Daily Picayune declared. “The fistic carnival is over. It ended in a murder.” Bowen’s fatal bout would be the last legal, professional fight in New Orleans in the nineteenth century.

IV. Duffy’s Last Fights

John Duffy tried to revive the spirit of pugilism in early 1897, when he matched Joe Green (the black bricklayer who had been involved in the fatal fight at his saloon in ’93) against the “Terrible Swede” in a clandestine match on the banks of the Mississippi, somewhere upriver and out of Orleans Parish. About a hundred men paid $5 and boarded a steamboat (the Mabel Comeaux); when the bread and sardines ran out, many “tried to drown their hunger at the boat’s bar, and several succeeded in loading their stomachs with alcoholics.” At the first stop in Jefferson Parish, the sheriff would not allow the match to take place. Late in the day, the boat finally pulled onto the banks of Morgan’s Place, St. Charles Parish. Having no time to construct a ring, Duffy ordered the men to shake hands and fight. In the third round, a stranger appeared, “his face red with anger,” and demanded that the fight be stopped, reportedly blustering “the idea of niggers fighting white men. Why, if that darned scoundrel would beat that white boy the niggers would never stop gloating over it, and as it is, we have enough trouble with them.” The stranger, Henry Long, galvanized a group of supporters and the fight was halted, and the sports headed back to the city “sorry that they ventured on the trip.”

That October, a twenty-round charity exhibition match to benefit yellow-fever victims was arranged, with Duffy as referee, at the Tulane Athletic Club; no prize money was involved. Two amateurs, John Cummings, a motorman, and Walter Griffin, a clerk at the Illinois Central Depot, were matched to fight under a police watch. A speaker told the crowd that they “could not expect brutality and heavy slugging” and called for “perfect order” from the sports. Cummings received a rough beating, though he was still taking punches and staying on his feet or on his knees. Someone in the crowd cried out to stop the fight, but it continued until Cummings was knocked out; he died within hours from “many blows to the head, which probably ruptured a blood vessel.”

This was the third death on Duffy’s watch, and again he came under fire for not ending the bout sooner, but the referee later said that he “never thought for a moment such an end would come to the battle.” “I could not have afforded to have the mill continue, if I had dreamed of such a termination,” he explained. “Referee Duffy Would Rather Have Set Fire to the Building Than Forced the Fight to Death” the Picayune proclaimed. Griffin was charged with manslaughter but released since the fight had been under police regulations; he then promised his mother that he would never fight again, and said that he “would never get over the disaster which befell Cummings.”

It was clear the spirit of pugilism had left New Orleans. Indeed, professional boxing had already taken hold elsewhere: in Chicago and Buffalo and other cities, and, especially, in the athletic clubs of Manhattan, and the arenas of Coney Island. Title fights sprang up in random western outposts, like Carson City, Nevada, and across the Rio Grande from Texas. Rules and regulations were refined; weight divisions solidified. By the close of the century, the sport had been “absorbed into the hegemonic culture,” according to Elliott Gorn, as middle- and upper-class men, feeling an increased sense of powerlessness in the “tightly controlled” workplace and perceiving “the artificiality and stuffiness of modern life,” lived vicariously through the heroics of working-class, celebrity pugilists. By the 1920s, boxing would not only become an acceptable, even wildly popular, spectator sport for the bourgeoisie, it was big business as well, and fight promotion was a profession in its own right. All of these changes in the modern Queensberry realm of pugilism first publicly emerged, and took tenuous steps, in New Orleans.

 

John Duffy would not live to see his sport evolve; he took to bed in July 1898, and lay there for six weeks before he died, of cirrhosis, at the age of thirty-four. Captain Lee of Fire Company No. 5 tended to him in his sickness at his house on Julia Street (Duffy’s wife Kate had died in April of tuberculosis). His four children were sent to St. Michael’s Convent. Duffy had been supporting himself and his family with a job as lieutenant of night inspectors at the customs house; at the time of his death, the Professor’s friends (ninety-six of them) had been planning a benefit for him, which was then carried on for his children. “Even in his last days he was fully conscious of his approaching end, and thought of the famous ringside battles at which he had officiated.” Former mayor John Fitzpatrick, who had called for an end to boxing in New Orleans when Bowen died, was a pallbearer. At John Duffy’s funeral “there were men from all walks in life who had been his friends and admirers when he was at the zenith of his glory.”

 

Further Reading: For overviews of the New Orleans fight scene see Jeffrey T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana, 1990); Dale A. Somers, The Rise of Sports in New Orleans, 1850-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1972); William H. Adams, “New Orleans as the National Center of Boxing,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 39 (1956). Nineteenth-century boxing in the U.S. is explored in Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, 1986) and Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His America (Urbana, 1988). Gail Bederman’s Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917  (Chicago, 1995) uses the boxer Jack Johnson to explore issues of masculinity and race. For boxing history reference, see James B. Roberts and Alexander G. Skutt, The Boxing Register: International Boxing Hall of Fame Official Record Book (Ithaca, 1999) and Nat Fleischer and Sam Andre, A Pictorial History of Boxing (New York, 1959).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.2 (January, 2003).

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Melissa Haley is a manuscript archivist at the New-York Historical Society. Her ancestor, Patrick “Patsy” Haley, fought professionally as a featherweight in the late 1890s.

Black shadow politics in the antebellum North

On July 22, 1832, the trustees of Philadelphia’s “First Colored Wesley” church voted on an issue roiling the congregation each and every Sunday: the segregated seating of men and women. Hoping to reduce crowding outside the church, where men anxiously waited for women after services, Wesley trustees put forth a motion “that the women and men sit together for a time to try whether it will not do much towards keeping a mob from before the church.” Congregants and trustees had already debated the matter for a month, and so the decision to adopt the resolution was rendered with all the seriousness of a Supreme Court ruling. By a vote of five to four, church trustees would experiment with mixed seating.

While this vote offers an exciting range of interpretive possibilities—particularly about gender relations in early black churches—it also offers a window into the world of black shadow politics in the antebellum urban North. Although shadow politics has traditionally been defined by sociologists as an alternate universe of political activity (a liminal space in which powerless people act in place of and in conscious opposition to prevailing political practices and norms), I would like to extend its meaning to include the creation of parallel black political practices that both challenged racialized American political institutions and, at the same time, lay claim to core elements of those institutions. From the first freedoms of postrevolutionary society to antebellum disfranchisement in virtually every northern state, black communities created a vibrant universe of political activities that existed just below the more formal stratum of mainstream civic politics. In community organizations, educational institutions, and autonomous churches, free blacks practiced politics in ways that both shaped their daily lives and echoed the practice of democracy in the broader civic culture. Particularly in Philadelphia, where northern emancipation took root earliest and the free black community grew fastest (from under two thousand in the 1780s to nearly twenty thousand by the 1850s), localized voting, electioneering, and constitution making were a constant part of African Americans’ autonomous political culture. And no single institution offers a better perspective on this black shadow politics in Philadelphia than the church. In this autonomous space where African Americans exerted control, free black men and even women exercised rights unknown to them in the broader civic sphere—voting on referenda, running ballot initiatives on a wide array of issues, and electing leaders. Such elections, it should be said, were no isolated affairs. In electing specific church leaders, African Americans were also often selecting figures who could influence elections in the wider community through carefully placed campaign pledges.

Of course, questions abound about black shadow politics and voting rituals in Philadelphia churches. Did black suffrage in these sacred spaces exemplify a syncretic brand of political behavior (one that melded African notions of communalist politics and values with those of Anglo American-style written constitutionalism and individual voting rights)? Or did it signify a commitment to autonomy and self-determination? Does this emerging faith in the ballot among northern urban black churchgoers help explain the evolution of African American democratic practice itself? Finally, where does Philadelphia’s record of black church voting fit in antebellum political history writ large?

 

These questions first struck me a few years ago in the basement of Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel Church, where a magnificent example of black shadow politics sits in the back of the Richard Allen Museum. In a small protective case, a nineteenth-century voting machine sits rather majestically amid other examples of Bethelites’ political activism (a picture showing AME bishops awaiting the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education hangs nearby). The wooden machine affixed images of candidates for church office above a row of slots. Congregants voted by placing marbles in the hole of the candidate of their choice. Although the machine may have been a product of mid- to late-nineteenth-century church life, it fits clearly into a long history of voting at Bethel—a history dating to the church’s eighteenth-century beginnings. Probing other Philadelphia church archives, I discovered a plethora of examples of black church voting during the early republic.

This stratum of political activity does not rate much coverage in the scholarly literature of either black institution building or American civic politics. Indeed, despite the proliferation of scholarly work on northern emancipation and early black freedom struggles, northern black voting itself remains a marginalized topic. Part of this has to do with the limited amount of primary source material on black votes in the civic realm. Julie Winch’s magnificent biography of Pennsylvania black leader James Forten delves into every possible aspect of his financial life and social relations—yet Winch herself still doesn’t know if perhaps the wealthiest black man in early national America ever cast a vote in any local, state, or national election! Of course, there is scattered evidence that blacks voted in parts of the North and even the South. But the paucity of black civic electioneering material explains why historians such as Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin have declared that free blacks were essentially invisible political actors in the North.

In fact, early northern black church voting may be the missing link in our understanding of black political consciousness and civic mindedness. The beginnings of a modern black politics occurred in autonomous (and quasi-autonomous) northern churches, where the practice of politics—holding elections and referenda, establishing polling places, and running for office—occurred unimpeded. Black congregants and communities believed that grass-roots voting conferred both real and symbolic power—real in that it allowed African Americans to exert control over their internal operations, symbolic in that the franchise was part and parcel of a larger struggle for black citizenship and equality. If African Americans could demonstrate a nuanced understanding of political practice in their own churches, then they could argue for inclusion in civic elections locally and nationally. Black leader Robert Purvis made this link clear in his 1838 “Appeal of Forty Thousand,” which adamantly objected to disfranchisement of Pennsylvania’s black population that same year. Declaring that “we are citizens,” Purvis pointed to the growth of educational and religious institutions throughout the state of Pennsylvania as evidence of blacks’ fitness for freedom. “Our country has no reason to be ashamed of us,” he thundered, for “we are confident [black institutionalism shows that] our condition will compare favorably” with any other group.

 

In this sense, political activity in northern black churches was not invisible. Though believing in autonomy and/or outright independence from white religious authorities, black leaders and congregants also displayed their political practices before the public at large as a demonstration of the rights of citizenship. The plethora of written constitutions—and their references to internal electoral procedures—produced by black churches and reform organizations before the 1830s is a stunning testament to the hope that northern whites would recognize in black political conduct a fitness for freedom.

What forms did early black church elections take? The historian Elsa Barkley Brown has usefully divided postbellum southern black political activity into internal and external modes—those that relate to inward and outward political contexts, respectively. Black Philadelphia’s internal world of church politics occurred in a nonpartisan political context—there is little evidence of party labels infiltrating church life (though clearly many early black northerners favored antislavery Federalists and Whigs). Politics and electioneering operated at the grass-roots level and (for the most part) in the absence of white political figures, parties, and institutions. In terms of mechanics, shadow politics revolved around three main types of elections or votes: referenda, which dealt with specific issues of concern to the entire congregation (disposal of church property, for example); trustee and ministerial elections, which allowed congregants to establish the layers of church leadership on an annual basis; and trustee votes, which revolved around the daily business of church operations (assigning acting committees to deal with various problems, paying bills, determining and interpreting church procedure).

Wesley Church’s 1832 vote on integrated pews was an example of the third type of internal initiative: trustee votes. Here, elected church officials determined policies and procedures in accordance with the religious body’s constitution and/or act of incorporation. In this realm of political activity, representative democracy, and not grass-roots voting, determined day-to-day church affairs. Yet this seemingly republican-style politics did depend on broader congregational concerns, with a new slate of annual elections occurring in most Philadelphia churches. In addition, black church trustees functioned very much in the tradition of African elders, who took the pulse of the community before rendering decisions.

In October 1828, Mother Bethel offered a terrific example of the first type of vote: a referendum open to the whole congregation. After a running dispute with Wesley (whose leadership was comprised of Bethel dissidents) had left church coffers low, Bethel trustees put forth a referendum on selling extraneous church property, excluding the main church, key rentals, and burial grounds. On October 15 of that year, the vote occurred, with trustees stipulating that the church constitution required that “two thirds of the male members over 21” must vote for the resolution to pass. Judges and witnesses certified the election’s constitutionality. Moreover, each of the over one hundred voters—including over sixty people who had to sign with an X—”testif[ied] our full and free consent” in voting for the measure (which easily passed).

In many ways the second initiative—elections of church leadership—offers the most consistent view of black ballot initiatives. Each of Philadelphia’s major independent black churches held regular votes for church leadership by the early nineteenth century. First African Presbyterian, formed in 1807 by a former Tennessee slave named John Gloucester, held perhaps the most electrifying series of congregational votes between 1822 and 1823, when members were asked to determine the fate of ministerial succession. Founder Gloucester’s untimely death in 1822 left the growing church (numbering over three hundred members) bereft of leadership. Congregants debated two possible candidates for minister: Gloucester’s son Jeremiah, a youthful but promising preacher, and Samuel Cornish, a member of the New York presbytery who would soon become coeditor of Freedom’s Journal, the first African American-run newspaper. At a meeting presided over by a white minister (African Presbyterian remained within the fold of the synod, and white preachers took a special interest in the fate of this inaugural black Presbyterian church) on May 8, 1822, congregants voted first on whether or not to postpone this pivotal election. According to William Catto, the first historian of African Presbyterian and a well-known black preacher at the church, the motion to postpone was defeated by a vote of seventy-nine to fifty-three. Deliberations on the new minister then continued. After Cornish’s name had been forwarded as the prospective leader, congregants “proceeded to ballot” for and against him. Cornish’s candidacy was approved by a vote of seventy-eight to forty-eight.

The matter did not end there, however. “To say that this election passed off peaceably,” Catto later reported, “would be more than I can venture to affirm.” For before Cornish was officially offered the ministry by the Presbyterian Church, “warm opposition” among African Presbyterian dissenters made its way to the Presbytery meeting in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. A committee of white ministers visited the church in the fall of 1822, recommending Cornish’s ascension to minister—but a further “minority report” by church dissenters against this action prompted yet more consideration of the matter. Following work by another committee of white ministers in 1823, anti-Cornish congregants offered a petition to Presbyterian leaders “signed by 75 persons…requesting” the formation of their own church. Though Catto argued that fealty to Gloucester’s memory prompted dissenters to oppose Cornish (and nothing more), he was saddened by this result.

Ultimately, the church divided into first and second African Presbyterian congregations (yet a third branch soon formed as well). Despite outward appearances of unruly black congregants, white church officials were impressed with the solemnity and conduct of black voters. No mobbing or rioting had occurred, and congregants agreed to a most American political solution: the creation of different congregations. In fact, white officials celebrated black democracy. “Having heard the parties fully,” one Presbyterian church report declared, “and [having] maturely deliberated on all circumstances of the case…this Presbytery are fully satisfied that the parties which have existed in the first African church are of such a nature that further attempt to reconcile them are in expedient…” Although the formation of the second American party system was still a few years away, the use of “parties” to describe black church disagreements is interesting. White officials seemed to recognize the legitimacy of black differences as well as the utility of “parties” to mediate them. Or as William Catto put it, “as it is in civil communities, so it is in religious ones.” Translation: politics was inevitable, whether in American civil society or sacred institutions. Another translation: African Americans were no different from white citizens. Indeed, while Catto bemoaned the breakup of a sanctified community of God, he also made clear that African Americans understood democratic practice. Writing in 1857, he was perhaps thinking of the lessons such black shadow politics held for white legislators who continued to oppose black re-enfranchisement in Pennsylvania.

A congregational vote over ministerial succession was one thing; annual elections of church leaders were quite another, for they represent a nuts-and-bolts view of black shadow politics. Although not a black mainline church, First Colored Wesley provides the best and most consistent records of black voting behavior in the 1820s and 1830s. Formed in June of 1820 by disgruntled Bethel members who felt that Richard Allen and AME trustees operated with an iron fist and closed books, they established an independent branch of the black Methodist Church—one with an eye towards maximizing democratic practice. Account books and voting records would be open; rotation of trustees, encouraged; affiliation to regional and national Methodist groups, changing depending on terms (the church became part of the New York City AME Zion Connection before coming back into the fold of the white-controlled Methodist Episcopal Church). Wesley held trustee elections annually on the first Thursday after Easter. According to church minute books, a committee of three trustees was appointed to “nominate candidates for [the next] trustee” elections. Like Senators, trustees ran for office on a rotating basis so that new faces would be represented every few years. The elections themselves required further appointments: an election chair, two or three judges at the “polling place” (the church), a secretary to record all the votes. In most of Wesley’s elections, a slate of at least six candidates ran for trustee positions, with the top four vote-getters securing office. After elections were held, trustees then sorted themselves into various offices, including president, vice president, and secretary. Vote totals could fluctuate but were often quite impressive. In April 1828, 91 male congregants voted for a slate of ten candidates. By 1840, over 130 congregants cast votes in annual elections for six or eight candidates. These numbers correlated to perhaps half of Wesley’s male church members.

There was, then, rather widespread male suffrage in Wesley church. By the 1820s, other Philadelphia churches held similarly broad-based votes. Males over twenty-one in good standing for at least a year could vote at Bethel, First African Presbyterian, and First Colored Wesley. In the 1828 referendum on Bethel church property, laborers voted alongside master chimney sweeps and black gentleman.

What about women? Women did not have explicit voting rights according to church constitutions. Yet in key instances they either voted or were considered part of the congregational electorate. In 1807, Mother Bethel congregants—including women—voted unanimously to pass the African Supplement, a document guaranteeing black sovereignty over the church. The vote followed the advice of white lawyers who pointed out that Bethel could overturn a decade-old incorporation act that gave white Methodists control over black church property. Black self-determination would occur only if two-thirds of the entire congregation agreed to the new document. “Both male and female,” Allen proudly asserted in his posthumously published autobiography, supported the African Supplement. Bethel women thus bolstered the church’s political stand against white officials. The 1807 referendum was cited later in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision guaranteeing Bethel’s independence.

While the passage of the African Supplement remains the most striking example of women’s participation in early church politics, it is not the only such case. Indeed, roughly a dozen women had voted with their feet by joining Richard Allen’s departure of segregated St. George’s Methodist Church in the early 1790s. In 1815, women joined male congregants to again confront white preachers who wanted to take hold of Bethel’s pulpit. At Bethel, women were not silent actors.

In fact, these examples of male-female congregational mobilization raise a key question (one that scholars of the postbellum South are more familiar with): were black women consulted by men before casting church votes? Clearly, women were considered key parts of the congregational political and social world. Richard Allen’s second wife Sarah, a former Virginia slave, was often mentioned in early church histories as a helpmate who bolstered the respectable image of the new black church and its leaders in the public realm. This made her a sort of black republican mother, one whose selfless contributions to church success flowed from her belief in the greater good. But women often did more than bolster men’s image. Wesley women raised nearly 40 percent of the total money required to purchase a new church graveyard in the summer of 1838. And at both Bethel and Wesley, as at other black churches, women formed and staffed benevolent and burial-aid societies. Given their fundraising and reform activities, it is not hard to imagine women playing consulting roles with male trustees and voters.

While there are many more examples, it should be clear that Philadelphia’s black churches created a lively political arena—what historian E. Franklin Frazier in a later period referred to as a political “nation within a nation.” What does this shadow political world tell us about broader trends and issues? First, northern black church politics seemed to be defined by two mutually reinforcing, rather than diametrically opposed, sensibilities. On the one hand, black congregants sought to build autonomous power structures that guided Philadelphia’s growing free black community through the vicissitudes of freedom. Political activities at the church level occurred in a safe haven, so to speak, where autonomy and communitarian values flourished. Indeed, one might say that black shadow politics was merely part of a broader history of African American decision making. In reform institutions, autonomous businesses, and churches, African Americans exercised their ability to render decisions that framed their daily lives. This is an important point that should never be lost in any study of black politics during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

On the other hand, though, the creation of that black political world was aimed very much at influencing the American public—that is, legitimizing African Americans in the civic realm as freeman and free-women who understood both the ideals and practice of democracy. A strong community base, in other words, facilitated not merely the retention of traditional ways of understanding the world (communitarianism) but free blacks’ maturing understanding of American democracy itself. In this sense, historians C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya’s famous notion that black church life flowed exclusively from an African-centered “sacred cosmos” needs revision.

Indeed, northern black church politics was not so much a different world as it was a different arena for what Americans everywhere were doing in the early nineteenth century—holding elections, drafting constitutions, using power when and how they could. Black congregants running for church office as well as those voting in church elections believed they were enacting freedom. It was no mere performance to cast a ballot for church leaders; but there was a performative aspect to arriving at the church polls, saluting a black official who certified ballots, and awaiting official election results. The church, then, was a practical space where black men and women could conduct American-style politics in a manner that maximized democracy from below while also demonstrating fitness for freedom to those above. Here, historians of black politics can learn from literary and cultural scholars working on the ritualized nature of performance spaces (stages, marches, and so forth).

Similarly, northern black church elections allowed black congregants to perform the rituals of democracy unadorned. William Catto’s history of the African Presbyterian Church offered a peek into this world of shadow politics by describing how church voting actually occurred. After a committee of five church elders—who themselves were elected for office—met to determine the date and time of the vote for a new church leader, they moved that “the names of all persons entitled to a vote in the election be enrolled in a book, and each name called out as recorded, in order, and each person at liberty to vote as they may think most proper.” True, a white mediator in the form of a Presbyterian official did preside over some of these elections at this one church (it is not clear from the records whether white ministers were always present). Yet Catto highlighted not whites’ presence but blacks’ attention to political procedure—the roll call, tallying of votes, and fealty to a political process. Over a hundred people from the congregation had gathered to hear their names called—thus preventing fraud—after which they voted in a sanctioned event over the fate of the new minister (Catto does not say whether or not this was a secret ballot). Little wonder, then, that Catto’s son, Octavius, became a leading voting rights activist in Philadelphia following the Civil War. He was murdered in 1871 by a white tough who opposed black voting rights. Born in 1839, Octavius Catto lived his entire life as a disfranchised man; he survived only a year beyond Pennsylvania’s re-enfranchisement of black voters in 1870 (and then thanks only to the Fifteenth Amendment).

The second point concerns time frame and historiography. Black church voting in the urban North may ultimately point to the need for a new narrative of black politics. Rather than one that begins with formal disfranchisement in the North in the antebellum era, followed by the flowering of black electioneering in the postbellum South and then a second round of fin de siècle black disfranchisement, we might think instead of the ongoing reconstruction of American politics from the nation’s founding forward in both the emancipating North and slave South.

But the striking thing about the maturation of black shadow politics in the North is that it occurred precisely at the time whites grappled with the political meanings of the first emancipation. Though gradual and disappointing, the wave of first emancipation laws and constitutions appearing in the postrevolutionary North was very much the product of black protest—and very much exploited by black reformers into the nineteenth century. For Richard Allen, James Forten, and Robert Purvis—black Pennsylvanians, all of whom participated in church and institutional politics—blacks would indeed grow from political underlings in need of white oversight to independent citizens. When white citizens in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and other northern locales realized that African Americans were mobilizing beneath and alongside them as citizens (and not acting as marginalized subjects), they balked, rioted, and ultimately plotted black civic expulsion. 

Read this way, early black political history emerges not in reaction to disfranchisement but as the cause of it. Pennsylvania’s disfranchisement in 1838 was in a very real sense a reaction to an emerging black political order that understood the dictates and practice of democracy. It is not surprising, then, that black disfranchisement in Pennsylvania lasted until the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment—and that postbellum black Pennsylvanians called for a dual reconstruction of American political and social life (one which resulted in anti-black violence). There was, in short, no neat division between black political practices in northern churches and the wider political debate over black freedom. We need more histories that recapture the multivalent nature of black political conduct in the antebellum North as well as the post-Civil War South.

Happily, this is a story that scholars are beginning to take up. For now, we may say merely that free blacks in Philadelphia churches, like their colleagues elsewhere in the urban North, did not wait to be enfranchised or disfranchised. Rather, from the republic’s very beginning, they sought to practice politics where and when they could. They had faith in the ballot—and in themselves.

I would like to thank members of a SHEAR 2008 Conference panel on black politics and ideology in the Urban North, especially Elsa Barkley Brown, Erik Seeman, and Erica Ball, for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks to Dr. Jim Foley and to members of the audience—including James Stewart, Manisha Sinha, Reeve Huston, and Jeff Pasley—who offered great contextual comments and critiques.

Further Reading:

On free black political leaders in Philadelphia, see Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2008) and Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York, 2002). For a now-classic treatment of black political behavior after the Civil War, see Elsa Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom,” reprinted usefully as “The Labor of Politics” in Thomas Holt and Elsa Barkley Brown, eds., Major Problems in African American History, vol. 2 (New York, 2000). On antebellum politics generally (and blacks’ invisibility specifically), see Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin’s otherwise terrific Rude Republic: Americans and their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 2000). On black constitutionalism, see James Oliver Horton, “Weevils in the Wheat: Free Blacks and the Constitution, 1787-1860,” in This Constitution: A Bicentennial Chronicle, Fall 1985, published by Project ’87 of the American Political Science Association and American Historical Association. And on the use of the term “shadow politics,” see, for example, Elijah Anderson, “Black Shadow Politics in Midwestville: The Insiders, The Outsiders, and The Militant Young,” Sociological Inquiry (January 1972): 19-27.

 

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

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Richard S. Newman teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology and is the author, most recently, of Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (2008).

Or, why falling off a horse was worse than falling off the wagon in 1852

We dare not trust the helm to Pierce,
Though in truth he were a Saint,
When conflicts dark their “front unfold,”
We fear that he might—faint.

—”Campaign Song for 1852″

In May of 2004, President George W. Bush crashed his mountain bike on mile sixteen of a seventeen-mile ride at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, suffering extensive abrasions to his face, knees, and right hand. Press coverage of this event, like similar awkward incidents (colliding with a Scottish police officer when on a bike in Scotland in July of 2005 at the G8 summit, choking on a pretzel and losing consciousness while watching football on TV in January of 2002), was of limited duration. Late-night comedians moved on to other topics fairly quickly. Even Bush’s enemies greeted news of these misfortunes with quizzical wonderment more than glee. Friend and foe of W. alike, it seems, agreed that any number of the president’s actions signified more about his character than his ability to stay on a bike or remain conscious after a freak accident.

Not so for Bush’s ancestor Franklin Pierce, America’s fourteenth president. (Barbara Bush is descended from a second cousin of Pierce.) Like Bush, Pierce lost consciousness after an accident, and like Bush, Pierce proved unable to remain upright on his nonmotorized transport. But antebellum Americans didn’t laugh these mishaps off. Two unfortunate days during the U.S.-Mexican War would haunt Pierce’s future political career and presidency, in the process revealing much about the meanings of manhood in the decade before the Civil War. 

Pierce was a successful New Hampshire lawyer and former two-term U.S. Democratic representative and senator when Democrat James K. Polk provoked a war with Mexico in 1846. Like thousands of other Americans infused with the ideals of manifest destiny and convinced that Mexico deserved a “drubbing,” Pierce volunteered to serve in the war. He enlisted as a private but was promoted to colonel and then brigadier general (although he had no prior combat experience) because Polk was desperate for some officers without Whigish proclivities (the officer corps was as firmly Whig then as it appears to be Republican today). Pierce was part of the final dramatic campaign of the army, a two-hundred-mile trek under the direction of commanding general Winfield Scott from the port of Vera Cruz to Mexico City.

 

The army was nearing the capital when Pierce’s luck turned south. At the battle of Contreras on August 19, 1847, his horse reared, slamming Pierce into the pommel of his saddle. The resulting groin injury caused him to black out, and he fell from his horse, seriously injuring his knee in the process. His horse also stumbled and went down. Despite his injuries, Pierce somehow managed to mount another horse and fight through the evening, but the next morning, when leading troops into the battle of Churubusco, he twisted the injured knee on the uneven terrain, fainted again, and lay prostrate on the field until the end of the day.

Pierce issued a forthright and detailed explanation for the mishaps, which received wide newspaper coverage. His commanding officers vindicated his behavior and made it clear that a series of unfortunate injuries had understandably and temporarily incapacitated an officer of greater than usual stamina. Pierce’s standing within the army doesn’t seem to have been hurt by the incident. Indeed, it was Pierce’s officer friends from the exclusive Aztec Club who first proposed his name for president in 1852. None the less, the fainting incident became one of the key issues of the 1852 presidential campaign, which pitted Pierce against his old commander, Whig nominee Winfield Scott, a man who never fell off his horse (fig. 1). The Richmond Whig was typical in casting its support of Scott in the context of Pierce’s Mexico misadventures. Pierce’s “known propensity for ‘fainting’ on the eve of great conflicts” tended “to demonstrate to the people that he is not the man for the crisis.”

In an article titled “Presidential Qualifications” the New York Times focused primarily on the “alleged asphyxia, or fainting fit, which overtook Mr. Pierce at Contreras. It is highly important to know whether the fact is as rumor gives it. Did Mr. Pierce faint? Did he fall? And if so, why?” Was it “physical weakness” or “cowardice” that was “the cause of his being unhorsed”—or unmanned? “Not that weakness under such circumstances would be unpardonable,” the Times continued, somewhat insincerely, “considering that then, for the first time, the quiet country-lawyer stood face to face with horrid war; then first realized the nauseating smell of gunpowder; then first witnessed the struggle and the death of the soldier; and the profuse effusion of blood everywhere about him. We can very well understand, and understanding, forgive the momentary revulsion of nature at a scene so sickening, but coarser souls will make no allowances.”

The Democrats realized the importance of reassuring those “coarser souls” that Pierce was no coward. David W. Bartlett devoted an entire chapter of his 1852 campaign biography Life of General Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire to explaining Pierce’s fainting episode in Mexico, “because of the base attempt, on the part of some of his enemies, to traduce his military character.” In an attempt to put the literally below-the-belt accusations to rest, Bartlett quoted from eight separate testimonials, including General Scott’s official report, that the original fall was the fault of Pierce’s “restive” horse, that the battle was so strenuous that “many strong men fainted from sheer exhaustion,” and that two other general officers were not hurt as badly as Pierce but unlike Pierce, failed to continue fighting.

 

Old Bachelors are low in rate,
            Few days, few days;
They’d never populate a state:
            We’re going home.

The white house party’s must not drag,
            Few days, few days;
And what could BUCKS be but a STAG:
            We’re goin’ home.

—“There is the White House Yonder, or the Frémont Campaign Song” (1856)

The presidential election of 2016 has already been one for the history books. Extreme campaign promises, heated debates, and ad hominem attacks of all kinds have been its watchwords. And to be expected in our own time, where men and women compete equally for the nation’s top political spot, issues of sex and gender have frequently come to the fore. From Donald Trump’s outright sexist remarks about the physical appearance of female candidates, to the more subtly misogynist and insidious questioning of Hillary Clinton’s ability to lead, to the emergence of “Bernie Bros” and their outspoken feminist critics, this election season has proven nothing, if not that the battle of the sexes is still alive and well in the twenty-first century.

In the face of the frenzied fracas that has become the 2016 presidential election, we naturally look to the past to make sense of it all. After all, questions, or more properly allegations, aspersions, and downright attacks of a gendered and sexual nature have long fashioned the rhetoric of presidential elections. In 1804, for example, the Federalists accused Thomas Jefferson of an interracial sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings (proven correct, as turns it out), while in 1800 the Democratic-Republicans had attacked John Adams as possessing a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Those were fighting words in fighting days—the infamous Burr-Hamilton duel was four years away—but neither side suffered much the worse for their indiscretions. Since then, the personal lives of presidential candidates have been fair game for the public’s scrutiny and scorn alike.

Yet, across the pantheon of presidential elections in early America, few have stressed the themes of sex and gender so spicily as the heated contest of 1856. It was a year of many firsts. With the Whig Party more or less in the grave, the new Republican Party chose the bearded John C. Frémont of California as a virile representation of the new party’s antislavery convictions. Equally important to the Frémont campaign was his beautiful wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, the daughter of the legendary senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Meanwhile, the Democracy—the preferred name for the grand old party of Jefferson and Jackson—ran the aged bachelor James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. The first such presidential candidate never to have taken a vow of marriage, at sixty-five, he was also the oldest man to seek the office since George Washington.

A beard, a bachelor, and a bride. The combination could provide the tagline to a modern sitcom. But the presidential election of 1856 was no laughing matter, as an unprecedented sectional feeling of tumult pervaded the nation. In May 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina had caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Likewise, violent encounters between proslavery and antislavery forces racked the Kansas territory, so much so that the place had obtained a new moniker: “Bleeding Kansas.” In addition, a nativist coalition opposed to immigrants and Catholics offered a viable third-party challenge in the form of the widower and ex-president Millard Fillmore of New York (under the banner of the American Party or Know Nothings, as they were commonly called). Finally, social issues were insistently creeping like never before into the American consciousness, with cries of abolition, prohibition, and women’s suffrage being shouted in louder voices than ever before. In such an environment, for one man to be right, another necessarily had to be wrong.

 

With the political stakes that much higher in 1856, the nation was actually asking a much larger, gendered question: what makes for a “real man”? In the tumultuous political climate of 1856, the electorate of mostly white men could reach no easy consensus. Competing views of manhood, usefully delineated by the historian Amy Greenberg as “martial” and “restrained,” divided the nation along sectional lines. The more industrialized and urbanized North valued “restrained” forms of manhood, while the more agrarian, slave-holding South lionized “martial” manhood. These gendered differences routinely filtered into the political questions of the day. Conservatives derided pro-feminist proponents of women’s suffrage as “Aunt Nancy” men; abolitionists lambasted the destruction of black motherhood in the slave-holding South as morally evil; and filibusterers in Central America justified their conquest on racialized expressions of superior manhood. To a large degree, differences over gender had become as contentious as the traditional divisions engendered by sectional or party politics.

More than in previous presidential elections, political cartoons transformed visually the partisan battles of Democrats, Republicans, and Know Nothings into personal battles among fighting men. Usually distributed as standalone prints, the stunning visual imagery crystalized the meaning of political battles into pictorial, and very often gendered, terms. In “The Grand National Fight 2 Against 1 Fought on the 6th of Nov. 1856 for One Hundred Thousand Dollars,” Buchanan is depicted as a dignified but strong man, fully capable of knocking down his opponent Frémont in a match of fisticuffs (fig. 1). The caption above Buchanan reads “Look out now Young Mariposa for that hair on your face I will put in the ‘Right’ when you least expect it!” The allusion to Mariposa, a knock at the poor performance of the California State Militia in the so-called Mariposa War of 1850-1851, was meant as an attack on Frémont’s adopted state of California and implicitly on his manhood as well.

 

The reference in the political cartoon to Frémont’s full beard also hints how facial hair was a point of growing emphasis in the battle for manhood. As opposed to the fashionable look of trimmed facial hair sported by young men in cities, Frémont’s beard, full and flowing, displayed a more overtly macho look that recalled his many years of service as a soldier. His was a decidedly martial beard, as evidenced by one cartoon that pictures the former soldier mounted on horseback, his cap waving ostentatiously in the air (fig. 2). In contrast, the whiskerless Buchanan claimed the legacy of Andrew Jackson (who was also beardless), not only in his Unionist policies, but also in his invocations of a lack of facial hair as a marker of restrained manhood. The clean shave had long been the sign of gentility among the older generation, and the conservative and fastidious Buchanan followed suit. In 1856, voters would decide more than just which party represented their views. They would also select the man who best embodied their idealized version of manliness.

Given the Democratic Party’s association with continental expansion, empire, and general aggressive action abroad, there is a decided irony in the choice of the bachelor Buchanan as its candidate. For one thing, Buchanan lacked military experience. As compared to most of the previous candidates of the Democracy, such as Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Lewis Cass, and Franklin Pierce, Buchanan had never soldiered professionally. In this sense, he hearkened back to Martin Van Buren (the only Democratic president before the Civil War not to serve in the military), and who like Buchanan had been secretary of state to a previous president (Van Buren under Jackson, and Buchanan under Polk). For another, at age sixty-five, Old Buck (as his most common nickname implies) stood as a symbol more for the Democratic past than the Democratic future.

 

In contrast to the bachelor Buchanan and the widower Fillmore, the Republican Party standard-bearer boasted a beautiful bride in Jessie Benton Frémont. By 1856, Senator Benton’s daughter was already known nationally. In the lead-up to the Republican national convention, she promoted her husband’s candidacy among an extended network of political connections, most especially the influential former Jacksonian editor Francis Preston Blair. But the peculiar circumstances of the Frémonts’ marriage exposed the Republican frontrunner to a political liability; for, although Frémont was an Episcopalian, the couple had married in the Catholic Church in 1841. The Know Nothings and the Democrats seized on this fact and attempted to portray the candidate as enthralled to the Catholic power. So, too, might an asset become a liability, when Thomas Hart Benton threw his support to Buchanan over his own son-in-law. “I am above family and above self when the good of the Union is concerned,” Benton declared.

Indeed, the campaign propaganda on all sides made much of marital status (or the lack thereof). Especially noteworthy was the comparison of the domestic ideal of the marriage of John and Jessie Frémont with the pathetic state of Buchanan’s bachelorhood. For Republicans, the beautiful Jessie Benton Frémont presented a political asset to be publicly touted. In one cartoon, “The Candidates,” the two camps “Young America” and “Old Fogyism” correspond to their candidates, “Frémont and Our Jessie” and “Old Buck,” respectively. The dichotomy could not be starker: the Frémonts enjoying the pleasures of domestic life versus Buchanan suffering alone in bachelor’s quarters (fig. 3). In another cartoon, “A Serviceable Garment—or Reverie of a Bachelor,” the artist depicts Buchanan as a poor bachelor whose long history of public service seems more a liability than an asset (fig. 4).

 

The contrast between the marital bliss of the Frémonts and the sad state of Buchanan’s bachelorhood also received special treatment in campaign songs and at political rallies. Devout Republicans hummed along to such tunes as “We’ll Give ‘Em Jessie,” “Huzza, for the Railroad,” and “Frémont and Freedom.” Of the trio, the first song cleverly inverts the expected sequence of events, placing Jessie above her husband as the main attraction to potential voters. Yet, the themes of manhood did not lurk far behind. “In every word, in every deed / Such manliness appears, / Frémont’s the man to lead us on / To beat the Buchaneers.”

In the beautiful Jessie and the handsome John, the Republicans offered a virile, coupled alternative to Buchanan’s sterile, singular bachelorhood. Republican newspaper editors regularly made the comparison. Typical is a line from “A Northern Republican” in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator of October 1856: “The Democrats have no feminine element in their two-legged, walking platform; no Jessie to hurrah for; no Jessie to vitalize their manhood and kindle their enthusiasm! Theirs is a bachelor party, and it will be a bachelor Administration if they get it.” At Republican rallies, the party touted its candidate’s marital strengths. “No Bachelor for JESSIE: Free Hearts and Free Homes,” Republican Horace Greely’s New-York Tribune reported of one rally upstate. Through her marriage, her beauty, and her behind-the-scenes maneuvering, Jessie Benton Frémont helped the Republicans to expand their message beyond free soil, free labor, and free men, to include the equally critical themes of free hearts and free homes. And given that few images circulated of Jessie, songs and rallying cries were that much more important in the popular imagination.

With their invocations of “We’ll Give ‘Em Jessie,” the Republicans enjoyed a decided edge in the musical battle for the people’s hearts. For their part, the Democratic Party actually defended their bachelor candidate, though in the medium of print rather than song or cartoon. The party’s authorized campaign biography, written by the New York editor and slavery apologist Rushmore G. Horton, did not back away from its candidate’s bachelor status. Instead, Horton embraced Old Buck as an exemplar of restrained manhood and Democratic principles: “[Buchanan] is now about sixty-five years of age and has never married,” he wrote. “His family consists of himself and niece, whose … knowledge and sense, derived from books, study and reflection, peculiarly qualify her to grace and cheer the fireside of the Sage of Wheatland.”

 

Other Democratic supporters went further still. At the Democratic nominating convention in Cincinnati, the Buchanan supporter and future attorney general Jeremiah Black declared: “[A]s soon as James Buchanan was old enough to marry, he became wedded to the Constitution of his country, and the laws of Pennsylvania do not allow a man to have more than one wife.” Black’s tongue-in-cheek comment was both a subtle insult to Frémont’s own family’s checkered history of marriage—he was himself the product of an illegitimate union—and a clever transformation of a perceived weakness into a political strength. Nevertheless, that Buchanan could accurately claim to have once been engaged (way back in 1819 to Ann Coleman of Lancaster), only to have lost her to an early death, went a long way in legitimating his bachelorhood and manliness. The story, one not uncommon among nineteenth-century bachelors, appeared sporadically during the campaign.

In an era where the reading public increasingly wanted to know the full biography of its presidential candidates, the Democracy did its best to extol Old Buck’s many years of public service and strong record of party principles. Perhaps less known to the public was Buchanan’s many intimate male friendships. As the biographer Horton acknowledged, no friend was closer to Buchanan than the Democratic senator from Alabama and fellow bachelor, William Rufus King. To many modern ears, the close friendship of these two bachelors has raised suspicions of a homosexual relationship (a matter still debated by historians). Yet, in its own time, their friendship was widely interpreted as emblematic of the kinds of cross-sectional friendship that had once formed the best tradition of political cooperation, hearkening back to the days of the Founding Fathers.

As summer turned to fall, the three-way race of 1856 remained as uncertain as any in recent memory. This uncertainty is reflected in the colorful political cartoons that commonly depicted the presidential election in a mixture, or mise-en-scène, of competing images. In the pro-Buchanan cartoon “The Buck Chase of 1856,” the Philadelphia illustrator John L. Magee shows Fillmore fallen to the ground, Frémont straddling two horses that he can’t control, and Buchanan literally as a buck deer racing ahead to victory (fig. 5). The image gestures toward the view that the agile, restrained manhood of Buchanan had outrun the slow, martial manhood of Frémont and moribund showing by Fillmore. Yet the underlying and perhaps unintended message was clear enough: the presidency was up for grabs.

 

By October, the election had largely been secured for Buchanan, and much of the nation breathed a sigh of relief. One last cartoon is telling, though, for how it registered Buchanan as a man and promoted an essential political conservatism. In “The Morning After the Election—November 1856,” a dignified Buchanan is seated under a trellis of grape vines near a field of wheat (fig. 6). The reference to Buchanan’s idyllic country home, Wheatland, is notable, since he had spent the entirety of the campaign there in continuation of the model of every presidential candidate since George Washington. The political message of the cartoon resonated with a gendered undertone:
the restrained manhood of a bachelor Democrat had defeated the martial pose of a bearded Republican and a blind Know Nothing challenger.

As is often the case the morning after an election, many questions remained. Why was Buchanan elected? What role did his bachelorhood play? Had competing visions of masculinity influenced the outcome of the 1856 election? Why hadn’t the barbate candidate and his beautiful bride beaten out the hardened old bachelor? And, at the end of the day, was Jesse Benton Frémont an asset or a liability, and why? Historians and political scientists have long debated patterns, motivations, and loyalties among voters. As with all presidential elections, the final vote tallies are revealing. Buchanan won soundly in the Electoral College, taking 174 votes to Frémont’s 114 and Fillmore’s 8, with an overall 45.3 percent of the popular vote to Frémont’s 33.1 percent and Fillmore’s 21.6 percent in the electorally rich battle ground states of the so-called Border North—Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and especially Pennsylvania. In his home state, Buchanan also polled strongly among the traditional power base of the Democratic Party: Irish and German immigrants, Catholics, and urban mechanics and artisans.

In the end, the differences of gendered representations of manhood were not the determinative factor in the final outcome of the presidential election of 1856. Buchanan won not because of his restrained manly character but because of the strength of the Democratic Party among key voters in the Border North. Frémont lost not because the electorate rejected his martial beard but because a critical portion of them in the battleground states rejected the platform of the “Black Republicans.” Yes, in the election of 1856, not just James Buchanan but the Democratic Party won, and a resounding victory at that. On more symbolic levels, however, the Democrats had lost badly in 1856—for, on the gendered issues of beards, bachelors, and brides, they were on the losing side of the political battles in the years to come.

Although John C. Frémont’s brief political career ended in 1856 (future adventures as an embattled general during the Civil War awaited), beards would soon have their day in American politics. In fact, Frémont had set something of a barbate standard for future Republican presidential candidates. Famously, Abraham Lincoln began to grow a beard during his own presidential campaign in 1860 and kept his whiskers during the remainder of his presidency. So too, nearly every president from Ulysses S. Grant to William Howard Taft sported whiskers of some kind. The twentieth century witnessed reverses in this trend, with voters consistently preferring a clean shave to even the most meticulously groomed facial hair. Modern hirsute aficionados patiently await the return of the beard to the Oval Office, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s dismissal of challenges that his famous hairdo is anything short of the genuine article.

Bachelors, by contrast, have fared worse than beards. Ironically, it was the conservative Democratic Party that incautiously persisted in its love affair with bachelor candidates. When the next bachelor president ran for office (the Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884), he also faced questions about his manhood and sexuality. But unlike Buchanan, Cleveland married soon after entering office. His marriage to the exceedingly young Frances Clara Folsom—he was forty-nine and she was twenty-one—scandalized the nation for but a minute, and put to rest whatever concerns Cleveland’s bachelor status may have raised. America has not yet seen another bachelor emerge as a major presidential candidate (the recent efforts of Lindsey Graham of South Carolina notwithstanding), but it has seen more than its fair share of May-December marriages in the White House. Donald Trump, who at age sixty-nine is twenty-four years older than his wife Melania Knauss Trump, would fit right in with Grover Cleveland, or for that matter the twice-married John Tyler—who in 1844, at age fifty-four, married the twenty-four-year-old Julia Gardiner.

Finally, there would be no stopping women from entering politics in the years ahead. The long-term effect of the beautiful bride Jesse Benton Frémont presaged the rising power of the First Lady in modern times, which culminated with the ascension of the inimitable Eleanor Roosevelt to the office. Even so, women would not win the right to vote until 1920 and have continued to be circumscribed in their access to public office (women still do not hold elected office in the same proportion as men). Even after women’s suffrage became law, no woman would become a serious presidential contender until the Republican Margaret Chase Smith in 1964 and arguably until Hillary Clinton in 2008. For all her beauty and charm, the example of Jessie Benton Frémont underscores that American voters do not vote based on looks alone. Equally so, the political limitations of feminine power in securing presidential elections underscores the gendered demands placed on American political leaders of both sexes to conform to a public conditioned to evaluating candidates through the lenses and expectations of masculine roles. It’s a lesson that the former First Lady and two-time presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has learned well, her famous pantsuits and short hair being her most obvious concessions to masculine comportment.

Times change and yet they remain the same. From this point of view, the bitter exchanges and personal attacks among Republicans and Democrats in 2016 are par for the proverbial presidential campaign course. But one cannot help be struck as well by the similarities on the levels of appearance and marital status of this season’s candidates to the contenders of 1856. Is Donald Trump’s mysterious coiffure and fake tan the equivalent of John Frémont’s beard? Is Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state herself, another example of the Old Public Functionary? Are the Republicans’ promises of banning the immigration of Latinos and Middle Easterners the equivalent of the nativist views of the Know Nothings? And, ironically, is the looming presence of ex-President Bill Clinton the male equivalent to Jessie Benton Frémont? Much like the diverse images that compose the mise-en-scène of political cartoons produced during the presidential campaign of 1856, the election of 2016 is a mixed bag of gendered stereotypes and popular forms swirled about for maximum effect.

The election of 1856 was more than a final warning of impending sectional crisis or the last gasp of national political parties antebellum. It also represented a clash over sex and gender of the first order. Ultimately, the competition among Old Buck, Frémont, Fillmore, and their respective wives whether present or absent, underscores the fact that gendered and sexual performances still matter in politics today as much as, if not more than, they did 160 years ago. The more things change, the more they remain the same—the alchemy of beards, bachelors, and brides is to blame!

Acknowledgements

This essay grew out of a paper presented at the 2014 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) in Philadelphia. The author would like to thank the participants of that panel, “Contest 1856: Year of Men, Year of Women,” especially Stacey Robertson, Rachel Shelden, Douglas Egerton, and John Belohlavek. In addition, the author would like to thank Michael Birkner, Michael Landis, Amy Greenberg, and the editors at Common-place for their insightful comments on earlier drafts.

Further Reading

On the election of the 1856, two chapters in edited collections are excellent starting points: Philip S. Klein and Roy F. Nichols, “Election of 1856,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, 9 vols., ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Fred L. Israel (New York, 1985) 3:1007-96; and Michael F. Holt, “Another Look at the Election of 1856,” in James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s, ed. Michael J. Birkner (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1996), 37-67. See also William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987), 239-448; and Michael T. Landis, Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y., 2014), 148-168.

Web resources about the election of 1856 are few but important. See especially the Library of Congress’ “Presidential Election of 1856: A Resource Guide”; and Dickinson College’s “The Election of 1856.”

For a compendium of select campaign songs, see Irwin Silber, ed., Songs American Voted By (Harrisburg, Pa., 1971), and the wonderful collection of campaign songs at “Lincoln/Net” hosted by the Northern Illinois University Libraries. On political cartoons in early presidential contests, see Alan Nevins and Frank Weitenkamp, A Century of Political Cartoons: Caricature in the United States from 1800 to 1900 (New York, 1944).

On the role of gender in the Republican Party campaigns of 1856 and 1860, see especially Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts & Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003). On bachelorhood more generally in the nineteenth century, see Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, N.J., 1999). The most complete biography of James Buchanan remains President James Buchanan: A Biography (Newtown, Conn., 1962). A recent biography of the Frémonts is Sally Denton, Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2007). On the Know Nothings, consult Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York, 1992). On voter motivation more generally, see Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, “‘Where Is the Real America?’: Politics and Popular Consciousness in the Antebellum Era,” American Quarterly 49:2 (June 1997): 225-67.

 

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

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Thomas J. Balcerski is assistant professor of history at Eastern Connecticut State University. He is currently working on a book project titled “Siamese Twins: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King.”

After more than 225 years and fifty-seven presidential elections since the nation’s founding, there have been remarkably few contests in which large portions of the population questioned the accuracy and fairness of the results. Only during the elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000 did the candidate who won the popular vote ultimately lose the Electoral College vote amid accusations of voter fraud (1876), miscounting of ballots (1876 and 2000), and corrupt back-room bargains (1824 and 1876). (Although sitting president Grover Cleveland tallied slightly more votes than his Republican challenger Benjamin Harrison in 1888, Harrison’s lopsided victory in the Electoral College left people questioning the system, but not the results.) Yet because these episodes are so rare, and the stories of intrigue and corruption so captivating, the details of these elections have become ingrained as part of the meta-narrative of American history.

 

For example, we all know that the election of 1824 was the contest when the only political party left standing from the first party system failed to settle on just one nominee, resulting in a five-man race among political insiders (John Quincy Adams and William Crawford), emerging stars (Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun), and a popular general (Andrew Jackson). In an election in which voters increasingly asserted their voice at the polls, marking the emergence of full-blown white, male democracy, Jackson won a plurality of the popular and Electoral College votes, yet not the Electoral College majority required by the Constitution. With the election now in the hands of the House of Representatives, where each state delegation would have an equal vote, Clay redirected his supporters to vote for Adams, handing him the White House. When Adams later chose Clay as his secretary of state, the traditional stepping-stone to the presidency, rumors of a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay were seemingly confirmed. Jackson’s supporters immediately began campaigning for his 1828 election, using this corrupt bargain that stole the presidency from the people’s choice as their rallying cry.

Donald Ratcliffe’s new book, The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-Horse Race, seeks to challenge key elements of this narrative that has been heavily influenced by what came after—the rise of Andrew Jackson, the creation of the Democratic Party, and the emergence of the second party system. The first half of the book presents the main characters and issues of the election. As I read this book in the midst of yet another presidential election cycle, it was nearly impossible not to find strong parallels between these figures and our own presidential candidates. There was the frontrunner, John Quincy Adams (Hillary Rodham Clinton)—an extremely qualified politician from a political dynasty who had served ably as secretary of state, and who yet was widely distrusted and disliked. Easily “the most distinguished candidate in the field,” he “was a divisive figure”; many “regarded him as most unsuitable and looked around for alternatives” (59). One potential alternative was DeWitt Clinton (Bernie Sanders), the popular New York politician who had little sense of party loyalty, instead publicly criticizing President Monroe and charting “his independent political course” (72). As the force behind the construction of the Erie Canal, he “symboliz[ed] both positive government and the decline of party spirit.” DeWitt Clinton received nominations in several states, and there were continued calls for him to run throughout the campaign. Although he ultimately declined to join the fray, Clinton’s popularity and potential to disrupt the race “dictated the strategy of others” (73).

The establishment wing of the Democratic Republicans, represented by supporters of the Congressional Caucus, believed early on that Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford (Jeb Bush) was the strongest candidate and “the man to beat” (25). He had come extremely close to snagging the party’s nomination from James Monroe in 1816, and by the 1820s was a leader of the party’s growing neo-antifederalist wing, who actively rejected national government policies such as protective tariffs and internal improvements. Yet despite the early buzz about his dominance of the field, Crawford’s candidacy failed to catch fire. A stroke in September 1823 and lingering questions about his health probably didn’t help his cause, but even more damning was the growing belief that his selection by the Congressional Caucus was an attempt by party elites to subvert the will of the people in selecting the next president; “to be hailed as the presidential choice of local political leaders was not necessarily an advantage” (110).

The populace seemed to be seeking an outsider who would bring fresh blood and ideas to the White House. Initially, this seemed to offer an opening to members of the new generation of politicians such as Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun (Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio), young men with more limited political experience but filled with presidential ambition. Yet before either could fully win the heart and soul of the party, Andrew Jackson (Donald Trump)—a true political outsider—stepped into this already crowded field. Although he was a nationally renowned figure due to his heroics at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, few people initially took his candidacy seriously, viewing it instead as a “diversion” due to his “hot-headedness and apparent lack of political judgment” (116-117). Jackson was able to tap into the pervasive belief that “Washington’s corruption…overwhelm[ed] all who went there” and that “Washington needed ‘the pure eye of a Patriot stranger’ to ‘discern abuses’ and ‘correct and purge them’” (141).

Although there is little new about these five candidates, Ratcliffe adds texture by discussing the impact of important almost-rans like William Lowndes and DeWitt Clinton, as well as the political calculations of Martin Van Buren. Yet whereas many histories focus mainly on the individuals, Ratcliffe insists that this election was ultimately about issues and not personalities. By immersing the reader in the details of the election itself—on a state-by-state and even county-by-county level—the second half attempts to strip away all of the post-1824 historical baggage that now colors this story to show how growing rifts over slavery and internal improvements dominated the discourse. Additionally, he uses this close reading of politics on the ground to demonstrate that the movement away from deferential politics and toward a strong sense of democracy was already well under way by the election of 1824, long before Jackson became its symbolic champion.

Finally, Ratcliffe changes the punch line of the story. Adams, not Jackson, won the popular vote; Adams was the natural second choice for Clay’s supporters; and there is no evidence that Clay and Adams ever struck any bargain—either explicit or implied. The standard popular vote figures only include the eighteen states where the people voted directly for the presidential electors, and these totals give Jackson an edge over Adams of about 25,000 votes. The popular vote in the remaining six states is traditionally not included in these figures, since the legislators still chose the electors, yet Ratcliffe (in a separate 2014 article) has interpolated what those votes would be. (Quite frustratingly, his methods for coming up with these alternative numbers are not included, although the estimated popular vote numbers are in the book.) Key to this discussion is New York, which contained 15 percent of the nation’s population. Jackson was not a contender in New York, with Adams, Crawford, and Clay battling it out for the critical thirty-six electoral votes. Regardless of the methods of calculation, it is not hard to be convinced that including New York in the popular vote numbers easily tips the balance in Adams’s favor. Ratcliffe also convincingly demonstrates the lack of evidence for a corrupt bargain, and why Clay supporters logically would have favored Adams over Jackson, particularly those Kentucky and Ohio delegations most interested in internal improvements.

This book is unquestionably the most complete, detailed work on the election of 1824. And it will absolutely change several of my slides on the 1820s. Where it is most successful is in demonstrating the importance of slavery and internal improvements as real issues dividing the nation and driving many presidential choices in 1824; he is less convincing about ethnicity, the protective tariff, and lingering effects of the Panic of 1819. But personality also still mattered. The unpopularity of Adams certainly cost him support, while the popularity of Jackson gained him votes despite his lack of clear policy stances on the main issues. And whereas the book is a constructive rethinking of the period, it doesn’t actually challenge the basic premise of the meta-narrative. While it is extremely useful for historians to be able to assess the comparative popularity of Adams and Jackson, and to know that Adams most likely had the most nationwide support, how much does it matter if contemporaries were unaware of this? Jackson’s supporters were quickly able to spin the results as electoral robbery, using the available voting returns and Electoral College results as their evidence. Without the counter-evidence of 2015, Adams’s supporters were powerless to alter this narrative. And even if we can today clear Clay’s tarnished name from participation in any corrupt bargain, is that more important than the fact that this belief dogged him for the remainder of his political career? So while Ratcliffe certainly is on solid ground in correcting the historical record and rereading 1824 without a post-1824 bias, he should not trade one anachronism for another—the knowledge that contemporaries lacked of national voter preferences and Clay’s true actions.

 

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

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Sharon Ann Murphy is professor of history at Providence College. She is the author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (2010), winner of the 2012 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history, and the forthcoming book Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Her latest projects are an investigation of the public perception of banks around the Panic of 1819, and an examination of the relationship between southern banks and American slavery.

 

 

Object Lessons is sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation.

On April 3, 1802, the merchant vessel Connecticut arrived in Philadelphia after a year in Canton, then the sole port of foreign trade in China. In addition to the teas, silks, Nanking cottons, and porcelain wares destined for American markets were trunks of personal merchandise consigned to the ship’s captain, John E. Sword, a veteran merchant seaman returning from his second Canton run. Sword’s 1801 purchase abroad included an unlikely group of objects of Chinese production: portraits of George Washington painted on glass (fig. 1). In a surviving example now at the Peabody Essex Museum, Washington’s serious visage glows beneath the crystal-clear pane and his white lace and silk collar, carefully rendered in precise, flowing brushstrokes, stands out sensuously against his flat, inky coat.

At the height of the Canton Trade, an American ship captain commissioned Chinese artists to copy portraits of George Washington onto glass. His fragile imports sparked an 1802 Philadelphia court case concerning copyright infringement. How might we unpack the layers of technical virtuosity and cultural exchange that made such objects possible?

This set of paintings was no doubt imported to meet a growing American demand for Washingtonia. A celebrated national hero in 1802 (three years following his death), Washington had become the subject of a proliferation of images, from grand neoclassical marbles to schoolgirl samplers. In this instance, Philadelphians would have found Washington’s glass portrait uncannily familiar, since it replicates a well-known oil painting by Gilbert Stuart, which had been in circulation for several years (fig. 2). Though a precise copy of its model in composition, the technique of reverse painting on glass gives Washington’s portrait a look of reflective, crystalline liquidity. Why might Sword have chosen such an uncommon technique to reproduce Stuart’s painting, and how might American audiences have received this unfamiliar medium?

 

Unlike other examples of Washingtonia from the early nineteenth century, the glass portraits emerge from a trans-oceanic world of commerce. Onboard the Connecticut, they traversed the Indian Ocean and rounded the Cape of Good Hope before crossing the Atlantic to arrive in Philadelphia. Such circumnavigations are central to the history of many export arts, but it is surprising to find that glass, an especially fragile material, would have been chosen to produce portable artifacts destined to travel. Moreover, considering their impressive size (over two feet long) and high clarity, the glass sheets on which the Washington portraits were painted could only have been produced in Europe and brought to Canton via North America, adding to their miles logged. All this suggests that reverse painting on glass, though a part of many folk art traditions worldwide, was a medium of particularly high stakes in the context of the China trade and its far-reaching global networks. Indeed, the practice of glass painting was perfected to an unprecedented degree in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canton.

Reverse painting on glass can only be understood in relation to the international commerce that propelled its growth and development. The Washington portrait, in particular, offers us an opportunity to combine this commercial history with an exploration of the material conditions of painting on glass. How does the fragility and reflectivity of glass painting, for instance, relate to its status as a reproductive medium, favored for replicas and copies? Did the medium’s highly involved procedures offer its makers or consumers insight into practices of visual reproduction across cultures and distances?

 

Painting for Export

Reverse painting on glass is not a native tradition in China. It has origins in the West and grew in tandem with east-west maritime trade. The earliest references to painting on glass in China date back to the mid-seventeenth century, with the Jesuit introduction of Western technologies including glass and mirror production to the Kangxi court. The emperor’s fascination with Western technologies led to court-sanctioned experiments with foreign media and subject matter in the arts. Both missionaries skilled in painting and a select group of European artists who took up residence in the imperial court could have trained local artists in oil painting on glass. By the 1750s, the production of glass paintings had shifted to Canton, where it became a specialty of export painting workshops. For their foreign clients, these shops offered glass paintings in a range of Western and hybrid subject matter, though copies of Western paintings and prints were especially popular. The medium, as we shall see, was particularly well-suited for the work of replication.

Painting Washington would hardly have been a novelty for Cantonese artists in 1802. Export art workshops had long been adept at catering to new waves of foreign consumers, and when Americans first entered the China trade in 1784, patriotic themes related to the recent Revolution quickly entered their repertoire. The novelty of Sword’s Washington portraits was thus not their subject matter, but their mode of circulation. In Canton, art market purchases were often made on a small scale, intended solely for private consumption. Only high ranking officers and merchants were allowed on land, and their movements were highly circumscribed—limited to the city’s foreign “factories,” a group of Western-style buildings designed specifically for conducting international trade, and the surrounding shopping streets. Trade in high-volume commodities was handled by supercargos in negotiation with the Chinese representatives of the Co-hong, a government-sanctioned guild of merchants. Glass paintings and other artistic goods, including fans, tortoise-shell and lacquer wares, special-order porcelain pieces, furniture, and works on paper, were not formally traded in such transactions, but rather purchased by officers and merchants directly from Cantonese artisans. Once they left China, such artifacts served as personal mementos of the voyage and circulated through gift exchange and inheritance. Though many export artifacts were replicas of existing artworks, their limited circulation kept them from public view.

 

 

Copies and Counterfeits

Sword’s decision to sell his Chinese artworks transformed a typically private mode of consumption into a public commercial venture. His entrepreneurship proved problematic when Gilbert Stuart, then also residing in Philadelphia, learned of the sales and moved to sue Sword for copyright infringement. Stuart argued in the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania that he had earlier sold Sword a portrait of Washington on the condition that “no copies thereof should be taken.” He later discovered that Sword “did shortly afterwards take the same with him to China and there procured above one hundred copies … by Chinese artists and hath brought the same copies to the United States, and proposes to vend them.”

While the case proceedings traffic in the language of forgery, Sword did not necessarily intend for the portraits to sell as counterfeits. Given that some portion of the 100 copies Sword commissioned were paintings on glass, it is almost certain that their purchasers would have been aware of their Chinese authorship and thus satisfied with their seemingly contradictory status as both national symbol and foreign curio. Complicating the case further is the fact that the “original” painting referenced in the lawsuit is but a copy—one of over sixty identical portraits Stuart sold for $100 a piece. Each is a replica of an unfinished work now known as the Athenaeum Portrait, produced during the president’s 1796 sitting for the painter (fig. 3), which Stuart kept in order to capitalize on the public demand for Washington’s portrait.

The legal case against Sword and his Chinese Washingtons brings to light the instability of terms like “original” and “copy” in export art contexts. Copying existing artworks in the same or another medium was a standard service offered by artists in Canton. Given its transparency, glass was an ideal support for copying existing images. In an account of his 1836 visit to one Chinese painter’s workshop, nineteenth-century British traveler C. Toogood Downing observed artists working with “a great many prints from Europe.” He goes on to write that “by their side are placed the copies which the Chinese have taken of them in oil and water colours. Many are brought thither by the officers of the vessels, who exchange them for native drawings, or frequently for the copy which is taken of them.” For many Western observers, manual reproduction of this sort constituted a form of subservient labor. They dismissed Cantonese artists as mere copyists, capable of “wonderful fidelity” but little else. The British traveler John Barrow, for instance, insisted in 1804 that the Chinese “exercise no judgment of their own. Every defect and blemish, original or accidental, they are sure to copy, being mere servile imitators.”

 

Complicating the Copy

How does reverse painting on glass, a medium decidedly associated with the China trade, fit into such negotiations of artistic labor? While glass paintings made after prints may be highly faithful, they have a complex relationship to their models. Take for instance the allegorical painting entitled America (fig. 4), which is based on an engraving by Joseph Strutt (fig. 5). The detailed glass picture shows a lamenting America at the edge of a war-ravaged city consoled by the figures of Peace, Liberty, Virtue, Industry, Concord, and Plenty. The painter has copied onto glass the print’s marginal inscription word for word (“To those, who wish to sheathe the desolating sword of war …”) and painted the gold border from the mat in which the print was framed. While Barrow may have dismissed such details as thoughtless replication, we might also interpret them as the artist’s attempt to reproduce an artwork as not just flat image but as three-dimensional object, reanimated in full color.

 

Such compositional decisions were part of a sophisticated process of translation—from print to painting, line to color, paper to glass—that entailed a complex series of reversals and inversions. The artist first traced the original through the sheet of glass placed directly over it. He then turned over the transparent sheet to fill in a now-reversed composition freehand from sight (the original tracing would later be erased from the unpainted glass surface). In a Chinese watercolor documenting the second stage of the process (fig. 6), the original framed print hangs vertically before the artist, who is shown working on a horizontal glass surface. The composition on which he works is flipped: the foliage on the right of the original print is on the left in the unfinished copy. Any textual inscriptions, like those in America, would have added an additional layer of complexity since letters had to be painted as mirror images of the original. In other words, for the Washington portrait on glass to maintain the same orientation as Stuart’s Athenaeum composition, with the figure facing left, the artist had to paint Washington facing to the right.

In this way, the practice of glass painting shares in the technical logic to printmaking, another medium for reproduction. To make an engraving after a painting, a common practice at the time, a printmaker had to reverse the composition on his metal plate in freehand so that the final print could register on paper in the same orientation as the model painting. Yet despite their shared technical strategies, printmaking and reverse-glass painting occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of visual reproduction. While printmaking is a mechanical process designed to create multiples from an original (often paintings), reverse glass painting manually turns multiples (often prints) back into singular originals. The glass painting America, for instance, is in many ways materially closer to the now-lost painting on which Strutt’s print was based, a 1778 work by the British anti-monarchical artist Robert Edge Pine. In its relationship to its model, a glass painted replica constitutes a complicated return to originality.

 

Beyond the Copy: Reversals and Inversions

Glass paintings may best be conceptualized as copies-in-reverse. Their production involved not only physical but also temporal inversions of oil on canvas or panel. Since the image on glass is rendered on what is technically the back of the support, artists had to start by painting the finest details closest to the surface before gradually moving toward the background—the equivalent of building a pyramid from the capstone down. For Washington’s portrait, this means that the furled edge of the sitter’s collar and the highlight along the ridge of his nose would have been the first marks set down on the glass, while the brown background surrounding the body would likely have been the last. Such protocols of working on a transparent support counteract the very material advantages of oil paint as a medium, namely its potential for building subtle contours by layering lighter colors atop darker ones and its possibilities for revision by overpainting. On glass, even the subtlest highlight had to be planned out in advance, thus precluding compositional improvisation or correction. As a regimented system of image construction, reverse glass painting seems ideally suited for replicating existing images. Paradoxically, however, the procedures of this replication only distance the original from the copy.

Manual copying, generally speaking, requires an artist to constantly compare her imitation to a referent. Imagine Gilbert Stuart painting a Washington portrait from his Athenaeum model. To create a faithful copy, Stuart constantly looked between the model and the replica in order to calibrate each successive mark. Painters on glass, meanwhile, were not privy to the direct feedback loop of copying since they produced doubly inverted images (reversing left-right and surface-depth). For them, the mediation between original and copy (between Washington on canvas and Washington on glass) entailed the invention of visual tricks, which reorient the model as would a mirror, or peel away its layers as might an X-ray (though this analogy is clearly anachronistic). It is often said that mechanization is responsible for the erasure of technical knowledge about how raw materials are transformed into end products. Ironically in the case of Chinese glass paintings, the visual similitude achieved through complex craft labor gets misread by Barrow and other observers as a form of “mechanized” reproduction.

 

The glass painters of Canton were sophisticated theorists of reproduction. Perhaps in an effort to preserve signs of their technical knowledge and optical skills, they often painted on mirrors, surfaces designed for inversion and doubling. European-made mirrors were brought to Canton, and there artists scraped off the silvering in areas where paint would take its place. In designing such mirror compositions, glass painters were intentional and strategic in their deployment of reflectivity. In a 1780 portrait of Mrs. and Miss Revell, the wife and daughter of a British East India Company supercargo (fig. 7), the artist has organically incorporated a large section of mirror as the sky of the landscape surrounding the two figures, who are dressed in Chinese costume and seated in a Chinese-style porch. The painted trees and architectural features surround the mirrored space like a sinuous, decorative border. Like Washington’s portrait, the likeness of the two sitters would have been taken not from the flesh (women were forbidden to enter Canton), but from existing pictures, copied in reverse. Once hanging in the home of the sitters, the picture would still have functioned as a mirror, reversing the features of any viewer who stood before it and rendering his or her reflection a part of the image. Such instances of reflection mimic the artist’s work of painting the embedded portrait, a process that involved reversal at multiple levels.

For Philadelphians circa 1800, the appeal of a Chinese Washington on glass must have extended beyond its status as a replica of an already popular artwork. Surely, more sound counterfeits could be had. Rather, the object speaks to the very nature of replication as an artistic enterprise that negotiates original and copy, singular and multiple. Perhaps the very flowering of glass painting during the Canton trade had to do with the unique ability of this medium to encode the reversals involved in its own making—to make visible the creative labors erased by the assumptions of reproduction governing export art.

 

Further Reading

For period accounts of travel to China, see Toogood Downing, The Fan-Qui in China, 1836-7, vol. 1 (London, 1838) and John Barrow, Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey through the Country from Pekin to Canton (London, 1804).

On the decorative arts of the China trade, see Carl L. Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade: Paintings, Furnishings and Exotic Curiosities (Woodbridge, U.K., 1991); David S. Howard, A Tale of Three Cities: Canton, Shangai & Hong Kong. Three Centuries of Sino-British Trade in the Decorative Arts (London, 1997); Patrick Conner, The China Trade, 1600-1860 (Brighton, U.K., 1986); and Craig Clunas, ed. Chinese Export Art and Design (London, 1987).

On China trade exports and the American market, see Jean Gordon Lee, Philadelphians and the China Trade: 1784-1844 (Philadelphia, 1984) and David S. Howard, New York and the China Trade (New York, 1974).

On reverse glass painting as a medium, see Reverse Paintings on Glass: The Ryser Collection (Corning, N.Y., 1991) and R. Soame Jenyns, “Glass and Paintings on Glass” in Chinese Art III, revised edition (New York, 1982): 95-126.

On Gilbert Stuart’s Washington portraits see Egon Verheyen, “‘The most exact representation of the Original,’: Remarks on the Portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and Rembrandt Peale,” History of Art 20 (1989): 127-140 and Carrie Rebora Barratt and Ellen G. Miles, Gilbert Stuart (New York, 2004).

On Chinese-made Washington portraits, see E. P. Richardson, “China Trade Portraits of Washington After Stuart,” PMHB 94 (Jan 1970): 95-100, and Homer Eaton Keyes, “The Editor’s Attic—A Chinese Washington,” Antiques 15: 2 (1958): 109-111.

 

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

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Maggie Cao is a Mellon Research Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is writing a book on the end of landscape in nineteenth-century American painting, which is forthcoming from University of California Press.

In April 1841, medical missionary Reverend Peter Parker, M.D., addressed an enthusiastic audience gathered at a special meeting of the Boston Medical Association. His subject was “the condition and prospects of the hospitals of China.” He described his own work at the hospital he had established in the foreign factory district outside the city walls of Canton where he offered free treatment for both rich and poor. At P’u Ai I Yuan (Hospital of Universal Love, as it was known in Chinese) Parker and his colleagues used western surgical techniques as a means to facilitate religious conversion. Medicine, Parker believed, could be the “handmaid of religious truth,”and he held regular religious services for his patients. While he had, at best, modest success attracting converts to Christianity, the hospital had fostered tremendous goodwill among the Chinese. It was a bright spot amid the gloomy period of Western-Chinese tension that led to the outbreak of the Opium Wars between Great Britain and China. Forced to flee Canton because of these hostilities, Parker returned to the United States to raise money and interest in his operations. In the spring of 1841, he spoke to many religious societies, a few medical bodies, and even the United States Congress, where he preached to members of the House and Senate and lobbied legislators on the need for diplomatic relations with China.

In his talks, Parker described the state of medical and surgical knowledge (or rather scientific ignorance) in China. He pointed out that China had neither systematic nor “scientific” forms of medical education, and he regaled his audience with accounts of the kinds of “quackery” common to Canton. Parker had seen, for example, a practitioner who dealt in plasters, which patients routinely returned after treatment for reuse. The man’s shop “was covered with them, the most incontrovertible of all testimony of the high repute of the doctor who has them at his disposal.” Parker had observed a man with his finger inserted into a live frog as a cure for a whitlow on the fingernail; he had watched air being blown into the rectum of a drowned child in an attempt at resuscitation; and he had seen powders blown into the eyes of infected patients. Hoping to relieve a patient’s constipation, one doctor had come to Parker requesting the use of “something like a corkscrew to bring it away.” This litany of outlandish medical practices or folk remedies (some practiced in Europe and the United States) served to convince his audience that China was desperately in need of western medicine, especially the kind of surgery that Parker could provide.

Despite the surgical feats of legendary ancient doctors like Hua T’o of the third century A.D., surgery did not develop to any great extent in China. Some accounts attribute this to Confucian precepts about the integrity of the body and proscriptions against any form of mutilation or dismemberment; others emphasize the pharmacological tendencies within traditional Chinese medicine and a preference for moxas and other caustic plasters. Whatever the cause, it was undoubtedly the case that Parker’s surgical practice tapped into a huge unmet need. Almost as soon as he opened his Ophthalmic Hospital in Canton, as it was known in English, he acquired a reputation as a surgeon of such skill that the hospital quickly became a general hospital. Parker and his small staff handled thousands of cases each year, treating more than fifty thousand cases by the 1850s. His hospital became the model for other medical missions, and Parker and his British colleagues formed the Medical Missionary Society of China to coordinate the efforts of all the western hospitals springing up in the trading ports of Asia. Parker earned his reputation performing operations to remove tumors and cataracts–forms of surgery with relatively good odds of success that, as important in an era without anesthesia, could be accomplished quickly. Parker also found a demand for his skills. Because of the absence of surgery in China, a large number of patients were afflicted with mature tumors (typically five to thirty-five years old) of a size seldom seen in Europe or the United States. It was this work that Parker described to his Boston audience, and in the most significant cases Parker presented what were at the time state-of-the-art visual aids–oil paintings of his pre-operative patients by a Cantonese artist known as Lam Qua.

 

Picturing Chinese labor and industrial velocity in the Gilded Age

In late 1869, just months after the transcontinental railroad linkage was completed at Promontory Point, Utah, a young illustrator for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was ordered by his publisher to make a trip across the nation on a railway sketching tour. As Joseph Becker, who would later serve as head of the periodical’s art department, remembered in a 1905 interview, the illustrated “Across the Continent” series that came out of his journey turned out to be a celebrated media event. For the first time, it was possible to traverse the entire country in one fluid, industrial sweep, and the “special artist” was there to experience and transmit this watershed event on behalf of his paper.

Using the railroad to move with due speed across the vast nation, Becker was able to send back to his editors illustrations of far-flung places. Among the subjects he was told to illustrate were the Chinese immigrants who labored on the railroad. Actually, as he revealed in his interview, this was the principal purpose of his trip:

Mr. Leslie commissioned me to go to California to portray the Chinese who had come over in large numbers to build the Union Pacific Railway. These people were then a novel addition to our population, and Mr. Leslie planned a “scoop” on our competitors. My destination was kept a secret. I reached California in due time, [and] spent many weeks among the celestials, making drawings.

In addition to scooping other periodicals with novel subject matter, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper wanted to be the first major periodical to use the transcontinental railroad to bring news to Americans on the East Coast. Indeed, nearly forty years after his sketching voyage, Becker still bragged that he had “scored ‘beats’” for having portrayed the Chinese. That is, using the new transcontinental railroad, he brought those illustrations to press before anyone else did.

In a Becker illustration bearing the caption “Across the Continent—In the Sierra Nevada, on the Line of the Pacific Railroad,” from the March 5, 1870, issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, small figures pose on and beside the train tracks, which have wended their way through towering mountains in the background (fig. 1). In many ways, the image is typical of those the artist’s publisher likely expected him to create. By drawing the viewer’s eyes along the railroad tracks, it unites grand vistas with exoticism and technological prowess. As Thomas Knox, the journalist traveling with Becker, described the scene, it is one in which “mountains rise abruptly and in front on either hand, while immediately before us is the road and the river . . . and the huts of Chinese laborers.”

 

If Becker was the first pictorial journalist to make a cross-country exploration—one in which he kept a vigilant eye out for any Chinese immigrants—he was hardly the last. Throughout the 1870s, such expeditions constituted an entire genre of travel writing. Writers as popular as Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Nordhoff and other periodicals as widely read as Harper’s Weekly also turned out first-person accounts of rail travel from coast to coast. Indeed, in 1877 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was still sticking by the transcontinental article series. It was doing so, in fact, in the most high-profile fashion. In addition to Becker’s 1869 voyage, the popular newspaper revisited the transcontinental series in 1877 when publisher Frank Leslie himself undertook a tour, even repeating part of the original title: “Across the Continent—The Frank Leslie Transcontinental Excursion.” This series featured the work of staff artists Harry Ogden and Walter Yaeger. Among the many such accounts produced, these two series were especially prominent for the lengths of time they ran, the geographical territory they covered, the number of illustrations they produced, and the large readership they likely commanded. This last, because both were published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which was, together with Harper’s Weekly, the leading illustrated weekly of the day.

The scenes created during both of these cross-country assignments revealed the vastness of the national landscape, the means by which industrial achievement allowed Americans to traverse the nation with great speed, and the ways representations of Chinese workers were essential to that formula. These illustrated transcontinental tours were self-conscious, stylized productions, heralding the railroad as the preeminent icon of modernity. To that end, illustrators repeatedly turned to the figure of the Chinese immigrant in portraying the railroad as an unprecedented invention that could race across national space. Relying on such a juxtaposition, Joseph Becker’s “The Snowsheds on the Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevada Mountains,” which appeared as an engraved double-page supplement to the February 5, 1870, edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, showed Chinese workers returning salutations from occupants on a passing train.

Becker’s placement of the railroad laborers gave readers the opportunity to linger over the “exotic” nature of the workers’ appearance—the fall of dark queues down shoulders and backs draped in loose-fitting shirts or the wide, round brims of straw hats. At the same time, the stationary positions of the workers served as a counterpoint to the forward momentum of the train. Moreover, as they salute the train, their bodies resting on lowered shovels, the train’s movement through the landscape is emphasized by several pictorial details. Trailing wisps of smoke from the engine, the successive progression of cars, and that long fragment of track extending from a distant background through the left foreground where a snowshed ensures the train’s continued passage—all of these elements demonstrate the consistent speed of the train as it passes its ardent yet inert observers.

Text accompanying the illustration describes passengers experiencing the railroad in the Sierras as it “hangs over deep valleys, that make the brain whirl when the eye is turned into their depths; and again it passes along high embankments, and shoots suddenly into tunnels that pierce solid rock, and save a high ascent to the skies.” These lines reveal an acute awareness of the rushing landscape. Here a sense of speed is conveyed with a vertigo-inspired intensity. In this illustrated article, the velocity of the train provides for a new kind of “panoramic” vision in which elements of the landscape—such as mountains, valleys, and rivers—acquire a new connection to one another. In this context, Chinese immigrants become one feature on—but not necessarily “of”—this novel, passing scene. Mesmerized and physically “sidelined” by the train, they linger somewhere between the landscape all around them and the speeding railroad cars before them. 

What is happening here, in relation to the sidelined workers, is a kind of visual transference. One of the attributes of mechanical speed, as cultural historians have explained, is its ability to become a new space upon the plane of a constantly receding picturesque landscape. It was not simply the case that traveling at speed inspired new sensations. Additionally, and far more radically, mechanical velocity created a new realm of sensation—one that was experienced as wholly separate from and intrinsically different from its surroundings. Becker’s illustration reveals that this transformation of mechanical speed into a new form of space, one of the most basic experiences of industrial modernity, was also marked by considerations of the racialized, laboring immigrant presence that made such a shift possible—and particularly in relation to an ambivalent awareness of Chinese presence. In this image, then, Chinese workers are depicted less as the creators of that industrial space and more as its visualized parameters. Like sentinels of industrial change posted between the locomotive and the natural landscape, they witness and react to the mechanical velocity of the railroad, even as it leaves them behind.

 

If Chinese figures helped reinforce the notion of industrial speed as its own new kind of space, what sort of meaning was that space imbued with in relation to their watchful forms? How did the returned gaze of Chinese laborers function in relation to envisioned awareness of industrial speed? In anotherillustration, published in 1878, railroad laborers are again depicted pausing in their work (something they probably did far more within the pages of the periodical than in real life) in order to stare at a passing train (fig. 2).As the engine passes them on a tight curve, the workers are hemmed in on one side by its shiny mass. A rider near the conductor’s compartment regards them while various other figures atop the trailing cars mimic his pose. Meanwhile, on the other side of the seated workers, the approach of another figure, probably a foreman, is made ominous by the gun he carries and the dog he leads. Here again, the static and liminal pose of the observing Chinese laborers is pronounced. It is actually even more emphatic than it was in Becker’s earlier sketch because its composition is more constricted. The workers’ pose is enforced not only by the steeply angled mountain landscape but also by the imposing presence of both the train and the gun-toting figure.

And, again, the matrix of locomotive speed and natural grandeur is highlighted in juxtaposition to the stationary laborers. Establishing the contrast to the workers’ stillness, the text announces, “we have reached Cape Horn, the steep jutting promontory which frowns at the head of the Great American Canon [sic], and the train swings round it on a dizzily narrow grade, a wall of rock towering above, and the almost vertical side of the abyss sweeping down below.” “[I]t is like standing,” the reporter concluded, “on the edge of the world and looking away into heaven—a heaven where verily ‘God hath made all things new.’”

 

Constrained as they are by the power of the speeding locomotive and the authority of the approaching foreman, the workers are unable to share in this sublime moment. Yet, if there is a temptation to see them only as a “captive audience,” we must account for the waving figure among them as well as the sense that their interest was genuine. Indeed, in both of these illustrations, the seriousness with which the workers view the train is too obvious to be incidental. Further, these illustrations feature more than Chinese simply looking in wonder. They also depict railroad passengers aware that they are being observed by a stationary audience as they themselves traverse the land with industrial swiftness and ease. The sense of industrial movement is thus underscored by the gaze of Chinese laborers. The latter’s static and observant presence helps to characterize the pictorial representation as admirable, enviable, even marvelous.

Unsurprisingly, if a “sidelined” Chinese presence evokes remarkable industrial space, the effect of such positioning on the laboring figures themselves is hardly celebratory. Instead, the individual laborers and the nature of their work are obscured. In another two illustrations, for instance—”Wood Shoots in the Sierra Nevada” and “The Truckee, The Great River in the Sierra Nevada, Near the Pacific Railroad” (figs. 3 and 4)—the trackside figures are actually doing something more than admiring a passing train. In the first illustration, they stack railroad ties. In the second, they pass to and fro over the tracks while working. However, within the context of both the illustrated articles, even these obvious activities are obscured.

In “Wood Shoots in the Sierra Nevada,” laborers are positioned at the base of the wood shoots, which fall in descending lines from the top corners of the frame to meet with the railroad tracks. The men are enclosed on all sides by the narrow verticality of the natural environment, and also by the built structures of industrial progress. The only rationale for the presence of these figures is their work. Yet, details of its exact nature are sacrificed to the panoramic view of tracks sliding through the landscape. If, in relation to the train, workers are static, in relation to the natural environment they become minute and even crudely drawn.

“The Truckee,” the second image, also obscures laborers’ actions by again maintaining the contrast between these figures and their surroundings. Their role is not centered on the train tracks; rather, their importance is determined, like the “Great River” itself, by proximity to what is truly significant. Both are understood, as the caption declares, to be “near the Pacific Railroad” and not the other way around. That is, it is their presence that is defined in relation to the newly existing railroad. Or, as the article announces, “One of the surveyors of the Central Pacific Railway declared, after the route for the iron horse was finished, that the Truckee River was especially designed by nature for the accommodation of the company.” In this illustration, Chinese figures are actually rendered part of the landscape by the railroad—like rocks, trees, and rivers, it naturalizes them as a feature of the passing panoramic scenery. Perhaps even more than that, and this applies to figures in both engravings, these workers are also diminished by the unseen presence of the train. As the tracks extend out of the frame and toward the viewer, the illustrations maintain the sense that these figures are receding into the land and falling away from the train.

 

Ultimately, the Chinese are marked in invidious comparison to the velocity of passing trains. Their positioning both subjugates them to and holds them at a remove from the pivotal point of modern industrial activity. “Sidelined” by the railroad, connected to it while distanced from it, these workers appear as a visual contrast to the rushing mass of the train. In contrast, when white figures made an appearance in the Leslie’s article series, as they do in an 1877 station scene bearing the caption “The View of the Town of Sydney, the Nearest Railroad Station to the Black Hills,” they were aligned with the approach of civilization in a way that the Chinese were not (fig. 5).< The white figures in this engraving are thus posed against the outlines of a growing commercial town. The passing trains have little effect upon them. Other groups in other illustrations also escaped Chinese labor’s thrall to a fast-paced train. For example, European immigrants were generally characterized in ways similar to “generically” white Americans whose ethnicity, as is the case in the station scene, receives no obvious visual elaboration. And as for Native Americans, they were often portrayed fleeing the train—unless of course they were attacking it.

 

What the distinctive visual treatment of the Chinese suggests is that a racialized sense of industrial superiority is being worked out through the illustrated media. The work of both the “Special Artist” and the reporter in one 1877 illustrated article makes the point (fig. 6). In “Chinese Railroad Laborers Getting a Tow,” a male passenger hauls himself up onto the rear platform of a passenger car so that he may observe four workers attaching their handcart to the back of the train. His action carries some symbolic weight, as the journalist’s supporting comments underscore: “Among the ‘side-scene’ sketches which our artists scratch down by the way, the Chinese road-menders come in . . . [W]e, on the rear platform, find an ever-fresh delight in looking down upon them.”

 

Taking into account the longer visual record of these workers raises questions about their putative antithetical position to industrial speed. Indeed, the Leslie illustrations obscure an important quality once associated with Chinese labor. That quality was speed.

When the owners of the Central Pacific Railroad took on Chinese workers in 1865 (by 1869 they employed roughly eleven thousand Chinese workers—about 90 percent of their workforce), they gained a fighting chance against the Union Pacific, their rival in competition for track mileage. Prior to bringing on the Chinese, the company lacked sufficient and affordable manpower. Hiring Chinese immigrants filled that labor gap and allowed the railroad to dramatically increase the pace of construction. The Central Pacific was to build eastward from Sacramento while the Union Pacific built westward from along the Missouri River. Gaining track mileage mattered because the first Pacific Railroad Bill passed by Congress in 1862 determined that government bonds would be paid out and land grants assigned per mile of track laid. Further heating up the “race” to lay track was the fact that no officially fixed meeting point for the two lines had been set. Hence, in a situation in which time was both money and space, speed of labor meant increased track mileage laid and greater profits. In the spring of 1866 this was a losing equation for the Central Pacific: the company was still being outpaced by the Union Pacific. Recourse to Chinese workers changed that.

Employing this labor force allowed the Central Pacific to extend track over the Sierra Nevada Mountains far more quickly than the company’s owners had originally thought possible (about seven years faster, according to the estimates of owner James Strobridge). When the railhead moved out onto the Nevada and Utah plains in September of 1868, flat expanses permitted greater lengths of track to be laid down at a highly accelerated pace. Indeed, at this point the race for mileage between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific became something of a media sensation. And attention soon turned to the Chinese laborers who were pitted against the largely Irish workforce of the Union Pacific. Crews from the two companies “volleyed” back and forth in their efforts to speed construction along greater distances in decreasing amounts of time. First the Union Pacific’s Irish crew laid down six miles of track in a day, only to be topped by the Chinese with seven miles. The Irish rallied with seven and a half miles but were ultimately outdone by the largely Chinese crew of the Central Pacific. In the end, Chinese workers won the competition for covering the greatest distance in the least amount of time by laying down over ten miles of track within a twelve-hour period on August 28, 1869.

“If we found that we were in a hurry for a job of work,” Central Pacific owner Charles Crocker later testified before Congress, “it was better to put on Chinese at once.” Such stiff-jawed praise appears to have held firm among the owners of the railroad company. Leland Stanford concurred, writing as early as 1865, “Without them, it would be impossible to complete the western portion of this great National highway in the time required by the acts of congress.” From the outset of their involvement in the construction project and through its dramatic conclusion at Promontory Point, Utah, Chinese railroad labor was thus valued for speeding the railroad’s construction. This fact is obscured in the “Across the Continent” illustrations.

The transcontinental series featured in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper celebrated the new and immense power of the railroad, which could, in a popular phrase of the era, bring about “the annihilation of space and time.” Illustrations of Chinese labor display a shifted awareness of industrial speed. Formerly valued in Chinese workers by their employers, appreciation of speed was transferred within the two series to the mechanical creation itself. With this transference, speed was annexed—by illustrators, by writers, and by publishers—as a quality of experience associated with traversing the breadth of the nation. It is an ironic twist of fate that the Chinese workers who were a cause of this industrial achievement came to be seen very much as its antithesis.

 

Further Reading: 

For a very precise discussion of several transcontinental series appearing in illustrated periodicals of the late nineteenth century, see the sixth and seventh chapters of Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850-1900 (New York, 1953). On the topic of western tourism in the era more broadly, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism and the American West” in Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger, eds., Over the Edge: Remapping the American West (Berkeley, 2001). Furthermore, there are several studies that comment on the railroad and new configurations of industrialized space in the nineteenth century. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley, 1977) considers the “panoramic view” of the landscape from the windows of moving train cars. See also, Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (London, 2001). In terms of the labor history behind the building of the transcontinental railroad, see Alexander Saxton’s classic The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971). On Chinese railroad workers, see Paul Ong, “The Central Pacific Railroad and Exploitation of Chinese Labor,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 13:2 (Summer 1985). On the racialization of this workforce, see David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, N.C., 2001).

Currently, there are a number of especially useful studies of late-nineteenth century-representations of Chinese immigrants. Earliest among these is Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley, 1969). More recently, see John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore, 1999); Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, 1999); and Anthony Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley, 2001).

Finally, there are several important studies of Frank Leslie and his publishing empire. Among the earliest of these is Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850-1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938). Bud Leslie Gambee’s well-researched dissertation also deserves mention for its treatment of both the publication and the biographical information it offers on Leslie the publisher: “Frank Leslie and his Illustrated Newspaper, 1855-1860: Artistic and Technical Operations of a Pioneer News Weekly in America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1963). On the preeminence of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, in terms of illustrated reporting, see Andrea Pearson, “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly: Innovation and Imitation in Nineteenth-Century American Pictorial Reporting,” Journal of Popular Culture 23:4 (Spring 1990): 81-111. Most recent and most thoroughly researched among these works is Joshua Brown’s study of illustration in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, 2001).

 

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

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Deirdre Murphy received her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota. She teaches history in the bachelors’ program of the Culinary Institute of America.

Commenting on the first of his numerous collaborations with Mark Twain, the illustrator Daniel Carter Beard recalls that his relationship with the author was enabled by an unnamed “Chinese story.” In his autobiography, Hardly a Man is Now Alive: The Autobiography of Dan Beard, he writes:

Mr Fred Hall, Mark Twain’s partner in the publishing business, came to my studio in the old Judge Building and told me that Mark Twain wanted to meet the man who had made the illustrations for a Chinese story in the Cosmopolitan and he wanted that man to illustrate his new book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The manuscript was sent to me to read. I read it through three times with great enjoyment.

 

The Chinese story in question was Wu Chih Tien, a serialized novel purportedly “translated from the original” by the early Chinese American author Wong Chin Foo and the first novel published by a “Chinese American.” (In fact, Wong Chin Foo coined the term “Chinese-American,” and claimed to be the first Chinese person to be naturalized as an American.) Beard’s illustrations for Wu Chih Tien—whose plot features a prince leading a revolt against a usurping empress—may have appealed to Twain on numerous levels: they present historical scenarios from roughly 140 B.C. to 120 B.C.; they depict period costumes, depraved aristocrats, epic journeys, expert horsemanship, and magical events with versatility and grace; and they elegantly supplement a plot that pits a national populace against a brutal and corrupt regime. Twain’s interest in Wu Chih Tien did not stop at Beard’s illustrations: a passage from his notebooks disparaging a travelogue published in the February 1889 issue of Cosmopolitan reads: “Pity to put that flatulence between the same leaves with that charming Chinese story.” More broadly, Wu Chih Tien addressed an interest in China, Chinese immigrants, and transpacific sites of U.S. imperialism that spanned Twain’s career. In 1868, Twain published an article praising the Burlingame Treaty for supporting China’s self-determination and equal status with Western nations, as well as the rights of Chinese laborers in the United States. Over the following decades, Twain continued to write—without always publishing—sporadic essays exhibiting strong sympathies with the Chinese in the United States, ranging from Roughin’ It and the unfinished “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again” to “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy” and the posthumously published “Fable of the Yellow Terror.”

Given Twain’s interests in the “charming Chinese story,” its illustrator, and the broader topic of Western incursions in China, it seems likely that he continued to peruse chapters from the novel as they appeared in subsequent months. While Twain was editing and revising A Connecticut Yankee, he may have read the May 1889 installment of Wu Chih Tien, which describes a battle strategem that incorporates both the technology of gunpowder and the military tactics of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. “In the pass, through which ran the main road to the camp, [General Mah] ordered deep pits to be dug, and these were filled with powder that was to be exploded by fuses if the foe succeeded in entering the defile.” A few pages later, the explosion kills thousands of the corrupt empress’s soldiers:

At length they gained the pass, and poured in till the foremost men could see the white tent of the prince, with his banner above it.

Then they cheered till the echoes trembled; and, as if this had been the signal, the rocks from the tops of the pass came thundering down, and the powder-pits at the bottom were fired, and twenty thousand men were hurled into the sky.

The toppled rocks and explosion lead to a momentary victory, as enemy soldiers retreat from a pass suddenly filled with “blood and the limbs of torn men.” Whether he read this passage or not, Twain probably noticed Beard’s rendering of this scene in one of Wu Chih Tien‘s largest and most striking illustrations (fig. 1). It is easy to imagine that this image secured Beard’s position as Twain’s illustrator of choice: Beard was offered the contract for illustrating A Connecticut Yankee in June, just a few weeks after this image appeared.

 

This scene from Wu Chih Tien bears a striking resemblance to the descriptions of exploded buildings and bodies that recur throughout A Connecticut Yankee (figs. 2 and 3). In that novel’s climactic scene—a massacre euphemistically named the “Battle of the Sand Belt”—the Connecticut Yankee and his followers instantaneously slaughter tens of thousands of knights by detonating “dynamite torpedoes” buried beneath a sand belt. “Great Scott! Why, the whole front of that host shot into the sky with a thunder-crash, and became a whirling tempest of rags and fragments; and along the ground lay a thick wall of smoke that hid what was left of the multitude from our sight.”

Connecticut Yankee and Wu Chih Tien share more than a fascination with the brutally effective use of explosives. Both novels project modern ideas and technologies into the past to counteract conventional opinions about the progressive nature of history and the socially backward status of non-Western civilizations. By doing so, Twain and Wong countered the nativist visions of white masculinity characteristic of popular romance novels featuring historical or foreign settings. Reading these novels together helps us better understand how contending visions of empire, “progress,” and racial inequality were presented and debated in works of literary fiction. It also makes visible affinities between the two writers and their audiences that—in spite of Twain’s career-long interest in the Chinese—neither author noted in print. As platform lecturers, humorists, newspaper editors, and occasional political activists, both Twain and Wong understood how entertaining adventure novels could sway public sentiment and politics.

Both A Connecticut Yankee and Wu Chih Tien seem out of place when compared with popular romances published in the 1880s and 1890s. Romantic adventure novels responded to the closing of the U.S. frontier and the rise of industrial capitalism by projecting ideals of force, passion, and physicality onto medieval and foreign cultures such as Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune (1897), Charles Major’s When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898) and F. Marion Crawford’s Via Crucis (1899). In these romances, masculine American heroes could rescue themselves from becoming urbane, sophisticated, and over-civilized by heroically rescuing kingdoms and romancing exoticized women in historical and/or foreign settings. While the rage for historical romances was fueled by the rise of cheaper periodicals in the 1890s, the groundwork for the genre’s success was laid in the 1880s. That decade saw the publication of Lew Wallace’s vastly popular historical novel Ben-Hur (1880); the revival of interest in Sir Walter Scott by critics who saw in his corpus (as historian T.J. Jackson Lears puts it) “the emblem of a larger, fuller life”; and widespread anxieties about industrialism’s enervating influences upon Anglo-Saxon men.

 

Hank Morgan, the Yankee protagonist and narrator of A Connecticut Yankee, provides a satirical counterpoint to the romantic heroes of Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Lord Tennyson, H. Rider Haggard, Lew Wallace, and other authors popular in the 1880s. Twain’s novel derives much of its humor from the distance between Hank’s utilitarian perspective and the chivalric ideals that his contemporaries often associated with medieval society. Mysteriously transported to the sixth century, Hank quickly rises to power as King Arthur’s chief advisor by passing off scientific feats and nineteenth-century technologies as “magic.” In an allegory of imperialist development, Hank introduces modern technologies of transportation, communication, education, hygiene, governance, and war to medieval England. However, these reforms precipitate increasingly strident forms of antimodern resistance, to which Hank responds with increasingly violent measures that culminate in the novel’s explosive finale. The contradictory nature of Hank’s design is eloquently expressed by his mixed metaphors of enlightenment: he figures modernity as both a benign mechanical lever ready to “flood the midnight world with light at any moment” and a “serene volcano…giving no sign of the rising hell in its bowels.” Twain thus satirizes both romantic accounts of the past and imperialists’ arrogant, often violent schemes for “modernizing” colonized lands and populations. According to Lears, Twain’s novel expresses a deep ambivalence about the culture of “antimodern vitalism” which associated physical vitality with the heroic past: “It is possible to imagine the Yankee as Twain himself, tossing on his bunk, torn between loyalty to the respectable morality of the bourgeoisie and longings for the lawless realm of childhood.”

A Connecticut Yankee‘s satire is directed at multiple targets. First, it undermines the romanticization of the past by juxtaposing medieval romances like Malory’s Morte d’Arthur with historical analysis gleaned from works such as William Lecky’s History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869) and History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1878-1890). If historical romances fantasized that swashbuckling performances could be reenacted in foreign battlefields of the present, Twain exposes how chivalric ideals masked the oppressive regimes of the Catholic Church and feudal state. Calling in question the very notion of historical progress, A Connecticut Yankee also highlights resonances across historical periods by associating medieval peasants with antebellum American slaves, poor whites, and industrial laborers (fig. 4). Twain also links a peasant mob to “a time thirteen centuries away, when the ‘poor whites’ of our South who were always despised and frequently insulted, by the slave-lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with slave-lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery…” (fig. 5)

 

Although A Connecticut Yankee‘s references to imperialism are more circuitous, they are also more ubiquitous and compelling than its references to antebellum slavery and Gilded Age capitalism. The novel invokes relations of imperialism by alluding to Gatling guns and Christopher Columbus’s use of a lunar eclipse to control “savage” populations. More importantly, the ideology of imperialism informs Hank’s entire project of enlightening the sixth century through technological, political, and behavioral transformations. Imagining that his avowed goal of progress justifies blowing up buildings, posing as a magician, establishing a secret school or “man-factory” for indoctrinating young men, and slaughtering recalcitrant knights, Hank embodies both an outlook and a set of strategies characteristic of imperial regimes. Critics including Kaplan, Steven Sumida, and John Carlos Rowe have associated Hank’s violent and surreptitious methods of disciplining medieval subjects with historical phenomena such as the British empire, U.S. policies of Indian Removal and assimilation, and various Western incursions on Hawai’ian sovereignty which culminated in its annexation by the United States in 1898. Sumida, for example, points out that just prior to writing A Connecticut Yankee Twain had attempted an unfinished novel about how Christian missionaries affected the lives of Hawai’ians. Rowe links the novel to China by suggesting that Hank’s duel with five hundred knights echoes the celebrated death of the British colonial officer “Chinese” Gordon. Although he died while fighting Madhists in Khartoum, “The legend of Chinese Gordon as imperialist hero begins with his appointment in 1863 as military commander of the forces organized by the United States and Great Britain to quell the Taiping Rebellion…and to prop up the tottering Manchu dynasty in China.”

A Connecticut Yankee famously concludes with Hank reluctantly enacting his own version of a colonial massacre, only to be trapped by the heaps of decaying corpses he has created and, finally, put into an indefinite sleep by Merlin. Hank’s project backfires on both a practical and a moral level: not only does England’s peasantry prove too recalcitrant to turn against the Church and aristocracy, but the failings of sixth-century feudalism are repeated in the failures of nineteenth-century capitalism. Twain’s novel exposes the violence and hypocrisy underlying ideals of physical force, chivalric masculinity, and historical progress—ideals that were becoming central features of popular historical romances as well as the antimodern writings of people like Frank Norris, Theodore Roosevelt, and Brooks Adams.

 

Like Twain, Wong Chin Foo made a name for himself by creating and manipulating controversy in the periodical press (fig. 6). Wong’s prolific publications—mostly in the form of nonfiction essays and sketches—appeared in many of the same periodicals that Twain published in around the turn of the century, including Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Youth’s Companion, Harper’s, North American Review, The Atlantic, and The Chautauquan. Throughout his public career, Wong’s careful self-fashioning as an exiled Chinese nationalist makes it difficult to distinguish between his public persona and biographical facts. In 1873, he told the New York Times that he had been sponsored by “an American lady philanthropist” to attend “a Pennsylvania college” where he graduated with honors and observed American “social and political clubs, benevolent societies, trade unions, &c.” before returning to China. The biography of Wong that appeared in the monthly Shaker Manifesto (1879) is typical:

Though only 26, he has visited this country twice, has been an officer of the imperial government at Shanghai, and a rebel against the present Tartar emperor. For this last a price was set on his head, and he was hunted for months, never getting into such serious danger as when he put himself into the hands of English missionaries, who, finding out who he was, decided to give him up to the emperor. He remonstrated against their betrayal of him to torture and final execution by cutting him into 18 pieces; but they promised to obtain him the favor of simply having his head cut off, and thereupon locked him in a room, and told him to put his trust in Jesus. Disregarding this very practical advice, he broke out and got to the coast, where an irreligious seaman gave him passage to Japan. Thence he came to San Francisco on a steamer which carried in the steerage 200 Chinese young women of the lower class, imported for infamous purposes; and on arriving he went into the courts and secured their freedom and return to their country.

The nineteenth century marked a turbulent period of China’s history, when missionaries and foreign settlements were encroaching on the cultural and political hegemony of the Qing Dynasty’s Tartar rulers. Wong put that turbulence to good use in creating a picture of himself for U.S. readers. He indicts Western missionaries in order to fashion himself as an exiled hero: a nationalist rebel with “a price…on his head” who manages to appeal to U.S. laws to liberate 200 Chinese slave women “on arriving.” The U.S. consul at Yokohama who helped him escape describes Wong’s exile in terms that could apply to Hank Morgan’s reform projects in A Connecticut Yankee: “not approving of the Oriental methods of government, [he] had attempted to establish—over night—a republican form of administration in that conservative empire.” In the United States, Wong attempted to sway public opinion against the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which would be considered for renewal in 1892) by mobilizing cosmopolitan, parodic, satirical, and protest discourses in a variety of periodicals and newspapers. These strategies range from a comic dialect poem (“Moon faced gal on balcony floor/ See young fellow down by door…”) to publicly challenging anti-Chinese demagogue Denis Kearney to a duel, from touring as a “Buddhist missionary” lecturer to founding the first Chinese newspaper in the United States, The Chinese-American. Wong’s literary production and public performances consistently present the Chinese as subjects who are not only assimilable to U.S. norms, but who already possess qualities that Americans would identify with, such as sentimental tendencies, a passion for justice, and a strong sense of humor.

 

Although Wu Chih Tien, the Celestial Empress: A Chinese Historical Novel purports to be a “translation” of a Chinese narrative, I have not been able to identify a plausible source text. In the early 1880s, several literary periodicals announced that “Wong Ching Foo” was going to translate “The Fan Yong: or the Royal Slave,” a Chinese historical novel written by “Kong Ming” “twenty-two hundred years ago.” But Kong Ming was the name of a character in the classic Chinese novel Water Margin; “the Royal Slave” echoes the subtitle of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; and the earliest Chinese novels were written in the fourteenth century. All of this suggests that Wong was the author. Whether he wrote or translated Wu Chih Tien, Wong is responsible for both its language and commentary on Gilded Age assumptions about history, race, and masculinity. Loosely based on the controversial regime of the Empress Wu Zetian from A.D. 655-705, the novel begins with the concubine Wu Chih Tien usurping the throne, forcing the emperor’s newborn son into exile, and subjecting the populace to brutal taxes intended to fund her extravagant lifestyle. The plot’s focus then shifts from the empress to the prince, Li Tan, who grows into a tall, beautiful, talented, eloquent, and sympathetic young man. Hounded by the empress’s soldiers, Li Tan exchanges clothing with a swineherd to escape (fig. 7). He is then pursued by Tartars intending to sell him into slavery, but he escapes slavery—at least nominally—by indenturing himself to the cruel merchant Wu Deah. Just as the adoption of a swineherd’s clothes and the threat of being duplicitously sold into slavery echo recurring motifs in Twain’s novels, Wu Deah’s offer to Li Tan resonates with Twain’s interest in the blurry boundaries between “free,” forced, and indentured labor: “If you will pledge yourself to work for me for five years, I will give you fine raiment, plenty of food, and a nice bed where my slaves sleep; and when your time is up I will give you a new suit of clothes and five taels; and then you will be a very rich man—for a swineherd.” Immediately after Li Tan saves himself from slavery by accepting this offer, Wu Deah has him brutally whipped for failing to kow-tow properly.

At Wu Deah’s palace, Li Tan begins a romantic relationship with Sho Kai, Wu Deah’s poor niece. After the two pledge their love and the prince entrusts his fiancée with the imperial seal, Li Tan leaves to rejoin the rebel army. Sho Kai is tricked into believing Li Tan has died, and marries an arranged suitor in despair; Li Tan nearly enters into an arranged marriage, too, when he learns of Sho Kai’s apparent infidelity. Once these romantic complications are resolved, Li Tan and Sho Kai are finally married and the novel comes to a swift conclusion: the final battle for China’s capital is narrated in two short pages. The novel’s conclusion shifts from scenarios of punishment (including a graphic illustration of the empress’s half-naked body ablaze) to reports of the new emperor’s happy and fruitful marriage. Li Tan’s love match with Sho Kai signals a shift away from polygamy and arranged marriage towards a model of freely contracted marriage across class lines (fig. 8). In a period when U.S. law presumed that Chinese women seeking to enter the country were prostitutes, and when missionaries and other writers focused disproportionate attention on misogynistic Chinese practices such as footbinding, prostitution, polygamy, and infanticide, Wong’s novel builds towards an exemplary monogamous marriage: “And although [the emperor] might have had many wives besides Sho Kai, he was too happy to want another.” The arc of the novel thus moves from the polygamous situation from which Wu Chih Tien rose to power to one of the fundamental building blocks of Western liberal society: a monogamous, self-contracted, and prolific marriage.

 

Drawing on the conventions of historical romance, Wu Chih Tien thus represents heroic and liberally minded Chinese men in an era characterized by Chinese Exclusion and racist stereotypes ranging from the “Heathen Chinee” and “yellow peril” to Twain’s own effeminizing formulation (in Roughin’ It) of “The Gentle, Inoffensive Chinese.” By taking as its protagonist the handsome, robust, intelligent, sympathetic prince, Wu Chih Tien both appropriates and unravels the equation of whiteness with imperial manhood that would underwrite many historical novels of the 1890s. Ironically, the generic conventions of historical romances that make Li Tan’s triumph possible trap the novel’s female characters. The genre’s sexist logic contrasts the idealized male hero with both the passive Sho Kai—who is ultimately rescued—and the demonized usurping empress—who is ultimately burned alive.

As “a Chinese rebel chief…now an exile for the part he took in the rebellion to overthrow the present Tartar dynasty,” Wong would have had strong reasons for identifying with the exiled, liberal-minded prince. Likewise, Wong’s choice of subject suggests parallels between the usurping empress and the contemporary regime of the Manchu Empress Dowager Cixi in China. Cixi’s conservatism and political scheming came to a head in her power struggle against the reformist Prince Gong, who she felt had become too favorable to foreigners; in 1884, Cixi consolidated her power by forcing the prince to retire to private life. Exiled for promoting pro-Han and modernizing reforms in China, Wong framed his story of the revolutionary removal of Wu Chih Tien as an allegory—and an argument—for the overthrow of the Qing (Manchu or Tartar) dynasty in China (an overthrow that eventually occurred in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution). As Western nations were competing for commercial, religious, and political influence in China, Wong’s novel endorsed self-rule and reforms designed to strengthen the nation against foreign encroachments, as well as to protect the rights of Chinese living abroad. Generating support for a political revolution in China, of course, counteracts racist thinking by suggesting that the Chinese are capable of self-rule-even if that self-rule must be allegorized through the installation of a rightful, popularly supported emperor. Unlike most later popular romances that were set in foreign countries, national liberation in Wu Chih Tien does not call for the intervention of a heroic American man. By imagining Li Tan as an enlightened despot capable of ruling China objectively and responsibly, Wong reaffirms an earlier Harper’s article on “Political Honors in China” (1883), in which he argued that China’s system of rule is grounded in democratic systems of meritocracy and substantive (as well as merely formal) justice. Alluding to the Fifteenth Amendment, “Political Honors” argues that China’s system of assigning government positions based on competitive examinations differs from U.S. politics insofar as the former makes “no distinctions…relative to nationality, color, or previous condition to servitude.”

 

Wu Chih Tien suggests that China can adopt modern technologies of war and governance without the help of colonial rulers—indeed, the novel argues that China had already been ruled by an enlightened, monogamous, and liberal emperor over a century before the birth of Christ. As Wong put it in his controversial essay “Why Am I A Heathen?”, “we [Chinese] decline to admit all the advantages of your boasted civilization; or that the white race is the only civilized one. Its civilization is borrowed, adapted, and shaped from our older form.” Wu Chih Tien‘s depictions of the buried gunpowder strategem and an egalitarian emperor—which appeared months before Twain published on similar topics in his masterpiece of anachronism—surpass even Yankee in unsettling Eurocentric notions of technological and political progress. Through its strategic use of anachronism, the novel implicitly argues that, far from being “unassimilable” (as anti-Chinese agitators had long believed and as numerous Chinese exclusion acts presumed) to Western liberal practices, the Chinese had in fact invented many of those practices. Indeed, Wong’s argument about China’s prior invention of civilized practices suggests that Wu Chih Tien is not anachronistic at all: rather, it is anti-anachronistic. The novel emphasizes modern aspects of seventh-century China in order to unravel the representation of China as—to borrow Anne McClintock’s term—”anachronistic space,” or an atavistic space remote from historical “progress.” Reading Wu Chih Tien with A Connecticut Yankee provides a concrete reference point for the anti-imperialist allegory of Twain’s novel and shows that Twain was not alone in strategically deploying literary anachronism to combat the imperialist tendency to represent real and potential colonies as “anachronistic.” While A Connecticut Yankee has already been linked to multiple imperialist contexts ranging from the trans-Mississippi frontier and Hawai’i to Africa and India, Wong’s “Chinese Historical Novel” introduces a nonwestern, non-white nation that, in the second century B.C., was (by Hank Morgan’s standards) already more politically and technologically “advanced” than sixth-century England. Explosives, gunpowder, and meritocracy were not exclusively Western inventions: ironically, they could have been transported into sixth-century England from sixth-century China, rather than from the 1880s.

 

Further reading:

For a sampling of Wong Chin Foo’s literary production, see Wong Chin Foo, “The Story of San Tszon.” Atlantic Monthly 56:334 (August 1885): 256-63; Wong Chin Foo, “Why Am I A Heathen?” The North American Review 145:369 (August 1887): 169-79; Wong Chin Foo, “The Chinese in New York,” Cosmopolitan 5 (March-October 1888): 297-311. Studies of Wong’s writings and political activism include Qingsong Zhang, “The Origins of the Chinese Americanization Movement: Wong Chin Foo and the Chinese Equal Rights League,” in Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era, eds. K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia, 1998); Carrie Tirado Bramen, The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge Mass., 2000); John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore, 2001); and Hsuan L. Hsu, “Wong Chin Foo’s Periodical Writing and Chinese Exclusion,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 39:3-4 (Fall/Winter 2006): 83-105.

For a sampling of Twain’s writings on imperialism and anti-Chinese racism, see Mark Twain, “The Treaty with China,” New York Tribune (Aug. 4, 1868), reprinted inThe Journal of Transnational American Studies 2:1 (2010); Mark Twain, “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,”Galaxy (May 1870): 717-18; Mark Twain, “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852-1890, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York, 1992): 455-70; Mark Twain and Bret Harte, Ah Sin: A Dramatic Work (San Francisco, 1961); Mark Twain “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” North American Review 182:531 (Feb. 1901): 161-76; Mark Twain, “The War Prayer,” in Great Short Works of Mark Twain, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York, 2004): 218-21; and Mark Twain, “The Fable of the Yellow Terror,” in The Devil’s Race-Track: Mark Twain’s “Great Dark” Writings, ed. John Sutton Tuckey (Berkeley, 2005): 369-72.

For studies of Twain’s engagements with imperialism, see Fred W. Lorch, “Hawaiian Feudalism and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” American Literature 30:1 (Mar. 1958): 50-66; Stephen H. Sumida, “Reevaluating Mark Twain’s Novel of Hawaii,” American Literature 61:4 (Dec. 1989): 586-609; John Carlos Rowe, “Mark Twain’s Rediscovery of American in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” in Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: from the Revolution to World War II (Oxford, 2000): 121-40; Amy Kaplan, “The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain,” in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Joel A. Johnson, “A Connecticut Yankee in Saddam’s Court: Mark Twain on Benevolent Imperialism,” Perspectives on Politics 5:1 (2007): 49-61. On Twain’s career-long interest in China and the Chinese, see Martin Zehr, “Mark Twain, ‘The Treaty with China,’ and the Chinese Connection,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 2:1 (2010) online publication. On illustrations in Mark Twain’s writings, see Daniel Carter Beard, Hardly a Man is Now Alive: The Autobiography of Dan Beard (New York, 1939), and Henry B. Wonham, “‘I Want a Real Coon’: Mark Twain and Late-Nineteenth-Century Ethnic Caricature,” American Literature 72:1 (March 2000): 117-52.

On the historical romance, see William Dean Howells, “The New Historical Romance,” North American Review 171 (1900): 935-48; George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge, 1990); Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire,” in The Anarchy of Empire ; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (Chicago, 1994); and Andrew Hebard, “Romantic Sovereignty: Popular Romances and the American Imperial State,” American Quarterly 57:3 (September 2005): 805-30.

Thanks to Edlie Wong, Martha Lincoln, Cara Shipe, Kristian Jensen, Catherine Kelly and a Mark Twain Circle panel at the American Literature Association for responding to earlier versions of this essay.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 11.1 (October, 2010).

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