I.

I did not expect to find Samson Occom at the Mohegan Sun Casino–”300,000 square feet of gaming excitement”–in Uncasville, Connecticut. But there he was, an eighteenth-century Mohegan missionary, etched into the wall in one of the casino’s twenty-nine restaurants. I was hunched over a cup of clam chowder, trying to recover my senses from snow-blindness brought on by four days reading Occom’s archived manuscripts at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, four hours north of Uncasville. Now, dining at the Mohegan Territory Diner, my bleariness was compounded by the overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke and the electronic din of slot machines. Lifting my eyes from my lunch, I glanced up at the giant reproduction of an 1861 reservation map plastered onto the wall. And there I spied a dot located just off the New London turnpike in the heart of the Mohegan Reservation: “Occom house.” How did Samson Occom get here?

Born in 1723, near Uncasville, Occom was raised by a traditional Mohegan family, before converting to Christianity during the Great Awakening and seeking a college-preparatory education from the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock. As an author, itinerant minister, fundraiser for Dartmouth College, tribal politician, and leader of an intertribal Christian separatist movement, Occom developed an indigenous brand of Christianity that promoted American Indian political independence and spiritual vitality during an era of rapid decline for many New England Indian communities. His archive of letters, journals, sermons, and hymns is the largest extant body of American Indian Anglophone writing from the colonial era. It documents the marginal, often fragile political and economic existence of American Indian communities in eighteenth-century New England and New York, as well as Occom’s struggle to support his wife Mary and their ten children.

Occom’s writings communicate a deep sense of the hunger, wet, and cold that characterized subsistence living in early New England and New York, especially their impoverished American Indian communities. For four feverish days at Dartmouth, I followed Occom and his fellow Native missionaries as they argued in vain for fair pay from missionary societies, bargained endlessly with creditors, and struggled to maintain tribal land bases against predatory white tenants and speculators. To get by, Samson Occom carved bowls and bound books. He darned his own socks. He chased his only horse–an especially wayward mare–across pages and pages of marshes and wet fields, until he found her, legs broken, dead.

I left the Dartmouth archive saturated with a sense of the tenuousness of Mohegan life in eighteenth-century New England. A few hours later, I arrived for the first time at the Mohegan Sun Casino complex. I parked my rental car in the six-story “Indian Summer” garage, then walked the path circling the perimeter of the “Casino of the Earth” in simple astonishment. I have visited tribal casinos in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, but none of them compare to the Mohegan Sun: its arching domes glittering with stars, shielded by giant banshells painted with tribal designs; the casino itself mapped on a four-directions, four-seasons axis; thirteen seasonal moons marking its circular perimeter; corn, squash, and beans “Three Sisters” designs woven into the carpet; frame longhouse and Indian stockades straddling casino entrances; animatronic wolves perched on stone outlooks hovering over the “Wolf Den” gaming area; and Pendleton-blanket covered chairs in the diners. 

As I lapped the Casino of the Earth, I laughed out loud marveling at the strange twists of history. I am an early American literary historian. I descend from the Puritans, but I tend to root for the Indians. I like texts thick with ironic signifying and secret codes, texts that fold history back on itself. I did not expect to find Samson Occom at the Mohegan Sun, but I should not have been surprised. Native Americans in New England have always had to contend with colonial expectations of what Indianness should look like. Their livelihoods have often depended on it. The Mohegan Sun Casino is a brilliant, unsettling monument to this long historical negotiation.

II.

Money troubles followed Samson Occom his entire writing life. His first letter dates from 1752, when Occom was stationed as a schoolmaster among the Montauk tribe on Long Island. He wrote, “I have not Receiv’d a peney from the Gentlemen at Boston . . . and I am now Driven to the want, almost, of every thing.” During the early years of his career, when he was employed by religious societies, Occom typically received a fraction of what was paid white missionaries. “Now You See What difference they made between me and other Missionaries,” Occom would later remark. “They gave me 180 Pounds for 12 years Service, which they gave for one years Service in another Mission– . . . what can be the Reason? . . . I believe it is because I am [a] poor Indian.”

From 1765 to 1768, Occom traveled to England as a fundraiser for Moor’s Indian Charity School, an educational experiment designed by the Yale-educated New Light minister Eleazar Wheelock to train Native missionaries. Throughout his tour, Occom was ogled, scrutinized, mocked, misrepresented, interrogated, and exoticized. Wheelock’s American rivals accused Occom of imposture, declaring it impossible that in one generation a traditional Mohegan could become an ordained minister. Occom wrote to Wheelock in 1765, “They further affirm, I was bro’t up Regularly and a Christian all my Days, Some Say, I cant Talk Indian, others Say I Cant read.” Despite these indignities, Occom managed to raise thirteen thousand pounds. “I was quite Willing to become a Gazing Stock, Yea Even a Laughing Stock, in Strange Countries to Promote your Cause,” he remembered bitterly in a letter to Wheelock. Wheelock soon phased out admissions of Native American students and moved Moor’s Indian Charity School to Hanover, New Hampshire. It became Dartmouth College.

In 1768, Occom composed a short autobiographical narrative, in the hopes that he could once and for all establish his identity on his own terms. “Having Seen and heard Several Representations, in England and Scotland, made by Some gentlemen in America, Concerning me, and finding many gross Mistakes in their Account,—I thought it my Duty to give a Short Plain and Honest Account of myself, that those who may hereafter see it, may know the Truth Concerning me.” Occom affirmed that he had been brought up a “Heathen,” in “Heathenism,” choosing words that squared with his white audiences’ vocabularies and expectations. He included ethnographic details that also satisfied his readers’ notions of the cultural distinctions that supposedly separated American Indians from Europeans: “Neither did we Cultivate our Land, nor kept any Sort of Creatures except Dogs, Which We Used in Hunting; and Dwelt in Wigwams, These are a Sort of Tents, Coverd with Matts, made of Flags.” A few paragraphs later, Occom repeated this autoethnographic detail, describing his home at Montauk, Long Island, in the 1760s: “I Dwelt in a Wigwam, a Small Hutt fraimed with Small Poles and Coverd with Matts made of Flags.” The repetition is revealing. When he wrote this narrative in 1768, Occom was living in a wood-frame house in Uncasville. But he knew that the English colonial imagination coded wigwams, not frame houses, as Indian, and proving his identity and defending his integrity meant satisfying to some extent the English colonial imagination of Indianness.

III.

Just as Samson Occom had to prove he was really “Indian” in terms familiar and comfortable to his English and Anglo-American audiences, American Indians today are often called upon to answer non-Indian expectations about how “real” Indians should look and act. This points to an abiding paradox at the heart of American Indian tribal sovereignty: in order to access federal resources and enact certain forms of institutional self-governance, tribes must win “recognition” from the federal government. The enactment of self-determination in the public sphere is also mediated by dominant cultural expectations of Indianness. Tribal gaming has been so controversial in part because it challenges romantic notions of Native Americans as essentially precapitalist peoples.

Reaction to Indian gaming has been especially fierce in the state of Connecticut, home to both the Mohegan Sun and the Mashantucket Pequot Foxwoods casinos. Tribal gaming opponents in that state and elsewhere have challenged the legitimacy of American Indian tribes and of the federal recognition processes through which these tribes have won the right to operate casinos on reservation lands. Twenty Connecticut communities petitioned for a moratorium on tribal recognition in May 2001. They charged that opportunistic self-proclaimed “Indians” were bamboozling the federal government into granting them recognition.

Among American Indian tribes, winning federal recognition is not viewed as an easy prospect. It can be a costly and difficult process. It requires that tribes document hundreds of years of continuous tribal self-governance, continuous occupation of traditional tribal lands, and continuous observance of cultural practices. Colonial conditions including war, impoverishment, political upheaval, and removal have made mustering this kind of documentation exceedingly difficult if not impossible. In fact, the survival of some tribal communities, traditional governments, and cultural practices has historically depended upon the evasion of colonial surveillance and government documentation and regulation. 

During the eighteenth century, colonial overseers purposefully disrupted the traditional Mohegan tribal sachemship that had long resided with the Uncas family. In protest, Samson Occom and his generation founded separatist Indian Christian churches as spaces for community self-governance and self-determination. Occom led many Christian Mohegans away from Connecticut in 1785, to join with other Christian southern New England tribal members in exodus to Brotherton, New York. His sister Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon did not make the journey. Instead, she stayed home in Uncasville and assumed a leadership role in tribal affairs. Historians have observed that what happened at Mohegan also happened among the Choctaw, Creek, and other Removal-era tribal communities: female-headed tribal factions tended to resist removal from traditional lands, even when it cost them formal recognition from the federal government; male-headed tribal factions developed male-focused tribal governance and land ownership systems recognized as legitimate by federal Indian overseers and broader Euro-American society.

In 1831, during the Jacksonian era of Indian Removal, Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon, her daughter Lucy Tantaquidgeon Teecomwas, and her granddaughter Cynthia Teecomas Hoscoat deeded a plot of land on Mohegan Hill to tribal ownership for the building of a community church. These women understood that it would be strategically important to the continuance of the Mohegan on traditional lands to escape removal by demonstrating themselves a “Christianized” people. The Mohegan Congregational Church has remained a key venue of tribal political, social, and cultural life ever since. Even when tribal treaty relationships with the federal government were terminated in 1860s and 1870s, the traditional matrilineal tribal leadership remained intact through the church’s Ladies Sewing Society. The half-acre on which the church stands is the only plot of land that remained continuously in tribal ownership. Proving their ownership of that plot of land and proving the female line of leadership that began with Lucy Occom was critical to the Mohegan tribe’s successful petition for reinstatement of federal recognition in 1994.

American Indian tribes must document continuous histories in order to win federally recognized powers of self-determination that make casino gaming possible. Now, casinos are funding initiatives to restore and continue tribal cultural and historical traditions. The Mashantucket Pequots have devoted Foxwoods revenues to the construction and maintenance of an enviable museum, library, and archive—employing at least one full-time manuscript archivist—on the grounds of the tribal complex. The Mohegans are also invested in preserving and perpetuating their culture. “Aquay / Greetings, Welcome to the Mohegan Indian Reservation. Mundo Wigo [The Creator is Good],” read the green road signs at the tribal reservation boundaries. With gaming revenues, they undertook a million-dollar restoration of the aging and fragile Mohegan Congregational Church in 2003. Without the Mohegan Congregational Church, there would probably be no Mohegan Sun Casino; without revenues from the Mohegan Sun Casino, the church might not be standing today. The beautifully restored white clapboard structure stands about a mile down the road from the Mohegan Sun. The tribe also maintains a park and burial grounds at Shantok on the bluff overlooking the Thames River. Signs provide park information and regulations in both English and Mohegan languages. Riverside trails are littered with crushed clam shells, a reminder of the aquacultural practices at the heart of traditional Mohegan life, practices that were interrupted by colonial incursion and that are being revived—thanks to gaming revenue—in tribal oyster and clam farms in Long Island Sound and area rivers. 

History is also built into the Mohegan Sun Casino. It is an exceptionally smart space, one designed to both confirm and redirect our ideas of New England Indian life and history. There are, of course, the hyperreal mobilizations of the familiarly iconic “Indian,” designed to establish once and for all, beyond the question of federal recognition, beyond the interrogation of gaming critics, that the Mohegans are indeed an American Indian tribe. But there are also more subtle and profound memorializations of Mohegan tribal history. The casino houses an unassuming life-size statue of legendary modern Mohegan medicine woman and anthropologist Gladys Tantaquidgeon (1899-present). Fidelia’s Restaurant (located next door to Michael Jordan’s Steak House) is named after Fidelia Hoscott Fielding (1827-1908), the last fluent speaker of Mohegan dialect and an honored traditional culture keeper. The Hall of the Lost Tribes—a smoke-free gaming room—features the marks of sachems of thirteen extinct Connecticut Indian tribes culled from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents. And there on the wall of the Mohegan Territory coffee shop, Samson Occom’s home site appears in a wall-sized 1861 map of the reservation.

IV.

Within the last decade, the emergence of tribal casinos has changed the American landscape and challenged how we have become accustomed to thinking about American Indian communities. Casinos spatially demarcate sovereign American Indian political domains within the United States. They materialize the new political and economic power of tribal communities assumed long gone. No doubt this is why so many Americans find them unsettling.

Even people who know a bit about American Indian history and who support tribal sovereignty as an abstract principle find themselves troubled by tribal casinos, especially ones as spectacular as Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun. It can be difficult to reconcile these contemporary manifestations of New England Native American life with our historical imaginations, or to rectify our sense of what tribal sovereignty ought to mean with the ways living Native peoples actually decide to exercise self-determination. The cognitive distance between archives and casinos seems almost impassable.

But finding Samson Occom at the Mohegan Sun proves an exceptionally astute historical intelligence at work in casino design: the Mohegan have designed their casino to reflect public fantasies about Indians while maintaining their own tribal history. It is possible, then, to see the Mohegan Sun Casino as a renegotiation of practices of cultural commemoration, a reconfiguration of the intersection of historical time with contemporary space. Tribal casinos teach us what Samson Occom and other Native peoples in colonial times knew all too well: how chancy and random the turns of history can be, how strange and unimaginable its forms and outcomes.

Further Reading:

For more on Indian Casinos, Samson Occom, and the Mohegan, see David Kamper and Angela Mullis, eds., Indian Gaming: Who Wins? (Los Angeles, 2000); William DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (reprint Syracuse, 2000); Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Tucson, 2000).

This article originally appeared in issue 4.4 (July, 2004).

Joanna Brooks is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and author of American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford, 2003).

Disease permanently robbed Oliver Shaw of his sight as a youth. But instead of despairing about his damaged eyes, Shaw (1779-1848), who made his adult life on Westminster Street in Providence, Rhode Island, cultivated his ear. He became an esteemed pianist, church organist, and music teacher, as well as a modestly prolific composer of hymns, marches, and waltzes. Local sites and historical events of Rhode Island and southeastern New England frequently inspired him, along with his son, Oliver J. Shaw (ca. 1813-1861), who followed in his father’s footsteps to a thriving career as a musician. In 1840, one of the Shaws—likely the younger—published a curious composition titled Metacom’s Grand March. It was dedicated to John W. Dearth of Bristol, Rhode Island, the colonial settlement established on the very homegrounds of the Pokanoket-Wampanoag sachem Metacom, or King Philip. Philip was one of the most influential Eastern Algonquian leaders of the late seventeenth century. He was also the namesake of the conflict known as King Philip’s War, which seared New England and the Native Northeast between 1675 and 1678. The war destroyed English settlements, roused anti-Indian fears among colonists, and decimated or dispersed countless tribal peoples, who were attempting to maintain their landholdings, political autonomy, and cultural distinctiveness amidst rising tides of English settler colonialism. Philip’s homegrounds in upper Narragansett Bay lay at the geographic epicenter of the violence, and it was on the mountainside that Philip died following pursuit in August 1676.

By the time Shaw took up the war and its landscape as musical subjects, Philip and Mount Hope figured very differently in Euro-American imaginations than they had nearly two centuries earlier. No longer was Philip a treasonous, despicable heathen, as he had appeared in the 1670s to his English antagonists. (They thought him so “Blasphemous,” Jill Lepore argued in The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, that Cotton Mather posthumously silenced him by ripping the jawbone off his skull.) Nor was his Mount a forbidding, swampy wilderness resistant to colonial presence. Shaw romanticized Philip, heroically elevating him to martial stature in the formal strains of his Grand March. If the composition’s title did not convey adequate meaning, the accompanying illustration on the sheet music’s cover clarified the message (fig. 1). It showed a picturesque western view of Mount Hope, depicted as a conically shaped hill partially denuded of trees, crisscrossed by roads or walls, and topped by a tiny structure. In front of it posed “the renowned Indian warrior King Philip.” This stylized Philip confidently brandished a large bow, while reaching back into his quiver for an arrow.

How Philip came to figure in the Grand March involves a story of music’s complex intertwining with memory in colonial contexts. Music played an important role in Native/settler encounters of early America, as well as in the remembrance of cross-cultural violence. As a crucial turning point in the region commonly called New England, King Philip’s War has persisted in collective memories for more than three centuries, haunting tribal as well as settler imaginations and understandings of history. Memory—slippery to define, but characterized here as the usable forms of the past handed down to posterity—is frequently a collective enterprise, involving group rituals and performances. Aural elements animated many of these activities: war chants, mourning laments, victory songs, and folk ballads. Metacom’s Grand March exemplified one strain of commemorative musicality: genteel, even nostalgic colonial appropriations that played off notions of the noble savage or fearsome foe, and claimed Philip as a regional founding figure.

But the Northeastern soundscape was never wholly controlled by Euro-Americans. Counter-traditions of indigenous musicality associated with the war and its aftermath also endured, affirming indigenous continuity, presence, and power in a region too typically represented as devoid of Native peoples following the colonial “Indian Wars.” By tracing a range of metamorphoses in music connected to King Philip’s War, we can see how unstable memories of these events became over the centuries, adjusting in response to changing social circumstances and musical trends. We can also better understand how intensely localized commemorative sensibilities could be. For many composers and performers inspired by King Philip, their attentions were less beholden to national (“American”) articulations of identity, and more so to the minor, even parochial, concerns of particular towns, regions, and tribes.

Additionally, while the mid-nineteenth century brought a flowering of musical treatments of Philip, it is important to contextualize this period within a longer sweep of time. Native and colonial peoples all cultivated distinctive forms of music-making prior to the crisis of the 1670s, while in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Algonquian communities and their music have undergone noteworthy revivals. Recent mainstream revisitations of the war’s meanings have also used music as a tool for re-centering indigenous practices conventionally marginalized by popular interpreters. Taken together, these multi-generational developments demonstrate how people of the Northeast and beyond have persistently turned to music as a way of confronting—or skirting around—an intensely contested watershed in early American history.

Well before conflict with the English broke out around Mount Hope in summer 1675, Algonquians’ ceremonies and everyday life incorporated music in key ways. At nighttime, lying side-by-side in wetus, Algonquians would “sing themselves asleep.” Powwows, or shamans, sang as they practiced rituals, prayer, and medicine, sometimes with onlookers joining in “like a Quire.” Nipmucs “delight much in their dancings and revellings,” Daniel Gookin observed about a community gifting celebration: “at which time he that danceth (for they dance singly, the men, and not the women, the rest singing, which is their chief musick) will give away in his frolick, all that ever he hath,” an event akin to Narragansetts’ Nickómmo feasts/dances. To send deceased relations to the afterlife, some communities buried tiny brass bells with their dead, possibly used in rattles, jingles, or other sound-making items.

To mourn their relations, Narragansetts undertook structured rituals of vocalizing grief: “blacking and lamenting they observe in most dolefull manner, divers weekes and moneths”; “morning and evening and sometimes in the night they bewaile their lost husbands, wives, children brethren or sisters &c.” What, exactly, this “lamenting” consisted of Roger Williams did not specify in his Narragansett/English lexicon, A Key into the Language of America (1643). Nor did other English observers record fine-grained notations of Algonquians’ musical practices. But their indirect commentaries, along with material traces recovered by archaeologists, attest to a rich aural milieu intertwined with tribal cosmologies and lifeways. This music was functional, not simply aesthetically or sonically experimental. Algonquians used music as a conduit to sources of power, and as a community-building mechanism that connected the living to a multitude of animals, plants, landforms, and an ancient community of ancestors.

Sustained contact with European settlers transformed some Algonquian musical traditions. In the Praying Towns established in the mid-seventeenth century, psalm-singing in the Massachusett dialect served as a critical technique of religious and cultural conversion. But despite some early optimism about cross-cultural interactions, tensions between tribes and colonial authorities in Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut escalated at mid-century. Settlers grew wary of certain Algonquian behaviors, including community gatherings and their accompanying sounds. The English were particularly suspicious of dances, which were important rituals in the prelude to war as tribal parties engaged in diplomacy and felt out each other’s intentions for alliances. The brash Plymouth colonist and military ranger Benjamin Church attended one such event hosted by Awashonks, the sunksquaw, or female leader, of Wampanoags located at Sakonnet, east of Narragansett Bay. In his postwar memoir (a freewheeling account that trafficked loosely in facts), Church remembered how he and Charles Hazelton “rode down to the place appointed, where they found hundreds of Indians gathered together from all parts of her dominion. Awashonks herself in a foaming sweat, was leading the dance.” Such dances, he wrote, were “the custom of that nation when they advise about momentous affairs.”

Following the war’s outbreak, colonial soldiers and Native war-parties grappled for control of territory, and sound played a critical role for both as a medium of communication. English troops took horns into combat to signal to each other, for instance. Rumor had it that the sounding of a trumpet “without order, did much hurt” on one campaign, though evidently the metallic blast carried poorly in the woods. When Mohegans allied with the English dismembered a Narragansett captive, they inflicted pain while “making him danceround the Circle, and sing, till he had wearied both himself and them.” This allowed the captive to preserve honor by displaying mettle in the face of certain death. For English captives removed from their homes and thrust into unfamiliar surroundings, Algonquian music-making heightened the sense of dislocation. Mary Rowlandson vividly described a Native attack on Lancaster, Massachusetts, in February 1676, in which part of the trauma was visual: “It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of Sheep torn by Wolves.” But as she elaborated in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), she also felt distressed by boisterous vocalizations of the Natives, who were “roaring, singing, ranting and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out.”

The first night of her captivity, Rowlandson was taken up a hill within sight of the smoldering town. She recalled the spectacle: “Oh the roaring, and singing and danceing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell.” The “joyfull” Natives feasted on slaughtered sheep, calves, pigs, and fowl. After that she “removed” west into a “vast and desolate Wilderness”—well-known homelands to Algonquians—and periodically heard loud celebrations among victorious Natives returning from offensives:

Oh! the outragious roaring and hooping that there was: They began their din about a mile before they came to us. By their noise and hooping they signified how many they had destroyed …Those that were with us at home, were gathered together as soon as they heard the hooping, and every time that the other went over their number, those at home gave a shout, that the very Earth rung again… Oh, the hideous insulting and triumphing that there was over some Englishmens scalps that they had taken.

These songs and exclamations, which struck Rowlandson as “noise” rather than tonally, symbolically sophisticated communication, would have sounded noticeably different from the austere singing done by New England Puritans in worship.

King Philip’s War caused massive casualties among Algonquian communities through direct assaults, as well as starvation and cold as tribal peoples were forced away from resources of their customary homelands. Algonquians’ complex rituals for dealing with death likely changed under the exigencies of wartime. The massacre at Great Swamp in December 1675, and the equally devastating massacre at the waterfalls of Peskeomskut in May 1676, made traditional practices of mourning difficult. Native survivors fled the scenes to seek refuge in other places and regroup, since it was risky to remain and inter the bodies of their fallen relations in the usual ways. Perhaps they engaged in “lamenting” and associated forms of grieving in their diasporic locations. It is also possible that Native peoples who survived, and their descendants, managed to return to these sites of devastation to mourn, despite territorial dispossessions and growing colonial restrictions on Native mobility. In a tantalizing shard of “tradition,” a “gentleman” owning land at Mount Hope reported “he remember[ed] a squaw, formerly belonging to Philip’s family, who lived to extreme old age, and annually repaired to the Mount, to weep over the place where he was slain.” Published in the Massachusetts Magazine (1789), this account may have been invented. Or it may have been evidence of ongoing Wampanoag connections to that landscape and its unsettled past.

“Indian Wars” raged in the Northeast for decades after the formal closure of King Philip’s War, in conflicts that drew northern French and Wabanaki communities into strife with New Englanders. English men, women, and children taken captive found themselves drawn into Native orbits, and during their forced sojourns, they heard astonishing new music. John Gyles was taken in 1689 from Pemaquid in mid-coastal Maine to a Wabanaki settlement at Madawamkee, where he encountered this: “a Number of Squaws got together in a Circle dancing and yelling.” He found himself pulled into the ring, until his “Indian Master presently laid down a Pledge and releas’d [him].” Gyles maintained ethnographic curiosity about the Natives with whom he lived, and documented other instances of singing during his time among Wabanakis. To express gratitude for a successful bear hunt, for example, a female elder and captive “must stand without the Wigwam, shaking their Hands and Body as in a Dance: and singing, WEGAGE OH NELO WOH! which if Englished would be, Fat is my eating. This is to signify their thankfulness in feasting Times!” As war fostered uneasy intimacies among captives and captors, these settlers observed selected dimensions of Algonquian cultures that otherwise would have remained beyond their circles of seeing—and hearing.

One intriguing account of Algonquian singing from this later period arose from the repercussions of King Philip’s War. At Cocheco (Dover, New Hampshire), the trader and military leader Richard Waldron had hundreds of “strange” Indians, refugees from the war’s southern theater, seized during a “sham fight” staged in September 1676. It was an act of betrayal that sat poorly with the neutral or “friendly” local Algonquians who remained. In 1689, during the early stages of King William’s War, Native forces struck back at Waldron in retaliation for this and other grievances. Two Native women infiltrated the settlement to open its doors for nighttime attackers. According to tradition, one of those women sang an ominous song to the over-confident Waldron. It may have warned him of the imminent violence, or perhaps mocked him with cryptic verse:

O Major Waldo,
You great Sagamore,
O what will you do,
Indians at your door!

But heedless of her singing, the garrison and Waldron himself fell as Natives attempted to push back the colonial frontier.

As the eighteenth century progressed, violent Native/settler confrontations tapered off in southern New England. Some colonists preferred to forget the area’s blood-soaked past and focus on the future. But others decided to commemorate ancestral losses in public ways. Perhaps people sang at Sudbury, in eastern Massachusetts, in the 1730s when Benjamin Wadsworth, president of Harvard College, installed a stone memorial to his father. Captain Samuel Wadsworth and troops had been killed there in an engagement with Natives in April 1676. President Wadsworth’s diary is silent about the proceedings, unfortunately. Overall, eighteenth-century colonial commemorations of the war are somewhat elusive in the archives, especially at the level of “folk” practices. (The original Sudbury memorial stone and a larger, nineteenth-century monument presently stand in a town cemetery that has hosted Memorial Day commemorations, accompanied by singing and drumming related to King Philip’s and subsequent wars.)

By the early years of the American republic, colonial violence became fodder for more formalized Yankee commemorations of local, regional, and national heritage. In 1835, residents of South Deerfield, Massachusetts, and surrounding towns decided to erect a monument at “Bloody Brook” to honor colonial troops killed in King Philip’s War. Thomas Lathrop and his company of North Shore militiamen (the “Flower of Essex”) fell to a Native ambush in the Connecticut River Valley in September 1675. That loss loomed large in settler imaginations thereafter. The commemoration was an enormous spectacle, said to attract 6,000 visitors. A choir and band performed, and several “original hymns” specially composed for the occasion solemnized the proceedings, which culminated in the laying of a cornerstone for an obelisk. In a major coup for the small town, organizers secured the presence of politician Edward Everett. He delivered a rousing oration commemorating colonial sacrifices, while briefly mourning the supposed vanishing of Indians from the valley.

Harriet Martineau chanced to be traveling through the area at the time. The sharp-eyed British commentator dissected the proceedings with an acid tongue, and published the critique in Society in America. The theatrics left her unimpressed, including the band’s musical efforts: “They did their best; and, if no one of their instruments could reach the second note of the German Hymn, (the second note of three lines out of four,) it was not for want of trying.” The ensuing oration “deeply disgusted” her. So did an amateur painting of the ambush exhibited in the Bloody Brook Inn. Overall, Martineau found the Bloody Brook commemoration a grotesque spectacle, involving inept folk performances and shameless electioneering by politicians angling for the western Massachusetts vote.

Martineau’s dyspeptic analyses notwithstanding, Yankees tended to revel in these grassroots commemorations of Anglo-American ancestors and the colonial past. Decades after the installation of the cornerstone, Everett’s nephew Edward Everett Hale composed “The Lamentable Ballad of Bloody Brook,” presented in 1888. Though the piece evidently was read aloud rather than being set to music, the “Ballad” invoked the genre of folkloric songs to give New England a distinctive piece of mythology. Its lines elevated colonial casualties to martyred stature:

Oh, weep, ye Maids of Essex, for the Lads who have died,—
The Flower of Essex they!
The Bloody Brook still ripples by the black Mountain-side,
But never shall they come again to see the ocean-tide,
And never shall the Bridegroom return to his Bride,
From that dark and cruel Day.—cruel Day!

The antebellum period proved a popular moment for revisiting the meanings of King Philip and the colonial period more generally. It was an era when the six-canto poem Yamoyden: A Tale of the Wars of King Philip (1820) appeared, and when James Fenimore Cooper published a frontier romance based on the war, titled  The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1829). In 1833, orator Rufus Choate urged New Englanders to develop romantic mythology about their own regional past, holding up King Philip’s War as an ideal subject. Not only literary luminaries found romantic inspiration in Philip. Musicians also tapped into this growing popular fascination, in compositions like Metacom’s Grand March. Oliver J. Shaw’s 1840 piece—to be performedcon spirito—was part of a “grand march” genre that included other martial-themed compositions, to be performed with gravity and ceremonial pomp. This stylistic choice indicated that Shaw’s work was honoring Philip as a worthy leader, rather than lampooning him or denigrating him as a mere “savage.”

Shaw’s Grand March was generic in one sense, invoking notions of Indian nobility and exoticism circulating in American consciousness at a national level. But it also responded to local topography and traditions. Shaw intimately knew the environs of Providence and Rhode Island, along with neighboring corners of southeastern Massachusetts, and Mount Hope was undoubtedly familiar terrain. He dedicated the piece to John W. Dearth, Esq. of Bristol, whom he may have known through common interests. (Dearth was identified as a “teacher of music” in the 1870 census.) Bristol in 1840 was thoroughly colonized terrain, having been claimed by English settlers soon after the conclusion of King Philip’s War and developed as a seaport and village. The grounds were thus formally removed from Wampanoag land-holdings, although Natives labored as servants/slaves in colonial households, and may have continued to travel along the peninsula and Mount. Later in the nineteenth century, members of the Rhode Island Historical Society made pilgrimages en masse to Mount Hope for commemorative festivities, with particular energy around the bicentenary of King Philip’s War, ca. 1876. These antiquarians also installed monuments marking Philip’s “Seat” and the alleged spot of his death. But it is not apparent that such prominent events were underway when Shaw developed his composition, or if his source of inspiration lay elsewhere. Whether anyone ever performed the Grand March for an audience is also unknown at present—either in its original instrumentation (possibly for band), or in the arrangement for piano. The piece may have attained renown in local circles. Or it may have languished unheard, the musical token of one composer’s affection for a place, a past, and a friend.

Shaw was not alone in taking King Philip as a muse in the antebellum period. “King Philip’s Quick-Step” (fig. 2) was piece No. 1 in a collection titled The Indians (1843), arranged by Simon Knaebel for piano. Published by Henry Prentiss in Boston, its front page bore a gaudy chromolithograph of an Indian draped in Plains-style regalia, carrying a spear in his right hand. The “Quick-Step” was more upbeat than the Grand March, and the collection contained other pieces on comparable themes: “Song of the Red Man,” “On-Ka-Hye Waltz,” “Osceola Quick Step,” “Keokuck Quick Step,” “Black Hawk Quick Step,” “Nahmeokee Waltz.” This final waltz referenced the fictional female Indian featured in John Augustus Stone’s wildly popular nineteenth-century play Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags, a romanticized theatrical treatment of King Philip’s War. In its final scene, Metamora stabs Nahmeokee to death to spare his wife from capture by the English, then falls to English fire. Drums and trumpets sounded as the curtains closed.

The play’s star, the charismatic actor Edwin Forrest, received a musical tribute in the form of The Metamora Grand March, published in New York in 1840 and dedicated to him. Composed by an anonymous “eminent professor” and arranged for piano (D-major, 4/4), this Grand March directed the pianist to perform in a Marziale manner (fig. 3). The sheet music featured on its cover the elegantly suited Forrest posing in a chair. It memorialized not the original historical Metacom, as Shaw’s march did, but instead the celebrated white performer many degrees removed. The Grand March conceivably could have been played during one of the numerous showings of Metamora. (A Philadelphia performance of 1863, for instance, promised that an orchestra under Mark Hassler would play “a Selection of the most Popular and Classical Music.”) Many pieces from this period approached King Philip’s War with a degree of regret for a tragic past, albeit a dramatic one; and with unease about losses caused by colonial “conquest”—sentiments at an apex during the hotly contested Indian removals of the Jacksonian age, which New Englanders were eager to critique even as they sidestepped Native struggles on their own doorsteps. But such pieces showed more interest in the idea of Indians than in actual, contemporary indigenous people.

Native Americans had not disappeared, despite Euro-American tendencies to write them off as a doomed race. Those who remained were capable of musically mobilizing King Philip for their own ends in the same period. Thomas Commuck (1805-55), who self-identified as Narragansett, removed from the New England region to the Brothertown community of Christianized Indians, and in 1845 he co-produced a hymnal that incorporated a profusion of Algonquian names. (Thomas Hastings did the harmonizations.) Among the names were individuals and locations prominent in King Philip’s War and the Native Northeast: Sassamon, Wetamoe, Annawon, Pocasset, Assawomset, Seconet, Pokanoket, Tispaquin, Philip. “This has been done merely as a tribute of respect to the memory of some tribes that are now nearly if not quite extinct; also as a mark of courtesy to some tribes with whom the author is acquainted,” Commuck explained in the preface to Indian Melodies (fig. 4). The handful of direct references to Narragansett heritage (like hymns titled “Canonchet” and “Netop”) formed pieces of a multi-tribal mosaic, fittingly emblematic of the composite community at Brothertown.

The names did not appear to bear any particular relation to the content of the hymns, however, some of which derived from the well-known Isaac Watts. Indeed, the earnest expressions of Protestant faith would have been at odds with many figures’ anti-colonial stances. But they were not entirely dissimilar from other Native Christian worship music of the time (following the “Indian Great Awakening” of the mid-eighteenth century), and they signaled admiration for the real historical figures referenced. Commuck’s goal in publishing the hymnal was not strictly memorial. He also hoped to

make a little money, whereby he may be enabled, by wise and prudent management, to provide for the comfortable subsistence of his household, and be enabled, from time to time, to cast in his mite to aid in relieving the wants and distresses of the poor and needy, and to spread the knowledge of the Redeemer and his kingdom throughout the world.

Here, King Philip had been re-purposed to support Christian charitable works by members of an Algonquian diaspora. Though separated from ancestral homelands, they committed themselves to fashioning a new, viable Indian community in the west.

Yankee musical tastes morphed in the latter nineteenth century, decades that brought major political and territorial blows to contemporary Algonquians. The state of Rhode Island illegally “detribalized” the Narragansetts in the 1880s, for example, and auctioned off tribal lands. Yet cultural fascination with historicNatives persisted. During the colonial revival’s burgeoning interest in Anglo-American heritage, casts of hundreds, even thousands, converged on town greens and in performance halls to enact the founding scenes of local history in pageants. All the while, they excised indigenous presence from the narratives, or relegated it to stock formulations. In Rehoboth, Massachusetts, Anawan Rock Pageant; or, The Atonement of Anawan: A Tercentenary Drama from the Indian Point of View dramatized the exploits and ultimate capitulation of Anawan, one of Philip’s advisors. Rehoboth laid claim to an enormous geologic feature said to be the site of Anawan’s 1676 capture, and the 1921 pageant spun its theatrics around it. Henry Oxnard designed the five-part drama for use in churches and granges. Performed at an energetic clip, the whole could be presented in under fifty minutes. Or it could be lengthened by inserting music between the parts.

Stage directions suggested the use of “Patriotic and Indian songs.” They helpfully provided a laundry list of popular tunes with zero connection to the war, but ample familiarity to the audience:

O, Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,
John Brown’s Body,
Battle Hymn of the Republic,
Juanita,
The Breaking Waves Dashed High,
America,
Katherine Lee Bates’ America, to the tune of Materna

The directions also suggested a slate of “Indian Songs” like “From the Land of the Sky-blue Water” and “The Sadness of the Lodge.” Both came from Charles Wakefield Cadman’s Idealized Indian Themes for Pianoforte, said to be derived from Omaha melodies. The final scenes prescribed closure and reconciliation. After being tried by an English court, Anawan died, and mourners attended his “Rude grave” while a piano tinkled “sad music.” A “Short dirge with tom-tom” also sounded. Then an Indian marriage occurred, followed by a symbolic dance set to music signifying “Victory of Peace Over War.” The pageant concluded with a collective rendition of “America the Beautiful.” The sing-along affirmed Euro-American sensibilities about the moral justification of colonial military conquest, and encouraged patriotic sentiments about the U.S. nation-state, a resonant theme in the aftermath of World War I.

Indeed, in contemporary times of global upheaval, King Philip’s War emerged as a way to express anxieties about combat and social roles. William Schofield’s novel Ashes in the Wilderness used music to delineate gender norms as it unabashedly sexualized the sunksquaw Awashonks, whose dance Benjamin Church attended. First serialized as “Narragansett Night,” then published in book form in 1942, the work spoke to concerns of World War II, portraying dashing male heroism and stoicism on fields of battle. Its male protagonists went by jaunty nicknames like Ben and Chris, while Awashonks received the diminutive moniker Fire Girl. A pivotal scene was the Native dance at which Church attempted to win Awashonks’ loyalty to the English. “She danced to the roaring and crackling of the ceremonial flames and the heavy throbbing of the drums—to the thump of naked feet on the hard earth and the rising minor wails of her tribesmen,” read the vaguely pornographic beginning of the dance scene. It devolved into voyeurism as Ben let his masculine colonial gaze rove over the indigenous female body:

Her skin was dripping with sweat, and the firelight glistened over it, making it look like wet bronze. Her slender body weaved and twisted, curving with the dance. He watched her leaping high toward the flame tops, with her back braids tossing wildly and her breast beads outflung; and he watched her stoop earthward, to pound the dirt with clenched fists and then to leap aloft again, her arms thrown upward, her stomach and face gleaming in the firelight.

For an instant, Ben found himself dangerously absorbed with the Native ritual rather than maintaining expected distance as an English spectator: “He caught himself swaying his head from side to side, in time with the rapid pounding of the drums and the yells of the warriors dancing in Fire Girl’s footsteps.” The obvious physical vivacity and sensuality of Awashonks contrasted sharply with the demure roles attributed to Tina, Chris’s colonial love interest.

Perhaps surprisingly, King Philip’s War, unlike other major events and conflicts of early America or the trans-Mississippi frontier, has not received major film treatment à la Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Walt Disney’s Pocahontas (1995), or Mel Gibson’s The Patriot (2000). Those films’ soundtracks, by renowned composers like John Williams and John Barry, achieved widespread acclaim and honors. The closest approximation to popular treatment for King Philip’s War has come not from Hollywood, but from PBS. We Shall Remain, a five-part American Experience series, aired in 2009. The nationally televised production began with an episode titled “After the Mayflower,” which examined Dawnland Algonquian communities like the Wampanoag and their increasingly acrimonious relations with English arrivals. The episode culminated with King Philip’s War, the death of Philip, and the display of his head atop a pike at Plymouth.

Rather than attempting dramatic bombast, the series mounted a sobering investigation that aimed for cultural authenticity and scholarly rigor. Understated music for the entire series was scored by John Kusiak, principal composer for Kusiak Music of Arlington, Massachusetts. Among the credited “Native Music Consultants” were Victoria Lindsay Levine and Annawon Weeden, the former an ethnomusicologist specializing in Amerindian subjects, the latter a Wampanoag actor, performer, and activist who played the role of Philip. The cultural pendulum had begun to swing. Instead of the earnest Euro-American mythologizing (and stereotyping) of the nineteenth century, this production showcased more ethnohistorically grounded types of sound, compatible with the series’ critical perspectives on indigeneity and colonialism.

The most unusual recent treatment of King Philip’s War may be a foray into musical theater. Song on the Windre-animated the forced removal of Natives to Deer Island in Boston Harbor in 1675-76, where many died. Written by David MacAdam, founding pastor of New Life Community Church in Concord, Massachusetts, it was produced through New Life Fine Arts. Song on the Wind interpreted King Philip’s War and its lead-up through a religious lens, focusing on the “Praying Indians.” A multiethnic cast performed scenes of John Eliot’s meeting with potential converts, as well as the beginning of King Philip’s War, sung to the tune “A Shot in the Dark.” For the exile to Deer Island, set designers recreated the windswept island hills inside the theater. That episode portrayed the island internment as a trial of Native converts’ new faith. The first full production premiered in 2004 in an historically resonant location: Littleton, Massachusetts, site of the Praying Town Nashoba. The production received generally enthusiastic receptions. Yet its interpretation of the colonial period was not uncontroversial: “a story of love and betrayal, sacrifice and courage, shared hopes and dreams that transcend racial and cultural differences.” Its emphasis on reconciliation, common humanity, and shared experiences of suffering and grace stands at odds with some Native communities’ (and historians’) emphases on long-term conflict and colonialism, political struggle for decolonization, and a range of perspectives on spirituality and Christianity.

Today in the Northeast, Native music is diverse and dynamic, and often an integral part of commemorations related to King Philip’s War, which remains a sensitive historical touchstone. Native musicians perform at annual commemorations at Deer Island and the massacre grounds at Great Swamp. Besides mourning the wartime loss of ancestors, these are occasions to re-gather communities, speak out against state colonialism, and affirm indigenous and occasionally cross-cultural solidarities for the future. “Drums” and singing groups that perform at community events and on the powwow circuit include tribally specific and intertribal ensembles like the Iron River Singers, Mystic River Singers, Eastern Suns, Nettukkusqk Singers, Wampanoag Nation Singers and Dancers, Urban Thunder, and Rez Dogs. Native-language songs are important components of their repertoires. They audibly demonstrate the revival or recovery of indigenous languages that have been preserved or brought back from endangerment through collective efforts.

Over the past centuries, music keyed to subjects like “Indian War” has performed a range of cultural work. For Euro-Americans, it frequently tapped into serious, deep-seated anxieties about cultural and political legitimacy, and was used to consolidate suitable mythologies about New England’s and America’s foundational moments. Metacom’s Grand March exemplified that spirit. At times, it accomplished a reductive function, making immense violence and dispossession into grounds for public entertainment. Among Algonquian communities, music has conveyed distinctive understandings about a period of tremendous dislocations. It has performed grave, even sacred functions of perpetuating community memory, affirming tribal identities through shared repertoires, and mourning the dead. Perhaps most important, these indigenous musical traditions have pushed back against colonial representations of Indians as defeated, vanished people or romantic stereotypes. Instead, they audibly insist on the endurance and reinvigoration of tribal identities in modernity, in the shared space of the Northeast.

Further reading:

King Philip’s War and its contested meanings have inspired scholarship like Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998), which analyzed the conflict’s national resonances and effects on language. For an examination of how the war has shaped local understandings of landscape and heritage, see Christine M. DeLucia, “The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in the Northeast after King Philip’s War,” The Journal of American History 98:4 (March 2012): 975-997. Sound played a critical role as American settler colonialism and frontier violence pushed across the continent, Sarah Keyes argued in “‘Like a Roaring Lion’: The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest,” The Journal of American History 96:1 (June 2009): 19-43.

Roger Williams was an astute though flawed observer of Narragansett culture and language, and he noted the singing “like a Quire” and “lamenting” in A Key into the Language of America: or, An help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America, called New-England. Together with briefe Observations of the Customes, Manners and Worships, &c. of the aforesaid Natives, in Peace and Warre, in Life and Death (London, 1643). Patricia E. Rubertone explored Williams’ legacy and Narragansett mortuary practices, including the brass bells, in Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, D.C., 2001). Erik R. Seeman critiqued other indigenous and colonial “deathways” inDeath in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 (Philadelphia, 2010). Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, one of the most widely read and taught texts from early America, is available in a recent edition annotated by Neal Salisbury, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson with Related Documents (Boston, 1997).

Indigenous, colonial, and European musical/sonic practices all underwent transformations following “contact.” For example, Puritan missionizing sparked Algonquian musical translations among the “Praying Indians,” as Glenda Goodman described in “‘But they differ from us in sound’: Indian Psalmody and the Soundscape of Colonialism, 1651-75,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69: 4 (October 2012): 793-822. Other transformations are traced in Olivia A. Bloechl’sNative American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (New York, 2008), Gary Tomlinson’s The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (New York, 2007), and Matt Cohen’s The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis, 2010).

Euro-American musical representations of Native Americans have been thoroughly examined by Michael Pisani in Imagining Native America in Music (New Haven, 2005). He catalogued relevant sources in “A Chronological Listing of Musical Works on American Indian Subjects, Composed Since 1608” (2006). Thomas Commuck’s biography and collaboration with Thomas Hastings are discussed in Hermine Weigel Williams’ study Thomas Hastings: An Introduction to His Life and Music (Lincoln, Neb., 2005). The influence of Christianity among New England Native communities, along with its intersections with traditional practices and beliefs, continues to capture scholars’ attentions. For surveys about the region’s southern parts, see William S. Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons, eds., Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765-1776 (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1982), David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1871 (New York, 2005), and Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York, 2012).

Rufus Choate delivered his plea for mythologizing in “The Importance of Illustrating New-England History By A Series of Romances Like the Waverly Novels,” delivered at Salem, Mass., in 1833, and published in The Works of Rufus Choate, with a Memoir of His Life vol. 1, ed. Samuel Gilman Brown (Boston, 1862): 319-346. This type of mythologizing, which proliferated in nineteenth-century America, tended to distort indigenous histories and deny the contemporary persistence of Algonquian tribal communities, as Jean M. O’Brien argued in Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010).

At Mount Hope, Native and non-Native connections to those historically significant grounds have endured through the present day, as Ann McMullen showed in “‘The Heart Interest’: Native Americans at Mount Hope and the King Philip Museum,” in Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum, ed. Shepard Krech III (Bristol, Rhode Island, 1994): 167-185. Other modern rituals continue to link communities to the 1675 massacre site of Great Swamp; Patricia E. Rubertone has discussed these in “Monuments and Sexual Politics in New England Indian Country,” in The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects, eds. Barbara L. Voss and Eleanor Conlin Casella (Cambridge, 2012): 232-251. Contemporary Native music and performance merit an essay of their own. For one Northeastern/Wabanaki case study, see Ann Morrison Spinney’s Passamaquoddy Ceremonial Songs: Aesthetics and Survival (Amherst, Mass., 2010).

Local and regional archives are crucial for uncovering “folk” or vernacular memorial practices. My research on King Philip’s War has taken me to dozens of public libraries, town historical societies and museums, and other small sites, in addition to the perhaps better-known state historical societies of New England and repositories like the American Antiquarian Society. For example, the libraries of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association and Historic Deerfield, located in Deerfield, Mass., contain a wealth of manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and ephemera about commemorations at Bloody Brook, while the Blanding Public Library in Rehoboth, Mass., has materials about “Anawan Rock.” The South County Room of the North Kingstown Free Library in Rhode Island maintains an extensive regional history collection. The Goodnow Library in Sudbury, Mass., holds items pertaining to the Wadsworth monument(s). Collections at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center are useful for Pequot and regional Native studies. I first encountered Metacom’s Grand March not in the Rogers Free Library of Bristol, Rhode Island (home to numerous items about Mount Hope), but in the Special Collections of the Newberry Library in Chicago, which has long supported research on Native topics.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Where were you last October 9th? What about November 23rd? If you spent these days as I did–the former enjoying the small glories of a three-day weekend, and the latter around a table heaped with turkey and trimmings–you may have missed an important new twist in the chain linking the present to the past. In recent years, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, two seemingly all-American holidays, have been “outed,” unmasked as racist rites. Turned upside down, mostly by Native American activists, these festivals have re-emerged transformed: Columbus Day has become Indigenous Peoples’ Day; Thanksgiving, the National Day of Mourning. These are days of rage, their organizers tell us, not days of rest, occasions for fasting rather than feasting. But we might wonder, when and why did the nasty business of Colonialism get mixed up with the quaint charms of ye olde colonial holidays?

Thanksgiving, long a painful holiday for Native Americans, first came under sustained public attack in 1970. That’s when officials of the state of Massachusetts vetted the text of an oration that Frank B. James, a Wampanoag leader, was slated to deliver at a banquet celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower‘s landing. Deeming James’s impassioned narrative of stolen lands and broken promises off-key for the occasion, they promptly rescinded their invitation to break bread with him, thus inverting the very mythic, ancestral feast they were gathered to commemorate. But James didn’t go away hungry–or silent. He found another outlet for his voice when, that Thanksgiving, he gathered with hundreds of other Native American protesters on Cole’s Hill, the promontory above Plymouth Rock. There, they countered ritual with anti-ritual as they blanketed the rock with sand, dusted it off, and buried it again, thereby covering Thanksgiving with the first National Day of Mourning.

Thirty-one years later, this annual commemoration of an “un-Thanksgiving” continues. Now organized by the United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the National Day of Mourning lays at the alabaster feet of those mythic Pilgrims not a wreath, but a host of present-day evils including “sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails, and the class system.” Last fall’s protest–which the Boston Globe pronounced “peaceful and uneventful” when compared to the alleged police brutality that had marred the event in 1997–was dedicated to the cause of Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement leader sentenced to death for the 1976 murder of two FBI agents. Quite a distance from William Bradford and Tisquantum.

The reincarnation of Columbus Day is both more recent and more thorough going. Since the Columbian legacy first fell under scrutiny during preparations for the quincentennial year of 1992, states and municipalities across the country have changed the tone and the terms of their commemorations to force a certain Genoese sailor off center stage. In Berkeley, California, an annual celebration of Native arts and history known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day has replaced Columbus Day on the official calendar. South Dakota likewise renamed the federal holiday that falls on the Monday nearest October 12th Native American Day, while New York City and San Francisco celebrate a generic Italian Pride Day. From sea to shining sea, fealty to Columbus has become, quite literally, a love that dare not speak its name. The point was brought home last fall in Denver, where thousands of demonstrators converged to protest the Sons of Italy’s decision to put Columbus back into a parade that had been, after extensive legal wrangling, recast as a “March for Italian Pride.” Some 147 of the anti-Columbus forces were arrested. But the crowds, if not the police, were on their side: Columbus’s detractors outnumbered his filiopietists by as many as ten to one.

What are historians to make of such battles? We could try to plumb the bottom of it all–to determine, for example, whether Columbus “personally invented European imperialism . . . and the transatlantic slave trade,” as the City of Berkeley’s Indigenous Peoples’ Committee maintains, or whether Plymouth’s “Pilgrims” were indeed the grave-robbing hypocrites that UAINE describes. Is Columbus truly the moral equivalent of Hitler, as some of his critics argue? Was the “first Thanksgiving” merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades? Combing period documents and archaeological evidence, we might peel away some of the myths, inching closer to the factual core. Perhaps in this way, we might get the cultural politics off the table and leave more room for turkey.

But to do so would be to miss a fundamental point of these holidays–of Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, and their modern anti-types alike. Politics has always marched in the Columbus Day parade and taken a place on the Thanksgiving menu. From the very beginning. Which was when, exactly? Not 1492 or 1621. Columbus’s arrival and the first Thanksgiving were all but non-events in their own day. Both stories were rediscovered–rather, re-invented–in the late 18th eighteenth century. The centennial and bicentennial of Columbus’s legendary voyages passed largely unmarked in the colonies. But the tricentennial, in 1792, occasioned sermons, toasts, and parades from New York to Boston. Likewise, Plymouth’s annual observance of a Thanksgiving feast, begun in the late rather than the early seventeenth century, remained a strictly local affair until 1777, when the Second Continental Congress proclaimed a national Forefathers’ Day to honor the “first comers” from Old England to New.

It is certainly no accident that these two would-be “ancient” traditions, commemorating events that took place over a century apart, sprang to life at nearly the same moment, a moment when the United States was so new as to be barely a gleam in its own eye. Nations, built as much on shared ideas as in shared spaces, demand shared stories–origins myths, as an anthropologist would say. For the infant United States, Columbus’s “discoveries” and the first Thanksgiving provided two such stories, tales that proved both powerful and flexible, as origins myths need to be. Thus in the 1860s, when the fabric of the still-young nation was nearly rent by Civil War and urban strife, Thanksgiving and Columbus Day were dusted off and retrofitted. In the 1863 proclamation that created the first national Thanksgiving, President Abraham Lincoln dedicated the day to “the whole American people,” so that they might give thanks “with one heart and one voice”–surely more a wish than a reality in the shadow of Gettysburg.

Now, in this new millenium, these sacred secular rites are once again pressed into service–this time by new nations, with new visions of the present, to be reached through new versions of the past. In place of one origins myth, the inventors of Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the National Day of Mourning invoke another. One in which all Europeans were villains and all Natives, victims. One in which indigenous peoples knew neither strife nor war until the treachery of Columbus and his cultural heirs taught them to hate and fear.

To ask whether this version is true is to ask the wrong question. It’s true to its purposes. Every bit as true, that is, as the stories some Americans in 1792 and 1863 told about the events of 1492 and 1621. And that’s all it needs to be. For these holidays say much less about who we really were in some specific Then, than about who we want to be in an ever changing Now.

In 1998, after the violence that had marked Thanksgiving the previous year, the Town of Plymouth reached a settlement with UAINE. The Town dropped all charges against the 25 protesters that had been arrested in the fall, and cleared away the procedural hurdles impeding future observances of the Day of Mourning. Plymouth also agreed to provide $15,000 to create two large, bronze plaques, which would be prominently displayed in the town’s most public, historic sites. The texts on those plaques, the settlement states, relate important chapters of “the true history of Native people.” Including Thanksgiving.

Is it “true history” that Thanksgiving Day celebrates European “genocide,” theft, and the “relentless assaults” Plymouth’s English migrants visited upon indigenous culture? The settlement establishes that no less an authority than the Massachusetts Historical Society will “confirm the accuracy of the facts set forth in [sic] the plaque.” But, the agreement continues: “No higher level of accuracy for the ancient facts set forth on the plaque will be demanded than has been required for representations that are made in the Town of Plymouth” about its own early history. The Indians’ Thanksgiving needs only to meet the standard of truth set by that of the Pilgrims’ eighteenth-century descendants. Turnabout, in other words, is fair play.

So have another helping of politics with your turkey. It’s been there since the beginning. Whenever that was.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.2 (January, 2001).

Settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe contends, names not a discrete event but a persistent structure. Thus, it stands to reason that some of the epistemological resources used by the separatists whose settlement at Plymouth set a template for greater New England might endure beyond temporal boundaries. William Bradford’s canonical Of Plymouth Plantation sought to determine how their conscientious settlement would be remembered—mournful, yet not miserable; meek, but mightily resourceful. However, two complementary texts, the anonymously published Mourt’s Relation and Edward Winslow’s sequel, Goode Newes from New England, nuance Bradford’s representation of triumphant passivity. Both texts have been published in print in recent decades, discretely. Yet their brevity and closeness of composition recommends them for paired reading. Together, they reveal the conditions for a disposition whose seeming self evidence comprises its political strength. These texts show how Anglo-Americans learned to love their walls and fences.

In November 1620, just over 100 English men and women, many separatists from an oppressively liberal Stuart regime, concluded their flight from Europe in disappointing fashion. Hoping to land at Virginia, they found themselves instead on a less hospitable northern coast. Mourt’s Relation, or, a Journal of the Proceedings at Plymouth, diurnalistically documents these settlers’ newly realized struggles. These struggles included: difficulty approaching land and debarking the ship; cold; illness; hunger; lack of proper resources to secure or produce food; and an unrelenting visibility to new neighbors whose vigilant and often unseen presence frustrated their sense of integrity and peace. Though they had covenanted, in the Relation’s fourth paragraph, eventually to make agreeable laws, every time they tried, these neighbors inexplicably appeared. Only after treating with them about proper neighborly comportment and recognition of boundaries would the English finally legislate. These English had been deliberate about their own domestic boundaries. Immediately off the boat, they addressed their vulnerability. To secure safety and warmth, the Pilgrim fathers commanded the construction of the fewest houses possible, sorting single men among existing families. The Relation passes over much of the math: Each settler merited a little over 400 square feet. Each of the nineteen households averaged a little over 2,200 square feet. Knowing the specificities of this space matters because within the first six months, half of those hundred settlers died, doubling the spatial experience of vulnerability, enfolding it into the grief shared among these exposed households.

After concluding that document, Edward Winslow, one of the surveyors who likely co-authored the Relation, took up his pen again to document what happened after the English survivors treated with the Wampanoag, who were also dying at alarming rates following their exposure to disease brought by prior English surveyors. Winslow’s Goode Newes from New England progresses more comprehensively than the Relation; its narrative arc traces the effects of the vulnerability these English felt, and their work to diminish the ongoing visibility that underwrote it. One of the earliest concerns that troubles his narrative is the decision to build a palisade and a fort around those nineteen houses. Strangely, in the first two years, they had not done this. Or perhaps not so strangely, given the strategizing that the Goode Newes obliquely narrates. Fortification, the Pilgrims knew, meant redirecting the energy of the few able-bodied men from the work of planting crops. A palisade, they knew, might communicate to their neighbors that they were afraid. And a fort, they suspected, would communicate to their neighbors that they had plans to engage offensively, thereby provoking commensurate hostility from those neighbors upon whom they still depended. Goode Newes documents the psychologically taxing nature of this dilemma; its climax indicates one consequence of that stress when Winslow, with something like pride, remembers to note that the first use of their hard-won fort was to imprison a native messenger, to chain him to a pole and later to expose him to visual evidence of the English capacity for “extremity” in order to extract information about the weakness of their enemies. Thus, Winslow begins to conclude, did they frighten their neighbors so successfully that “none of them dare come amongst us.”

These texts, published in England in 1624, informed the Puritans who settled at Massachusetts in 1630 what they might expect upon arrival. Both Kelly Wisecup’s excellent introduction to the University of Massachusetts Press’s recent edition of the Good Newes (2017) and Dwight Heath’s introduction to an earlier small press reprinting of the Relation (1986) describe the European context of these texts, their generic precedents, and their rhetorical goals. The success of these texts, however, exceeds the ambitions that have thus far been noted. The nation remembers these settlers as capable of deep, melancholy feeling.

Caricatures of Puritan repressiveness do not countervail but rather affirm this capacity. If there is to be an accounting of repression—of memory that has been convincingly disavowed—one place to justly begin would be in recalling the earliest uses of these walls (a utility whose dynamism nationally endures) to assert into existence a people that are weak, meek, and mournfully passive, but yes, aggressively so, too.

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

Ana Schwartz recently completed her doctorate in English at the University of Pennsylvania and is beginning her first year as an assistant professor at Montclair State University. Though attending primarily to the seventeenth century, thematically, her research queries the likelihood and the implications of the possibility that early America has not passed.

Recent early American scholarship has worked to underscore the violence and privation that attended the English settlement of New England, in Plymouth and beyond, for settlers and native Americans alike. Outside of early American scholarship, it is a different story. If once we celebrated Thanksgiving because of the Pilgrims, we now celebrate the Pilgrims because of Thanksgiving. The (somewhat sketchy) Pilgrim origins of Thanksgiving commemorate a brief interlude of relative peace and plenty for Pilgrims and the native inhabitants of the land they settled. The gathering William Bradford describes in Of Plymouth Plantation is memorable precisely because it marks a departure from the struggle that preceded and followed it. These details have not prevented Thanksgiving from becoming the heart of an orgy of consumption that runs from Halloween to New Year’s. Increasingly, Thanksgiving feels like the undercard to Black Friday, when we gather to endure scenes of chaos and violence in order to get more stuff. The Plymouth that Bernard Bailyn and Kathleen Donegan conjure also reels with chaos and violence, but this story replaces big boxes and big deals with empty larders and empty stomachs.

In the Plymouth chapter of Seasons of Misery (2013), Donegan frames her analysis around a quotation from Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford: “the living were scarce able to bury their dead.” The portrait she paints is not of buckled shoes and big hats but of starving settlers driven to eating the leather from those shoes. Seasons of Misery is, in Donegan’s words “a study about the unsettling act of colonial settlement, and how English settlers became colonial through the acute bodily experiences and mental ruptures they experienced in their first years on Native American ground.”

In the case of Plymouth, the process of becoming colonial features the display of dead bodies, both English and Indian. The head of the Indian Witawamut, severed from his body by Miles Standish, better known for his role in the courtship of Priscilla Alden, is displayed on a pike in front of the Pilgrim encampment—“the head of one of them stands still on our forte for a terror to others,” wrote William Bradford. The Pilgrims had their own terrors. Facing simultaneous threats of starvation, sickness, and Indian attack, the Pilgrims created a macabre Potemkin village of their brethren. As Phineas Pratt explained, “We asked them wheare the Rest of our friends weare that came in the first ship. Thay said that God had taken them away by deth, & that before thayr second ship came, thay we are so distresed with sickness that thay, feareing the salvages should know it, had sett up theyr sick men with theyr muscits upon thayr Rests & thayr backs Leaning against trees.” This “cadaverous tableau vivant of forest sentinels,” as Donegan calls it, is hard to imagine integrating into our current observations of Thanksgiving, but violence and terror, in Donegan’s account, were the very fabric of Pilgrim settlement.

Bernard Bailyn strikes a similar theme in his 2012 The Barbarous Years, a companion to his Peopling of British North America (1986) and Voyagers to the West (1986). For Bailyn, the experiences attending the British settlement of North America were “not mainly of triumph, but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and to recapture lost worlds, in the process tearing apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded.” Many writers have noted the irony that the declension and dispersal of the Pilgrims that Bradford laments in the later years of his journal was a function of the colony’s growing prosperity. Coupled with the still more popular story of the First Thanksgiving, it is easy to imagine that this feast marked the end of the starving and the beginning of that prosperity.

Bailyn reminds us this is not the case. In the summer of 1623, a new group of settlers had “found a scene that shook their confidence in God’s favor.” The survivors of the Mayflower and Fortune were, Bradford reports “‘ragged in apparel and some little better than half naked.’ They seemed to have lost the ‘freshness of their former complexions,’” a consequence of a diet consisting of fish and spring water. This encounter takes place in 1623, or more than a year after this famous Thanksgiving. These 1623 newcomers, not surprisingly, “all were full of sadness,” all the more so for sharing Bradford’s realization of “the mighty ocean which … was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all civil parts of the world.”

Narrating how we got from the precarity of this first Plymouth Thanksgiving in the 1620s to the current terrain of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the twenty-teens would take more time and space than is available. Suffice it to say Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday. Its inception lies in recirculating a fantasy of settler colonialism dissolving into racial harmony as the occasion to give thanks for the blessings the United States enjoys. Giving thanks properly in 2015 means committing to a ritual of hyper-consumption, where eating to the point of discomfort in order to wake up before dawn to fight strangers for deals on flat screen TVs is a national ritual of gratitude. It is a holiday, appropriately enough, filled with paradoxes. In the United States, we endure long and grueling trips to spend time in rooms with people we only ever see on Thanksgiving, thankful that there is televised football to fill the space where conversation would be. We work long and hard to prepare foods that many people dislike.

These paradoxes found their way into my current research interest in tracing reverberations of seventeenth-century New England in other times and in other places. How do early twentieth-century women’s clubs appropriate the figure of Anne Hutchinson? Why does John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” address retain so much appeal in a secular and political context for Ronald Reagan? More broadly, why and how do the stories we tell about the English settlement of North America continue to shape and inform U.S. self-image? As one way of exploring these questions, I wrote an essay about statues of the English settlers of New England in Boston and elsewhere for a forthcoming collection edited by Carla Mulford and Bryce Traister.

It was not until I had submitted the essay that I realized that some of these statues were already in my house, which is in South Carolina. Publix, the southern grocery chain, offers a festive salt and pepper shaker set for the holidays:

NOW YOU CAN TAKE HOME YOUR VERY OWN PILGRIM PAIR FOR YOUR THANKSGIVING TABLE

THESE HANDCRAFTED CERAMIC COLLECTIBLES ARE AVAILABLE FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY.

The Pilgrim Pair are also a cherished holiday tradition for many. Other people find them profoundly creepy. Queries on social media suggested that these figures routinely show up on holiday tables in parts of the country served by Publix, and a search of eBay shows that there is a brisk secondary market as well. There is a television commercial where they come to life. The Pilgrim Pair, made in China, is a man and a woman, each roughly egg-shaped. The woman has two holes in her white bonnet (salt) while the man has three holes in his hat with a buckle (pepper). Each Pilgrim or Lilgrim comes with a sticker on his or her bottom that reads “PUBLIX SUPER MARKETS INC.” and the year. There are also Lilgrims, the son and daughter of the Pilgrim Pair.

Generally, holiday collectibles work by offering something to collect. For example, Hess gas stations offer a different toy every Christmastime. There are collectible Budweiser steins, and so forth. But last year’s Pilgrim Pair is the same as this year’s, except for the date. In this universe, there are only Pilgrims and Lilgrims. From time to time, the Pilgrim Pair can assume other forms—gravy boat, napkin rings—but they never have any company.

Their isolation is sad but understandable. If one imagines a typical evolution of collectible figurines, Publix would introduce a new character every year, presumably finding a market for a new and expanded set of figurines. The reason for this deviation from the standard marketing plan is pretty clear—if Publix were to expand its roster of Thanksgiving figures beyond this nuclear family, the logical choice would be their roly-poly Indian pals, which seems like a pretty clear nonstarter. For one thing, in the realm of ceramic collectibles, the specter of mammy doll figures looms over table accessories depicting non-whites. More immediately, portrayals of white settlers and Native Americans for the table can result in unfortunate items like the Dartmouth College Toby mug, where Rev. Wheelock’s Indian pupil contorts himself to be the handle of the mug.

The result is a temporal and racial stasis—in the world of Publix’s Pilgrim Pair, the only thing that ever changes is the year on their bottoms. What happens on the dinner table echoes what happens with the life-size versions of these statues. I learned that there are relatively few statues of orthodox pilgrims and Puritans in New England, but a surprisingly large number far away—in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, to mention a few. As Erika Doss details, the Saint-Gaudens statue of “The Puritan” became an iconic and much-reproduced figure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. The appeal of a figure like this is a visual invocation of a coherent, Anglo beginning to the national narrative of the United States. Perry Miller’s notion of a “coherence with which [one] can coherently begin” appeals in mass culture, not just scholarship. More generally, the collapse of Plymouth into Massachusetts into New England as the unitary origin of U.S. culture offers a putatively uncomplicated, white story of national origins that is appealing in its simplicity.  

The Pilgrim Pair are also remote from the ostensible context they represent. Even as they exist in a temporal vacuum, the symbolic gesture toward Ye Olde New England is a stretch, in that this iconic symbol of Pilgrim colonists is a product of late twentieth-century Florida. Publix is based in Lakeland, Florida, and the Pilgrim Pair debuted in 1998.

More importantly, the Pilgrim Pair are deeply inaccurate: given the starvation that preceded the first Thanksgiving, they are way too fat. Historically accurate Pilgrim figurines would look more like Giacometti statues, and less like Weebles. So what should an early American scholar do when confronted with these tchotchkes on a holiday table? Do they present a dangerously misleading version of history, like, say, Benjamin Martin’s groovy and collegial relations with his free black employees in The Patriot, a film set in eighteenth-century South Carolina? Is it incumbent upon those of us who teach and study early America to dash these saltshakers to the ground, and deliver a disquisition on The Truth?

That would probably be bad manners, not to mention bad pedagogy. But imagining this confrontation with figurines that offer a cheery and whitewashed version of a complex and violent historical moment follows the pattern of many contemporary renditions of early American culture. It is nice to have the public paying attention to early America, but it would be nice if they were paying more or better attention.

To engage this gap between the early America of mass culture and the early America of scholarly monographs, I’d like to propose that we consider a conversation across a smaller gap. As in, for instance, Jane Kamensky’s recent review of Stacy Schiff’s book on the Salem witch hysteria. Jane Kamensky is a prominent early American historian who has spent her entire professional life teaching and researching in this field. Stacy Schiff is an award-winning biographer whose last book was on Cleopatra. As of this writing, Schiff’s The Witches was No. 2 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list. Kamensky is generous to Schiff, and works to praise what she can. The sticking point comes when Schiff’s effort to make this distant past legible to contemporary readers, in Kamensky’s phrase, “takes times out of mind and minds out of time.” As Kamensky explains, in an effort to make Salem legible to her readers, Schiff conjures up analogies such as asserting that “Increase Mather’s 1684 treatise ‘Remarkable Providences’ was ‘an occult Ripley’s Believe It or Not,’ while the durability of a witchcraft accusation ‘resembled an Internet rumor.’”

Kamensky characterizes “this effort to drag the past into the present” as “pandering,” albeit “earnest” pandering. More seriously, however, Schiff’s effort of translation is misleading. I would stress that this difference between incorrect and misleading is an important one for early Americanists who feel compelled to intervene in the case of careless popular appropriations like Schiff’s book. There are details in the uniforms the British soldiers wear in The Patriot that are incorrect. There is a wedding reception that is an interracial hoedown in The Patriot that is misleading. And “misleading” itself is complicated, in that it suggests that it might be possible to lead the misled back to the Truth, which suggests a level of positivism that would make most currently practicing scholars of the humanities uneasy.

In this situation, one approach is the “well, actually” stratagem, as when Kamensky challenges Schiff’s caricature of Cotton Mather and sets the record straight:

“Poor Cotton Mather, cast by Schiff as a preening, ego-driven throwback who ‘reveled in the occult,’ was in fact not only a leading theologian, but also a fellow of the Royal Society of London—the first elected from the colonies—who helped pioneer the practice of inoculation against smallpox, thus transforming, quite literally, the face of the world, an achievement orders of magnitude more significant than his writings on witchcraft.”

What would the equivalent strategy look like for the Pilgrim Pair? Thanksgiving is already a holiday that has a public “well, actually” narrative baked in. This year’s National Day of Mourning in Plymouth will mark the forty-sixth consecutive year that Native Americans gather on the fourth Thursday in November to share their Thanksgiving counternarrative. It is possible to imagine a program where early Americanists could volunteer to distribute a pamphlet with information about the true context and origins of the Thanksgiving tradition outside of Publix, but Publix does not permit the distribution of literature on its premises, and it is hard to imagine early American scholars agreeing on the text of such a statement.

If we can’t do this work in the parking lot, what about the classroom? Does the proliferation of a willfully idealized and ethnically cleansed version of what might be the most complicated holiday on the calendar offer early Americanists a teachable moment? If it does, the opportunity is less a question of killjoy debunking and more of an occasion to reflect on the power of the Thanksgiving narrative—a power that allows a story from early seventeenth-century New England to leap hundreds of years and hundreds of miles to take root in mutant form in a grocery chain in the deep south in the twenty-first century. For starters, it is worth noting that Thanksgiving is a story of racial reconciliation all the more compelling for its conclusion at the dinner table, rather than in the bedroom.

Kamensky closes her review of Schiff’s book about the other popular New England story with: “To reckon with Salem, 1692, is to peer into a leaded 17th-century window, thick and cloudy and bubbled, not to stare, as Schiff does, in a mirror that reflects most brightly our own self-satisfied faces.” Rather than making an effort to set the Thanksgiving record straight, as history, the first challenge for early Americanists is to understand the appeal of the narrative we see reflected back to us in the faces of the Pilgrim Pair. Instead of looking for our own faces, it is worth reflecting on how an all-white family of ceramic figurines can come to embody a national holiday that celebrates a fantasy of ethnic harmony.

Further Reading:

Kathleen Donegan and Bernard Bailyn offer salutary correctives to the narrative suggested by the Pilgrim Pair and their Lilgrim offspring. Both books range far beyond the context of Plymouth to reconsider the English colonial project in the seventeenth-century Americas. Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York, 2012); Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia, 2014). Every early Americanist owes Jane Kamensky a debt for her sober and measured reading of Stacy Schiff’s popular account of the Salem witch trials. Jane Kamensky, “’The Witches: Salem, 1692,’ by Stacy Schiff,” review of The Witches, Salem, 1692, by Stacy Schiff. New York Times, Nov. 1, 2015, Sunday Book Review. For the reader who has not encountered the Pilgrim Pair in real life, and is skeptical of their popularity, a search of Publix + “Pilgrim Pair” on Pinterest or another social media platform will indicate the extent of their popularity. Their online home is here. Erika Doss’s article “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan: Founders’ Statues, Indian Wars, Contested Memories, and Anger’s Memory in Springfield, Massachusetts,” Winterthur Portfolio, 46:4 (Winter 2013), offers a useful account of the appeal of life-size statues of the English settlers of New England.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Jonathan Beecher Field was born in New England and educated in the Midwest. He is an associate professor of English at Clemson University. His essay on bigger Puritan statues will appear in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies, edited by Bryce Traister and Carla Mulford, and forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Over the past ten to twenty years, a rising number of historians have recast both the history of North American slavery and Native American history by bringing to light the prevalence of American Indian enslavement in the Southwest, the Southeast, the Mississippi Valley, French Canada, and now New England. Margaret Ellen Newell’s focus on New England is especially revolutionary in transforming how historians have typically depicted this region and the nature of English settlement there in the seventeenth century. We used to think early New England’s colonists wished foremost to kill Indians off and push them out of the way, to clear the land of them so that John Winthrop and his ilk could found their “city on a hill” and “little commonwealth” of self-sufficient, faith-based English households and towns. Newell adds an alternative dimension to this version of the English conquest of New England by arguing that over the course of the seventeenth century, colonists brought Indians into their homes, extended legal jurisdiction over them, and depended on Indians for the growth of the New England economy. The driving force behind this incorporation of Indians was English demand for Indian labor.

Newell’s evidence in support of her argument is harrowing in how effectively it demonstrates the ruthlessness by which English settlers engineered expropriation of Indian bodies, forcing them into servitude and slavery in English households and putting them up for sale in slave markets around the world. She begins with the Pequot War and the moral, religious, diplomatic, and pragmatic debates that led to the capture, dispersal, and sale of several hundred Indian women and children by 1637. (The English saw adult men as intrinsically combative and dangerous and so executed those not killed in battle.) Many of these captives found themselves enslaved by the region’s most prominent English colonists, including John Winthrop and Roger Williams. Others were transported to the Caribbean and exchanged for African slaves.

Several chapters then explore the vital work enslaved Indians performed for English masters and the “hybrid society” that emerged from the intimacy of English and Indians living and working alongside each other (62). Particularly fascinating are Newell’s accounts of quite a few Indian servants who resided in the households of the colonies’ political elites and who became cultural and political intermediaries between Native communities and English authorities. Most notable were John Sassamon and Cockenoe, servants held by Richard Callicott of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and Robin Cassacinamon, John Winthrop Sr.’s servant who later revitalized the postwar Pequot presence in southern Connecticut by closely associating with John Winthrop Jr.

When King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, the conflict again served as a pretext for enslaving Indians. The victors divided the spoils—Native women and children—among themselves. In addition, many Natives who had been promised English protection as Christians living in praying towns or as neutrals in the war fell victim to kidnapping and transport out of the region. Hundreds ended up in Barbados, Jamaica, and elsewhere in the Caribbean but many were sold in more distant slave markets: Cádiz, Spain; Tangier on the North African coast, the Azores, and possibly even Madagascar. But for the several dozen reduced to debilitating labor as galley slaves in Charles II’s navy and others forced to build a fort for the English at Tangier, their fates are difficult to trace.

After King Philip’s War, English demand for Indian captives and slaves continued to feature in conflicts with Indians on the northern frontier while colonists also began purchasing “Carolina Indians” and “Spanish Indians” from outside the region. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Indians native to the New England region were less often categorized as slaves but still subject to forced labor as courts routinely sent debtors and convicted criminals into servitude without calling for clear contractual guidelines spelling out length and terms of service and rarely intervening in cases of abuse.

Throughout the book, Newell emphasizes the critical role ambiguity played in enabling the English to hold Indians literally as slaves or by some other designation that effectively amounted to perpetual and heritable enslavement. From uncertainty over the biblical stance on slavery to the sparse, erratic, and vague body of law that would eventually develop variously across the New England colonies to the incestuous conflicts of interest that allowed owners of slaves and servants to act as the administrators of justice in freedom suits brought against them, Indians and other people of color became subsumed by English jurisprudence but without the protections and privileges that that jurisprudence afforded its English constituents.

This book has completely altered my understanding of early New England history, making it—in my view—one of the most important books on this topic, and in American history more generally, to come along in the past few years. The only problem I had as a reader was that, on occasion, I wanted more precision in the footnoting to identify which sources certain information came from. However, on the whole, Newell’s research was impressively prodigious and wide-ranging. The depth of her research makes incontestable her conclusion that English colonists had a demand for unfree labor and employed a variety of devices—warfare, legal adjudication of debt and criminal cases, and purchase—to force the region’s Native people to satisfy that demand.

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

Nancy Shoemaker is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Her most recent book is Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race (2015).

Beauty Revealed, as Sarah Goodridge called it, is an extraordinary self-portrait no matter how you look at it. Goodridge painted it in 1823 on a 2 5/8″ x 3 1/8″ sliver of ivory shaved so thin that light shines through it. The miniature was a gift from the forty-year-old artist to her famous and frequent client, the orator and public servant Daniel Webster. Over the next twenty years, Goodridge would paint her own image two more times, in 1830 and again in 1845. Yet it is to Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait) that our eyes return. What sort of self did she fashion in that image–and how and why did she modify it over the years?

Self-fashioning refers to the choices made by artists in self-portraits to associate their images with certain items of clothing, hairstyle, furniture, or scenery. Analyzing these choices reveals a unique perspective on an artist’s view of herself. In Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait) (fig. 1), Sarah Goodridge conjured herself as a kind of visual synecdoche, a part for the whole. Outwardly, at least, the artist offered far more information about her view of herself in her second self-portrait, dated 1830, and in her third and last known self-portrait, ca. 1845. Unlike Beauty Revealed, both of these include facial expressions, clothing, hairstyle, and pose that communicate historical and editorial commentary.

What must Daniel Webster have thought about the self that Beauty Revealed revealed? Of course each brushstroke is a piece of a costume; Goodridge dressed this image with color, shadow, and light. To enhance the three-dimensional effect, she draped the breasts with gradations of color. In order to please the viewer–Webster alone, the miniature format suggests–she crafted each nipple delicately and placed it deliberately and harmoniously. As she mixed the pinks and grays in her paint box, she probably studied her own forty-year-old body and thought about how to best capture its shapes. Through this process she idealized reality. Goodridge costumed these breasts with youth, balance, paleness, and buoyancy. With masterly skill, she used the bare ivory’s luminescence to make the objects seem to glow in particular ways. In this sense the breasts that make up Beauty Revealed are clothed–arranged, fashioned–and we can interpret their adornment as we would any conventional self-portrait.

According to Stephen Greenblatt, the choices artists and writers make about how to fashion their self-representations reveal what he calls “the point of encounter between an authority and an alien.” By authority, he means the shared, referential meaning associated with an object or an item of clothing. By alien he means the figure in the painting, which becomes an alien twin to the artist, frozen in a constructed world. Greenblatt would say that self-fashioning in self-portraiture forces the artist to select a costume. But unlike an actress the painted figure cannot take the costume off when the drama is over. The alien image in the self-portrait separates from the real self, living a different life than its maker whenever it is viewed, often surviving the artist’s corporeal existence, forever captured in relation to certain unchanging objects.

Dozens of Goodridge’s miniatures survive today; they and her neatly written business accounts are the only evidence from her own hand. Sarah Goodridge was a prolific but not lavishly honored miniaturist who made a decent middle-class income from her trade. Born in 1788 in Templeton, Massachusetts, the sixth of nine children, she showed an early propensity for drawing. Informal instruction and self-education, and a move to Boston in 1820, brought her to study with the celebrated portraitist Gilbert Stuart. Under Stuart’s influence her skill increased markedly. Upon arrival in Boston, she opened a studio and commenced a nearly thirty-year career in making miniature portraits, often two or three per week. The Boston Athenaeum held five exhibitions of her work between 1827 and 1835, and Goodrich twice traveled to Washington to carry out commissions for her longtime friend and frequent client Daniel Webster. She never married, and earned enough money to raise an orphaned niece and take care of her invalid mother for eleven years. In 1850, due to failing eyesight, Goodridge retired to a house she bought in Reading, Massachusetts. Three years later she died of a stroke at the age of 65.

Goodrich limned some of her biography into her last known self-portrait, where she fashioned herself as an artist at work at her easel. She was somewhere between forty-five and fifty-two years old when she painted it–older, though not by much, than the self portrayed in Beauty Revealed. Her eyes are lowered, denying the viewer the typical eye-to-eye confrontation that usually adorns self-portraits. Partial views of her water glass, her hand, and her shawl hint at her illustrated profession. Posing herself working at her easel, she assumes an active, preoccupied role, too busy even to look at the viewer/mirror. No other female miniaturist painted herself in this pose, although several men did. This painting distinguishes Goodridge from her same-sex peers–Ann Hall, for example, who painted herself arranging flowers–but aligns Goodridge with such titans of American painting as Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, and John Trumbull, all of whom fashioned their self-portraits with palettes, brushes, and easels. Goodridge pictures herself as a working person, proud enough of her occupation to depict herself doing it. Unlike West, Peale, and Trumbull, who gaze piercingly outward at viewers, Goodridge refuses a returning gaze, due not to modesty but to distraction. Forever her alien twin is working, frozen in the act of daubing paint, shackled to what Greenblatt would call the authority of male painters of her era and nation.

Goodridge was a businesswoman as well as an artist, so she must have known that her self-portraits functioned as an advertisement of her skill, as marketing tools, in effect. Her 1845 self portrait is both an example of her work, and it is an illustration of her profession. Potential clients could judge whether this likeness was accurate, and use it to assess the quality of likeness they might see in their own commissioned portraits.

Is this figure alien to the artist? Careful analysis reveals that light falls rather unflatteringly on her brow and neck. This same light bleaches out part of the eyebrow and rather sloppily daubs yellow on the eyelashes on one side, making the pair of eyes seem unbalanced. Neither bright lips nor fashionable hair decorations embellish this figure. In fact, her scarf, her hair, her dress all seem burdens. These gender markers seem to weigh her down. The dark swags of the painted dress and knotted shawl contribute to a yoked feeling. The hair seems a heavy helmet, under which the prim, elderly looking face appears to recede. The flesh tones are as dull as mayonnaise when compared to the luminous colors of Beauty Revealed, where harmonious balance, light, and color dress the illustrated breasts with youthful energy and vigorous health. The pinks on the elder woman’s cheeks do not vibrate as the pinks giving shape to the breasts. All that her first self-portrait promotes is covered over in her final self-portrait, obscured behind the easel, the table, and the heavy clothing.

Painted between Beauty Revealed and the 1845 image, Goodridge’s 1830 self-portrait is a classic of its genre, and it aligns itself with conventional self-portraits by other miniaturists–both men and women. Compared to her last self-portrait, this version of her face seems less burdened, less dour. The color palette for the flesh tones is the same as her first self-portrait; they vibrate with healthful intensity, suggesting a blush. The costume and hair are much more harmoniously arranged around a face that is bright enough to support them. The figure’s off-the-shoulder dress illustrates a certain degree of wealth, as well as her skill at rendering lace and shimmering black silk folds. The hair, too, and an embroidered scarlet shawl reveal her skill at illustrating fabric realistically–as well as her consciousness of fashion, of style. The dynamic 3/4 pose alone aligns the image with all miniatures depicting middle-class women during this period. Nothing in this image betrays the spirit of her first self-image except the pinks and ivories of the skin.

Look into Goodridge’s painted eyes. Peer closer at her face as it regards viewers. Can you see through the image to the artist who painted it? Is there a hint of the erotic spirit that went into painting her first self-portrait? Her willingness to face us implies an intensity, a soul-searching intimacy. The stippled backdrop is unornamented, increasing the tight focal emphasis on the figure. However something about the pose–the figure’s immobility, and the protective shawl–suggests distance, artifice, and coldness. While this figure begs a viewer’s idle gaze to turn into active inquiry, it yields relatively little in return: just an arch expression, a cool returning gaze, and skin tones that hint at warmth. Although almost nothing of the eroticism of Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait), painted just two years prior, surfaces here, both images confront the viewer directly, appealing to the senses, insisting upon engagement, while yielding none of the intimacy they promise.

As she painted Beauty Revealed, what did Goodridge think about? Did she consider herself to be making an object that crossed the boundaries of conduct, class, and gender expectations? Perhaps these boundaries were less clearly marked than we assume today. We know this image came to Webster as a gift, and like any present it suggests a relationship. Can we infer, then, a degree of intimacy between them? Can we attribute a voice to the image? John Updike recently imagined the breasts saying, “We are yours for the taking, in all our ivory loveliness, with our tenderly stippled nipples.” I agree that Goodridge’s painting communicates availability, but instead of coquettishness, these breasts seem to confront the world of the viewer. They demand attention. They seem to come forward out of the picture plane. This effect is intentional, and it relies upon masterful use of the luminous ivory, which is thin enough to be semi-transparent. The result is that the breasts seem to glow with more light than an opaque surface would allow. The luminosity contributes to the three-dimensional effect, but the gauzy curtain surrounding the breasts really makes them pop out of the frame. Like curtains drawn back on a Vaudeville stage, the painted image of sensuously bulging fabric defines a space devoted to performance and spectacle. The fabric limits the viewer’s gaze, focuses it. The fabric also erases the rest of the body, suggesting instead its shapes in abstractions. More evocatively than words, this image seduces viewers while attesting to frank openness about female erotic power.

What company did Goodridge imagine for her portrait? Other breasts in fine art are famously associated with the Madonna. But given Goodridge’s nonacademic artisan’s training, and her family’s association with the Boston Unitarian church, her idealized breasts probably do not derive their authority from the Madonna tradition of bared breasts in art. Perhaps a more likely source for this image is the Venus/Aphrodite motif. She would likely have seen Greenough’s “Venus Victrix” in at the Boston Athenaeum, a sculpture whose breasts are no less ideally represented, albeit in marble and in three dimensions instead of in watercolor on a flat surface.

Goodridge gave this image to Senator Daniel Webster in 1828. Some would argue that its meaning is therefore private, impossible for outsiders to know. However the stage, with its curtain drawn back, implies a far more public performance than an audience of just one. Fashioning the image with youth and availability suggests a universal appeal. Aligning the image with representations of a pre-Christian goddess broadcasts beyond the private intimacies shared by Goodridge and Webster alone. Goodridge’s first self-portrait communicates a message about erotic license in Anglo-American culture during the 1820s, and communicates it from a woman’s perspective, from someone who did not conform to the domestic stereotype that her peers valued. Any modesty clings to the curtain, which is drawn aside, revealing without shame, without demurring from the viewer’s gaze.

The title Goodridge gave this self-portrait–Beauty Revealed–suggests that it should be associated with abstractions like “Beauty” (for which Venus is often a simulacrum) and surprises that get “Revealed” after a veil is lifted. The title exhibits the confidence with which she painted and labeled her breasts. Certainly she painted them for Senator Daniel Webster’s pleasure, but to some degree she also painted them for other eyes as well. She fashioned them for audiences in the future, and she relied upon the tradition of pre-Christian celebrations of female desire as a reference to authority. What is beautiful should be revealed, her self-portrait seems to say, and the curtain emphasizes the revelation.

Perhaps the only other nineteenth-century text that dares to express the erotic jouissance of nineteenth-century, middle-class, Anglo-American culture is Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” composed almost thirty years after Goodridge painted Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait). Whitman’s poem, like Goodridge’s painting, promotes erotic uses by readers and viewers. In “Whoever You Art Holding Me Now in Hand,” for example, Whitman tells readers to “put your lips upon mine I permit you,” and to thrust his book “beneath your clothing, / Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip.” Like Goodridge’s self-portrait, Whitman’s autobiographical verse joyously defies staid, conventional, shame-ruled representations in print and in pictures.  Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait) and Whitman’s autobiography fashion their makers’ naked bodies with a kind of promise, an effort to reach out and through the representation to viewers. They invite the gaze of readers and viewers without judging them or turning into a coy pose.

Assessed as a group, Goodridge’s self-portraits demand a revision of the popular view that middle-class white women in the Jacksonian period conformed universally to the doctrine of sentimental domesticity, with its rigid prescriptions for a woman’s modesty, chastity, piety, and purity. The three miniature paintings fashion versions of a woman who deviates radically from a stereotype, but also conforms to it. Think of Goodridge, therefore, as that particularly American stereotype, the Jack of all Trades, whose opportunism was an essential component of the freewheeling Jacksonian Democracy that emerged among the second generations of U.S. citizens during the 1820s-40s. Like Whitman’s autobiographical poem, Goodridge’s self-portraits reveal selves large enough to contain multitudes, but whose real power lies in the one-to-one intimacy with the reader or the viewer.

Further Reading: See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980); John Updike, “The Revealed and the Concealed: An Extraordinary Love Token Holds the Key to America’s Ambivalent Relationship with the Nude,” Art & Antiques 15 (February 1993): 70-76.

This article originally appeared in issue 4.1 (October, 2003).

Chris Packard teaches at New York University. His essays have appeared in Arizona Quarterly and Concerns. His book Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature will be published by Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press in early 2004.

Two early American ministers construct themselves through painting

Self-portraits by itinerants and other nonacademic early American painters provide insights into how artists conceived their identities when they took up the brush while pursuing numerous other strategies for surviving economically. For most artists in the early national period, art making was not and could not be an exclusive pursuit. As Neil Harris has commented, “when geographical and occupational mobility were the norm rather than the exception, the experience of moving from trade to trade before settling on one of the arts was not as dangerous or demoralizing as it might have seemed in Europe.” Although the two Maine artists whose self-portraits I examine here—Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847) and John Usher Parsons (1806-1874)—were of different generations, both produced images of themselves that compellingly constructed their identities less as romantic geniuses than as mobile and flexible participants in their seaport communities. Fisher and Parsons were well-educated ministers who pursued a number of different trades and professions in addition to making art. The two men used similar strategies of self-fashioning to produce images that provide overlooked evidence for how artists fit into the commercial culture of the early national period. Fisher’s and Parsons’s self-portraits emphasized the values of virtue and intellectual achievement, at the same time that they demonstrated the painters’ participation in New England’s maritime communities.

The two self-portraits have been considered examples of folk art, despite the fact that neither Fisher nor Parsons was uneducated or unfamiliar with academic culture, as folk artists are often assumed to be. Fisher, the son of a Revolutionary War widow, was educated at Harvard College in the late 1780s and early 1790s where he was trained in the use of perspective for representing three-dimensional objects and spaces on a flat surface; at the time, this was a standard part of the mathematics curriculum. Parsons was educated at Bowdoin College where James Bowdoin III had donated a part of his collection of European paintings, old master drawings, and family portraits by 1811. Although we do not know whether his formal education touched on art in any way, it is possible that Parsons received some instruction from Josiah Fisher, Jonathan’s son, who was a classmate first at Bowdoin and then at the Andover Theological Seminary where they completed their studies in 1831. Both Jonathan Fisher and John Usher Parsons were thus well educated and to some degree familiar with the conventions of academic art.

That said, these two portraits display formal affinities with images made by less sophisticated limners of the nineteenth century and earlier. The relatively unmodeled faces, stark color contrasts, and somewhat awkward rendering of the human form in each man’s self-portrait connects it with works by itinerants and other artists who operated far from centers of urban culture. Such terms as “plain” and “simple” have been used to distinguish folk from academic painting, while the concerns of folk artists have been assumed to be primarily with formal issues such as color, geometry, and pattern. For instance, Stacy Hollander, curator of the American Folk Art Museum, notes Parsons’s “sense of abstraction and decorative playfulness.” Their manifest concerns with form notwithstanding, Fisher and Parsons used painting to interrogate their own positions as artists, intellectuals, and moral authorities, as their relatively deep engagement with self-portraiture shows. Although Fisher enjoyed a permanent position as a minister where Parsons was peripatetic, the two men found that painting did not preclude engaging with commercial life but was instead part of it, a point they made in complex ways in their self-portraits.

Self-portraiture constitutes a substantial proportion of the men’s oeuvres. Of about twenty-five known oil paintings by Fisher, four are self-portraits. Parsons did two self-portraits, one of which is arguably his most complex composition. Each man must then have had a keen interest in representing himself, although in each case the artist’s concern was not so much in conveying a unique personality as it was in documenting his varied contributions to the community around him at a particular point in time. While both artists foreground their solitary intellectual achievements, they also placed themselves in wider worlds. For Fisher as well as for Parsons making a self-portrait was, finally, an act of self-memorialization. In Fisher’s case this impulse is particularly clear since we know that the self-portraits were made for his four daughters, to whom the paintings descended after his death to keep his memory alive in their homes.

What is memorialized in the two cases is primarily the men’s intellectual labors, reflecting an emphasis on the learnedness of the minister rather than on his piety. Both men chose not to represent themselves in traditional ministerial garb but instead in relatively up-to-date clothing. In this sense, the portraits are of a piece with other images of the early nineteenth century, when ministers exchanged the white linen bands and black “Geneva” gowns, which Congregational ministers had worn since the seventeenth century, for clothing that was generically professional. This sartorial shift registered the decreasing authority of the Congregational ministry in early nineteenth-century New England; ministers were demoted to an occupational status shared by doctors, lawyers, and others. Fisher’s self-representation fits this nineteenth-century formula in that he wears a black coat and vest with a white shirt and cravat, similar to the way in which merchants and other “upper middling” portrait subjects appeared. Showing himself pointing to his own literary and religious work is also consistent with ministers’ portraits of the early national period, which were often more amply provided with props than in earlier times and especially with those things that signaled the minister’s learning, such as books and writing implements. Fisher’s attire and his inclusion of an array of telling objects in his self-portrait may reflect the lessening status of the Congregational ministry in relation to other professions, but his finger jabbing at a page of his Hebrew Lexicon seems to insist on his authoritative role in the community. In all of his self-portraits, Fisher depicted himself at a table with a paneled door behind him. That architectural detail is quite revealing for it suggests that he had a room with a door that closed for his reading and writing. Like other frontier families, the Fishers depended upon paid boarders and family members to participate in a variety of activities to make ends meet. Braiding straw hats and weaving cloth to earn cash and store credits, not to mention the daily household work of a small farm, could create noise and disrupt the parson, but the 1814 addition he made to his house included a study with a door to close out the distractions of home production.

Fisher’s assertion of authority in his self-portrait compensated for the actual erosion of his position between the time of his being called to Blue Hill and his retirement in the mid-1830s. Following his Harvard graduation in 1792, Fisher pursued his theological studies in Cambridge and received his M.A. in 1795. Fisher’s theological positions became more distinctly Calvinistic as time went by. He remained a staunch religious conservative over the course of his decades in Blue Hill, despite the increasing migration of his parishioners from the Congregational Church to newly established Protestant sects. The first Anglo-American settlers came to Blue Hill on the eastern shore of Penobscot Bay in the District (after 1820, the State) of Maine in the 1760s. Many, like Fisher, came from southeastern Massachusetts. They profited from the vast reserves of timber further inland and eastward. A village grew up around Blue Hill Bay from where vessels traveled to the Canadian Maritime Provinces to the northeast and to Portland, Salem, Boston, and other ports to the southwest. In the new settlement, Fisher took advantage of his ability to make things by hand and his uncommon skills in drawing and painting to add to his minister’s salary. In some of these enterprises he had the assistance of his wife Dolly Battle Fisher (1770-1853) and some of their eight children, born between 1798 and 1812. Fisher himself painted shop signs and the names of ships on their stern boards and made furniture, buttons, and household utensils—all for cash payments, barter, or store credits. He applied his drawing skills, garnered at Harvard, in different sorts of paid work, such as surveying land and designing a small number of buildings for the new settlement. Fisher also produced broadsides, and he attempted to sell oil paintings, although the market for those was extremely small. His best-known work, A Morning View of Bluehill Village, Sept. 1824 (1824-1825, Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine), was painted for his own pleasure and displayed in his own home in Blue Hill, which is now the Jonathan Fisher Memorial.

Parsons came from a large family in York County Maine, in the southwestern part of the state, where his family settled in the seventeenth century. They were so closely associated with the place that the town where the artist was born was called Parsonsfield. Parsons received his early education at Latin schools in Parsonsfield and in nearby Effingham, New Hampshire. Parsons was ordained in New York City in 1831, and like Jonathan Fisher in the previous generation, he then headed to the frontier. In Parsons’s case that meant the western frontier—Indiana, Wisconsin, Kansas, and elsewhere—where he traveled in the company of his wife Harriet Hinckley Nye who was also from Maine. Harriet died in Indiana in 1832, and in the same year, Parsons married Rosetta Hebard, a minister’s daughter. The two returned to New England, where Rosetta “lived to share [Parsons’s] labors ten years” before she died; Parsons was married a third time, to Eliza Safford of Kennebunk, Maine, in 1843. By that time Parsons had accomplished a good deal in a wide variety of enterprises, including founding a college in Wisconsin and a mutual insurance company in Georgia.

A dozen or so paintings by Parsons date to the period just after his return to the East Coast. Most are portraits of subjects who lived in the area around Parsonsfield and in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the whaling port near Berkley, Massachusetts, where Parsons was settled as minister for several years. The works appear to have been executed during a four-year span from 1834 to 1838. At the beginning of that period, Parsons was recuperating from one of the many illnesses that dogged him throughout his life; he became Berkley’s minister in 1836.

Like Fisher, Parsons shows himself in his self-portrait dressed similarly to other subjects of relatively high social standing whom he painted, including an unidentified but obviously prosperous man from Union, Maine (1836, Private Collection), who wears a similar black suit, white shirt, and dark tie. Parsons signals his learning in his self-portrait by the books on the shelf behind him, some with partial Latin titles. Parsons was as prolific an author as Fisher (who published poems, religious essays, and other works) and produced a number of tracts, especially on religious topics. Interestingly, both Fisher and Parsons emphasized in their self-portraits the material circumstances that made intellectual work possible. Parsons is less specific about the space in which his intellectual labor takes place, but he does carefully depict the cabinet in which his books are stored, showing it to have a sliding door with a brass ring to close it and a lock with a diamond-shaped escutcheon in the style of the day. Like Fisher, Parsons places his hand on a book to claim intellectual authority. The abilities to read and write conferred one kind of power, as the two self-portraits make clear, while the possession of a substantial collection of books also distinguished ministers in the period. Although Fisher, in contrast to Parsons, does not actually show us his books, inventories demonstrate that his library was very large by the standards of the day.

Other texts in addition to books figure importantly in these self-portraits, suggesting the connectedness of writing and painting in the careers of the two men. Both artists illusionistically depict handwritten notes that help to fix the identity of the sitter as well as his place in time and space. In Fisher’s self-portrait, on the desk is a letter which has been sent from New Jersey where one of the parson’s brothers lived, while a paper to the left indicates the artist’s name and date. These bits of writing then connect Fisher with Blue Hill but also with the world beyond the village. Fisher intended the self-portraits as memorials to himself, but he could not rely on his face alone to identify the subject for future generations: he had to resort to words. Fisher accommodates the labels in his self-portrait by showing them to be part of the three-dimensional picture space. Parsons on the other hand simply labels his painting. (Before the conservation of the picture in the 1980s, it was even speculated that the paper label belonged on the back of the canvas, but it appears never to have been adhered there.) The label, which reads, “Painted Jan. 27. 1835. By J.U.P.,” asserts the flatness of the picture surface and undermines the illusion of a three-dimensional space inhabited by the sitter; this confounds the expectations of modern viewers for a consistent treatment of the picture space—hence the speculation that the label belonged on the back—but evidently did not bother the artist himself. Indeed, Parsons was not troubled by the quality of flatness in his paintings: witness the relatively planar quality of his face in the picture, especially as compared to Jonathan Fisher’s self-portrait where the artist is at some pains to map the wrinkles on his face, which give it some three-dimensionality.

Parsons’s one other self-portrait (in a private collection) is inscribed on the reverse of the canvas “John Usher Parsons, by himself.” The face in this second self-portrait is nearly identical to that in the self-portrait we’re discussing. This similarity is the basis on which the first is identified as a self-portrait, for in many other respects it seems as though the subject must be somebody other than the artist. Previous commentators have been confused by Parsons’s decision to depict himself in front of a landscape background that shows a coastline planted with a neat row of trees with ships at sea beyond. Such a treatment would have been expected in the portrait of a merchant or seaman, but it makes little sense for Parsons who did not travel abroad and was not a merchant involved in the coastal trade. The fact that he shows himself wearing a gold hoop in his left ear—a fashion adopted by sailors (and notoriously, by pirates)—has even led to speculation that the picture is not a self-portrait. However, if the picture is thought of as a work of self-fashioning, then these inclusions become more understandable. Parsons gives considerable attention to the shells lined up on the top of his bookcase, he shows himself in proximity to the coast, and he even includes a sailor’s personal adornment all to the end of fashioning himself as the intellectual and spiritual leader of a seaport. Parsons labels his self-portrait as one would an object of trade. In a way that parallels Jonathan Fisher’s self-portrait, Parsons shows himself to be part of larger intellectual and commercial networks: where Fisher included a letter mailed from New Jersey and addressed to Blue Hill to indicate his participation in those larger systems, Parsons gives us the coastal trade itself. In the one piece of autobiographical writing left by Parsons, occasioned by the thirtieth anniversary of his Bowdoin graduation, he never mentioned having been a sailor, and in fashioning himself as such in his self-portrait, Parsons was not so much claiming to have been a seaman as indicating his identification with the men who populated the busy seaports nearby. At once gentleman, scholar, and sailor in his self-portrait, Parsons effectively captures the fluid identities of early American artists who moved between many different professional categories, not only on the newly settled frontier but even in New England’s more established centers of manufacturing and trade.

Fashioning oneself in a self-portrait was a way for artists, even for those whose careers were played out far from major urban centers and with relatively few resources at their disposal, to articulate particular ideas of how making art fit with other pursuits in early America and of how the artist fit into his community. The two examples examined here are not as psychologically resonant as the portraits and self-portraits of their well-trained and well-known early American counterparts such as Gilbert Stuart, who was praised for having produced in his images of people “the portrait of the mind itself.” Nonetheless they speak to the self-conceptions of men who did not call themselves “artists” and whose images indicate that they saw themselves as fully integrated into communities of merchants, professionals, and even, in the case of John Usher Parsons, seaport workers of early New England. Neither man fashioned an emotionally charged image of a romantic artist detached from the world around him: instead, each showed himself to be a person who played many roles in his community and, in so doing, subtly demonstrated the seamless connection between art making and other kinds of self-expression (especially writing)—between intellectual and artistic work on the one hand and commercial enterprise on the other.

Further Reading:

Jonathan Fisher’s life is well documented in archives at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, and the Jonathan Fisher Memorial, Blue Hill, Maine. The one primary source for John Usher Parsons’s biography is an 1858 autobiographical note in the Bowdoin College Archives, Brunswick, Maine. Fisher’s biography is described in Mary Ellen Chase, Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson, 1768-1847 (New York, 1948) and in my forthcoming book, Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture and Community on the Eastern Frontier (Amherst, Mass., 2010). One modern biographical treatment of Parsons exists: Ralph and Susanne Katz, “In Search of John Usher Parsons,” Folk Art 30 (Spring 2005): 46-53.

On the subject of portraiture in early America, see Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society; The Formative Years, 1790-1860 (New York, 1966); Jack Larkin, “The Face of Change: Images of Self and Society in New England, 1790-1850,” in Caroline F. Sloat, ed., Meet Your Neighbors: New England Portraits, Painters & Society, 1790-1850, exh. cat. (Sturbridge, Mass., 1992): 13-14. In the same volume, also see Jessica F. Nicoll, cat. entries 44 (Portrait of Rev. Nathanael Howe’s by Zededkiah Belknap, c. 1815) and 61 (Portrait of Rev. John Perrin by Royall Brewster Smith, 1835): 102-3, 119-20. The concept of portraiture as self-fashioning is developed in T. H. Breen, “The Meaning of ‘Likeness’: Portrait-Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society,” in Ellen G. Miles, ed., The Portrait in Eighteenth-Century America (Newark, Del., and London and Toronto, 1993): 37-60 (originally published in Word & Image 6:4 [1990]: 325-350). A more recent treatment of colonial portraiture is found in Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia, 2005).

On Maine in the early national period, see Laura Fecych Sprague, Agreeable Situations: Society, Commerce, and Art in Southern Maine, 1780-1830 (Kennebunk, Me., 1987) and Charles E. Clark, James S. Leamon & Karen Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic: from Revolution to Statehood (Hanover, N.H., 1988). The classic account of Maine’s transition to statehood is Ronald Banks, Maine Becomes a State: The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785-1820 (Middletown, Conn., 1970). Detailing the religious, political, economic, and social relations between Maine settlers are Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982) and Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: the Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).

The literature on the folk art “problem” is vast. Some important contributions are: Henry Glassie, “Folk Art,” in Richard M. Doorson, ed., Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (Chicago, 1972): 253-80; Daniel Robbins, “Folk Sculpture without Folk,” in Herbert W. Hemphill Jr., Folk Sculpture USA, exh. cat. (Brooklyn, N.Y. and Los Angeles, 1976): 11-30; George A. Kubler, “The Arts: Fine and Plain,” in Ian M. G. Quimby and Scott T. Swank, eds., Perspectives on American Folk Art (New York, 1980): 344-46; and John Michael Vlach, Plain Painters: Making Sense of American Folk Art (Washington, D.C., 1988). Also see Stacy C. Hollander, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York, 2001).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

Kevin D. Murphy is John Rewald Professor and executive officer in the Ph.D. program in art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He will be a Chester Dale Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2009-10.

American daguerreotypes at the Great Exhibition

In the spring of 1851, the British government completed construction of the largest glass box in the history of the world. Occupying this million-square-foot “Crystal Palace” was an equally unprecedented display of the world’s raw materials, machinery, manufactures, and fine arts: the Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. A distillation of the nineteenth century’s obsession with progress, the Great Exhibition (as it came to be known) presented more than one hundred thousand items from around the world. Forty nations submitted examples of things made or found within their boundaries: from accordions to power looms to huge pieces of zinc ore, the Great Exhibition offered its visitors an encyclopedic tour of the known and built worlds.

A major motive for organizing the exhibition was the impulse to collect and compare versions of similar products and technologies in the interest of setting a world standard—for steam presses and textile weaving, as much as for soap and cheese. The sheer number of items to judge and the strong potential for accusations of bias in the awarding of prize medals occasioned significant procedural hand wringing. Although the entries were grouped in the Crystal Palace by their country of origin, multinational committees of scientists, artists, and gentlemen were specifically directed to award medals “without reference to Nationality.” The official instructions to the judges made it clear that “[t]he Medals will be awarded for excellence only, without reference to countries, the Exhibition being considered as a whole, and not consisting of the produce of different nations.” In spite of these provisos, the exhibition was an extravagant pageant of nationalism: as each of England’s invited guests understood, their country’s industrial and cultural achievements would be on view to the world, and its global standing and national pride, at stake.

For the United States, the Great Exhibition presented a significant opportunity to display the fruits of its independence from England and the virtues of a democratic republic to the rest of the world. By showcasing its natural resources, people, manufactures, and politics, the young nation sought to establish itself as at least equal, if not superior, to the countries of the Old World and to distance itself from their colonies. A circular from the United States Central Committee—appointed by the Washington-based National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Arts and approved by the Secretary of State for selecting and sending goods to the Exhibition—indicated that America’s produce should illustrate that the “human mind in the United States[,] being as free and untrammeled as it possibly can be, takes everything within its grasp, and knows no limits but those prescribed by nature and her laws.”

If the stakes were high for the Central Committee, they were even higher in the popular press, which understood that the things on display would necessarily advance narratives of the United States’ exceptional founding, progress, and status as a nation and culture. The New-York Herald‘s declaration is representative: the exhibition “is of more importance to us politically and commercially, than to any other nation.” The same article manifests a pronounced sensitivity to lingering European impressions that the United States produced better raw materials than finished goods and that it valued industry over art, emphasizing the exhibition as the “first opportunity” that the United States had “of laying before the world [its] productions of art” and insisting that “it should not be passed lightly by.” With its best wares gleaming in the light of the Crystal Palace, the article anticipated, America would be able to show the world “that we not only produce cotton, iron, coal, copper and gold in greater abundances than any other nation, but that we can work them up into manufactures often equally, sometimes surpassing the oldest nations in a perfection and with a facility unknown to them.” Six months before the fair’s opening, the Springfield (Mass.) Republican predicted that the “Industrial Exhibition of 1851, to come off in London … will be a great test, full of glorious meaning in truth, and inevitable in the development of facts instructive in the morals, systems of religion, modes of government, and intellectual progress of every nation which it may represent … If we mistake not, the English will learn some important lessons from their western child, whom they still associate with savage life and whom many among them regard with dignified superciliousness.”

As these excerpts only begin to suggest, in advance of the fair’s opening, American newspapers themselves were transformed into a great printed exhibition, assuming postures that were both aggrandizing and defensive. Nationalists with the bully pulpit of the press were anxious to drive home the point to the entire nation that it had more to prove and to lose at the Great Exhibition with the world watching. At the same time, they aimed to rally Americans with the cry that the young nation could teach Old Europe a lesson or two about the industrial age on its own turf.

Soon after the Exhibition’s May 1 opening, news of its proceedings made its way to the United States. American newspapers and magazines printed accounts of the Crystal Palace’s brilliance and the modern marvels within (fig. 1). Initial reports of America’s showing were bleak. Unlike other countries, the United States’ government had not overseen the necessary preparations for the exhibition. This left each state’s committees and subcommittees—acting independently of each other without any central oversight—to select, transport, and display the thousands of entries from different states, cities, companies, and individuals. Once the resulting entries reached London, the lack of coordination back at home showed. The Central Committee had significantly overestimated the amount of space that would be needed to show off American wares. Spreading out the various items to fill up the empty space did little to disguise the error. The satirical English magazine Punch took up the problem with acerbic glee, remarking of the prideful pasteboard eagle hanging over the American section, “No eagle, asking of itself where it should dine, and hovering in space without a visible mouthful, could represent the grandeur of contemplative solitude better than is shown by the United States’ Eagle in the firmament of Mr. Paxton’s Crystal.” The (Washington) National Intelligencer‘s exhibition correspondent reported that the “importance of this Exhibition has been greatly underrated by us … I fear we shall be very badly beaten; and I advise any one who intends coming here in the expectation that this Exhibition is going to raise our country in the eyes of the world to stay at home.”

The majority of items on display did little to change the persistent characterization of America as chiefly a source for mineral and agricultural raw material and utilitarian manufactures; as one London paper remarked, “the articles sent from our kindred across the ocean seem almost exclusively to be matters of utility, with which taste and ornament have had nothing to do.” Even the successful U.S. entries were rather dull: though Samuel Colt’s revolvers and Hiram Powers’s statue “The Greek Slave” caused some minor sensation, it was objects like Cyrus McCormick’s reaper and Gail Borden’s patented “meat biscuits” (or “Portable Dessicated Soup Bread,” as they were even less appetizingly called) that judges and spectators singled out for special recognition (fig. 2).

This state of affairs dismayed even the normally irrepressible Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New-York Tribune and chairman of the jury for the exhibition’s class XXII (Iron and General Hardware). In his dispatch from opening day, Greeley readily admitted “[o]ur manufactures are in many departments grossly deficient, in others inferior to the best rival productions of Europe.” He went on to lament that “few of these are goods which make much show in a Fair; three cases of Parisian gewgaws will outshine in an exhibition a million dollars’ worth of admirable and cheap” American fabrics. Lest his readers become too discouraged, however, Greeley turned to what was emerging as a bright spot in the U.S. department, if not an outright American triumph. “In Daguerreotypes,” he proudly announced, “it seems to be conceded that we beat the world … England is no where in comparison—and our Daguerreotypists make a great show here.” Confirming this success, the Scientific American reported from the exhibition later that month, “The American daguerreotypes are very fine, and do honor to our country. They have not their equals in light or shade. There are better colored daguerreotypes in Paris and even London, but none of such a rich and full tone perfection in chiara oscuro.”

In the written record of the exhibition—in the popular press and in the medal juries’ official reports—it is America’s daguerreotypes that came to be celebrated as incontrovertible proof of not only the nation’s success at the fair but also its industrial, scientific, artistic, and political prosperity. Daguerreotypy was the first form of photography, invented in France and announced to the world in 1839. Named after one of the process’s discoverers, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, daguerreotypes were also called “sun pictures” because their lifelike images resulted from the direct exposure of a mirror-like, silver-coated, copper plate to sunlight. Unlike later forms of negative-to-positive photography, each daguerreotype was necessarily unique, making it a precious, yet affordable medium of imaging. Attracted by these qualities, Americans took up the daguerreotype with tremendous enthusiasm and in unrivalled numbers. By the 1850s, daguerreotypes were being made by the millions in lavish big-city studios, in refitted wagons that brought itinerant daguerreotypists to small towns, and everywhere in between.

At the Great Exhibition, the different types of photography on display, including daguerreotypes, were classed as “philosophical instruments and processes,” both to downplay their resemblance to painting, which had been disallowed in the exhibition as not advancing industrial knowledge, and to emphasize the knowledge of various physical sciences necessary to producing any type of photograph. The multinational jury of scientists and artists for class X—which included photography among other instruments such as telescopes, galvanic batteries, and coin weighing machines—also wanted to emphasize photography’s significant scientific uses as much as, if not more than, its virtues as a medium for portraiture. Even so, the jury could not overlook the use to which the majority of the different entries were put, concluding “for daguerreotype portraits, America stands prominently forward … her works, with few exceptions, reject all accessories, present a faithful transcript of the subject and yield to none in excellence of execution.” Greeley proudly trumpeted to his U.S. readers, “Our Daguerreotypists make a great show here.” Even the more critical voices in the British press found in American daguerreotypy something worthy of praise beneath the pasteboard eagle. “Within the shadow of the eagle and the striped banner we find no lights too white and no shadows too dark; they dissolve, as in Nature, one into the other, in the most harmonious and truthful manner—and the result is more perfect pictures.”

What made these examples of the first photographic imaging process so significant to both the exhibition’s judges and the American press seeking an unimpeachable sign of both the technical and moral accomplishments of America’s industry? The answers can be found in antebellum American print culture. From the daguerreotype’s introduction in 1839 through the Great Exhibition, newspapers and magazines throughout the country regularly celebrated daguerreotypy as a powerful combination of art and science capable of producing images of unprecedented representational accuracy, as well as propagating American ideology. Even though the process had been discovered in France, American inventors, artists, and casual experimenters immediately learned Daguerre’s complicated process and began working to improve upon it. Newspapers and magazines featured news of the latest innovations, including techniques for shortening exposure times, enhancing and permanently fixing the image on the plate, and posing sitters to ensure their satisfaction with their portraits. In addition to such technical information about the process, short stories published alongside the latest news dramatized the daguerreian portrait’s fidelity in capturing its subject’s inner character as well as his or her appearance. Periodicals also commonly included stories that celebrated the daguerreotype’s impact on American society, praising it as the first truly democratic form of portraiture because it could be made so much more cheaply and quickly than a painting.

A few examples from the substantial archive of such writings bring this picture into focus. Shortly after its introduction in 1839, Edgar Allan Poe wrote in the Southern Literary Messenger that the daguerreotype “is infinitely (we use the term advisedly) is infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands … the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. The variations of shade, and the gradations of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth itself in the supremeness of perfection.” Because the daguerreian camera was capable of registering everything in its view in such exact detail, many came to believe that it also could manifest the deepest qualities of its human subjects’ characters. Of the numerous “advantages resulting from this novel art,” an article in Littell’s Living Age magazine declared in 1846, “The aid which it affords to the successful study of human nature, is among the most important. Daguerreotypes properly regarded, are the indices of human character.” Available for as little as ten cents, they imaged all types of human characters. In Godey’s Lady’s Book, the popular writer T. S. Arthur celebrated this fulfillment of a representative daguerreian democracy in America at the end of the technology’s first decade. “In our great cities, a Daguerreotypist is to be found in almost every square; and there is scarcely a county in any state that has not one or more of these industrious individuals busy at work in catching ‘the shadow’ ere the ‘substance fade.’ A few years ago it was not every man who could afford a likeness of himself, his wife or his children; these were luxuries known to those only who had money to spare; now it is hard to find the man who has not gone through the ‘operator’s’ hands from once to half-a-dozen times, or who has not the shadowy faces of his wife and children done up in purple morocco and velvet, together or singly, among his household treasures. Truly the sunbeam art is a most wonderful one, and the public feel it is a great benefit!”

By the Great Exhibition of 1851, then, the popular press had made a thorough case for the daguerreotype’s “Americanness.” By insistently linking the distinctive capacities of the daguerreotype to what they sought to establish as America’s exceptional values, virtues, and progress, antebellum newspapers and magazines effectively campaigned for American daguerreotypes as capturing the national character more faithfully than any other artifact of the industrial age.

There was some truth to the exceptionalism emphasized in these reports. What began as a scientific and artistic curiosity had become a full-fledged industry in the United States by midcentury. According to one estimate, by 1853, nearly three million daguerreotypes were being taken each year in the United States alone, and some seventeen thousand Americans worked as daguerreotypists or in manufacturing related to daguerreotypy to meet this demand. By the time of the Great Exhibition, the rest of the world, including France, looked to America for its daguerreian cameras and lenses, its processes and materials for coating and buffing the image plate, its chemicals for developing and fixing the image, its paints and brushes used to apply color to the silver toned images, its cases to protect and enhance the fragile pictures, and its machinery used to manufacture these various necessities. As the daguerreotypist and Photographic Art-Journaleditor Henry Hunt Snelling declared in his “retrospective view of the Daguerrean art in the United States” in mid-1851, “we cannot feel otherwise than proud of the high state of perfection to which it has been brought by the American Photographist. The last five years have established the fact all over the world, that the American Daguerreotypes surpass those of all other countries, not only for the beauty of their finish but the taste of their execution.”

Indeed, The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition offers a similar narrative of America’s exceptional accomplishments in daguerreotypy. “The Americans, from the first announcement of the wonderful art of sun-painting, have zealously made the subject one of much patient experiment. The first portraits from life were taken by the daguerreotype, in New York, and a variety of valuable manipulatory processes have originated in that country. The success with which the art is practiced, and the degree of perfection to which it has been brought, may be estimated by the specimens exhibited by various artists.”

In the companion volume of the exhibition juries’ reports, published to provide eager nations, entrants, and the public with lengthier explanations of how the juries had awarded their medals, the British astronomer and jury member James Glaisher reported in greater detail the findings of the class X judges with respect to daguerreotypy. “On examining the daguerreotypes contributed by the United States,” Glaisher wrote, “every observer must be struck with their beauty of execution, the broad and well-toned masses of light and shade, and the total absence of all glare, which render them so superior to many works of this class.”

Yet Glaisher was also quick to temper the jury’s praise. His report declares, “It is but fair to our own photographists to observe, that much as America has produced, and excellent as are her works, every effort has been seconded by all that climate and the purest of atmospheres could effect; and when we consider how important an element of the process is a clear atmosphere, we must be careful not to overrate that superiority of execution which America certainly manifests.” Glaisher’s backhanded compliment both limited the impact of praise the world’s most respected scientists and artists would give to America’s ardent nationalism and defended the work of the British daguerreotypists. As the jurors saw it, it was precisely the lack of American industrial progress that made its daguerreotypes so good: comparatively unfouled by factory smoke, American air did not interfere with the light essential to daguerreotypy. With this conclusion, the jury’s report effectively displaced America’s industry in favor of its environment as the secret of its daguerreotypes’ success: in the eyes of leading scientists and artists, these distinctive images derived their Americanness more from where they were made than how they were made.

The jury was also quick to foreclose the possibility that the makers of America’s daguerreian portraits be viewed as artists and that their subjects be seen to manifest uniquely American characters. The New York daguerreotypist Martin M. Lawrence’s entries, “two large portraits of General J. Watson and W. Bryant, Esq.,” are mentioned as “deserv[ing] particular commendation” not for whom they showed but for how the portraits showed them. The focus was purely technical. “Notwithstanding their large size, they are, throughout, perfectly in focus, and are beautifully finished in all their details.” Similarly, the portraits submitted by Mathew Brady were commended for the way that they “stand forward in bold relief upon a plain background.” “The portraits of General Taylor, Calhoun, General Cass, and James Perry, are strikingly excellent; but all are so good that selection is almost impossible,” the report concluded of Brady’s showing (figs. 3 and 4). Unacknowledged was the place of these portraits in Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans—a collection of “some of the most distinguished men of this country,” exhibited to the public (for a fee) at his New York studio and engraved and published together as a collectible book in 1850. By contrast, the United States Democratic Reviewproclaimed Brady’s accomplishment in explicitly nationalist terms. “No such portraits have ever been made of our public men, and better ones could not be desired.” For making such admirable images of the most venerable Americans available to posterity, the Review deemed Brady’s Gallery “the most magnificent national work ever published” and declared that “[e]very American should be proud of such a publication.”

The jury reserved its highest praise for a daguerreotype of the moon taken by John A. Whipple of Boston (fig. 5). Given that the judges were some of the day’s leading astronomers and opticians, their bestowal of their “highest commendation” and a prize medal on images that advanced the world’s scientific knowledge is not particularly surprising. The report declared the image to be “one of the most satisfactory attempts that has yet been made to realise, by a photographic process, the telescopic appearance of a heavenly body, and must be regarded as indicating the commencement of a new era in astronomical representation.”

What is striking in the report is its particular aversion to what Glaisher described as “theatrical” and “allegorical” daguerreotypes. Illustrations of the Lord’s Prayer submitted by J. J. E. Mayall and a series of portraits by the Meade Brothers that featured sitters in costumes and settings representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and America were particularly criticized by the judges as inferior to entries in which more attention is given to form than to content. Though these images seem to have been lost to time, descriptions of their appearance remain. Mayall described his daguerreotype representing the “Our Father which art in Heaven” portion of the prayer as featuring “a Lady on her knees before the Altar” with “her eyes directed to the Catholic emblem of the Redeemer, the Saviour on the Cross” and a “pure expression of humility and penitence in the countenance and attitude.” His “Give us this Day our Daily Bread” pictured “a way-worn Pilgrim, with a staff in hand, weary with fatigue … receiving two loaves from the hands of a beautiful child.” Following the stereotypical conventions and racialist thought of the era, the Meade Brothers’ allegorical portraits of the “four quarters of the world” represented Europe as “a beautiful group [of sitters] surrounded by the arts”; Asia in the form of “an Asiatic in costume, on a divan, cross-legged, with a pipe, etc.”; Africa as “two negroes naked, excepting a tunic from the waist to the knees”; and America as “a group of Indians.” Only mentioning without describing these images, the jury’s report gave “greater credit” to the “delicacy of execution, harmonious distribution of light and shade,” and the “artistic effect” of Mayall’s and the Meades’s ordinary portraits. This jury, the report made clear, would not reward America for any story that its pictures wanted to tell, either in its allegorical daguerreotypes or in daguerreotypy itself as an allegory of the young nation’s achievements.

Greeley, reflecting on the exhibition in 1853, provided his own take on the jury’s report in light of what he has seen and wanted America and the rest of the world to see. He wrote,

In contrasting the specimens of [daguerreotypy] which are taken here with those taken in European countries, the excellence of American pictures is evident, which is to be accounted for by several reasons. In the first place, American skies are freer from fogs and clouds—from bituminous coal not being much used, the atmosphere of our cities is free from smoke, at least upon the Atlantic coasts. Then the chemicals and processes are, generally speaking, of a more sensitive character, and the apparatus [camera] is more convenient and suitable than that of Europe. Our little inventions come into play and aid in saving time and developing a good picture; and last, though perhaps not least, our people are readier in picking up processes and acquiring the mastery of the art than our trans-Atlantic rivals. Not that we understand the science better, but the details of the art are acquired in a shorter time by us, while the enormous practice which our operators enjoy combines to render the daguerreotype a necessary contributor to the comforts of life.

In his attempt to have the last word on what is winning about American daguerreotypes, Greeley turned the jury’s backhanded compliment to America’s atmosphere into a jab at industrial England’s pollution. If Glaisher would not recognize America’s industry in the jury’s report, then Greeley would imply that smoky skies are a more accurate representation of England’s industry than the gleaming Crystal Palace. And he would insist that the “superiority of execution” in the United States’ daguerreotypes could not be “overrated,” as the jury feared. Americans, Greeley contended, were superior in every aspect of the daguerreotype’s execution—they used better cameras, materials, and methods and, most importantly, they mastered the art more quickly through economy of scale. With this Greeley implied that the United States’ successful execution of this mechanical art is a consequence of its government, people, industry, and imagination. In Greeley’s report, democracy and daguerreotypy better approximated all that was real and true than any other forms of representation. Thus he concluded, “If there be any one department in the whole building which is peculiarly American, and in which the country shines preeminent, it is in that of Daguerreotypes.” Charles T. Rodgers came to a similarly nationalist conclusion a year before in his boldly titled book American Superiority at the World’s Fair. “We may congratulate ourselves on having made signal triumph in just those arts which most distinguish civilized man from the savage; and in having lost honor only in those arts which most distinguish a luxurious nation from the hardy energy of practical workers” (fig. 6)

Yet despite the best efforts of America’s daguerreotypists and its press, the exhibition jury’s report ultimately produced the most realistic picture of early photography in the industrial age by emphasizing what was to be anticipated from future processes and applications over what had been achieved. “That photography is yet in its infancy,” Glaisher wrote, “there can be little doubt; and it is more than probable that its present application, (which we believe to be well represented in the Exhibition), is no more its ultimatum than were the first applications of the telescope.” In 1851, the United States had accomplished more than any other country with the daguerreotype; by 1855, the process would be mostly obsolete. With the close of the exhibition in October of 1851, America would have to decide between resting on its recently won laurels or applying its supposedly characteristic industry to keep up with the rest of a world that was already moving beyond daguerreotypy to other photographic processes.

Less than a year later, the American Photographic Art-Journal looked to the future by sounding a more fraternal note in a poem on the art’s prospects.

Franklin brought down the lightning from the clouds,
Morse bade it act along the trembling wire;
The trump of Fame their praises gave aloud,
And others with the same high thoughts inspire.
Daguerre arose—his visionary scheme
Was viewed at first with jeers, derision, scorn,
Conquered at last by the grand power supreme
Of god-like mind—another art was born.
In mists the clouds dissolved like morning dew,
The world rejoiced to see the victory won;
With admiration, wonder, now we view
The effect produced by Nature’s God, the Sun.
The mantle from the great inventor flown,
With tenfold splendor on his pupils fell!
France, England, and America have shown
The bright invention has succeeded well.
Go on, young brothers, in your great career,
With others in the art, joined heart and hand;
Be all improvements given with friendly cheer,
“Divided ye may fall—United ye must stand!”

Photography, the poem both insists and predicts, will progress as a pageant of international cooperation to rival the Great Exhibition itself.

Further Reading:

The United States’ participation in the Great Exhibition of 1851 has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. The most thorough treatment remains Robert F. Dalzell Jr.’s Amherst College honors thesis, published as American Participation in the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Amherst, Mass., 1960). For a general history of the exhibition, see John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Gloucestershire, England, 1999). On the significance of the daguerreotype in American culture, Richard Rudisill’s Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society (Albuquerque, 1971) is seminal; see also Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York, 1989). For discussions of America’s daguerreotypes and other entries at the exhibition, the nineteenth-century texts, several of which are available via Google Books, reward reading. See the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue [of the] Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London, 1851) and the Reports By the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes Into Which the Exhibition Was Divided (London, 1852); The Journal of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1851); Horace Greeley’s Glances At Europe (New York, 1851); Art and Industry as Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace (New York, 1853); Charles T. Rodgers’s American Superiority at the World’s Fair (Philadelphia, 1852); and Henry Howe’s Adventures and Achievements of Americans (Cincinnati and New York, 1859). Mayall’s description of his daguerreotype illustrations of the Lord’s Prayer is quoted in Helmut Gernsheim’s Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends, 1839-1960 (New York, 1991). The review of Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans can be found in the January 1851 issue of the United States Democratic Review. The details of the Meade Brothers’ allegorical portraits and the concluding poem of this essay both come from the May 1852 issue of the Photographic Art-Journal.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

Marcy J. Dinius is an assistant professor of English at the University of Delaware. She is completing a book manuscript titled The Camera and the Pen: American Literature and Culture in the Daguerreian Age as a John W. Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress.

Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the capacity and passion for pictures . . . Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and achievements: they see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.

–Frederick Douglass

In the late summer of 1839, at an extraordinary joint meeting of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre presented to the public and to the world the first truly successful photographic process: the daguerreotype. It is hard for us to grasp now, after more than 160 years of photography, the astonishment and enthusiasm that greeted Daguerre’s discovery. On a small plate of metal, Daguerre coaxed the sun’s rays, guided by the lens of a camera, to produce an image whose detail was as minutely faithful to reality as the reflection in a mirror–only in black and white. In an age of soaring expectations of science, the daguerreotype symbolized the possibility that human ingenuity might capture the very essence of nature. The daguerreotype is truly a marvel: strictly speaking, it is impossible to reproduce one, since a daguerreotype image sits on a silver surface that reflects like a mirror; one therefore sees oneself in the image, too. The only way to appreciate a daguerreotype properly is to see it, as it were, in person. This personal intimacy and immediacy lent much of the fervor to what Frederick Douglass called the new “passion for pictures.” While the inventor of the daguerreotype was a Frenchman, nowhere did this passion catch on as it did in the still young United States. For Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist orator, photography, as a mirror of reality, would serve as a new weapon in the fight for freedom and human dignity. Samuel F. B. Morse, the American inventor and painter, happened to be in Paris in 1838-39 to promote his own invention, the electromagnetic telegraph. There he met and befriended Daguerre. Morse tried his hand at the process as soon as Daguerre made it public, and, on his return to the States, he successfully spread word of Daguerre’s genius to his fellow Americans. Scores, then hundreds, and finally thousands of American practitioners took up the art, improving the technique so rapidly that by the early 1840s a skillful daguerreotypist could earn a respectable income as a portraitist. The American public hungered unrelentingly for portraits. Douglass explains this passion well: “The great discoverer of modern times, to whom coming generations will award special homage, will be Daguerre. Morse has brought the seeds of the earth together, and Daguerre has made it a picture gallery. We have pictures, true pictures, of every object which can interest us . . . What was once the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now the privilege of all. The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase fifty years ago.” By the 1850s and 1860s, American ingenuity had led to an explosion of photographic techniques including the ambrotype, tintype, and carte de visite–all to feed the endless American appetite for portraits. Tens of millions of images were produced. Once, portraiture had been the “special and exclusive luxury” of the rich or the noble in the form of paintings or sculptures that cost a small fortune to commission; now Americans could assert their egalitarianism in self-representation. For a day’s wages, even a mill worker could confirm her dignity and make her bid for immortality (fig. 2).

As Frederick Douglass saw it, Morse and Daguerre were two facets of the same democratizing revolution, a revolution that was fast uniting the world in communication (Morse) and in image (Daguerre). For Douglass, this universalizing and democratizing revolution involved more than a breaking down of class divisions; it also meant attacking what we might call the optics of racism, that is, how white Europeans had come to see black Africans as a nearly separate species, a view which corrupted painted portraits: “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists. It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. And the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other white persons, have adopted a theory respecting the distinctive features of Negro physiognomy.” When Douglass complained about how white artists “take likenesses” of blacks, he meant painters, sculptors, and engravers–all artists except photographers, because in all other art forms, the artist’s preconceived way of seeing necessarily intrudes upon the representation of the subject matter. In voicing this complaint, Douglass echoed a widely held notion about photography, one that persists to this day: that unlike other techniques in art, photography is a true mirror of nature whose method, because it relies on the nonpartisan effectiveness of rays of light rather than the hand of human beings, can present us with what Douglass calls “true pictures” of reality. Many contemporary theorists would now question that assumption. They would claim that photography is more art than science by pointing to how the subject matter is arranged, how the lighting is manipulated, to what type of lens or printing-out paper is employed, even to the way the scene is composed and framed. All these factors play as much of a subjective role in producing and seeing the work of art as does the hand of the artist with a paint brush or a mallet and chisel. The photograph, then, is no more a “true picture” of reality than a cubist painting by Picasso. But, at least for now, let us give Douglass the benefit of the doubt. After all, there is for most of us, in our pre-theoretical experience of photography, something of that experience of immediacy and revelation of reality that so astonished and inspired him, as well as so many other Americans, a century and a half ago.

Douglass was photographed often. One of the very earliest known portraits of him was taken in the mid-1840s, probably just around the time that the publication in 1845 of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Himself made Douglass a national and then an international celebrity. This austere portrait of the still youthful Douglass, who meets our gaze so forcefully, epitomizes his hope and expectation that photography might bestow a public dignity upon African Americans that would provide a pictorial argument for their inclusion in the promise of the Declaration of Independence: that the only legitimate government is one that gives support to the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Many other portraits make the same visual argument, such as this one of an unnamed self-confident horn-player (fig. 4).

With his complicated instrument and sheet music, his portrait proclaims the capacity for refinement and self-cultivation. Or consider this portrait of an unidentified African American woman whose strength and resilience break through the stiff pose of conventional portraiture (fig. 5).

These portraits, and others such as this one of a man holding a book, show sitters who have attained something like middle-class respectability (fig. 6).

Other portraits, such as this 1849 daguerrotype of a man in his work clothes and an apron (fig. 7) or the portrait of a fireman in his gear (fig. 8), illustrate that African American laborers and artisans could also afford to show themselves for who they were, with pride in their trade or their work in public service.

When the Civil War broke out, Douglass lobbied President Lincoln passionately for the right of African Americans to bear arms and fight for the Union cause. “I have a right to ask when I . . . march to the battle field” for “a country or the hope of a country under me, a government that recognizes my manhood around me, and a flag of freedom waving over me!” By 1863, black regiments were forming and young African American men resolutely met the call to arms (fig. 9).

The national struggle over the political meaning of race found expression in all arenas of antebellum visual culture. In The Octoroon, a statue made by John Bell, a naked and apparently “white” woman, her arms in chains, her clothes on the pillar beside her, bows her head in a sorrowful yet dignified resignation to inspection before going to the auction block (fig. 10).

As F. James Davis has explained so well in Who Is Black?, the American categorization of race is unique in the world. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the threat of abolition and to the fact of interbreeding between whites and blacks, the United States had developed the so-called “one drop rule,” stipulating that even a single African ancestor was enough to make a person black, not white–and legally a slave if born to a slave mother–no matter how distant that ancestor or how white-looking the subject. The Octoroon offers a challenge to the one drop rule by asking white Americans, Can’t you see that this person, whom the law and social convention treats as a slave and nearly another species from us, is in fact just like us? This same visual argument is made in a Civil War era photograph, “White and Black Slaves” (fig. 11).

The subjects here are liberated slaves from New Orleans–of very different skin color. The force of the title is the notion that the visual marker of skin color makes no sense as an indicator of race–and that, by extension, race itself makes no sense as a concept by which to organize society. “Slaves from New Orleans,” in which a very dark-skinned adult man reads with three lighter-skinned children, makes the same argument again: race and skin tone make no difference to the essential and universal dignity of human beings, all of whom deserve and are capable of education and uplift. Photographs like this can teach us about the fundamental ambiguity of race: it is conventional, not a natural category, but once convention gives race a social reality, race can make a terrible difference (fig. 12).

  Some images present difficulties for Douglass’s hope that photography would serve as an unambiguous language of freedom. For example, consider this portrait of a slave from Missouri (fig. 13).

The elderly man has been posed with a hoe, a symbol of his servitude, and a basket of produce at his side. We have to wonder: why did his owner make this portrait? As a mark of affection for this aging slave? As a token of the master’s wealth and success? Other portraits of servants, whether slave or free, also bear witness to a muted strength that speaks at the edges, as it were, of the subject matter of the photograph. The intended subject of this photograph (fig. 14) is obviously the wealthy white woman at the center; she or her family has paid for this portrait, and she has come with her dog and her servant to demonstrate her genteel status. The woman’s attention is focused on the dog, not the person directly beside her, and yet it is the servant who meets our eye and makes human contact, a connection that her mistress refuses to her.

Something similar takes place in this antebellum “nanny portrait,” in which the intended subject is the white child, and the client includes the family’s black slave or servant to indicate a class status: we are rich enough to afford this nanny (fig. 15).

Here, the young nanny (possibly a slave, possibly a servant) meets our gaze. Her demeanor, with her hands folded protectively across the squirming toddler in her lap, is not one of defiance but rather of reserved supportiveness. But what do we make of the extraordinary element of the human hair sealed under the glass, between the brass mat and the image, arranged as a kind of halo around the two figures? Perhaps it is the child’s, but it has the texture of an adult’s hair rather than the wisps of a toddler. If the hair is the nanny’s, then, that surely indicates the important place she held in the family, however subordinate. Three images from the Civil War era illustrate the national debate over the line between black and white (figs. 16, 17, 18).

All are cartes de visite, the products of a photographic process that allowed for mass reproduction, whether for sale at a profit or for raising charitable funds. Printed text on the reverse of the first two cards–of the branded slave, Wilson Chinn, and of the emancipated children, Isaac and Rosa–reads: “The proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted exclusively to the education of colored people in the Department of the Gulf, now under the command of Major-General Banks.” These two cards represent one contemporary interpretation of the goals of the war: on the one hand, to end the outrage of slavery perpetrated on men like Wilson Chinn (who is, by the way, the same Wilson as in Figure 12), and, on the other, to right an historical injustice by giving the liberated slaves a future as productive citizens of the nation. The third image is more ambiguous. No maker takes credit for it, as the photographer Kimball does on the other two. The photograph depicts two youths in horrendously tattered rags. They are almost certainly contrabands–slaves who have taken the opportunity of war to escape from their masters to seek refuge with the advancing Union armies. Beneath the portrait someone has written in pencil, “All men are created equal.” This direct quotation from the Declaration of Independence seems to support the abolitionist position on the war–until one turns the card over and reads further: “This is not exaggerated in the least — : not one out of ten of the niggers here, who have run away from their masters (and there are thousands of them) can boast of such good clothes. Shove them into the army, I say, and let them do the fighting in this hot Department.” This was probably written by a Union soldier who bought the card at the front from a camp merchant and sent it home in the mail. His caption about “all men” being created equal is at best darkly ironic; he clearly refuses to accept equality with these unfortunates, thereby repudiating the idealistic interpretation of the American founding as truly universalistic. While Frederick Douglass wanted former slaves to fight to affirm and confirm their dignity and equality as citizens, this anonymous writer wants them to fight purely because he sees them as expendable–and precisely because he deems them beneath human dignity. This is the tragic and enduring contradiction of race as represented in antebellum photographs: the same image can arouse at once pity and righteous indignation or contempt and arrogant dismissal. Perhaps it is too much to ask for an image alone to conquer the prejudices that we bring to bear in our seeing. Consider this tintype produced around the end of the Civil War period: it depicts a grinning white man in blackface (fig. 19).

Although the Jim Crow character as a feature of minstrel shows became popular in the generation before the Civil War, early photographic images of people in blackface are quite rare. Of course, minstrelsy “sees” the darkness of the African complexion. But by appropriating that complexion and superimposing it upon a white face–whose whiteness the viewer is never really meant to forget–all the participants in the performance of minstrelsy, both actors and viewers alike, attempt to make invisible the human dignity of the truly black faces who share their world and whose presence calls out for equality. The Civil War ended slavery, as Douglass had hoped, but Reconstruction failed to give former slaves the civic equality that Douglass believed the Declaration of Independence required as due to all human beings. Instead, there descended the long night of Jim Crow segregation, enforced by the terror of lynching. Was Frederick Douglass naive to hope for a revelation of human dignity from photography? Only if we believe that the failures of the past must be our failures, too. We can look carefully at these portraits. We can search in them for the echoes of human presence. We can affirm, celebrate, and restore the hidden, the neglected, and the anonymous. In this way, their past can be our present. And our future. Douglass said that we can “see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction,” and surely it is not too late for idealism like that. We are still the picture-making animal that can envision a future by seeing the present clearly in reflection on the past. The author wishes to thank his colleague and friend, Greg French, for permission to employ so many images from his collection in writing this essay.

Further Reading: See F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park, Pa., 1991); Frederick Douglass, “Life Pictures,” holograph dated 1861, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, microfilm accession no. 16377, reel 14, frames 394-412; Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress,” in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 3 (New Haven, 1979-92); Merry A. Forresta and John Wood, eds., Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (Washington, D.C., 1995); O. Henry Mace, Collectors’ Guide to Early Photographs, 2d ed. (Iola, Wis., 1999); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993); Beaumont Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America, 3d ed. (New York, 1976) and The History of Photography, 5th ed. (New York, 1994); John Stauffer, “Race and Contemporary Photography: Willie Robert Middlebrook and the Legacy of Frederick Douglass,” in John Wood, ed., The Journal of Contemporary Photography: Culture and Criticism(Brewster, Mass., n.d.); Colin Westerbeck, “Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment” in Susan F. Rossen, ed., African Americans in Art (Chicago, 1999).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

Gregory Fried is an assistant professor in the philosophy department of California State University, Los Angeles. He has written on the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and is currently working on a multidisciplinary project on race entitled “The Mirror of Race.”