Mark Twain was obsessed with zombies. Huck Finn’s adventures in the antebellum South, for example, can be traced in part to Pap’s lurid nightmare about what my students recognize as zombies: “Tramp—tramp—tramp; that’s the dead; tramp—tramp—tramp; they’re coming after me; but I won’t go. Oh, they’re here! don’t touch me—don’t! hands off—they’re cold; let go. Oh, let a poor devil alone!” In violation of his own rule “that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others,” Twain’s writings are shot through with ghosts, skeletons, resurrected cadavers, and the walking dead. We know Twain as an author who dealt with great themes: childhood, innocence, slavery, freedom, conscience. But all these themes are entangled with his fascination with reanimated corpses—a fascination that has much to teach us about our own preoccupation with zombies. Like The Walking Dead and other 21st-century zombie plots, Twain’s writings bring the dead to life in order to meditate on the social and economic circumstances that produce hungry, ragged, and diseased masses. In Twain’s corpus, divergent iterations of the walking dead dramatize how unevenly cultural prestige and human rights are distributed across the lines of class, race, and nation.

Dead celebrities

As an irreverent realist and a regionalist author invested in tall tales and vernacular speech, Twain found his fellow Americans’ admiration of dead authorities absurd. In early hoaxes published in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, Twain satirized the popular fascination with dead bodies by describing a recently exhumed petrified body thumbing its nose at spectators and a man riding into Carson City “with his throat cut from ear to ear.” In his account of his travels in Europe, The Innocents Abroad (1869), Twain describes a trick that he and his travel companions frequently played on their European tour guides:

There is one remark (already mentioned) which never yet has failed to disgust these guides. We use it always, when we can think of nothing else to say. After they have exhausted their enthusiasm pointing out to us and praising the beauties of some ancient bronze image or broken-legged statue, we look at it stupidly and in silence for five, ten, fifteen minutes—as long as we can hold out, in fact—and then ask:

“Is—is he dead?”

According to this joke, the grandeur and accomplishments of historical personages such as Michelangelo and Christopher Columbus count as nothing next to the prestige of death. For Twain—who famously contrasts the ruined landscapes of the Old World with the natural sublimity of Lake Tahoe and Niagara Falls—the Grand Tour of Europe maintains artificial notions of greatness and hierarchy through the ritual adulation of long-dead authorities.

Even the child protagonist of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is acutely aware of the reverence accorded to the dead. Feeling wrongfully punished and emotionally neglected by Aunt Polly, Tom fantasizes about dying: “And he pictured himself brought home from the river, dead, with his curls all wet, and his sore heart at rest. How she would throw herself upon him, and how her tears would fall like rain, and her lips pray God to give her back her boy and she would never, never abuse him any more!” Tom later indulges this narcissistic fascination with his own death by orchestrating his resurrection at his own funeral after he learns that he and his friends are presumed drowned. Along the way, Tom learns that Aunt Polly and others perceive the boys differently when they believe the boys are dead: instead of scolding and beating him, Polly remembers Tom as “the best hearted boy that ever was!” Later, when Tom and Becky are nearly given up for dead when they lose their way in McDougal’s Cave, their emergence leads to universal celebration: “it was the greatest night the town had ever seen.” Like the historical figures represented in European paintings and sculptures, Tom’s presumed deaths and reincarnations impart an ennobling aura.

Twain’s recently republished play, Is He Dead? (2003, written in 1898), further develops Tom Sawyer’s fantasy of being present at his own funeral. The comic plot is fueled by “This law: that the merit of every great unknown and neglected artist must and will be recognized, and his pictures climb to high prices after his death.” Hounded by poverty and debt, the painter Jean-Francois Millet decides to capitalize on this economic law during his own lifetime by faking his own death. This vastly increases the value of his paintings and saves Millet and his friends from their debtors. At the painter’s funeral, Millet’s scheme nearly fails when the king insists on viewing the body; however, the coffin has been filled with Limburger cheese as a precaution, and the rankness that overcomes the funeral guests when the coffin is unsealed dissuades them from looking. In Is He Dead? value emerges from the reputation of death: being presumed dead saves Millet from poverty, eviction, and debtor’s prison. Even more than it does for Tom Sawyer and the European celebrities of The Innocents Abroad, death turns everything around for Millet: it offers him new life possibilities. The following section will turn to stories concerned not with the celebrity status that death can impart upon one’s name, but with the body in the coffin.

Medical cadavers

Twain explored a darker instance of the reanimated dead in his treatments of “resurrectionists” who dug up fresh cadavers and sold them to medical researchers. The medical cadaver is in many ways the antithesis of the dead celebrity: its value derives not from its name and prestige but from its commodification as an anonymous object. Together, the dead celebrity and medical cadaver raise questions about whose deaths are memorialized, and whose deaths are ungrieved, forgotten, or commodified. Although they occur in novels focused upon Southern white boys, Twain’s references to medical cadavers significantly occur in scenes that highlight Tom and Huck’s encounters with racial difference.

In Tom Sawyer, Injun Joe’s first and last appearances occur in proximity to medical cadavers. Tom and Huck first encounter him in the cemetery, where he and Muff Potter have lured Doctor Robinson on the pretext of digging up a recently deceased corpse for medical experimentation. Injun Joe’s true purpose, however, is revenge: “Five years ago you drove me away from your father’s kitchen one night, when I come to ask for something to eat, and you said I warn’t there for any good; and when I swore I’d get even with you if it took a hundred years, your father had me jailed for a vagrant. Did you think I’d forget? The Injun blood ain’t in me for nothing. And now I’ve got you, and you got to settle, you know!” Toward the end of the novel, Tom encounters Injun Joe again when he and Becky Thatcher are lost deep in McDougal’s Cave. Injun Joe eventually dies in the cave, but his is not the only corpse that Twain—or others familiar with his childhood town of Hannibal, Missouri—would have associated with that cave.

The actual cave at the southern end of Hannibal was purchased by Dr. Joseph McDowell while Twain was a child. Twain later recalled that the cave “contained a corpse—the corpse of a young girl of fourteen. It was in a glass cylinder inclosed in a copper one which was suspended from a rail which bridged a narrow passage. The body was preserved in alcohol and it was said that loafers and rowdies used to drag it up by the hair and look at the dead face. The girl was the daughter of a St. Louis surgeon of extraordinary ability and wide celebrity. He was an eccentric man and did many strange things. He put the poor thing in that forlorn place himself.” If Injun Joe’s corpse stands in for the preserved body in McDowell’s cave, there are nevertheless stark difference between them: the former is sealed in the cave while still alive, and his body ends up hidden from sight, buried near the mouth of the cave rather than in the town cemetery. Although his funeral is well attended and his death memorialized by calling a cave feature “Injun Joe’s Cup,” this profane burial marks Injun Joe’s outcast status as a “half-breed,” a “vagrant,” and a criminal condemned to death.

In an episode excised from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Jim tells a lewd “ghost story” about the literal reanimation of a medical cadaver. Asked by a former master (a medical student) to warm up a cadaver in preparation for a dissection, Jim goes to the dissection room around midnight and sits the cadaver on the dissecting table. When the cadaver’s eyes open, a terrified Jim covers its face with a sheet and then reaches down between its legs to fetch a candle. While Jim’s head is lowered between the cadaver’s legs, “down he comes, right a-straddle er my neck wid his cold laigs, en kicked de candle out!” Twain likely decided to excise these passages because their lewd attempts at humor and their caricature of Jim’s superstitions detract from the novel’s emphasis on Jim’s dignity.

But this expunged story about Jim’s unwilling intimacy with a medical cadaver—like Injun Joe’s proximity to them throughout Tom Sawyer—points to significant demographic factors in the sourcing of cadavers for scientific research. Nineteenth-century “resurrectionists” disproportionately targeted the corpses of socially vulnerable groups because they were less likely to be prosecuted for stealing those bodies. As Harriet Washington explains, slaves could not legally withhold consent for research or medical procedures conducted after their death. “If a master sent a sick, elderly, or otherwise-unproductive slave to the hospital, he usually gave the institution caring for and boarding the slave carte blanche for his treatment—and for his disposal.” Washington demonstrates that this targeting of black bodies persisted after Emancipation: “In 1879, five thousand cadavers a year were procured for medical use, most of them illegally, and in the South most were those of African Americans.” If biological differences were cited as justifications for racist practices during life, dead black bodies became a valuable resource for enhancing medical knowledge and health care made disproportionately available to white patients. The sourcing of medical cadavers thus maps out one way in which life and death circulated between white and nonwhite subjects in the nineteenth century.

Civil death

The racial logic behind the sourcing of medical cadavers approximates Twain’s account of tourists collecting the bones of native Hawai’ians in an early travel sketch entitled “A Battle Whose History is Forgotten.” The willful forgetting of the Hawai’ian past makes these remains ungrievable to Twain and his white travel companions, enabling them to collect and trade bones with little compunction: “I did not think it was just right to carry off any of these bones, but we did it, anyhow.” Situated beyond the scope of ethical compunction and legal protection, these desecrated bones are not only literally dead but dead in the eyes of law and society. This condition, which the legal scholar Colin Dayan calls “civil death,” illuminates Twain’s career-long pattern of conflating racialized characters with cadavers.

In his early, unfinished story “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again” (1870-71), Twain depicts a Chinese immigrant named Ah Song Hi who is assaulted on the streets of San Francisco, arrested for “disturbing the peace,” beaten and called a “loafer” in jail by two Irish loafers, and convicted at a trial at which he is not permitted to testify. This narrative about the vulnerability of the Chinese in California breaks off with the remark that the newspaper reporter “would praise all the policemen indiscriminately and abuse the Chinamen and dead people.” Since neither the Chinese nor the dead people can bear witness in a California court, they have the same standing in the eyes of the court reporter.

Tom Sawyer makes numerous references to Injun Joe’s lack of legal recourse, and indeed depicts this inability to seek legal redress as the origin of his vindictive schemes. He first attacks Doctor Robinson because “your father had me jailed for a vagrant”; later, he attempts to attack and mutilate the Widow Douglass because her husband convicted him of vagrancy and had him “horsewhipped in front of the jail, like a nigger!” Injun Joe’s slow death in McDougal’s cave is also caused by a judge, who decided to prevent children from getting lost in the cave by having “its big door sheathed with boiler iron …and triple-locked.” A social outcast with a history of being arbitrarily jailed and whipped for vagrancy, Injun Joe dies in one of the few refuges available to him near town.

Injun Joe’s death has a source in “Horrible Affair,” an 1863 Virginia City Territorial Enterprise article attributed to Twain which tells of how a posse sealed a “noted desperado” in a cave, only to discover the next day “five dead Indians!—three men, one squaw, and one child, who had gone in there to sleep, perhaps, and been smothered by the foul atmosphere after the tunnel had been closed up.” As with Injun Joe, these Indians’ death by indirection results from their social vulnerability: the family was likely seeking shelter in the cave as a result of displacement, poverty, or persecution.

In Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s freedom and mobility are consistently contrasted with Jim’s immobilization. Whereas faking his own death gives Huck the freedom to experiment with new lives along the river’s shore, Jim’s movement paradoxically requires that he remain still, concealed in a swamp or cave, posing as a captured runaway, tied up on the raft, or painted blue and disguised as a “Sick Arab” who “didn’t only look like he was dead, he looked considerably more than that.” Jim looks more than dead because he is dead to the law, subject to being recaptured, punished, or sold by any white person he comes across. Twain’s most celebrated novel about a boy’s adventures is also a novel about a black man’s inability to move freely in the South, where antebellum slavery and post-Emancipation vagrancy laws both served to police black movement and capture involuntary black labor.

The unburied dead take on monumental proportions in King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905), Twain’s satirical condemnation of King Leopold’s brutal rule in the Congo Free State. In Twain’s pamphlet, Leopold describes a proposed monument consisting of 15 million skulls and skeletons. The monument would consist of an enormous pyramid of skulls surrounded by “forty grand avenues of approach, each thirty-five miles long, and each fenced on both sides by skulless skeletons standing a yard and a half apart and festooned together in line by short chains stretching from wrist to wrist and attached to tried and true old handcuffs stamped with my private trade-mark, a crucifix and butcher-knife crossed, with motto, ‘By this sign we prosper.’” In his anti-imperialist writings, Twain makes a point of counting those killed by colonial governments and wars. This grotesque image of fifteen million unburied skeletons bears witness to the dead black bodies underlying Leopold’s wealth. Twain’s meticulous calculations of distances challenge readers to fathom such an immense number of corpses, while subtly pointing to connections between racist policies within the U.S. and Leopold’s colonial violence by noting that this configuration of skeletons “would stretch across America from New York to San Francisco.” By putting colonialism’s dead bodies on display, Twain’s imaginary monument gives a new meaning to his aphorism, “Only dead men can tell the truth in this world.”

Returning to Pap Finn’s nightmare about the walking dead, we can see that his terror stems from a sense of being on the verge of civil death. Pap fears being criminalized and stigmatized as an alcoholic drifter with no means of employment. Specifically, his nightmare seems to register his status as a vagrant or tramp—a criminal category that was disproportionately used to police and discipline black subjects in the post-Emancipation South. As a poor white “vagrant,” Pap risks the kinds of brutal punishment imposed on the “loafer” Ah Song Hi and the “vagrant” Injun Joe, as well as the status of civil death that characterizes so many of Twain’s black, indigenous, Chinese, Filipino, and Congolese subjects. Pap’s dream dramatizes one important reason for white Americans’ investments in Jim Crow and other racist policies: an anxious desire to differentiate between impoverished white subjects and racial “others,” to bind social status and state protections to race rather than class, to insulate whiteness from death.

Further Reading

Writings by Twain referenced in this article include “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” in ed. Tom Quirk, Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (1994); “Petrified Man,” “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson,” and “Horrible Affair,” in eds. Edgar Branch, Robert Hirst, and Harriet Smith, Early Tales and Sketches, Vol. 1: 1851-1864 (1979); “Jim’s Ghost Story,” excluded manuscript passage, in ed. Stephen Railton, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2011). Mark Twain and Medicine: “Any Mummery Will Cure” (2011) by K. Patrick Ober details Twain’s familiarity with Dr. Joseph McDowell’s cave. For important analyses of Twain’s representations of slavery and blackness, see Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993). For overviews of Twain’s treatments of race and empire, see ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain (2002). On the links between race, imperialism, and death in Twain’s writings, see Hsuan L. Hsu, Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (2015).

On social and legal manifestations of death, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982); Colin Dayan’s discussion of the “civil death” of convicted felons in the wake of emancipation in The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (2011); and Achille Mbem11222321be, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15:1 (2003). For an analysis of connections between death and nineteenth-century American conceptions of citizenship and freedom, see Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2001). For a historical discussion of black medical cadavers and other instances of medical racism, see Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2007).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Hsuan L. Hsu is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2010) and Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (2015). He is currently writing a book about olfactory aesthetics and environmental risk.

“Poor George,” we grunted as we looked down to survey the damage. George was hurting. His face was flat on the ground and, while ants and shoots of uncut grass explored ways to migrate around his heavy, white body, layers of mold and errant pine needles concentrated in the decaying crevices on his back. Laboring just to pick him up, we hoisted George onto a pair of wooden 2-by-4s nearby, the damp ground almost groaning from the unexpected weight it now had to bear. As my colleague and I stood over George, contemplating the best way to clean him up, it occurred to us that we were using the word him to describe what was really an it. “George” was not an actual person, but a gravestone that memorialized a person’s life and mourned his death. And yet we spoke of his stone’s dilapidated condition as if it were a human being, someone in need of attention and care. George L. McIntire’s nineteenth-century marble marker had accumulated years of organic buildup, the weather had worn down much of its inscription, and it had tumbled forward and off its marble base, either from a natural incident or a malicious push. The stone, which rests in Wellesley, Massachusetts’ First Congregational Church’s cemetery, was, like many other stones beside it and throughout New England, in desperate need of repair (fig. 1).

Thousands of stones across New England share stories like George’s: although they were intended to honor and recall the dead, their decaying state (toppled over, broken, leaning, or just plain dirty) prohibits them from performing their designated function. Gravestones seem to be, like the memories of the people they honor, eternally immutable, intransient reminders of the lives, loves, and losses of the past. Even the substance they’re made of is a metaphor for durability and permanence. And yet, as any resident of New England knows, soil moves, water erodes, tree limbs fall, frost heaves erupt, sun rays blister, roots expand, and mold advances. Constant attacks from weather, in addition to the mechanization of landscaping, conspire to destroy these stones as they once stood. Ironically, New England’s historic cemeteries are dying.

Fortunately, a handful of preservationists are laboring to safeguard the invaluable treasures within these early American cemeteries. Fannin-Lehner Preservation Consultants, my summer employer, is an award-winning company out of Concord, Massachusetts, that does just that. Although it is a small firm, it has taken on the ambitious task of restoring and repairing cemeteries throughout New England and beyond. And the company is not alone. Dozens of other people, from preservationists and historians to local townsfolk and eager volunteers, are energetically preserving these endangered markers from oblivion.

The public, and historians in particular, are intrigued by the physical process of preservation. As we work in Salem, Massachusetts, for example, visitors constantly inquire about what we’re doing there. “Are you digging up the witches?” younger kids (and a handful of adults) often ask. While the jokester in me wants to reply that we are rummaging for bones to include in a perfectly delectable “witch stew” (or something to that effect), the historian and responsible employee instead patiently explains the process of assessing, removing, cleaning, and resetting the gravestones that inhabit these holes. Assuring my spectators that I rarely dig more than two feet below grade helps set them at ease, even if I can’t resist occasionally pretending to strike a coffin. Although many observers are initially unsettled and disturbed, they frequently wind up inquisitive. How do you restore a gravestone? What if it is chipped? What’s that soapy stuff you use to remove the gunk?

I have to admit that, when I began preserving gravestones, I wondered about the darker, macabre impulses that gave me such an affinity for the work. And yet I never find it to be depressing. Instead, working in cemeteries has been surprisingly uplifting. There are few places more peaceful than a New England cemetery in the summertime, and as a historian, I relish playing a small part in this gargantuan effort to preserve these seemingly permanent but ultimately delicate examples of early American material culture.

So, how exactly does one preserve a gravestone? How would one go about fixing stones similar to poor “George”? The answer depends on the stone, and each type of stone has its own qualities, characteristics, and challenges. If you travel to any colonial cemetery (contemporaries would have referred to them as burying or burial grounds), you’re certain to find the most common material used in early American gravestones: slate (fig. 2). Dark and tall, slate stones are the easiest material with which to work. Although slate can chip and flake quite easily, the stones’ slenderness usually makes them lighter and relatively easy to maneuver (excepting the massive ones). Slate can be easy to clean, as it is generally smooth and resistant to the lichen and mold that accumulates easily on other stones. And yet, some slate stones still have ridges in their backs from their original quarrying, giving lichen and other organic material an ideal place to accumulate. Slate markers can be deceivingly hefty, for only 60 percent of any slate gravestone is actually exposed to the air. The other 40 percent is below grade, using simple physics to keep the stone straight. Imagine that: every time you see a slate gravestone in a colonial cemetery, you are looking at just more than half of its full size! The other half is buried beneath the surface, amidst the rocks, sand, roots, bricks, and other materials that may have migrated into the soil.

By the nineteenth century, thanks to improvements in transportation and technology and the expansion of the market, marble and granite began to eclipse slate as the cemetery stone of choice. These nineteenth-century stones are generally thicker and thus heavier and sturdier, so they are less inclined to lean than slate; their mass and large footprint generally keep them upright. And yet, they too can topple over and become victim to the changing landscape, frost heaves, and even vandalism. Granite, like marble, is crushingly heavy. Unlike slate stones, trying to remove a marble or granite stone by yourself will almost surely send you to the chiropractor, as such a stone can weigh hundreds of pounds. However, because nineteenth-century carvers usually cut them square, these stones are relatively easy to slide, grasp, and turn. They usually need to be rolled or pried out of their holes, and some of the heavier ones actually remain in these excavations during preservation. Over time, the components that hold marble together can disintegrate, especially in acidic environments (think acid rain). This makes the stone more porous, more vulnerable to organic penetration, and therefore more difficult to clean. In these cases, an hour or more of vigorous scrubbing is needed to really make a difference (notice George’s stone, for example, in fig. 1). Granite is generally smoother than marble, less porous, and therefore much easier to clean.

Whether the stones are slate, marble, or granite, the rehabilitation process is essentially the same. Smaller ones are removed from their holes and carefully placed on wooden 2-by-4s for cleaning, while larger ones remain and are leveled by simply shifting their bases until they are in line and level. Workers clean the stones with a healthy dose of Photo-Flo, a non-ionic and soapy liquid that is used to process film. It is strong but soft, and it helps attack the mold and lichen without bruising or flaking the stone. They also use standard brushes one might find in any store’s cleaning aisle, along with plastic scrapers, wood sticks, and even hard toothbrushes, which may be better suited to cleaning up the names, dates, and ornamental motifs inscribed on the stones than cleaning teeth and gums. The goal, of course, is to attack the dirt and organic material that has become encrusted on these stones without damaging the stone itself. Cleaning a slate stone takes only a few minutes; granite and especially marble markers take much longer. George’s marble marker, for example, took two people nearly two hours to clean. Once the stone passes the “toothbrush test” (so that a clean toothbrush will come up clean after it’s been rubbed on the stone), workers pack the stone back in the hole by using a fifty-fifty mix of sand and pea-stone to reset it at the proper height and angle. When it is stable and level, they replace the sod around it while recording the work that was just done. Simple enough, right?

While this seems like a reasonably straightforward process, every cemetery—and every stone—possesses its own character, shape, size, and, of course, challenges. Many stones are in perfect shape, but others have tortured angles or awkward bumps on them. Some have bricks, parts of other gravestones, or cement in their holes, revealing that this was not the first time they’ve been repaired. Stones that have broken into two or more sections are not uncommon, and these always require more attention and time. Broken slate markers can be reassembled with a quick-setting adhesive. Repairing broken marble and granite stones can be a bit more complicated. Preservationists usually drill holes into top and bottom sections and join the two together with a fiberglass pin. Sometimes preservationists will make an entirely new base for the stone out of wood forms and fast-drying concrete mix. However, preservationists must be certain not to set the stone itself into concrete, as that could catalyze further damage. Instead, an empty slot is left in the concrete form, and the stone is fitted in. The gaps are then packed with a strong but flexible and lime-rich mortar that gives the stone adequate room to shift while simultaneously keeping it sturdy and upright. In all cases, each stone presents its own personality.

What can preservation teach us about gravestones? The most obvious lesson is that gravestones are surprisingly frail. We assume that these markers for the dead are enduring and immovable. The truth is that they are, like the coffins and bodies below them, caught in a constant process of deterioration. Scholars, preservationists, and town and church administrators need to recognize that grave markers are not permanent and can’t be taken for granted; like any historic treasure, gravestones should be carefully protected and diligently preserved.

There are other lessons to draw from these stones. First, like any historical source, grave markers always unearth more questions than they answer. Although many stones record only a name, date of birth, and date of death, others give a fuller sense of the identities and relationships that contemporaries sought to memorialize. Women are often described in relation to men who either fathered them or married them, while the more eminent male lawyers, politicians, judges, and military leaders are remembered for their professional exploits. I have never seen a stone that reads shoemaker, midwife, tanner, or sailor; stones reiterate class and gender hierarchies. The funerary iconography of the stone can also reveal much about how the deceased’s families wanted to represent the wealth, character, or piety of the dead (figs. 3 and 4). Willows and urns eventually replaced the more grisly death’s heads in the late eighteenth century; cherubs seemed to operate as a transitional symbol between the two. Although markers might employ the same motif, the difference was in the details, and burial markers display a fairly wide range of detail and elegance. The more ornamental and meticulous images illuminate the stones of families that had the wealth and wherewithal to afford them. Indeed, participating in American funerary culture was in many ways a financial decision. The more elaborate designs are therefore found on the stones that recall the area’s most prosperous families.

Gravestone preservation also creates opportunities to introduce students to funerary rituals, ideas about death, and to provoke discussions about how past cultures imagined and experienced both death and life. Whether it is because my college students are fascinated with material culture, value gravestones as historical sources, or are simply obsessed with the macabre, they have been uncommonly interested in how the dead are memorialized. Taking students to a cemetery is surely the best way to bring early American death culture into the classroom. These visits allow students to see the stones firsthand, but also consider how they are laid out, along what kind of orientation they were placed, and how they fit in with the natural, institutional, or municipal landscape around them.

But because limits on time and money can make this sort of fieldwork difficult, if not impossible, I’ve had to look for alternatives. Indeed, if you cannot take students to the stones, bring the stones to students. Websites have been a tremendous pedagogical asset in this regard. There is an excellent Website on New York’s African Burial Ground that explains recent efforts to commemorate the site and broadcast its importance to the wider public. In addition, Keith and Theresa Stokes created a Website that documents Newport, Rhode Island’s famous “God’s Little Acre,” one of the oldest black burial grounds in North America. Including a historical overview of slavery in Newport, an explanation of African burial markers and names, and even photographs and transcriptions of dozens of black gravestones, the Website is an amazing yet underutilized resource for teaching about the African diaspora, material culture, and early American ideas about death (click here to watch a mini-documentary on God’s Little Acre).

Of course, the act of preserving a stone—whether physically through preservation or virtually by posting its inscription on the Web—highlights the myriad questions surrounding the actual meaning and purpose of the stone itself. This question is particularly salient in a classroom setting. Indeed, the irony of introducing students to gravestones and efforts to preserve them is that the actual meaning of the stone changes when doing so. No longer is the stone speaking solely for the memory of the deceased person below it, for it now serves as an entrée into a past world, one whose meanings and realities we constantly struggle to adequately understand. For example, when I was teaching an upper level course on the social and cultural history of early America, I distributed a packet that included a variety of documents on slavery and race in colonial Newport. The packet consisted of maps, laws, censuses, runaway and slave sale advertisements, manumission papers, diary extracts, and other primary sources. The goal was twofold. First, I wanted to teach my students about the dynamics of slavery in the colonial North. Secondly, I wanted them to wrestle with the nuances and complexities of different types of historical sources. Of course, I included images and transcripts of grave markers from God’s Little Acre. Interestingly, the grave markers ended up generating the most engaging discussion during this lesson, and one of the most intellectually exciting conversations we had the entire semester.

Duchess Quamino’s stone, for example, was an elaborately worded marker that said she was a “free black” (though she had previously been a slave) who was of “distinguished excellence, Intelligent, Industrious, Affectionate, Honest, and of Exemplary Piety.” The rest of the inscription reads, “Blessed thy slumbers in this house of clay, And bright thy rising to eternal day.” Some of my students took this marker to mean simply that Quamino was as the stone said she was: a pious, honest, and faithful Christian. This might have been true, but the words may hold further meaning. Before her emancipation, Quamino worked as a slave in the Channing household, and it was William Ellery Channing, the abolitionist and founder of Unitarianism, who added the poetic inscription to her marker. Quamino lived several years in a religious Anglo-American family, was married in one of Newport’s Congregational Churches, and had married a freed slave who became an ardent Christian; his death aboard a privateer’s ship during the American Revolution stopped him from undertaking an evangelical mission to Africa. So it is probably safe to conclude that Quamino likely personified a few of the traits inscribed on her stone.

But markers like Duchess Quamino’s also offer opportunities to discuss how gravestones served not only to honor the dead, but to express social conventions on race, religion, and power. Quamino might have been a pious, honest, and affectionate person, but framing her as such also spoke to the ways in which the Channing family wanted her to be remembered. Her marker certainly reflected well on her own personal qualities and achievements—”industrious” is an implicit reference to her success as a caterer and entrepreneur—but that’s not all. By depicting Quamino as a converted African who exemplified the best Christian qualities, the stone also highlighted the paternal care of the Channing family, which had presumably instructed her in the very principles that she personified so strikingly. While Quamino may or may not have been pious, someone certainly had an incentive for her to be described that way, especially a family of former slave owners who began to criticize the institution.

In other words, gravestones reflect the salient power relationships within any given society, especially one so clearly implicated in the social tensions of racial slavery. In fact, my students often debate whether slaves were considered products or people, and gravestones help to add nuance and complexity to this question. The stones that lie within God’s Little Acre can, in some ways, support the argument that slaves were perceived merely as commodities. Although all of the slaves buried in Newport were dubbed “servants” (and not slaves), most were described in some kind of relationship to those who legally owned them. Cato was a servant to Mr. Brinley, for example, and Captain John Brown was the master of his servant, Hercules Brown. Their identity was therefore inseparable from the masters who owned them, and even in death their status as slaves was engraved in stone. Coupled with newspaper advertisements that placed slaves alongside wool, rum, and other commodities, grave markers served to remind others that these people were in fact property. Even the location of the markers reifies these power relations, for blacks had their own separate burying place. In life they resided, worked, and lived with whites, but in death they were completely segregated.

And yet, many gravestones (and newspaper advertisements, for that matter) highlight the human qualities of black slaves; several were described as faithful, pious, exemplary. Even the fact that they were buried at all exposes their humanity, as does their apparent longing for a life after this mortal one, a uniquely human attribute. When juxtaposed against and used in conjunction with other primary sources, these gravestones reveal the fundamental social tension in Newport slavery: although these people were considered marketable commodities, their underlying humanity could never be totally denied,

Gravestones also reveal larger attitudes about the meaning of death itself, and recently preserved gravestones can aid in exploring these themes. In addition to the Newport assignment, my social and cultural history course also read Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, which gracefully explores how the magnitude of death during the Civil War affected everything from how women in mourning sported the latest fashions to how entrepreneurs cashed in on the embalming craze. “Dying was an art,” Faust asserts, and for nineteenth-century Americans, a “good death” meant lying at home surrounded by family, rejecting Satan’s temptations, and dying peacefully, penitently, serenely. However, and as Faust makes clear, the unprecedented exigencies of the Civil War ensured that soldiers were unlikely to experience a “good death.” Sniper fire, ruthlessly effective weaponry, astronomically long casualty lists, exploding bodies, and mortal anonymity rent a hole in this practice while fundamentally challenging Americans’ notions of what dying actually meant.

The recently preserved gravestone that began this article encapsulates this idea tidily. According to his marker, George L. McIntire died just shy of his thirty-third birthday in September 1865 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Was he a victim of the war? It is tough to say, but whether he died in the war or not, his morose inscription clearly reveals that the distance between him and his family prohibited a “good death.” It reads:

No mother stood beside his couch,
To cheer his dying bed;
No sister there with kindly hand,
To bathe his aching head

If McIntire was a casualty of this war (or some disease that resulted from it) the stone does not mention it (figs. 5 and 6). Instead, McIntire’s marker offers a critical narrative of a bad death, one where the victim’s body was in social isolation while his soul was in spiritual peril. The stone therefore functions not as a celebration of this individual’s life, but rather as a commentary on the perils of westward migration and family disruption. Although his may not have been a Civil War death, the stone’s message appropriates the same conventions about the “good death” to portray McIntire’s death as a bad one, or at least one comparable to those that hundreds of thousands of men experienced during the recent war. This man died fairly young, away from home, and alone, and the inscription on his marker implicitly warns other members of the family and the younger residents of Wellesley to avoid the same fate. In the end, the stone is not really about McIntire, but about the anxieties and fears that migration might cause for all members of a family. In drawing such attention to this bad death, McIntire’s stone functioned as a cautionary tale, a brusque reminder of how others might experience a “good death” while avoiding a regrettable one.

Cemeteries and the gravestones that reside within them unearth a panoply of human emotions: sadness, regret, and loneliness, as well as happiness, nostalgia, and beauty. Indeed, if there is no place more haunting than a cemetery at night, there are also few places more idyllic in the day. When we cease to think of cemeteries simply as places to deposit our dead and more as open-air museums, their intrinsic value becomes even more apparent. As living museums, cemeteries require no admission fees and have no curators. Indeed, gravestones may be silent reminders of the lives of the past, but if meticulously preserved and carefully interpreted, these stones can speak to us. But rather than speaking in one narrative chorus, grave markers reveal a host of meanings, conventions, and voices. Preservationists are working diligently to keep these voices alive, and we would be fortunate if future generations did the same for ours.

Further reading:

The historical literature on death and funerary rituals is too broad to comprehensively summarize here. The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife has published several volumes on Puritan gravestone art. For more on how death in the Civil War affected its meaning, practice, and understanding in American society, read Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008). For a diverse collection of scholarly essays on death in early America, take a look at Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, eds., Mortal Remains: Death in Early America (Philadelphia, 2003). Michael G. Kammen’s new book, Digging Up The Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (Chicago, 2010), examines why some people decided that one burial for extraordinary Americans was simply not enough. Finally, and for an intercultural approach to death in the first few centuries of American encounters, read Erik R. Seeman’s Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 (Philadelphia, 2010).

For more on the historical archaeology of Newport’s “God’s Little Acre,” see James C. Garman, “Viewing the Color Line Through the Material Culture of Death,”Historical Archaeology 28:3 (1994): 74-93. In addition to the Website dedicated to “God’s Little Acre,” Keith and Theresa Stokes also created an award-winning site on African American and Jewish history in Newport. It can be found at www.eyesofglory.com.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.2 (January, 2011).

Edward E. Andrews is a visiting assistant professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, as well as a part-time grave preservationist.

In early 1692, Katherine Branch, the teenaged maidservant of Daniel and Abigail Wescot, was overtaken by “fits.” She claimed that she was under attack by invisible tormentors who pinched her, pricked her with pins, and spoke of women who assumed the shape of cats. Witnesses in her small New England Puritan community told of her violent convulsions and trance-like states. Soon several local women were accused of witchcraft. The story is a familiar one, but its setting is not. Instead of the much better known Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this episode happened in Stamford, Connecticut, hardly known as a witch-hunting hotbed. But young Kate Branch’s accusations began a witch-hunt so totally eclipsed by the events that same year in Salem that little has been written about it. This is too bad. In comparison to the events in Salem, which quickly exploded beyond the control of authorities, Stamford, Connecticut’s episode seems downright orderly.

Escaping Salem details this “other witch hunt of 1692” and is one of the first volumes in a new series from Oxford entitled, New Narratives in American History. The series promises short studies that will “re-imagine the craft of writing history.” Copy from the marketing department aside, the structure of the book with a novelistic-narrative style and a separate afterword that discusses the process of writing a history provides both the engaging narrative the editors promise and a substantive section that will provide rich material for discussion in the book-club meeting or the undergraduate class. The credit for this success rightly belongs to the author, Richard Godbeer, who brings to this study the authority of his earlier work on religion and folk magic in early New England, The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge, 1992). 

Like Mary Beth Norton and others who have studied Salem’s episode, Godbeer understands where the responsibility for the excesses at Salem are located and how Connecticut avoided them. While the accusations of children begin each episode, it is the action of the adults in the households of the afflicted and in the churches and courts that determined the experiences of each community. Godbeer clearly relates what was at stake in episodes of witch fears. The trial of a witch involved the whole community. As neighbors served as watchers over Kate Branch they became potential court witnesses. The failure to convict and execute true witches left those who testified against an acquitted witch at risk for “terrible revenge” (10).

To convict an accused witch, Puritans relied not on simple accusations but “careful observation and experimentation” of claims made by the victim and by witnesses: a system that Godbeer calls “scientific supernaturalism” (142). It was the deliberate use of this traditional approach by magistrates that ultimately saved Stamford from becoming a Salem in 1692. Trials also had a political dimension as the law was sometimes at odds with community notions of guilt and of justice. Other earlier witchcraft acquittals had angered communities convinced that the accused was indeed a witch. As those acquitted returned to their homes they met suspicion and even violence at the hands of terrified neighbors. Courts knew they had to move decisively but carefully. 

Even in a time and place where witchcraft was not only a possible, but at times a probable, explanation for a case like Branch’s, the devout Puritan folk of Stamford disagreed about its sources. Some saw deceit and attention-getting tactics while others believed it was truly witchcraft. As in other cases in Puritan New England, the women named by Kate Branch were linked by certain factors. Goody Elizabeth Clawson and Goody Mercy Disborough fit the type of women upon whom suspicion usually fell. Clawson was “notorious for her argumentative nature and her vengeful spite” (5) and her long history of conflict with the Wescots. Goody Disborough from nearby Fairfield not only had a history herself of contentious relations with the Wescots but had been suspected of witchcraft by her own neighbors. Other women whose reasons for attacking this young servant in the Wescot household were less logical were accused. Despite the willingness of the grand jury to prosecute all the women named, the court found no reason to proceed against any but Clawson and Disborough.

The Connecticut trial of Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough began on September 14, 1692, in Fairfield, just a week before the last eight of the convicted witches were hanged in Salem. But the jury in Fairfield failed to reach a verdict. The case was sent to the General Court at Hartford, which promptly sent it back. It was then that the court consulted with the ministers of the colony. In their written report the Connecticut Puritan ministers effectively eliminated the most crucial independent evidence. The results of the “ducking” of the accused were condemned as “unlawful and sinful” (116). The mixed results of an examination for “witches teats” done by midwife Sarah Bates and other women were also dismissed as unsatisfactory because not performed by a qualified physician. Kate Branch herself came under scrutiny as the ministers raised questions about “counterfeiting” and judged her not to be a “sufficient witness” in her own right (117).

The court again convened at Fairfield on October 28, 1692, to deal with the suspended prosecution of Disborough and Clawson. Again the jury was sent out. How long they deliberated and under what specific instructions is unknown but they returned with an acquittal for Clawson and a guilty verdict for Disborough. The magistrates clearly found this troubling and the jury was sent back to reconsider. Disborough was again found guilty and, under the laws of the colony, was sentenced to death. The court granted her a reprieve pending a review of the case by the General Court in Hartford, where she was ultimately acquitted. 

Godbeer likens examining seventeenth-century witch trials through the surviving transcripts to watching “narrow-beamed spotlights that play upon an otherwise darkened landscape” as the accused and their accusers “made a brief and dramatic appearance in the records at the time of their trial and then returned to obscurity” (129). This indeed is the fate of Katherine Branch who was at the center of this episode. Goody Clawson, whose death in 1714 at the age of eighty-three is recorded, and Goody Disborough, who can be briefly glimpsed in probate records in 1709 as the survivor of her husband, are nearly as invisible. As the “spotlight” of the public record moved on they returned to the shadows of history that so many New Englanders, particularly women, lived and died in. Here in this small book the spotlight again returns. Whether this series will live up to its self-proclaimed goals depends as much on the authors as on the topics. But if the future selections are as careful as that of Richard Godbeer for Escaping Salem it is very likely to be a great success.

Further Reading:

For more on the general subject of witchcraft in North America, see: Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca, 1997); Richard Godbeer, The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (New York, 1992); Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987); John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York, 1982); and, David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989). For published documents relating directly to this episode, see: David D. Hall, ed., Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638-1693, 2d ed. (Boston, 1999).

Salem’s 1692 witch-hunt provides both a context and counterpoint for the episode in Connecticut that same year. Among the best books on various aspects of that event are: Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York, 2002); Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974); Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 (New York, 1993); and, Peter Hoffer, The Devil’s Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692 (Baltimore, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.4 (July, 2005).

Gretchen A. Adams is an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University. She is completing a manuscript entitled The Specter of Salem in American Culture for the University of Chicago Press and is an associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

The War of 1812 is to historians what the common cold is to doctors: an embarrassment. It should be pretty simple, but its causes, nature, and ending are maddeningly elusive. Thankfully, the War of 1812 shares another feature of colds: it doesn’t seem to have done too much harm. So we ignore it.

Ignoring the War of 1812 is more difficult than usual in a bicentennial year, especially for Canadian historians. Although fought by both Americans and Canadians, the war is a more important historical datum for Canadians. By repelling invading Americans, the colonists and the British army demonstrated the durability of British North America in the face of a more populous United States.

The War of 1812 was also the last war fought on Canadian soil: Canadians had no Mexican War, Civil War, or Pearl Harbor. And physical proximity makes up for chronological remoteness. Nearly half of the Canadian population lives within a three-hour drive of some War of 1812 site. Little wonder, then, that so many Canadian War of 1812 books offer prefaces that recall school field trips.

The War of 1812 will also be hard to miss because of its political charge in Canada. While the memorialization of war can cause hard feelings between ex-combatant nations, this one is arguably more problematic within the country that can more reasonably claim victory. Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a robust bicentennial celebration a part of his Conservative Party election platform, and followed through with public appropriations in the tens of millions of dollars. Canadian expenditures dwarf those on the U.S. side, where a comparatively weak economy and indifference stifled most commemoration initiatives. (Full disclosure: the present author is the recipient of a Canadian Studies grant from the Canadian government related to the war.)

The commemoration is being promoted with a view towards inculcating nationalism, like the “Own the Podium” campaign that aimed to promote Canadian athletes, especially medal contenders, in the years leading up to the Vancouver Olympics. Although stereotypes suggest that this kind of emotional patriotism would not come naturally to most Canadians, the 2010 Olympics showed it could be teased out.

As the Canadian newsweekly Macleans observed, the war “scratches a great many Conservative itches”: it celebrates the nation’s military heritage and its imperial connection while sidelining what federal heritage minister James Moore described as a “leftist mythology” that identifies the Canadian state with progressive social and political programs and institutions.

Indeed, the previous Liberal Party government would probably have spent less and downplayed the military theme. Consider that the slogan of the provincial commemorations in Liberal-run Ontario is “Pathways to Peace.” Although the logic is a little odd, it does help Canadians segue quickly and efficiently from black shako hats to U.N. blue helmets, another symbol with which many Canadians like to associate themselves.

Like the Vancouver Games, the bicentennial did not get off to a smooth start. In February, at Ottawa’s “Winterlude” festival, a commemorative activity involved kids donning redcoats and replica muskets. This raised hackles. Some critics objected to the fact that the event divorced guns from their bloody consequences, and claimed it was simply wrong to “glorify a war at a family-oriented event” celebrating the season. The debate even echoed in Parliament, where Senator Roméo Dallaire, formerly force commander of the U.N. mission in Rwanda, took the government to task for putting weapons, albeit mock ones, in the hands of children.

In the background—barely—was a controversy over the Conservative government’s abolition of Canada’s “long-gun registry,” which tracked possession of all rifles and shotguns. The Harper government did not simply discontinue the registry, but mandated the destruction of all records as well. For Harper’s critics, the Winterlude event amounted to promoting a pro-gun political agenda among the four-to-twelve set. For Harper’s supporters, the lesson was different, if equally clear: no guns, no Canada.

A more significant federal initiative for the teaching and commemoration of the war is 1812.gc.ca, the official virtual gateway to the bicentennial. Portraits of four individuals adorn the Website portal: Sir Isaac Brock, British officer; Tecumseh, Shawnee chief; Laura Secord, a Niagara local who became Canada’s Paul Revere; and Charles-Michel de Salaberry, French Canadian battlefield hero. It’s a compelling band of protagonists for a nation in which English-speakers, French-speakers, and Natives still hold sway in separate regions of the country, and between whom tension persists. The question of national integrity in Canada is a perennial one.

Indeed, Québécois literary historian Bernard Andrès recently lit into the French version of 1812.gc.ca as “an ideological campaign grafted on to a military campaign” that serves to naturalize a fictitious Canadian identity. For Andrès, “the Harper site” uses the War of 1812 to weave a politically correct, multicultural cloak that makes French Canadians just another cooperative minority. It obscures what he sees as the true nature of the relationship between the French and the English, which is rooted in Wolfe’s triumph over Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. That fateful event ushered in British domination of the French peoples of North America. Amusingly and appropriately, Andrès misspells the British general’s name “Wolf.” Since he critiques the Website right down to its hyphenation practices, the error seems more poetical than accidental.

Those historians inclined to view Québec as a separate nation are at pains to deal with Salaberry. They ultimately dismiss him as another aristocrat co-opted by the British, but find it best to leave the war aside entirely. Fondements historiques du Québec, a manual for history teachers, offers a timeline of Québec history. Somewhere between the first steamboat on the St. Lawrence in 1809, and Louis-Joseph Papineau taking the reins of the Parti canadien in 1815, the War of 1812 somehow goes missing. Well, not entirely missing—we find it on a parallel timeline on the same page, under the heading “elsewhere in the world.” There, the authors describe the War of 1812 as a “war between England and the United States,” and sandwich it between Venezuelan and Argentine independence. Images of the Gulf Coast or the Falklands come more readily to mind than the Montréal suburbs. Can you send a war into exile? Apparently you can.

At least thus far, the mainstream of the Canadian historical profession is keeping controversy at arm’s length. Canadian historians are dutifully scheduling panels at conferences, giving lectures to local historical societies, and occasional interviews to journalists. They seem content to leave the glory, such as it is, to the re-enactors.

Perhaps historians are simply ducking the question of, “We won, right?” That would not be impolitic, since the best answer is probably, “it depends on what you mean by ‘we.'” Reading the Canadian nation back into the War of 1812 is, after all, anachronistic. The outcome of the war left open the possibility of a future state, but that was not on people’s minds at the time. Confederation did not take place until 1867. In 1812, the people of British North America included the families of Revolutionary-era loyalists, expatriated Americans, French settlers, and Native Americans. Their actions in repelling the aggressive American republic did not imply unity; they were mostly local responses, their meaning evaporating with the threat. They had their own aims and cooperated—or not—as they saw fit.

If the war was an inchoate affair, its memory proved useful to some. In the decades that followed, immigration from the United States was cut off, and emigrants from the British Isles arrived in greater numbers. Loyalty to the Crown was increasingly touted as a prime index of civic virtue. In the eyes of later nineteenth-century Ontario elites, the war evinced that loyalty, and justified their dominance over the Canadian nation, so they celebrated it accordingly. The version being advanced today appears not dissimilar to its centennial predecessor. Canada’s professional historians have taken a long time to move past this hackneyed approach to the war, and are loath to see it return.

Thus, Canadian scholarly discussion of the war revolves around a book written by an American. Alan Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812 revels in the peculiarities and peccadilloes of borderlands communities—and tosses in a few Irish radicals to boot. It is a testament to the diminished estimation of the war’s significance in the eyes of the Canadian historical profession that no major Canadian historian or press has offered a new synthesis of the war for its bicentennial.

Of course, the official narrative is not completely at odds with prevailing scholarly opinion. 1812.gc.ca acknowledges that the British army, not local militia, did most of the heavy lifting. The site likewise acknowledges that, “Without the alliance with First Nations during the war, the defence of Canada would probably not have been successful.” Of course, it is more likely that the Natives were fighting to save their own ancestral homelands, rather than a nation that would be created more than half a century later. Nevertheless, the site does clearly reflect scholars’ increasing appreciation of the significance of Native people to the fighting of the war.

While professional historians might proceed to highlight the postwar diminution of Native rights as British officials redefined aboriginal peoples as wards, rather than allies, 1812.gc.ca places the issue within a more flattering comparative frame: “Under the Crown, Canada’s society retained its linguistic and ethnic diversity, in contrast to the greater conformity demanded by the American Republic.” While this statement may resonate with American historians’ understanding of the U.S. in the age of an ascendant Andrew Jackson, it also echoes a hoary tradition of Tory condescension towards the U.S. as a slaveholding republic.

Will spending a lot of money to promote awareness of a historical event ultimately foster serious reflection and understanding? This is something that will have to be assessed over both the shorter and the longer term. Happily or not, in this particular experiment, we have a control: the United States, where near-zero investment in and preparation for the bicentennial is likely to yield minimal returns.

Leaving the interpretive field entirely to the Canadians may well affect the dynamic of the Canadian commemoration. For want of interest and money, the anticipated American counter-narrative may simply never appear. Its absence could temper the Canadian nationalist flame and leave Canadians better able to focus on debating one another about the war and its historical legacy north of the border. Still, the abdicating Americans have much to smile about: what better way to commemorate a conflict that the U.S. government entered with no funds and no plan, and that yielded only an abortive invasion? It’s true to history, and it’s cheap, too.

Further reading:

As noted above, the Canadian government’s official War of 1812 Website is 1812.gc.ca. For Bernard Andrès’ critique, see “1812-2012: Viger, Harper, et la République des Maringouins,” Les Cahiers des dix 65 (2011): 47-74. For a taste of the polemics surrounding the commemoration in the Anglo-Canadian press, see Jeffrey Simpson’s “Let’s Not Exalt the Folly of 1812” in The Globe and Mail (Oct. 7, 2011) and C.P. Champion’s response, “The War of 1812 was Canada’s War of Survival,” in the National Post (Oct. 11, 2011).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

Karim Tiro is associate professor of history at Xavier University and visiting professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is the author of The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of Removal (2011).

French historians rediscover their American past

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, even after the territorial losses of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the French Empire in North America extended from Newfoundland to the Mississippi delta, and the French crown claimed to exercise its sovereignty over a large part of the North American continent. In theory, this huge territory constituted one single colony under the authority of the governor of New France; in practice, it worked as three different colonies (Acadia; Canada, which included the St. Lawrence Valley and the Upper Countries; and Louisiana), each with its own links to the home country. Less a single colony governed by the genera; governor at Quebec, New France functioned more like a loosely structured confederacy, unified by a collection of administrative, military, demographic, economic, and cultural links.

The pluralistic character of New France—the fact that it was really more a collection of semiautonomous regions—has had a strong impact on the writing of the colony’s history. Although much of North America was claimed by France, Francophone historians—insofar as they have directed their energies to early French America—have tended to focus on Canada and have paid very little attention to Acadia and Louisiana. This is in part a reflection of the fact that most of those Francophone historians are themselves Quebequois. But it is also indicative of the deep divide that has split Canadian society since the peace of Paris in 1763. To study New France, for many Quebequois, has been for a very long time an assertion of the primacy of French language and culture in Canadian history.

In recent years, however, historical writing about New France has changed dramatically. Far from privileging a single region, it has begun to treat New France in its totality, directing renewed attention to the hitherto neglected regions of Acadia and Louisiana. And, in a truly novel development, some of this work is being done by French historians—French nationals, trained in France. To appreciate the sea change this represents, it is instructive to consider the place the history of New France has occupied in French historical writing of the past two centuries.

For some time, French historical scholarship has been a very important presence in the history of New France. The École des Annales, in particular, has exercised a very strong influence on the way Canadian historians have studied New France, as demonstrated, for example, in the very important book by Louise Dechêne, Habitants et marchands de Montréal au XVIIe siècle (1974). Reflecting its Annales pedigree, the book is based on a quantitative analysis of censuses, parish registers, and notarial records. But for all their influence on the shape of French-colonial history writing, French historians themselves have been very slow to take up the subject—at least for the past half-century or so. This has not always been the case.

During the Third Republic (1870-1940), the history of New France occupied a prominent place in French history writing. This was largely a reflection of nationalist efforts to glorify the long history of French colonialism and its modern culmination in Africa, Indochina, and the South Pacific. The colonial historians of this era, who belonged to the imperialist lobby, sought to demonstrate that the “French race,” as Eugène Guénin put it in 1898, was “apt to colonization.” According to these pro-empire historians, there were no differences between French colonial expansionism in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both reflected the self-pronounced French capacity to civilize, which, in turn, came from the supposedly benevolent Catholic missionaries of the ancien régime and the equally benevolent ideals of the French Revolution of 1789. The history of New France was thus seen with nostalgia and, like the history of France’s modern colonies, was enshrouded in the rhetoric of French “génie colonial,” meaning a peculiar temperament to understand, love, and free non-European peoples.

This credo was particularly strong among historians of New France. In 1918, on the occasion of the bicentennial anniversary of the founding of New Orleans, the French historian and diplomat Gabriel Hanotaux wrote that “France is loving and generous. She gives and creates. The world is full of her children.” And he suggested that her colonizers are not crass conquistadors but are instead apostles for French civility. Hence, Hanotaux described La Salle, explorer of the Mississippi, as “a sower of civilizations.” This history of New France, even if it culminated in failure, was full of great heroes—La Salle, d’Iberville, Montcalm, etc.—who embodied French dynamism and constructive expansionism.

In Gabriel Louis-Jaray’s L’Empire français d’Amérique (1534-1803), published in 1938, readers learned that “collaboration between races” was the “colonial vocation” of France and that “the success of the French policy towards Natives in America” reflected the colonizers’ “great skills.” A contemporary of Louis-Jaray, Georges Hardy wrote similarly that “removal and extermination of Natives, so much used by other countries, [was] repulsive to the government of the French king.” Meanwhile, as in the writings of nineteenth-century historians such as Francis Parkman, these historians continued to depict Indians as hapless primitives, unable to govern themselves—a view that was echoed in contemporary French views of the indigenous peoples of Africa and the South Pacific.

The methodology of this Third Republic scholarship reflects the ideology of its creators. In its quest to illuminate the greatness of France’s colonial past, it treated every region of New France (the St. Lawrence Valley region as well as Louisiana and Acadia). But with the exception of Emile Salone’s book, La colonisation de la Nouvelle-France (1905)—where the author, even more than Canadian historians until the 1970s, explores the economic and social development of Canada—this work made little attempt to transcend the prevailing top-down conception of the French Empire. The history of the colonies was only treated as the history of government policies and the political and military events they elicited.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the history of New France seemed to drift from French historical consciousness. Insofar as French historians were at all interested in colonial history or anthropology, they tended to focus on South and Central America, regions that saw very little French colonial activity. After the disasters of Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s and early 1960s, the nation seems to have done with its imperial past more or less what it did with the Vichy regime—the pro-Nazi government that controlled the country during World War II. With the traumas that accompanied the French Empire’s collapse came a long bout of collective amnesia as the nation attempted to recast its collective identity. France wished to start from scratch again.

More recently, while the period of Nazi collaboration has finally been integrated into collective historical memory, the French colonial past remains outside the national narrative. As the historians Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès have argued, “colonization is always a real black hole (trou de mémoire)” in modern France. While the Old Regime monarchy was one of the greatest colonizing powers in history and while the Third Republic could hardly have existed without its extensive imperial undertakings, French historians—and the nation as a whole—continue to neglect the French imperial past. A history of colonization and domination simply does not comport with the modern French self-image of a people committed to the ideals of republicanism and universalism.

One must add that French amnesia is particularly strong for the first French colonial empire, mostly because it disappeared in 1763—before the Revolution of 1789, the matrix of the French nation-state and the founding event for contemporary French national identity. Finally, if New France is even less studied than the French West Indies, for example, it is certainly because Louisiana and Canada had a very limited social and economic impact. Much as had been the case for the British Empire, it was the West Indian sugar islands that constituted the political and economic centerpiece of the early French Empire. The nationalist tendencies of French historians might also have played a role in the disappearance of the history of New France from the history of the French nation. For this was the colony lost to Great Britain in the humiliating peace that brought the Seven Years War to an end. Colonial failure remains, for many French, impossible to reconcile with national greatness.

Despite the forces arrayed against French interest in New France, the field survived thanks to the work of several maverick historians. Of particular importance in this regard was Marcel Giraud (1900-1994). Not surprisingly he is often better known among North American historians than French ones. Elected in 1946 to the Collège de France, the most prestigious French academic institution, Giraud held the chair of the history of North American civilization, a position he held until his retirement in 1971. Though he wrote many articles, especially in the esteemed journal Revue Historique, he is best known for his books, particularly his thèse d’État, Le métis canadien (1945), translated into English in 1986, and the five volume Histoire de la Louisiane française, published between 1953 and 1991, and also available in English. Significantly, the fifth volume of the latter, which appeared in 1991, was never published in French, but only in English, thanks to the Louisiana State University Press. Although Giraud’s work reflected very little deference to the dominant Annalesschool (the demographic and economic history of New France was of only slight interest to him) and although he had very little to say about race relations and social patterns in Louisiana, he did point the scholarship in an important new direction. By studying colonization on a local level, he overcame the metropolitan bias that had shaped most other French work on New France. Giraud, however, worked in a very solitary way and was never interested in training and leading a group of young scholars; thus, he did not create any French colonial school.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he had only two main followers in France: Philippe Jacquin, whose most important publication is his book on coureurs de bois, Les Indiens blancs Français et Indiens en Amérique du Nord, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles (1987), and French-American historian Joseph Zitomersky, whose works deal with the spatial and social structures of what he labels “Greater French Louisiana.”

The neglect of New France has not, as we have seen, been solely a French problem. Anglophone historians of North America, particularly those trained in the United States have until relatively recently paid very little attention to the French portions of colonial North America. Louisiana has been particularly neglected. Part of the reason for this is that the way the colony developed does not fit the models of colonization presented by New England and Virginia. Over the past decade, this neglect has given way to a remarkable surge of Anglophone scholarship on French Louisiana. Not only have monographs multiplied but their results have been increasingly integrated into syntheses devoted to “colonial America.” French (and Spanish) Louisiana, in particular, has attracted growing attention from American historians, as the number of new Ph.D. theses about the “colony of Mississippi” demonstrates. This new interest is rooted in two books, both published in 1992, one by Daniel H. Usner—Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy—and the other by Gwendolyn M. Hall—Africans in Colonial Louisiana. Hall’s work, in particular, has played an essential role in this scholarly resurgence by sparking debate about the character of slavery and race relations in colonial Louisiana.

Although this new historiography deserves credit for having attracted the attention of historians of British North America, it is not without its faults. First of all, Anglo-American scholars tend to characterize French (and Spanish) Louisiana as a frontier colony or a borderland. This would not be problematic if the concern were simply the British colonies’ point of view, since Louisiana was truly located at the margins of all French, Spanish, and British Empires. But for the Louisianans themselves, the designation would have had little real meaning. Secondly, most American scholars have been interested in the lower Mississippi valley—even if several books and articles have also been published on the Illinois Country—and they have focused mainly on the territory that in the present day constitutes the state of Louisiana. This too has a distorting effect on the full dimensions of French North America. “Greater French Louisiana” extended from the Great Lakes south to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Appalachian Mountains west to the Rockies.

Fortunately, Anglophone and Francophone Canadian historians have begun very recently to adopt a continental framework in their study of New France. Influenced by the claims of Francophone minorities living outside of Quebec, Canadian geographers in the 1980s developed the concept of “Franco-America” or “French America.” This notion has been most useful to the increasing numbers of North American historians who in recent years have begun studying all the French colonies of the Americas, including those of the Caribbean, from a comparative perspective. Moreover, the new Atlantic history has stimulated new interest in French America among Canadian scholars. The annual conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Quebec in June 2006 had a special emphasis on the French Atlantic; this conference and the recent large grant received from the Mellon foundation by McGill University in Montreal to finance a program on the French Atlantic constitute signs of the rapid development of this field in Canada. In the same way, some American historians studying French colonization in the Americas are now more and more inclined to conceive of their field of study as the whole French Atlantic world, encompassing the mainland colonies, the Caribbean possessions, and French outposts elsewhere around the Atlantic basin.

All of these developments have been accompanied in recent years by a resurgence of French interest in New France. In part, this trend reflects the recent debate in France over the need to better integrate the history of colonization and slavery into the national narrative. The trend also reflects important domestic problems that have plagued France since the 1990s. As the 2005 riots made plain, France is in the midst of a profound struggle to understand its multicultural present. Understanding that present, many French seem to have recognized, will involve a more complete understanding of the nation’s colonial past.

Further Reading

On the French historiography of New France, see Mickaël Augeron and Laurent Vidal, “Du comptoir à la ville coloniale: la France et ses Nouveaux Mondes américains. Bilan historiographique et perspectives de recherche (c. 1990-2001),” in Manuel Lucena Giraldo, dir., ‘Las Tinieblas de la memoria’, Debate y perspectivas. Cuadernos de historia y ciencias sociales (Madrid, 2002): 141-171; Claude Fohlen, “Vingt-cinq ans d’histoire canadienne en France,” in Jean-Michel Lacroix, ed., État des lieux de la recherche sur le Canada en France, AFEC (Bordeaux, 2001): 27-46; Gilles Havard, “L’historiographie de la Nouvelle-France en France au XXe siècle: nostalgie, oubli et renouveau,” in Thomas Wien, Cécile Vidal, and Yves Frénette, eds., De Québec à l’Amérique française. Histoire et mémoire. Textes choisis du deuxième colloque de la Commission franco-québécoise sur les lieux de mémoire communs (Québec, 2006): 95-124; Cécile Vidal, “The Reluctance of French Historians to Address Atlantic History,” The Southern Quarterly 43:4 (Special Issue: Imagining the Atlantic World, 2006): 153-189; Joseph Zitomersky, “In the Middle and on the Margin: Greater French Louisiana in History and in Professional Historical Memory,” in Claude Féral, dir., Alizés, numéro spécial: le citoyen dans l’empire du milieu. Perspectives comparatistes (Saint Denis de la Réunion, 2001): 201-264.

On the debates on colonial history in France, see Romain Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire. La controverse autour du “fait colonial” (Paris, 2006); Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès, La République coloniale. Essai sur une utopie (Paris, 2003); Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale. La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris, 2005); Claude Liauzu and Gilles Manceron, La colonisation, la loi et l’histoire (Paris, 2006); Colette Zytnicki, “‘La maison, les écuries.’ L’émergence de l’histoire coloniale en France (des années 1880 aux années 1930),” in Sandrine Dulucq and Colette Zytnicki, eds., Décoloniser l’histoire? De “l’histoire coloniale” aux histoires nationales en Amérique latine et en Afrique (XIXe-XXe siècles) (Paris, 2003): 9-23.

For French scholarship about New France, see Arnaud Balvay, L’épée et la plume: Amérindiens et soldats des troupes de la Marine en Louisiane et au Pays d’en Haut (1683-1763) (Québec, 2006); Saliha Belmessous, “D’un préjugé culturel à un préjugé racial. La politique indigène de la France au Canada” (Ph.D. diss., EHESS, 1999); Fernand Braudel and Michel Mollat du Jourdin, eds., Le monde de Jacques Cartier (Paris, 1984); Marcel Giraud, Le Métis canadien. Son rôle dans l’histoire des provinces de l’Ouest, 2 vol. (St. Boniface, Man., 1984; 1ère éd., 1945); The Métis in the Canadian West, 2 vol. (Edmonton, 1986); M. Giraud, Histoire de la Louisiane française, 4 vol. (Paris, 1953-1974); M. Giraud, A History of French Louisiana, 5 vol. (Baton Rouge, 1974-1991); Eugène Guénin, La Nouvelle France(Paris, 1896-1898); Gabriel Hanotaux, L’Union de la France et de l’Amérique. Commémoration du Bicentenaire de la fondation de la Nouvelle-Orléans (Paris, 1918); Gilles Havard, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century (Montréal and Kingston, 2001); Gilles Havard, Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’En Haut, 1660-1715 (Sillery and Paris, 2003); Gilles Havard, “Le rire des jésuites. Archéologie du mimétisme dans la rencontre franco-amérindienne (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle),” Annales HSS (2007): 62-3; Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris, 2003, new edition 2006); Philippe Jacquin, Les Indiens blancs: Français et Indiens en Amérique du Nord, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1987); Gilles-Antoine Langlois, Des villes pour la Louisiane française. Théorie et pratique de l’urbanistique coloniale au 18e siècle (Paris, 2003); Émile Salone, La colonisation de la Nouvelle-France: Étude sur les origines de la nation canadienne française (Paris, 1970, 1st ed. 1905); Khalil Saadani, “Une colonie dans l’impasse: la Louisiane française, 1731-1743” (thèse de Doctorat d’Histoire, EHESS, 1993); Khalil Saadani, “L’État, les Amérindiens et les présents: la Louisiane française au XVIIIe siècle, 1699-1765” (thèse de Doctorat d’Etat, Université Cadi Ayyad, 2001-2); Alain Saussol et Joseph Zitomersky, eds., Colonies, territoires, sociétés: l’enjeu français (Paris, 1996); Éric Thierry, Marc Lescarbot (vers 1570-1641). Un homme de plume au service de la Nouvelle-France (Paris, 2001); Cécile Vidal, “Les implantations françaises au pays des Illinois au XVIIIe siècle (1699-1763)” (Ph.D. diss., EHESS, 1995); Au Pays des Illinois. Français, Indiens et Africains en Haute-Louisiane au XVIIIe siècle (Paris and Belin, forthcoming); Cécile Vidal, “Africains et Européens au Pays des Illinois durant la période française (1699-1765),” French Colonial History 3 (2003): 51-68; C. Vidal, “Private and State Violence Against African Slaves in Lower Louisiana During the French Period, 1699-1769,” in Thomas J. Humphrey and John Smolenski, eds., New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas (Philadelphia, 2005): 92-110 and 306-310; Cécile Vidal, “Antoine Bienvenu, Illinois Planter and Mississippi Trader: The Structure of Exchange Between Lower and Upper Louisiana Under French Rule,” in Bradley G. Bond, ed., Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World (Baton Rouge, 2005): 111-133; Laurent Vidal and Emilie d’Orgeix, eds., Les Villes françaises du Nouveau monde, des premiers fondateurs aux ingénieurs du Roi (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles)(Paris, 1999); Joseph Zitomersky, French Americans-Native Americans in Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana. The Population Geography of the Illinois Indians, 1670s-1760s (Lund, Sweden, 1994).

For synthesis on French colonization, see Robert Cornevin and Marianne Cornevin, La France et les Français outre-mer (Paris, 1990); Georges Hardy, Histoire sociale de la colonisation française (Paris, 1953); Philippe Haudrère, L’aventure coloniale de la France, t.1: L’Empire des rois 1500-1789 (Paris, 1997); Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade, and Annie Rey-Goldzeiger, Histoire de la France coloniale, des origines à 1914, t.1 (Paris, 1991); Pierre Pluchon, Histoire de la colonisation française, t.1 (Paris, 1991).

For Canadian scholarship and synthesis on New France see Louise Dechêne, Habitants et marchands de Montréal au XVIIe siècle (Paris and Montréal, 1974); John A. Dickinson and Brian Young, A Short History of Quebec: A Socio-Economic Perspective (Toronto, 1988); Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto, 1997); Jacques Mathieu, La Nouvelle-France. Les Français en Amérique du Nord, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris and Québec, 1991); Dale Miquelon, New France, 1701-1744: A Supplement to Europe (Toronto, 1989); Peter N. Moogk, La Nouvelle-France. The Making of French Canada—A Cultural History (East Lansing, Mich., 2000).

For recent American scholarship on Louisana see Guillaume Aubert, “‘Français, Nègres et Sauvages’: Constructing Race in Colonial Louisiana” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 2002); Winstanley Briggs, “The Forgotten Colony: Le Pays des Illinois” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1985); Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834 (Chapel Hill, 2007); Carl J. Ekberg, Colonial Ste. Genevieve: an Adventure on the Mississippi Frontier (Gerald, Mo., 1985); Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana, Ill., 1998); Gwendolyn M. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the 18th Century (Baton Rouge, 1992); Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge, 1997); Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville, 1999); Jennifer Spear, “‘Whiteness and Purity of Blood’: Race, Sexuality, and Social Order in Colonial Louisiana” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1999); Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy (Chapel Hill, 1992). On slavery, see also Brett Rushforth, “‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60:4 (2003): 777-808.

For a broader perspective on the French Empire and its aftermath, see Philip P. Boucher, Les Nouvelles Frances/France in America, 1500-1815: An Imperial Perspective (Providence, R.I., 1989); Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763 (Montreal and Kingston, 2002); James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas (New York and Cambridge, 2004).

For a geohistorical perspective on “French America,” see Dean Louder and Éric Waddell, eds., Du continent perdu à l’archipel retrouvé: Le Québec et l’Amérique française (Québec, 1983); D. Louder, Jean Morisset, and Éric Waddell, eds., Visions et visages de la Franco-Amérique (Sillery, Québec, 2001); Thomas Wien, Cécile Vidal, and Yves Frénette, eds, De Québec à l’Amérique française. Histoire et mémoire. Textes choisis du deuxième colloque de la Commission franco-québécoise sur les lieux de mémoire communs (Québec, 2006).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Gilles Havard is first class chargé de recherche at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and a member of the CENA (Centre d’études nord-américaines), at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris. He works on the history of relations between Europeans and Indians in North America.

Cécile Vidal is an associate professor in history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She works on French and Spanish Louisiana and the Atlantic world.

Did war ships or whaling ships “open” Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century? The complementary fates of two sea drifters, the American Herman Melville and the Japanese John Manjiro, help answer the question. Melville and Manjiro, who crisscrossed the Pacific during the 1840s, offer a particularly mesmerizing example of suggestive coincidence. The oddly parallel lives of these two “Pacific men” (to borrow a term from the poet Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael) help us to understand both the nature of the multicultural floating world of the Pacific during the mid-nineteenth century and the emerging relationship, crucial to both countries, between the United States and Japan. The twin tale of Melville and Manjiro complicates the usual narrative of Commodore Matthew Perry’s fabled opening of Japan 150 years ago, when his so-called Black Ships steamed into Edo Bay and demanded, in the name of President Millard Fillmore, that Japan open its ports to the West.

On January 3, 1841, the twenty-one-year-old Herman Melville boarded the whaling ship Acushnet in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, bound for the rich whaling grounds off the coast of Japan. Two days later, on January 5, the boy Manjiro, a fourteen-year-old fisherman from a small village, boarded a fishing vessel on the coast of Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan. Melville’s itinerary, at least for the next few months, progressed more or less according to plan, rounding Cape Horn and entering the Pacific. Manjiro’s did not. His small boat was caught in a storm and drifted far out to sea, where it was eventually wrecked on the tiny island of Torishima, or Bird Island. Months later, Manjiro and his four companions were rescued by the whaling ship John Howland, like Melville’s boat out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, under the command of Captain William Whitfield. Whitfield took the castaways to the Sandwich Islands (later renamed Hawaii) and entrusted them to his friend, the medical missionary Dr. Gerrit P. Judd. Judd ascertained that they were Japanese, and found employment for them as servants with local American families. Captain Whitfield, childless and deeply impressed with Manjiro’s acumen and spirit, asked to adopt him and take him home to Fairhaven, an arrangement agreed to by all.

Meanwhile Melville, bored with the monotony of whaling, abandoned ship in the Marquesas (an experience detailed in his partly fictionalized novel Typee), and made his way to Honolulu. There he found himself in the midst of a conflict between, on the one hand, British naval officers and, on the other, the local King Kamehameha III and his American prime minister, the very same Dr. Judd, whom Melville called “a sanctimonious apothecary-adventurer.” A clerk for a British merchant, Melville sided with the British, and wrote angrily in Typee about Judd’s predatory operations in Hawaii.

Melville was moved by the native cultures of the South Seas and appalled by what the missionaries had wrought in Hawaii. “Not until I visited Honolulu,” he wrote sardonically, “was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught horses, and evangelized into beasts of burden.” He suggested that the missionary trade was going in the wrong direction: “Four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.” If the missionary plague spread across the South Pacific, there was always, in Melville’s view, inaccessible Japan, which had wisely expelled her Christian missionaries during the early seventeenth century and locked the doors behind them. “So, hurrah for the coast of Japan! Thither the ship was bound,” Melville wrote wishfully at the end of Omoo, his lively sequel to Typee.

Herman Melville never reached the shores of Japan, however, returning instead to New York and western Massachusetts to write his books. He knew that Japan was a country, like death, from which no traveler returned. Except for a narrow trickle of goods and ideas filtered through Dutch traders at Nagasaki, Japan was officially closed to the West for 250 years, with xenophobia as national policy. Travel abroad was punishable by death; visitors from abroad, such as shipwrecked whaling crews, were routinely tortured, forced to trample Christian icons, and killed.

If Melville never traveled to Japan, he was fascinated by the island nation nonetheless, as a kind of heart of darkness of the Pacific. “The same waves wash . . . the new built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham,” he wrote, “while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans.” Like Conrad’s Kurtz on the Congo, Melville discerned in Japan a realm of mystery and ultimate horror. In Moby-Dick (1851), he fitted out his imaginary whaling ship the Pequod with masts cut from trees along the coast of Japan and a captain, the monomaniacal Ahab, who had been “dismasted”—deprived of a leg—off the coast of Japan. The path of the Pequod with its polyglot crew is a direct route to the Japan whaling grounds, the lair of Moby-Dick. The triple threat of a typhoon, a crazed captain, and a white whale spell disaster for Ahab’s ship.

But Melville also thought that the two nations that faced each other across the Pacific were somehow meant for each other’s embrace. He sensed that the United States would play its part in prying open a recalcitrant Japan, and predicted as much in Moby-Dick: “If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.”

Oddly enough, Melville’s prediction was about to come true, though not quite in the direct way that he had imagined. For just as Melville was wondering what it might take to open Japan, Manjiro was embarked on his own extraordinary journey to open the United States. Manjiro, renamed “John Mung” by the sailors on board the John Howland, arrived in Fairhaven (facing New Bedford across the Acushnet River) in May of 1843, when he was sixteen. Of the ten years he spent away from his native Japan, as Junji Kitadai points out in his translation of Manjiro’s travels, Drifting toward the Southeast, Manjiro was on land for only four of them—as much aboard as abroad.

In 1846, having gone to school in Fairhaven and learned both celestial navigation and the barrel maker’s trade in New Bedford, Manjiro joined the crew of the whaling bark Franklin, an ill-fated voyage in which the crew seized control from the mad captain (an incident that may well have inspired the scene in Moby-Dick when Ahab, off the coast of Japan, threatens Starbuck with a musket), and appointed Manjiro second mate. In 1849, Manjiro made the seven-month journey around Cape Horn to join the forty-niners in California. There, pan-handling alone, he amassed enough gold to fund a voyage back to Honolulu, where he was reunited with his fellow castaways. In Hawaii he made arrangements for a dangerous return journey to Japan and landed in the Rikyu Islands in the winter of 1851.

Manjiro’s return to Japan is remarkable for many reasons. He helped to persuade the Japanese authorities that neither he nor the United States was a threat to Japan. His timing was impeccable. At the very moment that Melville, in 1851, was predicting that whaling ships would open Japan, Manjiro was arriving on Japanese shores in a whaling boat. And just as Manjiro was enduring lengthy interrogations—during which he made the case for the benefits of American technology and American-style government— Commodore Perry was preparing his armada of Black Ships for the voyage to Japan.

Manjiro was reunited with his mother in Tosa Province (now Kochi Prefecture) in Shikoku, and almost immediately summoned by the forward-looking provincial lord to educate young samurai leaders in the ways of the West. Promoted to the rank of samurai himself, Manjiro had barely begun his work in Kochi when Perry’s flotilla arrived in Edo Bay, in the summer of 1853, a complete surprise to the Japanese. As Kitadai points out, the United States in 1853 was “an unknown entity” to the Japanese. “No one in Japan had a working knowledge of the English language”—no one, that is, except Manjiro, who at the age of twenty-six was accordingly summoned to Tokyo for meetings with Masahiro Abe, the shrewd prime minister, and other Tokugawa officials.

Perry, who had presented his demands for access to Japanese ports and safe treatment of American sailors, promised to return the following year for an answer. The Tokugawa regime was desperate for information on the Americans, and again Manjiro painstakingly sought to educate Abe and the others concerning the geography, history, culture, and government of the United States. He described the wonders of steam engines and railroads and elected presidents. He tried to persuade the Japanese officials that they had much to learn from the Americans, and that Japan was hurting herself by her policy of self-imposed isolation.

Unfortunately, not all the officials trusted Manjiro. While Abe wished to employ him as interpreter for all future dealings with Perry, another official suspected that Manjiro might be a spy—a sort of American Trojan Horse dropped off the coast of Japan. But Manjiro’s assurances about the essential benevolence of the Americans carried the day with the Japanese officials who may have felt, nonetheless, that faced with American will and weaponry they had little choice.

When Commodore Perry returned to the United States, he expected a hero’s welcome, but Washington had other things to think about, including the threat of civil war. Commodore Perry decided he needed better PR, and asked Nathaniel Hawthorne if he would consider writing a book about the opening of Japan, with Perry as hero. Hawthorne was tempted. As he wrote in his journal on December 28, 1854, “It would be a very desirable labor for a young literary man, or for that matter, an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan.” But Hawthorne had other books on his mind, and suggested that Perry ask Herman Melville, who knew something about the Pacific, to write the book. Perry, stupidly, decided to write the book himself. Herman Melville’s book on the opening of Japan remains one of the great might-have-beens in American literature.

Manjiro, for his part, continued to work toward an opened Japan, serving as an interpreter of American things to the Japanese. He was the official curator of gifts—including a telegraph machine, a daguerreotype camera, and a quarter-scale steam-powered railroad train on a circular track—from Perry’s expedition, since he alone knew what such marvels were for. Manjiro also became a curator of language, writing the first Japanese guide to spoken English and spending several years translating Nathaniel Bowditch’s Practical Navigator—the “seamen’s bible”—which allowed ships at sea to find their bearings from the moon and stars. Manjiro became, in sum, what the anthropologist James Clifford calls a “Squanto figure,” someone who lives between cultures. Melville, too, was a Squanto figure of sorts, a trafficker in languages and cultures. His Typee is an eloquent plea for tolerance of “primitive” cultures, and Moby-Dick offers a vision of men of different nationalities working in concert on a whaling ship.

Manjiro and Melville were most at home at sea. They were Pacific men, as their friends and associates recognized. When a thirty-three-year-old Manjiro helped navigate the first Japanese clipper ship across the Pacific to San Francisco in 1860, an American naval officer on board admired his calm during a typhoon: “Old Manjiro was up nearly all night. He enjoys the life, it reminds him of old times.” Hawthorne wrote of his friend Melville, who also nostalgically reentered the Pacific in 1860 and stopped in San Francisco: “I do not know a more independent personage. He learned his traveling habits by drifting about, all over the South Sea, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trousers.” As Melville himself had written in his great Pacific chapter (111) of Moby-Dick: “To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption.”

Herman Melville called pre-Perry Japan “that double-bolted land,” and Japan, in fact, had to be unlocked not once but twice. Perry did the easy part, forcing Japan to open her major ports to Western ships and Western trade. But there was a second, more significant opening of Japan; this second opening happened much more slowly. It was one thing to fire a few cannonballs across Edo Bay and run a miniature railroad along the beach to impress the samurai. It was quite another to grasp the subtle moves of judo, the tenets of Esoteric Buddhism, or to understand why the most highly prized vessel in the tea ceremony was a dun-colored water jar that had collapsed in the kiln. In this second sense, the opening of Japan occurred as much in the hearts and minds of individuals as in some particular location in Japan or the United States. What sets such people as Melville and Manjiro apart, I think, is that at a certain point it no longer makes sense to speak of them only as travelers or interpreters or guides or Squanto figures. Over time, their cultural encounters occurred not so much between worlds as within themselves.

This idea gives me a way to understand why I am uncomfortable when people speak about the Japanese influence in America or the American imprint in Japan. That model implies a simplistic diorama of Perry and the natives: here are the Japanese with their interesting art objects, and there are the Americans trading modern technology with them. Think of this as the particle theory of cultural exchange. But what we see in nineteenth-century America and Japan is something more complicated and harder to name. Perhaps we need a wave theory of cultural exchange, too. In Pacific men like Melville and Manjiro there is a constant oscillation, a great wave, between East and West. “I believe good will come out of this changing world,” Manjiro wrote to his benefactor, Captain Whitfield, in 1850. In opening themselves to this changing world, Manjiro and Melville opened themselves as well.

Further Reading:

Manjiro’s story is vividly recounted in his own words in Drifting Toward the Southeast, translated by Junya Nagakuni and Junji Kitadai (New Bedford, 2003). Katherine Plummer provides a usefulcontext for such sea drifters in The Shogun’s Reluctant Ambassadors (Tokyo, 1984). And Donald Bernard’s The Life and Times of John Manjiro (New York, 1992) is a well-informed biography. Melville’s Moby-Dick is available in many editions. For a more sustained comparative analysis of Melville and Manjiro, see the first chapter, “The Floating World,” of Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (New York, 2003). An exhibition featuring Manjiro entitled “Pacific Encounters: Yankee Whalers, Manjiro, and the Opening of Japan,” is on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum through April 2005.

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

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and the author of books on Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane, as well as The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (New York, 2003). Benfey writes for many publications, including the New York Review of Books and The New Republic.

Comparing American and Turkish history

How do you teach the early history of the United States to foreigners? Foreign students—in particular, those I’ve taught in Ankara, Turkey—know a lot about American pop culture. And they are familiar with American literature, if they have taken any courses in American studies, the main academic discipline for teaching and learning about America from abroad. But foreign students often know little, if anything, about American history. In a course I offered on U.S. foreign relations, I asked one student, a graduate of an American studies program, why American culture and literature seem worth studying but not American history? My query was a leading question: I hoped she would exclaim, “But American history is important!” Unfortunately she calmly replied that studying American literature offered her the chance not only to learn English but also to learn about similarities between American literature and other kinds of literature. American history offered no such advantage, however, because it was too unique to say anything about other nations’ histories. What, for example, could U.S. history possibly have to do with Turkish history?

By way of answering these quaint-sounding but in fact important questions—how to teach U.S. history abroad and why—I explained that U.S. history actually has quite a bit to do with Turkish history and not only since World War II, when America achieved true global influence. I have in mind the era of the early American republic, when American relations with the Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey’s ancestor, consisted largely of trade in opium and figs and the evangelical business of a few hearty New England missionaries.

It is clear to me that, despite these seemingly modest connections between the United States and Turkey, the early history of the United States can offer Turkish students lessons about the early history of their own country. And Turkish students’ familiarity with Turkish history and society, in particular issues of national identity and citizenship, minority rights, and women’s rights, can enable them to better appreciate early U.S. history. Both countries, in other words, struggled with how to form “republican” identities. The challenge of getting foreign students to see the early United States as more than a fuzzy abstraction has prompted me to teach important episodes in U.S. history through cross-national and cross-cultural analogies. I don’t incorporate such a comparative strategy wholesale, but even a selective use of the method has paid substantial dividends.

College students in Turkey have mixed feelings about the United States. On one hand they generally dislike U.S. policies in the Middle East, especially concerning Iraq and Israel. The Bush administration’s policy of “preemption” has left them fearing American actions against Turkish territorial sovereignty. On the other hand, some students like contemporary American films, pop stars Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, and NBA basketball, whose stars include not only Americans Allen Iverson and LeBron James but also Turkish players Mehmet Okur and Hedo Türkoğlu. American educational opportunities are also a great draw. Every year a few of the best students in our history department go to top graduate programs in the United States.

Turkish students may have heard anecdotes of pre-World War II presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson. But the first American leader whose policies mean anything to them is Harry Truman. Truman’s opposition to global communism influenced Turkey through the Marshall Plan and the dispatch of the USS Missouri to Istanbul in 1946. The Missouri‘s official mission was to return the remains of a deceased Turkish diplomat (Mehmet Ertegün, the father of the founders of the great R&B label Atlantic Records), but in fact the massive ship’s presence in the Bosporus Straits simply reinforced the sense that America saw Turkey as a bulwark against Soviet communism. Today an observer occasionally may find small businesses or memorabilia with the name “Mizuri.”

Notwithstanding Turkish students’ lack of knowledge about the deep American past, their familiarity with American culture has grown since the end of the cold war and the expansion of cable television and the Internet (through the 1980s Turkey had one television channel). This cultural familiarity, arguably manifesting what Joseph Nye Jr. has called American “soft power,” has created the impression among many Turkish students that American influence—not only cultural, but also military and economic—is eternal or at least as old as the United States itself: American power today, that is, has no traceable origins.

I try to disabuse them of this impression because it reads the past through the lens of the present and because it is tautological, saying in effect, “America is powerful because of its historic power.” An example of this thinking arose in my U.S. history survey when we studied contemporary debates about Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy. A student arguing for the removal’s justification declared, “We know that the U.S. government is strong, and when it wants to do something, it does it.” Might makes right; more pertinent, might has been an American constant.

These sorts of perceptions remind me of the need to communicate contingency in my teaching: that the United States developed one way and not another was not inevitable. It was the result of discrete events, temporary circumstances, the influence or absence of certain key individuals, and the like. And I remind students that contingency is equally important in Turkish history.

With this in mind, the commonalities that emerge in the respective early periods of the United States and Turkey present numerous illuminating subjects for classroom discussion. The national governments of both countries resorted to squashing political opposition in the first decades of their existence: in America the Federalists resorted to the Alien and Sedition Acts; in Turkey, the Republican People’s Party remained the only political party with parliamentary representation until 1946. Although both countries are ethnically diverse, both on occasion forced distinct ethnic communities to “relocate.” In America, the Sauk, Fox, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Indian tribes were relocated from ancestral lands in the East. In Turkey, Turkish citizens of Greek Orthodox background were sent to Greece in exchange for Muslims of Greek ancestry, and Kurdish people were removed from their historic areas of settlement.

It is possible that without such drastic steps, neither early republic would have avoided dissolution (although African slavery in the United States mitigated whatever unifying effects ethnic cleansing may have had). Classroom dialogue about conservative nation building in the United States by reference to analogous developments in Turkey encourages students to think more analytically and sympathetically about the costs of forming the American state.

Other aspects of republican state formation in the United States and Turkey provide additional points for comparison. Both countries owe their early survival partly to the protection offered by a global power. The United States was able to expand early in its history partly because Britain, while recognizing American sovereignty, prevented other European powers from encroaching on its former colonies. Likewise Turkey was able to resist encroachment from the Eastern Bloc, as noted above, partly because of the United States. Both of these early episodes of patronage presaged longer-term friendly alliances.

Likewise, Turkey’s founder and first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, took a revolutionary step towards fostering a new Turkish cultural identity by establishing a new Turkish alphabet and language. The formation of the modern Turkish language, different from its Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic antecedents, helps dramatize the analogous enterprise of the American lexicographer Noah Webster, advocate of an “American tongue,” who believed that a distinctive American English would unify American culture and wean Americans from European influence. Turkish students, sensitive to the influence of American and European cultural exports, can readily appreciate Webster’s zeal.

Atatürk’s leadership and importance as a public symbol amid early instability also help students understand the importance of George Washington to the early American republic. After his military leadership in the American Revolution, Washington retired from public life but returned to serve as the first president, to build grass-roots support for the U.S. Constitution, and generally to impart legitimacy to the new U.S. government. Turkish students’ awareness of the absence of democratic institutions under the Ottoman regime, and also Atatürk’s celebrity, helps them understand, on the one hand, the early cult of Washington and, on the other, the evolutionary, not constitutional, formations of the first national political parties in American life: Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, and Republicans. In a class on American political history, a student confessed that he admired America because its politics were more transparent than Turkey’s. But then our class discussed such irregular U.S. presidential races as the election of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson, as president of the Senate, had responsibility for counting state ballots for or against his own candidacy; and the so-called corrupt bargains in 1824 and 1876, when respective winners of the popular vote lost the elections. Through such tales, the Turkish student came to feel less embarrassed by the nitty-gritty of his own country’s politics.

Another point of instructive analogy concerns the status of women. Both the American and Turkish early republics were paternal, in their assumptions that the principal enactors of civic virtue would be men. In the early United States, this largely meant white men. Turkey, although it legitimized political opposition more slowly than did the United States, was more liberal with its early extension of the franchise, empowering all male citizens to vote in 1924. Thus both early republics envisioned a political role for women, but it was an indirect role, focused on raising sons and disciplining or loving husbands who would become virtuous citizens. Similar to the early American ideology of “republican motherhood,” Atatürk proclaimed the emancipation of Turkish women because the republic “needs men who have better minds, more perfect men.” “The mothers of the future,” he hoped, “will know how to bring up such men!”

Yet women’s suffrage was established more rapidly in Turkey than in the United States: Turkish women gained the national right to vote the same decade American women did. So comparison of women’s aspirations and rights in Turkey enhances classroom discussion of the relatively slow process of enfranchising American women. I admit I stumbled on this point when I distributed to my class Abigail Adams’s famous letter urging her husband to “remember the ladies.” I asked students to tell me about Abigail’s tone in the letter. A female student remarked that Abigail was “probably quiet,” because if she were too assertive in demanding equality, John might abuse her. Such a response suggests both a traditional expectation that married Turkish women should be submissive and a more modern sense that women had a rightful place in the political nation.

In the last generation some historians of the United States have begun to teach their subject from a comparative or international point of view. Such an approach is designed to reinforce the reality that the American past was never really separate from the world. If my classroom in Turkey is any indication, however, that message has had little resonance outside the United States. But comparison of the early American republic and its Turkish counterpart—one regime with which students have virtually no familiarity, one regime of which they have a civic if not analytical understanding—produces many instructive points of comparison. Both the similarities and the differences can invigorate discussions of how the United States was formed and how that process was just as fraught and historically contingent as the growth of modern Turkey. What hardships, good fortune, civic building blocks, or realpolitik did Americans of the early republic share with later generations in other countries? In an increasingly globalized academic environment, such questions should help both American and foreign students better appreciate the commonalities of their nations’ histories.

Further Reading:

Joseph Nye described “soft power” in The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford and New York, 2002). Atatürk’s remarks may be found in Lord Kinross, Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey [1964] (New York, 1992). A newer biography is Andrew Mango, Ataturk (London, 2004). Mango’s The Turks Today (Woodstock, N.Y., 2004) interprets modern Turkey. Noah Webster’s remark appears in Jack Greene, ed., The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits (New York, 1987). Suggestions for teaching U.S. history comparatively may be found in David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” Journal of American History 79 (1992) and Carl Guarneri, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,” The History Teacher 36 (2002). An earlier essay about teaching U.S. history in Turkey is Russell Johnson, “Stranger in a Not-So-Strange Land: Teaching and Living the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in Turkey,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (2002).

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

Tim Roberts is assistant professor of history at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He is the author of Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press, and is currently researching the interaction of American overseas traders and missionaries during the early American republic. He thanks Bilkent students Ayşegül Avcı, Gülşah Şenkol, and Veysel Şimşek for their insights and corrections to this essay.

After spending the summer of 1890 in Venice, the American painter Thomas Moran and his wife, the etcher Mary Nimmo Moran, boarded the steamship Shelter Island to cross the Atlantic and return to their Long Island home. Accompanying them on board the ship was a seemingly odd (and cumbersome) souvenir: the nearly 36-foot-long gondola that the Morans had used during their time in Venice (fig. 1). Due to its substantial length, the gondola made the transatlantic voyage alongside the steamer’s lifeboats, hanging from the davits on the side of the ship. It was transported from New York to Sag Harbor in a similar fashion, and from there it traveled along the Long Island country roads to the Morans’ East Hampton home in a specially outfitted horse-drawn wagon. The vessel quickly became a popular local attraction: there was even an article in the East Hampton Star to celebrate the gondola’s first American voyage, when a group consisting of the Morans and two other couples enjoyed a ride around a local pond.

The gondola fulfilled a range of roles: it was a souvenir that served as a physical reminder of the Morans’ Venetian trip, a visual source that Thomas Moran could refer to in future paintings, a means of pleasurable entertainment for the Moran family, and an antique craft that had supposedly belonged to the poet Robert Browning. Although it might seem an unconventional souvenir today, the gondola, which is now in the collection of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, is also a rare surviving example of something that was surprisingly common at the turn of the twentieth century: Venetian gondolas in America. At their most basic level, these gondolas represented the desire to capture a bit of Venice’s mystery and picturesque culture and bring it to the United States. Yet their presence also points to a growing concern about modernization and the loss of history at the turn of the century.

From Venice to America

Born in England and raised in Pennsylvania, Thomas Moran is known for his landscape views of the American West. However, following his first trip to Venice in 1886, he devoted significant attention to painting Venetian seascapes in a shimmering, light-infused style that was influenced by the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. Moran was not alone in his fascination with Venice: over the course of the 1880s, a number of American artists—most famously, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent—worked in Venice, depicting the island’s iconic canals and landmarks, as well as its most recognizable workers. Moran, however, was primarily interested in Venice’s lagoon, where boats of all shapes and sizes crossed paths in front of the city’s famed skyline.

After traveling alone in 1886, Moran took a second trip to Venice in 1890, this time accompanied by his wife. When the Morans arrived in Venice in May, they followed the common practice of hiring a local gondolier. While elite Venetian residents—both native and foreign—employed full-time gondoliers as part of their household staff, the common practice for visiting foreigners was to hire a gondolier, usually at daily or weekly rates. In addition to providing a gondola and transportation as needed, gondoliers would also perform other household duties. As the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson explained in an 1893 letter to Mrs. Samuel Mather, “In Venice your gondolier not only takes you out in his gondola … but goes to market and waits at table, blacks shoes, and brings up wood, etc.”

The basic features of Venetian gondolas have remained consistent since the nineteenth century. The boat has a flat bottom and the bow and stern are raised, giving it a shape that is often described as banana-like (fig. 2). Today’s gondolas are famously asymmetrical, with a pronounced tilt toward the starboard side. Although the asymmetry has become more pronounced over time, it originated in gondolas produced at the Casal boatyard in the mid-nineteenth century. The Moran gondola was likely built at the Casal boatyard, which could make it the oldest surviving gondola in existence.

Attached to the bow is the ferro, a distinctive iron fitting whose shape loosely resembles a comb. A popular belief holds that the six forward-facing “teeth” in the ferro represent the six different sestieri, or districts, that constitute Venice. The ferro has two main purposes: it protects the bow of the gondola in the case of a collision, and it counterbalances the weight of the gondolier, who stands on a raised platform at the stern. Historically, it was common for gondolas to have two gondoliers, one each at the bow and stern. This gradually changed over the course of the nineteenth century, and nineteenth-century photographs show both single- and double-gondolier arrangements.

In Venice, the Morans hired an elderly gondolier named Giovanni Hitz, whose gondola was uncommonly ornate. In the early modern era, it was common to see highly decorated gondolas painted in bright colors. However, the passage of a series of sumptuary laws in the Renaissance limited the decoration of any gondola owned by one of Venice’s noble families (the gondolas of foreign diplomats and other non-Venetians were exempt). The gondola’s famous black color—which led Mark Twain to describe the vessel as a “hearse”—dates to these laws: the black pitch used to seal the waterproofing was the only form of color permitted.

Although enforcement of the laws concerning gondola decoration was inconsistent, the sheer number of decorative elements on the Morans’ gondola is surprising. Comparing the Moran gondola to photographs of other nineteenth-century gondolas indicates just how uncommon its level of decoration was. At the gondola’s bow, a series of pitched beams creates a raised platform; the gondolier typically stores his belongings in the enclosed space below. Photographic records show that it was common for the wooden planks closest to the gondola’s passengers to contain relief carvings (figs. 2-5). Yet on Moran’s gondola, not only the final plank, but the entire prow, is decorated with geometric and vegetal reliefs; similar decorations appear on the boat’s stern.

The interior of the passenger compartment contains more low-relief carvings (see slideshow at end of article). A panel depicting the god Neptune brandishing a trident in a seahorse-drawn chariot decorates the front of the passenger compartment. Panels containing a crowned eagle surrounded by serpentine branches adorn the interior sides of the gondola; the crown reappears atop a large monogram surrounded by plant and animal motifs, which attaches to the back of the black leather settee (fig. 6). When Moran purchased the gondola, the interior carvings were painted in black and gold. A 1999 restoration, undertaken at the historic Tramontin boatyard in Venice, saw the panels repainted in the same colors.

Although rarely seen today, in the nineteenth century gondolas were equipped with a felze—a detachable cabin, complete with a door and windows, that provided privacy and protection from the elements. Alternatively, a linen summer awning, which was more like a tarp than a cabin, could be used in warm weather. While the Moran gondola’s felze is currently in storage, it likewise contains elaborate decoration (fig. 1). Shells and arabesques decorate the exterior panels on the front and sides of the felze, and the center of the door depicts a relief carving of a bearded figure with a snake in his mouth. Even the glass windows feature etched floral motifs around the perimeter of the glass. The combination of all of these features results in a gondola that is distinctly more decorative than what would be found on a typical nineteenth-century gondola.

According to Moran, his purchase of the gondola was directly linked to its sumptuous decoration, as caring for the extravagant gondola had become a burden for his aged gondolier, Hitz. As an artist, Moran appreciated the craftsmanship of the boat’s carvings, which were, in his words, “of exceptionally artistic merit.” In a 1909 letter explaining why he purchased the gondola, Moran pointed to its decorative elements: “It was so beautiful & graceful, & so ancient & fine in its carvings, brasses, & fittings, that we fell in love with it, & decided to buy it & have it sent to our Long-Island home.” Yet the gondola—and its elaborate fittings—could also serve a practical purpose for the artist. Although Moran’s 1890 Venetian trip was the last time he traveled to the island, he continued to paint Venetian scenes for the remainder of his career, and his letters confirm that he depicted the gondola in many of his later artworks.

The usefulness of a gondola for a painter who depicted Venetian subjects was noted in contemporary newspaper accounts. News of the Morans’ return from Venice and their acquisition of the gondola was apparently of nationwide interest, as newspapers as far away as Louisiana reported on the event. An article in the Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago) on September 23, 1890, noted that “Moran tried to get it [the gondola] into the country free under the description, ‘tools of trade,’ but the Custom House thought that a duty of 45 per cent ad valorem would do better.” The subject of import taxes was again raised in an October 4, 1890, article in the New Orleans newspaper The Daily Picayune:

Thomas Moran, the artist, imported recently a Venetian gondola, formerly the property and water carriage of Robert Browning, and, it is now swimming on Redhook Pond, Easthampton, L. I. The New York custom-house people made Mr. Moran pay a duty of 45 per cent ad valorem under the schedule for manufactures of wood and metal. Think of writing down a gondola—and a dead poet’s gondola at that—as a ‘manufacture of wood and metal!’ There are some very stupid people in New York.

As The Daily Picayune noted, the gondola was more than simply an artist’s tool. Yet the article also points to another factor in the gondola’s history: its purported connection to the poet Robert Browning. According to Moran’s account of his purchase of the gondola, after he settled his affairs with the gondolier Hitz and once the boat was packed up for transit, the manager of the hotel where he was staying mentioned that the gondola had formerly belonged to the poet Robert Browning, who had died in Venice just a few months before the Morans’ trip. According to the story, Hitz had previously been Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s gondolier, and Browning gave the highly decorated gondola to Hitz before the Brownings returned to England.

The rumored Robert Browning connection to the gondola is likely false, since Browning didn’t reside permanently in Venice, and foreign visitors did not typically purchase gondolas. However, it is possible that Hitz worked for Browning’s son Pen, who had purchased Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice in the 1880s and was a full-time resident. Despite the tenuous factual connections, it is clear that Moran took some pleasure in the story and in the gondola’s possible connection to the Brownings. Although in his letters Moran remained ambivalent and perhaps more guardedly circumspect about the validity of the Browning connection, Moran nonetheless specifically mentioned his hope that Browning might have composed his poem “In A Gondola” while lounging in the gondola now in the painter’s possession.

Gondolas in America

Today, the Moran gondola’s age and location in a museum collection distinguishes it as a rare object. However, the Morans were by no means alone in their interest in gondolas: acquiring Venetian gondolas for private or public use was surprisingly common at the turn of the century. In fact, the Morans’ gondola was not even the only one in East Hampton. According to reports in The East Hampton Star, Albert and Adele Herter, a wealthy couple who were also members of the artist’s colony on East Hampton, also had a gondola, which they brought back from a wedding trip to Venice. Their gondola was a scaled-down version that was likely designed for tourists: it only measured about fifteen feet long, compared to the Morans’ thirty-six-foot behemoth. Another New Yorker, the comic actor Joseph “Fritz” Emmet, also acquired a Venetian gondola in the late nineteenth century. In his case, the boat wasn’t intended to be a souvenir. Instead, Emmet purchased the gondola as a form of leisurely transportation to be used on the man-made lake at “Fritz Villa,” his elaborate and architecturally incongruous estate just outside of Albany.

While a small number of private individuals acquired gondolas, these Venetian boats were regularly seen in public settings. As early as 1862, a gondola was donated to Central Park’s Board of Commissioners for use on the lake; although seen in use in an 1894 photograph (fig. 7), it is unclear at what point gondola rides became a regular fixture at Central Park, since initially there was no one available who could accurately maneuver the boats. In contrast, planners of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago brought fifty-seven gondoliers to the city to man the gondolas that famously floated around the lagoon in the White City.

Gondolas also became popular public attractions at Coney Island, with Luna Park and Dreamland both featuring Venetian-themed entertainment venues that included gondola rides. When Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy opened Luna Park in 1903, one of the main attractions was a reproduction of Venice’s Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal, complete with gondolas. When Luna Park’s competitor Dreamland opened a year later, it also included a Venetian city (figs. 8 and 9). Dreamland’s “Canals of Venice” contained a miniature replica of Venice inside a building designed to mimic the Doge’s Palace. Visitors could travel in a gondola through the half-mile of canals and experience the sights of Venice—all without leaving Coney Island.

Not surprisingly, the development plans for Venice, California, also incorporated gondolas (fig. 10). After acquiring a parcel of marshy land south of Santa Monica, the real estate developer Abbot Kinney began creating the “Venice of America.” The resort town would include buildings in a “Venetian” style, canals, gondolas, parcels of land for homes, and eventually a hotel and amusement pier. Although most of the canals were later filled in, when Venice first opened in 1905, the resort contained several miles of canals, including a large “Grand Canal” that fed into a lake. Whether Kinney intended for the town’s residents to use gondolas to traverse the canals remains unclear. However, gondola rides were a common pastime for visitors, and images of tourists riding gondolas through the canals were regularly depicted on postcards.

Gondolas, Modernization, and Leisure

What might have prompted this interest in gondolas in turn-of-the-century America? Certainly some of it can be explained by the increasing numbers of foreign travelers who visited Venice in the nineteenth century, both on their own and as part of organized tour groups. As material objects that were inextricably linked with Venice, gondolas had long played a role in the remembrance of Venetian holidays. When wealthy young men traveled to Venice on the Grand Tour, they often returned with painted depictions of Venice, such as those by Canaletto. These views of the Grand Canal were typically populated with gondolas and gondoliers. With the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, travelers began to collect photographs and photographic albums; gondolas again played a significant role in these collections. And for the large percentage of Americans who had never been to Venice, riding in a gondola at Coney Island or at the Columbian Exposition would have provided the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience a “foreign” culture without leaving the U.S.

However, another factor may also explain why gondolas began to appear across the United States in the late nineteenth century: a concern that Venice’s unique character and history was under assault. Venice in the nineteenth century was far from an unchanged relic of a preindustrial past: a railroad bridge was built in 1846, which connected the island to the mainland for the first time; a corresponding railroad station was built in the northwest part of the city in 1860. An iron bridge was constructed near the Gallerie dell’Accademia in 1854; the construction of an aqueduct beginning in 1881 eliminated the city’s dependence on well water; and in the 1880s a French company began running steam-powered boats down the Grand Canal.

While there was a general displeasure among foreigners about the changes Venice was experiencing, the presence of the steamboats caused particular distress in the English-speaking world. Following reports in London newspapers, news of the steamboats made its way to the United States, and on October 23, 1881, the New York Times described the situation: “According to our Italian correspondent, a line of steamers will in a short time be plying on the Grand Canal of Venice. This news must be a shock to the aesthetic feelings of every properly constituted mind, while its effect on Mr. Ruskin is a subject too painful to contemplate.” The article complained about “the snore of steam-boats” and expressed concern about what effect this new development would have on Venice’s gondoliers. It ended with a dramatic rhetorical flourish:

The Piazza di san Marco, the Campanile, the Torre dell’Orologio, the Doge’s Palace, the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, the Academia, the Scuola of San Rocco, the Rialto, where Shylock cozened Antonio and Othello made love to Desdemona, are there for the tourists whose finer feelings are not lacerated by a smoke-begrimed facade. But who can quote Byron with the smell of train-oil in his nostrils? And though the moon will light up, as of yore, the wondross view from the Ponte dei Sospiri, it is sad to think that it must be enjoyed in the incongruous society of a Glasgow engine-driver, who gives “her half a turn ahead” and wipes his sooty brow with a wisp of cotton waste as the funnel belches out smoke against the convent wall which guards the choicest treasures of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese.

Despite the article’s humorous tone, the concern about Venice’s modernization—and especially how the changes would affect tourists—is apparent. Yet although there was spirited opposition on both sides of the Atlantic, and a gondolier’s strike in late 1881, the steamboat venture would eventually be a success.

By the time the Morans traveled to Venice in the late 1880s, Venice’s gondolas were already beginning to be displaced by motorized steamboats. These ancestors of the vaporetti, or water buses, that transport tourists around Venice today originally traversed a single route on the Grand Canal. By 1899, however, Baedeker’s guide to Northern Italy listed ten steamboat routes that linked Venice with the surrounding islands. While gondola travel remained necessary in certain instances (for example, when traveling with trunks, which were not permitted on the vaporetti), riding in a gondola increasingly began to shift from a form of transportation to a leisure activity.

In many ways, the appearance of gondolas in the United States affirmed the gondola’s transition from an object of labor to one of entertainment. Despite Moran’s claim that he bought the boat for its beauty, it is clear that the Moran family also saw the gondola as a source of pleasure and amusement. Indeed, Thomas Moran joked that his gondola became a “seven day wonder” when he first brought it to East Hampton. Yet for the Morans and their guests, the “wonder” of the gondola involved the experience of riding in it as a passenger, rather than attempting to maneuver it. As his biographer Thurman Wilkins noted, “Moran developed no knack as a gondolier, but on the assumption that the canoe was the nearest thing to a gondola in America, he hired a Montauk Indian named George Fowler to be his boatsman.” Among the Mariners’ Museum files is a copy of an undated photograph showing Fowler (in a jaunty gondolier’s uniform) with members of the Moran family aboard the gondola (fig. 11). A picnic basket placed on the shore in the central foreground of the photograph reinforces the connection between the gondola and leisure—for everyone but Fowler, at least.

From America to Venice

Over a hundred years after the Moran gondola traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, it made another transatlantic journey—this time, back to Venice. In 1999, the boat, including the felze and all of its accessories, was shipped from Virginia to Venice for restoration at the century-old Tramontin boatyard, or squero. Before founding the Tramontin boatyard in 1884, Domenico Tramontin had worked as an apprentice at the Casal ai Servi boatyard, where experts believe the Moran gondola was likely made. Today the Tramontin boatyard is operated by Domenico Tramontin’s descendants, and it is one of only a handful of Venetian squeros still in operation. At the boatyard, parts of the gondola that had been previously restored were removed and replaced, new felt was applied to the top of the felze, old nails and screws were replaced with more secure versions (and, incongruously, epoxy glue) and the boat—and its decorative panels—were repainted.

Ironically, one of the main challenges the museum staff faced was the issue of transportation. Specifically, once the gondola arrived in Venice, how would they transport the hundred-plus-year-old boat—which had not been on the water in half a century—to the squero without getting it wet? Ultimately, the gondola itself was taken for a ride, traveling through Venice’s narrow side canals atop another boat. In this short trip we find a distillation of the gondola’s journey—from a boat that was itself a form of transportation for Venetian tourists like the Morans to a museum object whose transportation requires detailed planning and care. Over the course of its history, the Moran gondola has taken on a variety of roles, which reflect changing attitudes toward modernization, leisure, labor, and transportation. Yet despite Thomas Moran’s belief that his gondola was the only one of its kind in the United States, it is clear that it is, instead, a rare surviving example of a much more widespread phenomenon, in which Americans from Coney Island to California shared in the wonder of Venetian gondolas.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the staff of the Mariners’ Museum, especially Jeanne Willoz-Egnor and Claudia Jew, for their assistance with this project.

Further Reading

Thomas Moran’s Venetian trips (including his purchase of the gondola) are discussed in Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains (Norman, Okla., 1965) and the revised second edition, Thurman Wilkins and Caroline Lawson Hinkley (Norman, Okla., 1988). Fritiof Fryxell’s Thomas Moran: Explorer in Search of Beauty (East Hampton, N.Y., 1958) contains a summary of the Moran-related materials at the East Hampton Public Library and several reminiscences of Moran.

For the history of gondolas in Venice, see G. B. Rubin de Cervin, “The Evolution of the Venetian Gondola,” The Mariner’s Mirror 42:3 (Aug. 1956). Riccardo Pergolis’s Le Barche di Venezia (The Boats of Venice) also addresses the history and development of the Venetian gondola, with text in English and Italian (Venice, 1981). A richly illustrated account of the restoration of the Moran gondola at the Tramontin boatyard can be found in the magazine Wooden Boat; see Paolo Lanapoppi, “Six Centuries of Gondolas,” Wooden Boat 152 (Jan.-Feb. 2000): 42-49.

The best introduction to the history of Venice, California, is Jeffrey Stanton’s Venice California: ‘Coney Island of the Pacific’ (Los Angeles, 1993). For the history of Coney Island, see Michael Immerso, Coney Island: The People’s Playground (New Brunswick, 2002) and John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1978).

Margaret Plant’s Venice: Fragile City, 1797-1997 (New Haven, 2002) provides an excellent history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Venice with a focus on art and culture. The exhibition catalogue Venice: The American View, 1860-1920 (San Francisco, 1984), which was curated and authored by Margaretta Lovell, provides a good introduction to the American artists who were interested in Venice and the reasons for Venice’s appeal. For more on American artists in Italy, see The Italian Presence in American Art, 1760-1860 (New York, 1989) and The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860-1920 (New York, 1992), both edited by Irma B. Jaffe; see also Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914 (Boston, 1992).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Ashley Rye-Kopec is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation examines depictions of Venetian laborers in British and American art in the late nineteenth century.

What is “American” about American literature? The question was once posed rather often, in the heady days early last century when scholars undertook the work of establishing canons. Then, the question’s answer was most often thematic: American literature was literature “about” America. Such arguments were made, for example, by Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition, which linked the ruddy wildernesses of the North American continent with the romance genre, and distinguished it from the European novel of manners. Another thematic reading stands at the heart of F.O. Matthiessen’s enduringly influential American Renaissance, which unfolded masterful readings of five authors by locating what in their works reflected the democratic spirit of their nation.

It is not themes, however, but material texts that animate the national literary concerns of Joseph Rezek’s London and the Making of Provincial Literature. This monograph revisits older questions about national literature, but revises their answers substantially by homing in instead on the historical conditions by which books are produced. The study’s point of departure would appear simple enough: some of the most celebrated national Anglophone literary works—American texts by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but also Irish texts by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson and Scottish works by Walter Scott—were all printed in London. For each of these authors, the London marketplace—the dominant seat of Anglophone publishing in the world—provided a foreign point of access by which their nations and regions could, somewhat paradoxically, find self-representation. The contribution of this remarkable book, then, is to explore that paradox. Contravening received wisdom, London and the Making of Provincial Literature avers that “Irish, Scottish, and American literatures must be located within the cross-cultural procedure of distinction only London could perform. These literatures were not born within the nation through an insular process of organic unfolding, nor did they develop as symptoms of nationally delimited historical contexts. They were made in the transatlantic marketplace through an uneven process of struggle and triumph” (3).

Clearly stated and convincingly argued as this thesis may be, its implications are explosive. For one thing, the comparative frame of this study considers different national literary traditions working in the same language, and discovers in that comparison not so much national differences as analogous social positions vis-à-vis London. The job of comparative literature, despite its name, is often to contrast, to distinguish; but in Rezek’s view, the national literatures of the U.S., Ireland, and Scotland look less like the pure reflections of their respective cultures or peoples than, collectively, like a set of provincial riffs off a metropolitan literary standard. One might immediately object that, to choose only the U.S. example, a provincial identity is exactly what scholars, no less than the writers of the 1830s and 1840s themselves, have told us early national literature was trying to slough off. But this nationalist consensus understands antebellum literature in terms of what it achieved, not how. Restoring some of that how, London and the Making of Provincial Literature suspends the nationalist conclusion that made so much sense between the Civil and Cold Wars. In its place, the book supplies the careful plotting of a metropolitan-provincial antagonism between literary London and the much smaller literary centers that radiated around it. Doing so, this work defies the nationalist parameters that organize the study of nearly all literature, whether British, American, postcolonial, or comparative. Scholars simply do not tend to think in these terms. London and the Making of Provincial Literature accordingly shines a bright light onto one of our critically blindest spots.

Rezek’s study arrives at such counterintuitive conclusions in part because it’s working with book history. Joining the growing number of scholarly monographs that draws on this interdisciplinary field, London and the Making of Provincial Literature sifts through authorial correspondence, reconstructs publication records, and collates editions (turning up some fascinating details along the way—who knew, for example, that there was no single first American edition of Irving’s Sketch Book?) The study is also peppered with smart and detailed close readings, of the kind that grant more traditional literary critics their professional chops. But this study’s real project is to coordinate such thematic close readings with interpretations of the historical and sociological conditions under which the texts on which we perform those readings were first brought into the world as books. The study effectively uses more than one method and, indeed, uses each to cross-check the conclusions of the other. London and the Making of Provincial Literature accordingly provides coordinated and truly interdisciplinary insights—no small feat in a world where “interdisciplinary” is too often a polite way of saying “eclectic.”

Another way in which this study achieves its conclusions has to do with its relatively tight historical focus. The argument of London and the Making of Provincial Literature is deeply bound to the historical terrain between 1800 and 1850 in which it works. Fifty years does offer a slightly wider swath of time than some of the other book-history inflected studies in other periods—such as Jonathan Beecher Field’s wonderful Errands into the Metropolis (2009), which covers about 1642-1662, or Meredith McGill’s indispensable American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003), with its narrow focus of 1834-1853. At the same time, however, in London and the Making of Provincial Literature one wonders about the portability of the argument beyond the first half of the nineteenth century. Is what Rezek calls “aesthetics of provinciality” (14)—an ideological position that absorbs and accommodates the Romantic-era paradox by which great literature is expected to be both universal and particular—something that obtains beyond 1850, when this study leaves off? While I am convinced that we who read and study Anglophone literatures live with the legacy of such a paradox, I am left with questions about whether it begins or ends at precisely the points that London and the Making of Provincial Literature identifies. Thus, a circumscribed historical focus, which enables Rezek to bring forward his evidence and his claims with extraordinary clarity, also presents one of the few potential limitations of this study.

However, the book’s larger argument stands. Scholars who take this study’s conclusions seriously will have to reconsider whether the nation—British, American, Irish, Scottish, or otherwise—can really continue to be the organizing principle for the teaching and study of literature. At the very least, London and the Making of Provincial Literature makes clear that the nation is not a uniform field. Nation-ness does not saturate its territory evenly, and some corners of the national domain may be working much harder to materially produce and mediate the nation than others. Our literatures can seem now to be inescapably national, but another world was once possible. If we adopt the implications of this work in all its challenge to critical orthodoxies, another world may be possible again.

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

Jordan Alexander Stein is the co-editor of Early African American Print Culture (2012). He teaches in the English Department at Fordham University and tweets @steinjordan.

The voyage of Moncacht-apé

To celebrate the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-06, Americans have created countless books, museum exhibitions, Websites, television documentaries, and tourism promotions. The hype devoted to Lewis’s dog Seaman is a veritable industry unto itself. But what if Lewis and Clark were not the first explorers to cross what became the continental United States? There is in fact a rival for this honor, a Native American explorer who has the potential to steal the limelight from those iconic figures of Manifest Destiny, and to inspire a debate about Lewis and Clark analogous to the controversies about Columbus, the supposed discoverer of America. The explorer was a Yazoo Indian named Moncacht-apé, and the narrative of his journey comes to us from a French historian of colonial Louisiana, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz.

Le Page lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734, the first eight of those years at Natchez, Mississippi, where he lived with a Chitimacha woman, learned the Natchez language, and befriended local native leaders. Rather than describing the “manners and customs of the Indians” in the detached, homogenizing fashion of so many other colonial authors, Le Page recorded many pages of the words of his native informants, the Yazoo explorer among them. What Moncacht-apé told Le Page filled three chapters of his multivolume Histoire de la Lousiane, published in 1758. It first appeared, however, in a shorter version in August and September of 1752 in the Paris periodical Journal Oeconomique, two installments in a series of twelve articles that served as a draft or prospectus for his book. 

The name Moncacht-apé, Le Page wrote, “means ‘one who kills difficulties or fatigue.’ In fact, the travels of many years did not affect his physique.” Clearly the aptness of the man’s name impressed Le Page. He wanted to know more. “I begged him to repeat to me an account of his travels, omitting nothing,” and Moncacht-apé was happy to oblige (3: 88-89). 

The motives for his journey had not been the familiar ones of exploration or trade. Rather, Monacht-apé had set out to learn about the origins of his own people. He began by asking the neighboring Chickasaw “if they knew whence we all came . . . they who are our ancestors” (3: 89). This question absorbed Le Page as well, for in his book and in the August 1752 article, the Moncacht-apé episode follows immediately after an exposition of his ideas on the longstanding controversy over the origins of the American Indians. Quoting at length speeches by the Natchez temple guardian and Great Sun explaining how the nation had migrated from Mexico, Le Page presented a theory that they were descended from an abandoned fourth-century-B.C. colony of Phoenician immigrants. This explained why the Natchez, with their strict caste hierarchy, differed so sharply from other nearby tribes, including the Yazoo. Le Page believed that ancestors of most American “naturels,” as he called them, had come across a land bridge linking Asia to Northwestern America. 

Moncacht-apé set out northward in search of evidence of this migration. The first journey takes him up the Ohio River and past the Niagara Falls to the Atlantic Ocean. This episode does not appear in the 1752 version, however, where Moncacht-apé sets out straightaway up the Missouri River, a route that, since Joliet and Marquette’s initial descent of the Mississippi in 1673, had been identified by the French as the most promising for a transcontinental passage. 

When Moncacht-apé reaches the “Canzés” or Kansas nation they inform him that it will take another month to reach the headwaters of the Missouri, and that from there he should walk for several days north until he finds a westward-flowing river, and that along this river he will find the Otter nation of Indians. His journey proceeds just as he is told, and the Otter people greet him warmly, help him to learn their language, and accompany him downstream. After eighteen days’ travel, he finds an unnamed tribe living in a grassy land with many dangerous snakes. Moncacht-apé winters here, and the following spring continues his descent of the Beautiful River, through other native villages, until he finally nears the Great Water (the Pacific), and meets a tribe that lives chiefly on fish. These folk keep their distance from the ocean however, for they must:

“be on the watch against the bearded men, who do all that they can to carry away young persons, doubtless to make slaves of them. They have never taken any men, although they could have done so. I was told that these men were white; that they had long, black beards which fell upon their breasts; that they appeared short and thick, with large heads, which they covered with cloth; that they always wore their clothes, even in the hottest weather; that their coats fell to the middle of the legs, which as well as the feet were covered with red or yellow cloth. For the rest they did not know what their clothing was made of, because they had never been able to kill one, their arms making a great noise and a great flame” (3: 116).

These dangerous visitors did not come for otter or beaver pelts, but for “a yellow and bad-smelling wood which dyes a beautiful yellow” (3: 117). The latter was evidently a dyewood analogous to the red brazilwood, although it is unclear what Northwest tree this might be.

Moncacht-apé joins an alliance of coastal tribes who are laying plans for an armed resistance against these invaders, and his experience with firearms, learned in French Louisiana, makes him a valuable military advisor. He instructs them to hide near a cove and wait for the bearded loggers to come ashore. When they do, Moncacht-apé and his friends attack and kill eleven men, and divide up the victims’ strange clothing, weapons, and gunpowder as booty.

After winning the confidence of the locals, Moncacht-apé continues farther along the coast toward the Northwest, where the summer days are very long. In the last village he reaches, a group of elders tell him that the coast extends a great distance farther to the northwest, and suggest that it once had been linked to Asia: “One of them [the elders] added that when young he had known a very old man who had seen this land (before the ocean had eaten its way through) which went a long distance, and that at a time when the Great Waters were lower (at low tide) there appear in the water rocks which show where this land was” (3: 127). With this Moncacht-apé has completed his quest, and has also confirmed Le Page’s idea of a land bridge migration to America, a theory that has grown in influence from José de Acosta’s 1590 Natural and Moral History of the Indies to the work of twentieth-century anthropologists. Moncacht-apé returns to Louisiana, and his narrative concludes with an estimation of the distance of his journey from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast.

Because his story was published just prior to the Seven Years’ War, which cost the French their Louisiana colony, Moncacht-apé did not inspire an exploratory expedition, and very few Americans have heard about him. In the 1763 English translation of Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana, or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina, the narrative of Moncacht-apé, like the rest of the book, was severely abridged. That version was reprinted in a few nineteenth-century books about American Indian history, such as those by Samuel Gardner Drake. Not until 1883 was a full English translation and analysis published in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society by the amateur historian Andrew McFarland Davis. The story had “slumbered in the pages of Le Page du Pratz until it was revived by [French anthropologist M. A.] de Quatrefages” two years earlier (321). Davis concluded that “there is nothing in the story to tax our credulity if we are not called upon to believe in the annual visits of the bearded men and the various doubtful incidents which their presence involves,” and thus there is a “probability that the journey was actually accomplished” (348).

It is also probable that Moncacht-apé influenced Lewis and Clark. Thomas Jefferson had Le Page du Pratz’s book in his library, and Meriweather Lewis carried a copy of the 1774 English edition to Oregon and back. A couple of references in the letters and journals of the expedition reveal that he and Clark used the book and its map for information about the Padouca Indians and for the possible location of the French Fort Orleans, built by the explorer Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont on the Missouri River in the 1720s. But the papers of the expedition never mentioned Moncacht-apé by name. John Logan Allen in his 1975 Passage Through the Garden, a detailed study of the geographical knowledge consulted and acquired by Lewis and Clark, puzzled over this question: “While the only reference to the Du Pratz work that are found in the field journals of Lewis and Clark relate to the lower Missouri, the fact that the captains thought the book important enough to carry a copy with them raises the fascinating questions of how much faith they placed in the bizarre tale of Moncacht-apé . . . it is highly unlikely that they would have rejected it out of hand, because of the tremendous implications it had for their objective” (96). 

Moncacht-apé had ascended the Missouri and made a portage to the Beautiful River without mentioning any high mountains or other barriers. This fit perfectly the optimistic plans of Jefferson. Perhaps it was the information in Le Page du Pratz that inspired Lewis to design and carry a folding boat. For he mistakenly believed that such a contraption could be easily carried between the headwaters of the Missouri and the westward flowing Columbia. But the fact was, these Europeans had no better information than what natives had provided them. In addition to the map in Le Page du Pratz’s book, Lewis and Clark carried a more recent map of the upper Missouri, made in London from a fur trader’s copy of maps drawn by a Blackfeet Indian named Ac Ko Mok Ki. So perhaps Lewis and Clark suppressed the name Moncacht-apé because they did not want to accept the possibility that they were not the first to make the trip. 

Did Moncacht-apé really make this transcontinental journey nearly a century before Lewis and Clark? Or did Le Page du Pratz invent this Yazoo explorer and his remarkable narrative? I believe it is possible and even likely that some Native Americans did make such long journeys of exploration. Geographical curiosity is not confined to Europeans. My analysis of this question, like that of Davis, must compare not only the three versions of the narrative but also the maps and geographical theories behind them.

All through the eighteenth century, French, English, and then United States leaders badly wanted to find a practical trade route through the continent to the Pacific Ocean. The promise of trade with Asia was what had enticed Columbus, after all, and it became even more enticing in the 1740s when Russian fur traders began to take Otter pelts from the Alaskan coasts and sell them at huge profits in China. Moncacht-apé’s story clearly fed this dream, even if his narrative has significant gaps. He did not carry navigational instruments to calculate his latitude, and he did not provide Le Page du Pratz with a map of his journey. The fold-out map of Louisiana in the 1758 book (fig. 1) includes only the Gulf Coast and basins of the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio Rivers. The geography of this unsigned map portrays the outlook of Le Page and the French colony by excluding all the English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard; blank space lies to the east of the Appalachian chain. The map does trace the route of Moncacht-apé from the upper Missouri river north to the Beautiful River, and it even shows a village of the “Loutre” or Otter nation. But that river exits off the upper right corner. Neither Le Page nor, evidently, Moncacht-apé, would commit to drawing the shape of the northwest coast of North America, which was still little known to Europeans.

Even so, the Le Page map constituted an important declaration about the contemporary geographical knowledge of North America. French cartographers since the 1720s had published maps showing a large Western Sea or “Mer de l’Ouest,” a huge inland bay joined to the Southern or Pacific Ocean through an apocryphal strait of Anian, a feature first described by a sixteenth-century Spanish explorer named de Fonte in a relation that was most likely a hoax. Philippe Buache, the French royal cartographer, had in 1752 published two treatises with maps, arguing for the existence of this Mer de l’Ouest just beyond the Rockies. It was to this imagined geography that Le Page du Pratz and Dumont de Montigny added their narratives of Moncacht-apé.

Moncacht-ape’s narrative first appeared in August 1752, the same month that Buache’s map (fig. 2) was presented to the French Academy of Sciences. In the shaded region in the center of the continent it shows a chain of lakes derived from the Indian informants of French fur traders in the 1730s and 1740s, and to the west of that lay the fabled Mer de l’Ouest as indicated by Buache’s father-in-law and predecessor as royal geographer, Guillaume Delisle. This sea is connected to the ocean through straits named for Spanish explorers de Fuca and d’Aguilar. The mythical city of Quivira, for which Coronado searched in the 1540s, appears on its shores. Moncacht-apé dissented from the geography of Buache and Delisle. Le Page wrote that Delisle’s map:

“does not at all agree with the relation that Moncacht-apé made to me of his voyage. The good sense for which I know him, who has no cause to mislead me, gives me faith in all that he told me, and I cannot persuade myself otherwise, than that he went along the coast of the South Sea, of which the more northern part might be called, if you will, the Western Sea. The Beautiful River that he descended is a considerable river, that one should have no difficulty in finding, as soon as one should come to the sources of the Missouri. And I have no doubt that a similar expedition, if it were undertaken, could fully establish our ideas about this part of North America and the famous Western Sea, of which everyone in Louisiana is talking about, and seems to desire so much to discover” (3: 137-38).

Thus Le Page had more trust in Moncacht-apé’s geography than that of some of France’s most celebrated cartographers. 

The question of the authenticity of Moncacht-apé must remain unresolved, but I think it helps to see the question in light of a fundamental tension in the writings of colonial French Louisianans. Their better judgment led them to promote the promise of wealth from agriculture in the Mississippi Valley, mainly tobacco, indigo, and rice. But to lure more investors and migrants they had to offer seductive stories of precious metals or pelts or of a profitable trade with New Spain, and these promises relied in part upon native informants’ maps and voyages, information susceptible to exaggeration and misinterpretation. 

The lines with which Le Page concluded the story of Moncacht-apé are instructive. After questioning the existence of the Western Sea, he wrote: “[W]hat advantages can we derive from our knowledge of this ocean? Would it be to our interests to go off to look for imaginary riches in a land that has not yet been discovered, whose soils will always be less fertile than those we already possess, and which we are neglecting? Let us put to use that which we have in hand. Will not a real value always be preferable to chimerical profits that must be sought at a great distance, and which may not even exist?” (3: 139-40). As a historian and promoter of Louisiana, Le Page’s primary goal was to promote its agricultural potential, not to look past it to the Pacific and Asia. And yet he could not resist the urge to do so, to complete the overland circle of a global imperial world.

Further Reading: 

The quotations from Le Page du Pratz are from my Web-based translation of excerpts of  The History of Louisiana. The Buache map was published in Considérations géographiques et physiques sur les nouvelles découvertes au nord de la Grand Mer (Paris, 1753) and is reproduced courtesy of the Newberry Library. Another tale of an indigenous transcontinental explorer, published well after Lewis and Clark, is John Dunn Hunter’s Memoires of a Captivity among the Indians of North America (Philadelphia, 1823). Quatrefage’s article about Moncacht-apé appeared in Révue d’Anthropologie 4 (1881). The story of Moncacht-apé has recently been expanded and embellished by Jonathan Reynolds Cronin to produce a 550-page narrative: Yazoo Mingo: The Journeys of Moncacht-apé across North America, 1687-1700 (Bloomington, 2003).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.4 (July, 2005).

Gordon Sayre is associate professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is currently working on an edition of the previously unpublished manuscript narrative of Dumont de Montigny, which does not mention Moncacht-apé.