Rejuvenating the Revolution? Roundtable on Turn: Washington’s Spies

A Historian’s Take on AMC’s Turn

In telling the story of the American Revolution, academic historians and Hollywood filmmakers have a troubled history. Both parties have attempted to bring the founding of the American republic to life for a contemporary audience, but rarely have they agreed on how best to accomplish this. There has been no shortage of directors who have ignored the advice of their historical consultants or of historians who have criticized a film’s most trivial anachronisms. A clever work of satire, the 1986 film Sweet Liberty captured the dynamics of this dysfunctional relationship. The film’s protagonist, Michael Burgess (ably played by Alan Alda), is a college history professor who sells the movie rights to his prize-winning study of the American Revolution to the director Bo Hodges (Saul Rubinek). Thrilled that his life’s work will be captured on the silver screen, Professor Burgess eagerly welcomes the production crew to his sleepy Southern college town only to learn that Hodges intends to adapt the book as a bawdy comedy targeted at a teenage audience. Horrified, Burgess confronts Hodges to demand an explanation. Clearly amused at the historian’s discomfort, Hodges proclaims the three principles of a successful Hollywood blockbuster: “defy authority, destroy property, and take people’s clothes off.” Nonplussed, Burgess retorts, “What does that have to do with American history?” Blinded by the demands of their respective disciplines, Burgess and Hodges fail to see their common mission. Both the historian and the filmmaker must to do more than merely relate an accurate narrative of the period’s events. They must make the past relevant to the present. Done well, both academic history and historical cinema have the potential to breathe new life into familiar stories. Each can rejuvenate the Revolution.

Making the American Revolution meaningful to a twenty-first-century audience is exactly what the cast, crew, and producers of AMC’s new television series Turn have set out to accomplish. Promising to tell “the story of America’s first spy ring,” Turn speaks to a post-9/11 audience intrigued by the workings of global espionage and raised on a diet of political violence served up by CNN. Turn is a product of its time. Though historians often disparage historical interpretations driven by a presentist agenda, few would deny that the questions we ask of the past are shaped by the world we live in today. The producers of Turn and academic historians have this in common: neither can escape viewing the past from the perspective of the present.

Errors in chronology and costuming are easily overlooked because the show succeeds at capturing the spirit of America’s tortuous path to nationhood, but it fails epically in its responsibility to the very real people who walked that road over 200 years ago.

Turn‘s implicit argument, that the American Revolution was far more violent, more terrifying, more contested, and more uncertain than we usually imagine when we picture George Washington crossing the Delaware or Thomas Jefferson drafting the Declaration of Independence, falls in line with a recent trend in the historical literature that depicts the birth of our nation as a brutal and divisive struggle. Turn portrays an embryonic America torn apart by political discord. The conflict raging in the small Long Island town of Setauket, where much of the series is set, is presented as a microcosm of the larger conflict. Like all American colonists, Setauket’s denizens must confront the fraught questions of political and family allegiance in a time of turmoil. One cannot help but think of the stark divisions between blue and red states in contemporary America. To drive this point home, as well as to increase the dramatic tension, the protagonist Abraham Woodhull (Jamie Bell) lives in a house divided. Abe’s father, Richard (Kevin R. McNally), a socially prominent judge, and his wife, Mary (Meegan Warner), are firm supporters of the crown. Abe’s own loyalties, which he strives to conceal from his family, end up reluctantly, though resolutely, with the Revolutionaries. As the series unfolds, Abe struggles to maintain his principles in a morally ambiguous world. His allies on the Patriot side, Benjamin Tallmadge (Seth Numrich) and Caleb Brewster (Daniel Henshall), are not above committing atrocities in the name of the “glorious cause,” and his British opponents, most obviously Major Hewlett (Burn Gorman) and Ensign Baker (Thomas Keegan), are capable of integrity and humanity. This is not the traditional story of America’s nobility and virtue in the face of Britain’s barbaric brutality most recently showcased by the 2000 film The Patriot. What’s not for a historian to love?

As is often the case, the devil is in the details. Errors in chronology and costuming are easily overlooked because the show succeeds at capturing the spirit of America’s tortuous path to nationhood, but it fails epically in its responsibility to the very real people who walked that road over 200 years ago. Like many historical dramas, Turn uses a combination of actual historical individuals and fictional characters in its cast. In a recorded discussion with faculty from the College of William & Mary in February 2015, the producers of Turn lauded their efforts to portray the experiences of little-known revolutionaries like Woodhull and Tallmadge rather than the usual parade of Founding Fathers. They are pleased to be doing “history from the bottom up.” While household names like George Washington and Benedict Arnold are present, the show’s principal players are men and women long obscured by the cobwebs of history. Perhaps it is because of this obscurity that the producers felt entitled to take such great liberties with the lives of these individuals: liberties that would undoubtedly expose the producers to a defamation of character suit were the people portrayed in the series still alive.

Actor Samuel Roukin, who portrays John Graves Simcoe on Turn: Washington’s Spies, addresses the audience at William & Mary’s “Television, History, & Revolution” from William & Mary news video. Courtesy of the College of William & Mary.

Some of these liberties are harmless, perhaps even necessary. The real Hewlett, for instance, was an American, born and bred on Long Island, not the posh Englishman Burn Gorman personifies. In fact, a regiment of American Loyalists, not British regulars, garrisoned Setauket throughout the war. Green-coated Americans fighting blue-coated Americans might easily confuse the lay viewer, however. The producers’ decision to anglicize Hewlett and his troops is justifiable on the grounds of narrative clarity and does little to misrepresent Hewlett, a man who was historically dedicated to the British Empire. Depicting an adulterous relationship between Abe Woodhull and Anna Strong (Heather Lind) is more questionable. Woodhull, who was a single man during the war, was ten years Anna’s junior. There is no evidence that the married mother of six had a romantic relationship with Woodhull. Yet, the demands of drama are paramount. The romance between Abe and Anna is a crucial component of the show’s narrative arc. In a work of historical fiction, creative liberties will be taken. Turn does not purport to be a work of documentary history after all.

Artistic license, however, is no excuse for the series’ portrayal of British Captain John Graves Simcoe (Samuel Roukin). In the show’s pilot episode, viewers are introduced to a tall, foppish, effeminate, but unmistakably sinister Englishman destined to be a thorn in the side of the would-be hero Abe. It is no surprise that the producers of Turn, aiming primarily at an American audience, wanted a British antagonist. Simcoe is that and more. He is for Turn what William Tavington was for the Patriot: a British officer of unspeakable cruelty and devilish cunning. Roukin has described the character he portrays as “basically a sociopath,” and not without reason. Turn‘s Simcoe is a predator. He sexually menaces Anna, brutally beats Abe, stabs an American spy in the throat at a dinner party, hangs an innocent man, and murders a Loyalist soldier in order to bolster his reputation among his men. These are but a few of his more egregious acts. But Simcoe is no mere brute. His is a calculating and clever embodiment of evil, born of hatred. According to AMC’s website, “John Graves Simcoe is a born attack dog who harbors an intense dislike for most colonists.” That dislike—or better yet, loathing—manifests itself in his scheme to assassinate Abe’s father and frame the Patriot-leaning Reverend Nathanial Tallmadge (Boris McGiver) for the shooting. When Abe foils his plan, Simcoe is livid. During a prisoner-exchange negotiation with Patriot forces, Simcoe defies Major Hewlett’s direct orders and callously executes Caleb Brewster’s uncle in front of his nephew. Although Hewlett has him arrested, Simcoe escapes court martial, languishing for a time as a clerk in the quartermaster’s department, before being promoted to command of the Loyalist Queen’s Rangers regiment. The British high command appears largely unconcerned by Simcoe’s brutality.

The real John Graves Simcoe did none of these things. The son of a decorated naval officer who died during the British campaign to capture Canada in 1759, Simcoe was a twenty-three-year-old Eton- and Oxford-educated lieutenant when war erupted in Massachusetts in 1775. Though he lamented “the dreadful scene of civil war” that had engulfed the colonies, the young officer was eager to prove an effective soldier. Like many of his fellow British officers, Simcoe believed that the colonists had been led astray by Whig demagogues and that force alone could bring about an “effectual reconciliation” between the king and his colonists. There is no doubt that Simcoe was what historian Stephen Conway has dubbed “a hard-liner:” an officer who thought rebellion deserved to be punished. In a letter to his mother, he referred to the rebellious colonists as “infatuated wretches” and hoped for their “inevitable destruction.” Yet his zeal to suppress the American rebellion did not translate into unrestrained brutality toward American soldiers or civilians. He approved of his commanding general Sir William Howe’s orders to protect the property of the people of Boston and to spare the town from flames upon the army’s departure in 1776. A man as deeply committed to his God as his King, Simcoe strongly disapproved of harming the helpless. When he discovered that some of his soldiers were disinclined to take prisoners in battle because Simcoe had forbidden them to confiscate their captives’ watches, Simcoe reversed his policy. Human life was more important than private property. This is hardly the portrait of a sociopath.

Paradoxically, the likely culprit behind this case of cinematic slander is the historian behind the series: Alexander Rose, the author of the popular history Washington’s Spies, upon which Turn is based. To Rose, a Cambridge University-trained historian of twentieth-century Britain, “Simcoe exemplified the worst aspects of the British army.” The evidence supporting this claim is tenuous, to say the least. Rose points to the Queen’s Rangers’ occupation of Oyster Bay during the winter of 1778-79 as proof of Simcoe’s “wanton brutality.” In Rose’s words, Simcoe “stripped Oyster Bay bare of wood” and “sacrilegiously converted” the Quaker meetinghouse into a storeroom. Simcoe’s troops did occupy Oyster Bay that winter, and no doubt they seized buildings and other supplies for purposes of defense and firewood, but this was common practice among eighteenth-century armies. The Continental Army would have behaved no differently, except perhaps promising the buildings owners’ reimbursement in worthless Continental currency.

Most erroneously, Rose claims that “Simcoe made his presence felt” in Oyster Bay by apparently overseeing—or at least condoning—the whipping of a townsperson. Following Rose’s footnote leads to an obscure local history that relies on a nineteenth-century source as evidence of this incident. The source, Henry Onderdonk’s Documents and Letters Intended to Illustrate the Revolutionary Incidents of Queens County (1846), records excerpts from a number of eighteenth-century documents but omits documentation for this particular incident, in which the author narrates the arrest of “a respectable young man, John Weeks,” for failing to give the correct countersign when challenged by a sentry. Weeks was “seized, tried, and sentenced to be whipped.” His punishment was interrupted only by the “frantic appeals of his mother and sister.” The problem is that even according to this undocumented nineteenth-century account, Weeks’s arrest occurred before Simcoe and his Rangers reached Oyster Bay. The contingent occupying the town was the Loyalist regiment Fanning’s Corps, a “rude and ill-behaved” unit, in the estimation of the nineteenth-century historian. It is hard to imagine how Simcoe could have made his presence felt in the town when he was not even there. It is equally difficult to fathom why Rose would cite a twentieth-century local history to ascribe culpability to Simcoe for this alleged incident when he cites Onderdonk’s work elsewhere in his book. An ungenerous reviewer might assume bad faith.

John Graves Simcoe by John Wycliffe Lowes Forster. This portrait depicts Simcoe as the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.

Though the event is not depicted in the show, the real John Graves Simcoe did have an altercation with the Woodhull family. In late April 1779, Loyalist John Wolsey, who had been released recently from a Patriot prison, informed Simcoe of Woodhull’s career as a rebel informant. Intent on apprehending the suspected spy, Simcoe and a party of his Rangers descended on the residence of Abraham’s father, Judge Richard Woodhull. The judge, who historically was a Patriot rather than a Loyalist sympathizer, became the hapless victim of his son’s clandestine activities when Simcoe’s men failed to discover Abe. According to a letter that Abe later wrote Tallmadge, Simcoe, eager “to make some compensation for his Voige [voyage] … fell upon” the Judge “and Plundered him in a most Shocking Manner.” Rose’s interpretation of this event was that Simcoe personally “beat up Abraham Woodhull’s father.” An alternate reading of the source suggests that Simcoe sought financial compensation for the expedition and permitted his men to seize items of the judge’s private property. British troops plundering inoffensive American civilians was in and of itself a “Shocking” act of cruelty discouraged by the prevailing European rules of war, but it was a far from uncommon practice during the conflict.

Plundering was one thing; physical assault was entirely another. Had Simcoe personally beaten a fellow gentleman—and an elderly one at that—he would have faced official censure, if not court martial and dishonor. Moreover, Abe would certainly have been more explicit in his letter had that been the case. When New York Loyalist Edmund Palmer “fell upon” a Mr. Willis, who was an “old Gentleman,” American Major General Israel Putnam informed Washington that Palmer “abused, beat, & left him, to appearance dead.” Abe’s letter is silent on his father’s status after the raid. It is highly unlikely that Judge Woodhull experienced such treatment at the hands of Simcoe. During a similar raid in 1778, Simcoe had personally protected the improbably named American Colonel Thomas Thomas, “a very active partizan of the enemy,” from his “irritated soldiers” who wanted to revenge the death of one of their comrades. If Simcoe or his troopers had brutalized Judge Woodhull, rather than merely plundered him, the Patriot press would have had a field day. Instead, the raid failed to make the news.

This is not to suggest that the real Simcoe was a softy. During his raids in New Jersey, Simcoe and his Rangers regularly burned barns and even private dwellings belonging to suspected Patriots. A Frenchman visiting Canada after the war was struck by Simcoe’s persistent “hatred … against the United States” and his “boasting of the numerous houses he had fired during the unfortunate conflict.” In 1779, the Pennsylvania Evening Post claimed that Simcoe’s “exploits have generally been marked with acts of the most inhuman barbarity.” To the governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, Simcoe was “a consummate savage.” Seeking to exploit Simcoe’s raids for propagandistic purposes, both the author of the piece in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and Livingston—who was a skilled propagandist often writing under the pseudonym Adolphus—painted Simcoe as a barbarian: someone beyond the pale of the civilized world. Rose, and by extension the producers of Turn, have accepted uncritically the Patriot propagandists’ interpretation of Simcoe.

The historical Simcoe, despite his firm belief that the stick was a better inducement for loyalty than the carrot, was no murderer. The Duke of Northumberland, who knew him well, claimed that Simcoe was “brave, humane, sensible, and honest.” Even Simcoe’s arch rival, American cavalry commander Colonel Henry Lee, described Simcoe as “one of the best officers in the British army” who “was a man of letters, and like the Romans and Grecians, cultivated science amid the turmoil of camp.” To Lee, Simcoe was “enterprising, resolute, and persevering.” It is hard to imagine an American officer endorsing someone who regularly murdered Patriot soldiers and brutalized civilians. Turn‘s portrayal sullies the memory of an officer who, though inveterately opposed to American independence, served his king and cause with honor and vigor.

Turn‘s depiction of Simcoe is not only unjust to a man who would go on to be one of the founders of modern Canada, it is regrettable in its predictability. Roukin gives us the classic cliché of a sexually aggressive and cruelly sadistic aristocratic English villain. The viewer instantly recalls the English lord who rapes newly married women under the guise of the law of Primae Noctis in Braveheart (1995) and Tim Roth’s repulsive interpretation of rapist and murder Archibald Cunningham in Rob Roy (1995). The Patriot‘s William Tavington, while not a rapist, does delight in burning innocent men, women, and children alive. All three characters accomplish their evil deeds with a smirk and a hint of an aristocratic lisp. But these characters are works of fiction. Though potentially inspired by historic characters, they bear fictional names. Their nefarious deeds require no documentation. Simcoe, on the other hand, was real. He and his Queen’s Rangers operated on Long Island and raided Setauket. Abe Woodhull considered Simcoe an especially dangerous foe, even wishing him dead. The opportunity to create a sophisticated, complex, zealous, and contemporarily relevant antagonist was thrown away on Roukin’s Simcoe. In the end, Turnfails most spectacularly by failing to live up to its potential for originality, squandering its chance to rejuvenate the Revolution by resorting to a tired trope. This unfortunate decision tarnishes an otherwise plausible and entertaining historical drama.

A Loyalist Guarded, Re-guarded, and Disregarded The Two Trials of Mather Byles the Elder

As the siege of Boston ended in March 1776, about 1,100 Loyalists and their families sailed from the town with the British military forces. Abigail Adams watched from Penn’s Hill as the ships passed by—the “largest Fleet ever seen in America,” she wrote. “They look like a forest.” Since then, only those Boston Loyalists who relocated elsewhere, chiefly in Nova Scotia or England, seem to have attracted much interest among American historians. Otherwise, the Boston Loyalists, their properties confiscated, their contributions to colonial Massachusetts denigrated, simply evaporate from Boston’s history.

But not every Loyalist left Boston, and although we know little about those remaining, we do know what happened to the most prominent among them, the Reverend Doctor Mather Byles the elder. When fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Byles was sixty-eight and a Congregationalist minister at the Eighth Congregational Church (called the Hollis Street Church) in Boston. By July 1777 he had been expelled from his ministry, convicted by the revolutionary Committee of Safety as a dangerous person, and placed under house arrest and the guard of an armed sentry. His crime: making disdainful jokes about the rebels and their cause.

The case of Mather Byles actually involves two clergymen named Mather Byles, father and son, and it redirects our attention to the local history of the Revolution as civil war—tearing families apart, setting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, and reconstructing the social order for generations to come. It even separated Loyalist families. For example, Mather Byles père stayed with his daughters in their Boston home during and after the blockade. But his Loyalist son, Mather Byles Jr., fled with his five children to the British garrison at Halifax.

If we think of the War of Independence as a civil war fought between British subjects, we also get a sharper look at revolutionary politics during and after 1775-1776. This story recalls the famous question Carl Becker asked a century ago: If the colonies were to get “home rule,” then “who should rule at home”? In 1776-1777, old man Byles learned to his cost that in his Boston home, the revolutionaries would rule. In this account, I focus on the siege and its aftermath in two events in 1776 and 1777 that disciplined him, punished him, and dramatically silenced him after he had spent seven decades as a British citizen in his hometown but suddenly found himself in a Boston he could no longer recognize.

There is a subplot.

"General Knox," engraving by David Edwin based on the portrait painted by Charles W. Peale. Found on page 99 in the Port Folio, Vol. 6, No. 2 (August 1811, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Courtesy of the Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 1, the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “General Knox,” engraving by David Edwin based on the portrait painted by Charles W. Peale. Found on page 99 in the Port Folio, Vol. 6, No. 2 (August 1811, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Courtesy of the Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 1, the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Upon the story of the elder Mather Byles falls the shadow of a contrasting “back story” involving his son, Mather Byles Jr. In 1775, the younger Byles, age 41, was, like his father, a Bostonian descendant of the Mathers, a Harvard graduate, a talkative Tory, a recent widower, and a clergyman. Unlike his staunchly Congregationalist father, however, he was an Anglican priest; hence his Loyalism involved sworn allegiance to the king as head of his church. Moreover, he was an apostate. Formerly an ordained Congregationalist minister, he had served for eleven years as a pastor in New London, Connecticut, before he surprisingly converted to the Church of England, resigned his pulpit in New London, and sailed to oldLondon for ordination. Swiftly, he managed an appointment in, of all places, his hometown (and that of his father), where he served for nine years as rector at Boston’s Christ Church, commonly known as the North Church. These were nine awkward years for both men, all around, and they offered the junior Reverend Byles every opportunity to make enemies of his own, as well as some for his father.

Furthermore, after encountering deep political trouble at Christ Church (its members were known as the most revolutionary Anglicans north of Maryland), the junior Byles resigned his position there—on, of all days, April 18, 1775. He relinquished his keys to the North Church on that afternoon. A few hours later, the church’s sexton and an accomplice placed two lanterns in the church bell tower to signal the movement of British regiments against Lexington and Concord. On the next day, the world changed for both father and son. Having resigned his clerical position, the son eventually accepted a post as chaplain to the royal regiments, duties he performed during the siege and continued when he and his family left Boston. They hurriedly abandoned their home in the North End and left much of their property to whatever fate their neighbors chose. In his absence, the political and ecclesiastical sins of the son were soon to be visited upon the father. And that directs us to a perennial question about what happened at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775—a question that was to shape the fate of Mather Byles the elder: Who fired the first shot at Lexington Green on Easter Wednesday, the nineteenth of April, 1775?

At dusk on that day, when General Gage’s battered, exhausted British troops had staggered back to Charlestown from Lexington and Concord, everyone in New England wanted to know who had started the fight. Did a “Lobster,” one of those red-coated British Regulars, first squeeze the trigger, or had it been a New England man in his hunting shirt?

Within four days after the battle, this rumor swirled through Boston: the king’s troops admitted firing first. Lieutenant Hawkshaw had said so to the elder Reverend Mather Byles and the Boston merchant Gilbert Deblois. Hawkshaw, an officer of Hugh Earl Percy’s 5th Regiment of Foot, scoffed at the rumor, issuing a sworn statement that “the Country People” had fired first, but on the streets of Boston, residents muttered about a cover-up. Hadn’t the lieutenant privately said otherwise to Byles and Deblois? Pressed on the issue, Byles and Deblois, each a prominent citizen and a Loyalist supporter of the Crown, responded with their own sworn declaration that they, “the only two Gentlemen of the Town, who have visited Lieut. Hawkshaw since his being brought into Boston, both declare that, neither of them had the least Conversation with Lt. Hawkshawe upon the Subject of the Affair of Wednesday last the 19th April; + particularly, that They nor Either of Them ever heard Lt. Hawkshaw say that the King’s Troops had fired first upon the Country People.”

Hawkshaw had been wounded on the road near Lexington. Could anyone believe that when Byles and Deblois had visited him they simply passed the time in pleasant conversation without ever discussing the previous week’s armed confrontation between British troops and rebellious locals? But the two gentlemen swore that they had not asked about the first shot. And that put Mather Byles Sr. in the thick of it. In April 1775, there could be no walking away from this fight. The long-held suspicions of many Bostonians, including most members of his Hollis Street Church, had been confirmed: that when the shooting started, the Reverend Doctor Byles would be on the wrong side. He was now not only a damned Tory but also officially a dangerous person.

Father and Son under Siege: Boston, 1775-1776

Following the battle at Lexington and Concord, General Gage withdrew his regiments into the city, and from April 20 on, Boston lay under siege. Boston citizens, rebel and Loyalist alike, realized immediately that the British Army, now numbering more than 3,500, was trapped against the sea and vulnerable to attack by the rebels. Minister at Hollis Street Church for forty-four years as its first and only pastor, Mather Byles and his daughters Mary, age 25, and Catherine, 22, and his ward, Mather Brown, 14, hoped both rebels and Crown would soon regain their senses and avoid an all-out war. Almost all the other Congregational ministers were trying to leave Boston, but Byles decided to trust the king and the king’s men to do their duty by him and his family. He would hold his ground. He understood full well that their only hope for safety rested in the protection of British officers and troops.

A Plan of the Town of Boston with the Intrenchments &c. of His Majestys Forces in 1775. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in new window.

In his late sixties, he was still a man to be reckoned with. Broad-shouldered, energetic, and unusually tall, he projected a hearty, commanding presence and a deep, powerful speaking voice. Even his enemies respected his erudition, his quick mind, and his sharp tongue. Some people considered him the best preacher in a town famous for its preachers. And while they groaned at his incessant puns, they delighted at tea-tables and coffee houses in sharing the latest Byles witticisms among themselves. The previous year, when a doggerel ballad about Boston’s ministers circulated in the town and made everyone chuckle, Byles got a dose of his own satiric humor and surely recognized his lineaments in the caricature:

There’s punning Byles invokes our smiles,
A man of stately parts;
He visits folks to crack his jokes,
Which never mend their hearts.
With strutting gait, and wig so great,
He walks along the streets,
And throws out wit, or what’s like it,
To every one he meets.

Byles could claim ties to the Puritan past and the traditions of the New England Way comparable to that of his Boston cousin the Reverend Samuel Mather. Despite the Mather family’s fierce struggles with Whitehall for the past century and a half in defense of the right of Massachusetts to rule itself under its royal charter, and despite the Mather family’s traditional self-congratulations on New England’s role as the New World antidote to European corruption, Byles believed that the Mathers had always considered themselves English and loyal. He would not budge from insisting that a man could be simultaneously a dissenting Congregationalist and a loyal British subject of the king.

He had spent his boyhood as a fatherless poor relation, passed from hand to hand, but for a half century he had spent his adult life in close contact with the families of the leading government officials. Related by marriage to several of them, he had been true to friends, family, and the Crown during the tumultuous, decade-long buildup to this outbreak of armed hostility. They had a claim on his fidelity and he a claim on their protection. He was certain that eventually they would prevail.

But the siege of Boston, from April 1775 to March 1776, was a terrible year for him. His wife died of dysentery. His daughter-in-law died, leaving his son a widower with five young children. The battles at Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill caused huge losses to the proud British Army and to its officer corps. Because the tolling of funeral bells in Boston during so many daily processions crippled morale, General Gage forbade the ringing of bells in mourning. Thousands of British reinforcements eventually arrived in Boston by sea, but with the town crowded with discontented soldiers and closed off from the countryside, rations became extremely scarce. A female British retainer was court-martialed for having stolen the town bull and having it slaughtered. In the winter, the milk cows were slaughtered for beef, and the taste of milk became a merely a fond memory. Everyone needed firewood so badly that the soldiers felled hundreds of trees and even tore down the Congregational North Church meetinghouse and used its planks for firewood. The British Army appropriated Byles’s church meetinghouse on Hollis Street for use as a barracks. The winter was bitter, and so was the spring. When Byles walked the two-mile length of Boston from the Neck at the south end to Greenough’s Shipyard at the north, he saw his town deteriorating into a shabby, denuded, dispirited armed camp, vulnerable at any moment to total conflagration, its shops closed, its business crippled, empty of two-thirds of its citizens—their places taken by thousands of soldiers, sailors, and various entourages—with the small remaining civilian population frightened of each other, of smallpox, scurvy, and dysentery, of spies and informants, and of soldiers patrolling their streets and contending over their heads. Even in springtime Boston seemed a weather-beaten place with the gray feel of winter, its street lamps no longer lit, its hours measured by military drumbeat, and its populace, both Whig and Tory, wracked by anxiety, grief, suffering, sickness, and want.

And the morning of March 5 brought a nasty surprise. Nearly eight months earlier, at dawn on June 17, 1775, Boston had awakened to the startling discovery that, while the town had slept, the rebel forces had silently fortified Breed’s Hill in Charlestown. Now came another rude awakening. On March 5, Boston woke to the shocking discovery that overnight the Continental Army had silently fortified Dorchester Heights, the high ground overlooking the town on the peninsula stretching from the south toward Boston Harbor like the thumb of a mitten. There had been increased bustle and business in the vicinity of Breed’s and Bunker Hill during the past few days and a bombardment on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but now Boston realized it had been a diversion, focusing the town’s attention to the north while in the other direction Washington had sneaked his forces onto Dorchester Heights after dark and, in another incredible feat of digging, had in one night built a sturdy fort on each of the prominent hills commanding the heights, the town below, and the British fleet in the harbor. The noise from the bombardment had cleverly covered the movement of troops and equipment and had masked the sound of furious digging through the frozen ground during Monday night and Tuesday morning. But when Byles used his telescope to scan the hills of Dorchester that morning from the lookout he had built on the second story of his house near the Boston Neck, he could immediately see a crucial difference between this unpleasant surprise and the one he had faced on June 17: now he was looking at the barrels of cannons. Washington had emplaced artillery! Where in the world had he got it? And how had he got so much of it? Byles could count at least fifty pieces.

Mather Byles, Sr., John Singleton Copley, oil on canvas (24 1/4 x 27 1/2 inches), 1765-67. Courtesy of the Portrait Art Collection (Gift of Josephine Spencer Gay, 1923), the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Now the Americans could take the offensive. Placed high on hills so close to town, Washington’s cannon could surely reach the British ships resting at anchor and set Boston afire by pouring shot down into it. How could civilians hope to escape? How could an old man safeguard the lives of his daughters and son, his young ward, and his grandchildren? If the city burned, the flames would easily reach his house at Byles’s Corner and his neighboring meetinghouse. They would consume his son’s home, and everything that the Byles family had built and cherished for the better part of a century would be lost. He had to rely upon General Howe and the protection of the British Army.

Yet within a few days, after a hurricane-force storm had prevented General Howe from launching an offensive, it became increasingly clear that General Washington had left Howe with two bad alternatives: on the one hand, face devastating losses to the British Army and fleet, perhaps even total destruction, along with the reduction of Boston to a heap of charred wood; on the other, save his soldiers and sailors to fight again another day in another place but abandon the town and suffer the humiliation of defeat. Panic swept through the streets of Boston. Howe had long ago proposed evacuating Boston for some more viable place, and with this enormous storm (which seemed like a Providential sign to the Whigs), Howe had a reason to do so. When the weather cleared, he chose to evacuate his troops and ships from Boston if Washington pledged not to destroy the city. Washington agreed. Which meant that the most powerful military in Europe could not, after all, protect its friends huddled together in weather-beaten Boston.

Henry Knox, of all people!

Mather Byles Jr. decided to leave the city, with many of the other Boston Loyalists, for Nova Scotia, where he hoped to continue serving as a chaplain. Mather Byles, with Catherine, Mary, and Mather Brown, tearfully bid farewell to his family and then trudged across town toward Byles’s Corner. While slogging their muddy way home from the littered wharves through Boston’s rain-soaked, debris-strewn streets, they sorted through dockside chatter about their fellow townsman Henry Knox. Like everyone, they had been surprised enough on the morning of March 5 when they awakened to discover the dozens of field guns in place on Dorchester Heights, but this new information startled the townspeople: Henry Knox, of all people, had put them there!

Everybody in Boston knew him, though chiefly as that portly fellow in his mid-twenties who a few years earlier had set up shop with a bookstore at William’s Court. Mary and Catherine were about Henry’s age, and they and their father, who were avid readers and proud of the family library, had of course spent plenty of time at Knox’s grandly named London Book Shop. It was also a fashionable place during the British occupation, not only for its books but also for Knox’s stock of “patent medicines, flutes, bread-baskets, telescopes, dividers, protractors, and wallpaper.” But nobody would have expected the bookish storekeeper/peddler to turn artilleryman. After all, Knox’s only previous military experience consisted of few years as a militiaman and then as a lieutenant in the militia’s Boston Grenadiers. But Mather Byles knew that Knox had specialized in books on military history, tactics, and fortifications. This giant of a man—six feet high and massive in bulk—might have been merely a debt-ridden shopkeeper surrounded by books, but Knox had dreamed of something grander. He had studied how cannons like those now menacing the city had been used in the past and how they might be better used in the future.

Evidently, George Washington had given the young fellow his chance. The stories filtered out from the rebel lines and into Boston: Washington had sent Knox all the way to Lake George and Lake Champlain, where Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys had captured Fort Ticonderoga. Knox had orders to get Ticonderoga’s captured British guns and haul them 300 miles back to Cambridge—and he did that, in the dead of winter, by commandeering oxen- and horse-drawn sleds from farmers and dragging 60 tons of weaponry through snow and over frozen lakes just in time for Washington to emplace them above Boston. Could this story be true? Could a big-bellied young Boston bookseller have caused that forest of British masts and sails to vacate Boston Harbor? The reports insisted that there was no mistake. It had been Henry Knox, of all people.

Of course, there was another side to the Henry Knox story, and all the Loyalist families knew it. Everybody crowding the Boston docks on those hectic days and nights this week felt fear and remorse as they fled their homes, but the Flucker family had special reasons to worry, and their friends to worry with them. Just over two years earlier, their eighteen-year-old daughter Lucy had defied the objections of her parents and had married Henry Knox. Marrying a tradesman with few prospects was bad enough, but Lucy’s father was the Royal Secretary of Massachusetts, an appointee of the Crown and among the most important of the province’s administrators. The king had few families more loyal than were the Fluckers. Lucy’s mother, Hannah Waldo Flucker, was the daughter of a brigadier; Lucy’s brother Thomas was in the British Army; her sister Hannah was married to a British officer. Their lot had always been cast with England. There were whispers that her father, after grudgingly agreeing to Lucy’s marriage, tried to get Henry Knox a commission in the British Army, but Knox had refused. A year after the marriage, however, early in the siege, Henry and Lucy had quietly slipped out of Boston one night and had never returned.

Mather Byles, Jr., Mather Brown, oil on canvas (30 x 25 1/4 inches), 1784. Courtesy of the Portrait Art Collection (Gift of Josephine Spencer Gay, 1923), the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

It was clear now that they had made their way to George Washington at Cambridge. Knox had been spotted at the battle of Bunker Hill. Washington had put Knox in charge of artillery and had made him a colonel!

Within hours of the British troops’ departure, five hundred of Washington’s soldiers were clambering over the barriers and working their way around the fortifications at the Neck. The scuttlebutt in Boston brought news that Washington knew about the smallpox there, for he had sent to reconnoiter the town only men who had previously survived smallpox or had been inoculated against it. Not until this detachment finished its reconnaissance did others come in to shore up the defenses the British Army had wrecked in its departure: evidently, Washington was guarding against a sneak counter-attack by General Howe.

As Mather Byles and his diminished family reached home and looked across the Boston Neck from their upper rooms, they could see the rebel guns on Dorchester Heights, but they could also see strewn around the Neck the wreckage of British equipment discarded or broken up in the hurried departure. The town, with its entrenchments and fortifications, was instantly a shell of a civilian town with scores of houses hurriedly left vacant as hundreds of families closed them and fled for safety. For a couple of days, the only soldiers seen on the streets were some Continental work-details. But that changed on the morning of March 20.

Word traveled quickly: Washington was planning to march his army into Boston. The townspeople, long penned up during the siege, were curious to see this Virginia aristocrat who was a stranger to them. But Henry Knox was a local man. When he and the other Bostonians accompanying Washington marched into town, they would parade down the familiar streets where they had grown up and lived as British subjects all their lives. Their relatives and friends—even a Loyalist friend such as old Mather Byles—were eager to see them again for the first time in nearly a year. Knox would surely have a prominent place in the parade, and Byles decided to find a good vantage point along the street so that he could behold the young bookseller now transformed into a colonel in this audacious, just-formed army of provincial rebels. Like Falstaff awaiting the arrival of the newly crowned Henry V, Byles was waiting for his own (somewhat Falstaffian) Henry to ride by.

He heard them before he saw them. A great huzzah had gone up when the gates at the Neck had been thrown open, and the sound carried as people hurried to their windows or took up posts on the streets to see the parade. Soon Washington and his staff rode smartly into view. He was as tall as reports had said—as tall as Doctor Byles, probably taller—and he sat a powerful horse impressively. He had the look of command. And arrayed behind him rode his staff officers. Surely Knox would be easy to find among them. There he was, as fat as Byles had remembered him, riding a fine horse and handsomely got up with a splendid coat, polished brass and leather. His cheeks were red with the excitement of entering Boston as a hometown hero, and he was smiling and nodding to acquaintances waving to him from their doorways and from the margins of the streets. Byles shouldered his way through a couple of onlookers so that he could catch the eye of Henry Knox as he came toward him. Their eyes met, and Byles, with a smile, sang out this greeting: “I never saw an ox fatter in my life!”

As with all plays on words, this one took a moment to register, a second while the minds of bystanders and Knox himself translated “an ox” to “a Knox.” But just a moment, for there followed a titter, then a few snorts, and then some nervous laughter as the onlookers caught the joke but also its audacity—so typical of the town’s greatest punster, to be sure—but what in the world was the old parson thinking? Obviously, he meant to be jocular—but Colonel Henry Knox was not amused. He jerked his mount’s head away. As he spurred his horse, some observers were sure they saw him mouth the words, “Damned fool.”

As Knox and his artillerymen moved down the street, several people in the crowd mentally added Byles’s latest pun to a list of his offenses that they had quietly been compiling during the past year spent under the thumb of British military rule in the dismal town. This was the same old Byles, habitually dispensing his wisecracks and puns on all subjects, even the political. The doggerel of 1774 still held true in 1776:

With strutting gait, and wig so great,
He walks along the streets,
And throws out wit, or what’s like it,
To every one he meets.

But three days ago, General Howe and his troops had sailed away somewhere, and today a new order was about to replace the British commanders in rebellious Boston. With a prominent but irritating Tory minister living in their midst, Boston patriots saw in Mather Byles a handy opportunity for an illustration of how they would wield their power and who would truly rule at home. Byles swiftly became their target. The pastor of the Hollis Street Church, whose meetinghouse had been appropriated as barracks for the British army and whose apostate clerical son had gone over to the enemy, would learn to bridle his tongue, or it would be bridled for him.

The first “trial” of Mather Byles the Elder

In the early summer, the hopes of the Byles family for reconciliation crashed when independence was declared in Philadelphia in July. The printed Declaration arrived in Boston on July 18, 1776. Thomas Crafts, Sheriff of Suffolk County, read the document in public, receiving three huzzahs, and a great celebration followed. Gun batteries on the surrounding hills fired thirteen rounds, thirteen infantry units fired in succession, and church bells pealed throughout the town.

Citizens ripped down all signs of royalty in Boston, including the king’s arms that were displayed at the State House, throwing them into a bonfire in front of the Bunch of Grapes Tavern. “Thus ends royal authority in this State,” wrote Abigail Adams to her husband, “and all the people shall say Amen.”

A little more than three months earlier, however, just a few days after Byles’s congregation had returned to Hollis Street Church following the evacuation, his former friends, prominently including his Congregational colleagues whom James Otis would come to call the “black regiment,” had organized a plan to punish him for his Loyalist opinions, his sardonic puns, and his friendship with the British during the siege. Now, with political independence declared in July, his church seized its opportunity and brought Byles before the church and congregation to dismiss him. (The “church” refers to members in full communion; the “congregation” included members not in full communion.) This trial was the first of two Byles was to undergo in the coming year.

In late July 1776, the people of his church publicly summoned Byles to the meetinghouse for a hearing before the male members of the congregation. The most prominent Congregationalist minister in Boston, the bellicose Charles Chauncy of the First Church, had spent the siege under self-imposed exile in Brookline. He seems to have instigated the movement to oust Byles from his position. Yet Byles, having served Hollis Street Church since its founding in 1732, was not about to give Chauncy the satisfaction of seeing him sweat under an interrogation or, worse, meekly present a confession of error or an apology.

As an eyewitness later recalled, when the men of Hollis Street assembled in the meetinghouse gallery to bring their grievances against the best preacher in town, he made them wait, fidgeting nervously in their seats. Suddenly, the door opened, and Dr. Byles, wearing gown and bands, a full wig, and a three-cornered hat, appeared in the doorway. Shoulders back and head up, he walked with a stately tread while passing under the gaze of his accusers. Reaching the pulpit, he ascended the stairs, removed his hat, slowly placed it on a peg, rose to his full height, looked out at them, and finally seated himself. Silence. After a few moments, Byles turned to the gallery to face his accusers.

“If ye have aught to communicate,” he said, in the deep voice they had heard on so many Lord’s Days—”say on!”

Motionless silence from the assembly until finally a deacon rose, unfolded a paper, and began to read in a tremulous voice: “The Church of Christ in Hollis Street …”

“Louder!” commanded Dr. Byles.

The deacon tried again, raising his voice: “The Church of Christ in Hollis Street …”

“Louder!” thundered Dr. Byles for a second time.

The deacon tried for a third time, his voice now squeaking in following his pastor’s command: “The Church of Christ in Hollis Street …”

“Louder!” interrupted Dr. Byles for the third time.

Finally, the deacon began to shout the bill of charges against Mather Byles. When he reached the third charge on the list, Byles rose to his feet and proclaimed, “‘Tis false! ‘Tis false! ‘Tis false! And the Church of Christ in Hollis Street knows that ’tis false.” He reached for his hat, placed it on his head, and descended the stairs. In a measured, unhurried manner, he dramatically strode from the meetinghouse, closed its door behind him, and never entered it again.

In declaring its independence of Dr. Byles, the Church of Christ in Hollis Street brought the following charges against him, all of them political and none of which Byles had seen in advance: that he “associated and spent a considerable part of his time with the officers of the British army, having them frequently at his house and lending them his telescope for the purpose of seeing the works erecting out of town for our defense”; that he neglected “to visit his people in their distress, and treat[ed] the public calamity with a great deal of lightness and indifference”; that he prayed “in public that America might submit to Great Britain, or words to the same purpose”; that he used “his influence to prevent people from going out of town, and [said] that the town would be inhabited by a better sort of people than those who had left it, or words to that purpose”; that he had been “officious to lend his aid and assistance to furnish our enemies with evidence against the country, by signing a certain paper at the request of Gen. Gage, relative to what one [Lt. Hawkshaw] said (or did not say) respecting the battle at Lexington”; that he was “unwilling to preach on a fast-day appointed by Congress, when with difficulty he was prevailed to preach one-half the day; and further, his refusing to have two services on the Lord’s day”; he regularly met “on the Lord’s days, before and after service, with a number of our inveterate enemies, at a certain place in King-street, called Tory Hall”; and that he allowed the British to take away “the fences belonging to the society, the seats of the pews, etc.”

Byles did not stay to hear all these charges. It is likely that the third charge read—that he prayed in public that America might submit to Great Britain—triggered his outburst and dramatic exit, for he had always refrained, on principle, from preaching politics in his sermons. When pressed to take a political stand during services, he had replied, “I have thrown up four breastworks, behind which I have entrenched myself, none of which can be forced. In the first place, I do not understand politics; in the second place, you all do, every man and mother’s son of you; in the third place, you have politics all the week—pray let one day out of seven be devoted to religion; and in the fourth place, I am engaged in a work of infinitely greater importance. Give me any subject to preach upon of more consequence than the truths I bring to you, and I will preach upon it the next Sabbath.” The charge that he had prayed in public for America’s submission to Britain would provoke his denial: “Tis false! ‘Tis false! ‘Tis false!”

For the other charges, however, there was plenty of evidence. And although he had not preached on politics before the siege, there was a risk that he might start now. Removing him from the pulpit removed that threat. The bill of particulars demonstrated that during the siege year between April 19, 1775, and March 20, 1776, someone had quietly, but carefully, observed and recorded his activities—and now those notes were codified as a matter of record.

Byles left the Hollis Street meetinghouse on Friday, August 9. On that day, the Provincial Council ordered every Massachusetts congregation to read the Declaration of Independence two days later. On that Sunday, therefore, Charles Chauncy kept his congregants after morning service, read his people the catalogue of accusations against the king, implored, “God bless the United States of America,” and commanded all the people to answer with a solemn Amen. By leaving his church on Friday, however, Byles escaped having to do the same—or trying to invoke his rule against preaching politics from the pulpit. One week after Byles closed the door behind him, on August 16, the Hollis Street church and congregation met and voted to dismiss the Reverend Dr. Byles from his pastoral charge.

Except for Byles, all of Boston’s Congregationalist ministers were in Chauncy’s camp politically, as were most of their colleagues elsewhere in New England, but what happened at Hollis Street troubled clergymen throughout the region. News of this dismissal on political grounds, with no council called and no theological charges brought, spread rapidly. The events at Hollis Street were highly irregular, nearly unprecedented in Massachusetts’s Congregational history. Pressed by several worried Patriot clergy about the precedent Hollis Street had set (and by the contradiction between Chauncy’s lifelong opposition to dismissing a minister without calling an ecclesiastical council), Chauncy merely stated that “Byles is not fit for a preacher” and that “it was an irregular time & we must expect things irregular.”

The State follows the Church: The second trial

Byles’s opponents, however, had only just begun. The church had acted, and now it was time for the state to punish him. Only a week after his dismissal from his pulpit, the political apparatus went to work. The Boston Committee of Correspondence and Safety called a hearing to question “a number of Persons who had heard Dr. Byles express himself very unfriendly to this Country.” Several of his Hollis Street worshippers testified as to the Doctor’s sarcasm—his insulting joke about fat Henry Knox surely came up—but the committee took no punitive action. That action needed a state law that could be applied to Byles, and that law got passed in the spring of 1777.

On May 10, 1777, the General Court of Massachusetts passed an act providing for “procuring evidence, preparing lists of suspected persons, for their apprehension, their trial by jury, their punishment on convictions, with sundry regulations as to the disposition of their property and estates.” Boston swiftly put this new law to work. The town meeting of the following Saturday appointed William Tudor to “procure Evidence that may be had of the inimical Dispositions, towards this, or any of the United States, of any inhabitants of this Town, who shall be charged by the Freeholders of being a Person whose Residence in this State is dangerous to the public peace or Safety.” The scale of crimes had now escalated from actions to attitudes. The meeting recommended to the General Court that anyone with an inimical disposition be “immediately apprehended and confined.” It also called upon the Boston Selectmen to “retire & make a List of such Persons,” which the Selectmen promptly did, publishing it two days later. On the list of twenty-nine men, Mather Byles, D. D., stood second, behind Ebenezer Norwood and ahead of Benjamin Phillips. It was clear who would rule at home and who would be ruled.

Byles had seen this day coming as far back as August 1776, when the Committee of Safety had investigated him only a week after Hollis Street Church had dismissed him. With his tendency to joke about the rebels, and with the negative associations of his son’s fealty to the Crown, his position had been made even more tenuous during the winter, when the General Court passed the Seditious Speech Act, empowering rulers now to punish not just deeds but words and thoughts alike. Anyone preaching, praying, or speaking against the American cause faced arrest and fines. Heading the list in February, he was still at the top of it in May. This time, however, the authorities had the sanction of general law behind its list-making; the penalties for an “inimical disposition” could cost him his life and property, which would leave his daughters unprotected. Although certain to be apprehended and tried, he resolved to stay in Boston and protect Mary, Catherine, and his property. Within days, he was brought before a court of special sessions.

The trial occurred on June 2, an unseasonably cold day. Byles dressed both for the weather and the occasion: long black coat, clerical bands, full wig, and hat. Representing himself, he appeared without counsel. He knew that his reputation for punning and making light of Patriot earnestness had brought him to this court room. After all, in 1770, when the riot they now called the Boston Massacre took place, he had famously asked a friend, “Tell me, my young friend, which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?” Still, if he would go down, he would go down as Mather Byles, not as some timid shadow of himself.

Four justices of the peace comprised the court. Byles knew them all: John Hill, Sam Pemberton, Joseph Greenleaf, and Joseph Gardner. They soon gave him an opportunity to disarm them—or dismay them—with a pun. When he entered the room, they motioned him to a seat by the fire. He remarked, “Gentlemen, when I came among you I expected persecution, but I could not think you would have offered me the fire so suddenly.” During jury selection, he objected to a townsman named Fallas, whose name was pronounced “Fellahs.” “Fellows?” He thundered. “I’ll not be tried by fellows!” intending the now archaic meaning of “worthless man or boy.”

Nonetheless, tried he was, and convicted. In case there was any doubt about who was ruling at home, the court sternly issued this warrant to the sheriff: “Whereas Mather Byles of Boston in said county, clerk, stands convicted at Boston aforesaid on the second day of June A. D. 1777 as a person who hath been from the nineteenth day of April A. D. 1775 & now is so inimically disposed towards this & other United States of America that his further residence in this State is dangerous to the public peace and safety. You are therefore in the name of the government & people of Massa [chusetts] Bay in New England hereby directed immediately to deliver the said Mather to the board of war of the State to be by them put on board a guard ship or otherwise secured until they can transport said Mather [Byles] off the continent to some part of the West Indies or Europe agreeable to a late law of said State.”

Perhaps, however, there was some doubt after all. John Eliot, a young Boston patriot aspiring to the ministry and hoping to become Chauncy’s assistant at First Church, wrote to Jeremy Belknap about the trial, scornfully describing Byles’s performance but concluding: “The evidence was much more in favour of him than against him. All that could be proved was that he is a silly, impertinent, childish person. … It was to the great surprise of every one present, as well as to the whole town, that he should be bro’t in guilty. His general character has been so despicable that he seems to have no friends to pity him, tho’ all allow upon such evidence he o’t not be condemned.” Still, if they could convict old man Byles on flimsy evidence—well, watch what you say. Especially if you make people laugh. When Byles was taken to his appearance before the Massachusetts Board of War, its members decided against dispatching him to a prison ship—tantamount to a death sentence—but silenced him by quarantine, changing the sentence to house arrest, imprisoning him at his home, forbidding him to leave the property or receive any visitors, and prohibiting any correspondence.

The Board posted an armed sentry at the house. Byles immediately dubbed the sentry “My Observe-a-Tory.” One hot day, Byles asked the sentinel to bring him a bucket of cold water from the street pump. When the sentry replied that he could not leave his post, Byles told him not to fret, for Byles would walk his rounds for him. Whereupon, he shouldered the young man’s musket and marched smartly up and down in front of the house until the soldier returned from the well. Although his house arrest lasted for two years, the Board of War removed the sentry after two months. Byles then told his family, “I have been guarded, re-guarded, and disregarded.”

Meanwhile, in Halifax

In general terms, his son’s situation resembled that of most Boston Loyalists relocating in Nova Scotia. He realized that the property and belongings he had hurriedly left behind were vulnerable to looting and confiscation. About the evacuation, he wrote: “… it has totally ruined multitudes, who thought themselves perfectly secure in the British protection. Of this number I am one, not being allowed to bring away any furniture, or anything that I possessed, but a couple of beds, with such articles as might be contained in a few trunks and boxes.” Bostonians held a grudge against Mather Byles Jr., a grudge his father’s presence recalled for them every day. Two years after his departure, Massachusetts passed the Banishment Act. His name prominently appeared on the list of those forbidden, under penalty of death, to return. With the Confiscation Act of 1779, his home and belongings were sold at public auction.

After the war, he pressed his claims, and those of his father, for compensation before the Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American Loyalists, itemizing losses of £800. The Commission gave him £120 and paid for his passage back to Nova Scotia; his father received no compensation from Britain but considerable scorn from Bostonians because of his wayward son.

In one way, however, Mather Byles Jr. was more fortunate than were many other United Empire Loyalists. General Howe had retained him as chaplain to the British regiments posted to Halifax, so he had a salary there. Like other Anglican clergymen, moreover, he also received a stipend as a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and eventually he obtained regular Anglican positions both in Halifax and ultimately in St. John, New Brunswick. Although he had a price on his head in Massachusetts, and he sometimes called Halifax “the American Siberia,” at least he had some money coming in.

Many other Nova Scotia Loyalists were less fortunately placed, as was his father in Boston, who, of course, then had neither a profession nor a salary. Politically quarantined in his own house, he could not attend worship services, even if any Congregational church would have had him. After the imprisonment ended, Reverend Samuel Parker, rector of Trinity Church, befriended him, and he sometimes attended services at Parker’s Anglican church, but he stuck to his Congregational principles. Parker later related that Byles on his deathbed, with characteristic slyness, whispered, “I have almost got to that world where there are no bishops!”

Mary and Catherine remained unmarried and became seamstresses. Byles could no longer support his then-16-year-old ward, Mather Brown, so, legend has it, he gave the boy his last fifteen dollars and bade him farewell. The lad eventually reached England, studied with Benjamin West and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and became a respected painter of portraits, for a while competing with John Singleton Copley. Byles sold some of his property, lived off a few meager rents paid on property that had been in the names of his two late wives, and, despite a series of strokes, existed for the next eleven years upon the kindness of some brave friends who, despite John Eliot’s assessment, did pity him and did not consider his wisecracking tongue a clear and present danger to the new nation’s peace and security.

Even after their father’s death on July 5, 1788, his daughters never surrendered their father’s house. Mary and Catherine refused to move from the house or sell it. In the 1830s, they each died there, a couple of years apart, and six decades after a civil war that resulted in their father’s loss of his most prized possession: his voice, public and private. In order to achieve home rule, the revolutionary government had ruled aggressively against their family at home. But the two daughters of Dr. Byles, until the days they died, refused to acknowledge either that government or its successors. In their wills, they insisted that nothing the family possessed, from its furniture and their family’s fine library to the family papers, should come into the hands of a citizen of the United States. It was all crated and shipped to their relatives in Halifax. Throughout the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson, they remained true to their father and their king, stubborn Loyalists to the end.

Appendix: The list of twenty-nine names of Loyalists deemed dangerous to the state in 1777.

The names of the twenty-nine people identified as dangerous are printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 34 (1880) 17. See also John Noble, “Some Massachusetts Tories,” Publications of the Colonial Society of America, Vol. 5: 257-59 (Boston, 1902). The list of names is given below. Noble identifies many of these people and indicates, as far as the documentary evidence will permit, the disposition of their cases. In some instances, as he writes, the person “left nothing behind but the shadow of a name.” Noble also prints a record of persons in jail on February 18, 1777. It includes Edwards, Davis, Capen, Brush, and (John) Whitworth. The most prominent name among the prisoners is Dr. Benjamin Church, the infamous double agent. Interestingly, the list of prisoners includes seven women, three of them (Mary Noax [or Voax], Mary Young, and Miss Hill [and daughter]) mentioned by name. Lorenzo Sabine mentions most of the twenty-nine above, but in some cases he can indicate only that they appear on this list. See Sabine, The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in The War of the Revolution … (Boston, 1847). I am researching this list as part of an overall effort to construct a profile of the cohort of Loyalists who stayed in Boston, but my work is not yet complete.

Ebenezer Norwood

Mather Byles, D. D.

Benjamin Phillips

Dr. James Lloyd

Daniel Hubbard

Dr. Isaac Rand Jr.

John Tufts

Edward Wentworth

William Perry

Dr. Samuel Danforth

George Lush

Edward Hutchinson

Thomas Edwards

Hopestill Capen

Patrick Wall

Benjamin Davis

Benj Davis Jr.

David Parker

James Perkins

Nathaniel Cary

Richard Green

William Jackson

Samuel Broadstreet

Thomas Amory

Charles Whitworth

Dr. Thomas Kast

John Erving, Esq.

George Bethune

Dr. Miles Whitworth

Loyalist Diaspora

In recent years we have seen a surge of interest in American loyalists. Highlights of this renewed attention to loyalists include: journal essays by prominent scholars such as Philip Gould, Alan Taylor, and Jasanoff; several recent books, most notably Cassandra Pybus’ Epic Journeys of Freedom, which generated a significant response; a conference at the University of Maine in 2009; and the 2011 AAS Seminar in the History of the Book dedicated to the topic. With Liberty’s Exiles Maya Jasanoff has added a remarkable book to this list, one that establishes the ground for all future studies of American loyalists. Jasanoff’s meticulous and ambitious study deftly captures the experience of a wide range of loyalist actors, including black slaves, Native American allies of the British, Southern planters, and powerful mid-Atlantic and New England political figures. The demographic diversity of her history is impressive, as is the fluidity with which her narrative moves across gendered, racial, social, and regional variations. For these reasons, it would be an injustice to reduce Liberty’s Exiles to the category of a study of loyalism. Loyalists may be the key players of the study, but the central theme of the book is the resituating of the American Revolution in a much broader global imperial history. As such, Liberty’s Exiles makes an indispensable contribution to a growing body of work on empire and the globalization of eighteenth-century studies.

Jasanoff provides a vivid sense of the impact that key events and decisions of the Revolution had on the people who were most affected by them.

Another way to describe Jasanoff’s study would be to say that this is a book about how the American loyalists who left the United States reshaped the British Empire in the decades following the American Revolution. The Revolution here becomes a crucial event in the history of the British Empire, which, of course, it was. But this dimension of the conflict has often been elided in nationalist histories focused on how the Revolution changed (or didn’t change) the politics and culture of thirteen colonies turned states. Either way, as the emphasis on exile in the title implies, Jasanoff’s study is principally focused on the loyalist migration out of the United States during and after the Revolution. The early chapters of the book explore the nature of American loyalists’ sentiments and their views of the Revolution. The trajectory of the narrative, however, is always directed toward their eventual departure for England, Canada, and other parts of the British Empire.

Liberty’s Exiles unfolds chronologically, but the focus of the study is biographical. Jasanoff builds her metanarrative around the stories of individual loyalists. This strategy of emphasizing individual experiences and tying them to the major political, military, and administrative events that unfolded has the advantage of giving a real human face to the conflict. In many ways it’s a brilliant decision by Jasanoff, especially when we consider how intensively the traditional story of the American Revolution has dehumanized loyalists. Through the stories of loyalists such as Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, David George, and William Augustus Bowles, Jasanoff provides a vivid sense of the impact that key events and decisions of the Revolution had on the people who were most affected by them. Policy decisions and military actions are not just currents in the broad flows of history; they have specific effects on individuals who then make decisions accordingly. In addition to providing a more concrete sense of how individuals experienced the events of the Revolution, this approach highlights the kind of agency afforded to these loyalists.

Foregrounding the biographical also calls attention to the different and similar questions faced by loyalists from across the demographic spectrum. We can see, for example, how the departure of British loyalist forces in Savannah affects both the elite white Johnston family and the free black George Liele. Jasanoff constantly organizes her narrative around these comparisons and contrasts. The other key device that moves the narrative forward is the comparison between regions. So with an event like the aftermath of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, she moves through a series of characters in Savannah and Charleston to show us how a diverse range of actors responded to the British departure from those cities. Later, in Part III of the book, she dedicates a series of chapters to the fates of loyalists in different outposts: the Bahamas, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and England. This way we get both local variations and regional comparisons. In both cases, Jasanoff’s remarkable archival work has enabled her to tell the stories of a diverse set of peoples. And Jasanoff has gone to great lengths to track down exiled American loyalists around the world and to tell their stories. Through them she traces the global effects of the American Revolution and its impact, particularly, on the British Empire as it rearticulated itself around the world. In this respect, Liberty’s Exilescontinues the work of Jasanoff’s first book, Edge of Empire, which explored the origins of the British Empire. Closer to home, the early chapters of Jasanoff’s book integrate the loyalists more fully into the story of the American Revolution and provide insights into what a less nationalistic reading of the Revolution might look like.

In its metanarrative, though, Liberty’s Exiles is only peripherally interested in the Revolution itself and in the United States more generally. The loyalists in this book are always on the path to departing their homes in the thirteen colonies. The narrative trajectory of Jasanoff’s history points away from the United States so that it sometimes can feel as if these characters, while clearly shaped by their American experiences, are mostly passing through the Revolution on their way to the more important work that will take place when they go on to challenge and reshape the British Empire. Ironically, then, the loyalists whose voices are absent from this study are those who remained in the United States after the war. Of course, those loyalists are not the subject of Liberty’s Exiles. They were not exiled.

Jasanoff’s study thus underscores a gaping hole in the historiography of the Revolution. For every loyalist who departed the colonies, at least seven stayed behind, and the number is more likely closer to ten or eleven. To do the math in shorthand: by Jasanoff’s count, which can be found in the detailed appendix to the book, about 60,000 loyalists emigrated from the United States in the 1780s and 1790s, but by most estimates there were between 500,000 and 750,000 loyalists at the time of the Revolution. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the United States in 1780 was about 2.8 million, and the general view among historians is that in 1775, 2.5 million people resided in the colonies. Using the 1775 figure as a baseline, if 30 percent of Americans were loyalists, there should have been a total of around 750,000 loyalists. Even if we take the most conservative estimate of 20 percent of the population, the total number of loyalists would be 500,000. By any count then, the vast majority of loyalists remained in the U.S. after the war. We sorely need a parallel study to Jasanoff’s to recover their experiences, their voices, and, most importantly, their role in the creation of the new American state. To take only one example, Tench Coxe, one of Alexander Hamilton’s most important confidants and advisors, was a loyalist who had left during the war but would return and come to play a key role in the new United States.

Virtually every study of American loyalists has focused primarily on the stories of those who left, from Mary Beth Norton’s study of loyalists who relocated to England and Bernard Bailyn’s biography of Thomas Hutchinson in the 1970s, to more recent work by Judith van Buskirk, Ruma Chopra, and Liam Riordan. No doubt the archive has made it much easier to tell the stories of those who left. For obvious reasons, loyalists who stayed tended not to publish narratives of their experiences of the war and not to advertise their feelings about the war and its effect on their families. We can find glimpses of those experiences, however, in the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, who married the loyalist Susan DeLancy, and in the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, whose loyalist father was banished from Pennsylvania when the author was a mere child. One suspects, however, that with the longstanding emphasis on the Revolution as a narrative of triumphant nationalism, scholars have also not looked terribly hard to uncover the stories of loyalists who stayed.

To tell the story of the loyalists who left, Jasanoff draws on the language of diaspora. Surprisingly, however, Jasanoff never comments on or tracks the larger implications of this concept. What does it mean to call the experience of largely white American loyalists who felt they had to leave the United States a diaspora? The term diaspora has both a long history and, perhaps more importantly for the purposes of Jasanoff’s study, a contentious recent history. Without going into that history here, suffice it to say that the study of diasporic peoples and their experiences has become so important in the social sciences and the humanities that it has an influential journal dedicated entirely to the topic. A quick perusal of any issue of Diaspora will show how vibrant and exciting, but also how contested, scholarship on the topic has been. Scholars of diaspora fiercely debate the applicability of the term to peoples other than the original Jewish and Armenian populations whose experiences have shaped its meaning. In recent decades, scholars such as George Shepperson and Brent Hayes Edwards have profitably argued for its applicability to the case of Africans relocated to the Americas. But they did so through a direct and careful engagement with the conceptual frame and theoretical meanings that diaspora has obtained.

Recently, in The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse has argued for diaspora as a useful framework for thinking about the British migration to the United States. Once again, though, Tennenhouse situates his use of the term in dialogue with its past uses and connotations. So, what does it mean to think of the loyalist exiles in terms of a diaspora? How do their experiences resemble the experiences of other diasporic peoples such as the Jews, the Armenians, and African-Americans? How might the insights of scholars who have worked on those other diasporic populations help us understand the ways these American loyalists experienced their dislocation and reconstructed their identities? By attending to these questions, Jasanoff might have helped us think about how a particular notion of what it meant to be British (or Anglo-American?), borne of a diasporic mentality, shaped these exiles’ approach to the work of reconceiving and refurbishing the British Empire. Diaspora theory, in other words, has long been engaged with precisely the questions that Jasanoff takes up in her book: How do global flows of population shape cultural practices and identities? How does the notion of a home, or a cultural memory of home, inform cultural agents’ or actors’ approach to fashioning themselves and their world abroad? Diaspora refers to a way of thinking about these questions related to globalization and to the movement of people and ideas across space and time, a topic that is at the heart of Liberty’s Exiles.

Liberty’s Exiles is required reading for any scholar interested in the early phases of globalization, the impact of the American Revolution on the reshaping of the British Empire, and the exportation of what we might identify as an American way of thinking about the relations between periphery and center in an imperial context. Thus far I have emphasized the “exiles” in Jasanoff’s title, but I would be remiss not to conclude by underscoring the metanarrative of “liberty” in her story of the American loyalist exiles. Again and again, Jasanoff traces how the ideas of liberty that the loyalists had developed during their time in the thirteen colonies would resurface and challenge the shape of British imperial authority in the other outposts of the empire to which they moved after the war. To some this might be the most surprising insight of Jasanoff’s book: the long-demonized loyalists who had been written out of American national history as opponents of liberty and democracy would become among the most vocal advocates of their rights and liberties in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, the Bahamas and elsewhere. As Jasanoff shows, the American loyalists were never opposed to liberty or notions of representation in government. They were simply opposed to a separation from the British Empire, which they, and for that matter their patriot countrymen, saw as the source of liberty in the modern world. Liberty’s Exiles tells how the loyalists’ commitments to those ideas would transform the British Empire, if not the world.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.1.5 (November, 2011).

Edward Larkin is associate professor of English at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (2005) and edited the Broadview edition of Paine’s Common Sense (2004). He is currently working on a study of the way notions of empire shaped the politics and culture of the early United States.

Was Dr. Benjamin Church a Traitor?

A new way to find out

The sad story of Dr. Benjamin Church is one of the forgotten tales of the Revolutionary War. The William L. Clements Library, one of the foremost repositories of materials on the Revolution, calls Church a traitor. Church, the library relates on its Website, belonged to “both the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts and . . . the Sons of Liberty.” But he “was really a paid spy for the British general, Sir Thomas Gage. Six weeks before the battle of Lexington, Church sent Gage letters detailing hidden military and political secrets of the American rebel forces . . . In October of 1775, one of Church’s spy letters to Gage was captured and delivered to General Washington. Church was arrested, stood trial for treason and imprisoned until 1777. After his release, Church sailed to the West Indies in a schooner that disappeared at sea.”

Historians have long agreed that Dr. Church committed treason. Nearly three-quarters of a century ago, Allen French appeared to have closed the case against Dr. Church in his book General Gage’s Informers, the source of most later accounts. French reviews the evidence against Dr. Church: Paul Revere’s reminiscences of Church’s treasonous activities; Church’s appearance in Boston during the siege, when patriots had left; his exemplary performance as director of the Continental Army hospital; and the captured letter and the patriots’ response to it. French discovered letters, in several hands, in the Thomas Gage Papers at the Clements Library that proved to be from Church to British General Gage. French’s opinion, after sifting the evidence, is clear: Church “deserved his sentence,” and “it is impossible to frame an excuse for him.”

For more than half a century, all authorities have accepted French’s conclusion. The Dictionary of American Biography (1937) adds damning details of duplicity and double-dealing. He wrote patriot tracts—and answered them in Loyalist journals. He drafted letters for the Boston Committee of Correspondence—but supplied intelligence to Governor Hutchinson and General Gage.

The most thorough short biographical account is in the online subscription database American National Biography Online, by Edward W. Hanson. It deems Church a “physician, poet, and traitor” but raises questions about his culpability. Perhaps he did write for Tory journals, but “if so, it was in a disguised and ineffectual manner quite unlike his well-known style promoting the colonists’ views.” Hanson makes a measured judgment: Before his letter was intercepted, Church “had secured . . . a place among the patriotic leadership of the Revolution in Massachusetts,” but “his attempt to assist both sides in anticipation of the outcome of the Revolution ended in failure. The extent of Church’s treasonous activity, beyond the single intercepted letter, is unknown, as are the possible benefits of his act to the British military leadership.” Patriots were incensed about his betrayal. “He was abhorred by former friends and colleagues, who were particularly bitter about being betrayed by one of their own, and that remains the abiding judgment of Benjamin Church.”

A 1997 article by David Kiracofe in the New England Quarterly provides the best account of Dr. Church’s behavior. Kiracofe explains the legal problems of trying Dr. Church (in 1775, when Church’s transgressions began, there were no treason statutes, save those protecting the king’s government). After assessing Church’s upbringing (he was from a prominent Plymouth and Boston family) and career as a Whig propagandist, he details Church’s testimony, his trial, and the pained reactions of his Whig colleagues to his treason. Kiracofe does not concern himself in a major way with Church’s innocence or guilt, but at the article’s end, he does presume the evidence supports his guilt.

Portrait of Benjamin Church, from Mary C. Gillet, The Army Medical Department, 1775-1818. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981. Courtesy of the Northern Illinois University Libraries.

Dr. Church vehemently denied the charges. He claimed that he fed the British misinformation about American forces to mislead them, greatly exaggerating both the troop strength of the Continental Army and the abundance of its military supplies. The letter baffled both John Adams and Samuel Adams, but they still asserted his guilt. The Massachusetts House of Representatives listened to his impassioned defense but refused to believe him.

Letters French discovered add to this confusion: in his letter of May 13, 1775, Church appears to declare his fealty to Britain but mostly reports what any reader of colonial newspapers would know. He revealed his trip to Philadelphia to petition the Continental Congress to allow Massachusetts to form a government in defiance of British authorities, but the British had long believed the colonies already in rebellion. He also insisted “they will not lay down their Arms unless the Acts are all repealed or are soundly beaten,” a belief America’s friends in Parliament had long held.

What are we to make of this evidence? Kiracofe emphasizes Church’s awkward political circumstance. Members of Church’s family, he reports, were well-known Tories, and Church himself openly associated with rich Tories. The Whigs tolerated this behavior (they punished others for lesser offenses) because Church was such a good polemicist for their cause. But he was confused and uneasy, as French concludes: “here is a perplexed man, troubled to find matters continually growing worse—worse than he had ever expected, more difficult than ever to find the way to peace and . . . honor.”

The case appears closed. But was Dr. Church really a spy for the British? Why would he send misinformation, mixed with common knowledge? Perhaps he believed what he reported about the Continentals, but—having gained the trust of the Whigs—he surely knew the real situation. Could he have been ambivalent about his loyalties, as were many? There are three logical possibilities:

1. Dr. Church was a spy for the British, however incompetent.
2. Dr. Church was a double spy, providing a mix of truth and lies to the British, while aiding the patriots.
3. Dr. Church, forced to choose between Tory family and friends and the patriot cause with which he sympathized, became a kind of accidental traitor.

We can go no further without primary documents. One might visit a university library or the Clements Library. But there is a new, more accessible way to answer questions about Church and about a multitude of other issues related to the coming of independence. We will return to the hapless Dr. Church after we introduce readers to our new (but very old) resource.

This resource is a free, online version of Peter Force’s American Archives, a compilation of documents from 1774 through 1776. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and housed at the Multimedia Digitization Lab at Northern Illinois University, the American Archives Digitization Projecthas digitized, indexed, and published that compilation. From this site, users can search the database, read documents, and download materials.

Title page of The American Archives, Fourth Series, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1837). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

American Archives was originally published in two series between 1837 and 1853. These nine folio volumes, with 15,573 densely-packed columns—the equivalent of forty-three 500-page books—contain a huge mass of material, including documents concerning Dr. Church.

Who was Peter Force and what makes his compilation so valuable? Force, a printer for the Whig party and mayor of Washington, D.C., worked constantly during the 1830s and early 1840s collecting documents from the revolutionary years, with the goal of publishing all extant information on that era. He traveled through the country, looking at collections at historical societies, state bureaus, and in private hands, purchasing manuscripts as he proceeded. Force convinced Congress to appropriate $223,631, a huge sum for that time, to subsidize the collection, printing, and dissemination of the volumes. That sum proved to be only enough to start the project. Because of partisan fighting, funding ended, and Force published only nine volumes, covering the years 1774-1776, a small part of his projected collection.

Still, what he was able to publish is immensely important. The documents cover a critical time at the beginning of our national history. Between 1774 and 1776, local notables founded new revolutionary governments, the Continental Congress deliberated relations with Britain and organized the Continental Army, military actions began, Tom Paine published Common Sense, private citizens and public bodies debated the merits of independence, Congress declared independence, and states began drafting their first constitutions. American Archives reports all of these events. By emphasizing the activities of local notables and ordinary colonists, the materials add greatly to what we know about the Revolution.

The volumes are a landmark in historical editing. They contain published material, such as the Declaration of Independence, Paine’s Common Sense, and Washington’s letters. But a substantial portion has never been reprinted. It includes Parliamentary debates; proceedings of the Continental Congress and state, county, and town-level conventions and committees of correspondence; newspaper reports; political pamphlets; petitions from militia companies; reports about the treatment of Tories; military dispatches and descriptions of military engagements; correspondence between revolutionary leaders; early local declarations of independence; and accounts of the reception of the Declaration of Independence after its publication. Users can find information on every major state and national political event between early 1774 and late 1776. Placing these materials, the commonplace with the unique, in one fully searchable site allows users to recreate a collective text of the founding of the country.

No scholar has questioned the authenticity of the materials reprinted. Unlike many nineteenth-century editions, Force did not edit the documents to suit the sensibilities of Victorian readers, nor did he abridge documents. Any rewriting, condensing, or other changes would have called into question the collection’s accuracy. Only an accurate, verbatim transcription would allow Force, in the words of a colleague, to “prove error in every History” published to that point and provide future historians with materials to write the “true history of those times.”

The volumes reflect a surge of interest in the Revolution during the 1830s and 1840s. The last patriots of the Revolution were dying off, and many events had been suppressed or forgotten. Soldiers’ memoirs appeared by the dozens, and fifty-year celebrations of Revolutionary events proliferated. George Bancroft had begun to write his monumental, ten-volume history of the United States, while the Unitarian minister and eventual president of Harvard College Jared Sparks published extensive Revolutionary diplomatic correspondence as well as editions of Washington’s and Franklin’s works.

Finding out about an individual—Benjamin Church, for instance—in the printed version of American Archives is extraordinarily difficult. Each page has two numbered columns of dense type, each column the equivalent of two pages of a book. Although documents are in chronological order—running from March 7, 1774, to December 26, 1776—Force prints proceedings together, rendering a chronological search difficult. The volumes are woefully indexed and must be searched page by page to find material on most topics. No full, integrated index of all the volumes has been compiled, and neither the volume table of contents nor the volume indexes provide thematic direction.

Our new online version provides what you expect in a search engine and much more. There are multiple entry points and many ways to find information, using words in the text, coded themes, and card-catalog style information like title, date, author, and place (metadata). You can combine simple searches and Boolean searches (multiple terms combined with logical operators AND, OR, or NOT) with thematic, place, and date searches.

How can you search? First, you could browse the database. The online table of contents includes a descriptive title for each item in American Archives. A mouse click will take you to the document of interest. If you wish to read documents in order, click on the “next document” tab; this is a particularly useful feature when reading the multiple documents found in legislative proceedings. Second, you can search either for words in the full text or variables within the metadata. Combining both kinds of searches will limit your results. In both the full-text search box and the metadata fields, you can use the * symbol to truncate the search terms, which enables you to find all word forms (for example, parliament* returns parliament, parliaments, and parliamentary).

Let’s find out about Benjamin Church. Here we run into a problem. In various documents, he is called Dr. Church, Benjamin Church, or Dr. Benjamin Church, and sometimes the Dr. is spelled out. You could perform three searches, but that would be inefficient. Searching for Church on its own will return all results, but it will include documents about church services and the like as well. The Boolean capabilities of the “American Archives” database make possible a search on all three options simultaneously, enabling the user to get the most precise results. Writing Dr | Benjamin | Doctor Church (using the Boolean OR symbol “|”) will return all references to Dr. Church, Benjamin Church, or Doctor Church but no others. The last term should be Church, which must appear in all the documents. Do not use a period (.) as that is reserved for system use. (In the search examples provided throughout this piece, you will be linked to the search page with the search parameters set as described in the text. To view the results, simply click on the SEARCH button.)

Our search turned up 102 documents! What do those documents show about Church? Look at the headings returned with the search; you can click to read the documents and go forward and backward in the database. What services did he render to the patriot cause? Was he trusted by the patriots? Was the intercepted letter a surprise, once you came upon it? How did the patriot leadership respond when they discovered the letter?

Peter Force, the frontispiece of The Magazine of American History, April 1878, John Austin Steves, editor. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

The search results appear in the order they are found in the printed edition, so they are largely in date order. The early documents (May-June 1775) view Dr. Church as a trusted advocate for the Patriot cause. They reveal that he faithfully carried out his responsibilities for the Massachusetts Committee of Safety and the Continental Congress. The letter that becomes crucial evidence in Church’s supposed-traitorous behavior is his July, 1775, letter to a British officer (Major Kane) in Boston, where he describes the inevitability of American independence if Britain doesn’t seek reconciliation. He outlines the military might of the Colonial forces, exaggerating fantastically their numbers, zeal, “warlike appearance,” and stocks of gunpowder.

Through July and August, Church remains an important member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. In September, however, he writes General Sullivan that he is “peculiarly happy that the undeserved prejudice against him is so totally removed.” Although we haven’t seen what precipitated this letter, it indicates that all was not as it seemed from May to August. In October, General Washington informs the Continental Congress of Church’s intercepted letter to Major Kane. The most incriminating evidence is Church’s response to Washington’s questions about the encrypted letter (before it was deciphered) wherein Church lies about the letter’s contents and intended recipient.

Upon receiving the information from General Washington, the Council of War interrogated Dr. Church. He explained that he wrote the letter “to impress the enemy with a strong idea of our strength and situation, in order to prevent an attack at a time when the Continental Army was in great want of ammunition, and in hopes of effecting some speedy accommodation of the present dispute.” The Council saw his actions as criminal and imprisoned him. In a January 1776 petition to the Continental Congress, Church reiterates his innocence and claims again that the letter was in fact a decoy intended to “promote the welfare of his country.”

Bet you crave more on similar topics. There are additional ways to search. What if you want to find all the documents of a particular type? Say you want to read Parliamentary debates on colonial issues to see the British government’s response to rebellion. The “American Archives” staff determined a “doc_type” for each document. Such data types include proceedings, laws, petitions, speeches, and proclamations (click to see all doc_types). If you add the document type proceedings to the theme Parliament, you will have retrieved all the proceedings before both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. But maybe you only want the proceedings for 1775 (or March 1775). You can add 1775 to the “Year Presented” field and 3 to the “Month Presented” field. Click to see the search query, and click the SEARCH button to see the results.

Revolutionary documents can be difficult to search. Eighteenth-century writers used concepts and words long lost, and recent historians have invented an altogether new lexicon to describe Revolutionary events. How will searchers test out assertions by historians Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood that ideas of conspiracy permeated Whig and Tory rhetoric? Conspiratorial language often excludes the word conspiracy. How will they find all relevant documents about Loyalism in sources where the words “Tory” and “Loyalist” fail to appear? For such searching, thematic indexing is essential. This allows users to search under a series of carefully designed themes and subthemes—”social reality” or “political philosophy,” to take just two examples. There are numerous subthemes for most of the themes (click to see all themes/subthemes).

American Archives is not a twenty-first century compilation. Unlike most modern historians, Force viewed the Revolution as a purely political event. Hence, users should not expect to find extensive materials on gender, class relations, slavery, and community life—though the documents do provide insight into these topics. But they will find superb political history. Rather than exclusively focus on the famous men who ran the new national government and army, Force collected widely and emphasized the activities of local notables who met as Committees of Safety, Inspection, or Observation. These men understood the necessity of mobilizing the populace. The collections thus illuminate the history and ideas of ordinary people (and their leaders) and allow users to reconstruct local meetings and conventions and, in turn, understand ideologies that appealed to embattled farmers and artisans.

The “American Archives” database is particularly strong in ideological materials. Using a thematic search, a user could, for instance, retrieve pamphlets, political proceedings, newspaper articles, and correspondence containing discussions of political ideas. We have coded more than thirty subthemes (see the link above), on a wide range of ideas. One might, for example, explore whether the revolutionaries regularly refer to the British conspiracy to deprive them of their liberty. A simple word search on conspiracy is a good first step. The search engine returned rather few entries. But the word conspiracy has other forms, such as conspiracies or conspiratorial. A wildcard search (*) on conspir* will uncover all those documents as well.

Searching for variations on the word conspiracy, while potentially revealing relevant documents, will likely eliminate many others because conspiratorial language does not require the use of any form of the word conspiracy. The “American Archives” staff included “political philosophy: conspiracy” among the themes they coded in the database. Many of the documents that appear do not have the word conspiracy—and the coder considered that many documents that do have the word fail to refer to the concept in any systematic way. Both searches together demonstrate how widespread ideas about conspiracy were among the patriots and their Tory and British opponents.

Peter Force had little interest in the ideas of Tories, but he showed great concern for the problems Tories made for the patriots. A simple word search on tor* turns up a large number of results with far too many false hits because it found documents containing the word torn or torrentincluded with those having Tory or Tories. This example illustrates that sometimes it is best to utilize the Boolean OR “|” symbol instead of the truncation symbol (*). Redoing the search with Tory | Tories offers a more limited search with more appropriate results.

We can combine word searches with other field specifications, such as defining where Tory activity occurred. New York was a center of Tory activity. Hence, if we add New-York, North America in the “where presented field” to a word search on Tory | Tories nearly all the hits are appropriate, but our search turned up few results. Did we eliminate relevant documents because we specified location? Is it possible that the terms Tory or Toriesdo not appear in some documents about Tory beliefs, writings, and behavior? To find a greater number of relevant documents, we return to searching for Tory or Tories, combining it now with the theme of “Loyalist, British resistance and ideology: opposition to Loyalists.” The result is a reasonable number of records.

Who should use the American Archives online database? Almost everyone! Of course, having such an important source online will make life easier for professors. But navigation tools make it easy for teachers to spice up their courses with interesting and obscure documents. High school students can use the site to write term papers about the coming of independence, using documents that only grad students and faculty had ever seen before. Professors can send students to the site for answers to more specific questions. (How did Maryland patriots treat Tories? Why did the Continental Congress establish the Continental Association? What role did oaths take in establishing loyalty? Why did the Quebec invasion fail?)

There has been great interest lately in the founding era. Recent biographies of Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, Hamilton, and Franklin abound, a few of them best sellers. Washington, Adams, and Franklin are key figures in the database, along with generals and governors. Once the site is fully operational, with the entire contents of American Archives (by early 2006), we expect the educated public to use the site regularly. (Searchers will find many more documents in some of the sample searches in this article. Please revisit the site next year!) In making this site available, the “American Archives” staff honors Force’s original intent: he had dreamed of publishing and disseminating widely the history of the Revolutionary era. That dream—as it relates to the coming of independence—is about to come true.

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

Allan Kulikoff, Abraham Baldwin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, University of Georgia, is currently working on several books, including one on contemporary patriotism and another on the farmers in the American Revolution.

Tara L. Dirst, Technology Coordinator of Digital Projects at Northern Illinois University Libraries, supervises the creation and maintenance of multiple historical digitization projects in addition to American Archives, including Lincoln/Net, the Illinois Historical Digitization Projects, and Mark Twain’s Mississippi River.

H. J. Lewis, Free man and Freeman artist

The first African American political cartoonist

What would it be like to start off in life as a severely handicapped slave? Not a very auspicious beginning, to say the least, but H. J. Lewis overcame it and became the first African American political cartoonist.

His early years are obscure, and it is difficult to define even general contexts, due to uncertainties about dates and to some extent about places. Henry Jackson Lewis was born in or near Water Valley, the seat of Yalobusha County in north-central Mississippi, about twenty miles south of Oxford. The year of Lewis’s birth is uncertain. Some sources say 1837, but one of his sons, Chester A. Lewis, said 1838. Other sources suggest later birth years, some as late as the 1850s.

The general setting of Lewis’s upbringing was not the stereotypical plantation of the “Delta Blues” lowlands of northwestern Mississippi but was about thirty miles east of the Delta margin, in rolling, low-hilly country. While still a small child, he fell into a fire, blinding his left eye and crippling his left hand. He “never had a day’s schooling in his life, but . . . educated himself,” according to an 1883 article in the New York periodical Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which blithely characterized him as “a remarkably bright colored man.” But we know little more about his early life or young adulthood.

We also have no information at all on H. J. Lewis’s situation during the Civil War or the early postwar years and Reconstruction. We do not even know whether he still lived in Mississippi. If he did spend the war years there, they might well have been relatively quiet for him. There were no important battles in the Yalobusha County vicinity, which was remote from major strategic locations such as Memphis and Vicksburg.

We next pick up the Lewis trail in February 1872, when records show that a Henry Lewis bought a house in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The Pine Bluff city directory for 1876-77 lists a “Lewis, Henry J., colored, laborer” living in that location, and the 1880 census includes an “H. J. Lewis” household there, including his wife (Lavinia Dixon Lewis) and their first three children (John, Richard, and Lillian). His age is listed as “40,” which would imply a birth year of 1839 or 1840.

Lewis probably did not earn his living primarily as an artist during the 1870s. We have no record of any of his drawings before 1879. In January, March, and August of that year, six engravings made by Harper’s Weekly staff artists and credited to “sketches by H. J. Lewis” showed scenes and situations along the Arkansas River in the Pine Bluff region. Then there is another frustrating gap: we have no further published Lewis drawings or derivative engravings until early 1883. But we do know that his fourth child and second daughter, Elizabeth, was born in Pine Bluff around 1881.

Lewis must have remained active artistically, at least locally and probably regionally. In its October 25, 1882, issue, the Pine Bluff Commercial, a white newspaper (still in existence), in a series of one-paragraph entries under the heading “Additional Local News,” stated, “J. H. [ sic ] Lewis, the caricaturist and pencil artist is still aboard in Pine Bluff. His sketches of both imaginary and real scenes, are wonderfully correct and we bespeak for him a brilliant and successful future in his line of business.” This prediction, and the characterization of the artist as a “caricaturist,” foreshadowed Lewis’s ultimate career.

But very shortly after the article appeared, Lewis took on a new and unexpected line of artistic work, making pencil drawings of prehistoric Indian mounds and their surroundings for the Smithsonian Institution. In early November 1882, he was hired by Dr. Edward Palmer, a pioneering and prolific field worker and specimen collector in “natural history” and archeology, who had been working about a year on the Smithsonian’s great “Mound Survey.” That project covered much of the eastern United States and ultimately disproved the racist theory that the mounds had been built by a “lost race” of non-Indian “Mound Builders.”

It is not clear how Lewis came to work for Palmer, but the latter had been working at a hectic pace in northeast Arkansas and had traveled by train and boat from Forrest City eastward to Memphis. Lewis’s first mound drawings were made in early November, either in the southern part of Memphis or along the Mississippi River to the north on the Arkansas side, so they may have met on the waterfront in Memphis. Perhaps Lewis had traveled by steamboat and set up his easel there to sketch river life and make caricatures for passersby. Palmer himself was not a good artist, yet had been charged with bringing back drawings of the mounds. In Lewis, he found just the person to make such drawings.

Lewis may well have influenced the coverage of the survey, for within a few days after he joined Palmer, they traveled by train from West Memphis to Little Rock and thence almost immediately to Pine Bluff, which was used as a base for forays to mound sites in the southeast Arkansas interior. Lewis worked with Palmer from that time until March 1883, producing at least thirty-four pencil drawings (including a few valuable maps) of mound scenes in Arkansas, plus one in Tennessee, two in Mississippi, and three in Louisiana.

Fig. 1. H. J. Lewis, "Mound at Walnut Lake Station (Desha County, Arkansas)," November 1882. MS 2400, (Box 1), National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. — Fig. 1. H. J. Lewis, “Mound at Walnut Lake Station (Desha County, Arkansas),” November 1882. MS 2400, (Box 1), National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

Engravings made from a number of Lewis’s drawings by Smithsonian artist-archeologist William Henry Holmes were published in the 1894 final report on the Mound Survey project, but Lewis was not acknowledged. For nearly a century, Lewis’s originals were more or less unseen but were well curated in the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives. A few of them were published by archeologists in the 1970s and 1980s, but his works were not fully published and properly credited until 1990 (fig. 1).

Several engravings derived from Lewis’s Mound Survey work (some showing flood scenes rather than mounds, or mounds as islands surrounded by floodwaters) were published in April and May 1883 in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. But Leslie’s engravers grossly exaggerated mound heights and the sizes and decorations of artifacts such as pottery vessels. In late May 1883, Leslie’s published one more engraving derived from a nonarcheological Lewis sketch, showing an Arkansas River ferry near Pine Bluff, perhaps indicating that the artist had returned home. His fifth child and third son, Chester, had been born in January of that year.

The next five years are, once again, lost ones as far as the artistic evidence is concerned. We have not found any further Lewis-derived engravings in Harper’s or Leslie’s from these years, nor anything at all in issues of Puck and Judge, two pictorial humor weeklies to which several sources say he contributed. If one April 1891 obituary’s statement that Lewis moved to Indianapolis “two and a half years ago” is correct, he must have made the move in late 1888, but we have no evidence of his presence there until the publication of a February 2, 1889, cartoon.

Our only real clues to Lewis’s whereabouts and activities during those “lost years” are the births of his two youngest children, Henry W. and Francis Louise, in Pine Bluff around 1885 and 1887 and a brief interview with him published in the November 24, 1889, issue of the Indianapolis Journal, a white newspaper. In the interview he reported that “only four years ago” he ran out of work in Pine Bluff and went (about fifty miles) to Little Rock, where he was hired as a “porter” by the Arkansas Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers west of the Mississippi. While there, he watched some white engravers and learned something of their trade.

Fig. 2. H. J. Lewis, "The Race Problem Again," Freeman, June 2, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. — Fig. 2. H. J. Lewis, “The Race Problem Again,” Freeman, June 2, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Meanwhile, in mid-1888, an energetic virtuoso of Victorian eloquence, Edward Elder Cooper, founded an Indianapolis-based weekly black newspaper called The Freeman. Some sources have credited Lewis with being a “co-founder,” but this seems unlikely. Neither his name nor his cartoons are to be found in the seventeen surviving 1888 issues of the paper. Moreover, a white newspaper’s April 10, 1891, obituary stated that “Mr. Lewis was brought here a couple of years ago from Arkansas by Mr. Cooper.”

Fig. 3. H. J. Lewis, informal self-portrait in the offices of the Freeman, pen and ink drawing (Indianapolis, c. 1890). Courtesy of the DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago.

The Freeman’sinception more or less coincided with Cooper’s participation in a “black bolt” from the Republican Party and a black endorsement of the Democratic incumbent, President Grover Cleveland. “Not a colored man from Indiana had a voice in the last National Republican Convention,” said Cooper in an early issue of the Freeman. Shortly afterward, he proclaimed that the Republican Party had “willfully abandoned its first principles for the gold and silver of the country; best known as trusts, monopoly, syndicates and combinations . . . A few men, like hungry vampires are sucking the life blood from the honest labor of the country.” Cooper endorsed the Democratic slate for all offices on the national, state, and local levels.

When Republican Benjamin Harrison was elected president, Cooper responded by transforming the rather conservative-looking, sparsely-illustrated Freeman into a “National Illustrated Colored Newspaper,” which he billed as “the Harper’s Weekly of the Colored Race.” He used the new national paper as a platform for his intensifying attack on the turncoat Republicans. The January 5, 1889, issue featured a new engraved masthead laden with symbolic illustrations, including Abraham Lincoln loosening the shackles of a slave. The issue also included a cartoon by someone named Beck, showing an “intelligent colored man” being refused admission to a theater, while a “seedy Irishman” was welcomed. This cartoon was more social than political, so Lewis’s status as the first explicitly and predominantly political black cartoonist remains intact.

The next surviving issue of the Freeman, for February 2, 1889, includes Lewis’s earliest known work for the paper: a two-panel cartoon entitled “The Race Problem Again” (fig. 2). The cartoon addressed the recurring issue of federal appointments for blacks and introduced figures that became essentially “stock characters” in Lewis’s later work. One was Uncle Sam, generally represented as benevolently inclined toward blacks and a sort of conscience for white leaders. Another was Benjamin Harrison himself, depicted upon a throne-like chair and having the power and obligation to help blacks but somehow lacking the motivation or fortitude to act. More ominously, a southern planter type exerts his baleful influence upon the president. Along with these figures, Lewis included a black cherub, pointing to a wall clock whose hands approached twelve o’clock. Referring to the clock, the cherub says, “Ben did you say [’tis?] too soon for the colored man?—This is the hour—the XIth NOW.”

Fig. 4. H. J. Lewis, "The Political Pharisees," Freeman, April 27, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. — Fig. 4. H. J. Lewis, “The Political Pharisees,” Freeman, April 27, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The cartoon’s crude and sometimes reversed or inverted lettering suggests that Lewis was still learning the art of woodblock engraving. But his style and lettering would rapidly improve thanks to a new, and for Lewis, more congenial reproductive technique. In a later editorial, Cooper proudly mentioned the paper’s “chalk plates made in two hours by the best Afro-American artist in the country,” and a self-caricature of Lewis at his drawing board (now in the collection of the Du Sable Museum of African American History in Chicago) included a sign reading, “Chalk Plates done here” (fig. 3).

Fig. 5. H. J. Lewis, “Frederick Gets the ‘Plum’ (Haytian Mission),” Freeman, July 20, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Chalk-plate printing was a cheaper and more efficient way of reproducing images than was woodblock engraving. Instead of a mirror image, cumbersomely carved in a wood block, the artist could simply carve the image into a hardened layer of chalk on a metal plate. Then, through a casting process involving molten lead, a reverse image for printing could be readily created. The process was especially advantageous for creating the textual elements of prints, since the artist would no longer have to produce backward letters.

The most common theme of Lewis’s 1889 cartoons was the failure of particular politicians to support job opportunities for blacks. Among his subjects were well-known African American figures of the day, including Frederick Douglass and Blanche K. Bruce, as well as prominent white politicians including, of course, President Harrison.

This theme reached its apex with Lewis’s April 27 cartoon “The Political Pharisees” (fig. 4). It shows Harrison and his powerful secretary of state, James K. Blaine (“the man from Maine” who was widely regarded as the power behind the Harrison presidency and had been considered a presidential possibility himself), “cooling the ardor” of a well-dressed black applicant for an ambassadorship with a spray of water from a pump labeled “ICE . . . very cold.” Although Harrison is shown as the sprayer and principal pumper, “BLANE’s [ sic ] fine Italian hand” can be seen subtly adding a little extra pressure on the pump handle. Lewis’s best cartoons included a number of such details as well as several layers of symbolism, such as the U.S. Capitol in the background and Uncle Sam’s head as the benevolent sun.

After Harrison appointed Frederick Douglass ambassador to Haiti, the black press attacked the president for insulting Douglass and black Americans in general. Surely so distinguished a man deserved a post of greater importance. Lewis’s response was an ironically titled cartoon published in the July 20 Freeman, “Frederick gets the ‘Plum'” (fig. 5), showing Harrison as a monarch, with Blaine to the right of his throne, flanked by “Oriental” attendants. Harrison tosses the “plum” to Douglass, who already has put out to sea in a rowboat headed toward the distant tropical isle of “Hayti.”

Fig. 6. H. J. Lewis, "Protection for the Negro," Freeman, June 1, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. — Fig. 6. H. J. Lewis, “Protection for the Negro,” Freeman, June 1, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Beyond the patronage issue, Lewis addressed the more general and persistent issue of racism and politicians’ general refusal to acknowledge the issue’s importance. Using another ironic title, Lewis depicted “Protection for the Negro” in a June 1 Freeman cartoon (fig. 6). It showed four recent outrages against blacks. Off to the right side, with the nation’s cornucopia of wealth and armaments at his disposal and the scales of justice readily at hand, Harrison disdainfully looks back on these scenes and inexplicably strides away.

Fig. 7. H. J. Lewis, "H. J. Lewis," Freeman, July 13, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. — Fig. 7. H. J. Lewis, “H. J. Lewis,” Freeman, July 13, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Near the apogee of his all-too-brief new career, Lewis’s formal self-portrait appeared in the July 13 Freeman (fig. 7). It shows his face in right profile to conceal his blinded and misshapen left eye. On the table in front of him are various tools and texts of his trade and a copy of the Freeman. His palette bears a Latin motto meaning, “Not for ourselves alone but for the whole world.” He is flanked by two black children, a boy whose hat ribbon is labeled “J. W. L.” (the initials of his oldest son John W. Lewis) and a girl whose fluttering hair ribbon is labeled “L. E. L.” (the initials of his oldest daughter Lillian Estella Lewis). Perhaps in tribute to Lewis’s technical skill, in the portrait’s background are the recently completed engineering marvels, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower.

Although Lewis’s most significant (and probably, most heartfelt) works were in the political vein, he also produced artwork for the Freeman on other subjects. These included race relations in general, humorous caricatures, and cartoons inspired by holidays and amusements. A few were in comic-strip format, which was then in its infancy. Lewis also produced architectural drawings and many portraits of leading or up-and-coming African Americans around the country. But his passion was most deeply expressed in political cartoons, such as ” The Freeman’s Political Horoscope” in the August 3, 1889, issue (fig. 8). One of Lewis’s major works, this cartoon predicted defeat for the Republicans in 1892. On the left, a black man is shown painfully climbing up a set of steps constituting a sort of bar graph of progress from 1889 through 1892. Meanwhile, Harrison is actively demolishing the steps of progress with hammer and chisel as Blaine and others (including an unidentified black man) wait their turn to swing the hammer. The panel’s right side offers “A Prospective View of 1892,” with the four competing political parties lined up in phalanxes. The Republicans are labeled, “White man’s Party,” and are represented by a long line of white men, but they are outnumbered by an endless line of white and black Democrats labeled, “The People’s Party.” In the foreground, Uncle Sam guards the ballot box and reads the Freeman.

Lewis returned starkly to the theme of Harrison’s inactivity in “The National Executive Asleep” in the October 19 Freeman (fig. 9). Here, the president is depicted sleeping on his throne despite the presence of two black men blowing trumpets in his ears. In his lap, Harrison holds a tablet labeled, “I Must Attend to the Race Question at Once.”

Fig. 8. H. J. Lewis, "The Freeman's Political Horoscope," Freeman, August 3, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. — Fig. 8. H. J. Lewis, “The Freeman’s Political Horoscope,” Freeman, August 3, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

After October 1889, the Freeman ran only two new political cartoons by Lewis, one in December 1890 and another in January 1891. Although these cartoons contained veiled criticism of Harrison and his administration, the paper had essentially abandoned its oppositional tone.

Fig. 9. H. J. Lewis, "The National Executive Asleep," Freeman, October 19, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. — Fig. 9. H. J. Lewis, “The National Executive Asleep,” Freeman, October 19, 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Cooper and his newspaper were chronically in financial difficulties (the subject of some of his editorials and some of Lewis’s cartoons), and it is quite likely that creditors aligned with Harrison (who was from Indianapolis) put pressure on Cooper to stop the attacks. Perhaps significantly, Lewis’s final two political cartoons depicted Uncle Sam in a less idealistic manner, as if Lewis, already in poor health (according to his obituary in the Freeman) and only a few months away from death, had given up any hope for true racial justice. Appropriately for a religious man, Lewis’s last known work was a well-done architectural drawing of the new St. Paul A.M.E. Church in St. Louis, which appeared in the Freeman on March 28, 1891.

Lewis died in Indianapolis, probably on April 9, 1891. The Indianapolis News, a white paper, reported, “Mr. Lewis stood toward the head of the colored artists of the country . . . but never was well in this severe climate, and died of pneumonia.” The Indianapolis Journal, in a more expansive obituary, praised his work while noting Lewis’s unfulfilled promise: “[H]e was a genius, and with proper direction might have made his way in the world.”

Lewis’s life is perhaps best summed up in an obituary notice from the April 18, 1891, Freeman, undoubtedly written by Cooper at his eloquent best.

Mr. Lewis, in many respects, was a remarkable man, and had his lines been cast in different places, and his earlier years been spent under different skies, surrounded by other influences and aids, the space he would have filled in the world’s notice might have been one that biography would not have spurned . . . [H]ewas a genius, and when his equal shall come to us again, we do not know . . . It were but simple charity to hope that it is well with him to-day, and that his death was but an aperture through which his feverish and worn spirit took its way to spheres of higher mysteries, and a completer life, where conditions may not interfere, or man’s narrowness or unfair hatred prevent the full expression of his unique and striking gifts.

Indigenous and Black Geographies in Letters to the Editor

CartoDB data visualization of Indigenous American students' letters to the Southern Workman, 1880-1891

Newspapers have included a letter to the editor section as a public forum for debate for as long as they have circulated, yet we remain divided on how to read them. Media history tends to take up letters to the editor as a press form through which editors construct and shape perceptions of their publications. Journalism scholars tend to understand letters to the editor as a vital public sphere institution where reader debate provides a forum for democracy in action. These rather different understandings of letters to the editor together emphasize the individual—whether as controlling editor or empowered reader—and the capital each asserts, both economic and cultural. The African American and Indigenous students’ letters I have read in Hampton Institute’s Southern Workman between 1873 and 1884, the inaugural decade of what would become a sixty-seven-year run, raise the question of how we might read letters to the editor differently. Taking letters as indices of ordering and controlling space and movement through it means we read less for content or for how they are constructed and managed by editors, and more for what I’d call, after Henri Lefebvre, contestatory practices of taking space. Reading letters to the editor in this way also shifts us from a focus on the individual to one on the collective, a shift of particular importance when we study letters written by people whose histories often denied them both the choice to move and the ability to remain in place.

To take space in print is an act of taking public space and, by extension, contesting who can move and where, and how space is claimed. Even though letters to the editor appear to register movement in a limited way—by originating in one location when addressed to another—they mark larger material and historical geographies and pass through the space or pages of a periodical without being wholly underwritten or determined by its economics, its ideologies, or its politics. Hampton’s students wrote letters to the paper that in content attested to the racialization of space. They also traced a politics of space through their very movement. I suggest that data visualizations of that movement can help us see things we might otherwise miss, or question established ways of understanding what we do see.

Hampton Industrial and Normal School, which published the Southern Workman, was founded by General Samuel Armstrong in 1868 to address the perceived needs of newly free African Americans by combining discipline with what it called “productive labor” in order to train both teachers and industrial leaders for “the race.” Hampton graduates were seen as ideal representatives of the school, who would take its ethos, ideology, and training back to their communities, particularly the institution’s emphasis upon education, the moral value of hard work, self-sufficiency, property ownership, and respectability. The first African American graduating class left Hampton in 1871, and roughly 90 percent became teachers. By 1878 Hampton admitted its first Indigenous students, who had been warriors taken prisoner and held at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, where Richard Henry Pratt developed the educational philosophy and practices he would use at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania a year later. Booker T. Washington, Hampton’s most famous graduate, modeled Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, established in 1881, after Hampton. Armstrong referred to Hampton’s program as a “tender violence,” and by the turn into the twentieth century, its “civilizing” ideology and “pacifying” pedagogy were critiqued by Black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who indicted Hampton for perpetuating the idea of African Americans as a “docile” servant class.

These letters are complex and at times contradictory mixes of nods to Hampton’s ideology and indictments of its limitations.

While at Hampton, students were not only exposed to periodicals and newspapers as essential reading and teaching material, but African American and Indigenous male students were trained in all aspects of print production and produced Hampton’s print jobs, including the publication of the Southern Workman. The training and experience in print production that Indigenous students received at Hampton meant that some, like Harry Hand (Crow Creek Sioux), established their own papers upon leaving the school. The monthly Workman (1872-1939) presented itself to readers as “furnish[ing] a variety of choice reading” with news of “what is going on in the world,” all in a package that promised to “please and profit both young and old alike.” Described in scholarship as produced for Hampton’s white philanthropists and government supporters, the paper certainly courted that audience. Yet reading the Southern Workman in its early decades reveals that it also sought and addressed an African American audience as well as its former students both Black and Indigenous. Its agents listed in May 1872 included African American activist, poet, and novelist Frances E.W. Harper, and letters from its graduates indicate that they were actively promoting the paper in the communities where they taught and lived. The Workman also circulated through and was clearly cognizant of distinctive African American reading practices, such as collective rather than isolated reading and the communal sharing of reading materials. In a letter published in May 1872, a reader tells of receiving the paper from his son—”I liked it so much that I had it read, by a better scholar then myself in Sunday school, and then I loaned it until it was worn out.”

In addition to a complex address, circulation, and conditions of production, the Workman‘s pages were also sites for student and graduate expression that could run counter to Hampton’s public image. Even though the Workman has been characterized as a Hampton propaganda machine, students’ letters made its pages a counterspace where the promise of the school’s pedagogy was tested. The paper’s deliberate circulation in and through racialized spaces also reveals that its address, authorship, and readership were far more complex than we’ve acknowledged. Attempts to control space are always contested and, at times, by using the very means through which that control is asserted. Lefebvre’s point that the use of space can itself be a powerful form of contest can be translated to the space of a periodical, be that how the space of its pages and the press forms that comprise it are used, or how the periodical itself moves through space and is used by its readers.

Letters in the Southern Workman were cued by Hampton’s practice of having teachers write their graduates “a Christmas letter along with an inquiry sheet asking for current positions and activities.” But the letters themselves make clear that students also wrote the paper because they were inspired by letters from their peers that they read monthly in its pages. What may have begun as a controlled cuing seems to have turned into something students took beyond a yearly report, given that they wrote throughout the year. Students addressed their letters to Armstrong, the Workman‘s managing editor, or to their “Dear Teacher,” and it is clear that they understood these letters might be published. It is also clear that such a dynamic—writing to an authority figure and this possibility of publication in the school’s paper—means that we would be mistaken to read these letters’ content at face value. The power dynamics of Hampton itself as well as the editorial power that established the “Letters from Hampton Graduates” section highlight the limitations of reading letters to the editor straightforwardly as readerly opinion or democratic debate.

These letters are complex and at times contradictory mixes of nods to Hampton’s ideology and indictments of its limitations, marking the fraught conditions of their solicitation that students, nonetheless, were managing in order that their voices be heard. The letters offer an important record of education in Black communities through Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina predominantly, including the value those communities placed on education for both children and adults, in spite of racialized pay inequity among teachers, and the poor material conditions of racially segregated schools in the South and on Indian Agency lands. They also mark the ways in which Hampton sought to ameliorate those conditions, rather than challenge them politically, as the letters often noted that the philanthropic Northern investment that the school facilitated paid for educational materials lacking in these segregated schools. Even as these letters at times contest Hampton’s approach to structural racism, they also reflect back Hampton’s ideology, remarking upon the importance of land and home ownership, work as a central value, and temperance.

Yet however mixed these letters are, the scholarly and Black activist conception of Hampton as “pacifying” sits in sharp contrast to what they actually detail. Graduates’ letters in the Workman record both their interest in politics and the school’s request for reports that detail political conditions on the ground. Of particular concern to graduates and the school were the November 1879 elections in Virginia, in which state debt readjustment was at issue. Student letters published in the December 1879 and January 1880 issues report that African Americans unanimously agreed that they should not be taxed to enable the repayment of debt incurred while slavery was in force. As one student put it, African American men and women insisted that “they had no right to take a part in paying a debt incurred by the State of Va. when they were chattels and property, and of which they have received no benefit.” Letters in these issues also record that many Black voters were so concerned that they would be manipulated or might misunderstand the ballot that they did not vote at all. Black Virginians took suffrage rights and their responsible exercise seriously, as did Hampton graduates and the school itself.

Many letters also offer a politicized critique of limited labor opportunities for African Americans created by an over-reliance on agriculture and labor exploitation under tenant farming and sharecropping. Here the letters contradict Hampton’s pedagogical script. Hampton was assiduously training its students for agricultural labor, but largely failed to prepare them for the industrializing of that sector. In other words, these letters were directly critical of conditions on the ground and implicitly critical of Hampton’s focus on agriculture as the predominant form of industrial training it offered. For example, a graduate signing himself “P.” wrote from Norfolk Co., Virginia, on November 16, 1878, saying that most African Americans where he was teaching did not work in the agricultural sector, but rather were poorly paid for work in the swamps and ditch-digging at “forty-five cents per day and board, or rations.” Those who did farm were caught up in the exploitative sharecropping system: “If the tenant furnishes team [of oxen to plow], he is to have two thirds of the crop … If the landlord furnishes the team he is to have half. This year they say the crop is very poor on account of the drought.” He stressed that “the majority of the colored people are very, very poor, few of them own the land they live on.” Hampton’s ethic of land and home ownership through agricultural labor was belied by realities of which it was unaware or deliberately ignorant. Some of these letters also contest racialized space as constructed through employment segregation and the separation of families resulting from migration for better work. An “ex-Hampton singer,” who had to both teach and farm in order to support himself, wrote in November 1887 that, pushed by poor crops, “the men had to leave their wives and children and go off to other States to find work to do to support their families.”

These implicitly critical letters, together with those that provided information Hampton had solicited in 1884 on poor-houses and prisons, paint a dire picture of African American unfreedom in the decades following the Civil War. In May 1884, the paper published letters focused on counties in Virginia that detailed, time and again, higher rates of incarceration for African Americans who had committed petty offenses, and enforced convict labor to work off fines. A letter from Staunton, Virginia, describing the conditions of the local poor-house documents that it was “occupied exclusively by colored women and children.” This graduate also connects the rates of African American incarceration for petty theft and prostitution to limited agricultural employment and the whites’ perception that African Americans “have come up in large numbers from east Virginia and now swarm the cities and towns of … the ‘Garden Spot of Virginia.'” The result is a racialization of crime, sentencing, and the prison as space. His interview with “the jailor” confirms that “the whites commit the worse crimes, the colored a greater number of small ones.” The figures he provides in his letter document that in 1883 fully 36 percent of Staunton’s African American population was incarcerated; 81 percent of these people had been jailed for “petty larceny” with the remainder “abandoned women” imprisoned for prostitution.

Similar to the letters from African American graduates, letters from Indigenous graduates depict restricted labor opportunities as a tool to create and maintain racialized space. These letters document what employment Indian Agents were willing to open to Hampton grads upon their return to the reservation. Students also highlighted the extent of individual land ownership in their communities and resistance to severalty, and discussed the political struggles between Nations forced to occupy the same agency lands. Early generations of Hampton graduates encountered agents who cited the graduates’ youth as a barrier to hiring them as teachers in reservation schools and offered them poorly paid manual labor instead. These students, along with their chiefs, exerted pressure on agencies that eventually resulted in more favorable hiring practices, including preferential hiring for positions on agency lands. Like their African American peers, Indigenous students did not leave Hampton as “docile” graduates.

Since graduates’ letters challenge at least as much as they reassert Hampton ideology, what we think we know of Hampton’s pedagogy and its results is, in turn, challenged by reading letters in the paper. We learn a lot, then, from reading these letters for content and for how their selection has the periodical’s, and the school’s, public image in mind. Yet at times these two established protocols of reading this press form—for the content of readerly opinion or as a way to construct and consolidate a periodical’s self-presentation—are at odds in Workman letters. Those moments of contradiction in turn raise the question of why we continue to read this press form in these ways. Or rather, is there another way to read letters to the editor?

CartoDB data visualization of African American students' letters to the Southern Workman, 1873-1891 — 2. CartoDB data visualization of African American students’ letters to the Southern Workman, 1873-1891. Courtesy Nicholas van Orden.

By creating data visualizations of place and movement from these letters through CartoDB, we see further reading opportunities that a focus on mobility, race, and space can create. Such a focus can help us see what reading only for content will miss. This visualization of Indigenous students’ letters from 1880-1891 (fig. 1) includes St. Augustine, Florida, registering the imprisonment of Hampton’s first Indigenous students and the wars entailed in “Indian Removal.” It also records a highly circumscribed movement from reservation to boarding school, whether Hampton alone or a combination of Hampton and Carlisle, and back to reservation. Together, these register what spaces Indigenous Americans could occupy, when, and why, as well as what trajectories they were permitted to move through in the highly racialized space captured by the visualization. Yet students write of these spatial aggressions only obliquely through passing mention of severalty and allotment, which are cast as reflecting the school’s emphasis upon land and home ownership and so appear to be much more benign than they, in fact, were. In other words, putting movement and space in the foreground with a data visualization helps us to read what the letters don’t seem to mention at all. Seeing how Hampton’s Indigenous students moved marks quite clearly the school’s work within a multifaceted racialization of space that removed Indigenous Americans to agency lands in the territories, incarcerated them if they resisted, and furthered the removal project by shuttling Indigenous children between residential school and reservation in a national “experiment” to “civilize the Indian.” What we might call Indigenous geographies, as recorded in letters to the Workman through signature and elaborated with research on students in sources such as Twenty-Two Years’ Work of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (1893), mark what is otherwise silent in the letters’ content: removal as part of an ongoing racialization of space and movement that entails not only constructing agency lands as racialized “Indian,” but also conscripting highly controlled Indigenous movement through space outside those lands racialized as “white.” Hampton’s Indigenous students were never expected to do anything but return to the reservation after their education, preserving precisely this racialization of space.

In other cases, data visualizations can help us to see that our scholarly assumptions about movement and mobility need to be questioned. The visualization of African American students’ letters from 1873-1891 (fig. 2) appears to depict greater mobility and spatiality that increases over time, something we see more clearly when we animate the visualization (fig. 3). The visualization’s intensity represents at least three things to consider: 1) more graduates write from Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas than anywhere else; 2) movement beyond these states appears to open up in the 1880s; 3) this movement farther afield still remains in the minority. The tendency would be to read that increased mobility and spatiality as indicative of an increased freedom of choice and ability to move. Yet pausing to consider what movement might tell us in light of how I have just read the visualization of Indigenous students’ letters is crucial. Movement does not always or clearly indicate freedom.

Data visualizations are very useful for the questions they can prompt us to ask when we see differently or for the first time. And so I want to frame what are common critical readings of African American mobility as questions in order to highlight that we need to remain curious. For a population whose movements, historically, were forced or highly constrained, does this visualization show us that mobility was a resistant act to white racial supremacy and a pervasive one by the 1880s? And, so, given that movement beyond Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas is limited even as African American mobility appears to increase, is it depicting constrained resistance in a decade during which we know racialized violence is on the rise? The most established way to read mobility is through a resistance-constraint dichotomy that hinges on autonomy. Yet these visualizations of letters to the Workman are also indexing movement into the public sphere —taking space in print—as collective, which requires us to think critically about whether a lack of or limited movement indicates constrained autonomy and whether movement itself indicates resistance or the exercise of freedom. The contexts of Indian Removal, Reconstruction, and African American migration as well as the geographical histories that precede them, all affect collectives and their ability to move or occupy certain spaces, as do commitments and obligations to family and community. The decision not to move can be an assertion of choice rather than evidence of constraint; movement can be coerced or forced rather than resistant; and both movement and staying in place can be ways in which a collective is dominated in and through racialized space rather than how autonomy is exercised. If we base our readings of movement largely upon notions of mobility as resistant or exercised autonomy, we risk missing the politics—spatial, collective, and public—underlying what appears to be apolitical.

While letters in the Southern Workman are produced under a power dynamic of white authority, they are also far more complex than we might initially expect. These letters and the movements they trace confirm that people are more than simply subject to the powers exercised over them. By identifying the racialization of space that, because it is repetitive, appears to naturalize identity and/in place, Hampton students’ letters contest the spatial project of domination. Here Katherine McKittrick’s work on Black geographies proves helpful to understanding the letters written by both African American and Indigenous students as documents that expose the naming and organizing of space and movement as manifesting and consolidating dominant notions of social difference. Both African American and Indigenous students’ letters document a complex mobility and spatiality in their content and in their writers’ movement that together index a mix of collective mobility and relative stasis forced, coerced, and circumscribed through the racialization of space and the social order it enforces. As a result, the letters challenge us to read them for the spatial politics they register and contest and, in turn, require us to press on how we read space and movement.

The spatial complexity of letters to the Workman also includes the affective and imaginative, which is an important part of the movement they track and the spaces their publication creates and sustains. Teaching in isolated small communities or returned to reservations, graduates wrote repeatedly that these letters and the paper itself offered them a sense of affective connection and the validation of common experiences. Attending to the spaces and movement these letters register also means reading them for the imagined spaces of connection and affinity they were actively creating. McKittrick offers the insight that Black geographies are far more than physical, but include imagined, material, represented, and philosophical spaces and trajectories of movement that, I would add, can facilitate aspirational notions of space and mobility even when they are limited materially. Reading beyond movement and space as material and transparent facts to include imagination and feeling extend what we conceive mobility, movement, and space to entail. This is especially acute, I think, when we are studying the work of collectives for whom movement and space, historically understood as American values and rights of citizenship, have been wielded as forms of domination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZVUoGe9xko

Samuel Sewall, attr. Nathaniel Emmons, monochrome oil on panel with inscribed paper label (ca. 1728). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Teresa Zackodnik is professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is author of Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform (2011), The Mulatta and the Politics of Race (2004), and editor of “We Must Be Up and Doing”: A Reader in Early African American Feminisms (2010) and the six-volume set African American Feminisms 1828-1923 in the Routledge History of Feminism series. Her current book project, Rich Thought and Polished Pen, focuses on African American women’s political writing in the Black press from the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

The Emancipation of Boyhood

So what defines this community that is both so intensely imagined and so weirdly empty, that exists only to be a community?

In the late 1860s, manufacturers of printing presses in the United States began producing smaller versions of their commercial offerings for use in the home, where they could sit on a dining room table or fit in the corner of a parlor (fig. 1). The invention of these hobby presses led to an explosion of newspapers written, edited, and printed by teenage boys, who identified themselves as “amateur journalists.” By the end of the 1870s, every state in the union could boast at least a handful of amateur papers, and some had hundreds. There are over 55,000 in the American Antiquarian Society collections alone (fig. 2). Most issues were four to eight pages, or one or two folded sheets of paper, but some ran up to thirty-two pages. At least one was printed on the back of a postcard. About half of amateur editors printed their own papers; perhaps another quarter or third had them printed by other amateur printers, and the remainder took them to professional job printers. In the twentieth century, amateur journalism grew to include adults as well as adolescents, but in its early decades it constituted a uniquely teenage print subculture—arguably, the first in existence.

When I first delved into this archive as part of a project on nineteenth-century underground literature, I did so with high hopes, because amateur newspapers constituted not only a cultural underground but also a material one, with largely autonomous networks of production and distribution. And I assumed that, since the amateur newspapers were made by teenagers, they would be particularly incendiary. Once I started reading through the amateur papers, however, I found a print subculture very different from the rowdy, subversive one I had anticipated. Although the amateur press trumpeted the free-spiritedness of its boy-editors, it is, to all appearances, incredibly boring. The papers are derivative, moralistic, and monotonous. At first I was disappointed by how boring the amateur press turned out to be. Then I started to suspect that this boringness might actually be what was fascinating about it.

Fig. 1a Advertisement for hobby printing presses: Novelty Press, 1870s. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. Photograph by the author

Fig. 1b Advertisement for hobby printing presses: Golding Junior Press, 1879. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 1c Advertisement for hobby printing presses: Columbian Press, ca. 1875. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. Photograph by the author.

Given how boring the results were, what led amateurs to start newspapers? No one, it seems, started an amateur newspaper because he—and it was almost always he—had something to say. The contents of the papers are unrelievedly repetitive of one another. Instead of creating an outlet for one’s own thoughts, it appears that one started an amateur newspaper to join a community of other amateurs. This community is not just an effect of print, as has often been argued of other print cultures. Community is also the cause of print. Thus while amateur newspapers often address themselves to what they termed “the boys and girls of America,” their actual audience largely seems to have consisted of other amateurs. The amateur press’s distribution methods more or less ensured this. The majority of the papers were distributed through an old-fashioned exchange system that hearkened back to the late eighteenth century: one editor would write to another requesting an exchange, and before long editors developed standing exchange arrangements (fig. 3). Amateur editors often accused other papers of being what they called “exchange frauds,” or papers got up solely to obtain exchanges from other papers. But arguably, these accusations masked the fact that such practices were less exceptional than normative. To a certain extent, all amateur papers only existed to exchange.

The subject matter of the papers further built amateurdom into a self-contained world. While the front pages of papers would often feature a poem, a story, or didactic essay, by the mid-1870s most of their contents revolved around the activities of amateurdom—or “the ‘dom,” as most called it. These consisted of editorials on the state of the ‘dom, reviews of other newspapers, in-jokes aimed at fellow editors, reports from local, state, and national amateur conventions, histories of amateur journalism, profiles of prominent amateur editors, and so on.

The media of the amateur press likewise promoted its insularity, for the amateur press’s second most popular product, after newspapers, was directories of amateur newspapers. As soon as a town could boast at least three amateur newspapers, an enterprising amateur would issue a directory of them (fig. 4). Directories would typically list the editor’s name, age, the title of his paper, and his address, but they also often included his height, weight, and hair and eye color (fig. 5). Sometimes editors hacked out woodcuts to accompany these profiles (fig. 6). The set of images below shows a series of cuts from the Warsaw (Ind.) Amateur Directory parodying the convention, which indicates just how popular it was (fig. 7). Rather than treating print as a technology of disembodiment, as we so often do, the amateurs insisted on visualizing one another’s bodies.

This projection of bodily presence through print suggests how avidly amateurdom imagined its print networks as more intimate connections. One Missouri amateur described this structure of feeling in a kind of Whitmanian reverie:

[W]e imagine ourself in far-off Massachusetts—in Gardner—enjoying ourself amid the score of surrounding amateurs, and pleasantly participating in one of the Gardner Clubs’ socials. Then, away we fly over the thousands of miles between old Massachusetts and the ‘golden fields of California,’ to a meeting of the California amateurs. We can see them, though mostly young, sincerely laboring, in their best manner, for the upbuilding of the cause in the West. O, how we long to mingle with them, give the benefit of our greater experience, and enter as sincerely into the work as they … Then, away we go again to New York—and the number of other places to which we sometimes allow ourself to roam, within our mind, is limited only by the number of places and amateurs constituting Amateurdom.

Amateur newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society's collection. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. — Fig 2 Amateur newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society’s collection. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

The article’s vision of cross-continental communion strikingly prefigures Benedict Anderson’s famous argument about the role that the newspaper plays in the construction of imagined communities such as nations. But perhaps more remarkable is the way it manages to forget about the newspaper as an object—both a material object and the ostensible objective of amateurdom. Actual presswork dissolves into amateur “socials” and the “upbuilding of the cause.” Indeed, the author’s description of the other amateurs “sincerely laboring,” and his longing to “enter as sincerely into the work as they,” suggests that what amateurs produce is less objects than feelings. This emphasis on the experience of production rather than the finished product highlights an important distinction between Anderson’s imagined community and that of the amateurs. In Anderson’s argument, a community coalesces around the fact that thousands (or millions) of people were reading the same thing at the same time, but reading seems to have been a relatively low priority of amateur newspapers. At times they raise the question whether the very term “newspaper” is a misnomer, in the sense that newspapers exist to be read. Amateur newspapers, by contrast, might better be described as printed newspaper-shaped objects, meant less to be read than to be made, exchanged, and collected.

Fig. 3 Request to exchange, The Amateur Baltimorean (Baltimore), Vol. 1, Nos. 4 & 5 (July & August 1878). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

So what defines this community that is both so intensely imagined and so weirdly empty, that exists only to be a community? Various other groups in the late nineteenth century, from soldiers to patients in mental hospitals to polar explorers, took advantage of the newly available hobby presses to produce amateur newspapers. Yet only the teenage amateur journalists rallied under the banner of “amateur.” The definition was recursive: if only teenage boys identified as amateurs, they identified amateurs only as being teenage boys. As one guide explained, the term “has a separate or different signification from the word found in the dictionary. In Amateurdom … the expression is used to denote what may be called, in plain terms, a boy editor, or boy journalist.” By “boy,” the amateurs meant something closer to what we would call “teenager”; amateurs usually set the age range as between 11 and 21.

Fig. 4 Amateur directories, clockwise from top left: Marietta & Harmar Amateur Directory for 1878 (Harmar, Ohio: Will S. Knox, 1878); The National Amateur Directory (East Saint Louis, Ill.: The Future Great, 1879); North-American Amateur Newspaper Directory (Osage City, Kansas: Clinton C. Hollenback, 1882); Dubuque Amateur Directory for 1875 (Dubuque, Iowa: G. H. Graves, 1875); The Eastern Amateur Directory for 1882 (Frederick: Frank A. Doll, 1882); Amateur Directory (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Will A. Innes, 1875); California and Nevada Amateur Directory for 1877 (East Oakland, Calif.: E. William Gracey, 1877). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

By equating “amateur” with “teenager,” amateurs posited teenagers as being by definition excluded from the world of letters. Indeed, the amateur press routinely presented itself as dissident and oppressed. In this respect, amateurdom constituted not only a subculture—that is, a group whose aesthetic practices depart from those of the dominant culture—but also a counterpublic. Michael Warner defines a counterpublic both by its oppositional stance with regard to the public sphere and by its “awareness of its subordinate status.” Amateur journalists wore their “subordinate status” like a badge of honor. They delighted in recounting the persecutions of the professional press and, indeed, the world at large, in language that cast middle-class white adolescents as society’s most victimized demographic. The Bowensburg Illinois Amateur complained, “Talk about the women and the darkies, and the—the—all the rest of ’em; none of ’em all are half so badly used as the boys … [T]o be a boy is to be somebody without a right in the world.” Cincinnati’s Idyllic Hours agreed, declaring, “Boys and young men [are] systematically suppressed.” Thus on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, one prominent editor adopted the language of slavery and freedom to describe amateur journalism as “the emancipation of boyhood from the fetters of sixty centuries.” Accordingly, the names amateurs gave their papers conjure up liberation, even revolution. Little Lunatic, Terror, Spunk, Dynamite, The Wasp, The Hornet, Gatling Gun, Snark, Jolly Queer, Thunderbolt, Little But Loud—all project a rowdy independence.

Yet not only does this sense of persecution sit awkwardly on these boys of privilege, who had the money available to buy a hobby printing press, but their oppositional postures turn out to have little substance. The papers insistently promulgated bourgeois order. They extolled the virtues of perseverance, punctuality, and correct grammar. They warned readers against using slang, being late, smoking, reading dime novels, or even playing baseball at amateur press conventions. In fact, several papers explicitly presented amateurdom as the antidote to adolescent misbehavior. The San Francisco Ubiquitous advised parents, “If your boy wishes to run a paper, by all means, give him all the encouragement in your power. By editing and printing a paper, he may derive many useful lessons … Editing a paper will keep him home nights, keep him out of bad company, mischief, etc.” The Worcester Diamond echoed these sentiments in the form of a poem called “Youth Not Wasted” that presents amateurs as saviors of other boys’ misspent youth:

Fig. 5 New Jersey State Amateur Directory (Vienna, N.J.: Zander Snyder, 1877). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

Of all the periods of life
From the cradle to manhood’s strife
When weak are morals and trembles Truth,
Is in the perilous time of youth.
Then sown are seed which harvest yield;
And we must culture Life, the field
Upon whose tilled and troubled soil
Are grown the fruits of honest toil.
Yes, important as it is to all,
That time to many marks their fall,
That they the pleasures of life may taste
Their time of youth must go to waste.
But—thank Heaven!—there’s one class of boys
Who glean from youth more than transient joys!
Who have a purpose,—a work to do;
Who have ambition, industry, too.
THE AMATEUR JOURNALIST!

Fig. 6a Woodcuts of amateur journalists; Richard Gerner in the Amateur Gazette (Fostoria, Ohio), Vol. 1, No. 4 (August 1877). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

Fig. 6b Woodcuts of amateur journalists; N. H. Kelsey in the Amateur Gem (Enfield Centre, N.H.), Vol. 2, No. 2 (August 1872). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

Fig. 6c Woodcuts of amateur journalists; Geo. W. Hancock in the Amateur Iowan (Washington, Iowa), Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1878). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

The poem emphasizes the hazards of adolescence, “the perilous time of youth,” before realizing “But thank Heaven!—there’s one class of boys / who glean from youth more than transient joys!” The poem’s enthusiasm over this discovery is so intense that the final line, which reveals the identity of these boys, ruptures the previously neat pattern of rhyming couplets, bursting out “THE AMATEUR JOURNALIST!” It’s tempting to read this as an allegory for the mode of the amateur journalist himself—formally disruptive but tremendously staid in content.

In fact, when amateurs did decide to challenge the authority of their official counterparts, as they did on one notable occasion, this was the battle they picked: they mounted a campaign to wipe out sensationalist newspaper fiction and dime novels, which they objected were not sufficiently edifying for young people. They proposed to replace this “blood and thunder” literature with what they termed “pure literature.” A typical editorial from the Brooklyn Waverly urged on the cause:

This fight must, it seems, be fought alone and single handed … Those papers, from the nature of their contents, will always find readers in a certain class; but it is our work to prevent them reaching the firesides of our homes. Let the good work continue. Keep a steady front. Whip the stragglers into line. Recruits will flock to our standard. The fraternity must and will be victorious … At first our efforts were laughed at, then smiled at; but now, with a sober face and still more sober thoughts, the publishers of these sheets are beginning to find that our efforts have not been in vain,—their large circulations are slowly but surely decreasing. The day must surely come when they will disappear entirely, and, on that day, when the last of those vile sheets is wiped from the face of the earth, Amateurdom will rise in the estimation of the public, one hundred percent.

The Waverly‘s harangue is remarkable for its combination of the martial and the domestic, the indignation at being marginalized coupled with the resounding sense of privilege (sensationalist papers “will always find readers in a certain class,” but not at “the firesides of our homes”). It is at their most square that the amateurs present themselves as most oppositional, giving the whole campaign an air of embattled priggishness.

The amateurs’ desire to put their rebelliousness on display, even amidst their indisputable propriety, appears quite graphically on the cover of the 1875 Amateur Directory from Grand Rapids, Michigan (fig. 8). The first thing to note about this scene of amateur printing is how unlikely it is. Editors sometimes made space for their presses on dining room tables or in bedrooms; lucky ones wrote of repurposing disused sheds. But a capacious room devoted to presswork, complete with full-size composing table and imposing desk, was unheard of. Perhaps the most startling aspect of this imagined scene of production, however, is the painting hanging on the wall on the left. Apparently of two figures in a fistfight, its crude lines and combative subject seem out of place in the tidy domestic setting. Its very incongruity, though, makes a striking figure of amateurdom’s ornamental unruliness. Indeed, the illustration’s depiction of the comfortable home that such rebellion finds within scenes of middle-class propriety suggests that amateurdom’s oppositional postures may actually work in tandem with its conservatism, as much as in tension with it.

Fig. 7 Warsaw Amateur Directory (Warsaw, Ind.: Aborn & Winder, 1877). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

In her study of nineteenth-century childhood, Karen Sánchez-Eppler suggests that this combination of boisterousness and primness rippled beyond the amateurs’ circle. She identifies the late nineteenth century as marking a transition in the understanding of childhood, one that she argues pivoted on a middle-class embrace of “mischievous play.” She explains, “By the end of the [nineteenth] century, play, and the worlds of the imagination, would become cultural markers for what was marvelous about childhood, and this culturally valuable play would be recognized as an attribute of middle-class affluence and leisure.” Yet she argues that it is through images of working-class children that these middle-class ideals about play and leisure develop. Ironically, borrowing ostensibly working-class traits of trouble-making actually consolidates middle-class belonging. Sánchez-Eppler cites amateur journalists as evidence for her argument, noting that hobby presses “enabl[ed] well-to-do youth to play press laborers themselves.” Understanding the amateurs as taking on working-class identities illuminates the frequency with which they represent their hobby as work—and hard work, at that—even when, as in the article by the Missouri amateur quoted earlier, work appears less as an action than a feeling. Moreover, it allows us to see that when they imagine themselves as rebels, they draw on a history of very real class conflict in America, a history in which laborers in the printing trades were often the most radical.

The amateurs’ iconoclasm, however, detaches their rebelliousness from anything resembling political action. Instead, their sense of embattled boyhood recasts rebellion as a developmental trait—an innately teenage characteristic as temporary as it is endemic. Linking rebellion to age (while delinking it from a broader sense of history) aligned the amateurs squarely with contemporaneous theories of adolescence, particularly those of psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Hall’s pioneering study Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904), which he based on research he conducted in the 1880s and 1890s, defined adolescence as a distinct developmental stage characterized by “storm and stress,” a term Hall borrowed from the German Sturm und Drang movement but separated from its core elements of political and aesthetic critique. Moreover, for Hall, adolescent “storm and stress” was not just developmental but racial. His conception of adolescence drew on German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s theory that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” or that individual development echoes the evolutionary history of a species. Hall argued that whereas children are analogous to “savages,” adolescence marks the time among the “higher races” when “the later acquisitions of the race slowly become prepotent.” His study thus carefully distinguished between the youth of “the white race” and “American aborigines,” “Filipinos,” “Hawaiians,” “Eurasians,” and “the Negro in America,” effectively circumscribing adolescence as a developmental stage reserved for white children.

Fig. 8 The Amateur Directory (Grand Rapids, Mich: Will A. Innes, 1875). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

In 1879, however, a challenge to such racial demarcations—and the theory of adolescent rebellion they underpinned—memorably shook the ordinarily humdrum world of amateurdom. Each summer the National Amateur Press Association, or N.A.P.A., held a convention at which it elected new members to office. Among the officers elected at the 1879 convention was Herbert A. Clarke, who became Third Vice President (fig. 9). Clarke was the editor of a Cincinnati journal called Le Bijou, otherwise known as “the boss journal of the Ohio Valley” (fig. 10). He was also African American. Upon learning of the election, Edward A. Oldham, editor of the Wilmington, North Carolina, Odd Trump, published a stinging editorial titled “Civil Rights in Amateurdom,” objecting not only to Clarke’s election but to his membership in the N.A.P.A. Other North Carolina newspapers soon followed. The North Carolina Amateur announced, “From today onward we declare ourselves seceded from the National Amateur Press Association (?) and do earnestly hope that all who coincide with us will lend their assistance to establish a white boys’ Amateur Press Association”—or, as the group later dubbed themselves, an “Amateur Anti-negro Admission Association.”

Group portrait of the assembled amateurs at the 1882 National Amateur Press Association convention in Detroit, from H. H. Ballard, "A Convention of Amateur Journalists," St. Nicholas (July 1882): 708. Herbert A. Clarke is in the second row, third person from the right. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. — Fig. 9 Group portrait of the assembled amateurs at the 1882 National Amateur Press Association convention in Detroit, from H. H. Ballard, “A Convention of Amateur Journalists,” St. Nicholas (July 1882): 708. Herbert A. Clarke is in the second row, third person from the right. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

Immediately, editorials on “civil rights in amateurdom” filled the pages of the amateur papers. Some papers explicitly argued for white supremacy in the amateur press, and others indicted the North Carolina amateurs for their bigotry. In Le Bijou, Clarke rebuked the North Carolina amateurs for violating the very meaning of the print public sphere:

In the Republic of Letters there has never been any distinction save that of merit. From the blind man, Homer, down the ages through Aesop and Terence, the slaves, to Dumas, the mulatto, the only credential asked or given, was that of merit. A footing was obtained within its sacred bounds and all were alike—the slave and the prince, the beggar and the millionaire stood together on one platform and were joined in a noble equality. It remained for the members of the North Carolina Amateur Press Association to demand that this ancient and noble glory sh’ld be cast aside and men be rated not by their degree of ability; not by moral worth, but by accidents of birth or fortune.

But few others viewed the controversy within the context of an expansive (and eternal) “Republic of Letters.” For most amateurs the major issue the controversy raised was not civil rights per se but the threat civil rights posed to the perceived unity of the ‘dom. Thus the Lafayette, Indiana, Welcome Visitor “regret[ted] the Southern amateurs were so foolish as to broach the subject of Civil Rights” because “it has caused bitter feeling. Why cannot the fraternity leave such topics alone?” Yet the “Civil Rights” controversy revealed that such “fraternity” was a mirage, as the Brooklyn Phoenix (one of several northern papers that opposed Clarke’s election) demonstrated when it opined, “Amateur Journalism is an institution, whose members are bound together by a strong fraternal feeling, and on that account alone negroes should not be recognized.” Even as the Phoenix embraces the notion of “fraternal feeling,” it tacitly acknowledges how fragile this feeling is; it can only be sustained if amateurdom is already homogenous. Other papers accordingly tried to erase the possibility of difference that the controversy had raised. The Hoboken Jersey Amateur Journal, for instance, reassured readers that the notion that “one solitary negro, who is moreover acknowledged to be a cultured gentleman, may contaminate, injure the prospects of, or control an Association composed of a hundred whites, is too preposterous and absurd to be worthy of refutation!” Meanwhile, the Cairo, Illinois, Egyptian Star supported Clarke on the grounds that “He is a ‘nigger,’ as some vulgarly term him, only in color, and not in head or heart.”

Fig. 10 Advertisement for Le Bijou (Cincinnati, Ohio), Vol. 2, No. 2 (March 1879). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

Clarke’s election opened sectional rifts that threatened amateurdom’s sense of itself as a national movement. It also revealed deep and not necessarily sectional currents of hatred that threatened to overwhelm amateurdom’s commitment to fellow feeling. But what made Clarke’s election most fraught was not the amateurs’ racism, or the danger it posed to their sense of unity, but the way that racism tested amateurdom’s notion of itself as a community of outsiders, united by oppression. Edward Oldham, the editor of the Odd Trump, offers a striking example of this dilemma. Oldham styled himself an eccentric, somewhat on the model of Edgar Allan Poe; he gave the Odd Trump the motto “Wrapt in the Solitude of Our Own Originality” (fig. 11). The ‘dom, apparently with Oldham’s blessing, interpreted Oldham’s singularity as blackness. It gave him the nickname “Plutonian,” which twitted a poem he wrote that contained a line about “Dame Night’s Plutonian Darkness” (which, as the Washington, D.C., Southern Star pointed out at the time, “Literally translated means “dark, dark darkness”). But the nickname also took on racial resonances, especially as the “Civil Rights in Amateurdom” controversy raged. Various editors began referring to Clarke‘s “plutonian darkness” or reminded Oldham of his own claims to it, suggesting that Clarke might offer competition for this title. In Le Bijou, Clarke noted the irony:

Jerking himself spasmodically from the pit of plutonian darkness into which he had so unwisely crawled, Oldham [has tried] to blacken the N.A.P.A. by forming the National Amateur Journalists’ League, devoted solely to youths of white-faced ancestry … Wickedly enough, he chooses Boston as the cradle for his nefarious offspring. What! in sight of Bunker Hill, … and within hearing of Faneuil Hall and those spots divinely sacred to future generations as the birth-place of our American patriotism and liberty? Hamburg (S.C.), or some other city whose history is indelibly written in the blood of the oppressed, would be more suitable.

Fig. 11 Odd Trump (Wilmington, N.C.), Vol. 2, No. 6 (July 1879). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

Clarke’s reference to Oldham’s nickname, in combination with his punning reference to Oldham’s attempt to “blacken the N.A.P.A.” by forming a whites-only rival organization, calls out Oldham’s opportunistic blackness. Moreover, by explicating Oldham’s invocation of Pluto, the god of the underworld, he identifies how this opportunistic blackness makes claims on subculture (“the pit of plutonian darkness”). Clarke delineates the relations between race and rebelliousness more soberly in his complaint about the proposed headquarters of the League. Suggesting that Oldham move the headquarters from Boston to Hamburg, S.C., site of a notorious massacre of black freedmen that ended Reconstruction in the state, Clarke accuses Oldham of confusing the revolutionary with the reactionary.

But egregious as his combination of opportunistic blackness and virulent racism was, Oldham was not alone among the amateurs in identifying, however fleetingly, as black. As noted earlier, one way amateurs enacted the intimacy of the ‘dom was by making and circulating woodcuts of themselves and one another. Because few of them were very skilled engravers, however, they often cut away the negative space on the block and left the positive space to take the ink. In practice, this meant that they represented themselves as if in blackface, as in the case of the portrait of Richard Gerner above (fig. 6a). One of the earliest amateur papers, the New Haven Boy’s Herald, bemoaned the phenomenon. In an otherwise admiring review of a guide to amateur journalism that included several portraits of “prominent amateurs,” the paper complained that these were “the poorest caricatures we have ever had the misfortune to come across … they all look like so many ‘gentlemen of color,’ or in plain language ‘niggers,’ (no offense to the persons whom they are intended to represent).” Yet if the Boy’s Herald deplored the effect, the masthead to the Nebraska City Phunny Phellow suggests that other amateurs embraced it (fig. 12). The unusually proficient engraving of the masthead, as well as the oversize ears, lips, and teeth all too familiar from minstrel caricatures, indicates that its self-portrait in blackface might have been intentional, rather than accidental—a way of rendering what the paper elsewhere called the “naughty caper” of amateurdom.

Fig. 12 Phunny Phellow (Nebraska City, Neb.), Vol. 1, Nos. 3, 4, and 5 (July, August, and September, 1880). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

By raising the specter of “civil rights,” Clarke’s election forced the question of amateurdom’s marginality—a question that the amateur press, with its tradition of oppositional forms without content, was not prepared to answer. The paths of the central players, Clarke and the North Carolina amateurs, illustrate how difficult it was to contain the controversy within the existing parameters of amateurdom. Up to this point, Le Bijou had been a pretty conventional amateur paper, printing news from the ‘dom, reviews of other papers, and some sentimental poetry, comic stories, and puzzles. The election controversy, however, evidently radicalized Clarke. He devoted the entire September 1879 issue to the debate, reprinting the North Carolina attacks, the responses they garnered from other papers, and his own vigorous rejoinders. Le Bijou‘s tone, which had previously been very decorous, became considerably more caustic. In the next issue, Clarke taunted his attacker: “Ed. Oldham favored us with a tin-type of himself lately. We’ve placed it in our album opposite our black gal’s photo. Sh-sh—Ed—don’t run—she won’t hurt you!” The paper’s contents also became much more explicitly political. In subsequent issues, Clarke reported on educational disparities between North and South, the link between women’s rights and “the future of the American negro,” the relationship between wages and the length of the working day, and racial prejudice at West Point. The title page of the April 1880 issue endorsed a slate of candidates in the next N.A.P.A. elections under the unauthorized slogan, “EQUALITY, RIGHT, JUSTICE!” Yet amateurdom was evidently less willing to adopt equality, right, and justice as its guiding principles, and Clarke issued Le Bijou more and more irregularly, eventually discontinuing it in 1881. In 1882, he left amateurdom entirely and founded the Afro-American, the first Democratic African American newspaper in the U.S., and according to historian Paula Petrik, he began the first African American newspaper in Indian Territory, as well.

The Amateur Anti-Negro Admission Association took a different route. Where Clarke took his battles outside the world of amateurdom, they continued to operate within it but moved underground. In 1884, the Nova Scotia Boys’ Folio printed an article titled “The A.A.A.A.—An Association Whose History Has Not Been Recorded.” It revealed the membership structure and activities of the A.A.A.A., which had apparently reinvented itself as a secret society devoted to infiltrating regional and state amateur press associations and preventing the admission of African American members. The Boys’ Folio reported, “New members silently and secretly signed” the membership pledge daily, and as a result, the word “white” was quietly added to amateur press association constitutions. The article ended ominously, “It is a question whether the association is still alive.”

Shaken, perhaps, by this crisis in its self-definition, by the end of the 1880s the amateur press largely abandoned its experiment in teenage print culture and opened its doors to adults, including women. But as transitory as it was, the amateur press contributed to a fashioning of rebelliousness as adolescent that still frames our understanding of adolescence—and indeed, rebellion—today. In their noisy editorializing, their mannered unruliness, and their appropriation (but ultimate refusal) of difference, the amateurs strip the underground of its politics and make it available as a style. The emergence of their subculture thus points us toward a revaluation of cultural capital in the late nineteenth century—specifically, to a moment in which it becomes possible to produce cultural capital out of a lack of cultural capital. Amateurdom consolidated its teenage members’ privilege through a collective expression of being unjustly deprived, making a virtue of their exclusion from power. The fact that this exclusion is false is exactly to the point, for it helps us ask with due wonder why a group that, by the usual criteria of race, class, and gender, enjoys all of the privileges of mainstream culture, might reimagine that community as a counterpublic.

Copernicus at the Newsstand

In the face of more than a century of competition from all sorts of faster and more flexible media, the daily newspaper has proven remarkably enduring and resilient. Long after radio, film, television, electronic billboards, and the World Wide Web have diversified and accelerated the pace of official news transmissions, many Americans still regard the morning paper as an indispensable feature of public life. Just how deep this cultural attachment runs is difficult to assess, however, not least for those trying to nudge their way into the daily print business, an industry that has become exceptionally unwelcoming in recent decades.

The question of why people continue to be drawn to the ritual pleasures and symbolic associations of reading the daily paper may or may not have occurred to the people responsible for the well-funded reappearance of the New York Sun on New York newsstands 169 years after its original founding and a half century after its much-lamented demise. Since rising in April 2002, the Sun has faced an uphill battle to carve out a niche in a city where few residents can recall the era when dozens of papers (in several languages) jostled profitably for the daily attention of New Yorkers.

Weighing in at only twelve pages, the new daily has none of the reassuring heft of the major New York newspapers with which it seeks to compete, but in other respects the Sun is familiar, if a bit idiosyncratic. Small type and a relatively large number of discrete articles on each page might incline some readers to suppose that they are consuming a headier journal than their neighbors on the subway. But a few minutes’ perusal ought to dispel such feelings. Much of the Sun’s news is drawn from wire services (this was especially true during the early weeks), and most of the articles written by the Sun staff adopt a similarly disembodied tone.

Fig. 1. Masthead for The Sun, May 7, 1838. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

The paper’s patently conservative politics resemble those of the New York Post, though editor Seth Lipsky’s extraordinary preoccupation with a few issues (terrorism, Israel, school vouchers) gives the new daily the kind of strident ideological focus more typically associated with a weekly magazine. Prominent and typical headlines announce that “NYPD Greets Muslims with Terror Ties,” or delight in the specter of “Farrakhan Praying for Iraq.” The word “appeasement” recurs with perverse and numbing frequency, invariably in reference to the Arab world. The only consistently light note on the front page is the regular appearance of a short item about a distressed member of the animal kingdom. When an AP story on an errant buffalo in Ulster County or a canine candidate for statewide office in Florida is not available, Sun reporters produce their own accounts of dogs rescued at sea or giant turtles recaptured by German police.

None of this, of course, is part of the paper’s public self-perception, nor would such distinctions in typography and tone account for the founders’ decision to rehabilitate an ancient and venerated player in the history of New York journalism. Press releases insist that the new Sun’s distinctive mission is to give “a priority focus to the city it serves,” and this turns out to be the larger significance of the name. While the masthead reaffirms the traditional motto, “it shines for all” (which the original editor had appropriated from a much older tavern sign from across the East River), emphasizing the democratic function of the newspaper as a source of illumination for the masses, advertisements for the new Sun opt for a more Copernican gloss. “Every issue revolves around New York,” potential readers are reassured at the local newsstand.

Since there is relatively little room in this minipaper, as critics have pointed out, for serious coverage of life, politics, sports, entertainment, or anything else in what is still America’s largest city, one must take the trope of heliocentrism as a symbolic statement about newspapers. The Sun may not have the resources to remedy the failure of the Times to devote adequate attention to its local base, but at least it will offer a lesson in journalistic priorities. A newspaper, Seth Lipsky seems to be reminding us, ought to be about a great city.

Here, history is on Lipsky’s side. The American daily print newspaper has always been metropolitan in character, and remains, even in its modern form, an artifact of urban life in the nineteenth century. Newspapers originated in early modern Europe as periodic merchants’ letters, circulating information about prices, shipments, and commodities among far-flung commercial entrepôts. As journals attained greater regularity and wider readerships in eighteenth-century North America, they continued to be the exclusive property of cities, which had a near monopoly on printing presses and long-distance market activity.

These urban papers during the colonial and early national periods were still a far cry from the modern newspaper. They were expensive, sold mainly by annual subscription, and addressed to an elite readership of merchants and lawyers. In the nineteenth century, however, an altogether different species of daily journalism appeared. Spurred by the economic possibilities and the social needs created by massive population explosion in America’s major urban centers, newspaper editors created an inexpensive product that would be sold in the streets by the issue, and could be supported by advertising. The new breed of paper focused on sensational stories about city life and trumpeted the value of a popular press as a bulwark of democracy.

Conventionally, historians date the advent of this era in modern print journalism with the arrival of the first issue of the penny press on September 2, 1833. On that day a twenty-three-year-old journeyman printer named Benjamin Day offered New Yorkers a paper called the Sun.

The Sun’s mission was both simple and bold: “to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for advertising.” This alternative newspaper invoked a public that included those without property and Day addressed his readers as a set of city dwellers rather than as fellow businessmen. Day’s paper also looked different from what typically circulated in the coffeehouses and merchant exchanges. Like Lipsky’s Sun, the first penny paper made a virtue of its reduced size, which was less than one third the height and width of the standard newspaper page—about one-fourth the size of the new Sun, and, at four pages, only a third as long.

Within a few months, Day’s paper was the most popular in the city, and soon thereafter cheap dailies in Boston and Baltimore achieved similar distinctions. All told, dozens of penny dailies emerged in the immediate wake of the Sun, though most collapsed during the depression of 1837. A few of them survived to make a major imprint on the daily life of American cities, among them the New York Herald (1835), the New York Tribune (1841), and the New York Times (1851).

The original New York Sun initiated the era of mass journalism by pioneering the economic model that continues to underwrite modern mass communications. If you can create a sufficiently popular, repeatable spectacle, you can sell the buying power of your spectators to advertisers at potentially limitless rates. Benjamin Day devoted considerable energy to staging this spectacle. For a week in 1835, Day printed a series of articles allegedly reprinted from a Scottish scientific journal, describing telescopic discoveries of life on the moon. As it turned out, these highly detailed reports of spherical amphibians, blue goats with single horns, two-legged beavers, and short hairy men with bat wings, were the handiwork of Sun reporter Richard Adams Locke. Still, by the time the Moon Hoax was exposed a couple of weeks later (Locke admitted as much to friend who wrote for a rival paper and the Sun coyly suggested the possibility that the story was a satire on local journalists), Day’s circulation had soared to almost twenty thousand, making it in all likelihood the best-read daily newspaper in the world. Adopting a stance that would become more famously identified with P.T. Barnum, Day urged “every reader of the account [to] examine it, and enjoy his own opinion.” He understood that for a daily paper each issue supersedes its predecessor. You could print the confessions of a murderer on Tuesday and call them bogus on Wednesday—collecting revenue on both items. You could sell the Moon Hoax one day and its retraction the next.

The following year saw Day at the forefront of the Helen Jewett controversy, as the brutal murder of a beautiful prostitute in New York became the cause célèbre of the young penny press and the model for a new focus on the city as an object of reportage. In covering the murder, New York’s dailies articulated the now familiar view that important questions should be tried in the court of public opinion. The Sun was a leading voice calling for the conviction of Richard Robinson, a dry-goods clerk with wealthy connections, linked to Jewett’s murder by a mountain of circumstantial evidence. After Robinson’s acquittal (produced largely by a judge’s instruction that the jury ought to disregard testimony of sex workers), a disappointed Sun declared that “a popular opinion formed upon a fair report of the trial in the public papers, is a solemn authority which every judicial functionary . . . is bound to respect.”

Day’s naïve populism may sound quaint, but his equation of the popularity of the newspaper with the democratic nature of its function remains central to our notions of a free press. Over the course of the nineteenth century, freedom of the press shifted from an emphasis on the right of an editor to criticize the regime to an insistence on the right of an abstract readership to unimpeded access to information—the right, in other words, to live in a world where journalists are hard at work, perpetually casting light on the shadowy realms of American life.

It’s hard to see Seth Lipsky as a worthy successor to the populist, working-class entrepreneur who ran the Sun during the first five years of its existence before selling out to his brother-in-law. It is also hard to see what specific lessons the visionaries at the new Sun have drawn from its now classic eponym. The new Sun’s putative local focus tends to use the city not as a canvas, but as a peephole through which to view national and international issues. The city council makes the front page, for example, primarily when it debates symbolic resolutions about the Middle East. And far from rendering the city as a mystery in need of unveiling, the Sun’s interest in the peculiarities of urban life seems fairly muted. “Queens Democrats Live in Lawrence, L.I.” is hardly the equivalent of a sensationalist murder story.

Finally, the new Sun’s dependence on subsidies from patrons rather than high circulation aligns it more with the six-penny journals that Day’s brash, pocket-sized paper eclipsed. Perhaps Lipsky and his supporters were more inspired by Day’s postbellum successor, Charles A. Dana, whose conservative politics and stylistic simplicity find stronger echoes in today’s Sun. More likely, however, the appeal of the Sun pedigree lies more in a vaguer nostalgia for a time when New Yorkers read multiple newspapers and held them proudly in public space as badges of political and ideological identity.

Should this newspaper fail, as it seems likely to do, perhaps an alternative nostalgia might be in order. The original Sun appeared not at the dawning of the last century in the heyday of Pulitzer and the Yellow Kid, but in a golden age of a different sort, when it cost very little to launch a daily newspaper. To call the 1830s a golden age is misleading, though, since the porthole of opportunity was really quite small. Benjamin Day began his paper in 1833 without any capital, relying on a slow, hand-cranked flatbed press. James G. Bennett claimed to have founded the rival Herald two years later with only $500. By 1838, however the Sun (devalued after the Panic) sold for $40,000. Thirteen years later, Henry Raymond’s New York Times was launched with the support of $100,000. By 1855, an informed observer estimated that twice that figure might be required to get a daily going in New York.

In the span of less than twenty years, then, New Yorkers demonstrated the potential profitability of a popular daily journal, creating applications and markets for advances in print technology and effectively raising the price of admission to the field. Newspapers became far more expensive to produce soon after they became far less expensive to consume. Since 1850, producing a mass daily has been an expensive proposition and an elite trade. Lipsky was certainly under no illusions on this score, attacking New York with an arsenal of $20 million. But unlike Dana, Pulitzer, or William Randolph Hearst, he has to attract readers who may not be convinced that they need to read a daily print paper at all, let alone several.

The Sun has not released any circulation figures, and industry audits won’t be forthcoming for a few months, but the buzz around town is not optimistic. If they want to build a successful newspaper on nostalgia or on a New York-centered theory of the universe, the folks at the new Sun will probably need to think harder about why readers might want to see their city on the front page of a newspaper. For no obvious practical reason, newspapers continue, by and large, to be urban entities, their identities tightly tethered to particular cities of publication. USA Today stands alone in severing the link between the city and the daily paper, reminding mobile and deracinated readers in hotel lobbies and airport lounges all over the country that there is no inherent reason why daily print news ought to gravitate around a metropolis. As Lipsky’s Sun seems poised to demonstrate, the link between cities and dailies may be simply a vestige of an earlier historical moment that has survived for no good reason into an era when most American readers live in suburbs or small cities and most of the news they read is of a regional or national character. The original penny papers built America’s first mass medium around the possibilities and problems of urban environments. Attempts to claim their tradition inherit the burden of making new sense of that legacy.

Further Reading: See Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun (New York, 1918); Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690 to 1940 (New York, 1941); Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill, 1994); Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York, 1978); Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1980); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London, 1990).

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

An erstwhile New Yorker, David Henkin lives in San Francisco, teaches at U.C. Berkeley, and is the author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York, 1998).

Pressing Matters: An experiential study of the Isaiah Thomas printing press at the American Antiquarian Society

In 1756, Isaiah Thomas—newspaper chronicler of the American Revolution, eminent publisher, historian of American printing, and founder of the American Antiquarian Society—began a unique, nearly lifelong relationship with a printing press. Thomas’s mother had been impoverished when her husband left Boston to improve the family’s fortunes and instead died in North Carolina. When Thomas was six, she placed her son in the household of a printer, Zechariah Fowle, to whom Isaiah was formally indentured as an apprentice when he was only seven. Fowle’s modest Boston printing establishment depended on a single wooden printing press built in London in 1747 (fig. 1). It was not an unusual machine in its construction or design; it looked very much like other English “common presses” of the period. Thomas began his mechanical relationship by inking the press while standing on a box. Later, he learned to pull the press himself, and he seems to have quickly exceeded the abilities of his master. Some years after his apprenticeship ended, Thomas acquired the press from Fowle, and it was a mainstay in his establishment in the following decades. In 1796 he compiled an inventory of his by-then large shop, and in that document he referred to the press as “No. 1.” Notably, he also listed it as “old,” which may imply that the press was little used or even retired. In 1812, Thomas founded the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, and in 1830 he wrote a codicil to his will that left his then disassembled press to the Society. Thomas died in 1831.

Fig. 1. The Isaiah Thomas printing press, built in London in 1747, restored to its present condition in 1977, and now resident at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Photograph courtesy of the author.

The decades between Thomas’s apprenticeship and the revision of his will are changeful ones for the history of the hand press in North America. During those seventy-four years, the American importation of English common presses dwindled and native production became the rule; the design of wooden presses was subtly or more substantially improved by increasingly specialized press makers; and yet in spite of such improvements, by 1830 the wooden press was being pushed aside by the iron hand press. These developments, of course, took place within the larger transition of materials and processes that we traditionally designate as the industrial revolution. Thomas’s machine, which today presides over the reading room of the American Antiquarian Society from the second-floor balcony, helps us to glimpse these technological developments. As I describe below, having examined the press and its history closely, and having “embodied” that examination in the creation of a replica, I feel better able to speculate in an experientially informed way about the context for press innovation during this period.

Let me begin by recounting my own relationship to the Thomas press. Since 2007, I’ve been developing a letterpress studio and workshop associated with Special Collections in the Claremont Colleges Library. Students at the Claremont Colleges who take the workshop can learn to print on one of several iron hand presses. Working with these beautiful machines over the last few years, I became interested in how iron presses quickly replaced the wooden common press in the United States between 1814 (when George Clymer began to market his iron Columbian press) and 1840. In talking to my letterpress students about this technological transition, however, I found myself stumbling occasionally when speculating about why iron presses made wooden ones obsolete. I’d never worked with a common press, and I didn’t know enough about them to offer a very convincing narrative of their decline. With a year-long sabbatical leave in view, I decided to address my lack of direct knowledge about common presses in a somewhat unusual way: I prepared to build one, and “learn by doing” became my motto. Studying the press “by hand,” I thought, would help me to understand the technology and better construct my replica. I had long admired the Thomas press, one of a small number of remaining eighteenth-century common presses in the United States, and so I chose it as my original. While I’m not quite finished building my replica as I write this article, I’m close enough to draw a few conclusions about what I’ve learned through this experiential study. This is the point at which I should note that while I had a little experience with carpentry and metal work prior to this project, I had never tried anything remotely as large and complicated.

I began my project in fall 2011 by spending a month at the American Antiquarian Society studying the mechanism, history, and historical context of the Thomas press. When not examining printed and unpublished sources in the reading room, I could generally be seen by other readers on the balcony above them leaning over or crawling under the press, tape measure and calipers in hand. I spent many of my evenings and weekends drawing a set of plans from measurements and rough sketches, constantly comparing my drawings to the diagrams and descriptions in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing and Elizabeth Harris and Clinton Sisson’s The Common Press. I also consulted a number of early nineteenth-century printing manuals to make sure that I was correctly understanding and accurately representing the many pieces of the press. (The curators reasonably restricted my examination of the press by not allowing me to disassemble the spindle, nut, and hose, so for the dimensions of these pieces I relied on Harris and Sisson, who documented a very similar press at the Smithsonian Institution.)

One of the first things I noticed, something that would be obvious to even the most casual of observers, was that this machine had been well used. Ink covers much of the wood work, various parts have been gouged by nails or other sharp tools, the bar handle has been smoothed by the hands of many journeymen printers, and overall the press has the worn but proud look of an old veteran. On closer examination, however, I could see clearly what the more careful eyes of curators and conservators had previously noted: that this veteran is not completely original. Many parts have been repaired substantially, and a few of them have been replaced. Frustratingly, these alterations often don’t tell us much about when they were made or by whom, although there are clues that allow for some educated guessing.

Because some of these changes to the press as originally built seem dedicated to keeping it in working order, it is tempting to speculate that they date from Thomas’s lifetime. For instance, a wooden frame called the coffin was stabilized by driving nails into some of the joints and repaired by laying in new pieces (fig. 4). The coffin is an essential part of the machine: it holds a planed stone on top of which the type stands during printing. Wrought-iron flanges are nailed into the corners of the coffin, and the chase, the iron frame that holds the type in place on the stone, is wedged against these pieces. Over time, this wedging probably loosened and perhaps broke some of the wood in the coffin, necessitating the repairs that are now evident. This and some other repairs would have been worth making while the press was still in use; it seems unlikely that they would have been made later for the purpose of displaying the press.

Other alterations, though, are certainly more recent. Some may date from immediately after Thomas’s death. In the codicil to his will, Thomas instructed his grandson Isaiah Thomas Simmons to reassemble No. 1 and ensure that it was “well fixed” by Simmons himself or by “some Printer experienced in the construction of old-fashioned Printing Presses.” What exactly needed fixing and whether Simmons actually followed his grandfather’s instruction is unknown. The press was certainly altered later in the nineteenth century, but the extent of the changes is similarly hard to determine. In 1876 the press was loaned to Andrew C. Campbell, who owned the Campbell Printing Press and Manufacturing Company, for a display at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Corresponding with Samuel Foster Haven, the librarian of the Society, Campbell noted that “there was a part of it [the press] gone.” To which particular part or parts Campbell referred is unclear. That he didn’t really know much about the Thomas press—he identified it as having been built by Willem Janzoon Blaeu around 1680 in Germany—didn’t stop him from renovating the machine. He almost certainly replaced the hind-rail assembly and the forestay. Because he intended to print with the press while it was on display, he seems to have added a bolt and a new cross member to stabilize the foot assembly and to have repaired the damaged platen by cutting it down to its present size. (In 1977 a sliver of wood from the platen was sent to a laboratory which identified it as a species of maple, possibly as American sugar maple; the platen modified by Campbell, then, may itself be a replacement built after the press arrived in Boston around 1750.) The press that Campbell returned to the Society was thus a significantly altered machine from the one that left it.

Fig. 2. Selected parts of the Thomas press. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Fig. 3. Selected parts of the hose assembly. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Other repairs we can be more certain about, because they happened relatively recently and are well documented. In 1972, planning began at the American Antiquarian Society for a renovation of the press that would ultimately play out in three stages over six years and that involved consultants from Old Sturbridge Village, the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Virginia. In 1973, some modest changes were made to the press: blocks that had at some point been attached to the feet were removed and a replacement was built for the missing half of the till. Two years later, the press went through a more significant restoration that included disassembly, a thorough cleaning and fumigation of many of the pieces, and chemical analysis of a limited number of pieces that suggested that the press was built primarily of elm and white oak. The forestay was once again replaced, the tympan and frisket were covered with cloth and paper respectively, and new frisket hinges were forged to replace a set that seemed to date from the twentieth century. For the purposes of display, two new ink-ball racks were hung on the press, and four short pieces of wood were nailed to the cap to represent the way in which the press would probably have been stabilized in its original installation by bracing it to the ceiling or rafters. The hind-rail assembly, the forestay, the ink-ball racks, and the cap braces were painted a flat brown to indicate that they were not original. The stone had gone missing after Campbell’s use of the press in 1876, and it was replaced. The initial plan in this phase was “to restore the press to operating condition” in anticipation of the 200th anniversary of Thomas’s first printing in Worcester. As the librarians and consultants studied the press, however, it became clear that the wood in some parts was too weak to allow extensive use. Accordingly, just two proofs were pulled at two different times in 1975—one read “ISAIAH THOMAS,” the other was a specimen sheet of type—and the press was then effectively retired.

With the realization of the press’s somewhat frail condition, another phase of restoration, focusing on conservation, began in 1977, and during this phase the press was again dismantled. Several pieces were taken to the Smithsonian Institution’s preservation laboratories where they were analyzed, cleaned, and treated with appropriate preservatives. The off cheek, which had extensive and vitiating insect damage where it met the foot assembly, was impregnated with a hardening agent. The forestay and the hind-rail assembly were replaced with new replicas based on a very similar eighteenth-century press. The press was reassembled for display late in the year. In 1989, the press was taken apart and moved once more for an exhibit at the New York Public Library about the relationship of printing to the French Revolution, but that last ramble for Thomas’s press did not involve the fabrication of new pieces or the restoration of old ones.

This long history of repair and restoration posed some interesting questions for me as I planned my replica. Consider the forestay—in addition to the one currently installed on the press, there were two earlier and quite different designs, and we can’t say with certainty that any of these three replacements resembles the forestay that Thomas would have known. Eventually I designed a forestay different from any of these models, but one that I thought fit the simple aesthetic of the press. I applied a similar design to the hind-rail assembly, although with that part of the press I must confess that I sacrificed close imitation for better functionality. The hind-rail assembly is structurally important to the press in two ways. Once the carriage is installed, it fits snugly against the lower hind rail, an arrangement that helps to keep the carriage from moving when the bed is rolled in and out of the press. The hind-rail assembly also stiffens the framework of the press so that it resists the rotation of the spindle when the press is in operation. In an eighteenth-century installation, however, that motion would usually have been more potently resisted by two other practices: nailing the feet of the press to the floor and using long boards to connect the cap of the press to the rafters of the shop. Secured in such a way, the building that contained the press became part of the press’s structure and helped to stabilize the machine during operation. Understandably, the staff at the Claremont Colleges Library, where my replica will reside, was not wildly enthusiastic about the idea of nailing the press into the ceiling of the Special Collections Reading Room. The hind-rail assembly on my replica, then, had to provide substantial resistance to the rotation of the spindle, and I tried to achieve this by using brass bolts and threaded inserts rather than wooden pegs.

These design decisions were still in the future, of course, during my month with the press in Worcester. After returning home with my set of plans and hundreds of photographs, I organized my garage into a small workshop and gathered my tools—chisels, mallets, saws, planes, rasps and files, and other needed implements. While I did not set out to be true to eighteenth-century joinery practices in my use of tools (in fact, I regularly utilized a number of electric tools), I did do a great deal of the wood work on the replica with hand tools that would have been available to a London joiner in 1747. If I’d had back-to-back sabbaticals, I would have set up a forge and tried my arm at the anvil, but instead I used an arc welder and an oxygen-acetylene torch for my iron work. Additionally, the machinist at my college cut the spindle, nut, and a few other metal pieces that were simply beyond my abilities. With my shop set up, I then began to look for vintage wood to use in the construction. Common presses were typically constructed out of a mix of hardwoods, and some hardwoods have the unfortunate tendency to twist and check as they dry. For this reason, Moxon strongly advises press builders to use “Well-season’d Oak.” After some searching, I found a vintage-wood dealer who had appropriately sized timbers of oak and elm, and I supplemented those with a few pieces of relatively new but nonetheless dry and stable wood. My “well-season’d” lumber had come out of old barns and other structures; most of the pieces had tenons or mortises cut into them that I had to work around or incorporate.

Fig. 4. A closeup, from above, of one corner of the coffin on the Thomas press. A repair has been made by setting and nailing a small piece of wood, visible just above the corner iron, into the coffin frame. Photograph courtesy of the author.

With the wood replacing the car in my garage (fig. 5), I began to fashion my replica. When I purchased my lumber, I was delighted to find that much of it was close in size to the finished dimensions I would need before I could start carving—three-quarters of an inch thicker here, two inches wider there. This closeness encouraged me to believe that, rather than taking all of the wood to a lumber yard to be milled at considerable expense, I could save money and get a better feel for my wood by cutting the lumber down to finished size in my own garage. This decision cost me a huge amount of time, and were I to build a press again, I would have at least some of the pieces milled. But the time I spent sizing my lumber also afforded me the opportunity to learn more about my materials and helped me to a better understanding of some of the repairs I’ve already noted in the Thomas press.

In many ways, wood is an excellent material for mechanical applications. It can be very hard but at the same time shapeable and joinable. It’s a plentiful resource. Worn or damaged pieces can often be refashioned and reused. But in a machine like a common press, in which wood and iron are both used and the wooden joinery is constantly stressed by the rotation of the spindle and the expansive pressure when the impression is made, wooden pieces and joints tend to wear out, loosen, or break over time. When I was carving paired pieces for my press—the feet, say, or the cheeks—making the second piece was always easier, not because I had become a substantially better woodworker by carving the first, but because for the second I had a model. In the eighteenth-century, a joiner, a cooper, or a carpenter—probably any worker whose medium was wood—would have been able to supply a functional replacement if the right wood were available and the original served as a model. Such woodworkers were usually well represented in provincial communities. The repair of metal parts would have demanded more specialized skills.

Any repair on a press would have necessitated some disassembly. Replacing something like a frisket would have been a simple process, but a more structural repair, such as building a new winter (the piece that supports the rail assembly and bed), would require substantial dismantling. Wooden presses were often moved, so they were designed to break down into their constituent parts. Prior to building a replica press, though, I had no real sense of what would be involved in disassembling a wooden press. But having built most of my replica in my garage, and facing the impending conclusion of my sabbatical, a time came when I needed to break it down and move it to its permanent home in the library. What I learned from this experience was that these machines can be disassembled very quickly. Granted, my press was not yet finished when I disassembled it, I didn’t have to bore out any pegs that had become stuck over time, and I didn’t have to pull out the nails that would have typically connected the press to the floor and ceiling. Even so, working alone it took only half an hour to dismantle the entire frame and carriage assembly and lay out the pieces on my garage floor (fig. 6).

The rapidity with which my press came apart illuminates a famous adventure in the relationship between Isaiah Thomas and No. 1 that occurred in April 1775 at the start of the American Revolution: “As an armed clash seemed more imminent, one of the first acts of the British authorities was likely to be the seizure of the presses. Isaiah consulted with John Hancock and other members of the Provincial Congress, who advised him to move his press to some country town where it would be safe and would be available to do their printing. On the night of April 16, he dismantled his press ‘No. 1’ and packed up the rest of his equipment and with the aid of two friends got his press and types into a wagon and across the Charles River on the ferry to Charlestown.” The press made its way to Worcester, where it was set up and used throughout the Revolutionary War and throughout Thomas’s long career. As I think about that initial and hurried transport in the light of my experience knocking down my replica, it strikes me that it was probably more time consuming for Thomas and his friends, on that stressful April night, to prepare the type to move than it was to ready the press. The type, after all, would be subject to mixing while being jostled in a wagon on rough roads, and so it probably had to be packed in such a way that the different pieces of type were secured within their own compartment in the type case. The press itself would have packed into a relatively compact grouping in the wagon.

Repairing, disassembling, and reassembling a press, then, were relatively straightforward endeavors. Building a press from scratch, however, was a different matter, and the complexities of coordinating supply and craftwork was a significant barrier to native production until after the Revolutionary War, even though the demand for presses was growing. As with the Thomas press, colonial printers had generally imported their machines from England, and as Milton W. Hamilton notes, presses “made in America did not become common until the non-importation agreements of the struggle over taxation gave an impetus to colonial manufacturing.” Evidence of native production prior to the war is scarce. In his History of Printing in America, Isaiah Thomas dates the earliest press construction in North America to 1750, when Christopher Sower Jr. of Germantown had several presses made for his own use. In 1769, a New Haven clock maker ventured beyond his usual scope of business to build a printing press for an American printer. Around the beginning of the war, press production seems to have developed in Philadelphia, Hartford, and perhaps a few other places. By the 1790s, native press makers were supplying a large part of the market and advertising their manufactures widely. Of the twelve presses listed in Isaiah Thomas’s 1796 inventory, four were made in Hartford.

Fig. 5. Vintage wood in my garage: the raw material for my replica. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Fig. 6. The parts of the replica spread out on the bed of a truck, waiting to be hauled to the library for assembly. Photograph courtesy of the author.

By 1800, numerous newspaper advertisements demonstrate that being a “printers’ joiner” or “printing-press maker” had become a small but specialized American trade. A press maker from Elizabethtown, New Jersey, offers a sense of the growing market for native presses in an informative advertisement in the New Jersey Journal in 1796:

JOHN HAMILTON, PRINTING-PRESS MAKER, INFORMS the PRINTERS in this and the neighboring states, that they may be supplied with PRESSES, made on an improved plan, after the best manner, and at three weeks notice. He has made presses for most of the printers in this state, New-York, and elsewhere; and has the happiness to find that his endeavors to give satisfaction, have met their approbation.—His price is SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS, which, considering the manner in which he finishes his presses, he flatters himself will be considered as a moderate compensation.

I must confess to some feelings of inadequacy in relation to this advertisement, because as I write this article, it’s taken me eight months to almost complete a press. Of course, I can comfort myself by imagining that Hamilton’s three weeks was the ideal case—this is an advertisement, after all—and in knowing that he and his workers had experience building other presses. Still, taking Hamilton’s claim at face value, and considering it through my experience building a replica, it’s tempting to speculate on the necessary conditions for press making to become a specialized trade.

First, a division of labor and concomitant sense of entrepreneurship was required. A press maker in 1747 London or 1796 New Jersey would need a reliable source for the iron work of the press, since he would not be constructing those complicated parts himself. The spindle and nut (fig. 7) would be the most time consuming to build from scratch, but the rails, rounce spit, and tympan hinges would all present their own difficulties. As a time index for certain kinds of iron work, I hand filed one end of the “spit,” an axle that when turned moves the carriage in and out from under the platen. I worked just two inches of the spit, going from square, to smaller round, to yet smaller square; doing so cost me eight hours and two painfully cramped hands. Given Hamilton’s “improved plan,” perhaps he had a very specific set of instructions that he could give to the iron worker; if the iron worker had supplied Hamilton in the past, then maybe the smith also had a series of patterns and jigs that would speed the job. Perhaps demand was such that Hamilton planned ahead and had one or more sets of iron parts ready and waiting for the next order. In considering the press maker’s needs, two Philadelphia newspaper advertisements from the beginning of the nineteenth century suggest the working relationship and division of labor that specialization demanded. In 1804, Joseph Eagleson, a smith who advertised that his shop could produce “all kinds of PRINTING PRESS WORK,” indicated that orders could be left in the shop of Adam Ramage, the Philadelphia printer’s joiner who famously improved the common press and supplied the American market extensively for several decades. The relationship between two artisanal establishments suggested in that advertisement is strongly reinforced in another notice from 1810, in which Ramage himself advertised his manufacture of printing presses and noted that he had “Smiths and Joiners employed in these branches only.” In building printing presses, specialization demanded the predictable integration of multiple crafts.

Second, just as there was a market for used presses, so too iron parts from old presses may have found new life in new woodwork. Consider the Thomas press—while the wood in places is fragile enough to warrant the press’s retirement, the spindle thread still turns smoothly and tightly in the nut, and the rest of the original iron work is in generally good condition. In cases where the iron had outlasted its original wooden framework, certainly pieces like the spindle and nut must have been re-used. It is clear from the advertising record that used presses changed hands fairly often; it seems likely that there was also a market for used iron parts.

Third, a press maker contemplating the production of multiple presses for the same design would have made patterns and jigs for the wooden portion of the press. David Pye’s well-known distinction between the “workmanship of risk” and the “workmanship of certainty” is useful here. Rather than a process in which the result of the wood carving was not predetermined and thus open to risk, the press maker would have taken steps to regulate production, to make the results of the woodworking more certain. Philip D. Zimmerman adapts Pye’s distinction in writing about eighteenth-century furniture production, and his point seems applicable to press production as well: “The use of templates … and other patterning tools on a shop-wide basis resulted in the workmanship of certainty. They also represented a dual cost savings. First, the owner spent time laying out the design only once, no matter how many times that design was used. Second, a relatively unskilled worker could use the templates without loss of quality in the piece of work, and the shopowner could assign more highly skilled and highly paid workers to other tasks.” Even though I was building a single press, I nonetheless created jigs for facing the inside of the cheeks and for cutting the dovetail mortises and tenons, and I made patterns for cutting the various mortises in the feet (fig. 8). These guides made the carving easier and, in Pye’s sense, the results more certain.

Fig. 7. The spindle and nut cut by my college machinist for the replica press. Note the three-start thread visible on the nut and the plans from Harris and Sisson’s The Common Press in the background. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Fig. 8. The cheeks of the replica press locked up in jigs to keep the inner faces of the cheeks parallel to one another as I fitted pieces such as the head, till, and foot assembly. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Fourth, our printing-press maker would need a reliable source of hardwood that was adequately seasoned and sized when it arrived at the shop. The needs of a press maker in this respect would have varied from those of, say, a cabinet maker, as the dimensions of the wood for a cabinet and a press are very different. At the same time, the wood would have to be of higher quality than the timbers that might be used to frame a building, where knots, checks, and blemishes would be less difficult to work around. Such supply was not always forthcoming in the late eighteenth century; in 1792 Isaiah Thomas ordered presses from Hartford, “and when the manufacturers were unable to find good wood for them, he hunted it up in Boston.” Some of this lumber may have been used rather than new. If so, the press maker would have to work around or incorporate pre-existing mortises, tenons, peg holes, angled cuts, and sawn sizes dating from the wood’s earlier use. For my replica, I was able to take advantage of two large tenons in each of the pieces I worked for the cheeks, cutting down and reshaping the tenons slightly so that they fit into the mortises I had carved in the feet. The Thomas press suggests that printers’ joiners also worked with what they had: the off cheek in that press is noticeably crooked near the top. It seems likely that the lumber was imperfect to begin with and the joiner made do with it.

Hamilton’s “improved plan” reminds us that the technology represented by the Thomas press was in flux; joiners, smiths, and printers themselves had sought to make the traditional common press more efficient by improving certain parts of the machine. Consider the hose mechanism. The Thomas press, like most English presses of its period, has a square wooden hose through which the spindle passes and from which the platen hangs. The two-part till, cut to fit the hose fairly precisely, fastens around the hose to keep it from rotating with the spindle, and that control allows the platen to come down squarely, which in turn minimizes the slurring of the inked type on the paper. Many presses of the period, however, were built with “steel hoses,” an innovation originally utilized by Willem Janzoon Blaeu and later popularized through Moxon’s seventeenth-century championing of this style in Mechanick Exercises. In Thomas’s 1796 inventory, three of his twelve presses had steel hoses, including one built in Hartford. The overall framework of the press was a stable design, but printers, concerned constantly with making their jobs faster, more predictable, and thus more profitable, may have provided ready customers for innovative press makers. Beyond such minor innovations, more substantial reinventions of the wooden common press were occasionally attempted, including the successful design of the so-called Ramage press around 1807 and various experiments, inspired by the invention of the first successful iron hand press in 1800, to use compound levers to turn the spindle. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, such motivation led many inventors to experiment with iron as a new material for framing a press.

In my replica, there are certainly some examples that suggest the process of small-scale innovation. The machinist who cut my spindle made it cylindrical rather than tapered so that it would fit more precisely in the hose. I designed a way of connecting the “girts,” the leather straps that help to slide the carriage in and out of the press, to the carriage assembly without nailing them to it, the technique used for the Thomas press.

That wooden presses were often advertised as “improved” suggests widespread dissatisfaction with traditional press technology and the limitations of wood construction among late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century printers and press makers. This feeling was expressed repeatedly in newspaper articles when the newly invented, cast-iron Columbian press was promoted through American newspaper exchanges between 1814 and 1816. Commenting on the mechanical and practical superiority of this American invention, one writer held: “It has long been a desideratum among printers, to obtain a press for letter press printing, which should be worked with less manual labour than that now in use, whilst the simplicity of its construction, and the certainty of the result, should leave but little, or nothing to the judgment of the pressmen.” Another compared the materials head to head: “Being composed entirely of iron it is far less liable to get out of repair, and obviously more durable than the common Presses, and the impressions which it gives are more uniform and distinct.” Some writers were more harsh, such as the printer William Fry who wrote in a published letter about “the frequent and vexatious derangements to which other [wooden] presses are liable,” or an anonymous writer who seems to have had direct experience pulling a wooden press: “The defects of the common press are so numerous, that it is impossible to provide a remedy for every evil. Perhaps there never was a machine invented to effect any purpose that leaves so much to depend on the skill and attention of the workman; and the judgment and experience of the most acute often prove inadequate to provide a remedy for these irregularities or defects which militate against the neatness or beauty of the printing.” Iron presses like the Columbian were more expensive at first than wooden ones, but by the 1830s the cost had come down and their clear mechanical superiority to wooden presses made them worth the money invested in them. Along with being easier to operate, a key aspect of their design was the stiffness of their frame—they didn’t have to be nailed into the rafters in order to remain stable during use. In this respect, I can certainly feel the difference between my replica and any one of the iron presses in my studio. There is a solidity to the iron machines that is simply not possible to achieve with a wooden frame, especially since the latter, meant to be easily taken apart, does not feature glued or nailed joints.

Fig. 9. The replica press in the Special Collections Reading Room, the Claremont Colleges Library, with the author standing next to it. Photograph courtesy of Dan Petersen.

Building a replica of the Thomas press (fig. 9) has allowed me to practically and imaginatively conceive of the nature of the machine in a way that would not have been possible had I only examined it. My finished replica will further this process as I learn to print on it. Will my press exhibit “frequent and vexatious derangements” of the sort the Thomas press was prone to? I suspect so. But as I compare its functionality with the iron hand presses in my studio, understanding the limitations of the wooden common press experientially will help me to better understand the historical transition between wooden and iron presses in early nineteenth-century America.

The Rise of American Magazines

Haveman’s Magazines and the Making of America is a study in cultural sociology that explores the history of a print medium that flourished in the nineteenth century and beyond. Unlike a historian, the sociologist Haveman does not primarily seek to explain why magazines and their readers followed various paths. Instead the author aims to demonstrate that magazines promoted the creation of imagined, translocal communities. By assembling data on the chronology of the founding and survival of magazines, and by analyzing the specific places, urban and rural, where they were produced as well as their topical specialties, Haveman provides a significant contribution to scholarship on the early history of periodicals in the United States. Her primary audience is sociologists, but historians of printing, newspapers, the book, and of reading will find Magazines and the Making of America instructive.

The study is divided into eight chapters. The introduction explains that, since newspapers and books have been much studied, magazines warrant fresh analysis that will enable readers to understand “the modernization of America.” Haveman’s second chapter sketches the chronology of American magazines from their fragile eighteenth-century beginnings, when they catered to the gentry, to the next century when magazines multiplied dramatically and came to serve far broader audiences. Chapter three provides a brief history of specific changes in the United States that encouraged magazines to flourish: the emergence of industrial printing, postal expansion and subsidies, the growth of literacy and the education industry, copyright protection, and the commercialization of authorship. Haveman’s fourth chapter treats the who, why, and how of magazine founding. Though first started by printers and gentlemen in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, by the 1820s magazines were being created in many locations, both by entrepreneurs to gain profits and by organizations to support their missions.

Advertising print by R. Hoe & Co., color lithograph, printed on R. Hoe & Co’s patent steam lithographic press by the American Photo-Lithographic Co. (New York, ca. 1870). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The author turns next to the proliferation of specific types of magazines. In separate chapters treating religious, social reform, and economy-related magazines—covering topics as diverse as agriculture, foreign missions, fraudulent currency, and scientific technology—she charts the broad reach of these periodicals. In a concluding chapter Haveman argues that evidence drawn from magazine history revises the conclusions of classic sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Karl Deutsch in key ways. “The communities supported by magazines,” such as Sabbatarians, “could be simultaneously modern and antimodern” (272). By studying the development of this once new medium across time, she argues, we can better understand new media today. As she puts it, magazines were “both causes and consequences of fundamental shifts in American culture” (273).

Title page, The Scientific American, an Illustrated Journal of Art, Science, and Mechanics Vol. VI (New York, 1850). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — Title page, *The Scientific American, an Illustrated Journal of Art, Science, and Mechanics* Vol. VI (New York, 1850). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Haveman’s book is primarily a study of production and, to a lesser extent, distribution. She does not address why Americans sought to be informed or why legislatures approved public policies that promoted information systems such as political parties and the U.S. post office. Because of this focus, the book’s contribution to our understanding of the formation and extent of translocal communities, both imagined communities of similarly disposed individuals as well as formally organized voluntary associations, is more doubtful. For instance, she does not investigate their cultural foundations in ideology, social structure, or practice. Likewise, she makes little effort to explain the actual reception of periodicals or how their content differed from or overlapped with that of newspapers. The creation of a translocal community, therefore, is asserted but not actually demonstrated. Haveman’s evidence does not describe whether and how subscribers and readers interacted with each other. The closest the author comes to considering reader response is to quote readers’ letters—authentic or not—to magazines, where readers supplied admiring testimonials to the usefulness of the publication. No private letter, no diary, no report of a conversation illumines how the contents of any particular magazine affected the way any person thought about their actual local or imagined translocal community. In like manner, county, statewide, and national meetings and conventions, where translocal communities were embodied in face-to-face encounters, are omitted from consideration. Instead the author uses the statistics of circulation and organization membership to infer the reality of translocal communities composed of reformers like abolitionists or denominations such as Methodists. This is persuasive up to a point, but for historians this is not new.

Title page, Godey’s Lady’s Book (Philadelphia, 1843). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — Title page, *Godey’s Lady’s Book* (Philadelphia, 1843). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Much of the author’s discussion, derived as it is from historical scholarship of the past two generations, will be familiar to historians of the subject. Sometimes, as with Haveman’s account of ideas concerning intellectual property and the payment of authors, her treatment is attentive to the most recent scholarship; elsewhere, such as the coverage of education and literacy, it seems dated. And on occasion well-known information, such as the dramatic increase in urban growth, is presented at length. Perhaps in consequence, readers encounter generalizations so time-worn as to be banal, as when Haveman repeats a conclusion by Arthur Schlesinger Sr., provided nearly a century ago: “Urbanization fundamentally altered the nature of social life in America” (78).

The author has read widely in American historical scholarship and is generally well informed. Yet there are some puzzling omissions. The past generation’s work on the history of the book and the nature of reading practices, including William J. Gilmore’s Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835 (1992) and capped by the five-volume History of the Book in America (2007-10), evidently escaped the author’s notice. Admittedly this scholarship does not focus on magazines especially, but if one is to understand magazines’ place in American communication patterns, it is vital to consider them in the context of reading practices and within the broader range of communication systems, oral as well as printed.

Haveman’s apparent unawareness of key authors within this body of work, such as Robert A. Gross, David D. Hall, and Mary Kelley, is especially surprising since she does cite Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700-1860s (1989), David Paul Nord’s Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and their Readers (2001), Nord’s Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (2004), and Ronald J. Zboray’s A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (1993).

“Section and Elevation of a Wheel,” engraved frontispiece accompanying the "Description of a Hydraulic Machine" for The New-York Magazine, or Literary Repository (December 1797). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “Section and Elevation of a Wheel,” engraved frontispiece accompanying the “Description of a Hydraulic Machine” for *The New-York Magazine, or Literary Repository* (December 1797). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

These gaps in what is evidently a thoroughly researched work are likely a consequence of an author working across disciplines. For cultural sociologists, Haveman’s historical recounting of American economy and society may prove fresh and informative. Moreover for historians, Haveman’s forty-one graphs and twenty-seven tables, together with her carefully explained methods of data collection and analysis—laid out in two appendices—can seem like overkill in this post-quantitative era of historical scholarship. Inasmuch as Haveman is seeking to establish objectively verifiable generalizations about when, where, and how magazines succeeded and failed, the data and her methods are crucial for sociologists. For historians who may be skeptical of the accuracy and reliability of nineteenth-century circulation data, the methodological explanation may be less important.

Whenever a scholar in one discipline crosses disciplinary boundaries, s/he risks running afoul of the expectations of some parts of the audience. As the preceding comments demonstrate, Haveman, as a sociologist, has here encountered an “outsider” critique. But historians as well as sociologists should admire and learn from Magazines and the Making of America. It provides the most sophisticated analysis of magazine founding that exists thus far, and it offers an interpretation of the cultural importance of magazines that warrants serious consideration. Moreover Haveman’s attention to the formation of translocal communities as a key part of the modernization process warms the heart of this critic, who long ago made that argument in Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (1976). Inasmuch as Haveman quotes that old work, this reviewer, flattered, might be said to tilt in the author’s favor.

Title page, *The New-York Magazine or Literary Repository*, with “Description of a Hydraulic Machine” (December 1797). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3.5 (July, 2016).

Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History emeritus, at University of Connecticut, is the author of Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (1989) and The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 (1996). His Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Rejuvenating the Revolution? Roundtable on Turn: Washington’s Spies

Further Reading:

A Loyalist Guarded, Re-guarded, and Disregarded The Two Trials of Mather Byles the Elder

Father and Son under Siege: Boston, 1775-1776

Henry Knox, of all people!

The first “trial” of Mather Byles the Elder

The State follows the Church: The second trial

Meanwhile, in Halifax

Appendix: The list of twenty-nine names of Loyalists deemed dangerous to the state in 1777.

Further Reading

Loyalist Diaspora

Was Dr. Benjamin Church a Traitor?

H. J. Lewis, Free man and Freeman artist

Further Reading:

Indigenous and Black Geographies in Letters to the Editor

The Emancipation of Boyhood

Further Reading

Copernicus at the Newsstand

Pressing Matters: An experiential study of the Isaiah Thomas printing press at the American Antiquarian Society

Further Reading

The Rise of American Magazines