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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acknowledgements

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

Object Lessons is sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation.

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Painting for Export

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

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

 

 

Copies and Counterfeits

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

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

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

 

Complicating the Copy

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

 

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

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

 

Beyond the Copy: Reversals and Inversions

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

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

 

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

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

 

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Picturing Chinese labor and industrial velocity in the Gilded Age

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading: 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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A young nation looks to the Pacific

With their Revolution completed, their constitution written, their nation officially (if shakily) established, the self-styled “Americans” faced the world in a fundamentally altered posture. Throughout the preceding two centuries, they had been colonists, and thus, in a broad sense, dependents. They had absorbed from elsewhere regular infusions of migrants and goods, of cultural nourishment and guidance.

But henceforth the currents would flow, also, in reverse direction. The new United States would increasingly—sometimes aggressively—turn out toward other groups and places. It would proudly proclaim its republican credo as a “beacon of freedom” for political reformers around the world. It would proffer its “go-ahead” spirit as the key to social development. It would urge its highly charged version of Protestant Christianity on all sorts of “heathen” unbelievers. Moreover, its people would rapidly multiply their physical contacts with the rest of humankind. Especially after about 1800, their travel and commerce would extend, quite literally, to the farthest corners of the earth.

The acme—the epitome—of this remarkable outreach was the so-called China trade. To be sure, Americans were followers, not pioneers, here. Britons, Russians, and Spaniards (among others) had preceded them along the route to Cathay since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Portuguese had claimed the island of Macao (just south of Canton) in 1557. And occasional Europeans had been voyaging that way—singly or in small groups—from far back in the Middle Ages. The American colonists, meanwhile, had been expressly forbidden by their imperial masters from joining in most forms of international exchange.

Yet once independence was achieved, American traders hastened to assert their own claims to what they called the Far East. And, after little more than a generation, they had gained for themselves a leading role. From Boston and Salem, Massachusetts; from Newport and Providence, in Rhode Island; from New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore, further south, the ships poured out—by the dozens, and then by the hundreds, each year. Canton was their chief, but far from their only, destination. For the China trade was just one piece of a still larger “East India” (Asian) connection. Calcutta, Madras, Sumatra, Batavia, Port Jackson, Manila: these places, too, figured heavily in the traders’ itinerary. The eventual outcome would include some astonishing individual fortunes, and a burst of capital formation to fuel the first phase of American industrial development.

Even within itself, the China trade was a complex, multisided, many-splendored thing . . .

 

It was a clutch of prosperous merchants gathered on summer afternoons in a massive, glass-domed structure called the Boston Exchange Coffee House, dressed in ruffled nankeen shirts, seated at finely turned mahogany-and-bamboo tables, sipping tea from china cups, exchanging choice bits of financial gossip, and looking out across the nearby harbor for the return of long-departed ships. (Some voyages lasted for as many as four years.)

It was twenty-odd Yankee farm-boys turned “tars,” the crew of a trim, three-masted schooner, becalmed in the midst of a glassy tropical sea, mending ropes and sails and nets, whittling scrimshaw figurines, catching sea turtles, counting the spouts of a passing whale, cursing the endless, windless horizon, and dreaming all the while of the “shares” they would one day carry home to stake a claim in their native countryside. (Most sailors in the China trade would make just a single voyage, and then return to work the land.)

It was a gang of sea-hardened hunters, young men bent on adventure, accepting of danger, set ashore for months at a stretch on a rock-rimmed beach along the outermost of the West Falkland Islands, deep in the lower Atlantic, methodically clubbing to death hundreds of bellowing fur seals, whose skins would then be scraped and dried on nearby pegging grounds prior to stowage en masse for shipment to the Orient. (Fur seals were taken from islands and atolls across a broad arc girdling the entire southern quadrant of the globe, including large sections of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Within a scant few decades, the hunt had rendered them nearly extinct, nearly everywhere.)

It was another group of Yankees, but this one a resident colony, and numbering in the hundreds, living as “alone men” on the Spanish-owned isle of Mas Afuera off the west coast of South America; huddled in dank wooden huts, with scruffy little vegetable plots set alongside; struggling against ceaseless storms, insects, and disease; drinking, gambling, fighting; and gathering their own stash of skins for the arrival of the next season’s trade fleet. (Mas Afuera was a seal-hunter’s El Dorado. It is estimated that three million skins were taken from this one little site before a Spanish naval squadron evicted the hunters, and burned their settlements, in 1805.)

It was yet another group, with another trading target, in another place: Fiji, far out in the south Pacific, where a transient population of foreign “beachcombers” mingled with native Islanders, in love and war and occasional rites of cannibalism, all to the end of securing the highly aromatic bundles of sandalwood that would later fetch huge sums on the Canton market. (The Chinese turned sandalwood into a fine powder which, for centuries, they had used as incense in elaborate religious and funerary ceremonies.)

 

It was a wholesale assault on another ocean fur bearer, the charming, hapless sea otter, in the waters off the coast of present-day Alaska. And thus, too, it was a meeting-ground for white and native North Americans, the latter including Tlingit and Haida, Salish and Tsimshian, Nootka and Chinook, with their powerful warrior traditions; their water skills; their swift dugout canoes; their totem pole-fronted, stilt-raised villages; their potlatch and other complex cultural practices, all achieved within a productive system that did not (and could not) include agriculture. (The Northwest Coast would quickly become a vast adjunct to the China trade. Sea otter pelts, informally dubbed “soft gold,” were especially prized by merchants from the cold climes of north China; a fully loaded trade ship might thus expect triple, quadruple, or even better, returns on its investment.)

It was also, of course, Canton itself, the only Chinese port-of-entry open to foreigners. Here, at its eastern terminus, the trade was subject to elaborate regulation and protocol: gift exchanges; the engagement of pilots, interpreters, provisioners, and stevedores; the payment of taxes, duties, and outright bribes; the inspection and rating of all imported products (sea otters, for example, were divided into ten carefully delineated categories). There were dangers to avoid, ranging from Malayan pirates lurking outside the port entrance, to the sudden onset of Pacific typhoons, to local sharpers who packed shipping chests with wood chips or paper instead of tea and silks, to overindulgence in samshew, a potent Chinese whiskey. There were restrictions to obey, especially those that confined all fan kwae (foreign devils) to a narrow waterfront warren of streets and alleys set apart from the city proper. There was an intricate commercial system to master, with hoppos (customs superintendents) and cohong merchants (those formally licensed by the emperor), coolies (day laborers) and chinchew men (local shopkeepers), chops (official seals and marks) and hongs (warehouses). Finally, there were goods to buy and carry home—the point of it all—starting always with tea and silks, but also including nankeens (hand-loomed cotton fabrics), crepes, and grasscloth; porcelain tableware (china) of every conceivable description; lacquered furniture; elegant oil, watercolor, and reverse-glass paintings (portraits, landscapes, garden scenes); carvings in ivory, jade, and soapstone (chess sets, for example); sewing and snuff boxes in mother-of-pearl; silver flatware sets that mimicked Western styles; brightly painted hand-held fans of both screen and folding varieties (exported literally by the thousands, and considered de rigeur for genteel American ladies throughout the nineteenth century); elaborately filigreed tortoise-shell combs (also by the thousands, also wildly fashionable); umbrellas, window-shades, straw mats, wallpapers, feather dusters, horn apothecary spoons, and numerous other bits and pieces too humble to have been noticed in the surviving records. In short: a kaleidoscope of (what came to be known as) chinoiserie, on a scale bewildering to comprehend. (Virtually every middling household, in or near American cities of the period, would have had at least a few China-made objects. And in those with direct connections to the trade the total might easily rise into the hundreds. Moreover, tea was a beverage of choice for people of all classes.)

 

It was, even beyond the terminus, the various people who made these things in towns and villages stretched far across the interior of the Chinese mainland. Tea farmers in the eastern provinces above Canton who harvested the remarkably bountiful shrub three times a year, in dozens of varieties and grades. (Americans preferred green tea, especially the so-called Young Hyson, which came principally from Kiangsi and Chekiang). Also, merchants who brought the tea to market, mostly on rivers and streams in small, shallow-hulled junks. Also, silk-growers in the lower Yangtzee Valley who tended both the precious fiber-producing caterpillars (bombyx mori, the silkworm) and the equally essential caterpillar-sustaining mulberry trees. Also, painters, carvers, carpenters, silversmiths, porcelain workers, and other anonymous craftspeople whose handiwork would grace the homes—and lives—of strangers half a world away.

It was, perhaps most extravagantly, Hawaii. Set roughly in the middle of this entire web, and known then as the Sandwich Islands, the Hawaiian archipelago served as crossroads, as refitting and provisioning stop, as vacation spot, as pleasure garden, as commercial entrepôt, as hiring station, as escape hatch, and (beginning about 1820) as missionary target par excellence. Ships arrived from several directions—Sitka Bay, the coastal towns of Peru and Chile, other parts of Polynesia—reflecting the different segments of the China trade. Most stayed for intervals of from two weeks to two months before proceeding on across the Pacific. Officers, crew, and supercargoes alike described the islands in paradisiacal terms—”designed by Providence,” wrote an admiring visitor, “to become . . . a place for the rest and recreation of sailors, after their long and perilous navigations.” All praised “the genial climate, the luxurious abundance, and the gratifying pleasures” to be found there. All enjoyed the remarkable variety of fresh food and drink, especially pork (from the hogs that ran more or less wild onshore), fowl of several types, tropical fruits and vegetables (such as breadfruit and taro), and coconut (with its delicious milky contents). Most partook of the freely flowing liquor (in the form of locally distilled rum and gin). And—perhaps inevitably after the long months at sea—many sought the company of lissome wahines, native women described as wonderfully “complaisant” and “amorous.” (By one account, similar to many others, “[T]hey would almost use violence to force you into their embrace.” But, in fact, much of this activity was simple prostitution.)

It was, finally, a host of impressions—thoughts, feelings, wishes—that grew, and spread, and palpitated, in the hearts and heads of the innumerable throng whose lives it touched. Widened eyes, expanded horizons, a lifted gaze, a new sense of possibility and potency: thus its impact across the length and breadth of what was then called Young America. 

For the China trade was indeed a key part of our national youth. “China,” wrote a pioneer sea captain who had seen for himself, “is the first for greatness, richness, and grandeur of any country ever known.” Might America grow someday to become the same?

Further Reading:

On various aspects of this topic, see Ernest R. May and John K. Fairbank, America’s China Trade in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); James Kirker, Adventures to China: Americans in the Southern Oceans, 1792-1812 (New York, 1970); and James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods (Montreal, 1992). For an overview, with emphasis on the material side including many forms of chinoiserie, see Carl Crossman, The China Trade (Princeton, 1972). 

 

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

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John Demos, professor of history at Yale University, is the author most recently of Circles And Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). This article is adapted from a book he is currently writing on nineteenth-century missionary work, to be entitled The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic.

If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition. (De Toqueville, Democracy in America, Book II, 1840)

 

In the weeks leading up to the pivotal presidential election of 1864, 140 abolitionists from seventeen states, including numerous slave states, met in the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Syracuse, N.Y., to discuss what one delegate called the end of the “long dark night of sorrow” and the “morning’s dawn” of a new meaning of freedom in America. Many of the speeches delivered over the course of four days in Syracuse focused on questions of “equal opportunities and equal rights.” We have “been subdued, not by the power of ideas, but by brute force, and have been unjustly deprived not only of many of our natural rights, but debarred the privileges and advantages freely accorded to other men,” read a portion of the declaration of wrongs and rights, a “strong document” according to the Liberator, “drawn with point and terseness.” Delegates demanded, among other things, the right of suffrage, equal access to education, equal pay for black soldiers, the ability to serve on juries and the immediate end of slavery. Referencing the profound service of black troops in the Union war effort, one delegate maintained that “Wagner, Hudson, Petersburg, and all the other battles of this war, have not been fought in vain.” For Frederick Douglass, the most famous abolitionist in America and the president of the convention, the delegates were gathered “to promote the freedom, progress, elevation, and perfect enfranchisement, of the entire colored people of the United States.” As historian David Cecelski has noted, the declaration made at Syracuse was the “philosophical underpinning for the black freedom struggle.”

For years, I have framed my classroom discussion of Reconstruction by guiding students through a transcript of a meeting of black religious leaders with Union General William T. Sherman in Savannah, Ga. It is in many ways a remarkable document, detailing responses to large and momentous questions: What did the Emancipation Proclamation mean? How could the government assist freedmen? What did freedom even mean? For the black minister Garrison Frazier, freedom entailed “taking” slaves from the “yoke of bondage” and placing them where they “could reap the fruit” of their “own labor.”

Recently, however, an invitation to write a piece on Reconstruction for the New York Times digital series on the Civil War era forced me to rethink my reliance on the Savannah meeting as a complete framework for the unit. I realized that in order to help my students fully understand how black abolitionists in the North thought about the meaning of the Civil War, I needed to engage some issues that were not raised in Savannah and to explore how other black leaders defined freedom. The deliberations at the Syracuse Convention gave the class a wider window into the civil rights movement in the nineteenth century. An ongoing digital history project at the University of Delaware on nineteenth-century black conventions provided easy access to a complete transcript, along with dozens of other black conventions.

 

My students enjoyed the experience of researching the lives of the Syracuse delegates on blackpast.org. Though the vast majority of delegates were male, Edmonia Highgate and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper also played roles at the convention, though unfortunately the texts of their remarks have not survived. Among those in attendance at Syracuse were Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, John Sella Martin, James W. C. Pennington, Abraham Galloway, and Jermain Loguen, all of whom had escaped from the upper South and later became active conductors on the underground railroad. Brown, Pennington, Douglass, and Loguen all wrote best-selling narratives, detailing their time in bondage and their escape to freedom. In addition to helping fugitive slaves, these men were at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Before the Civil War, Pennington helped to found the Legal Rights League in New York to battle racial segregation. Douglass and Brown, along with New York delegate Henry Highland Garnet, Rhode Island delegate George T. Downing, and Ohio delegate John Mercer Langston, participated in efforts to recruit black soldiers for the Union Army. In his speech at the convention, Garnet referenced the 1863 draft riots in New York City and the “demoniac” anti-black violence that gripped the city over service in the military. My students were able to research this large urban riot on blackpast.org, along with the activities of various benevolent organizations mentioned at the convention, including the African Civilization Society and the National Freedmen’s Relief Association.

A convention speech by John Mercer Langston afforded me the opportunity to introduce the class to U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates’s November 1862 ruling on citizenship. At Syracuse, Langston, a trained attorney, highlighted the equality principles of Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration and then summarized Bates’s ruling for the audience. Bates dismantled Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857). The Constitution, declared Bates, said not “one word, and furnishes not one hint, in relation to the color or to the ancestral race” of citizens. Every person born free on American soil was, according to Bates, “at the moment of birth, prima facie a citizen” of the United States. Langston’s speech allowed me to revisit the story of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation using some of historian James Oakes’s scholarship. Bates’s opinion meant that freed slaves were indeed “free persons” as understood by the Constitution and, most importantly, they were to be afforded the privileges and immunities of citizenship.

 

The fruits of decades of black activism can be seen in Bates’s groundbreaking decision. For example, in 1842, black activists, along with their white allies in the Whig party, led a successful effort to strike the word “white” from the Rhode Island constitution. Throughout the pre-Civil War era, African Americans led drives to desegregate schools, to end segregated travel on street cars in major cities, and to gain access to public accommodations. As historian James M. McPherson noted long ago, northern freedom fighters “could not hope to revolutionize the southern social order without first improving the status of Northern” blacks. George Downing, president of the 1859 New England Regional Convention, and fellow Rhode Islander James Jefferson, were major contributors to the Syracuse Convention and worked tirelessly to end segregation in public schools. As historian Kyle Volk has recently documented in a path-breaking book, black-led organizations sought to break the color barrier through petitioning campaigns, lobbying efforts and legal battles in the 1840s, ’50s, ’60s. My students are often surprised to learn that the civil rights activism that they associate with the NAACP in the twentieth century was part of the pre-Civil War era.

On discussion boards, my students explored the powerful “Declaration of Wrongs and Rights” produced at the end of the Syracuse Convention. They noticed its structural similarities to the Declaration of Independence and compared it to abolitionist texts we had already studied, such as Angelina Grimké’s 1836 “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, and Douglass’s famous 1846 letter to Garrison, which was immortalized by Ken Burns in his film on the Civil War. “When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing,” wrote Douglass to Garrison.

 

Another thread in the students’ discussion focused on their observation that the debate in Syracuse was not simply an abstract, intellectual exercise on the meaning of citizenship, but a powerful conversation about American slavery, a “loathing” of a system that had destroyed the lives of millions of black Americans since the founding of the nation. Many of the delegates had been born into slavery in the South and it was their experiences that informed the construction of the declarations of “wrongs.” The text of the fourth “wrong” provided a wonderful opportunity for students to revisit what Douglass labeled the “dark night” of American slavery, a large topic in the fall term:

 

As a people, we have been denied the ownership of our bodies, our wives, homes, children, and the products of our own labor; we have been compelled, under pain of death, to submit to wrongs deeper and darker than the earth ever witnessed in the case of any other people; we have been forced into silence and inaction in full presence of the infernal spectacle of our sons groaning under the lash, our daughters ravished, our wives violated, and our firesides desolated, while we ourselves have been led to the shambles and sold like beasts of the field.

 

The subsequent statement of “rights,” which opened with a reference to all men being born “free and equal,” contained four sections. The delegates chastised all attempts to colonize them outside of the U.S. and demanded that land taken from rebel slaveholders be redistributed to slaves. Finally, the delegates desired to see the “immunities and privileges” of citizenship afforded to them.

 

At the end of the convention, Frederick Douglass was asked to draft an address to the nation that would reach a wider audience. Douglass drew from many of the themes he had put forth in his widely circulated wartime speeches, especially his December 1863 address to the American Anti-Slavery Society. In this jeremiad, “Our Work Is Not Done,” Douglass maintained that “mightier work than the abolition of slavery now looms” before the country. A true “abolition peace,” according to Douglass, had to include emancipation and civil and political equality for black Americans. Douglass declared in October 1864 that he was committed to the “right path”—emancipation and civil rights. Douglass understood that the “Slave Power” had yet to be completely vanquished, but he also feared the “shadow of slavery,” a reference to northern racism, which he believed was embodied in the ranks of the Republican party. “We may survive the arrows of the known negro-haters of our country,” wrote Douglass, “but woe to the colored race when the champions fail to demand, for any reason, equal liberty in every respect.”

Douglass had been fiercely critical of President Abraham Lincoln for months and in his speech in Syracuse he made it clear that though Union victory seemed near, there were still no firm guarantees about what a reconstructed union would look like. Douglass issued a stark warning to the Republicans: “make sure of the friendship of the slaves; for, depend upon it, your Government cannot afford to encounter the enmity of both.” In the end, Douglass maintained that the “change” in the conception of freedom that had been ushered in by the progress of the war and the Emancipation Proclamation was “great and increasing.” Douglass hoped to merge the cause of black equality with national renewal.          

After the Syracuse Convention, the newly created National Equal Rights League (NERL) took up the fight “to obtain by appeals to the minds and conscience of the American people, or by legal process when possible, a recognition of the rights of the colored people of the nation as American citizens.” Under Langston’s leadership, the NERL, which was headquartered in Philadelphia, began to oversee local branches across the North and in parts of the South that were under federal military control. The Pennsylvania Equal Rights League, perhaps the most well-known of the auxiliary organizations and well-documented by historian Hugh Davis, published a constitution in early 1865. The convention in Harrisburg, Pa., adopted a bold resolution: “As the nation has cast off slavery, let them destroy restrictions which prevent colored people from entries to libraries, colleges, lecture rooms, military academies, jury boxes, churches, theatres, street cars and from voting.” In May 1865, Octavius Catto, a delegate to the Syracuse convention and active member of the NERL, initiated a sit-in to desegregate streetcars in Philadelphia. After a driver unhitched the car that Catto had boarded in an attempt to prevent the black activist from riding, Catto simply sat down and stayed in the car until the next morning when he was joined by other black passengers who desired to be taken to work. In 1871, Catto was gunned down in broad daylight as he attempted to take part in an election. The white shooter was acquitted on all charges.   

Four years after Catto’s murder, the prominent Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner helped to orchestrate the passage of a far-reaching civil rights bill that built on the agenda of the NERL. American citizens, the 1875 Civil Rights Act declared, were entitled “to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement.” During the lengthy debate on Sumner’s bill, a contentious battle was waged in Congress over whether or not the federal government had the power to prevent acts of discrimination committed by private businesses and individuals. In order to trigger the Fourteenth Amendment, there had to be some type of state action. Was private discrimination by a theater owner, for example, permissible? Syracuse delegate George Downing certainly did not think so. “If an inn” has its “right to exist by virtue of state authority” and is “regulated by it,” he argued, it “may be said that the state does the discriminating.”

The U.S. Supreme Court did not follow Downing’s line of reasoning. In 1883, the justices declared the 1875 statute unconstitutional. The justices viewed privately owned theaters and restaurants as outside of the bounds of state action. Discrimination by owners simply constituted private wrongs that the national government was powerless to correct. In his final autobiography, Frederick Douglass maintained that “future historians will turn to the year 1883 to find the most flagrant example” of “national deterioration.” Though Sumner’s bill was ultimately nullified by a court and indeed by an indifferent nation, the spirit of the law lived on. It was up to modern civil rights leaders and activists to carry on the work that had come out of the Syracuse Convention. The steadfast efforts of the NAACP, the successor organization to the NERL, eventually led to the passage of a civil rights bill that the nation could not ignore.

The author dedicates this article to his students at the Lawrenceville School.  

 

Further Reading:

Thanks to editor Darcy Fryer, this is the third essay I have been able to write on the meaning of freedom in the Civil War era for Common-place (Part I & Part II). In preparing to write the end of the trilogy, I re-read historian James M. McPherson’s invaluable 1964 work, The Struggle for Equality, along with his 1965 book, The Negro’s Civil War. The Genius of Freedom website sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia is a wonderful classroom teaching tool. I benefited from reading Kyle G. Volk’s Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford, 2014). Hugh Davis’s ‘We Will be Satisfied with Nothing Less’: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North During Reconstruction (Ithaca, 2011) and Douglas R. Egerton’s The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York, 2014) helped in understanding northern civil rights activism in the Civil War era. Egerton’s Lincoln Prize-winning Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (New York, 2016) provided valuable insight into the ways in which black military service was connected to civil rights activism, a topic addressed by Massachusetts lawyer John Rock at the Syracuse Convention. James Oakes’s groundbreaking work, Freedom National: The Destruction of American Slavery, 1861-1865 (New York, 2013), provided insight into the significance of Attorney General Bates’s ruling on the citizenship question. For information on Jermain Loguen see Milton Sernet’s North Star Country (New York, 2001). David Cecelski’s The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2012) is a thoroughly engaging study and provides an excellent overview of the Syracuse Convention. Cecelski’s highly readable book would work well in any undergraduate or advanced high school class. Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin’s Tasting Freedom (Philadelphia, 2010) is a detailed biography of Octavius Catto. In September 2017 the city of Philadelphia finally erected a statue to commemorate Catto’s career. All students of Frederick Douglass anxiously await the publication of David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: An American Prophet (New York, 2018).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

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Erik J. Chaput, PhD, teaches American history at the Lawrenceville School, an independent boarding school in New Jersey, and in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College. He is the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (2013).