Though Uncle Tom appears relatively young in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, the perception of his age changed. The narrator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) invites the reader to observe “the hero of our story,” Uncle Tom, “a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black” and his wife, Aunt Chloe, who shares his sheen with her “round, black, shining face,” which is “so glossy as to suggest the idea that she might have been washed over with white of eggs.” There are three children in their cabin: two young boys, Mose and Pete, running around at their feet, and a baby girl. If one puts aside the not insignificant matter of their enslavement, then the two look every bit the picture of domestic bliss—young, healthy parents, who don’t have a wrinkle between them.

Yet by the turn of the century Uncle Tom had become much older in illustrations for the novel and in American popular culture more broadly: his hair changed from black to grey and balding, his face wrinkled, and his body stooped. The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2006) shows the far-reaching effects of this change when it hesitates to identify the three children in the cabin as belonging to Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe since their relationship allegedly resembles that of Abraham and Sarah. In the biblical story, the prophecy that the couple will have a child makes Sarah laugh—she was ninety and Abraham was 100 years old when their child, Isaac, was born.

The perception of Uncle Tom’s age clearly defies Stowe’s original description and exchanges the strong, powerful middle-aged young father with an old man whom he barely resembles. Given the cultural importance of Stowe’s novel and its afterlife, this particular transformation bears further consideration. Why does Uncle Tom grow old? Why does Uncle Remus, who becomes popular at the turn of the century, look so similar to him? What does it mean that he does?

The stage performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, known as Tom plays, offer one explanation. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was a literary phenomenon and when it took to the stage it became even more popular. Famously, Thomas F. Gossett has suggested that for every one person who read Stowe’s novel, there were fifty who attended one of the countless performances of the Tom plays, staged by as many as 500 companies and running from 1852 to 1930. Changes to characters, scenes, and plot inevitably occurred, including the use of live dogs to embellish the scene where Eliza flees across a frozen river.

The actors portraying Stowe’s characters often became more visually iconic than the characters in the book. Just as film adaptations change how we imagine characters of novels we’ve read so that Harry Potter becomes Daniel Radcliffe and Katniss Everdeen becomes Jennifer Lawrence, the stage personas of the Tom plays eclipsed their textual source. Robin Bernstein has shown, for example, how child actress Cordelia Howard’s brown hair became an iconic depiction of Little Eva, despite the fact that Stowe describes Eva as having golden blonde hair. Uncle Tom’s old age was yet another change made as the plays upstaged the novel. The plays were simply more accessible, more visceral, and more social than the written word, and without copyright restrictions to speak of they had the freedom to alter the content and characters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in profoundly influential ways.

The Tom plays were an outgrowth of blackface minstrelsy and they borrowed its stereotypes. A nineteenth-century entertainment staple, minstrel shows featured white actors who blackened their faces to engage in racial caricature. The aged slave was one such stereotype and while Stephen Foster’s “Old Uncle Ned” may have been the most famous example, other variations included “Old Dan Tucker” and “Old Black Joe.” Uncle Tom’s age rose upward, pulled by the collective influence of these pre-existing characters, until he melded into just another older slave, no different than any other. Charles Townsend, for example, recorded the directions for blacking up “for elderly negroes, like ‘Uncle Tom,’” which included drawing wrinkles “across the forehead and around the eyes, with India ink” and accentuating the lower eyelids and lips, “which will give them the sunken look of old age.” The physical manifestation of old age lent itself to minstrelsy’s tendency to emphasize racial weakness and dependency, which resulted in the association of old age and loyalty. The Tom plays exaggerated Uncle Tom’s age due to the influence of the minstrel stage, using it to make him seem impotent, weak, and complacent. The effect was the stigmatization of the name “Uncle Tom” into the epithet that it has become.

The other explanation for Uncle Tom’s increasing age has to do with his proximity to Little Eva. The daughter of Augustine St. Clare, Eva is saved by Tom when she falls off a steamship carrying a cargo of slaves to New Orleans to be sold. She persuades her father to purchase him as compensation for his heroism. Once they return to the plantation together, Uncle Tom and Eva become fast friends as she reads the Bible to him. When Eva falls ill later in the story, they become quite close: Uncle Tom carries Eva into and out of her room when she is too weak; he takes walks with her, sings hymns to her, and sits with her. When she nears death, he sleeps outside of her room on the verandah. Eva seems innocent in these scenes and Uncle Tom seems trustworthy and loyal. As Robin Bernstein discusses in Racial Innocence, Eva’s purity, her childhood innocence, allows her to transcend racial prohibitions. The physical intimacy shared between Uncle Tom and Eva becomes permissible, or at least explicable, when cast under the glow of her pure, angelic aura.

However, to some who feared the intermingling of races, Eva seemed vulnerable and the proximity between her and Uncle Tom proved disconcerting. Eva’s purity might sanction her relationship to Uncle Tom, but it could just as easily be spoiled by it. Age, while not resolving the racial tension stemming from the proximity between a white girl and a black man, certainly provided a more tolerable picture for those who held such anxieties. The older Uncle Tom became, the more the tension was alleviated between the two. The influence of the minstrel stage on Uncle Tom’s age provided a complementary solution to the problem of physical intimacy by adding a layer of separation. Insofar as Uncle Tom becomes old, he becomes, to borrow James Baldwin’s phrase, “divested of his sex,” and more like a grandparent for Eva. And, once Uncle Tom is estranged from his own family because he is too old for the children in the cabin to be believably his, the decision to be loyal to Eva above all else becomes easy. As Uncle Tom ages, his proximity becomes more tolerable and less threatening.

Just as Uncle Tom became old on the stage, another aging ex-slave entered American popular culture: Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. The two would prove indissoluble—it is almost as if Uncle Tom aged into Uncle Remus. Harris developed his signature formula in the Atlanta Constitution in which Uncle Remus tells stories set in the antebellum past to an audience—a nameless Little Boy—in the postbellum present. The stories are animal folktales that feature Brer Rabbit narrowly escaping the grasp of Brer Fox with his trickster antics. On the basis of these entertaining folktales in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Harris rose from regional to national fame and became one of the most significant literary figures in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. When Harris asks the reader of his first book to imagine Uncle Remus as one who looks as though he lived in the period he describes, that is, an old man who was an adult well before the Civil War, for many the image that came to mind was Uncle Tom. On their respective laps sat different children, but the image of an elderly black man with a white child stayed the same. The two blurred to the point that in Young Folks’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1901), it is Uncle Tom, not Uncle Remus, telling Eva Brer Rabbit stories.

At the 1905 Georgia State Fair in Atlanta, President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt drew out Joel Chandler Harris, who was notoriously reclusive. With Harris seated as a guest of honor at the presidential banquet, Roosevelt remarked, “Presidents may come and presidents may go; but Uncle Remus ‘stays put,’” before going on to praise him for the way he was able to exalt the South in his fiction without “even a flavor of bitterness toward any other part of the Union.” Roosevelt’s praise seems to be the exact opposite of the message Stowe apocryphally received from Lincoln: “so you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” According to Roosevelt, Uncle Remus helped heal the tensions of the war started by Uncle Tom. This transformation from instigator to alleviator is indicative of how old age effaced the anti-slavery politics of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Furthermore, I would submit that at least part of the reason why Uncle Remus seemed like he was always there is because Uncle Tom became old first.

What Roosevelt valued about Uncle Remus and, by extension, Uncle Tom, is troubling in retrospect. The saccharine stories without “even a flavor of bitterness” helped reconcile white Northerners and white Southerners at the expense of African Americans, whose suffering was denied by the manufactured consent imposed upon them. Imagining loyal, aged slaves who were nostalgic for the plantation economy helped the North find an exculpation for its long-time complicity in slavery, its failure to enact emancipation sooner, and its quitting of Reconstruction; it helped the South imagine a romanticized past that could justify disenfranchisement through Jim Crow legislation while preserving the illusion of Southern valor. Old age and loyalty became inextricable, and so too did Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom, their transformation made so complete it erased the traces of any transformation in the first place by making it seem as if they were never not there.

There are, however, two differences between Uncle Tom and Uncle Remus that I wish to bring to your attention in closing. Together they are indicative of a widespread shift in the cultural meaning of old age in the United States after the Civil War that often slips past unnoticed in the story of shared resemblance I’ve described above. The first difference is a mortal one: Uncle Tom dies while Uncle Remus stays old.

Uncle Remus was already old when he appeared in the first of Harris’s books in 1880, and in “A Story of the War,” he says he was old even before the war, let alone how he had aged since then. Yet in a volume published twenty-five years later, Told by Uncle Remus (1905), he is described as hale and hearty in spite of his age. The second difference between Tom and Remus is a didactic one, having to do with their relationships to the children with whom they are paired. Though children sit on their respective laps, Uncle Tom is taught while Uncle Remus teaches. Their respective lessons have to do with the past: Uncle Tom is taught about Christianity while Eva reads the Bible to him, and Uncle Remus teaches the Little Boy about the antebellum past through folk tales.

The two differences combine to make the meanings of their old age distinct. For Uncle Tom, old age is a penultimate state, meaningful only in its relation to death. The recognition of death’s value shows how receptive Uncle Tom has been as a vehicle for Eva’s religious instruction. By inviting death, Uncle Tom fulfills the role for which Eva has prepared him and accesses the religious meaning of martyrdom, his death conferring meaning upon his life. For Uncle Remus, however, old age becomes meaningful in and of itself. Unlike Uncle Tom, his value is contingent upon old age, not death. His lesson depends upon the continuation of his memory, so to die would be to lose value. Instead, Uncle Remus must stay put and in so doing he becomes doubly old: old enough to be a credible witness to the time of slavery and old enough to keep repeating his memory. Instead of a single generational transaction where Eva teaches Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus assumes a regenerative function, teaching generation after generation. When he reappears after a long absence, he returns in order to tell stories to another little boy, who is actually the child of the boy to whom he first told stories.

In this way, President Roosevelt incidentally puts his finger on the pulse of the matter. The “staying put” of old age assumes greater value at the turn into the twentieth century as the coming and going of death loses value. With the dissolution of the “good death” in the Civil War that Drew Gilpin Faust describes, what comes to take its place is old age. The threshold of death mediated power, culture, and identity in antebellum America. In the void left from its collapse, the cultural significance previously reserved for death began to creep into one’s late life.

The resemblance of Uncle Tom and Uncle Remus is important because it tracks the attenuated political meaning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Uncle Tom ages in appearance. Equally important, however, is an appreciation of their difference, which is suggestive of the widespread shift in the meaning of old age as a life stage. While it is common to think of the United States at this time as being reordered, reincorporated, reborn—in short, rejuvenated—by the process of economic modernization that accelerates after Reconstruction, perhaps old age plays a more fundamental role in that perception than previously thought.

Further Reading

Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York, 2011).

Kathleen Diffley, “Representing the Civil War and Reconstruction: From Uncle Tom to Uncle Remus.” In Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson, eds. A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 (Malden, Mass., 2005).

Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas, 1985).

Barbara Hochman, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911 (Amherst, Mass., 2011).

Jo-Ann Morgan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture (Columbia, Mo., 2007).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

Nathaniel A. Windon is a doctoral candidate at Penn State University. His dissertation, “Gilded Old Age,” is on the social construction of old age in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.

Scholarship on the American Revolution has long tried to answer two central questions. Were the men who moved toward revolution and the men who fought the war that accompanied it motivated primarily by ideology or self-interest? Was the post-colonial world that the Revolution created radically different from its colonial predecessor, or did most of society stay the same amid some reshuffling at the top? Of course, histories of the Revolution have always been subtler and closer to the reality of the past than these simple dichotomies imply. Still, historians who wanted to be in the forefront of Revolution scholarship needed to speak to these questions of large-scale motivation and result.

In recent years, historians have uncovered a world of subjects about and around the American Revolution that have made our old historiographic questions inadequate. Recent scholarship goes to new places and introduces us to new people. For example, in the work of Holly Mayer, we have learned of the thousands of white, black, and Native women who accompanied one or another of the armies and cooked, did the army’s laundry, nursed the sick and wounded, served the officers and their wives, made musket cartridges, and sold liquor and other goods to the soldiers. These women hardly chose war. Most of them followed an army out of fear that staying home would lead to worse forms of homelessness, hunger, and violence—a finding with parallels in many a war. Similarly, the Revolution’s radical implications (or lack thereof) mattered in very narrow ways to camp followers, to enslaved North Americans as they made their way through wartime, or to the more than half a million Native people living west of the Appalachians who would soon face the reality of U.S. expansion.

The old questions of the Revolution’s motivations and of radicalism or conservatism also fail to fit historians’ increasing realization that many eighteenth-century changes did not happen because of the American Revolution but instead reflected larger trends of the era. Or that change over time is not always the most important story, as some historians of women and the family have argued.

Finally, military historians have pointed out that questions about origins and effects fail to give us a framework for understanding the war years themselves. Surely scholarship on the American Revolution should have something to say about the Revolutionary War.

When we historians change our central questions, we have two goals. The first is to shift the range and framing of dissertations, articles, and most of our books. What falls within American Revolution scholarship? To what larger questions and themes should our more focused work speak?

The “American Revolution Reborn” conference showed that historians have achieved this first goal and are taking full advantage of new areas of study. Revolution scholarship is more exciting than it has been in decades, and young scholars no longer shy away from a field in which it had seemed that all the work was done (although I think we might need to be more explicit about our new questions and larger range of subjects to encourage graduate students to call themselves historians of the American Revolution). Colonial and Revolution history have dethroned the central narrative of the coming of the nation-state. Following historians of colonial North American history, Revolution scholars have not only expanded across the Atlantic but begun to find ways to incorporate the Caribbean and the continent. We tell multi-perspectival stories of how people experienced and understood the war, tying local chronologies and local interests to larger themes. As in most cutting-edge history these days, we combine the questions and methodologies of multiple kinds of history: political, social, military, diplomatic, intellectual, cultural. And, at long last, we are beginning to stop lumping together people “left out” of the Revolution’s promise—Indians, slaves, free people of color, all kinds of women—as if they all wanted the same things. Indeed, most Indians did not want to be U.S. citizens at all, no matter what shape the republic took.

Historians’ second goal in changing the terms of debate is to write new synthetic narratives, to tell the whole story differently. Can we create (and evolve) a central story out of our more focused work, a story that we might tell not only to our students but also to those who portray the Revolution in public history sites and popular history books? I will take a stab at one possible new narrative here, but of course there can be many versions.

I would start with the question of how North Americans on the eve of the Revolution expected the future to look. I think we would find startling agreement across North America, if we maintain a sufficiently broad focus. People expected multiple sovereignties to rule the continent, as had been the case long before Europeans and Africans arrived. The colonies of various empires would continue on the coasts and up some of the rivers, operating the ports that brought the products of the world to North America. A range of Native polities would continue to hold and contest power over the interior, which was most of the continent. Whether living in Native towns or colonial farms, most people would farm for their subsistence and center their lives on local communities and families but have connections to a global network of goods, people, and ideas. Slavery would continue, as most people believed it had throughout the world since the beginning of time, but few would have imagined either the huge scale of antebellum plantation slavery or the movement to abolish slavery altogether. People expected that whoever you were, in whatever kind of polity or culture, being born male versus female would probably determine your path in life more than any other single factor.

From that starting place, we might explore various paths through the Revolutionary War and beyond, keeping an eye on different people’s visions of what the world should be like (a question inherently both self-interested and ideological) through the vagaries of a war that might change those visions and ambitions along the way. The punchline would be that almost all of these visions were wrong. The republican empire that came out of the American Revolution and early republic developed both a power over the continent that no one predicted and the kind of rhetoric and promise that attracted immigration from around the world. In some ways, I would argue, the most important story of the American Revolution is how the more likely nineteenth century failed to come about.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Kathleen DuVal is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (2006) and a forthcoming book on the American Revolution on the Gulf Coast.

Night and day in the nineteenth-century city

To peer into an old panoramic map is to glimpse the American city as it might have appeared to an angel of real-estate investment. From a thousand feet in the blue sky, far above the smell of horse manure on shoe leather and the crush of bodies in streetcars, you see a landscape alive with commerce. Oversized ships crowd the waterfront, white sails bellied out. Factory smokestacks spew black pennants of progress. Rail lines veer into an infinite hinterland. Sunlight picks out skyscrapers thrusting eight, ten, twelve stories into thin air.

These lithographed bird’s-eye views, which still decorate the walls of restaurants, libraries, and lawyers’ offices, give us a sense of how the city could have been understood a century ago. No matter that only a balloonist could have contemplated the city from so far above the filthy pavement or that coal smog would have obscured his view. Thanks to the mass-produced panoramic map, Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could see their city as a functioning unit, with its industries and transportation routes highlighted in intricate detail, its slums vanishing into a mass of street blocks. On the ground, urban space was a huge mess, frighteningly different from anything ever before experienced. From the bird’s-eye view, it all made sense.

The same could not be said of another aspect of urban life: time. From whatever vantage, nineteenth-century urban time seemed to move in frighteningly unpredictable ways. This was especially so of those once-fixed temporal reference points: day and night. In the new chaos of urban life, these seemed to lose their reassuring permanence. A number of writers tried to make sense of this vexingly abstract force. From imaginary vantage points along major streets, they traced the life of the metropolis from its first vigorous stirrings before dawn through its murmurs and rustlings deep in the night. Like the panoramic maps, these descriptions are caricatures, but they help us to glimpse the emerging structure of urban day and urban night. We can see people inching toward what we would now call the twenty-four-hour city.

Writers with Pocket Watches

Walt Whitman suggested as much in an 1856 article about activity on lower Broadway in New York. “Within this straight and confined stretch of narrow street surges to and fro, all day, all night, year in and year out, absolutely without intermission, an endless procession, which might furnish no bad representative of the vast procession of humanity.” From an imaginary perch along the street, Whitman diagrammed the passage of different classes of people hour by hour, from the predawn rumbling of butchers’ delivery carts to the midnight journeys of late hacks (the equivalent of cabs). The morning commute of pedestrians began around five o’clock, in Whitman’s telling, with “twos and threes, and soon full platoons, of the ‘industrial regiments’ . . . uniformed in brick-dusty shirts and overalls, battered hats, and shoes white or burnt with lime, armed with pick, spade, trowel or hod . . .” As these men scattered to construction sites, shopgirls walked down Broadway toward the bookbinderies and tailor shops. “Mingling with them, and flocking closer, for it is now eight or nine in the morning, come the jaunty crew of the downtown clerks,” whose fashionable clothes covered physiques weakened by fast living. “Now their employers begin to crowd the sidewalks, and for an hour or two the way is full of merchants and money-traders—the ‘solid business community.’ A grim and griping generation are they; some fat and sturdy; most lean and dried up; all with close, hard faces . . . Among them you may distinguish here and there a lawyer, by something of an intellectual expression.”

From eleven o’clock to three o’clock, Whitman continued, “the full sea of the city, eddying and roaring, with no distinct current, boils and surges this way and that, in an undistinguishable and hopeless confusion.” Brightly-dressed women shoppers can be seen amid the flood, particularly in the later afternoon, when many are promenading. Among them, “the experienced city observer may everywhere recognize, in full costume and with assured faces, even at this broad daylight time, one and another notorious courtezan.” After four o’clock, “the feminine promenaders gradually disappear, and the successive waves of the morning tide now begin to roll backward in an inverse order—merchants, brokers, lawyers, first; clerks next; shop-girls and laborers last.”

Whitman was describing a time when New York was still what has been called a “walking city,” where even the affluent traveled by foot. By the end of the nineteenth century, daily journeys had been altered by the physical expansion of cities and by their starker division into zones of production and residence, affluence and poverty. Often traveling greater distances than their predecessors, the daily procession of workers was now linked to the timetables of commuter railroads and streetcars. Commuters flowed down Broadway in discrete pulses carried by cable car, as Stephen Crane observed around the turn of the century. “In the grey of the morning they [the cable cars] come out of the up-town, bearing janitors, porters, all that class which carries the keys to set alive the great downtown. Later, they shower clerks. Later still, they shower more clerks.” Crane hurries through the chaotic morning rush and the brief ten o’clock lull, to reach the onslaught of “feminine shoppers” who try the patience of cable-car operators.

Similarly, the humorist H.C. Bunner wrote in The Suburban Sage (1896) of a “time-table test” that supposedly revealed the status of each white-collar suburban breadwinner. From “an upper window in my house that commands an uninterrupted view of the little railway station,” he watched the daily procession of poor and rich commuters to New York. Men who rose to catch the six o’clock trains took little care in their appearance and evidently lived grim, meager lives. They were followed by the happily ambitious office boys who arrived to catch the 7:03 train. “But the 7:27 train is quite another affair. The errand-boy has got his promotion. He is really a junior clerk of some sort; and he has the glorious privilege of getting to his office exactly twenty-four minutes later. But, with his first step upward, he leaves light-hearted boyishness behind him and becomes prey to cankering ambition. His companions are men now, but mostly men who have barely escaped the bondage of the 6:38, and in whose breast the hope of ever rising even to the 8:01 is slowly dying out.” The status of the commuters rose with each subsequent train, Bunner continued, and so did their concern for reputation. “A commuter’s clothes improve from train to train until he gets to taking the 10:17, when he is reputed so rich that he may safely dress shabbily.”

Whitman and Bunner present the economic life of the city in a spirit quite different from what appears in the panoramic maps. While the maps celebrate order, progress, and unity, Whitman and Bunner point out the inequities between struggling early birds and wealthy sluggards. Many of the other attempts to map urban time also have a subtly (or not so subtly) subversive tone.

Harrison Gray Buchanan adopted for his 1848 narrative the literally devilish persona of “Asmodeus,” a demon who floated over cities, lifting the roofs of houses and laughing at the human foolery that he exposed. Buchanan’s purpose is spelled out in his flamboyant title, Asmodeus: Or, Legends of New York. Being a Complete Exposé of the Mysteries, Vices and Doings, as Exhibited by the Fashionable Circles of New York . . . Though he claims to be motivated by a desire to reform the city, he is obviously rubbing his hands in Asmodeus-like glee as he reveals the shocking truth. Buchanan starts his narrative with a walk down Broadway at dusk. Vehicles and pedestrians throng the street. Urchins and servant girls cluster near Barnum’s museum to hear the music. Brightly dressed prostitutes troll for pickups. Young men lounge outside the Astor House, staring at passing women. “The merchant and his clerk, lawyers and divines, poets and saucy editors, high and low—all ranks and classes, passed on in ceaseless currents.” Morality, not class, defines the structure of urban time. As the City Hall bell rings the hour of seven o’clock, the crowds thicken with theatergoers. A few furtive young men are on their way to visit brothels. Buchanan describes such a visit in loving detail, following two dissipated clerks through their evening at a house on Leonard Street. By midnight, the clerks have gone through ninety dollars of their employer’s money. Here and in other chapters, the action begins with the fall of darkness and the characters plunge deeper into sin with each passing hour.

A more elaborate chronology appears in an 1872 essay by the Brooklyn minister T. Dewitt Talmage, entitled “After Midnight.” Talmage described night as divided into four “watches,” each with its distinct activities and moral character. The first of these three-hour periods begins with the completion of the day’s work. Storekeepers and their clerks shutter their windows and bolt the doors. Tired workingmen trudge home to their families, and “the streets are thronged with young men . . . A few hours later, and all the places of amusement, good and bad, are in full tide. Lovers of art, catalogue in hand, stroll through the galleries and discuss the pictures. The ball-room is resplendent with the rich apparel of those who, on either side of the white, glistening boards, await the signal from the orchestra. The footlights of the theatre flash up; the bell rings and the curtain rises.”

The character of the night changes at the beginning of the third watch. The city grows quieter after midnight. A few working men walk home from night jobs, doctors and ministers are out caring for the sick and dying, but most of those who stay awake are up to no good. Robbers, burglars, and arsonists do their work at this time. Seemingly decent people indulge in vicious pleasures. Men throw away their fortunes on cards; drunks stagger through the streets or pass out on the saloon floor; ballroom dancers are in the throes of a “wild, intoxicating, heated midnight dance [that] jars all the moral hearthstones of the city.” In the final watch of the night, as the revelry subsides with the approach of dawn, working people emerge from their homes to begin the daily cycle of toil.

The Watches of the Night

Even a brief glance at a panoramic map dispels any illusion of accuracy. Likewise, the writers who tried to map urban time aimed for effects that had only a casual connection to reality. Whitman was cataloguing the occupational diversity of New York, Bunner was mocking status pretensions, and Talmage was warning young men against temptations. Their crude depictions of urban time, in some sense, replicated the pre-modern habit of dividing time into night and day, paying little attention to the invisible laborers and highwaymen, the midwives and nursing mothers or the toiling seamen for whom night was anything but a time of sleep. Nonetheless, their chronologies highlight real patterns: the precise opening and closing times in the industrial city, the long hours demanded of laborers, the tides of commuting along rail lines, the expansion of commercial entertainment, and above all the growth of nighttime activity. As night became more heavily used, it was developing its own distinct schedule.

What Talmage called the first watch of the night, from six to nine in the evening, had been the one least dissociated from the day. From colonial times through the early nineteenth century, when the workday followed the sun, both rural and urban Americans worked through early evening in the long summer months. After work on pleasant evenings, city dwellers would stroll the streets until darkness fell or the curfew bell rang. Then, at the setting of the night watch, presence in the streets became subject to official scrutiny, particularly the presence of racial minorities, women, and children. Thanks in part to the introduction of gas lighting between 1820 and 1860, evening work and evening entertainment both expanded. Evening work was already common in early nineteenth-century spinning and weaving mills, which were “lit up” with oil lamps in fall and winter. The expansion of these mills and the superiority of gas lighting at midcentury meant that more people found themselves working to eight or nine at night. Later hours also became common among dry-goods merchants, some of whom stayed open until ten or eleven at night. A writer for the Brooklyn Eagle explained in 1863 that “many people prefer to do their shopping by gas light, and not a few have no other time to do it, being engaged in their occupations during the day. It is certainly pleasant . . . to walk out and see the stores brilliantly lighted, and some kinds of goods look so much better by gas-light that purchases are more apt to be made at night than in daytime.” Evening shoppers appreciated the late hours, but clerks responded by forming an “early closing movement” that sporadically resisted the trend. One activist clerk in Brooklyn complained in 1850 that “all other classes in the community are furnished, both with the means and TIME for mental culture. We stand alone, as though our class had forfeited all claims upon libraries and lectures.” Merchants who opposed the early closing movement countered that the clerks were likely to waste any free evenings in saloons.

Regardless of whether clerks would have really preferred the library to the saloon, they were correct in noting that respectable entertainment options were limited by the time they got off work. Mid-nineteenth-century concerts and lectures typically began at seven, seven thirty, or eight; late arrivals were discouraged. These events, along with church services and meetings of voluntary associations, ended fairly early as well. Late arrivals to the theatre, though, could still find hours of entertainment ahead of them. Midcentury theatrical performances often included three, four or five plays and extended to the morally dubious end of the second watch, even into the third. As a mixing place for people of different classes, sexes, and moral characters, the theatre was noted as a bridge between respectable and disreputable leisure, a bridge frequently crossed by young men. Prostitutes sat in the third tier of seats, ready to arrange liaisons for after the performances ended. An evening at the theater thus crossed two important divides: one temporal and one moral. Men emerged into the streets around midnight only to continue the evening in places with shadier reputations.

As midnight approached in midcentury cities, young men and women enjoyed a lively sexual street culture. Apprentices, clerks, laborers, sewing girls, and servants cruised certain streets in the hours after ten o’clock to flirt or to find partners for recreational sex. Often indistinguishable from ordinary streetwalkers, and frequently charging for their services, the young women would take their companions into nearby parks and graveyards. In New York, such cruising grounds included the Battery, the Park at City Hall, and the sidewalks around the public hospital. Similar late-evening sexual activity could be seen at public parks and graveyards in Boston, Albany, Newark, Worcester, and other cities.

For young men with more money to spend, an evening that began at the theater often continued in the saloon or oyster cellar and concluded at the brothel or gambling hall. Already in violation of the weak ordinances that demanded midnight closings for drinking establishments, after-hours saloons had little incentive to honor laws forbidding gambling, prostitution, and public indecency. At the more elegant midcentury gambling halls, card play began around midnight and lasted until dawn.

Moralists claimed that men on the town shed their moral scruples as the night wore on. In a penitent account of his life written in 1850, the murderer Henry Leander Foote described his descent into vice twenty years earlier. Foote fell in with a group of wild young men while on the boat to New York from his native Connecticut.

The first night I was led to the Theater, from there to the brothel, and from there to the gambling house . . . Here we must be fashionable and have a game of cards and a bottle or two of champane [sic]. The cards I objected to, but one said we would be laughed at if we did not follow the fashion of the house . . . [The] champane [sic] beginning to work, I soon surrendered to their wishes. We played and drank till sometime past midnight, when we concluded it was time to retire. Some one or two proposed to return to the brothel, but that I absolutely refused to do.

On subsequent nights, Foote became an enthusiastic theatergoer, brothel visitor, gambler, and viewer of the “model artist” exhibitions of nude women.

Nightlife for most young men was just a temporary break from their cycle of work and rest. Their final descent into sin was prevented by rooming-house operators who locked the doors late at night and by the cruel reality of transportation schedules. Mid-nineteenth-century omnibuses and horse railroads tended to stop for the night within the second watch, forcing theatergoers to rush for the last car or pay heavy fares for nighthawk cabs. The hours varied from city to city. The Sixth-Avenue Railroad Company ran cars every thirty minutes all night, while in Hartford the evening’s last streetcar to Wethersfield left downtown at ten. Though traction companies resisted providing unprofitable late-night “owl car” service, municipal pressure and public demand slowly extended the hours. The Street Railway Journal reported in 1886 that street railways in cities of under fifty thousand people generally ran until eleven thirty or twelve. Night cars ran all night at intervals of fifteen or twenty minutes on some lines in Chicago and New York, though headways of thirty minutes to an hour were typical in other large cities. Twenty-four-hour service spread to more lines and smaller cities in the early twentieth century.

The atmosphere on owl cars also deterred some would-be night travelers, particularly women. Owl cars collected many of their fares from late-night drinkers. If conductors were too meek to impose order or expel the profoundly inebriated, rowdies annoyed other passengers with loud talk, foul language, cigar smoke, and occasional brawls. The New York Times editors complained in 1872 that “it is becoming almost impossible to enter a late-night car on some of the chief lines, without enduring insults, and taking the risk of deadly assaults from the drunken brutes that are generally found in them.” The Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners reported in 1909 that the presence of drunks on the late-night cars in Worcester and Fall River “creates conditions which at times outrage all sense of delicacy and decency.”

Women who rode the owl cars encountered unwanted seatmates, sexual propositions, and frightening stares. Those who safely navigated the streetcar system still had to walk through streets at each end of the journey. Even as dance halls, vaudeville theaters, and nickelodeons brought large crowds downtown, unescorted women could expect to be approached by strangers as the evening wore on. In center-city Philadelphia, according to the Public Ledger, women walking along Chestnut Street in the late evening were “ogled and insulted by crowds of men.”

Contributing to the rough atmosphere of the nocturnal city was the gender imbalance in the growing late-night workforce. More men than women had an economic reason to be out at night. In early nineteenth-century cities, two types of workers had been named and legally defined in relation to night: night watchmen (who later became the police) and night scavengers, or “nightmen,” who emptied privies. Night scavengers were typically forbidden to start work before ten or eleven, to shield the genteel public from distasteful sights and smells. Both of these types of work expanded in the latter half of the century.

Maritime shipping had always operated around the clock; the nautical tradition of constant “watches,” after all, provided Talmage with his schema for understanding night. Now newly illuminated waterfronts could also adhere to these round-the-clock work patterns. Ship owners wanted to minimize unproductive time in port and were willing to pay high wages for night work in order to ensure that ships would be unloaded and loaded without interruption. Railroads—with their sprawling urban systems of rail lines, marshalling yards, and depots—were even more visible sites of nocturnal work, employing huge workforces of mechanics, yardmen, and stationmen.

Round-the-clock manufacturing was rare before the late nineteenth century. Owners of early textile mills had not attempted all-night production, despite their common practice of extending the working day by “lighting up.” Gasworks and blast furnaces were among the few early industrial plants that ran continuously. The major growth in shift work began in the decades after the Civil War in large-scale, capital-intensive factories where a constant flow of production replaced the older practice of “batch” work. Manufacturers of steel, paper, refined oil, chemicals, and glass all developed production processes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which any interruption was needless and costly. The electrification of factories in the 1880s further encouraged nonstop production. By 1927, night workers accounted for more than forty percent of the employees making rubber, sugar, iron, and steel and more than twenty-five percent of those making paper. Among the most brutal working conditions were those in the steel mills, which ran on a two-shift system from the mid-1880s until 1923; periodically, one shift would continue for an unbroken twenty-four hours, so that the night shift could become the day shift.

Other sorts of jobs, less drastically out of phase with the dominant cycle, began in the fourth watch of the night, as the city gradually awoke from its three-a.m. stillness. Bakers kneaded the dough a final time and placed it in the oven to produce warm loaves for morning customers. Fresh milk, having arrived by train or ferry between midnight and four, was loaded into wagons for distribution to homes and groceries. Sales of country produce in public markets began as early as three or four in the morning in some cities in 1880. With the slow decline of public markets, night work only grew. Night was the time for transporting fresh food. Produce was less likely to spoil in the cool predawn hours, and traffic jams were unlikely to cause delays.

By the early twentieth century, more women were beginning to do night work as department store clerks, telephone operators, and bakery hands. Many boys also worked as night messengers and as assistants in all-night glassworks. Yet the appearance of women and children on the night streets was considered inappropriate by social reformers. For many women workers, testified an Ohio doctor at a 1919 legislative hearing, “fear on going to work late at night and on coming back early in the morning, especially between the home and the street car line, is a feature inimical to health.” By the time he spoke, fourteen other states had already banned some form of women’s work after nine or ten at night. By 1924, thirty-eight states prohibited night labor by children under sixteen years old. Concerned that children were the most likely to be exposed to immorality or abuse on the night streets, legislatures in fourteen states singled out the street trades for especially strict regulation. Adult men, therefore, continued to dominate the night.

Modern lighting and transportation had opened the night city to adult men, but had not reproduced the relatively safe atmosphere of daytime. The persistence of immoral forms of nightlife, the skewed gender profile of night work, and, finally, legislation combined to keep night distinct from day. Instead, a new schedule of nocturnal life was visible in the streets. Different sorts of people could be seen at distinct, predictable hours, from the parade of late-evening commuters, through the shift workers and revelers at midnight, to the marketmen and street sweepers before dawn. “Before these ghostly cleaners have done their task,” Whitman observed, “the circuit of the hours is over, and the endless procession . . . begins again.”

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

Peter Baldwin, an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, is the author of Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850-1930 (Columbus, 1999). He is writing a book about the social history of night in American cities.

The nineteenth century resonated with time’s sounds: Hour’s bells rang throughout American cities and towns, alarms punctuated bedrooms and bunkhouses, gongs and horns dictated action in fields and factories. Catholic church bells rang the Angelus to call devotees to prayer morning, noon, and night. After the 1870s, wealthy congregations installed big bells to ring the hours and Westminster chimes, to mark each quarter hour with a melody. Clockworks controlled the Angelus bell and Westminster chimes, as well as many other secular bells, so that they rang at appointed hours. “A listener hearing both the striking of the hours and the more solemn pauses marking services or ceremonies,” as the French cultural historian Alain Corbin observes, “has to cast his response in terms of a double temporal system.” This double temporal system encompassed time as a matter of occasion and time as a matter of measure. In each instance, the sound of time fostered time discipline.

It was just such a rich and complex temporality that emerged in colonial cities during the middle decades of the eighteenth century and persisted into the nineteenth century. However, with each passing decade, time as a matter of measure gained the better part of attention. In the biggest cities by the end of the century, the aural world of public time telling began to fade despite the installation of ever larger bells. It was drowned out by screeching machinery and crowd noise, or dissipated by wide streets, tall buildings, cavernous alleys. The sound of time never completely disappeared, but the contours of time discipline shifted toward modern practices that depended on a seeing public, on visible timekeepers that were at once accurate and precise, and on what E. P. Thompson described as “the inward notation of time.” Philadelphia is an ideal American place in which to explore the sound and look of time over the course of the nineteenth century.

No other place in colonial America was as well primed for the layering of traditional and modern timekeeping practices as was Philadelphia, where scientists, seafarers, and socialites shared the streets and public venues with merchants, millers, and farmers as often as with printers, churchmen, and silversmiths. Shortly after the impressive steeple of the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) was completed, a bell from England’s Whitechapel foundry arrived in 1752. Almost immediately the one-ton bell cracked. Recast by local brass founders, it was hung the next year with, according to one period account, “Victuals & drink 4 days.” Soon complaints were made about the bell’s tone. Recast again, the bell was still found insufficiently resonant. This bell, which would become known as the Liberty Bell owing to the inscription “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto the inhabitants thereof,” was left in the steeple, and another bell meant to ring the hours was ordered from England. When the second bell arrived, it was installed in the state house tower. It was attached to a clock movement (made by local clockmaker Thomas Stretch) situated in the middle of the building. Rods connected two clock dials under the gables of the east and west exterior walls of the state house to the clock movement. An ornamental case of stone, in the fashion of tall-case clock cases, protected the dial on the west wall’s exterior. The state house clock movement, clock dials, and bells worked together to enrich and complicate Philadelphia’s temporal rhythms. The new bell rang the hours; the gabled clocks showed the hours and minutes; and the old bell, the Liberty Bell, sounded fire alarms and marked mournful and joyous occasions.

Shortly after the installation of the Pennsylvania State House bells and clock, members of the fledgling American Philosophical Society built an astronomical observatory on the house grounds. The half dozen men who constituted America’s first learned society observed the 1769 transits of Venus and of Mercury, which resulted in the determination of Philadelphia’s longitude. They used a telescope mounted on a horizontal axis to follow the course of each planet as it passed between the sun and the earth. Afterward the Philosophical Society dismantled its makeshift observatory and moved its transit instrument (which was portable, previously having been used to chart the Mason-Dixon line) to the south windowsill of the state house tower where it was used to chart the movement of stars across the skies in order to determine the time. The state house’s clockworks sent this time, known as Philadelphia time, to the dials on the state house’s tall-case clocks and to its bell and then beyond.

Not everyone in colonial Philadelphia was pleased about having the hours rung on the state house bell. In September 1772, Philadelphians living near the state house petitioned the Pennsylvania General Assembly for relief from “the too frequent Ringing of the great Bell in the Steeple of the State-House.” They complained that the bell ringing “much incommoded and distressed” them, particularly when family members were sick, “at which Times, from [the bell’s] uncommon Size and unusual Sound, [the ringing] is extremely dangerous and may prove fatal.” What is more, the petitioners asserted, the bell was not supposed to ring except on public occasions, such as when the assembly or courts met. The assembly tabled the petition. Shortly thereafter the steeple had grown too rickety to bear the weight of the bells, and no mention is made in historical sources of their ringing between 1773 and 1781.

Complaints about the distress the bell caused, not as unusual as might be thought, were ultimately less important than Philadelphians’ disavowal of the utility of ringing the hours. The petitioners claimed that announcing the hours served no public purpose except during the brief periods of legislative and judicial sessions. This might lead one to suspect that residents of Philadelphia did not have a use for the hours, except with regard to coordinating the meetings of governing officials. Such a conclusion would be misguided. Rather, Philadelphians, like other colonials living in British North America, consulted a variety of timekeepers and followed several different temporal systems, including clock time. If they wished to know the hour, they listened for bells or they looked to their clocks, watches, sundials, or the sun itself. But the arrival of ships, wagons, storms, full moons, nightfall, harvests, and Christian holy days held more sway over their rhythms and routines than did that of noon or midnight.

In this, Philadelphians were not unique. Archaeological and probate data from British North America show an increase in the ownership of clocks and watches over the course of the eighteenth century. Through the end of the eighteenth century, ownership of a pocket watch was more likely than that of a clock. Jewelers and watchmakers in colonial cities imported watch movements and parts for assembly, often engraving their own signatures and place names onto the European movements. Watches were less expensive and sometimes better timekeepers than clocks. And as status items, they were easier to flaunt than a tall-case clock. Benjamin Franklin’s triumphant return from Philadelphia to his brother’s Boston printing shop in 1724 included his flourishing a watch.

In eighteenth-century Philadelphia, as in other cities of that period, pocket watches were extraordinarily special devices above and beyond their expense and technical features. In tandem with the dials of public clocks like the gabled state house clock, they facilitated, encouraged, and privileged the visual apprehension of mechanical time.

Despite the slow encroachments of visual markers of mechanical time, overlapping domains of time remained audible in cities and countryside. Immediately following the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, from a stage set on the erstwhile site of the Pennsylvania State House observatory, all of Philadelphia’s bells tolled. It is unlikely, however, that the two state house bells added to the din, because they had been taken down from the unsound steeple. Nevertheless, a lasting myth was concocted that the Old State House bell rang on the occasion. Had it rung, the Liberty Bell would have participated in the announcement of the nation’s birth, a moment John Adams described with the oft-quoted phrase “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together.”

Adams’s metaphor underscores certain key points about timekeeping during the Revolutionary and early national eras. First, Adams asks the reader to imagine thirteen clocks audibly demonstrating their coordination by striking together. His was a world in which authoritative time was aurally announced, not read on a clock face. Second, Adam’s metaphor was part of a longer sentence, which read in full: “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together a perfection of mechanism which no artist had before effected.” It was unimaginable in his day that a mechanism could be perfected such that multiple clocks could operate so well, so precisely, as to keep the same time. The conditions for synchronized time discipline dependent on clocks had yet to arrive, even in 1818 when Adams penned this famous phrase in a letter full of reminiscences. Indeed, they seemed as miraculous as a revolution meant to overthrow a king.

Because of the threat of the arrival of British troops in the early fall of 1777, all of Philadelphia’s bells, including the Liberty Bell, were hidden in nearby Allentown. As in medieval England and nineteenth-century France, bells in colonial British North America bolstered claims to legitimacy and authority, so their capture alone would have symbolically restored monarchical claims. But what is more, if confiscated they would have been melted down for shot. A year later, with the possibility of British invasion receding, the Liberty Bell and hour’s bell were brought back to Philadelphia. The Liberty Bell was kept in storage for seven more years because the steeple had gone from rickety to rotten and there was nowhere else for it to hang. The clock bell was hung in a shed jerry-rigged on the roof in front of the tower, where it rang the hours.

The importance of the Pennsylvania State House, its exterior clocks, and the Liberty Bell receded for several decades after the American Revolution, receiving neither public acclaim nor funds. The decayed wooden steeple was taken down in 1781. The one-ton Liberty Bell was reinstalled a few years later behind the louvers of the tower’s middle level. It called voters, opened legislative sessions, celebrated patriotic events, and tolled for the dead. After the Pennsylvania General Assembly moved to Lancaster in 1799, the Old State House’s clockworks were neglected. Various city papers criticized the clock for its irregularity and Joseph Leacock, its keeper, for his carelessness. Leacock, who was paid by the legislature, defended his reputation in 1800, explaining that he “wound the weight of that Clock full up, expecting it would have gone tolerably regular, but I found it had gained half an hour.” The fault he felt was that the clock was “poorly made.” In 1804, a cupola with clock faces was added to the bell tower atop Philadelphia’s Second Street Market (at Second and Pine). Two other public clocks also ran, though poorly, one on High Street, the other on Delaware Street. Some Philadelphians cared enough about the time the Old State House clock kept to calculate and remark upon its deviations. One journalist who pointed out in 1809 that it ran ten to twenty minutes slow, finger-wagged: “It is very important that this Clock should be kept right—Courts, Schools, Cooks, Coachmen, etc. etc. all regulate themselves by this clock.”

When the city of Philadelphia acquired title to the Old State House in 1818, it embraced the responsibility of maintaining its bells and clock. Increased activity of the courts, growing emphasis on timing in business matters, and rising acquisition of watches and clocks contributed to the city’s new attention to mechanical timekeeping. The city’s Select and Common Councils appointed a committee to examine the state house’s timekeepers in 1821 and again in 1828. By the second investigation, it was agreed that “the time of the citizens of Philadelphia was of so much importance to them, that there ought to be some accurate means of marking its passage.” The state house clock, it was lamented, was notoriously unreliable. Indeed, the Clock Committee remarked that, “if there is anything proverbial, it is the badness of the clock at the state house.” It was called “an excusing, not a regulating clock.” These complaints were amplified: “It is a clock which affords no rule to go by, but a rule not to go by, for everybody knows it can never go right.”

Persuaded by these pleas, and in concert with the restoration of the Old State House to its 1776 condition, in 1828 the city’s Select and Common Councils appropriated $12,000 (about $300,000 in today’s dollars) to install a new clock and bell on the Old State House. They also approved the purchase of two new clocks for the market houses, and funding to pay for the upkeep of all the city’s clocks.

The Select and Common Councils recommended the improvements to meet “the necessity of having a uniform time for the city,” and to improve “the appearance of our city, which is so deficient in embellishments, which in other cities are considered indispensable.” Installing a clock on the steeple rather than in cases gabled on the exterior walls, which was a departure from the original state house’s design, was agreed upon. The talented artisan Isaiah Lukens built the clockworks for the tower clock and a 4,000-pound hour’s bell was cast. It was hoped that the steeple’s turret would be high enough that the bell could “be heard over the city,” that the new clock dials affixed to the tower would be “seen in distant parts of town,” and that the gaslight illumination of the dials would make the time visible even after dark.

The new clock and bell were set in motion on New Year’s Day, 1829. Responses varied. It was Philadelphia’s first tower clock, but it lacked the visibility some residents expected. One Philadelphian complained that “two squares distant [from the clock tower] it is mortally impossible to observe anything more than hieroglyphics.” A predilection for tower clocks was becoming evident in other American cities and towns; as they gained modest amounts of wealth, they invested in signs of order, prestige, and permanence. They did so speculating that in being “seen from more than one thousand doors and windows,” their tower clocks would establish a time standard for the community. Loud hour’s bells also served such aspirations. Time as a matter of occasion was still important, but as a matter of measure it was gaining both visibility and audibility.

When Philadelphia’s new tower was completed, the Liberty Bell was rehung. It only rang on national occasions, such as July Fourth (1831), George Washington’s birthday (1832), and to mark the deaths of Lafayette (1834), John Marshall (1835), and President William Henry Harrison (1841). Since for most, if not all, of its tenure, the Liberty Bell did not ring the hours, its significance as a temporal symbol is within the realm of historical time. When it tolled in honor of deceased public figures (presidents, jurists, and founding fathers), it announced the end of epochs. When the city ordered its ringing to celebrate Washington’s birthday or July Fourth, it heralded the beginning of an epoch, a renewal of the commitments and bonds that had sent the colonies on a path toward nationhood. Erecting a massive clock tower, installing four clock dials meant to be seen across the growing city of Philadelphia, and hanging a large bell meant to ring the hours on a building coming to be known as “Independence Hall” suggest that by the end of the 1820s, Americans envisioned the conquest of time as much a part of national destiny—as literary historian Thomas Allen proposes in A Republic in Time—as the proclamation of liberty throughout the land. But without agreed-upon time standards, let alone methods of coordinating the great variety and number of timekeepers, clock time’s visual and aural authority would remain tenuous.

Clocks set time standards in Philadelphia and other antebellum cities. An 1830s local ordinance required the city of Philadelphia to provide accurate time. To meet this demand, in 1835 the Committee on Public Clocks recommended that public clocks “be designated by ordinance and so located as to accommodate our Citizens in different Sections of the City.” It proposed installing two new clocks to augment the clocks on the Old State House, St. Augustine’s Church, and a market house at Second and Pine Streets. In keeping with these recommendations, the city assumed responsibility for the upkeep of the clock and bells in St. Augustine’s Church and installed a clock on the Jersey Market. Through the 1830s, the city of Philadelphia maintained four public clocks. Among them, the one on the Old State House remained dominant. Indeed an 1836 guide to etiquette instructed that, “in Philadelphia it is necessary to be punctual to a second, for there everybody breathes by the State-house clock.” You must, it warned, be at your appointments “at the instant the first stroke of the great clock sounds.” It further admonished that it would be “useless to plead the evidence of your watch” and that “the unpunctual is pardoned by no one.” Tongue in cheek or no, punctuality was serious business.

Despite the seeming preference for state house time, the city’s clocks tended to indicate several different times. Grappling with the difficult problem of how to synchronize them, the city appointed an “Observatory Committee.” The committee suggested moving its observatory (which at this point was simply a collection of instruments) to a central location where the local time of Philadelphia could be determined and displayed on a visible public clock. Due to its expense, the city fathers did not support the proposal. So the city’s clocks showed the time as determined by their keepers, rather than displaying what was coming to be known as “observatory time.” Isaiah Lukens earned $100 a year to regulate the state house clock, which he had built in 1829. Lukens owned a “Fine Regulating Clock, for Astronomical Observations,” as well as other instruments for determining and carrying the time, which ensured that he could reliably fulfill his charge. It is not clear where the attendants of the city’s other clocks got their time. Sources also do not say how often the clockmakers reset the city clocks.

The contests for authority among antebellum timekeepers cannot be underestimated. Consider the account of the tensions between the state house clock and the pocket watch-carrying public found in George Lippard’s sensational 1845 novel, The Quaker City.

He halted for a few moments in order to ascertain the difference in time, between his gold-repeater and the State House clock, which had just struck one. While thus engaged, intently perusing the face of his watch by the light of the moon, a stout middle-aged gentleman, wrapped up in a thick overcoat, with a carpet bag in his hand, came striding rapidly across the street, and for a moment stood silent and unperceived at his shoulder. “Well Luke—is the repeater right and the State House wrong?” said a hearty cheerful voice.

This passage points to all the elements of midcentury time telling. The aural and visual compete—the clock has “just struck one,” but Luke “peruses” rather than listens. The mechanical and the natural comingle—it is the “light of the moon” that illuminates the “face of his watch.” Which is the authority for the time, the pocket watch or the state house clock, the bell striking one or the moon? The passage provides no clue as to which is more reliable, but it is a foregone conclusion that the timepieces won’t agree. Indeed, every timekeeper seemed to show its own time; there was little possibility of synchronicity, not between aural and visual time indicators, not between natural and mechanical ones, not even between a pocket watch and the state house clock.

Quaker City gave play to the anxiety and confusion nineteenth-century urbanization provoked. No longer could the faces of strangers be reliably read, nor could signs be trusted to mean what they said. Clocks were among the most visible of these enigmatic urban texts. They were found in public spaces among signs, trade cards, handbills, posters, parade banners, newspapers, and currency. But with only a few timekeepers deserving the commendation of “precision,” and with accurate time mostly out of reach, responses to these timekeepers in the 1830s and 1840s often included suspicion and mockery. Period fiction expressed reservations about the effects of investment in clockworks and timekeeping. For instance, in Empire City (1850), George Lippard described a New York City slumlord “whose secret depravity went by clockwork.” The temperance author T. S. Arthur mocks time discipline in “The Punctual Man” (1854).

The most arresting expression of derision about the expanding domain of clock time can be found in an odd story titled “The Devil in the Belfry,” penned by Edgar Allan Poe shortly after moving to Philadelphia in 1838. It describes carved woodwork of “cabbages and time-pieces” that could be found throughout “the finest place in the world,” a town known as “Vondervotteimittis” (Wonder-What-Time-It-Is). On the steeple above the town council’s chambers was a “great clock” with seven “large and white faces” with “hands heavy and black,” which were “readily seen from all quarters.” The clock “was never yet known to have anything the matter with it”; indeed “the bare supposition of such a thing was considered heretical.” All the town’s clocks, watches, and bells were precise and accurate. With the satire Poe was known for, he made it clear that a synchronized town may have been the aspiration of many but was actually preposterous enough for a Gothic tale.

The accumulation of timepieces both public and private during the middle decades of the nineteenth century is astonishing. As Philadelphia’s inventory of public clocks grew, so did the ones of other cities, and inexpensive household clocks and pocket watches proliferated. The Old State House’s importance as a source of visual and aural time for Philadelphia residents solidified at midcentury. In 1845, the clock acquired new hands. In 1852, its wooden dials were replaced with ones of solid ground glass whose diameters extended seven and a half feet. The near constant indication of the time on the state house’s enlarged and brightened clock dials attested to its imposing visual presence. Around the same time, the Liberty Bell itself underwent a transformation. As it was being rung in honor of George Washington’s birthday in 1846, a fracture deepened into a crack, rendering it impossible for the bell to ring. “Left a mere wreck,” as one commentator lamented, it remained hanging until 1852, when it was moved into the same room in which the Declaration of Independence was displayed. Several years later, in 1857, the city introduced an alarm system rigged to ring all the bells and gongs in the city in the event of a fire or other cataclysmic event. The system was also used to send time signals from the state house clock to the city’s bells and fire-alarm signal boxes, which together rang at noon every day. The state house clock was at the center of the network of aural and visual time signals. The sound of time ringing forth every day knit various parts of the city together around state house time.

The Old State House’s pivotal position as authority for clock time was reinforced in Philadelphia in 1876, the year of the nation’s centennial and first world’s fair. That year, Henry Seybert, a native son and reclusive heir to a large fortune, gave the city a Seth Thomas tower clock, a 13,000-pound bell, and four nine-foot dials with gilded hands and figures. His motives for the gift to Philadelphia were largely personal. Seybert recounted that at a séance, his deceased mother commanded him to give a clock and bell for Independence Hall. Following her spirit’s wishes, the terms of his gift called for the inscription of his family’s personal names on the clock and bell. The practice of inscribing bells as a way to honor cherished members of the community was and not unheard of in America either. Members of the Common Council, attentive to the communal and national importance of the Old State House timekeepers, rather than to Seybert’s personal affairs, refused the terms of the gift. Seybert eventually relented, agreeing to an inscription on the bell that read: “Presented to the city of Philadelphia July 4, 1876, for the belfry of Independence Hall, by a citizen.”

The new clock and bell debuted in 1876 at the stroke of midnight on July Fourth: the bell, made of cannon from both sides of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, struck thirteen peals. Then, “all the bells and steam whistles in the city joined in the sounds of rejoicing and fireworks and firearms made the noise tenfold louder.” The new Independence Hall clock and bell assumed a central place in the daily lives of many Philadelphia residents. As one newspaper opined: “It would be impossible for us to do without it. The four faces of the State House timepiece are as familiar as the features of intimate friends; and the same may be said of its voice.” Independence Hall’s 1876 bell also marked important moments of national time. In 1888, an ordinance was passed requiring that the bell toll on New Year’s Eve and July Fourth, in each case to “commemorate another year of American Independence.”

The new hour’s bell was itself a much heavier replica of the Liberty Bell. With each decade of the nineteenth century, American bells had grown more numerous, larger, and heavier, largely due to the work of three foundries; the Meneely Bell Company in upstate New York, Ohio’s Verdin Company, and Maryland’s McShane Bell Foundry. Big bells evoked Europe’s church towers, as well as the monasteries that preceded them. Their triumphal installations, however, commemorated independence from Europe, liberty from the past, and democracy’s triumphs. What is more, as creations of advanced steel and metal casting technologies often rung by automated systems, these bells were manifestations of innovations in industry and science. By 1900, at least 750 American cities relied on a time circuit to ring their bells on a daily basis, usually announcing noon and nine at night. Bells facilitated the distribution of clock time, but they also resonated with older meanings for time rooted in occasions, particularly historic ones.

The exhibition of the Liberty Bell, which had been mute for three decades, at the Centennial Exposition the same year that Independence Hall received its heavy bell and new clock drew attention to historic time and timekeepers. Many of the world’s fair exhibits in 1876 showcased American-made watches, clocks, bells, and clock systems. Seth Thomas’s “great clock,” with its fourteen-foot-long pendulum, hung above the east door of Machinery Hall; an electric circuit connected it to clocks throughout several buildings’ enormous exhibition spaces. The striking clock was attached to thirteen bells together weighing 22,000 pounds: each of the bells represented one of the thirteen original states. Watch manufacturers Elgin and Waltham each exhibited their lines at the fair, enjoying their triumph over Swiss and English competitors in various precision trials meant to test the watches. Each company’s exhibits were more than platforms for these competitions; they sought to inspire fairgoers by demonstrating the possibilities of synchronicity. Despite the successes of American watch manufacturers, the impressive design and function of Seth Thomas’s “great clock,” and Independence Hall’s state-of-the-art striking tower clock, the many dimensions of modern timekeeping had yet to coalesce. The most urgent need was for a reliable system to disseminate the time, but even more so, for an agreed-upon time standard.

Through the 1870s and into the 1880s, the most prominent public clocks throughout urban America were enlisted in the cause of banishing local time and crowning a national standard of time. In 1883 when railroads enacted a plan for a national system of standard time, most cities and towns acquiesced, agreeing to recalibrate their public clocks and bells to the new time standard. On the day the new system began, the city of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Railroad adopted it. An adjustment of thirty-six seconds brought the clock on Independence Hall into accord with 75th-meridian time.

Just when it seemed that clocks would be brought into agreement through the dissemination of standard time by time services and time circuits, a new impediment to synchronicity developed. In the effort to heighten visibility, the sponsors of public timekeepers set enormous dials with massive hands high upon towers. It was nearly impossible for the dial works of what were called “monster clocks” to function reliably. Imagine a technological device aiming for precision and accuracy that depended on “a little puff of air” traveling up seven floors “through a leaden tube having an inner diameter of no more than the sixteenth of an inch.” This is what was required to move forward “the ponderous minute hands” of Philadelphia’s new City Hall clock “about seven and one-half inches” every thirty seconds. At the turn of the century, monster clocks seemed a good way to disseminate the time to the nation’s largest cities: the populations of Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago each surpassed one million. How else could a single, reliable time signal reach so many people?

A variety of efforts over several years near the end of the century led to the decision to install a monster clock on Philadelphia’s new city hall. After months of investigation, which took a committee of commissioners of public buildings to Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Newark, and Washington, D.C., the commissioners selected a novel and largely untested pneumatic system. Compressed air would move the clock’s massive minute hands (each weighing 225 pounds) and hour hands (a mere 175 pounds each). The four clock dials would be connected to a master clock with “all the latest and most approved improvements to insure accurate time,” including being on a telegraphic circuit to the United States Naval Observatory, which was considered the nation’s most reliable source of time. While of an unusual scale, Philadelphia’s city hall clock belonged to the Gilded Age culture of public timekeeping in which clocks on civic buildings proliferated.

At the same time, another clock project absorbed some of the attention of Philadelphia’s residents. At Independence Hall, an architect planned to replace the dials of the 1876 Seth Thomas tower clock with decorative windows. Tall-case clocks would be added to the building’s exterior returning it to its original appearance. To justify the dials’ removal, the city’s director of public buildings flourished historic engravings depicting the state house of the Revolutionary period. Despite such armature, the very suggestion that the tower’s clock dials might be removed “aroused opposition.” As one newspaper writer observed, “the transference [of clock dials to the tower in 1829] was a public convenience, and a public convenience it has been ever since.” But not everyone agreed: another newspaper asserted that no one would “think of setting his clock or watch from a State House clock.” The controversy was heated. Ultimately no change was made before the rededication of Independence Hall in October 1898. Independence Hall’s clock dials remained perched well above the city streets and squares.

Shortly after the rededication of Independence Hall, commemorative friezes surrounding four twenty-five-foot clock dials on the new city hall tower were completed. Rising 361 feet from the building’s top floor, the tower’s height soars well above Independence Hall’s tower, but also above the bell tower of St. Mark’s in Venice and other landmark buildings in Western Europe. Bronze eagles perch above the clock dials. Crowning the entire ensemble is a statue of William Penn so large that according to a period publication, its mouth “would easily take in a whole turkey in one bite.” Allegorical groups “representing four epochs in the early history of Pennsylvania” sit next to the pediments framing the clock dials. The eagles are particularly noteworthy, since throughout the nineteenth century they served as a national motif on timekeepers of all sorts. The dials of the clock would be illuminated, so that the time could seep across the city through night hours. Furthermore, the entire tower itself would serve as a time signal, with its lights extinguished momentarily to indicate nine o’clock each night. Even at a distance, then, watches and clocks could be reset.

Although the clock was hung and ready in early December 1898, the commissioners decided to wait until New Year’s Eve to set it going. That night a party was held for the building commissioners, the mayor, and other officials, who then witnessed the starting of the clock. They were but a small portion of the people interested in the new clock; thousands crowded the streets around the city hall. “On the stroke of 12 last,” it was reported, “pealing bells, the shrill notes of horns, and shouts and cheers of thousands” welcomed “the last year of the nineteenth century.” Emphasized here are the aural sounds of time—bells and horns—heralding not only the New Year, but also the clock’s debut. But the clock dials’ visibility was also of note. It was reported that crowds delighted when “the great dial of the colossal new clock in the City Hall burst into radiant light,” and marveled as “the gigantic hands began their unceasing circuit.” The newest clock in Philadelphia stimulated grandiose dreams befitting the largest timepiece in the world. A celestial presence was attributed to it: one observer commented that “the great timepiece was shown like a star.” Like the North Star, this clock was expected to “regulate the comings and goings of countless succeeding generations of Philadelphians.” It would “serve as the standard and regulator of clocks and watches of all posterity.” The emphasis on the clock’s visibility and accuracy spoke to desires for efficiency, accuracy, and synchronicity.

All of these hopes, however, were dashed within an hour of the clock’s inauguration. The hands on the north dial stalled, probably because of the wind, sleet, and hail brought by a winter storm. The following day it was reported, “Broad Street travelers saw the monster hands flinging themselves wildly over the face [of the north dial].” Crowds of people gathered below, “gazing bewildered up at the tower.” The clock did not work. By May 1899 the clock’s problems were such that the city commissioners convened a meeting to discuss its “pure cussedness.” In its inability to show the correct time, in the wild movement of the hands, the clock itself highlighted the artificiality of mechanical time as well as the unreliability of mechanical timekeepers. Its four faces could not consistently keep the time. It could not possibly “regulate the comings and goings of countless succeeding generations.” Such an irregular clock had no hope of serving “as the standard and regulator of clocks and watches of all posterity.”

A little more than a year after Philadelphia’s gargantuan pneumatic clock was set running, the city unveiled a wooden “dummy clock” in a tall-case on an exterior wall of Independence Hall. The gold-colored hands on its face “pointed permanently at 11:22 o’clock.” This odd hour was “the supposed time of the announcement of the Declaration of Independence.” The dummy clock helped to return Independence Hall to its original appearance, for it was shaped like an oversized grandfather’s clock, resembling the two tall-case clocks that stood on the east and west walls of the building between the 1750s and 1820s. That dummy clocks might show some fictitious moment when the Declaration of Independence was signed was declared insulting to intelligence and basic principles of timekeeping, not to mention patriotism. Calling it “that terrible atrocity,” some Philadelphians wrote to the papers suggesting that “the dial was a criminal waste of space.” The “incongruous and meaningless presence” of the dummy clock, according to one report, understandably excited a “storm of indignation and ridicule.” The restoration committee members who arranged for it were accused of being “fakirs” and “vandals.” This outrage was not the result of being deprived access to the time, since the dials on the tower of Independence Hall continued to show the time. Philadelphians depended on a network of public clocks as conveyances of clock time; within this context Independence Hall held a venerable place. So strong was public disapprobation that ten days after the dummy clock was hung, it was taken down.

The controversies about the monster and dummy clocks in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia reveal how privileged seeing the time had become. Independence Hall’s tower clock and hour’s bell visually and aurally disseminated clock time well into the twentieth century. But the city hall clock, radiating time across the city and its environs, literally towered over Independence Hall. The faulty pneumatic system for moving the clock’s hands had been replaced. Clock time, to be sure, could be still be heard, and was still listened for; but it was the hands and faces of time that provided its centrifuge at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Further Reading

The best starting point for any study of timekeeping is E. P. Thompson’s landmark essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 56-97. The literature about timekeeping in early modern Europe is extensive, but there are two books that are essential reading: Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside (New York, 1998, 1994) and Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago, 1996, 1992). Michael J. Sauter’s 2007 American Historical Review essay, “Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin,” is also essential reading. About time as a matter of occasion and as a matter of measure, see Stuart Sherman’s Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 (Chicago, 1996). About timekeeping in early modern England, consult the recently published Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300-1800 (Oxford, 2009) by geographers Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, but don’t forget about David Cressy’s Bonfire & Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Great Britain, 1989). John Styles’s The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2007) looks closely at court records for evidence of watch ownership among working-class Britons.

Carlene Stephens, Michael O’Malley, and Mark M. Smith have each authored foundational works about time in the United States. Particular attention should be drawn to O’Malley’s Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington, D.C., 1996), Stephens’s On Time: How America Has Learned to Live by the Clock (Boston, 2002), and Smith’s Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, 1997). A detailed and exhaustive investigation into the important role astronomical observatories played in American timekeeping can be found in Ian Bartky’s Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Palo Alto, 2000). Two terrific studies that address the material culture of timekeeping in the nineteenth century are Thomas Allen’s A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2008) and David Jaffee’s A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia, 2010). About timekeeping during the Civil War, see Cheryl Wells’s Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865 (Athens, Ga., 2005). There are a number of scholarly articles about the ownership of timepieces in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. A good place to start is Martin Bruegel’s “‘Time That Can Be Relied Upon’: The Evolution of Time Consciousness in the Mid-Hudson Valley, 1790-1860” in Journal of Social History 28 (1995): 547-64.

About the timekeepers on Independence Hall and Philadelphia’s City Hall, see Michael J. Lewis’s ” ‘Silent, Weird, Beautiful’: Philadelphia City Hall” in Nineteenth Century v. 11 (1992): 13-21; Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (Philadelphia, 2002); and Gary Nash’s The Liberty Bell (New Haven, 2010). In a 2005 essay in American Literature titled “Stealing Time: Poe’s Confidence Men and the ‘Rush of the Age,'” the literary critic Clayton Marsh draws attention to Edgar Allen Poe’s stories, as well as other pieces of period literature, that address antebellum timekeeping.

Clocks are not the only the only way to measure and mete out time; nature provides all sorts of measures as well, none more important than diurnal rhythms of day and night. The German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1988, 1983) does for night what his The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19^th Century (Berkeley, 1986, 1977) did for time and space. A. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York, 2005) is a model social history of the experience of time in which many details about the incidence of clocks, ringing of hours, and notation of time are evident. Peter Baldwin’s In the Watches of Night: Life in the Nocturnal City (Chicago, 2012) extends this exploration into American city nights. Baldwin’s 2005 Common-place essay “Mapping Time: Night and Day in The Nineteenth-Century City” is a fitting companion for this essay.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.1 (October, 2012).

Alexis McCrossen, an associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University, is the author of Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (2000) and Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (2013).

Reading the newsboy’s New Year’s address

When I was fourteen, I began my first newspaper route. It was a grim and unrewarding job. My chief memories are of waking before dawn and trudging the London streets under steel gray skies, forcing oversized papers into undersized mail slots whose spring-loaded maws were designed to shred every object, being pelted with snowballs by delivery boys from a competitor’s news agency, and—on one memorable occasion—being chased by a fierce and bristling dog several blocks down the main road. The detour I was forced to contrive to avoid the house with the dog added an additional mile to my route and took me still deeper into the snowball throwers’ territory. It was, in short, a miserable chore.

The one thing that made it at all bearable was the day in late December when I knocked on the door of each house and received my “Christmas box,” a small (sometimes not-so-small) sum of money traditionally given to newspaper boys, milkmen, and others in the delivery business and which I spent on such Tom Sawyeresque accoutrements as penknives and candy. Not everyone answered the door, of course. But those who did not could expect the wrong paper to appear in their mail slot or to find the right paper pushed through their slot with such vigor as to turn the outer pages into expensive confetti. Few dared to risk my ire, and so in response to my mumbled incantation of “Christmas box,” wooly hat clutched firmly in hand, I took in a substantial sum. All in all, the day after Christmas was a pretty good day.

I could not have known it as a teenager—and would likely not have cared—but in soliciting money from my newspaper customers on the cusp of the new year, I was participating in a ritual that was several centuries old and rooted deeply in American, as well as in English, history. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and enduring clear through the nineteenth, newspaper boys—and the occasional girl—hit up their customers in much the same way that I had done. The resemblances in our experiences, once I discovered them, were uncanny. Currency and inflation issues aside, my American antecedents—especially those of the antebellum period—differed from me in two important ways. Firstly, they visited their customers not on the day after Christmas but rather on New Year’s Day, a point to which I will return at the end of this column. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, in making their plea for money, the historical carriers did not mumble their requests but presented them more decorously in the form of printed broadside poems. These poems were written sometimes by the newspaper editor or one of his friends and sometimes by the carrier himself, but they were always presented from the carrier’s perspective and in the carrier’s voice. They are remarkable documents.

The typical newspaper carrier’s New Year’s address—as they were known—began with a salutation to the customer; mythologized the newsboy as the embodiment of Hermes or Mercury, messenger to the Gods; summarized the news of the year in brisk and vivid couplets; and concluded with a plea for money. Appearing first in the 1720s in sporadic numbers, the vogue for addresses caught on in the 1760s, and by the end of the eighteenth century almost every newspaper issued one. Writing from Portland, Maine, in January 1823, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow told a college classmate in Norridgewock, Maine, “We have Carriers’ and News-boys’ good wishes in abundance and I suppose they are plenty with you.”

They were plentiful indeed. A recent bibliography published by the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), covering the first century of the addresses, lists almost one thousand examples. Several thousand more exist for the mid- to late nineteenth century, when newspaper production and consumption exploded. Yet despite the AAS’s bibliography and the fact that almost all of the addresses are themselves available online, the genre has received almost no sustained scrutiny. The addresses are, in fact, perhaps the most extensive literary genre of the colonial and early national period about which practically nothing has been written. This is a shame because they are fascinating documents from which we can learn a great deal about artisanal culture, the commercialization of Christmas, changes within the newspaper trade, the development of the middle class, and changing perceptions of youth, labor, and leisure.

I recently had the chance to read about seven hundred of the carriers’ addresses while working on my first book, The Business of Letters (Stanford, Calif., 2008). My goal in that project was to excavate and interpret the various economic systems through which authors disseminated their written and printed words. My argument, in a nutshell, was that rather than being dominated and defined by a single, market-based economy, texts were disseminated through a number of different economies—charity, patronage, gift-exchange, credit network, competitive writing, and so on—each of which had its own distinct rules and regulations, modes and moralities, even currencies. Unlike almost all of the other literary materials I used, the carriers’ addresses made the terms on which they sought money, and the reasons for seeking it, quite explicit. Hardly any of the addresses failed to conclude without a crafty plea for payment, and the fact that there were so many examples written over so long a period simply made them all the more useful. In the final editorial cuts for the book, I chose to excise my discussion of the addresses, a move I always regretted because in addition to being literarily fascinating they were also economically perplexing.

The challenge of the addresses lay in identifying precisely the sort of economic arrangement of which they were a part. Was it a form of extortion, a kind of gift exchange, an instance of charity, a variety of purchase, or some other part of the economic repertoire? I could not say, nor did my own experiences as a newspaper carrier offer much insight. The ritual in which I participated as a teen, just like the one engaged in by those in colonial and early national America, was one that all my customers—including those who declined to participate—seemed to understand but that no one possessed the ability or inclination to verbalize. What kind of economic transaction could this be that was so compelling yet so fraught with reticence and the potential for embarrassment?

When I first began reading the addresses, I gave this a great deal of thought and came to see the bestowal of addresses and Christmas boxes as an example of tipping and the gratuity economy. To an extent I still do. After all, the tip itself is a highly fraught transaction characterized by reticence, awkwardness, and taxonomic indeterminacy. According to economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer, tips are situated “at the boundary of other critically different transfers, not quite a payment, not quite a bribe, not quite charity, but not quite a gift either.” Not quite any of these economies—indeed always a supplement to other economies rather than an independent one itself—the tip borrows elements from each, presupposing the social inequality of charity but the professed warmth of the gift, the obligatory force of a payment and the coercive freight of the bribe but melded to the discretionary pretense of a present. Tips are supplemental, supernumerary, gratuitous; indeed, they reflect a certain impossibility. It is not possible to define a tip on its own terms, that is to say, only in terms of other economies. Although solicited in the context of a determinate commercial transaction, the tip, in essence, was redundant, oxymoronic even, seeking something for nothing.

The monies associated with carriers’ addresses shared this same protean quality. They were not quite a payment for delivery, since this was included in the cost of the paper; they were not quite charity, since something was given as well as received; and they were not extortion, because of the ongoing nature of the relationship between the carrier and the customer, both of whom knew one another; yet they could not be considered gifts either, since they were not exchanged between equals but given to lower-class men by their social betters. The concept of the tip would seem to capture perfectly the nature of the carriers’ transaction in its ambiguity, its scripted, ritualized nature, its awkwardness, and its potential for social transgression, and I was at first quite happy to call the money the carriers’ received tips. That seemed easy enough.

The only problem is that even though the word tip was used in its modern sense as early as 1733, at precisely the same time that the carriers’ addresses were starting to appear, tip does not appear in even one of the seven hundred or so addresses at which I looked. The money for which the carriers asked was, rather, described as a “boon,” a “bounty,” “a gift,” a “blessing,” “a present,” “a reward,” a form of “charity,” and much else. Indeed, every economy other than tipping was invoked. This surfeit of names led me to three provisional conclusions. Firstly, even as they bestowed addresses on their customers, the carriers were seeking to define the transactions in which they were engaged in terms of economies other than tipping. Secondly, such acts of economic designation obscured the precise—which is to say tipping—nature of the transactions in question. And lastly, this obfuscation was designed to give what was essentially a discretionary bestowal the force of an obligatory act. While tipping, in essence, demanded something for nothing, the economic labels invoked by the carriers’ addresses, as one of them explained, required “something for something.”

In staking their ethical and economic claims, the carriers had recourse to three models of discretionary-obligatory exchange, each one intimately associated with the season between Christmas and New Year’s Day. These practices were gift exchange, charity, and wassailing. Each offered something for something, although with varying degrees of reciprocity, to say nothing of amity.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, New Year’s gift exchange was characterized by what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has called “balanced reciprocity,” where a gift was responded to with a counter-gift of approximately equal value and within an expeditious time frame. The something one gave was a gift, and the something for which it was given was a gift in return. The value-equivalency of the gifts in question meant that Christmas gift exchange by definition took place between social equals.

Charity, by contrast—indeed by definition—flowed from those higher on the socio-economic ladder to those on its lower rungs. Often bestowed at Christmas time, it reflected a patrician world where the rich took care of the poor and the poor repaid them with gratitude and compliance. The something of charity, in other words, was repaid with the something of deference.

The last and most striking Christmas exchange ritual was wassailing. In a typical wassail, a group of poorer men would “invade” a home at Christmas time, sing songs or perhaps perform a brief play, and then demand money or food. The wassailers would refuse to leave until they had been recompensed, and if they were forcibly ejected they would undertake a campaign of sabotage and destruction that often lasted for months at a time. A wassail, in other words, inverted the hierarchical model of the charitable exchange by offering a coercive parody of gift exchange. The poor offered something the rich did not want to receive and then demanded in payment something they did not want to give. Wassailing, it’s worth mentioning, was also a part of my childhood years, as I joined gangs of boys in knocking on doors and “singing”—I use the word loosely—a carol that included the memorable line, “Now we all want some figgy pudding and we won’t leave until we get some.” Usually we received money, not the mysterious “figgy pudding,” and our audiences were glad to be rid of us.

All three of these Christmas practices pressed moral claims to reciprocity based on a tenuous exchange of something for something. But the somethings offered and received, and the terms on which they were exchanged, were defined by sharp class differences. Indeed, as Stephen Nissenbaum has compellingly argued, the “battle” over the meaning of Christmas in colonial and national America was fought across just this class-based economic terrain, with different constituencies laying claim to legitimacy for differing economic rituals. The carriers’ addresses were one of the major fronts where this protracted battle was waged.

Some carriers understood their efforts as engagements in a charitable economy through which they petitioned their wealthy patrons for sustenance in exchange for gratitude. A 1767 address concludes with a postscript that is almost painfully subservient.

Your Humble Slave
Does Prostrate lie,
And Humbly crave
Your Charity.

Its excessive tone notwithstanding, it is clear that many newspaper subscribers understood the money they gave out on New Year’s Day in just such a way: as largesse flowing from the wealthy and cultured to the modest and poor. Writing in his diary on New Year’s Day 1801, Philadelphia merchant Thomas Cope described the arrival of “the paper carrier for his boon & the watchman for his New Year’s gift. I love to make a cheerful heart. The awkward scrape of the leg, the smile of satisfaction & the thankee sir, thankee, are a rich regard for the trifle bestowed.” Note that while Cope was dispensing his money, which he called a boon, he felt that he was being recompensed by the deference and gratitude of the carrier. My younger self probably had something similar in mind in clutching my hat while seeking a Christmas box; it was a reflexive gesture for a child of working-class parents living in East London, even if I didn’t fully grasp the implications of the act. It suggested that I knew my place. Charitable money always comes with strings attached, and in this case, the strings kept the lower orders bowing and scraping like deferential marionettes.

Many apprentice printers, however, were schooled in an artisanal republicanism that vaunted the manual trades and rejected as inappropriate such fawning. Writing to poet Charles Prentiss in 1807 to commission an address for his apprentices, newspaper editor Benjamin Russell was happy to come “in forma pauperis“—that is, as a beggar—but he was quite emphatic that his carriers would not assume that role. In describing what Prentiss should include in the address, Russell insisted that it should “conclude with something like, and not beggary.” Russell’s description is immensely revealing, for if there is any rhetorical trait that best characterizes the addresses, it is precisely this tendency to approximate but not quite imitate beggary. In seeking to ask, yet not beg, for money, the authors of the carriers’ addresses typically moved from the language of charity to the language of gift exchange and even wassailing.

In eighteenth-century America, Christmas gift exchange was marked by a powerful reciprocity: one gave a present and received one back, or on the other hand, one received a present and then offered a counter-gift. In arguing that what they were due from their customers was nothing more than a gift well-earned and deserved, the carriers often described a number of gifts they had, or would, offer in return. Typically, the carriers pointed to the broadside poem itself, which they depicted as a gift to their patrons and for which they expected a gift of money in return. The same year the carrier for the Post Boy and Advertiser prostrated himself upon the floor, the carrier of the Connecticut Gazette claimed that the broadside he was dishing out was his gift, which he presented on terms of equality with his customers.

And tho, to most, tis much more pleasant
To take a Gift than make a present
Yet, as for mine, I’m free to make it, 
As any soul can be to take it.

Give me a gift or not, the carrier seems to say, and see if I care, but take mine and you are at least in my debt.

The carrier for the 1791 Baltimore Gazette exploited the reciprocity inherent in this form of exchange still more when he concluded his address by writing,

Then Masters kind reward the Boy, 
Whose labours brings the News
To oblige you is his chief employ 
The GIFT you’ll not refuse.

His careful use of syntax helps to obscure whether the gift that will not be refused is the broadside the carrier is handing to his customer or the money the customer is giving him in return. More common still was the practice of making the traditional seasonal gift of a blessing. “I wish you a happy new year,” wrote one Massachusetts diarist in 1838, “is sounded from all most all lips.” Benedictions likewise run rampant through the carriers’ addresses, in which customers receive an endless barrage of May you alwayses, May you nevers, and May you oftens. A typical carriers’ blessing took the form of the hope that the customer would always be rich, never be poor, and often tip the newsboy.

While these nominal gift exchanges were the most typical strategy seen in carriers’ addresses, one can also find evidence of more coercive, and subversive, wassailing-type strategies, in which a gift, loosely construed, was inflicted upon the customer with the giver refusing to leave until they had received a counter-gift. A 1768 address captured the wassail spirit perfectly in concluding,

A small gratuity to your Swain 
Who trudges of’t from Lane to Lane, 
Thro’ thick and thin, with grateful Heart 
He will receive, and then depart ————.

The carrier of the Pennsylvania Ledger of 1778 noted likewise that as he had

. . . nothing left but Paper —
A piece of Silver—how ‘twould make me caper 
On wings of joy I’d disappear,
Nor trouble you again—till next NEW YEAR.

The implication in this jolly quatrain seems quite clear: if you want to make the carrier disappear, give him money; if you don’t he will (and it’s his word) “trouble” you. A similar threat is levied in the many addresses that include the phrase “hope I don’t intrude,” acknowledging tacitly that a wassail-like intrusion is precisely what is taking place (fig. 1). Intimations of the “figgy pudding” carol and its threat not to leave until fed are clear.

Sometimes the trouble threatened was more explicit still. Wrote a carrier for the New York Gazette in 1765,

My Memory’s bad—I confess I have mis’d 
Sometimes, a good Customer—named in my List
But a Gift would my Memory greatly assist.

Translation: if you “forget” to give me a tip, I will “forget” to deliver your paper. Such threats approximate that of the modern newsboy to shred the paper or, to use the American example, to dump it in a puddle at the end of the driveway rather than tossing it, neatly and accurately, onto the doormat. (The plastic wrappers in which most newspapers are now delivered would seem to have obviated this threat, although no doubt the resourceful carrier could work around it.)

So far, we have seen that the New Year’s address poems transformed the instability and ambiguity of the tip into a more determinate form of reciprocal exchange, one in which something is given for the something demanded, albeit in different social and economic configurations. Offers of amity, docility, and compliance were extended along with an open hand ready to receive cash. The most interesting addresses, however, are those that embraced the very ambiguity of the tip transaction and left the nature of the substitute exchange uncertain. Two addresses of 1790—one from the New York Weekly Museum, the other from the Pennsylvania Gazette—capture precisely this economic indeterminacy; in each, the author of the address draws elements from two or more of the three Christmas rituals to claim his money, leaving it unclear on what grounds the transaction is being authorized.

The address for the New York Weekly Museum opens with a tone of great deference and describes the carrier as a “humble” “votary” “duty bound” for life to collect and dispense the news (fig. 2). Positioning himself in this manner, it would appear that the carrier will petition for charity.

Yet as the poem proceeds, the author invokes a labor theory of value, according to which inasmuch as he has collected the news and, indeed, “rang’d the types” to make the poem, it is his property and his gift to the customer. Yet even here, the author hedges, for when he writes, “Though small the gift—pray don’t the same refuse,” it is unclear whether “the gift” refers to the author’s poetic prowess, in which case he is suing for a form of charity, or whether he is describing the actual material broadside as itself a “small gift,” in which case he is demanding a gift (“the same”) in exchange. Finally, as he closes the poem, he plays the recurrent theme of deference against a hint of wassailing, writing, “With due submission now I take my leave,/Soon as your GENEROUS BOUNTY I receive.” It seems to matter little to the carrier, in other words, what the precise basis for his remuneration is, but he won’t leave until he gets it.

His fellow carrier for the Pennsylvania Gazetteis equally uncertain about the nature of the transaction in which he is engaged (fig. 3). While in good sermonic fashion he offers a key text—”Charity hopeth all things”—the lines that follow it are riven with ambiguity.

Thus, Sirs, I’ve given you the text, 
You are the judges what comes next; 
A Christmas-Box, or New-Year’s Gift 
Will give your humble ser—- a lift. 

It is decidedly unclear here whether the carrier is actually asking for charity or not. Indeed, not only does he counterpose the traditional supplicant’s “Christmas-Box” with the more egalitarian “New Year’s Gift,” but his strategic use of suspension (“ser—-“) makes it possible for us to read him as either a literally self-effacing humble servant or as an equally literal sir. If a servant, he will receive the Christmas box and pay for it with his gratitude; if a sir, he is gifting his poem and receiving a New Year’s gift in exchange.

The poet’s survey of news for the previous year, 1789, makes his own preferences utterly clear, however, for he describes the social inversions of the French Revolution where “The rich are humbled and the great brought low/The poor are raised and the mighty bow,” an upheaval, he adds, which was “long foretold in ancient revelations.” Invoking his own economic revolution, even while hedging on his social revelation, the carrier comes before his customer a servant but demands the respect of a sir.

Such texts—and they could be multiplied greatly—suggest the ways the economic exchanges associated with the New Year rested on shifting ground, always offering something for something, and in the process defining class identity and class relationships. That ground, eventually, began to settle. While the period between the 1720s and the 1810s saw a liberal mix of claims to money based on charity, gift exchange, and wassailing, the number of wassails diminished greatly after the 1790s, as did the number of pleas for charity. The very last address in which I have found a wassail is dated 1831. By the 1830s, in fact, not only did most carriers’ addresses offer only benedictions for their money—benedictions, moreover, presented as to equals—but some began to eschew requests for money altogether. Although the evangelical Christian Register and reformist Liberator both issued carriers’ addresses for 1831, neither publication’s poem made any mention of money, either explicitly or otherwise.

Several reasons account for this shift in the tenor of the addresses. In the first place, the 1830s saw the rise of new modes of disseminating newspapers based not upon regular delivery but on ad hoc street sales. Beginning in New York City in the 1830s and spreading to most major metropolises through the antebellum era, the penny press altered readers’ relationships with newspapers and their vendors. The familiar carrier was displaced by an ever-growing and perpetually changing army of newsboys with whom ongoing relationships were unlikely; and annual subscriptions—together with annual rituals such as the gratuity—became less and less a part of the urban newspaper readers’ experience. Even those who had their papers delivered understood them in a different context. Secondly, the increasing dominance of the middle class and its values made both the groveling of the poor and their bellicosity equally unwelcome. The polite gave gifts to one another, and newspaper editors, seeking to ingratiate and identify with their readers, sought to do the same. Thus editors sought to replace the ephemeral and quickly read poems that only simulated a gift of value with genuinely valuable gifts, the most popular of which was the address that doubled as a calendar or almanac. That offered by the American Republican offers a clear transitional example, reading on the left like a traditional carriers’ verse and looking on the right like the sort of calendar my insurance agent sends me every year to remind me of the joys of our actuarial relationship (fig. 4).

Lastly, the very meaning of the holiday season was undergoing a seismic shift. Where New Year’s Eve was an often rowdy holiday when many of the normal laws of social arrangement were suspended and others were turned on their head, drinking was permitted and wassailing was common, the middle class came to favor a sanctified and peaceful Christmas Day instead as the focal point of their celebrations. Revealingly enough, the turn of the century saw the first carrier’s address designated for Christmas rather than New Year’s Day, and the number of Christmas-themed addresses increased through the antebellum period. Waged in England as well as America, it was the victory of the Christian middle class that made me seek my tip—or whatever one wishes to call it—on December 26 rather than on January 1.

Of course, that does not mean that the more subversive, or subservient, rituals associated with the New Year’s addresses disappeared completely; my own experiences in the 1980s prove that much. The cap clutching was an atavistic reminder of the ritual’s patrician history just as the paper mangling was a token of subaltern surliness. Indeed, the tensions and ambiguities inherent in the gratuity economy persist to this very day, as the smiley faces, thank yous, and mints we receive with our receipts at restaurants remind us. These small gestures and others like them suggest that today, as in our past, we still feel as if we should exchange something for something.

Further Reading:

Carriers’ addresses are plentifully available online. Brown University’s Digital Collections—which are available freely—include a site with more than nine hundred addresses. Those with institutional access can read yet more examples through Readex’s American Broadsides and Ephemera and Early American Imprints, Series 1, both offered in conjunction with the American Antiquarian Society. The AAS has also published Gerald D. McDonald, Stuart C. Sherman, and Mary T. Russo, comps., A Checklist of American Newspaper Carriers’ Addresses, 1720-1820 (Worcester, Mass., 2000), which is useful but by no means complete or completely free of error. The decline of the newspaper carrier and the rise of newspaper street sales are limned in Vincent Richard DiGirolamo, “Crying the News: Children, Street Work, and the American Press, 1830s-1920s” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1997). The two best studies of the New Year’s season are Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas (New York, 1996) and Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, 1995), both of which discuss the addresses in passing, describing them as—but only as—examples of wassailing. Historical and theoretical meditations on the American tip come from Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Pay Checks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies (Princeton, 1997); and Kerry Segrave, Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities (Jefferson, N.C., 1998). The best contemporary application of tip theory can be found in Peter Bearman’s Doormen (Chicago, 2005).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Leon Jackson is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His first book, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (2008), has just been published. Much of the work for this essay was completed while an NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society (2003-2004). He is now at work on a cultural history of shame and embarrassment in nineteenth-century America.

Ever since I first received my copy of Cindy Weinstein’s inventive, invigorating new book, I have puzzled over its title. The book’s appealing cover reproduces Samuel P. Avery’s engraving of a “universal time plate,” a circular block into which are embedded a few dozen clocks registering the “times of all nations.” The title of the book appears in the center of this image: “Time, Tense, and American Literature” in a bold, red sans serif font against a white background; and beneath that, in slightly smaller but italicized black type “When is Now?” What puzzles me is this: Which is title and which is subtitle? Size and sequence—typically we read from top to bottom—would seem to nominate the former as the book’s title (and this is indeed confirmed by both its copyright and its less ambiguous title page). Yet academic titling conventions, not to mention the italics, might suggest otherwise: those conventions typically call for crisp, evocative titles—like, say, “When is Now?”—followed by more flatly descriptive, enumerative subtitles. Curiously, Weinstein’s book seems to place the subtitle before the title, and the title comes after the subtitle. Why?

There is something apt about this little perplexity, I think: the book’s title cleverly performs a version of the “temporal shenanigans” (6) that constitute its main interest in a handful of American novels from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Using Edgar Allan Poe’s “temporally unhinged” Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a kind of fulcrum, Weinstein analyzes fictions by Charles Brockden Brown, Rebecca Harding Davis, Theodore Dreiser, and Edward P. Jones that foreground questions of time and “whose hold on sequence,” as she puts it, “is wobbly” (4). Focusing attention on the various “temporal markers” in each text—verb tenses and adverbs, words that indicate time or tempo, the appearance of clocks and time-pieces, references to dates—Weinstein reveals the ways the novels in her archive unsettle straightforward chronology and leave time in disarray, confounding what comes before and what comes after, and the verbal formations that help us tell the difference.

Weinstein’s playful term for this intricate, often disorienting “temporal grammar” is “tempo(e)rality.” Tempo(e)rality represents “a breakdown in temporal logic” (5); it is “what happens when “the narrative goes into a temporal rabbit hole” (4). Drawing on the insights of narratology, especially the narrative theory of Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette, Weinstein develops a method of reading that attends rigorously to “verbal minutiae” and exerts unusual pressure on temporal terms and phrases like “while,” “first,” “at length,” “now and then,” or “would.” The result is a series of dazzling readings that identify, with a remarkable level of precision, what it is that makes the experience of reading a novel like Edgar Huntly or An American Tragedy so very strange and frequently disorienting. Weinstein reveals, for instance, the “condition of delay” (31) that characterizes the narrative movement (or lack thereof) in Edgar Huntly, a novel in which “the perpetual postponement of action becomes the action” (31). In her reading of An American Tragedy, she concentrates on Dreiser’s odd stylistic penchant for avoiding past tense verbs in favor of present participles and gerunds in an attempt to capture the presentness of the present moment, despite the fact that the novel is a past tense narrative. And her concluding chapter on The Known World proceeds by way of a detailed, sustained analysis of the “tricky word” would, which helps Jones to “harness the power of prolepsis” (110).

On this, the micro-level, the book is a tour de force of close reading and a reminder, if one needs reminding, of the pleasures and rewards of intense, prolonged scrutiny of the verbal complexities of literary texts. An exquisite reader, Weinstein models a method of analysis that has a great deal to teach about “how to read time” (8). Yet Time, Tense, and American Literature is not solely concerned with the strictly aesthetic dimensions of literary fiction. Weinstein also seeks to account for her chosen texts’ temporal intricacies by situating them “in the time of their production” (8). Which is to say that the book also tells a “macro-story that reads temporal patterns in dialectical relation to particular historical contexts” (5). So however much the narratives she treats might themselves seem to be “temporally at sea,” they are always nevertheless “anchored by a historical moment” (12). For example, Edgar Huntly’s preoccupation with hesitation and paralyzing deliberation mirrors the temporal conditions of debates over ratification of the Constitution: the Federalists’ insistence that “the time is now” versus the anti-Federalists seemingly endless deferrals. Or in Pym, the text’s unsettling of a temporal zero degree—a “now” point against which to measure before and after—is at odds with its commitment to the stabilizing force of conventional racial hierarchies. The novel’s “aesthetic power has the alarming effect of obstructing [its] ideological perspective” (42). And in her chapter on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar, Weinstein argues that “the temporal disorderliness reflects the experience of rupture and trauma that was the Civil War” (74).

As startling as Weinstein’s analyses typically are, however, her commitment to historicism turns out to be, for me at least, the book’s more surprising claim. Weinstein aligns Time, Tense, and American Literature with the recent “temporal turn” in American literary studies, exemplified in recent books by Wai Chee Dimock, Lloyd Pratt, and Dana Luciano, for example. Yet Weinstein resists the temporal turn when its investments in alternative temporalities lead scholars to question practices of periodization (one thinks here of Cody Marrs’s recent Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War) or to disrupt what I would describe as conventional historicist practices. Following Valerie Traub, Weinstein maintains that temporal studies “need not and should not be divorced from historical inquiry” (14). With this I agree and, to be sure, the connections Weinstein makes between texts and contexts—the temporal dimension of the ratification debates, for instance, or the links between Dreiser’s stylistic idiosyncrasies and William James’s work on time consciousness— are fascinating. Yet Weinstein’s particular form of historicist practice also leaves unexamined some questions about what constitutes historical inquiry and what it means to historicize.

Those questions arise from Weinstein’s tacit distinction between the time of (textual) narrative and the time of (perhaps extra-textual) history, the former, as Weinstein’s readings so vividly demonstrate, wayward and variable, and the latter seemingly stable and secure. Yet Weinstein’s final chapter itself collapses this dichotomy and ultimately unsettles, rather than adheres to, the Jamesonian imperative to “always historicize!” (14). That is, the historical context Weinstein chooses for her reading of The Known World is U.S. slavery. The chapter’s historical archive includes, for example, antebellum slave narratives as well as periodical articles, court decisions, and treatises that debate the legal status of slaves. Weinstein’s handling of these materials and their relation to Jones’s novel is characteristically perceptive and absorbing. Yet her treatment might also be seen as methodologically tenuous. After all, antebellum slavery is the context of the novel’s setting, not of its time of production. (In the same way, 1787, the year of the ratification debates, is the year the action of Edgar Huntly takes place; the novel was published in 1799). According to the logic of historicist contextualization, then, Weinstein’s reading is itself unhistoricist. Which, I want to say, I point out less as a criticism than as a condition of inevitability—since contexts, too, are temporal narrative devices.

These misgivings about Weinstein’s implicit theory of history aside, Time, Tense, and American Literature is a tremendously engaging book, a major contribution both to the temporal turn and, in its method of reading time, to the renewed interest in aesthetics and new formalisms. It also delivers on its promise to establish a new and surprising American novelistic tradition—one that places Poe, of all American novelists!—at its center.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

Jeffrey Insko is associate professor of English at Oakland University in Michigan, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. He is completing a manuscript titled The Ever-Present Now: Time, History, and Antebellum American Writing.

No, this detailed depiction doesn’t come from the ABC hit series, Touched by an Angel. It was written, in Latin, by none other than Cotton Mather, arguably one of New England’s most renowned and learned ministers. Recorded in his diary probably in 1685, Mather’s vision of a winged, beardless angel sporting a “splendid tiara” is surprising, virtually unprecedented. Puritan divines like Mather usually read portents and wonders negatively, as signs of God’s displeasure. They could accept that devils came to earth. Angels or God’s direct intercessions were another matter. Cotton’s father, Reverend Increase Mather (the first president of Harvard College and a prominent Boston minister) warned that angels must never be worshipped, and of this much he was sure: “[T]he Angelical Nature is invisible to bodily eyes.” Yet despite his father’s reservations (and no doubt even his own), Cotton Mather saw an angel in glorious splendor.

Why were Puritans more skeptical of benevolent angels than of fallen ones? And why did they doubt women’s sightings of these dubious creatures even more than men’s? These are important questions, ones that shed light on the pessimism of Puritan theology, on the misanthropy with which they interpreted the doctrine of predestination, and on their practical devaluation of women. All humans, they believed, were either doomed or saved, but it was far easier for a person to earn damnation than it was for any man or woman to merit salvation. Indeed, merit had nothing to do with it; you could effortlessly slide into hell, but you could not climb into heaven however many good deeds and works of charity you stood upon. Puritan fears were darker than their faith was bright, and consequently, they thought a spirit purporting to be a good angel was far more likely to be the devil in disguise. And, as we shall see, they believed women more susceptible than men to Satan’s subterfuge.

Puritan fears were darker than their faith was bright, and consequently, they thought a spirit purporting to be a good angel was far more likely to be the devil in disguise.

Puritans treated angels skeptically, yet because of their ubiquitous presence in Scripture, they could not be discounted entirely. Ministers sometimes attributed miraculous healing to divine intervention, tentatively linking curing to angels. Increase Mather pointed to the ways in which biblical characters, such as Daniel, had been healed and suggested that ordinary people might also benefit from angels. In The Angel of Bethesda, the colonies’ first complete medical guide, Cotton Mather recounted tales of several people who had remedies presented to them in dreams as they slept, or of men and women so miserably ill that doctors could do nothing more for them, yet who achieved full and dramatic recoveries due to “the Wonderful Work which He had wrought upon” them. Mather cautiously, but unshakably, suggested the direct involvement of angels, though he feared arousing “Unwarrantable Superstitions, or Affectations.” Nevertheless, he admitted that “It is possible there may be more of the Angelical Ministry, than we are Ordinarily aware of.” Angels operated covertly, “Behind the Curtain,” he suggested, by leaving “Impressions on the Mind” of physicians, providing them with information about cures available only through this “Insensible Manuduction.” Indeed, he hinted, his very own book, The Angel of Bethesda, might in fact have been a product of the angelic ministry’s guiding hand.

Angels’ powers were as broad as they were elusive. Increase Mather denied them any independent activity but nonetheless suggested they could be useful to the faithful. “There are Thousands of Thousands, yea, Myriads of Myriads of them,” he contended. “This we are sure of.” Angels were “serviceable” to believers, in order that they might better serve God, and thus wielded extraordinary power, enough “to manage and apply all the Elements, to make Thunders and Lightenings, and Earthquakes!” They answered believers’ prayers; they protected them from enemies; and they relieved people of “Wants, of Straits, of Difficulties.” Like God, angels watched over. Yet they also simply watched. Increase Mather warned, “Remember, that the Angels are the Spectators of your Behavior. Behave your selves, as having the Eyes of the Angels on you. Often think, Is not an Angel standing by?”

How could one know if supernatural interference was demonic or angelic? Ministers and laity alike struggled with this question. According to Paul in Corinthians, Satan frequently disguised himself as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14). Satan may indeed attempt this transformation, Puritans believed, in order to disarm his victims and lure souls away from Christ. Believers had to be on guard for such dangerous deceptions. Increase Mather was particularly concerned with trickery. “How easy then is it for Daemons, who have a perfect Understanding in Opticks, and in the Power of Nature to deceive the Eyes, and delude the Imaginations of Silly Mortals?” Despite angels’ invisibility, Mather believed that “Good Angels do not hide themselves in the dark under ambiguities, but declare their messages clearly.” Yet for Increase and Cotton Mather alike, an angel’s credibility seemed to depend on what the apparition’s messages were and to whom they were offered.

Two examples illustrate both Mathers’ wariness when it came to angels visibly or audibly declaring their messages clearly to ordinary people, especially women. In 1694, an unnamed female congregant in Boston’s North Church heard a voice which she initially assumed was that of an angel, but which Cotton Mather ascertained most likely was not. At first suspicious that the woman might be the victim of a “loose Imagination,” Mather came to believe the “Invisible Whisperer” was indeed angelic when it told the woman secrets that she otherwise could not have known. But later two factors caused Mather to change his mind and ultimately doubt the vision’s genuineness. First, under the alleged angel’s guidance, it seemed that the young woman no longer wanted to visit Mather, believing as he put it, “the Lord had made her Pastor.” In addition, the spirit apparently spread malicious gossip that Mather deemed inconsistent with the behavior of a benevolent angel, and so he became convinced that the voices “had no Angelical Aspect.” He warned his parishioner to ignore the voice. Heeding his advice, she said to her apparition, “I desire no more to hear from you; Mr. Mather saies you are a Divel, and I am afraid you are. If you are an Angel of the Lord, give mee a Proof of it.” The spirit apparently could not provide the evidence and never returned, satisfying Mather that he had successfully aborted “Witchcraft of the most explicit sort.”

Another unnamed female North Church parishioner saw an angel while she sat in Cotton Mather’s study for religious counseling. After entering a trance-like state, she revived to describe “a most Glorious Appearance of An Angel in a Shining Apparel.” Mather admonished her to be cautious of diabolical appearances; after she left him he shared his apprehensions with his father, who concurred that Satan might be involved. Later at a women-only prayer meeting, she was visited again, this time by more than one angel, with a message for both her and Mather. One of the spirits directly confronted Mather’s skepticism: “Our Friend Mather is Apt to doubt we are good Angels, but tell him for to Convince him that we are these things, for he’ll be here in half an hour, that he’s now Studying Such a Sermon on Such a Text, and that such and such Thoughts have occur’d to him lately, for we are assisting him in his Composure of and lately Suggested such thoughts to his Mind[.]” The angel’s prophecy turned out to be accurate; upon his arrival, Mather admitted that he had been studying that particular sermon. In the end the angels told the woman that because their appearance troubled Increase Mather, “we will[,] because we loath to grieve him, never visit you anymore.”

In both of these cases, the sighted angels authenticated themselves by knowing things otherwise unknowable to their subjects. But it was precisely this kind of secret knowledge that made angel sightings suspect. Puritans construed any sort of providential experience as a revelation, a dangerous step toward claiming certain knowledge of God’s plans for the future. Given their belief in predestination, where one’s spiritual destiny–election or damnation–remained unknown to mortals until Judgment Day, Puritans simultaneously searched for divine knowledge and shunned alleged demonstrations of spiritual assurance. They wanted to know their futures after death but contented themselves with ambiguity, searching instead for signs that might provide hints (but never absolute certainty) about their ultimate fate.

Cotton Mather’s own dramatic angel sighting remained within the bounds of theological plausibility because the spirit did not speculate on Mather’s destiny. Instead the shining, winged figure dressed in white foretold Mather’s great influence on earth through his writings and publishing. “[T]he fate of this youth should be to find full expression for what in him was best,” said the angel, and he predicted Mather’s authority would spread “not only in America, but in Europe” as well. Mather had no trouble justifying his own angel sighting, even though it contradicted his father’s insistence on angel invisibility. “I do now beleeve,” he wrote, “that some great Things are to bee done for mee, by the Angels of God.” If angels did help him, he promised not to abuse that privilege; he would continue to do God’s work by making himself more useful to the sick and poor, for example. In addition, Mather was quite conscious of his responsibility to be discreet, confiding in his diary that he would conceal “with all prudent Secrecy, whatever extraordinary Things, I may perceive done for mee by the Angels, who love Secrecy in their Administrations.”

Mather, as a powerful minister, had confidence in what he saw, and in his right to see it. He had less confidence in the visions of his parishioners, especially if they were women. Precisely because women were considered more likely to succumb to Satan’s temptations, they were thought less likely to be the direct or particular beneficiaries of angelical apparitions. Increase Mather doubted especially those reports in which women alone had seen angelic visitors; in his view, the chances that Satan had simply deluded these women were high. Mather reasoned, “if those White Angels appear to Females only, who are the weaker Sex, and more easy to be imposed on, that renders the case yet the more suspicious.” In “former dark ages,” he explained, many women achieved fame due to “pretended Angelical Apparitions and Revelations.” A noted anti-Catholic, Mather likely referred to female Catholic mystics, like Teresa of Avila, whom he presumed received spurious revelations. Mather urged his Protestant readers to rest assured: “if ever an Age for Angelical Apparitions shall come, no question but men, and not women only will be honoured with their Visage.”

The elder Mather apparently had hidden talents as a diviner of the future, for an age of angelical apparitions did come in the eighteenth century. And, as he predicted, both men and women claimed to see these divine beings. Eighteenth-century didactic verses and spiritual narratives betray a shift in religious world view: through the miraculous intercession of a heavenly messenger, hopeful souls searched more actively and optimistically for their ultimate destination and more often became convinced, because an angel told them so, that they were among the saved.

The story Heavenly Damsel, published anonymously in the 1750s, portrayed a girl’s active search for her ultimate destination, rather than a passive wait for divine grace: “Her Thoughts her Words her Actions were divine / How to gain Heaven she spent all her Time.” And for this she was rewarded. She had stopped to read and contemplate chapter 27 of Matthew on her way home from school one day when, out of nowhere, a “Person in bright Rayment, whose Hair was as White as Flaxen and whose Face shone like Gold approached her, and spake unto her.” The angel said to her, “Dear Child when thou of Life are dispossest, Thy Soul shall go into eternal Rest, With God and Christ, with Saints and Angels dwell.” Surprised by the angel’s presence and ecstatic about his message, the girl related to her mother the unusual happenings and went to bed. True to the angel’s word, the next day she became ill and later died, calling for the blessed angels to guide her to the hereafter.

The democratization of American religion has been well documented. Ministerial authority eroded, established churches felt the challenges of new denominations like Baptists and Methodists, and church membership expanded as the religious world became diverse and inclusive. Widespread angel sightings suggest that an increased sense of access to the supernatural as a means of knowing one’s ultimate destiny must be considered a part of that popularizing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trend. In the seventeenth century, certain knowledge of one’s future, however conveyed, signaled indisputable damnation, something believers hoped to avoid. By the beginning of the Great Awakening in the 1730s, angel sightings and accompanying divine revelation no longer carried the negative connotations of a century earlier.

As the religious climate changed, not only did the gender of angel witnesses change; so too did the gender of the angels themselves. By the nineteenth century, believers usually claimed to see or hear female angels with long flowing hair and white robes, a far cry from Mather’s masculine, loin-girded angel. The feminization of angels was a gradual process, and by no means completely consistent. It developed in unison with a kinder, gentler religious sensibility, one in which salvation was available potentially to all believers, and in which women and men alike could justify their optimism about their futures by claiming an angel of their own.

Today angels seem to be everywhere in American culture, as a glance at the “Spirituality” section of any mainstream bookstore or a look at this week’s television listings will attest. Contemporary observers “see” angels regularly, whether as personal guardians, spiritual leaders, healers, or comforters. Countless books and workshops promise to help the hopeful, primarily women, connect with these messengers from heaven. While the Hallmark card version of angels tends to be female or feminine, witnesses describe their own spirits variously: some are genderless beings, others mysterious voices or invisible hands, still others female or male strangers that help them out of impossible binds, even life-threatening situations. Grace is the order of the day; rarely do today’s apparitions prophesy doom. Today’s angels signify and confirm ordinary people’s intimate and favorable relationship with the divine, affirm the certitude of their salvation, and offer therapeutic personal assistance, all spiritual messages that were anathemas in the Mathers’ world.

Further Reading

On the dating of the angel sighting, see David Levin, “When Did Cotton Mather See the Angel,” Early American Literature 15 (1980-81): 271-75, and Kenneth Silverman’s review of Mather’s Paterna, in Early American Literature 15 (1980): 80-87; on the Puritan mistrust of miracles in the modern age, see Robert Bruce Mullin, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 1997). Increase Mather wrote about angels in several sermons, most fully in Angelographia, or A Discourse Concerning the Nature and Power of the Holy Angels, and the Great Benefit which the True Fearers of GOD Receive by their Ministry (Boston, 1696). Cotton Mather explained the connection between healing and angels in his comprehensive medical manual, published posthumously, The Angel of Bethesda: An Essay Upon the Common Maladies of Mankind (Barre, Mass., 1972). Mather’s sermon notes, located at the American Antiquarian Society, also contain his thoughts on angels. I’d like to gratefully acknowledge the American Antiquarian Society for their assistance and support.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.3 (March, 2001).

Elizabeth Reis is the author of Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca, NY., 1997) and the editor of Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America (Wilmington, Del., 1998) and American Sexual Histories: Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History (Malden, Mass., 2001). Reis teaches at the University of Oregon and is writing a book about the history of angel belief in America.

On March 11, 2012, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a cover story about a small town in western New York where eighteen female high school students had recently begun twitching uncontrollably. One bruised her face with her own cell phone; others uttered involuntary cries in the school halls which teachers tried bravely to ignore. Fears of toxic contamination from an old train wreck brought social activist Erin Brockovich to the scene, while psychologists made the more widely persuasive diagnosis of conversion disorder, or—since multiple individuals were involved—mass psychogenic illness. Environmentally induced malady or psychosomatic pathology? In this debate, perhaps even more than the girls’ behaviors alone, the contorted bodies of Le Roy, New York, powerfully suggest another group of twitching girls from almost two centuries before. There too, leading intellectuals used the events of a town few had heard of—Northampton, Massachusetts—to justify conflicting worldviews by making exemplary subjects of young women undergoing a shared affliction. Characterized by “outcries, faintings, convulsions and such like,” their behavior was described in eerily similar terms to that of the Le Roy girls with their “facial tics, body twitches, vocal outbursts, seizures.” Spastic girls, writhing girls, girls in pain, girls out of control. All made for good reading, in 1737 as again in 2012.

Both events share key features: from the use of the term “conversion,” to the attention brought to bear on an otherwise unremarkable location, to public figures’ use of the phenomenon for self-promotion, to the predominance of women in their exposition. In all these arenas, we will see that the struggle to interpret these behaviors correctly was also a struggle about social order. The crisis in Le Roy—a town of less than 10,000 in New York’s rust belt, between Rochester and Buffalo—began with one person, a seventeen-year-old high school cheerleader who woke up from a nap in the fall of 2011 experiencing facial spasms. Within a couple of months, three other girls, two of them cheerleaders, had similar symptoms, including stuttering and uncontrollable tics. Eventually, at least eighteen members of the high school were afflicted, all teenage girls except for two. The seemingly inexplicable nature of this contagion made for widespread media coverage (including local TV news, live appearances on “Dr. Drew,” online reporting by well-established sites such as The Daily Beast, and profiles in some of the nation’s most august print outlets). As public attention has diminished (and with it the strange combination of stress and sudden fame that may have fueled the symptoms in the first place), many individuals have recovered. Slightly less than a year after that fateful nap, one local station reported that the girls’ physical condition had improved significantly, with many living “symptom-free.” As for the conditions that contributed to the malady—which could range from widespread economic decline, to the absence of fathers in most sufferers’ lives, to the sometimes brutal social hierarchies of high school—they are perhaps even more mysterious, and more recalcitrant, than the tics themselves.

This essay explores the connection between these two related historical phenomena. It asks why we continue to see shared involuntary behaviors among young women in such oppositional terms, and what the stakes are behind our focus on female adolescents as a barometer of the state of our communities. Why, in the words of New Hampshire minister Ethan Smith in 1815, must we make “instructive biography” out of female behavior that is extravagantly, pointedly not intended to be didactic? The more the experience itself seems to resist coherent interpretation (whether by being characterized by erratic behavior, or spreading from one to another through unknown means), the more various authorities invest in their own particular readings, each representative of a competing social viewpoint. As opposing groups fight to defend antagonistic beliefs, their accounts take on a life of their own, such that the women’s existence becomes most important not in and of itself but rather as a register of broader cultural struggles. Somehow, bouts of intense, shared, atypical experience among young women attract attention both on the basis of their particular dramatic appeal and as uniquely pliable discourses in the service of ideological debate.

And yet these efforts to turn female experience into a “teachable moment” meet with curious resistance in the socially specific and physically freighted details that lard the narratives. Instructive biography stumbles under the weight of its own evidence, which compels our attention for reasons less salubrious than we might think or wish. While we may not share recent New York Times letter-writer Mark Schreiner’s view, regarding the events of Le Roy, that “it is a crime that Americans living in other places would watch all this for their entertainment,” it is undeniable that in both centuries, the suffering of otherwise unexceptional individuals brought their towns to the attention of a far-flung public. No one would have known about either event had the curiosity of strangers not driven an outpouring of print on the subject. And it is this curiosity, even more than the opposing viewpoints it allowed to see the light of day, that makes seemingly passive bystanders—guilty of no more than buying a New Yorker—active partners in putting teenage girls to particular uses. Regardless of where we place our sympathies, as readers, TV-watchers, Internet surfers and more, we are complicit in what we choose to consume. And despite our recent self-consciousness about the potentially insidious nature of celebrity culture, whether for driving princesses (literally) to their death or for glorifying the salacious over the significant, the scandal of Northampton reminds us that the hunger for what Joseph Roach calls “intimate authentication” is nothing new. In fact, celebrity might be called the “enthusiasm” of our moment.