The dissonance was palpable. I sat in the reading room of the American Antiquarian Society, looking up at a large portrait of Stephen Salisbury III (1835-1905). The portrait captures Salisbury in his middle years; the mood is somber and Salisbury projects a gravitas appropriate for a member of the nineteenth-century elite of Worcester, Massachusetts, and for one of the chief benefactors of the institution in which his portrait hangs. I was reading through Salisbury’s account books and had started with one he began in 1849, when he was thirteen years old. It was hard to reconcile the stern middle-aged man in the portrait with the boy whose childish scrawl recorded purchasing candy, seed for his pet canary, marbles, a shuttlecock, and valentines. The valentines would provide a key insight into Salisbury’s values, but I did not realize that when I first saw them listed in the account books.

I was at the American Antiquarian Society in the fall of 2009 on a long-term fellowship, doing research for my current project, an examination of how consumer activities and family relationships shaped one another in the nineteenth century. I am interested in how family members negotiated appropriate levels of consumer spending and in the meanings they attached to their consumer activities. Did increased opportunities to purchase goods challenge traditional household decision-making patterns? Did all family members share similar ideas regarding proper levels of consumer spending? How did family members determine which goods were appropriate to purchase and what prices were acceptable to pay? In what ways was consumer spending a cooperative venture within families? In what ways did it cause conflict between family members? To answer these questions I have turned to collections of family papers which contain account books, diaries, and correspondence created by multiple family members. The voluminous Salisbury family papers at the Antiquarian Society fit the bill precisely.

 

 A couple of years ago, I spent a semester-in-residence as a predoctoral fellow at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, conducting dissertation research. My dissertation examines how representations of the female body helped to shape period constructions of femininity in late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America. With its rich and varied resources, Winterthur served as an ideal place to investigate my topic. Formerly the country estate of the DuPont industrialist family and located outside of Wilmington, Delaware, Winterthur today is a world-renowned institution devoted to the exhibition, study, and preservation of early American decorative arts. Its museum collections include over 85,000 objects made and used in America between 1640 and 1860. These holdings encompass an amazing breadth of media, forms, and styles, and range from the exceptional to the everyday. In one of over 175 period rooms fitted into the original family mansion and in latter-day galleries, the visitor can encounter neoclassical architectural elements, Chippendale furniture, Pennsylvania German Fraktur documents, Chinese export porcelain, Benjamin West paintings, Paul Revere silver tankards, and much, much more. Complementing this unsurpassed artifactual repository is Winterthur’s library, which has over a half a million books, periodicals, manuscripts, and other printed ephemera: primary and secondary sources pertaining to myriad aspects of American cultural life from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries.

Over the course of my residency at Winterthur, I found a treasure trove of materials related to my dissertation topic. There were almost daily discoveries of images of or information about the female body in the museum and library collections. Winterthur has an arsenal of searching tools to help the researcher cull through its vast holdings: computerized databases, published collections guides, and old-fashioned card catalogs, as well as knowledgeable staff. With these aides, I conducted a series of searches using subject terms, thematic categories, and iconographic classifications that seemed likely to identify items dealing with women’s bodies. For instance, I looked for art treatises (for aesthetic ideals about the nude figure); medical guides (for materials on obstetrics and gynecology); and allegorical works (for depictions of female personifications). Given the nature of my topic–female flesh and corporeality–another logical line of inquiry was for sexual and pornographic images. The search for early American erotica proved to be one of the more difficult ones, full of many trials and the occasional triumph (or titillation!). In this article, I recount my discovery of three pornographic objects lurking in Winterthur’s exhibits, bookshelves, and storage vaults. In addition to providing a glimpse “into the bedrooms” of the past, these artifacts also function as instructive case studies for some of the challenges facing the modern researcher. Such challenges are by no means unique to Winterthur; but rather, stem from wider historical phenomena, museum practices, and moral and aesthetic biases–all of which have affected the study of erotic materials.

But before I turn to my particular tale, a few remarks about nomenclature. In this article, the terms “erotica” and “pornography” denote artifacts that contain the explicit representation of sexual organs and activities, and that were intended to incite desire or transgress period standards of decorum. I use these terms interchangeably, although some scholars differentiate them on the basis that erotica has redeeming aesthetic merit, whereas pornography is purely for titillation. Such semantic distinctions seem inherently flawed since both beauty and desirability are in the eyes of the beholder; that is, they involve subjective value judgments. Erotic standards are also historically contingent: what would have raised eyebrows in the eighteenth century often seems laughably tame, even quaint to the modern viewer. In addition, I employ “pornography” anachronistically: the word did not enter the English language until the 1850s. Prior to this time, sexual imagery was described with a variety of terms, including “ribald,” “obscene,” “licentious,” “bawdy,” “lewd,” and “unchaste.”

 

My first and easiest discovery came from Winterthur’s library. It is a book entitled Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis (Amours as observed in ancient gems) that I found cataloged under “erotic literature.” A luxury item produced in Europe in the 1770s, Veneres depicts classical carved gemstones in over sixty hand-colored plates, with brief captions in French. Many of the pictures contain graphic scenes of fertility rituals and sexual acts. In one plate, Venus, a satyr, and others make offerings to a statue of Priapus, the Roman god of generation who appears with his characteristically large and erect phallus (fig. 1a). Perhaps the kinkiest image shows two women playing with a wheel of dildos (fig. 1b)!

Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis typifies much of the extant pornography from eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America. In general, pictorial erotica was imported clandestinely from Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the audience for pornography was small and elite: gentlemen wealthy enough to afford such expensive items and erudite enough to have knowledge of Latin, French, and classical antiquities. (Not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century did erotica become mass-produced and widely available, with the help of new commercial printing and photographic technologies.) As is often the case with obscene materials from this earlier period, both the author and publisher of Veneres are not explicitly identified–an omission intended to protect them against social reproach. Nevertheless, the text is now attributed to Pierre-François-Hugues d’Hancarville (1719-1805), a French connoisseur who traveled around Europe cataloging the art collections of affluent patrons. It remains unknown, however, if the plates represent actual ancient artifacts. Scholars suspect that these illustrations are fabrications–pornography passed off with a wink and a nudge as an art historical study.

Veneres highlights some of the key difficulties facing the researcher of early American erotica: namely, the limited availability of such materials and the absence of historical documentation. What is arguably more surprising than the contents of d’Hancarville’s book is its continued existence given that very little pornography survives from colonial and early national America. This dearth of artifacts results from several causes above and beyond the vicissitudes of time. Prevailing notions of moral propriety led to the censure and censorship of materials with sexual themes. Just as d’Hancarville and his publisher tried to maintain anonymity, owners were reluctant to admit possession of such taboo items. Their descendents, too, have hidden and sometimes even destroyed potentially scandalous objects. Fortunately, Veneres survives, yet comes to us without a history, without a trace of the specific circumstances surrounding its creation, consumption, and reception. (Likewise, there is no documentation for the other pornographic objects in Winterthur’s collections.) Of course, any kind of historical research has its evidentiary gaps, but they are especially wide in the field of erotica. Such lacunae limit the scope of our understanding of these materials and the people who used them.

 

The next erotic object I discovered at Winterthur is a work of “homegrown” folk art: a kind of interactive peepshow now known by its modern title Gentlemen’s Amusement. Produced by an unknown craftsman in the first half of the nineteenth century, this extraordinary assemblage consists of a small rectangular cabinet containing the carved wooden figure of a Native American woman who holds the U.S. coat of arms. Two wooden soldiers in full military regalia flank the cabinet as if standing guard (fig. 2a). When Gentlemen’s Amusement is in the closed position, the woman’s face and the national crest are visible through windows in the cabinet door. When the door is opened and a hidden lever is shifted, the crest gets pulled aside exposing the fully naked body of the native female (fig. 2b). This pornographic toy was probably used by an all-male audience in a tavern, fraternal club, or some other place where men congregated.

For the modern researcher of American erotica, Gentlemen’s Amusement provides an interesting history lesson in the institutional treatment of pornographic collections. In several key ways, this peepshow structurally reproduces the “secret museum” or “private case” tradition in which curators kept obscene materials hidden, locked up, or otherwise restricted–just as Gentlemen’s Amusement places the naked woman in a cabinet under guard. This tradition began in the mid-eighteenth century, when the Museo Borbonico (today the National Museum of Naples) secretly stashed any pornographic artifacts excavated from Pompeii in locked vaults. In the following century, the British Museum in London and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, among other institutions, established their own versions of the private case. Such curatorial practices were intended to safeguard public morality, but gentlemen with enough clout and cash could still gain admission. Although Winterthur, opened in 1951, does not actually have a private case, the museum still in effect keeps certain indecent materials hidden from view. Gentlemen’s Amusement, for example, is displayed in the closed position and in a cluttered odds-and-ends room, off the beaten path of the more popular tour routes. (In order to see the full operation of the peepshow, one has to make a special appointment.) It is certainly understandable that Winterthur would want to avoid potentially offending a visitor, but such precautions pose a conundrum for the serious researcher: if one does not know about the existence of pornographic artifacts, how does one find them?

Sometimes, it is a matter of sheer luck, as in the case of my third “discovery”: a piece of mid-eighteenth-century Chinese export porcelain in the form of a tea saucer (fig. 3a). Produced in China for the Western market, porcelain items were imported in vast quantities by wealthy Americans throughout this period. Winterthur owns hundreds of such wares; but this one has an unusual feature. The top side of the saucer depicts a conventional and innocuous scene of a hunter and his dog set in a landscape. But on the bottom–a space usually left unembellished except for the maker’s mark–appears the image of a seated peasant woman who bares a breast and lifts up her skirts to reveal her underside (fig. 3b). A large leaf placed strategically over her genitalia mitigates the lewdness of her gestures. Like Gentlemen’s Amusement, this object plays with hidden pornographic contents and the owner’s privileged knowledge of their existence. Yet, in contrast to the peepshow, the saucer would have been used in polite, mixed company during the genteel social ritual of tea drinking. Part of its erotic charge would have come from the risk of exposing the ribald picture to the wrong–that is, an unappreciative–guest.

 

Despite my best efforts to be a thorough researcher, I did not find this saucer using any of the normal searching methods. In fact, I probably walked by it dozens of times in the museum where it hung with the top-side, hunter image facing out in a china cabinet, never suspecting it had a dirty underbelly. Nor did my virtual wanderings through Winterthur’s collections database lead me to identify the saucer as relevant to my project. Instead, I happened upon a reproduction of it in a book about porcelain while researching an unrelated topic. My failure to discover this object using the collections catalog underscores one of the chief problems in researching erotica: namely, the absence of a standardized classification system. In my database queries for pornographic imagery, I tried specific, sex-related terms including pornography, erotic, obscene, sex, and breast; as well as more generic descriptive words such as nude, naked, bare, and body. The results were inconsistent: none of these search terms yielded the saucer; “nude” flagged Gentlemen’s Amusement; and “pornography” got no hits.

Several interrelated, historical and museological factors have contributed to the lack of a uniform taxonomy for pictorial erotica. First of all, there is no consensus about precisely what makes a picture obscene. As former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously admitted in a 1964 opinion, he could not define pornography, adding, “[P]erhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it,” Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 198. Moreover, images often slip between pornography and art–as we saw with d’Hancarville’s Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiques, which used classicizing iconography to cloak obscene pictures with an art historical respectability. From the perspective of museum curators, librarians, and other collections managers, there has not necessarily been a great demand to establish standardized typologies for erotica. As previously mentioned, there is a limited quantity of available artifacts due to low survival rates and persistent reticence about ownership. In addition, the sheer number of all kinds of things in Winterthur’s collections–coupled with its unparalleled strength in decorative arts–naturally focuses curatorial resources on works and themes deemed most significant to its educational mission. Relative to the rest of the holdings, erotica is marginal both in terms of quantity and importance; hence, it has not received special treatment in the cataloging process.

Speaking of cataloging, art museums do not have an industry-wide standard for classifying objects: there is no equivalent to the Library of Congress subject-headings index which most libraries (including Winterthur’s) use for books and other printed materials. According to curatorial conventions, decorative arts have been classified primarily by medium and form (e.g., porcelain and tea saucer), not by subject matter or iconography. Winterthur’s collections database does include a searchable field with a description of the item, but this field contains text in prose, rather than standardized terminology. In the case of the pornographic tea saucer, the underside image is described only as “a seated woman lifting her skirt, wearing rose and blue.” Another reason museums do not use taxonomic standards for erotica stems from the traditional art historical devaluation of such works. Scholars have tended to regard obscene images dismissively–as amusing, yet trivial curiosities from the past, not potential historical documents. Only in the past couple of decades as the history of human sexuality has developed into a field of academic study, have scholars started to analyze the material culture of sex, including pornography. Even with this recent interest, a comprehensive study of early American pictorial erotica remains to be written.

A final, minor challenge of researching pornography is of a personal rather than structural nature. I must confess that–out of concern of offending someone or of being branded a pervert–I always felt slightly embarrassed whenever I approached a Winterthur staff member for help in finding sexualized imagery. My fears were unfounded: the staff met my requests with equanimity and accommodation . . . and sometimes a little smirk! These experiences at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library typify the kinds of difficulties that would be encountered at any institution with erotica in their collections. Yet despite the challenges–which include lingering moral prudery, limited availability of artifacts, anonymous production and use, institutional practices, and the absence of historical documentation and classificatory standards–the hunt for pornographic artifacts can be well worth the effort, not only for the “thrill” of the find, but also for the revealing glimpses they give us into the material lives and sexual culture of early Americans.

 

Further Reading:

Winterthur’s Website, which includes an online link to its library catalog (the museum’s collections database is not publicly accessible), is www.winterthur.org. On the cultural history of pornography in Europe and America, see: Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York, 1993); Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture, rev. ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1996); and Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London, 1988). Examples of pictorial erotica from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century can be found in: Cottie Burland, Erotic Antiques or Love is an Antic Thing (London, 1974); and Milton Simpson, Folk Erotica: Celebrating Centuries of Erotic Americana (New York, 1994).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 4.3 (April, 2004).

---

Karen A. Sherry is currently completing her doctoral degree in art history at the University of Delaware and works as a curatorial intern at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Nineteenth-century American brothel guides were the perfect size to be concealed in a gentleman’s pocket. They were about six inches tall and slender, usually containing no more than about forty pages in total. These paperbound booklets were valuable primers for men who wished to learn how to navigate urban underworlds of commercial sex. Brief reviews gave readers a sense of the general cost, quality, and clientele of each house, with an emphasis on houses that catered to white men of the middle, upper, and upwardly aspiring socioeconomic classes. American brothel guides focused primarily on brothels in New York City and Philadelphia, but also provided information about urban brothels across North America, as far north as Chicago and Montreal, as far south as Mobile and New Orleans, and as far west as Little Rock. This broad geographic scope suggests first a national network of informants, and second, that publishers intended these guides to be distributed, read, and used nationwide. Only eight American brothel guides, representing seven unique titles, survive in American archives. Published in New York and Philadelphia between 1839 and 1880, these texts comprise what is arguably the most important set of artifacts commemorating nineteenth-century urban prostitution in the United States.

These booklets reflect the influence of two print genres that were new to nineteenth-century American publishing: city directories and travel guides. Brothel guides’ lists of addresses and names recall city directories, which were published primarily for urban residents and provided the names and addresses of private individuals and local businesses. Brothel guides were also kin to American travel guidebooks for upper-class and upwardly mobile readers, which were first introduced in the 1820s. Ordinary travel guides focused on “fashionable” tours of the American countryside, leisure-time sojourns inspired by the British coming-of-age experience for well-to-do sons, the European “grand tour.” Brothel guides also served a purpose similar to that of urban travel guides, helping visitors find order and avoid unpleasant adventures in chaotic, rapidly growing, demographically heterogeneous cities. The audience for this literature was an emerging “fashionable” class of the educated, prosperous, status-conscious class that would later be known as the American bourgeoisie. A distinctive branch of the growing middle classes, the bourgeoisie was easily identified by its members’ conspicuous displays of wealth in the form of expensive commercial goods and mannered social rituals. Houses, furnishings, clothing, careful self-presentation, and social etiquette all served to signal bourgeois Americans’ prosperity and elite social status.

Reviews ranged from a few words to entire pages. Brothel guides’ covers were made of the same yellow paper that covered pornographic works. Thus, even before reading the title, a savvy man would know from the color of the cover that these pamphlets were full of erotic promise. The actual content of these guides had little in common with pornography, however. In fact, American brothel guides were surprisingly silent about the sexual activities that obviously went on in the bedrooms beyond brothel parlors. Further, the pages of these guides sustain what seems at first to be a peculiar focus on praising houses of prostitution that exemplified middle-class and bourgeois ideals of respectability, gentility, and good, class-conscious social order. For instance, the earliest known American brothel guide, Prostitution Exposed, published in New York City in 1839, declared that Mrs. Williams, at 21 Sullivan Street, ran a “very quiet and a genteel resort.” Similarly, Abby Mead’s house at 134 Duane Street, a fifteen-minute stroll to the southwest was, the guide promised, “decidedly A. No. 1, for respectability.”

 

Like a nineteenth-century Zagat’s for brothels, Prostitution Exposed appended reviews to its list of addresses and names, and later guides followed suit. The seven brothel guide titles that survive in archives today contain a total of 297 reviews, with 213 (72 percent) offering praise that highlights the gentility and respectability of these houses of prostitution and the women who worked in them. Sixty-five of the 213 positive brothel descriptions (about 30 percent of the total) used the terms “quiet,” “orderly,” “private,” “genteel,” and/or “respectable” to describe the merits of various houses. Most other positive reviews made similar, class-based judgments using similar language. They reflected middle-class social values in their promises, for instance, that a house was “free from vulgarity,” possessed a “good reputation,” or treated men with respect and decorum. In 1839, the fine house run by Julia Brown was noted for its unsurpassed “good order,” a direct rebuttal to the judgment implicit in the nineteenth-century legal term for a brothel, a “disorderly house.” As I will discuss shortly, prostitutes and brothel keepers (in first-class houses, exclusively women until at least mid-century) were also praised for their good breeding, “agreeable” temperaments, and well-mannered behavior.

Historians have offered various explanations for the curious emphasis on gentility and respectability in these guides and the absence of explicitly sexual language. The tone and content of American brothel guides, especially when compared with the bawdiness of English ones, led historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle to call them “priggishly American: pragmatic, straightforward, empirical, and objective.” Other historians have regarded this apparent priggishness as a thinly veiled mockery of urban moral reformers and a critique of middle-class men’s hypocrisy. American brothel guides’ constant reassurances about gentility can certainly be read this way, and they may even represent an effort to camouflage the true purpose of these guides. My study offers additional ways of reading this evidence: as authors’ anticipation that their readers were class-conscious men who would be concerned about the dangers involved in brothel-going, about the possibility of social discomfort in these unfamiliar settings, and about whether they could visit brothels without compromising their own sense of themselves as respectable gentlemen.

Both negative and positive assessments of urban brothels helped authors define for readers the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within an imagined community of gentleman brothel-goers. As Philip Howell has suggested, the very act of reading brothel guides helped readers imagine themselves as part of an exclusive brotherhood of men linked by their privileged knowledge of forbidden information. Critiques of brothels that catered to poor and working-class white men or black men of any class provided a further measure by which to demonstrate the superiority of white men who attended the better kind. As yet, no scholar has taken seriously the significance of these guides for providing middle-class and bourgeois men with an entirely new way of thinking about brothels, prostitutes, and even themselves. In American brothel guides’ admiring descriptions of first-class brothels, ladylike prostitutes, and the refined gentlemen who visited them, authors refuted moral reformers’ bleak view of prostitution and men’s role in perpetuating it.

Throughout the nineteenth century, middle-class, evangelical Christian moral-reform activists worked fervently to eradicate prostitution. While such efforts began in the late eighteenth century, moral reform organizations grew at an accelerated pace beginning in the 1830s. As American cities began to grow rapidly in this period, prostitution flourished in tandem. Reformers responded with a variety of strategies: evangelizing, rescuing prostitutes who wanted to get out of the business, and warning Americans through spoken word and print about the many dangers that prostitution posed to individuals, families, and even the very social fabric of the United States. The movement expanded into an effort to suppress all forms of non-marital sexuality, including masturbation, and reformers’ collective voice dominated nineteenth-century discourses about sexual matters. Moral reformers quickly became the dominant force in shaping popular ideas about human sexuality, advocating the repression of all sexual activity except within the sanctity of marriage. They stressed the new idea that prostitutes were victims of both economic circumstance and men’s failure to control their own sexual impulses. They called upon middle-class women to exert their domestic power and shun such men from social gatherings.

 

In the cheeky guise of moral reformers, the authorial personas of two nineteenth-century American brothel guides responded by providing justifications for brothels and brothel-going. Disguising their bold stance with the sheep’s clothing of moral reform rhetoric, these authors argued that efforts to end prostitution were futile, and that, in fact, prostitutes’ sexual services were beneficial and even necessary to maintaining a well-ordered society. Prostitution Exposed openly mocks moral reformers, beginning with its subtitle, “A Moral Reform Directory.” Upon opening the little guide, however, the ruse is clear: the frontispiece illustration of the booklet, facing the title page, is a roughly carved depiction of a nude, long-haired courtesan. With wicked, deadpan humor, the following dedication page extends the masquerade when it honors “the ‘Ladies’ Reform Association’ for the Suppression of Onanism.” The name of the organization appears at first little different from the names of actual moral reform societies. A closer reading, however, makes it clear that the title refers instead to prostitutes who provide sexual services, thus “saving” men from having to satisfy their sexual needs through “onanism,” another name for masturbation.

 

In the introduction that follows, the author employs the educated and certain tone of a gentleman reformer to justify his guide as merely designed to help godly, respectable men avoid the houses listed in the subsequent pages. Still, the author addresses “the reflecting reader,” calling on him to help “to crash the hydra-headed monster” by visiting these houses of prostitution. “Go you, personally,” he exhorts, “and with gentle admonitions, endeavor to prevent those midnight debaucheries, those base and disgraceful acts of bodily prostitution, which destroy thousands yearly through their baneful effects.” In a mocking of male moral reformers like John C. McDowell, who visited New York City brothels in the 1830s to rescue prostitutes, the author notes, with subtle satire, that prostitution continues to thrive in spite of men’s meetings with prostitutes to “commune with them in private.” “Commune,” of course, bears the double meaning of both a meeting and a sexual encounter, allowing readers to bring their own sexual knowledge and understanding to deciphering the author’s meaning.

The author of Prostitution Exposed goes on to argue that brothels are necessary to guard the safety of chaste and respectable women. This argument helps preserve the nineteenth-century middle-class womanly ideal, which rendered “true” women as pious and sexually pure. Although prostitution kept sex workers imprisoned as “lewd and wretched victims” of male passion and vice, their services were, the author argues, “a guard to virtue.” Employing the hoary myth that rape was the inevitable result of men’s repressed sexual passion, he explained that prostitution made it “less likely” that “respectable females” would “have the sanctuary of their virtue encroached on by lustful, amorous man.” Without commercial sex, “the bridegroom would seldom fold to his bosom a virgin, for the blight of illicit intercourse would disfigure the holy shrine of wedlock.” The author of Guide to the Harems and Turkish Palaces of the Empire City (1855, 1856) concluded likewise that brothels were “the best safe guards to the virtue of maidens, wives, and widows, who would otherwise be exposed to violence and outrage.” From this vantage point, gentlemen who visited well-mannered young ladies in “well conducted” brothels upheld, rather than compromised, the sanctity and respectability of the middle-class family. In mock sympathy with moral reformers, the author of Guide to the Harems concludes that all efforts to eradicate prostitution were ultimately futile. Regardless of reformers’ “preaching and moralizing,” he writes, men would “continue to seek amative intercourse with the opposite sex.”

Both authors rested their arguments on an assumption that prostitutes were of a breed entirely apart from “virtuous” women. Yet, in the rest of each guide, as in the pages of other nineteenth-century American brothel guides, descriptions of genteel brothel keepers and prostitutes suggested that they were little different from the ideal women of respectable, class-conscious society. Among the middle and upper classes, a woman’s reputation for chastity and her dependence upon men were foundational to her social identity. Conversely, a prostitute’s sexual and financial independence defined her as a permanent outsider. While the existence of prostitution supported the ideology of “true” womanhood by freeing wives from husbands’ sexual demands, the outsider women who met those sexual demands were paradoxically portrayed in brothel guides as just as respectable. Brothel guide authors erased the division for readers by judging prostitutes and brothels according only to the quality of their performances of middle- and upper-class feminine ideals. Brothel guide authors praised genteel brothels and their women using terminology that could just as easily have described more ordinary households and the respectable wives and daughters within them. For instance, the women who worked for Jane McCord in 1859 were noted to be well versed in “the rules of etiquette, &c., of society.” Miss Parker’s “beautiful and accomplished boarders” captured visitors’ attention “with their bewitching smiles and graceful manners.” Madame Louisa Kanth’s “pretty boarders” were all “supremely mannered,” and her house “a safe and honorable retreat.” In 1849 Philadelphia, the brothel keeper Mary Fisher reportedly “conduct[ed] herself with propriety,” and in 1855 New York, a brothel keeper who called herself “Madame A. Belle” reportedly had been “educated in the best circles.” Selfless attention to others, charm, and gracious hospitality were key components in these performances of the respectable womanly ideal, and the charming and attentive prostitute was, at least outside the brothel bedroom, an imitation of her respectable counterparts in family homes.

Even though brothels were antithetical to middle-class values, brothel guides’ emphasis on the similarity between genteel prostitutes and respectable women allowed men to have it both ways. Keeping company with well-mannered women in houses of prostitution that were almost—but not quite—respectable domestic spaces may have helped men justify brothel-going by blurring the line between the domestic and the commercial, the genteel and the illicit. While moral reform literature generally emphasized the wide gulf between prostitutes and their middle-class, respectable counterparts, brothel guides tried to close this gap. Such descriptions also provided another measure by which class- and reputation-conscious gentlemen could judge and define themselves and other men.

 Brothel guides’ reassurances and warnings about the relative safety or danger of various houses expresses authors’ anticipation of bourgeois readers’ concerns. Authors promised to provide reliable information that would prevent genteel readers from stepping into “the traps which are everywhere laid” by criminals who preyed on naïve men. A woman who solicited sex on the street, no matter how respectable her appearance, might actually be a pickpocket, or part of a panel scheme, with an accomplice hidden in a secret compartment behind bedroom paneling, waiting to sneak into the room and steal a man’s valuables. Matthew Hale Smith described this scheme in his sensational 1868 exposé of urban underworlds, Sunshine and Shadow in New York: “The place selected is usually a basement in a quiet neighborhood, the more respectable the better … The room is papered and a panel cut in the paper, or one of the panels is fitted to slide softly … The bolts, and bars, and locks are peculiar, and so made as to seem to lock on the inside, though they … really fasten on the outside. And while the visitor imagines he has locked all covers out, he is really locked in himself, and cannot escape till he has been robbed.”

 Blackmail was another concern for reputation-conscious men. The Gentleman’s Companion warned in 1870 that a man who was married or one “well known to the public” was vulnerable to blackmail. Devious female “plunderers” operated under “the presumption . . . that fear of exposure will prevent him from making a complaint” against them. The author of the Philadelphia Guide to the Stranger warned in 1849 that both “the stranger and the green one” were at particular risk of being “deluded into houses of bad repute without being aware of the impending danger.” The author of the Fast Man’s Directory (1853) warned readers to avoid an earlier (and competing) New York City brothel guide, which, he said, would lead readers to houses in which they would “run a great risk of being robbed, diseased, and perhaps ruined for life.” That ruin could be social, physical, financial, or all three.

With one exception, most nineteenth-century American brothel guides said little or nothing about the dangers of disease. Some gestured vaguely toward the issue with general terms like “safety” and “danger.” For instance, the 1839 guide, Prostitution Exposed, included a note assuring readers that the women at Sal Brown’s house were “clean and safe.” An entry in the New York City Gentleman’s Companion noted that Mrs. Lizzie Goodrich kept a physician “attached” to her house, suggesting that the women who worked there received regular checkups and treatment. The only American brothel guide that addressed the question of venereal diseases directly was Guide to the Harems. Its author, an “Old Man of Twenty-five,” promised that his little book would “prevent many a man from falling into a wicked snare,—warn others of the traps which are everywhere laid for him,—secure thousands from the chances of disease and ruin, and give all to understand where they can go with more safety.” The guide was “a source of kindly warnings, in regard to places of vice and danger,” even an altruistic “act of humanity” designed to warn urban visitors about the “hidden rocks upon which many a noble vessel has been shipwrecked.” In other American guides, readers were left to infer that the young, enchanting, well-mannered “ladies” employed in genteel brothels were, like respectable wives and daughters, clean and free from disease. The correlation between outward appearances and prostitutes’ health rested, of course, on the erroneous idea that disease was always visually detectable, and that gentlemen customers carried no diseases themselves.

Assurances of safety also anticipated other forms of danger that might lurk within an unfamiliar brothel. Violence was an inescapable part of men’s social worlds in the nineteenth-century United States, and brothel guides hinted at the fact that violence at the hands of other men, including visitors to first-class houses, was always possible. Notions of manhood required that blood be shed, from the Founding Fathers’ penchant for honor-defending duels to the street-prowling roughs of New York’s antebellum Bowery. That masculine culture of violence sometimes extended into brothel parlors, where men gathered to drink and socialize with brothel keepers, prostitutes, and each other. In the 1830s, New York City saw a surge of violence against brothel keepers, prostitutes, and their property, and although attacks on brothels appear to have largely died down by the end of the decade, spontaneous acts of violence remained a possibility.

There were relatively few negative reviews in brothel guides; they speak of the potential for both danger and social discomfort that awaited a gentleman who chose the wrong kind of house. Authors warned of houses that admitted white, working-class men and black men of any class, demonstrating the pervasiveness of ideas about the inferiority of blacks and untamed whites. For instance, in 1870, Hattie Taylor’s third-class New York City house was reportedly visited by “gentlemen who turn their shirts wrong side out when the other side is dirty.” Clearly, “gentlemen” is used here ironically. What was to one man a resourceful strategy of self-presentation was to brothel-guide authors (and, presumably, readers) evidence of a brutish character, signs of an instigator of disorder and carrier of disease. In the 1859 Guide to the Seraglios, the assertion that Sal Boyer (alias, Dutch Sal) had sex with a black man of the “lowest” sort highlights notions of white gentlemen’s class-based, racial superiority. According to the author, even worse was the alleged purpose of this interracial liaison: an exchange of sexual services “for the small remuneration of potatoes and flour to support her boarders.” This crude, non-monetary exchange of sex for such basic sustenance was a further indicator of the woman’s base character. In American brothel guides, working-class whites and black men represented a level of brutishness that contrasted starkly with white gentility.

Conversely, many brothel guide reviews emphasized that the best houses were visited by gentlemen. In a circular set of associations, the presence of gentlemen signified the quality of a house and its women, which served in turn to signify the status of the men who visited. Such claims also signaled to class-conscious readers that they could visit these houses without compromising their sense of themselves as gentlemen. The very title of the Gentleman’s Companion sought to flatter the reader, and suggested that the men who attended the brothels recommended in its pages would encounter in those places only men of similar respectability. Brothel guide entries often described brothel visitors as “gentlemen” or “gents” to highlight the quality of certain houses. Readers were assured, for example, that the house at 99 Mercer Street in New York was “frequented by men of taste.” The Philadelphia Guide to the Stranger noted in 1849 that at Sarah Turner’s house “none but gentlemen” visited “this Paradise of Love.” The brothel run by Miss R. Stiles was called one of the finest in 1853 New York. This splendid house was “of the very first class,” and the fact that it was reportedly attended by “none but gentlemen of distinguished rank, education, and conduct” affirmed its quality. The 1848 print by James Baillie, “Single,” imagines this young, well-educated, bourgeois “gent.” He sits in calm, dignified, manly repose, surrounded by the trappings of genteel, prosperous manhood within his well-ordered and fashionable domestic space. While twenty-first-century viewers might see the subject of this image as feminine and effete, the fashionable, tight-fitting clothing and his elegant bearing are typical of the pre-Civil War manly ideal as portrayed in popular American prints. In this aspirational image, the single gentleman is defined by an array of commercial goods. The fine, fashionable furniture and mantelpiece, the ornate ormolu clock, the thick, heavy drapes, carpet, and upholstery all signify financial prosperity and bourgeois taste. Rows of leather-bound books speak of the gentleman’s education, and both the roaring fire and the time on the clock—8:25 in the evening—suggest that this gentleman is at the end of a long day of gentlemanly pursuits. The boxing gloves and fencing foils hung on the wall represent the leisure-time arts of English aristocrats, and the hunting gear, including an indigenous-style, western leather bag, suggests the manly touch of the rugged American frontiersman. The authorial persona of each surviving nineteenth-century American brothel guide represents just such a figure: a confident white man of privilege, one of the fashionable, knowing, unmarried “young bucks” for whom brothel visiting was a weekly, if not daily, pastime.

Given the dominance of the moral reform perspective in nineteenth-century understandings of prostitution, the very idea that a brothel could be genteel appears to pose a deep contradiction. According to middle-class moral reformers, prostitution was, by its very nature, the antithesis of respectability. By extension, brothels were antithetical to the nineteenth-century domestic sphere, and prostitutes were entirely unlike respectable women. While brothel guide authors did mock moral reformers, they had an earnest message: that prostitution could be compatible with middle-class, bourgeois, and even upper-class white manhood. Contrary to moral reformers’ excoriation of men who visited brothels, the guides’ positive descriptions of well-behaved, mannered, self-conscious brothelgoers suggested that if such genteel, respectable men allowed themselves to enjoy the sexual pleasures for sale in American cities, then why couldn’t the reader himself? This emphasis on gentility also helped clarify for readers the kind of man who would be welcome at the better urban brothels, just as negative descriptions of other types of men helped clarify who would be unwelcome. Implicit in these guides is an argument in favor of men’s sexual pleasure-seeking that turns on the notion that a gentleman’s self-respect and dignity did not rest in his sexual behaviors, but in his continuous self-presentation as a gentleman and in the company that he kept. In this way, brothel reviews reiterated and reinforced the notion that there was really nothing wrong with visiting brothels, engaging in casual sex with professional prostitutes, and paying for these privileges, as long as men—white, class-conscious men—were careful to attend the right kinds of houses. The “right” kinds, of course, were those touted in the guides.

 

Acknowledgments

My deep thanks to Carolyn Eastman, Catherine A. Jones, Frances M. Clarke, and Michael Henderson, all of whom offered invaluable feedback on drafts of this essay; to Anna Mae Duane for her astute editing; and to Jaclyn Penny at the American Antiquarian Society for her always insightful and expert assistance with images.

 

Further Reading

Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1998).

Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).

Richard Gassan, “The First American Tourist Guidebooks: Authorship and Print Culture of the 1820s.” Book History 8 (2005): 51-74.

Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).

Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870 (Berkeley, 1993).

Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York, 1987).

Helen Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2002).

Philip M.R. Howell, “Sex and the City of Bachelors: Popular Masculinity and Public Space in Nineteenth-Century England and America.” Ecumene 8:1 (2001): 20-50.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 18.1 (Winter, 2018).

---

Katherine Hijar is an assistant professor of history at California State University, San Marcos.

Think of Aristotle’s Masterpiece as the seventeenth- (eighteenth- and nineteenth-) century’s version of The Joy of Sex…but with more religion. And babies. And monsters. The pseudonymous author’s introduction to Aristotle’s Masterpiece presented the work as a home guide intended to inform the modest and chaste about the purpose, pleasures, and particulars of sex, sexed and gendered bodies, reproduction, and childbirth. All of this information is framed by the context of Christian belief in an omnipotent divinity that designed sexuality as an incentive to populate the human race with more Christians.

The author expressed concern that his book would be used by the unchaste for less wholesome purposes, for aside from its religious discourse, sex is not metaphorized. Sex, the sexual body, intimate relationships, desire and pleasure, and reproduction are addressed frankly and with specificity. Therefore, Aristotle’s Masterpiece could easily be considered a “dirty book.” It is not hard to imagine the allure of such a work for readers—modest or otherwise—for it provided a rare detailed discussion of sex. It even included illustrations.

 

And surely the long print history of this book attests to its popularity and appeal, even if only in private. First published in England in 1684, Aristotle’s Masterpiece shared its pseudonym with Aristotle’s Problems, a sixteenth-century work that detailed sex in frank language, and the text of Aristotle’s Masterpiece consists of spliced together excerpts from midwifery guides (as historian Mary Fissell has noted). Thus, Aristotle’s Masterpiece’s popularity was based on previous popular works. Unlike its predecessors, however, Aristotle’s Masterpiece remained in print in America for over two centuries, and the number of editions is in the hundreds. Perhaps because this work is not often mentioned in literature of the same periods, its existence (even ubiquity) might surprise scholars working in this period, especially considering the sheer number of copies that were in circulation. Aside from references to Aristotle’s Masterpiece in scholarship on home medical guides and midwifery, the text has not received extensive critical attention (the exception being Mary Fissell’s ongoing research).

 

Aristotle’s Masterpiece hovers behind the scenes of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century discourses on love, intimacy, marriage, romance, sex, gender, family, religion, midwifery, health, and embodiment. Thus, scholars and readers of all types with an interest in these broader themes can find rich content in this work. This text is especially unusual in its references to women’s sexual desire and pleasure (which the author estimates may be twice that of men’s), concerns about women’s powerful imagination and its impact on the children she bears, and the discourse of “monsters and monstrous births.”

The acknowledgment of women’s sexual pleasure and concern about women’s power of mind may strike readers as revolutionary, yet the sensational and voyeuristic treatment of people with extraordinary bodies speaks to a normative embodiment, which dehumanizes those with physical anomalies.

 

Additionally, these three threads—women’s desire, women’s imagination, and “monstrous” embodiment—actually have a cause and effect relationship in this text. A woman’s unsatisfied sexual desire/pleasure may cause her to imagine non-normative sexual partners or acts, which can then be manifested on the body or bodies of her offspring in the form of marks, extra or absent limbs, and more (bodies that would constitute “monstrous births”).

Of course, Aristotle’s Masterpiece supplies countless other threads of potential analysis that scholars should feel encouraged to pull on.

Contemporary readers can access digital copies of hundreds of editions online through the National Institute of Health National Library of Medicine, and some are available on Google Books.

Scholars who wish to explore the text should plan on consulting multiple editions to get a sense of the revolving content from one edition to the next—including the images. For instance, in the chapter “On Monsters and Monstrous Births,” content in the opening pages in one edition might not appear until the end of another, and others will not include examples that seem to be otherwise standard features of most editions. Also, the many images included in this chapter differ depending on the edition.

 

When taking the multiple editions of this text into consideration, Aristotle’s Masterpiece seems to have its own organic vitality—changing shape, growing, retracting, touching… like the very bodies described within it.

 

Further Reading

Mary Fissell’s ongoing research on Aristotle’s Masterpiece is the best place to begin. Her articles “Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in “Aristotle’s Masterpiece” (William and Mary Quarterly 60:1 [2003]) and “When the Birds and the Bees Were Not Enough: Aristotle’s Masterpiece” provide readers with both analysis and print history of the text. Both provide a glimpse of her extraordinary in-progress book-length cultural history of Aristotle’s Masterpiece.

 

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

---

Sarah Schuetze is an assistant professor of English, humanities, and gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Her current book project on narratives about disease in early America is tentatively called Calamity Howl. In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Schuetze volunteers regularly at the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary where she helps tend to baby rabbits and injured birds of prey.

Martha Hodes has produced a masterfully written narrative biography complete with intrigue, suspense, and fastidious detail regarding nineteenth-century life in the United States and the Cayman Islands. The Sea Captain’s Wife is a book about many things, but it is primarily the story of Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly. In many ways, Eunice was an ordinary woman in nineteenth-century America. Born in 1831 on a farm in Northfield, Massachusetts, she worked hard for most of her life in the mills of New England, as a washerwoman, and as a domestic. Most of Eunice’s life was spent attempting to change her station in life, that is, to climb out of poverty through hard work performed by her own industrious hands or through other avenues such as marriage. Eunice wanted desperately to find stability, happiness, and comfort for herself and her family; however, many of these things eluded her. Unable to attain security and a life free from poverty, Eunice made a decision that was unconventional for the late nineteenth century: she crossed the color line and married Captain William Smiley Connolly, a black sea captain who would move his new bride and family to Grand Cayman Island.

Martha Hodes came across the letters of the Richardson family, housed at the Duke University library, and has combined detailed archival work and oral history with stubborn perseverance to create an imaginative narrative. The Sea Captain’s Wife is a work that will capture the attention of anyone working in women’s history, African American history, urban history, and biography. It offers a beautifully written description of life, love, and race in nineteenth-century America.

“Change felt relentless in an industrializing city,” writes Hodes (56). Eunice’s life was similar to many other northern women who moved from the farm to the factory. She lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, the largest city in the state, and worked at the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. She would eventually marry William Stone, a carpenter and a supposed answer to her prayers for a secure and happy life. But like many other nineteenth-century artisans whose skills fell from fashion as factories dotted the northern landscape, William found himself chronically unemployed. The Panic of 1857 moved the family closer to destitution as they moved frequently from rented dwellings to the homes of family members. By 1859, the desperation felt by Eunice and her husband was immense and drove William to leave a familiar New England and to join Eunice’s sister and brother-in-law in Mobile, Alabama. William hoped desperately to regain the security and respectability connected to skilled labor and left his wife and child to toil in New England while he tried his luck in the South.

Eunice became one of the many women forced into low-paying factory work when her husband set out for Alabama. She was forced to leave her young son Clarence with a widow who lived in West Manchester and felt very much alone. Hodes suggests that Eunice’s longing for a traditional patriarchal home in which she was cared for remained constant, but her work and perhaps the geographical distance from William began to erode her husband’s authority, and Eunice began the practice of making her own decisions. In a short time, Eunice decided to move to Mobile, to end her work in the mills, and to be reunited with her child and husband. Eunice made the long and dangerous journey and was hopeful for a better life in Mobile, but her hopes fell short once again when William fell ill and was unable to work.

Eunice became quickly disenchanted with the South, and Hodes suggests that she became uncomfortable with “the peculiar institution.” Within the text of her many letters sent to family members back North, Eunice “offered nary an opinion, not even a description” of slavery and its brutality (89). Although William decided to enlist with the Confederate Army, Eunice remained committed to the North and the Union cause. “I am with the North,” she wrote to her family, “though I have to keep it to my self” (101). Hodes suggests that Eunice was forced into autonomy. Once again abandoned by her husband and afflicted with uncertainty and poverty, Eunice began to direct her own life; she returned to the North. Seven months pregnant, Eunice made the long winter journey with her young son. Eunice’s was a bold and untraditional move, but as Hodes writes, “truth be told, William had never proved much help anyway. If Eunice was going to be poor, she would rather be poor at home, close to her mother and sisters, even without a husband” (117).

Life was difficult for Eunice. After the birth of her daughter, Eunice was barely able to survive on wages from domestic work. To make matters worse, the Civil War tore apart her family. In September of 1864 Eunice’s brother Luther Jr., who fought for the Union army, was killed in battle, and in the final months of the war she was to learn that her husband William died in a Confederate hospital in Atlanta. Eunice, deeply depressed, hung onto life and made another controversial decision: she met and married Smiley Connolly, a black entrepreneur who was a member of the elite on Grand Cayman Island. According to Hodes, this decision to marry outside of her race and to move to Grand Cayman was very unorthodox, yet it saved Eunice from the work, poverty, and depression of her life as a single mother. Eunice wrote that she did not think about race when she thought about her husband. “I do not look at that when I look at him, I look for a loving glance of his eye which I always meet” (197).

Life for the Connollys on Grand Cayman Island appeared to be happy and at last secure. Eunice loved her husband and her life of moderate wealth, yet she missed her family and yearned for their correspondence. Tragically, in 1877, the Connollys were lost at sea when a hurricane turned a turtle-fishing adventure into an early demise.

Although Martha Hodes is forced to rely on speculation throughout much of her work, she has done so with believable and probable accuracy.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

---

Erica Armstrong Dunbar is an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware.

Every four years, by the time the presidential primaries are in full swing, Americans already have been inundated with election coverage for months. Each day’s news cycle dredges up some fresh development—a poll, an accusation, or a faux-pas—and pundits react by recalculating the candidates’ chances for victory. Yet, despite being swamped with constant predictions of winners and losers, neither political commentators nor scholars have devoted much attention to the language used to describe these electoral competitions. That’s normal, of course. The way we talk about elections is so ingrained that it has become second nature. But let’s think about it for a moment. How often does a reporter get through an election story without describing it as a “race” or a “fight”? The contemporary discourse of elections in America refers to electoral politics as if it were a sport. The metaphor seems so easy and obvious today that it goes virtually unnoticed, but this was not always the case, and an examination of the metaphor’s evolution yields some new insights into the sources and nature of American political culture.

Like many components of American politics, the sporting metaphor came from Britain, where it originally took a visual form more often than a verbal one. Political cartoons representing elections as horse races date back to the 1760s in England (fig. 1), and reflect the increasing intensity and expense of campaigns for office as voting rights and factional politics expanded during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the time of the American Revolution, electoral competition, festivity, and bribery were legendary in Britain, triggering satirical allusions to elections as horse races where the same kind of environment flourished.

American-made prints of any kind were rare and technologically rudimentary before the 1790s, and they typically took the form of allegory rather than satire. In the heat of the imperial crisis, however, patriot writers grafted verbal allegory onto the visual sporting metaphor recently invented in Britain. The radical Pennsylvania Chronicle described the 1768 Parliamentary election as a horse race between factional leaders. “Coming to the post” in the competition for prime minister that year were Lord Rockingham’s “Commerce,” Lord Bute’s “Pickle,” Lord Holland’s “Shaver,” and Lord Chatham’s “Prerogative,” from the bloodline of a mare named “Changeling.” Each horse’s name summarized the candidate’s political reputation in the patriots’ eyes. The most stinging rebuke went to William Pitt, who had defended the colonies in 1765, then grew more conservative in his view of the crisis after receiving a peerage as Lord Chatham. The article concludes with a prediction that “the famous horse Liberty, formerly belonging to Lord Chatham, who has since sold him, will come to the post” and win the day. Even in New England, where organized Jockey Clubs did not exist in the colonial period, the partisan Massachusetts Spy explained the region’s strident opposition to British policy by analogizing political and sports junkies. Residents there used their “leisure to inform themselves in history and politics,” which took the place of “horse-racing and cock-fighting [as] the passion of the New-Englanders!”

Patriot writers built on this trend by framing explicit political action as sport. Their reports frequently characterized rioters as “sportive,” “playful,” or out “to divert themselves,” enjoying “anticks” or a hearty “frolic.” These terms might have accurately reflected the motives of demonstrators who often took to the streets after drinking at local taverns. But resistance writers also carefully chose such language in an effort to downplay the danger posed by these crowds. In this respect, Revolutionary-era authors still emphasized an important difference between politics and sport—that one had more serious consequences than the other. Nevertheless, the imperial crisis multiplied and strengthened the conceptual links between the two discourses.

Then the links were buried. Once the war started, the metaphor disappeared and decades passed before Americans again talked about elections as “races” or “fights.” British satires continued to picture political events as sporting events, and English artists as well as sharp-witted writers from all over Britain came to the United States after the war, but the new nation’s “republican” political culture marginalized sport and precluded a sporting metaphor for politics.

 

 

Republican thought considered sport an insidious threat to the inherently fragile project of representative government. A republic’s survival supposedly depended on an active and discerning electorate, able to identify and reject corrupt politicians whose greed would lead them to undermine the people’s voice and give rise to tyrannical autocracy. The dominance of this theory in Revolutionary America prompted the country’s new governments to vigorously legislate against vice, which allegedly destroyed republics by sowing selfishness and disregard among the citizenry. For this reason, just weeks into its first meeting in 1774, the Continental Congress asked each state to ban “every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions.” Enforcement was haphazard at best, but laws against games and sports lingered into the post-war era because they expressed a republican asceticism intended to keep citizens engaged in civic affairs and willing to sacrifice self-indulgence for the common good of the community.

Given this objection to sport, you might think a savvy candidate would have pictured or described his opponent in sporting terms. But sport’s inherently agonistic nature prevented a politician from representing his opponent’s participation in sport without suggesting his own involvement. After all, who else would the pictured candidate be competing against? Moreover by the 1790s, most politicians had tied themselves to America’s first party system. Besides connoting an unseemly individual participation in sport, a sporting framework also would have implied partisan competition, and republican ideology fostered an even stronger distaste for political parties than sport. According to republicans, parties undermined politicians’ independence, steering them to secure party power instead of acting in their community’s best interest. In fact, Revolutionary patriots had blamed much of their discontent with England on corrupt officials, secretive back room bargaining, and indecisive gridlock associated with the rise of partisan factions there. So, when the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans began to form ranks in the 1790s, each group claimed the other was a party while claiming it was only a party to the extent that its members refused to join their foe’s sinister faction. In effect, both parties’ members were “anti-partisan partisans.” Again, since picturing politics as sport required picturing competition, a sporting metaphor would have implied the existence of two parties, something both of them wanted to avoid.

 

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

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

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

I. The Fistic Carnival

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

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

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

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

Or something like that.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

II. Duffy’s Arena

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. The Death of Andy Bowen

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Duffy’s Last Fights

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

---

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

Black shadow politics in the antebellum North

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

 

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

---

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