“Today elections for speaker of the House are quick and uneventful” (1). So begins the second paragraph of Corey Brooks’s brilliant new book on antebellum political abolitionists—a paragraph undoubtedly drafted prior to October 2015, when the resignation of John Boehner as Speaker engulfed the House of Representatives in turmoil. When thirty arch-conservatives refused to endorse Boehner’s hand-picked successor, Republican officials began a month-long scramble to find an acceptable candidate. The turmoil abated only when Paul Ryan, who had previously declined the position, agreed to stand for election.

 

In the months since, Americans have only grown more accustomed to the myriad ways that dissident tails within the Democratic and Republican parties can wag, respectively, the donkey or the elephant. The use of parliamentary tactics to threaten government shutdowns or delay the appointment of judges and officials has become, for better or worse, a familiar part of congressional politics. In the House, such tactics on the part of the Republican majority have also led Democrats to embrace creative new forms of protest, as when legislators calling for the reform of the nation’s gun laws joined Congressman John Lewis in a day-long “sit-in” on the House floor.

Comparing the present to the antebellum past can be perilous, but in this case recent events may help prepare readers to grasp Brooks’s central arguments in Liberty Power about the influence of antislavery third parties on the coming of the Civil War. In 2016, for example, it is hard to deny Brooks’s point that “members of Congress have often powerfully influenced national political history by ‘taking stands’ intended more for swaying public opinion than for affecting the disposition of particular legislation” (48). This insight, applied to the antebellum period, keys Brooks’s convincing account of how even small numbers of political abolitionists in the Liberty Party and its descendants managed to melt down the major parties and forge something new in American politics. For Brooks, antebellum political abolitionists—not the Populists, not the Progressives—deserve to be remembered as “the most important third-party movement in American history” (225).

Richard Hofstadter once compared American third parties to bees that die as soon as they sting. But many historians have implied that the abolitionist Liberty Party died even before it stung. Founded in 1840, the Liberty Party’s candidate for president, James G. Birney, won only 7,000 votes that year, and its proportion of the presidential vote in 1844—the last year it fielded a nominee—was similarly minuscule. Even critics of the Liberty Party would concede that these returns say less about abolitionists’ failures than about the overweening strength of the Whig and Democratic parties. Historians of other radical groups like the Garrisonians have often scorned abolitionists who attempted to win election as compromisers. And with the exception of a few scholars like Richard H. Sewell and, more recently, James Oakes, historians of the Free Soil and Republican parties have traced their rise not to the simon-pure abolitionist commitments of the Liberty Party, but instead to less elevated concerns over white Northerners’ civil liberties or the territorial expansion of slavery.

In Liberty Power, Brooks persuasively challenges these previously dismissive views of the accomplishments of abolitionist politicians like Joshua Giddings and Seth Gates, who once called the leading Whig, Henry Clay, as “rotten as a stagnant fish pond on the subject of slavery” (69). Together with their colleagues outside of Congress, who included former slaves like Henry Bibb and pugilistic journalists like Joshua Leavitt, political abolitionists were primarily responsible, Brooks argues, for the development and deployment of the “Slave Power” thesis that slaveholders had a disproportionate influence on the federal government—a thesis that some other historians have instead traced to Jacksonian anti-bank and anti-aristocratic rhetoric. Moreover, says Brooks, political abolitionists pioneered a coherent and politically innovative analysis of the ways that the two-party system built by Whigs and Democrats served the Slave Power. Far from making a compromising peace with the two major parties, their mission from the beginning was to explode the major cross-sectional parties and create a Northern party determined to defeat the Slave Power.

Among Brooks’s most original contributions is his focus on the House of Representatives as “the pivotal battleground” in this insurgent war against the Whigs and Democrats (13). Nineteenth-century activists did not have the same social media bullhorns available to outsider movements today, though they undoubtedly would have taken full advantage of hashtags and memes if such things had existed. (#FeelTheBirney? #NeverClay?) Abolitionists knew that Americans closely watched events in the House of Representative, and newspapers often reprinted lengthy excerpts of speeches and proceedings on the floor. Liberty Men therefore relied heavily on theatrical and “disruptive dilatory tactics” that agitated the House, embarrassed major party leaders, and—most importantly—made news (54).

The strategies that political abolitionists used to agitate the House predated the formation of the Liberty Party. Most famous were the attempts by former president and Massachusetts Representative John Quincy Adams to present petitions discussing slavery, in defiance of an 1836 “gag rule” forbidding the reception of such petitions by the House. On one occasion, Adams incensed congressmen in both parties by attempting to read a petition from slaves, only to reveal—after an apoplectic reaction from Southern congressmen—that the petition did not discuss slavery and did not technically violate the House’s rules.

Fighting the “gag rule” was one of the surest ways that political abolitionists, though few in number, could use the House to reach broader national audiences. But it was not the only one. Abolitionist politicians used parliamentary maneuvers like convening the House as a Committee of the Whole in order to introduce wide-ranging discussions of slavery. On another occasion, Joshua Giddings used a debate over congressional funding for a bridge across the Potomac to argue against any non-essential appropriations for the District of Colombia as long as the slave trade was legal within it. Though these less famous tactics seldom resulted in outright victories for political abolitionists, they placed pressure on Northern Democrats and so-called Conscience Whigs to break from their parties on votes concerning slavery. They also created “newsworthy” spectacles that drew attention to the concessions to Slave Power that the party system constantly required antislavery Northerners to make (90).

Of all the dilatory tactics used by political abolitionists, speakership contests illustrated especially well how a small faction in the House could expose the devil-dealing ways of the two major parties. In the thirty years after the Jacksonian Democratic Party was formed, Southerners—whether Whig or Democrat—dominated this major post, which gave slaveholders the power to shape legislative agendas and make important appointments. In “interludes” interspersed with the book’s seven chapters, Brooks highlights five speakership contests to illustrate how political abolitionists exerted an influence on congressional politics out of proportion to their numbers.

Only one of these campaigns for the speakership concluded in abolitionists’ favor; Republican Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts was finally elected Speaker of the 1855-1856 House after an unprecedented 133 rounds of balloting. However, the presence of a small number of abolitionist politicians who refused to support either of the major parties’ nominees for Speaker also led to protracted contests in 1839, 1841, and 1847. In particular, the 1849 speakership contest was “a pivotal moment” in which it took 63 ballots and 20 days to choose a Speaker over the objections of Free Soilers and Liberty veterans (155).

In each of these contests, political abolitionists benefited from the fact that Speakers had to be elected by an absolute majority, meaning that even a small group—not unlike the one that more recently thwarted Boehner’s plans—could stall the House’s organization and make headlines. In the meantime, they could also place pressure on antislavery Northern congressmen who were conflicted about their parties’ alliances with the South. Political abolitionists with Liberty Party roots courted sympathetic Northerners like Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Horace Mann, William Slade, and John P. Hale and then used famous issues like the Wilmot Proviso, as well as less famous moments like speakership contests, to place those allies in increasingly untenable positions within their parties.

In short, by slowing down the business of the House, political abolitionists both publicized their arguments about the Slave Power and slowly built the political coalitions capable of challenging it. And often, they used the same dilatory tactics to stall elections in Northern districts. Many antebellum Representatives also had to be elected by a majority, rather than a plurality, and “Liberty men did not face the substantial impediment that formal state-sanctioned ballots today present for third-party organizing” (77). By running antislavery candidates in close races, abolitionists “forced uncomfortable standstills,” run-offs, or failed elections that embarrassed Whigs and Democrats and further publicized abolitionists’ claims about their complicity in empowering Southern slaveholders (90).

By expertly exploring these and similar tactics, Brooks shows how even an embattled minority of political abolitionists “seized opportunities to control balances of power between the two parties” (78). In the process, he credits them with laying the groundwork for the Free Soil and Republican parties, while simultaneously preventing other would-be third parties like the Know-Nothings from eclipsing Northern antislavery coalitions. This is not all that political abolitionists did. Working together with black Libertyites like Henry Bibb and Henry Highland Garnet, they fought locally for the civil rights of black Northerners and promoted policies within Congress that would “denationalize” slavery.

In Brooks’s account, therefore, actively engaging in third-party politics did not require abolitionists to compromise their ideals. Instead, agitating the House enabled them to achieve for those ideals a remarkable degree of influence. The battles in Bleeding Kansas or the killing fields of the Civil War began, he argues, in less famous battles in the House over funding for bridges and assignments for committees. For it was in these bruising (if less bloody) struggles that political abolitionists did the hard work of actually peeling elected politicians, one by one, out of the grasp of their caucuses and into the abolitionist movement. Only time will tell whether the tactics of dissidents in today’s major parties will result in a reorganization of our own party system. But so far, Brooks suggests, no third-party movement in American history has been as successful as the Liberty Power in transforming politics on a national scale.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

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Caleb McDaniel is associate professor of history at Rice University and the author of The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (2013). He is the recipient of a 2016-2017 Public Scholar Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The color line in The County Election

When Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was at work on his most popular and complex paintings he was also deeply engaged in Whig politics. Bingham was already well known for his genre scenes of riverboat men and frontier life—Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845); The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846); Boatmen on the Missouri (1846); among others—when he decided to run for state office in 1846. He had been involved in Whig electoral politics since the early 1840s, when he painted banners and delivered speeches on behalf of William Henry Harrison and Henry Clay. Bingham especially admired Clay of Kentucky, whose fiery orations compared Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren to Caesar, Cromwell, and Napoleon as usurpers of executive privilege and destroyers of the people’s independence. In 1846, fearing Missouri’s enslavement to a Democratic majority, Bingham himself ran for the state legislature as a Whig candidate from Saline County. He lost the race in a bitter post-election appeal. But the razor-thin election became the subject of his best-known political painting The County Election (1851-1852).

 

 

Given Bingham’s politics, it is not surprising that Whig ideals have dominated discussion of The County Election. What is much more surprising, however, is the degree to which scholarly attention to Bingham’s Whig rhetoric has sidelined the racial, ethnic, and class codes upon which that rhetoric depended. The County Election is a political parody that refers specifically to the Saline County election of 1846 in which Bingham ran against local Democratic favorite Erasmus Darwin Sappington (fig. 1). Sappington himself is represented in the painting as the obsequious party hack, tipping his hat to voters and proffering his card, while the portly election judge swearing in a voter at the window is Sappington’s own brother-in-law, former Missouri governor Meredith Marmaduke. The painting also parodies the men in the crowd, who are divided (a la the great eighteenth-century English artist and political satirist William Hogarth) by the moral valence of their characters: some men (the sober Whigs) read newspapers, debate or deliberate, write or draw, vote or wait quietly in line—while others (the Saline County Democrats) drink, recover from fighting, serve drinks, carry drunken voters, pander for votes, gamble, or run the election.

Because The County Election satirizes antebellum politics at a time when Missouri suffrage embraced all adult white men, it was initially charged with elitism. To counter this charge, art historians Nancy Rash, Gail E. Husch, and Barbara Groseclose argue conclusively that while The County Election parodies antebellum (and especially Democratic) party politics, it is fundamentally populist. The painting, they argue, asserts the artist’s republican faith in the voice of “the people,” the Union, and government by representation, despite corruption by party hacks, fixed elections, drunken voters, and physical intimidation. 

But this emphasis on Bingham’s Whig populism has obscured a second story contained within the famous work. In his study of race and labor in antebellum St. Louis, social historian Daniel Graff points out that in central Missouri socioeconomic alliances between bourgeois and working-class white men were buttressed by the color line. From St. Louis to Saline County, political solidarity across differences of class and culture was intimately tied to racial apartheid, or shared whiteness. While the racial dynamics of working-class politics are typically associated with Jacksonian Democrats, the Whig populism of The County Election is structured by precisely this kind of cross-class and multi-ethnic alliance, grounded in whiteness.

Every viewer of Bingham’s painting notes the African American man (who, we will see, was most likely a slave) on its far left margin, serving alcohol to a happy, drunken, white man. And art historians invariably identify the red-haired workingman “taking the book” at the voting window at the top of the stairs as Irish, according to the physiognomic codes and ethnic stereotypes of the period. But, in fact, the African American man on the painting’s margin and the Irish voter at its center work together in the painting’s design. Standing in the sun at the top of the stairs, with his hand on the holy book, the white ethnic voter represents the unmediated “voice” of the people—albeit a voice overwhelmed elsewhere in the painting by the ill-effects of drink. That the drunken Democrat at the drinking table happens to be receiving his drink from a slave establishes an allegorical relationship between enslavement and drink. Alcohol, in effect, enslaves the voter. What are we to make of Bingham’s temperance message? More important, what are we to make of this use of race and slavery on behalf of the familiar Whig perspective on drink? To answer these questions, we must begin with the social history of Bingham’s Missouri. 

The Paperless Voter

After the “internal” Missouri Compromise of 1821, which granted universal adult white male suffrage and guaranteed the legality of slavery, the racial and social dynamics of the state changed dramatically. Among the consequences of the compromise was a new and much harsher slave regime. Throughout central Missouri, town ordinances, city police, and vigilante “patrols” required passes, ejected or arrested unfamiliar freedmen, broke up African American social gatherings, and punished the owners of slaves who too freely hired them out. As African American workers experienced these new restrictions, propertyless white workingmen found themselves enjoying the fruits of their recently won right to vote. They were actively courted by the Missouri Democrats (as one might expect) and later by the Whigs. By the time Bingham made The County Election, his party had long been courting the white workingman vote. And in Missouri, doing so meant cloaking the Whig platform in a familiar rhetoric of whiteness.

The role of class and ethnicity in The County Election is clarified by an oration Bingham delivered in Jefferson City after losing the Saline County election of 1846 to Sappington. Bingham had initially won the election in the popular count, by the extraordinarily narrow margin of three votes. But as soon as Bingham’s victory was announced in the Columbia Statesman (fig. 2), Sappington declared himself the winner and, with the support of his brother-in-law, appealed the results to the legislature, where Democrats were in the majority and where he was assured of easy victory. Rejecting Bingham’s call to take the vote back to “the people” of Saline County, Sappington’s allies worked through a legislative committee to prove that at least four of the votes for Bingham were illegal. These included the vote of an aged Irishman named Murphy.

 

Printed in six columns of the Boonville Weekly Observer (March 11, 1847), Bingham’s speech decries the disenfranchisement of army veteran John Murphy who had fought with William Henry Harrison in the War of 1812. Now, “grown grey in the service of his country,” the old soldier’s vote had been rejected by the Democratic legislature on the grounds that he had lost his naturalization papers. Murphy had once possessed his discharge papers with the date of his naturalization. But, Bingham explained, “these discharges, with his naturalization papers, were destroyed by an unforeseeable accident.” On these grounds, the Democrats had rejected the Irishman’s vote, because he lacked written proof that he was “twenty years of age when he took the oath of allegiance.” On this tenuous thread, the state had disenfranchised a veteran who epitomized the very spirit of revolutionary independence.

[W]hen many of us now assembled…were yet reposing in our mother’s arms,…when British bayonets brightened on every side, and the tomahawk and scalping knife glanced in the lurid glare by the savage torch—then, then, it was sirs, that the man whose right, yes, whose right of citizenship I am now defending stepped forward as a volunteer, and bared his bosom to the blast.

Three years after making this speech, Bingham revisited the story of Murphy’s disenfranchisement in The County Election by picturing an Irishman—without papers—encountering election judge Marmaduke at the voting window. In addition, the painting juxtaposes the young Irishman at the window with an old man immediately below him, who, with bent back, descends the stairs after voting. In preparatory drawings for the painting,Bingham sketched this same aged character, with the revolutionary number ’76 on his hat. The grizzled figure of “Old ’76” was a commonplace of antebellum visual culture. By juxtaposing the red-haired Irish voter with the old veteran below, the painting condenses the past and present moments of Murphy’s story while recalling its moral: the worthy voter deprived of his rights (as Bingham had been) by the Democratic “clique” of central Missouri.

In the painting, the Irishman lacks papers of any kind. Having mounted the stairs, he is preparing to vote viva voce, consistent with state election law. Under the viva voce system a vote could be delivered either orally or in writing. Upon hearing or reading a voter’s choice, the judge then announced the voter’s name and his vote viva voce—or orally and audibly—to the clerks behind him, who then recorded them in poll books. Election judges were empowered to decide the legality of any voter. If an immigrant had lost his naturalization papers or a voter appeared too young or lacked proof of residency, the judge could then administer an oath. This is precisely what occurs in The County Election where the election judge swears in the Irish voter before accepting and announcing his vote.

Missouri was among the last states to abandon viva voce voting (in 1863), along with Arkansas (1854), West Virginia (1861), Virginia (1867), Oregon (1872) and Kentucky (1891). Although the practice was established to give voters assurance that their actual votes were recorded, it also invited ethnic profiling, bullying, bribery, and its own kinds of inaccuracies—as, for example, when large crowds of voters overwhelmed clerks with their cacophonous shouts. What is significant about viva voce in The County Election, however, is that the required oath sworn by the Irish voter elevates him within the painting’s visual rhetoric as an exemplar of “the people’s” original voice.

Coatless and hatless, at the apex of the painting’s pyramidal composition, the white ethnic workingman is a visual version of the theological motto of the American Revolution—vox populi vox Dei (the voice of the people is God’s voice). Reaching hopefully for “the book,” of the law or the Holy Bible, the man summarizes the painting’s logocentric faith in representative government as a mysterious ritual of incarnation where voting—either orally, or with paper and pencil—guarantees the presence of the voice, and thus the voter, in the vote.

But Bingham’s painting is also deeply ambivalent about the voter’s representation through writing. Writing unfolds in the shady space behind the voting window, where a clerk ambiguously sharpens the point of his pencil to either faithfully inscribe or to alter the election returns. The painting’s concern with faithful inscription is also communicated by the man reading a newspaper at far right and by the voter/artist seated on the lower steps in the center foreground. With pen and paper on his knee, this figure is usually (and rightly) identified as Bingham himself: as he writes, or sketches, two voters peer over his shoulder to watch which way the vote (or drawing) will go.

By picturing the artist, The County Election posits a relationship between the honest voice of the rejected Irishman and the pencil of the highly literate Whig artist, who uses Murphy’s story to articulate his own claims to faithful inscription. Grounded in the vox populi of the disenfranchised immigrant, The County Election projects a cross-class alliance between the bourgeois Whig and the white ethnic voter he claims to represent. Intimately associated with Bingham’s own disenfranchisement by the Democratic legislature, the Irish workingman is elevated at the moment of his assimilation to a text-centered legal and electoral system that claims to represent all white men across differences of education, class, and culture.

Black Work

On April 28, 1836, a mulatto steamboat cook from Pittsburg named Francis McIntosh was burned alive in the streets of St. Louis by a white mob. Just off the steamboat Flora, McIntosh had allegedly killed a white policeman while the latter was arresting two of his companions for fighting. No one among the more than one thousand people present at the lynching was indicted. While the mob’s lawlessness was widely decried (by twenty-seven-year-old Abraham Lincoln, among others), St. Louis officials claimed that popular justice had trumped the letter of the law. In an infamous extension of the logic of popular sovereignty, the astonishingly well-named Judge Luke Lawless argued that the lynching mob had been so large that it must have embodied the authority of the people themselves and could not, therefore, be punished by the courts.

The lynching of McIntosh is an example of the racial panic that could be induced in the 1830s by the presence of free black workers in the Upper South, especially after Nat Turner’s rebellion (1831). City law simply exacerbated the problem. While black codes and blue laws constrained the movement and behavior of free blacks, they rarely impinged on the affairs of white workers. A strike and its attendant social gatherings by the city’s Workingman’s Party would have been inconceivable for black workers. By excluding free blacks from public spaces, in other words, city law effectively made St. Louis politics white.

Antebellum racial panic in Missouri reflected white anxiety about slave revolts, abolitionist print culture, and northern economic power. But such panics were also stimulated by the everyday dependence of Missouri’s commercial and river economy on African American workers—from dockworkers and draymen to smiths, cooks, barbers, and bootblacks. Moreover, economic dependence implied social contact, calling attention to the reality of relationships (of identity as well as difference) between black and white races. This equivocal repression of, and reliance upon, black work is illustrated by an 1836 print satire of a black “strike”—published in the St. Louis Literary Register just three days before the lynching of McIntosh. Reprinted from a New York paper, the satire’s central purpose is to ridicule an African American bootblack named “Scip” who is attempting to strike in imitation of white laborers in New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.

When the bourgeois narrator approaches his bootblack to have his boots cleaned, he learns that Scip has decided to strike. Scip reports that all the other bootblacks are out on strike and that he will now require a shilling for shining shoes. “Oh Boss,” said he, “I’ve struck!…—can’t black boots for sixpence—muss hab a shillum…“ White and well-educated, the narrator refuses to pay.

“Oh, but Scip, I am an old customer; you won’t raise on me. I’ll send my boots with a sixpence, and do you mind, make them shine like a dollar.”

“Yes, boss, I’ll brush ’em a sixpence worth.” Not doubting but they would be returned in decent order, we were not a little surprised to find them in the hall next morning, one of them shining like a mirror, and the other covered with mud, with a note stating that he intended to assist the chimney sweeps in their turn out.

—”STRIKE EXTRA,” N.Y. Commercial Bulletin report in the Missouri Literary Register 25 (April 1836)

The effect of this exchange is to affirm the whiteness of both labor and bourgeois culture by highlighting the absurdity of a striking bootblack. Scip introduces the possibility of economic enfranchisement for black workers. But the joke hinges on the impossibility of a black strike or a black workingman, in a world where the only work that counts is free white labor. If we accept that he is a slave, this same oxymoron of “black work” defines the place of the African American man in The County Election.

Given the history of Saline County, it is difficult to imagine that Bingham intended the man to be anything but a slave. Saline County was in the heart of “Little Dixie,” a seven-county area of central Missouri known for its hemp and tobacco farms, and reliance on slave labor. According to historian Thomas Dyer, the county was “home to…almost five thousand blacks” in the late 1850s, “virtually all of whom were slaves. The slave population grew by 79 percent during the decade of the 1850s, by far the greatest increase of any county in Little Dixie, the area of heaviest slave ownership in the state.” Bingham’s home of Arrow Rock, the town pictured in The County Election, was the most important river port in Saline County. By 1860 Arrow Rock had a population of more than one thousand people, nearly half of whom were African Americans.

When Bingham associates African American slavery with drinking he does so in part to imply that Democrats are enslaved. His satire implies that Sappington, Marmaduke, and their allies have corrupted the county election, not only by manipulating the letter of the law but by substituting false “spirits” for the Whig spirit of republican independence. Their senses distorted by drink, the Democrats cannot possibly exercise their franchise in a free or disinterested fashion. Instead, it is the alcohol and the party hirelings dragging drunks to the poll that are voting.

The race of the Saline County slave tars the white Democrat at his table, not only by association with drunkenness but with blackness as well. Like the abject and beaten man on the opposite (far right) side of the painting, the drunk in the painting’s left foreground is positioned at the far edge of the white political community. While the white drunk does not exactly fraternize with the black servant, the plate of meat bones before him suggests he has been at the table for some time. As a site of social contact between a black slave and a white voter, the drinking table implies social, racial, and sexual degradation at the limit of white law and order—where mixed-race social contact violates the prohibition on racial and gender mixing in street gatherings or in leisure pursuits.

Bingham’s allegory of drinking as enslavement is neither pro- nor antislavery per se. Nor is the figure of the slave racist by itself. Antebellum newspaper satire could be much more virulently racist than The County Election, as proved, for example, by countless antebellum parodies of Lincoln as a black ape. In the Whig press too, cartoons of Irish Catholic voters were far more ethnocentric and racialized than Bingham’s Irish voter. But Bingham, nevertheless, engages in racist political parody by deploying an African American body to satirize his white political enemies, by associating them with blackness or with becoming black through contact.

Moreover, the linking of blackness with drink and degradation is carried across the entire canvas, through the three stages of decline that constitute the painting’s temperance narrative. Moving from left to right, the first stage is represented by the white man at the cider table; and the second, by the drunken voter held up by another man (in the left middle ground); while the third stage is represented by the beaten and bloodied voter alone on the bench at far right. Art historians have noted the temperance narrative in the painting. But what makes it especially significant is Bingham’s insinuation of race by way of the slave with whom it begins.

While the black man introduces the topic of slavery, the fact of racial apartheid and the threat of abolition are subsumed by the painting’s temperance allegory—which associates drunken Democrats with moral enslavement and racial blackness but not with slavery in particular or the legalized violence that enabled it. With the message that Democrats are (drunken) slaves, the impulse of antislavery is sidelined and contained by the less divisive Federalist topos of republican virtue, as practiced by the comparatively sober and upright (Whig) voters. By contrast, the upright and sober slave at the cider table is tainted by the racist implication that even an African American slave is more virtuous than a white drunk—or a Missouri Democrat.

In Bingham’s political parody, race and temperance are deployed together in keeping with the black codes and blue laws of central Missouri where, between 1836 and 1859, racial violence and moral panics unfolded together within the field of white solidarity. Between 1853 and 1859 Saline County and adjoining Pettis and Carroll counties endured seven white-on-black lynchings. As in the lynching of Francis McIntosh, these acts were construed by their white participants as acts of popular justice. In Arrow Rock, for example, over one thousand people turned out for the 1859 lynching of an unnamed slave “owned by Dr. William Price,” who was accused of molesting a twelve-year-old white girl.

Whatever Bingham may have thought of these appalling events, he knew slavery well. When his own family immigrated to Saline County in 1823, they brought several slaves with them from Virginia. When the artist began work on The County Election, he owned “a male and female slave,” and in 1853 he bought four more. Nonetheless, Bingham’s overarching political concern was to preserve the Union through peaceful compromise. The artist’s enemy was anyone, be they abolitionist or proslavery Southerner, who threatened the law and order of the federal system. Hence, as the conflict over slavery intensified and the Whig party disintegrated, Bingham allied himself with Lincoln and “the Black Republicans.” When war came, he served the Union in Missouri.

In 1846, when he first ran for political office, Bingham probably did not foresee the collapse of his party. The Whigs had tasted national victory in 1840, with Harrison’s Log Cabin Campaign. And when Bingham began to paint The County Election, Missouri was four years away from the electoral chaos and violence that erupted with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It is in the Log Cabin spirit of Whig popular politics, then, rather than as a prelude to Civil War, that The County Election celebrates white male solidarity across class lines. Nevertheless, the reasons for the party’s collapse are evident in the painting. While many factors explain the Whigs’ disintegration after 1854, they include the party’s deeply equivocal relationship to economic and racial inequality, as well as the abject failure of either Whig populism or legislative compromise to adjudicate, or even address, the black codes of antebellum political life upon which white power relied.

Further Reading:

Social historians of voting such as Stuart Blumin and Glenn Altschuler, Rude Republic: Americans and their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 2000), have commented usefully on the frequent and misleading reproductions of The County Election, in textbooks and on monograph covers, where the painting is deployed ideologically as evidence of some golden age of voting in the United States or a never-again-matched period of political participation (albeit among adult white men). But for a detailed voting history that considers viva voce voting alongside the wildly diverse, ethno-cultural attitudes and practices of antebellum voting in Missouri and elsewhere, there is no better source than Richard Franklin Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004).

Daniel A. Graff’s “Citizenship and the Origins of Organized Labor in St. Louis,” in Thomas M. Spencer, ed., The Other Missouri History: Populists, Prostitutes, and Regular Folk (Columbia, Mo., 2004): 50-80, is essential to seeing the centrality of racial apartheid in The County Election; Thomas G. Dyer’s exemplary account of lynching in Saline County, “A Most Unexampled Exhibition of Madness and Brutality: Judge Lynch in Saline County, Missouri, 1859,” in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997): 81-108, provides the data for situating Bingham’s art within the history of Saline County. Arrow Rock historian Michael Dickey has also just published a comprehensive history of Arrow Rock that draws on scattered sources to document the town’s emergence on the commercial frontier of the Santa Fe Trail and Missouri River, Arrow Rock: Crossroads of the Missouri Frontier (Arrow Rock, Mo., 2004).

Former slaves have also narrated the history of “Little Dixie.” Many of these oral histories were collected by the Federal Writers Project (WPA) in the late 1930s and are accessible online through the National Archives Website, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project. Three WPA narratives from Saline County—including the memories of a child of one of Judge Meredith Marmaduke’s slaves—are also reprinted at the roots Website) as “Slave Narratives of Saline County.“

The art historical scholarship on Bingham is abundant. Students of Bingham’s election paintings should begin with Nancy Rash’s The Paintings and Politics of George Caleb Bingham (New Haven, Conn., 1991); both versions of Gail E. Husch’s article “George Caleb Bingham’s The County Election: Whig Tribute to the Will of the People,” in Mary Ann Calo, ed., Critical Issues in American Art, A Book of Readings (New York, 1998): 77-92, revised by the author from the American Art Journal 19:4; and the entire 1990 exhibition catalogue George Caleb Bingham (St. Louis, 1990), which includes essays by Barbara Groseclose, Paul C. Nagel, and John Wilmerding, among others. For a comprehensive checklist of Bingham’s paintings and sketches, including the sketch of “Old ’76” descending the stairs in The County Election, see John Francis McDermott, George Caleb Bingham, River Portraitist (Norman, Okla., 1959).

 

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

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Laura Rigal is an associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Iowa. She is completing a study of the relationship between icons of American visual culture and U.S. territorial and economic expansion, Picturing Entitlement: Rhetorics of Expansion in American Visual Culture, 1776-1900.

In the summer of 1856, San Francisco was in turmoil. After allegations of corruption, criminal behavior, and election rigging, City Supervisor James P. Casey shot newspaper editor James King in cold blood. The city’s Committee of Vigilance, first formed in 1851 to fight corruption, reassembled, issuing their members medallions that featured an all-seeing eye and a personification of Justice who eschewed a blindfold, material reminders of their avowed commitment to observe, oversee, and perform their own “supervision” during this time of intensely perceived threats to democracy. In their ensuing investigations, members discovered concrete evidence of election fraud: the so-called “stuffer’s ballot box,” outfitted with a false bottom and side panel to conceal pre-marked ballots for the desired candidate (fig. 1). In response to this corrupt concealment, vision, visuality, and visibility became key concepts in maintaining and protecting a democratic society. This essay will explore the rhetorics of visibility and transparency that made themselves manifest in material form: a glass ballot box, designed, patented, and manufactured in New York in 1856-1857 and later illustrated in dozens of political cartoons and allegorical representations of the democratic process in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As much as the stuffer’s ballot box encapsulated fears and concerns about fraud and electoral rigging, the glass ballot box embodied both aspirations and anxieties.

Beyond San Francisco, several national newspapers ran the story of the deceptive ballot box, fearing it might be in use in their own districts. Frank Leslie’s included illustrations of the device, revealing its concealed panels and explaining its operations to readers:

The box is … a dark sky-blue color … The lock, which looked like an ordinary one, is so constructed that though it is worked with a key, it might also be opened by a peculiar pressure upon one side of the lid … On looking at the ballot box, few would suspect the contrivances about it; but on further and minute examination it was found that it had a false bottom and a false side, sliding in grooves under and behind which were packed quantities of spurious votes all ready for an election.

The deceptively plain blue box, which upon first appearance seemed so ordinary, was thus a device of concealment and chicanery. The newspaper’s accompanying illustrations also emphasized the simple, sturdy exterior, juxtaposed with cross-sections indicating the false panels and hidden compartments that obscured hidden ballots from inspectors’ view. How could faith in the ballot box be restored?

Meanwhile in New York, the State Assembly’s Committee on Grievances, also concerned about the possibility of ballot-box stuffing, “contrivances,” and the like, was charged with taking measures to prevent frauds at elections and to ensure “the purity of the ballot box.” As they proclaimed, the ballot box

 

… still fails to be a true reflection of the will of the people. …[I]ts guardians so far from protecting it, became the medium of its corruption and made its results such as they might desire … putting in unathorized ballots enough of an opposite character to outweigh and smother those honestly deposited. … [We] have but one desire and that is, an honest expression of the will of the people through the ballot box. … Underlying as does the ballot the beautiful superstructure of Republican institutions, it behooves all interested in their perpetuity or advancement to guard with especial vigilance its purity. The liberty of the subject, his property and reputation, all depend upon an honest election. … Cannot something be done to remedy this evil that is fraught with so much danger? Must we look coolly on and see the foundations of our liberty sapped, our glory depart, and our beautiful structure of self-government crumble and decay, the ballot dishonored, the elective franchise destroyed?

These concerns about “corruption” and “purity,” “evil,” “danger,” “honesty,” and “dishonor” indicate the gravity of the situation the legislators faced, with the very future of the democratic republic at stake. Indeed, what was to be done?

A Clear Alternative: The Glass Ballot Box

 

A few days after Frank Leslie’s published its account, New Yorker Samuel C. Jollie presented himself at the mayor’s office, unveiling his proposed solution with a flourish: a ballot box made of glass (fig. 2). In design and concept, it was the antithesis to the stuffer’s ballot box. Where the San Francisco box was wooden, dense, and plain, hiding its contents from view, Jollie’s invention offered viewers a transparent glass globe hovering in an architectural armature of iron columns, proudly exhibiting its gleaming, crystalline interior. Its hollow sphere seems to float within its setting. Its form was breathtakingly symmetrical, suggesting Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man” with its suspension of a sphere inside a cube, its columns gently swelling toward the center and back out again like a baluster, or perhaps like the legs of a Windsor chair, which had supported delegates as they debated and drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Openwork designs on its top and bottom suggest acanthus leaves, lightening its cast iron density and allowing patterns of light to play upon the curved glass surface while also evoking classical ornament (fig. 3); seen from above, this metal plate looks like nothing so much as a cast iron heating grate (and indeed, several New York iron works of this period proudly advertised their decorative grates, done in the latest designs and amenable to custom orders). At the center of the metal top is a hinged circle or lid. “JOLLIE” curves around the top of this circle, underneath the hinge; “PATENT APPLIED FOR” curves around the bottom, above a tab with an opening that fits over a small metal loop that would accommodate a lock. At the very center, like a bulls’-eye, is a circular opening that could admit ballots, smaller than a dime but slightly larger than the diameter of a pencil, suggesting that the ballots would have to be tightly rolled, like a cigarette. Overall, the form suggests one half of an hourglass, its single globe displaying the votes that had been cast, rather than grains of sand indicating the progression of time, balanced delicately between the solid columns of its stand.

Jollie’s spherical box arrived on the scene at a crucial moment of fears about corruption, deception, and election tampering, when many Americans feared for the very future of their democratic society. While the outcries about political machines such as Boss Tweed and his Tammany allies were rampant, the late 1850s were also a hotbed of broader cultural concerns about visuality, deception, and fraud, as seen in the public fascination with P.T. Barnum and his “humbug” exhibitions and displays (incisively analyzed in Michael Leja’s Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp and James Cook’s Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum). Jollie’s transparent box is a striking material object that testifies to these perceived threats to honesty and democracy. The distinctive form of Jollie’s box made it a recognizable emblem of these fears and hopes for American democratic society, and it was invoked to support a variety of positions and claims, alternately advocating for or mocking potential voters and revealing concerns about the electoral franchise. The very medium of glass is a potent material for thinking through issues of transparency, malleability, and perceived fragility or strength, as these qualities were widely associated with the material properties of glass, popularly discussed in journals and advertisements.

The mid-nineteenth century saw an exponential growth in the prevalence and use of glass and, as Isobel Armstrong termed it in her exploration of glass in British literature and culture, a proliferation of “glass culture” or “Victorian glassworlds.” Manufacturing and purchasing prices for glass dropped radically in the mid-nineteenth century, and so the use of glass, from plate glass windows to home aquariums to London’s “Crystal Palace” for the 1851 World’s Fair, rose in a similarly dramatic fashion. Jollie’s design for a glass globe ballot box fits into this broader context of the abundance of glass.

 

Jollie explained his design and its construction in a patent application that extolled what he saw as the merits of his box, repeatedly emphasizing the importance of display, witnessing, sight, and visibility. These breathless passages suggest the assurances of a prestidigitator, encouraging audiences to watch him carefully during a sleight-of-hand trick:

The object of my invention is the production of a ballot box which shall at all times exhibit the condition of the ballotings, in other words a ballot box so constructed that the bystanders may see every ballot which is put in, see all the ballots that are in, and see them when taken out. And to this end the nature of my invention for this purpose, consists in the employment of a glass globe mounted in a frame, by which it is held in position, as to exhibit freely all that it contains, and with a hole at the top of sufficient size to admit the hand, and provided with a hinged cover having a hole of the required size to receive the ballots.

… In this way it will be obvious that the bystanders can see whether every ballot that is put into the hole actually goes into the box, and whether more ballots go into the box than are actually put through the ballot hole at top. The whole progress of the balloting is clearly in view, and when the ballots are taken out to be counted it must all be done in open view.

 

The “free exhibition” and “open view” of ballots, rather than their secrecy, was primary to Jollie, once again evoking the “all-seeing” rhetoric of the Vigilance Committee. While he did not claim all glass to be used in ballot boxes for his patent, he did wish to emphasize the use of the glass “globe,” a sphere of influence that would hover in its metal frame “without concealing the contents,” making the submission of ballots and fairness of elections self-evident to observers. Of course, the glass globe was not a true globe but instead a sphere that tapered to cylindrical openings at each end in order to be mounted in the metal frame; the top has a wider mouth almost like a fishbowl, wide enough, as Jollie indicates, for a hand to reach in and retrieve all the ballots that had been carefully deposited inside once the hinged lid is unlocked and opened. Examples of surviving bowls have strips of felt or ribbon encircling where the glass and metal meet, holding them in place. Despite their seemingly documentary style, the patent application drawings are somewhat unrealistic, showing the sides of the glass globe swelling beyond the constraints of the column in ways that it couldn’t possibly fit (fig. 4). The drawings nonetheless emphasize Jollie’s artistic aspirations for the project, his “Fig. 3: horizontal section” suggesting the architectural plans of a grand Neoclassical temple, its square dimensions supported by four columns and surmounted by a dome—a design which echoes, in fact, Benjamin Latrobe’s plans for the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol (fig. 5), itself inspired by the grand architecture of the Classical past, with all its invocations of democratic ideals and republicanism. The box could be read as a microcosm of these values, an evocation of representative government, assembled to enact the will of the people, an assembly chamber of votes joining together in anticipation of their elected politicians’ move to the House of Representatives.

The New York Times described it as a “transparent ballot-box … a hollow glass globe supported on four pillars. On the top of the globe is an aperture (large enough to admit a ballot) made in a brass lid fastened with a lock to the globe. The arrangement enables every vote to be seen as deposited, and prevents the possibility of false bottoms.” Their description thus noted both the architectural qualities of the box (referring to its “pillars,” possibly also evoking principles or ideals) and its key design of transparency, of allowing the observation of votes as they were submitted, preventing the subterfuge of hidden recesses and pre-filled ballots. There could be nothing “false” about this box. By exposing the inner recesses of the box through the use of a transparent medium and allowing all to see its contents, writers believed, the election would be secure. News of the invention was picked up as far as Baton Rouge, where Jollie was heralded as a “genius” whose invention “meet[s] the exigencies of the times, and [will] prevent fraud.” An example of the box was also displayed at S. G. Courtenay’s book shop in Charleston, South Carolina, as evidence of the measures to which New Yorkers had to go to “preserv[e] the purity of elections.”

Jollie’s example and description were referred to the Committee on Arts and Sciences of the New York Board of Councilmen, who enthusiastically embraced the design after their examination. As they reported at a meeting on September 15, 1856, the box “is of glass… strongly encased in an iron frame, and would prevent fraud, while it is impervious to even extraordinary force. It could be secured to the table of the inspectors of election by screws, and only removable at the close of the poll, and then by their direction, and under their supervision.” Explicitly contrasting Jollie’s invention with the infamous stuffers’ ballot box, they pointed to the merits of his construction: “It has … been shown that wooden boxes are liable to have false interiors, capable of stuffing illegal ballots, and that the wire boxes are insecure; but we believe that the glass cylinder in an iron frame, which would be proof against a pistol ball and capable of being secured to the table, would afford every desirable quality of publicity, perfect security, and inviolability to fraud.” The committee was at pains to assuage fears about the box’s potential fragility (literal or metaphorical), confident that it could withstand bullets or other attacks, and its openwork, acanthus-leaf adorned base could easily be secured to any surface to prevent its removal. The very transparency of the glass globe and visibility of the operations within would, they asserted, provide “perfect security and inviolability.” The committee recommended that the city invest in the boxes before the next presidential election.

State legislators were apparently intrigued by Jollie’s invention, and members of the committee appointed to prevent election fraud promoted the virtues of the glass box even more ardently. As their report proclaimed,

Your committee congratulate the country and themselves in being able to present for your consideration what they think to be a perfect remedy for the evils complained of, in the adoption of the transparent ballot box, invented by Samuel C. Jollie, made of glass so thick and substantial as to be as safe as the wooden box now used, and render it entirely impossible that any fraud should be perpetrated, either by the inspector or any one else in any of the ways now practiced by false bottoms in the box, or by putting in more than one ballot at a time, or putting in more votes after the ballot is closed. Assuming that the box is kept in sight of the electors, the ballot is in sight from the time it leaves your hand until it rests securely in the glass globe beyond the reach of any one, till the canvasser unlocks his charge and its truthful story by an honest canvass becomes recorded as the judgment of a free people.

In contrast with the dark murkiness of the wooden ballot box whose potentially hidden crevasses might contain contaminating and “false” votes, Jollie’s contraption provided literal transparency, keeping the ballots at all times “in sight” of voters and electors, as the committee repeatedly emphasized, suggesting a holdover from Enlightenment-era values that conflated visibility and virtue, what Michael Gaudio and Jay Fliegelman have referred to as the “politics of visibility” and self-evidence. Like Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon or the all-seeing eye of the Vigilance Committee medal, vision and visibility held the promise of eliminating corruption and ensuring virtuous, democratic behavior. Other articles similarly praised the transparent properties of glass and its perceived benefits for the electoral process; the New York Times suggested Jollie’s box would “permit the daylight to shine upon the mysteries of the elective franchise in New-York City,” thwarting those who might try to defile it. As the Times related, “It is said that one of the City fathers, on seeing the article, remarked that ‘it was a temptation to smash’”—here was a foil to his machinations and desired manipulations of the ballot box.

These descriptions also suggest the embedded violence that uneasily surrounded discussions of voting. When the state legislators described the process of voting as one in which “the canvasser unlocks his charge,” it is likely that they meant to describe a paternalistic arrangement of responsibility, of the canvasser keeping track of the votes of the citizens as though they were orphans under his care, or as a congregation under the guidance of a minister. Yet “charge” can also suggest an explosive quantity of gunpowder, a military action, or even an electrical shock, one that might have been sparked within the glass sphere of a Leyden jar. The glass ballot box contained many of these multivalent possibilities, evoking the volatility and stakes of the electoral process.

 

Despite common associations of glass and fragility or concerns about those who might try to “smash” the box, Frank Leslie’s assured readers, “its strength is even greater than the old box, and its contents are perfectly visible to any of the voters, thus rendering the purity of the election a matter of the most perfect certainty.” In their accompanying illustration, however, Jollie’s box emerges from a dark haze, its much-avowed transparency replaced instead by shadowy and distorted reflections of its armature box or of the dark room in which it sits (fig. 6). Despite the ominous rendering of the box, which here appears more like a mysterious crystal ball or hourglass, Frank Leslie’s was certain that employing Jollie’s invention nationwide would make the U.S. elections an example of “the purest Freedom has ever held.”

These repeated invocations of purity not only suggest ethereal values of virtue, but also the material properties of glass itself, as it was understood in the period. The nineteenth century saw a massive increase of chemical apparatuses and glassware, as Catherine Jackson and others have observed, and discussions of both scientific and decorative glass repeatedly emphasized the “purity” and non-reactivity of the medium. Clear, transparent glass was prized for looking as pure as water, capable of withstanding corrosive chemicals, not altering or reacting with contents. Though made from base materials like sand and ash, the high temperature at which glass formed was understood to eliminate impurities; as the entry on “glass” from the 1852 edition of Appleton’s Dictionary of Machines and Mechanics explained, “it is left to the process of melting to eject the impurities in a more or less complete manner.” In its non-reactivity, chemical glassware both allowed observation of the experiments unfolding within, while it also promised not to alter or interfere in chemical reactions. It thus is a remarkably neutral material, not merely a transparent one, and the potential associations of (political) neutrality and stability might also have resonated with viewers encountering the box, its central sphere resembling a round-bottomed flask.

Making the Sphere: Glass, Labor, and the Cost of Democracy

Glassware in this period, from decorative decanters and everyday drinking glasses to chemistry apparatuses and our ballot box, was widely understood to be formed by glass blowing. Surviving boxes suggest this too, with tiny air bubbles, irregular striations, and slight variations in their surfaces. In her wide-ranging consideration of nineteenth-century “glass cultures,” Isobel Armstrong has elucidated not only the pervasiveness of glass and its metaphors or “poetics,” but also the period’s awareness of the materiality and labor of glass, popularized by accounts of visits to glass factories, part of the genre of factory tourism. The work of glass-blowers was seen as a kind of alchemical magic, but also one that demanded skill and endurance, cooperation and coordination, all conducted under dramatic and demanding labor conditions: extreme heat, likelihood of injury, strength of muscle and lungs. Indeed, the hollow spheres of ballot boxes and wine goblets alike were formed from the breath of laborers. Although tabletop apparatuses and delicate items like test tubes could be made at home by chemists experimenting with glassblowing, the scale of Jollie’s glass globe would have required heavy industrial labor. One newspaper account from 1858 suggested that at least three firms contributed glass globes for the city’s large order: New England Glass Company and Bay State Glass Company, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the P.C. Dummer Glass Company, from nearby Jersey City.

 

To make the globe of Jollie’s ballot box, glass workers would dip a long metal blowpipe into liquid, molten glass from a furnace maintained around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (this video shows of the process of glass-blowing, although the sphere for Jollie’s ballot box would have been approximately three times this size). Collecting molten glass on the end of the pipe in a glob known as a “gather,” an action that is often compared to the gesture of spooning up honey onto a dipper, the glass worker continually swirls the pipe in a circular motion to keep the glass on the end of his pipe with its centrifugal force. He (industrial glassworkers were almost always male in this period) then either rolls the end of the pipe with the hot glass gather across a slab (usually called a marver), so that this even force produces a round even shape and slightly cools the glass, or he molds it with a curved wooden scoop (called a block) that has been soaked in a bucket of water. Once the surface has cooled a bit, he brings the hollow end of the pipe to his mouth and blows, forming a bubble at the opposite end. To make the globe bigger or thicker, he could again return to the furnace to add more molten glass, continuing to roll the pipe and then blow into the tube. Once this reaches the desired size, the glass worker returns to a bench where he continues to roll the pipe, using gravity to help form an even sphere. There, a bucket of water holds additional tools for shaping the glass; for the purposes of making a sphere, a somewhat rounded scoop made of fruitwood is taken out of the water and rolled along the surface of the glass; the globe is then polished and smoothed by the worker’s palm, cushioned and insulated by a pile of damp newspapers. Given the popularity of glass factory tours and their presence in literature, viewers would likely realize the labor involved in producing the box. While the globe would soon be filled with paper ballots, metaphorically representing the voice of the people, it had already been filled and formed by the breath of laborers in the glass works. Although those cynical about the participation of laborers in the political sphere might then point out that these ballot boxes were thus full of “hot air,” others might emphasize the necessary collaboration and cooperation enacted among glass workers, as they transferred molten glass from pipe to rod or coordinated different aspects of factory-scale production, a potential microcosm of a functioning democracy.

Given the labor and materials involved in constructing the boxes, Jollie set a price of $15 for the boxes. Inspired by the promises of transparency and visibility, and hoping indeed to restore the “purity” of elections, the city of New York entered into a contract with the inventor to purchase up to 4,000 of his boxes (records suggest they actually purchased somewhere between 1,200 and 1,700). One hundred and fifty of Jollie’s ballot boxes were also shipped express from New York to San Francisco in the fall of 1856 in the hopes of “preserv[ing] the purity of elections” there as well, where the stuffer’s ballot box had originally been found. Trenor W. Park, one of the members of San Francisco’s Vigilance Committee, published advertisements in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, in which he announced he had received a consignment of 150 of these boxes, guaranteed to arrive before October 20, in time for upcoming elections. Although Jollie isn’t mentioned by name, Park’s description clearly evokes the patented spherical box: “The boxes are of globular form, and enclosed in an iron frame, and can be secured to the tables of the Inspectors of elections; and by reason of their transparent quality, are incapable of fraud, and would detect any fraudulent ballots that might be cast.”

Although the New York State Assembly had been presented with dramatic arguments that attested to the virtues of Jollie’s contraptions, they did not vote to adopt the boxes statewide, and so the boxes were used only in San Francisco and New York City, at least at that early date. Jollie delivered his boxes to the Board of Police Commissioners (at the time responsible for overseeing elections) by the end of October 1857, ensuring their use in the state elections of November 3, 1857.

 

Ironically enough, shortly after it was first unveiled in New York, Jollie’s ballot box itself became associated with corruption and fraud. New Yorker James Horner publicly accused mayor Fernando Wood, widely understood to be part of the corrupt political machinery, and his collaborators or cronies of setting up Jollie as their front man, pocketing the profits from the sale of the boxes themselves. An injunction brought against the men claimed the boxes could be made much more cheaply—perhaps only $4.50—but the city had been charged $15 apiece. Accusing Benjamin Wood of procuring the glass globes, rather than Jollie himself, the plaintiff outlined the materials and cost involved in making a box, albeit only for the raw materials (pounds of glass rather than the finished spheres), accusing Jollie of selling his interest to Wood. Jollie also had to take his case to court in order to receive payment; there was confusion over whether the Board of Police Commissioners was responsible for paying him or the city itself, and litigation dragged on through the murky court system as each accused the other of being the responsible party. Though Jollie’s glass ballot box promised transparency, purity, and clarity in politics and elections, it could not guarantee the same for itself. The literal and metaphorical costs of ensuring the democratic process suggested a more complicated reality than the glass had seemed to promise.

In the ensuing years, Jollie’s boxes nonetheless continued to be used in elections, and beyond their actual use at the polls, the boxes became potent symbols themselves, quickly recognizable icons of the ballot box and the democratic process. The many ways in which they were deployed in a variety of political cartoons and editorial statements, however, indicate the conflicts and struggles of different historical periods that nonetheless embraced the box as an emblem, evocative of both threats to and promises of democracy. The glass box and its representations were used to embody hopes and fears about American culture and its body politic, alternately assuaging anxieties about fraud or expanding voting rights, or serving as a vehicle to stoke the flames of racism, sexism, and class conflict.

Expanding the Sphere of Suffrage: The Ballot Box as Instrument and Icon

 

While Jollie’s boxes were first adopted in 1856, it’s clear that they were still being used in elections in 1864, when Frank Leslie’s, perhaps protesting a bit too much, ran a story that highlighted the “order” and rationality of the wartime election. In a report that congratulated the self-restraint and “perfect quiet” of that Election Day, likely due in large part to the enforced one-day closure of liquor stores, the journalists were at pains to illustrate in words and images the measures that were being taken to avoid fraud, including the use of Jollie’s boxes (fig. 7):

The ballot-boxes now used are hollow globes of glass, fixed in an iron frame; seven of these are placed on a table, and into them every voter deposits his ballot. Before, however, he is allowed to do this, he gives his name and address to the Inspector, who turns to see if he is registered; if correct, he ticks off the name, and the ballot is put into the box. When the sun sets, these are counted by persons appointed by both parties, to prevent the possibility of fraud. Our readers will recollect that when there was so much excitement on the subject of glass ballot-boxes—which were, by the way, the invention of the well-known music-seller, S. C. Jollie —we published an illustration of one, with full particulars, at the time they were adopted some seven years ago.

 

Yet the article—and accompanying illustrations—did admit to attempts at fraud, luckily thwarted by the actions of election inspectors. Vignettes showed the ballot boxes lined up on a table, seeming to form a balustrade of sorts, as the “Man who voted early and often” was led away; in another scene, an election official transports the glass boxes under heavy guard to be counted.

The arresting architectural form of the boxes, along with their inherent promises of transparency and neutrality, made them icons in representations of fair and orderly elections. A November 1867 cover of Harper’s Weekly marking the occasion of Southern elections under Reconstruction and the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment featured a line of black men approaching glass globe ballot boxes in the foreground, illustrated by Alfred Waud, who had been a special artist for the New York Illustrated News and Harper’s during the Civil War (fig. 8). Under an American flag, the three black men are dressed to represent different classes, from the patched and tattered clothes of the formerly enslaved to the fashionable suit of the aspiring businessman and the proud uniform of the Union veteran, all lining up to cast their first votes. The man at the front of the line with his graying hair and beard, mended pants, pockets full of tools, and rope belt suggesting his previously enslaved status, removes his hat upon the solemn occasion and raises his eyes heavenward; his outstretched arm drops a rolled ballot into the waiting, gleaming, glass globe. As with Frank Leslie’s account of the wartime election of 1864, the accompanying article extolled the order and restraint of the occasion:

 

The good sense and discretion, and above all the modesty, which the freedmen have displayed in the exercise, for the first time, of the great privilege which has been bestowed upon them, and the vast power which accompanies the privilege, have been most noticeable. Admiration of their commendable conduct has suggested the admirable engraving which we give on the first page of this issue. The freedmen are represented marching to the ballot-box to deposit their first vote, not with expressions of exultation or of defiance of their old masters and present opponents depicted on their countenances, but looking serious and solemn and determined.

The image and text thus served a didactic purpose, promoting the ideal behavior for “freedmen” enjoying “the great privilege” of voting (and here, Harper’s asserted this privilege was one that had been “bestowed upon them,” rather than a hard-earned right for which many had fought). In addition to the emblematic “types” of black men—former slave, aspiring businessman, proud veteran, conveniently lined up in a row—which suggest a somewhat more allegorical construction rather than “documentary” account, the use of a Jollie-style ballot box suggests an artist who has only voted in New York, rather than an eyewitness to elections in the southern states, which were unlikely to have such elaborate items, especially in the immediate post-bellum period. Nonetheless, Waud’s illustration highlights Jollie’s glass ballot box in this scene of order and democracy as a fitting repository for the noble process of voting and the orderly expansion of the franchise. Order, tranquility, and rule of law have returned to the post-Civil War South, and Jollie’s boxes, as much as the recognizable stars and stripes overhead, stand as emblems of unity and democratic society, bringing together races, classes, and ultimately, regions, promising an integrated, peaceful society.

 

In his cover design, Waud might have been influenced by the more famous Thomas Nast, who in March of the same year (1867) had published “The Georgetown Election—The Negro at the Ballot-Box” (fig. 9), depicting a black man who has removed his cap and approached the ballot box as an election official who resembles Abraham Lincoln looks up from his register approvingly; figures representing those who had attempted to veto black suffrage (including a man wearing a hat labeled “Ex-CSA” and a representation of Andrew Johnson) scowl in response. Here, the two boxes with their glowing, architectural forms stand as a promising counter to the corrupt politicians on the left side of the illustration, and viewers can see that Welch’s box is already full of ballots, while that labeled for “The White Man’s Ticket for Mayor H. Addison” seems nearly empty. Indeed, Charles D. Welch triumphed over Henry Addison in the mayoral race of 1867, taking office as the new mayor of Georgetown shortly afterward.

Beyond its depiction in supposedly documentary representations of voting at the polls, Jollie’s design for ballot boxes quickly became an icon of the democratic process, its distinct form showing up in dozens of political cartoons and even providing the inspiration for a campaign torch to be carried in night-time processions and torchlight parades, marketed as a “pure ballot box” torch in an 1880 pamphlet. Whether this is an indication of the New York-centered publication world or the appeal of its form, the box’s central glass globe and fluted columns appear throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, in representations meant to extol the process of transparent elections, in works that question the straightforwardness of the process, and in allegorical representations of suffrage, agency, and the will of the people. Its form proved malleable to deployment in support of differing political positions, and its use across the political spectrum showed that it could contain or convey a wide array of sentiments, much as the “neutrality” of the original glass box was meant to do.

 

Some artists’ renderings echoed the optimistic hopes that this ballot box would end corruption and fraud, indeed ensuring transparent elections. In a triumphant cover from December of 1871, artist Charles Stanley Reinhart depicted an allegorical figure of Justice, holding her scales aloft; from one end dangles the “Tammany tiger,” a noose gathered tightly about its neck, juxtaposed with the quiet and composed symmetry of the glass ballot box, here inscribed “Vox Populi” (fig. 10). Full of ballots indicated by quick rectangular lines and with its lock still prominently secured, Jollie’s box weighs down the scales and jerks the tiger into the air, indicating the victory of the people’s vote over the corrupt Tammany machinery. Almost a decade later, the cover of Puck featured an “American Invention for Blowing Up Bosses,” depicting the distinctive Jollie ballot box, full of “Free Ballots,” atop a smokestack and weathervane (fig. 11). The allegorical figure of Justice, outfitted with gladiator sandals, toga, and sword, has here been replaced by the smokestack of a factory or perhaps a power plant, powered by “Public Common Sense”—yet Jollie’s glass ballot box was still seen as a fitting emblem in both contexts, suggesting its adaptability and appeal as a potent symbol. As the accompanying article remarked, “That useful institution, the ballot-box, has let out its charge of free votes, and blown a large aperture through the body politic of Bossism.” The public’s ballots erupt from the top of the box, scattering corrupt politicians or “bosses” to all corners of the earth. This image and caption again evoke the double meaning of “charge,” the violent possibilities embedded within the radical process of the democratic vote.

In 1894, when debates over a proposed income tax in the guise of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act were raging, the box’s ability to represent the will of the people was taken to an even greater extreme. Louis Dalrymple’s Puck cover features an anthropomorphized Jollie ballot box, who wears a top hat and wags his gloved finger at the figure of “Democracy” occupying a chair labeled “Congress,” holding a quill pen as she furrows her brow at a scroll labeled “Income Tax Law,” as though she is debating whether or not to sign it (fig. 12). In this cartoon, the ballot box has been gendered male, an independent figure who knows his own mind and ominously reminds Congress of the power he wields, conveying his disapproval of the proposed income tax and threatening to vote representatives out of office. The ballot box then is rendered not as an empty vessel or “air-head,” but rather a powerful figure that enacts the agency of the people—or at least of those who had the right to vote. Even after the turn of the twentieth century, the box held this meaning of independent power; J.S. Pughe’s 1902 cartoon features Uncle Sam dressed as a policeman, sternly reprimanding a man whose hands and wallet are full of cash and whose top hat reads “Candidate for Senate” (fig. 13). The dark recesses of the “Senatorial Box Office” have been locked and boarded over, while Jollie’s box stands independently, elevated on a column and yet still under close supervision. Thwarting his attempts to purchase a Senate seat, Uncle Sam redirects the “candidate” away from the box office and toward the sculptural, transparent ballot box, though in this case it has been labeled, as if viewers might not immediately grasp the iconography.

 

Despite these many invocations of the ballot box in illustrations that were meant to indicate the free will of the people and the successful realization of democracy, Jollie’s box was just as often deployed in cartoons and objects that expressed doubt about the likelihood of preventing corruption and fraud. In one of the most marked examples from the contentious early 1870s, Boss Tweed leans with a scowl against a table on which the ballot box rests, his round belly echoing the form of the spherical ballot box; a sign notes “In Counting There Is Strength.” Tweed, smoking his cigar and with his hand in his pocket, unperturbed, is captioned as asking the reader “‘As long as I count the Votes, what are you going to do about it?’” Although Jollie’s box promised transparency and an end to fraud, Nast here points to the pragmatic concerns about the possible continuation of corruption and election manipulation. This pessimistic cartoon evokes similar reservations to those expressed by the New York Times shortly after the announcement of Jollie’s invention; as the editors warned,

There is a fraud beyond the ballot box that demands attention from Vigilance Committees in the political clubs now organizing—the fraud of ‘swapping’ and ‘juggling’ returns! … It is true the canvass is conducted in public, but the tallies are kept sometimes on slates—sometimes with pencil—and in nearly every case upon loose scraps of paper… It is this transposition of results which defrauds electors and not the stuffing of ballot-boxes. And the City swarms with experts in the art, who, keeping the cool head and automaton memory and gambling arithmetic of a professed rake, can surpass even the Wizard Anderson in rapid combinations and transformations.

 

Here, the “machinery” of vote counting and tallying threatened to undermine the investment in the new ballot boxes. Despite the greatest hopes in the technology and material of the boxes, the authors suggested, the process of voting and tallying was still open to manipulation and corruption. A mechanical bank featuring candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, patented in 1878, explicitly tied voting and money together; users would deposit a coin into the hand of Hayes, who then dropped it into a glass ballot box already filled with slips of paper reading “HAYES.” A legend at the base of the box instructed visitors to “Vote early and often,” undermining the supposed transparency of the election process and uneasily mixing money and ballots. Continued concerns about corruption and the inability of the box’s design to thwart those who were determined to cheat resurfaced as late as 1912, when a political cartoon mocked a “repeater” who might cast votes in multiple precincts; here, a man puffing a cigar and wearing a bowler hat winks at the viewer as he drops his ballot in a Jollie-style box. Jollie’s box was intended to address issues of corruption and fraud, and yet many realized that it could not on its own resolve these problems.

Beyond its continued susceptibility to tampering, the ballot box also didn’t prevent voter intimidation or violence, as some cartoons ominously warned. Thomas Nast’s “Relieving (‘Bayonet’) Guard” expressed concerns about Southern politicians supervising their own elections after the removal of federal overseers and is one such example. “An honest ballot box,” after Jollie’s design, has been under the watchful protection of a U.S. soldier, but now another figure comes to relieve him from duty; viewers can see that his cartridge box is labeled “C.S.A.,” indicating previous service in the Confederate army, and the brim of his hat turns up to reveal the letters “K.K.K.” A cartoon by illustrator J. A. Wales took these warnings further (fig. 14). “Every thing points to a Democratic Victory this fall” once again featured a line of African-American voters coming to place their ballots (one marked “Republican Ticket”) in the glass ballot box, but instead of their votes being accepted into Jollie’s box, they are met by a man who points a pistol at them; white voters enter through another door and pass by unencumbered. Although the New York councilmen were convinced the box itself could withstand bullets, “proof against a pistol ball,” the voters themselves were still vulnerable.

 

As seen in illustrations marking the passage and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Jollie’s glass ballot box was invoked in many works that broached the topics of expanding suffrage, whether artists were in favor of the new voters or opposed to them. While some cartoonists used the device to express sympathy for new voters, depicting them nobly engaged in a sacred pursuit, as seen in “The Negro at the Ballot Box,” others used the setup to deride new voters or others they considered not “worthy” of the right to vote. Thomas Nast’s “Give the Natives a Chance, Mr. Carl,” encapsulates this tension (fig. 15). Here, a stern, bespectacled white gentleman, meant to represent Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, presents Jollie’s ballot box to a group of caricatured American Indians dressed in stereotypical regalia of feathers and fringe; they crowd about the ballot box and poke it suspiciously, while one has a shocked expression on his face. On the wall behind them are drawings of three additional caricatures: a black man with exaggerated lips, a bearded Scotsman wearing plaids and carrying a pipe, and a stereotypical Irish man with bowler hat and broad jowls; each carries a Jollie ballot box over the legend “Civilized by the Ballot Box.” Nast’s cartoon starkly reveals assumptions about which ethnic groups were in need of the civilizing process, requiring “Americanization” and training before they could be fully functioning members of the republic. The ballot box itself was thus seen as a civilizing tool, an object that could instruct working-class, ethnic groups seen as not sufficiently “American” in the ways of democracy.

Representing potential voters who misunderstood the purpose or workings of the ballot box was also the tactic employed for Thomas Nast’s 1869 cover of Phunny Phellow, in which a caricatured unkempt Irish washerwoman attempts to clean the Jollie ballot box (fig. 16); she has attacked the box so vigorously, with soap and soda and boiling water and her scrub-brush, that it has begun to crack. While some proclaimed that women’s votes would “purify the ballot box,” again invoking language of purity and suggesting their higher morals, this potential female voter is ridiculed in her attempts at literal cleanliness, set aside as a working class woman who does not understand the delicate workings of the box. Yet the device of cleansing the ballot box was not always one of mockery. A few years after his caricatured Irish cleaning woman, Nast favorably depicted Uncle Sam and Miss Columbia cleaning house together to eliminate corruption; as she scrubs the judges’ bench with “reform soap,” Uncle Sam rolls up his sleeves and dips the Jollie ballot box in a sink of steaming water, gently polishing it with a cloth. These allegorical figures, though engaged in manual labor of cleaning, are coded as white, Anglo-Saxon, idealized figures, whose work elevates them and their society.

 

Despite its initial employment in cartoons that mocked the prospect of female voters and expanding suffrage, Jollie’s style of ballot box was actually used as an icon in support of women’s suffrage in later years. A 1909 special issue of the San Francisco Call entitled “Woman and the Ballot Number” used the Jollie ballot box as a decorative motif throughout, encircling portraits of female activists with Art Nouveau-inspired borders of garlands, ribbons, flowers, and the glass ballot box, stuffed with votes. The color insert for the issue featured an elegant woman, her arms outstretched (fig. 17). In her left arm, she holds a tiny cradle in front of a vignette of a mother and child; her right hand holds one of Jollie’s ballot boxes with a representation of fashionable white women seated at a table draped with American flag-style bunting. Graceful script proclaims “‘I can handle both,’ says the Lady.” Here, all of the responsibilities of participation in a democratic society were encapsulated in the Jollie-style ballot box, held aloft, while the feminized elements of Art Nouveau styling, with their graceful curves, aesthetically portray the ballot box as an appropriate element of a woman’s sphere.

A few years later, Kenyon Cox also embraced Jollie’s ballot box as a potent icon that could embody the values of a democratic society. Among his designs intended for the decorative program of the Wisconsin State Capitol, Cox composed an allegorical figure of “Liberty,” wearing a Phrygian cap and protectively holding a Jollie-style ballot box. The artist described his design in text that has been reprinted in guides to the Capitol ever since: “Liberty wears the traditional Phrygian cap of red, but is otherwise dressed in two shades of green, color of youth and hope. With her right hand she guards the ballot box, while with her left hand she points upward as if to say that ‘Under a republican form of government, the voice of the people is the voice of God.’” Preparatory drawings indicate the strict geometry of Cox’s composition and its emphasis upon circular forms, in keeping with his Neoclassical style. The ballot box, with its curving sphere and gracefully tapering legs, mirrors the round motif of the composition as a whole and also the allegorical figure’s billowing drapery. Cox’s decision to render the decorations as circular medallions that surrounded the dome of the rotunda echoed the composition of the ballot box writ large; as in Jollie’s cross-section patent design drawing, this form suggested a central circle bordered by four smaller circles, the columnar supports. The work was brought to completion as a pendentive mosaic in the Madison rotunda in 1914, its design translated into thousands of tiny pieces of glass (fig. 18). Here, the glass ballot box was itself rendered in glass, but in a glass of opposite qualities than the ones Jollie prized: rather than a clear and transparent medium that exposed what transpired under its surface, the multicolored glittering pieces of mosaic glass were opaque, reflective, and dazzling, providing surface decoration rather than a penetrative view (fig. 19). Another irony, of course, is that the female allegorical figure who guards the ballot box could not herself vote, as women did not attain the right to vote until 1920.

 

By that time, Jollie’s glass ballot box had become an old-fashioned curiosity, rather than a cutting-edge invention, exhibited and referred to as a relic of an earlier era. One example of a Jollie box was included in the Board of Elections display for the 1923 Silver Jubilee exhibition, which contrasted old and new New York; the catalog noted the changing values that had perhaps led to its disuse: “This style soon became unpopular due to the possibility of exposure to public view of the marking on a voter’s ballot.” Secrecy of the ballot, rather than transparency, had become more prized in the intervening years, and the voting booth, with its privacy curtains and narrow stalls, became the standard iconography of the democratic process in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, Jollie’s box still provides a lens through which to view history, and its continued display and relative disappearance are worth considering.

From the Polls to the Museum—and the Home

 

In the winter of 1919, George Hamilton Dean, who operated his family’s eponymous confectioner and caterer’s on Fifth Avenue, decided to donate his “iron ballot box” to the New-York Historical Society. Writing to librarian Robert Kelby, he related his memories of the box: “The only thing I know about it is that it has been in the possession of Dean’s as far back as I can remember. When I came with my father some twenty five years ago, we had it.” This note suggests the box had been decorating the store, rather than collecting ballots at the polls, at least as early as 1895. Its purpose had shifted from an emblem of democracy to a decorative prop owned by a private citizen and his family’s corporation; it was now once again transferred to the public domain in the form of the museum. The curators informed Dean that it would be placed in the New York City Room, where it joined “paintings and relics of this City,” such as the Marquis de Lafayette punch bowl, which commemorated Lafayette’s 1824 visit to New York, remnants of the equestrian statue of King George III and that of William Pitt, and the Beekman family coach, which was described as “a charming relic of Old New York” in an April 1917 quarterly report. These repeated invocations of “relics” suggest that the box was categorized with items of a far-distant past, enshrined with artifacts of New York history. As his stationery and many advertisements from the period note, Dean’s family business was celebrating its eightieth year, and it is possible that Dean wished to align himself and his family’s business with local history and the solid institutions of New York’s civic life. A plaque was screwed into the openwork of the box’s iron top, much as the box could have been affixed to balloting tables in earlier days. Its inscription read: “BALLOT BOX/USED IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK PRIOR TO 1870/PRESENTED BY/GEORGE H. DEAN/MARCH 8, 1919.” An interior view of the New York Room shows the Jollie ballot box in front of the Beekman carriage, displayed atop a millstone. The Society of Pewterer’s banner hangs almost directly above it, and a table that is likely one of the desks from Federal Hall sits next to it, its turned legs echoing the ballot box’s columns. Although it might have qualified as a “relic,” it doesn’t seem to be held in high regard among these other objects, resting as it does on the millstones, barely raised above the floor, as commonplace or rudimentary an item as wheels that had once ground grain.

 

Indeed, so far had the ballot box fallen from its once-exalted position that by the late 1920s, it could be found in the pages of the Bannerman Catalogue of Military Goods alongside surplus army uniforms and wartime relics, incongruously advertised on a page of “Belt Buckles and Miscellaneous Military Goods” (fig. 20). Bannerman listed it as a “NEW YORK CITY OLD-TIME BALLOT-BOX, relic of the days when Boss Tweed ruled the city. Can be used as an aquarium … heavy glass globe … weighs 39 pounds. Top, bottom and frame artistic iron casting, good glass; will make a splendid fish globe. Must have cost the city $50.00 each. Our bargain price, $2.85.” Rather than a proud icon of democracy, Jollie’s box was reduced to an overstock bargain and affiliated with Boss Tweed, associating it with the very corruption it was designed to prevent. Once regarded as a key component of the sacred sphere of the election process, Jollie’s box, with its confused historiography, was now available at a “bargain price” to anyone with purchasing power, with a suggested repurposing of holding not votes but pet fish, a leisurely spectacle for a family living room.

The transformation of the ballot box from a crucial apparatus in the machinery of the American democratic process to a domestic object suited for raising pets or observing natural history was pointedly examined by author Mary Bamford in a 1903 article for The Pacific. While her box was a square glass one, rather than Jollie’s globe design, her appreciation of the irony of a ballot box’s adaptation into a domestic object for a woman who herself could not vote is evident from the opening lines of her narrative:

It was in no spirit of derision toward the Person-who-does-not-vote that the Benevolent Man presented her with a genuine wood-and-glass ballot-box. The Benevolent Man had long been interested in spiders, and with masculine wisdom had perceived the adaptations of a ballot-box for a home for such creatures. The Person-who-does-not-vote was ignorant of Ballot boxes, never before having held one in her hands, but she perceived that a ballot-box … was a suitable cage through which … she might watch the doings of captive spiders. … The hole in the top of the box,—that hole through which the Person-who-does-not-vote supposed that the ballots of American Citizens once dropped,—had been covered with wire netting and so formed a ventilator, without allowing captive spiders to escape.

Bamford goes on to relate her observations of the spiders, couching her discoveries as those of an amateur naturalist, an acceptable activity for middle-class white women of the time. By repurposing a ballot box, and calling attention both to that act and to the discrepancies of power between the “Benevolent Man” and “the Person-who-does-not-vote,” her account transcends a work of natural history and instead becomes a commentary on gender relations and agency. Not only does the ballot box transform from an object of American democracy into an object of the domestic sphere by providing a “home” for a spider family, it also becomes a sort of prison or cage for them, trapping the “captives” inside, holding them under observation. Bamford archly observed, in not so many words, that this was as close an involvement as a woman might have with a ballot box.

 

Another tantalizing domestic adaptation of the ballot box by a woman who was herself unable to vote was featured in an election season story in the fall of 1926 in the San Francisco Chronicle, which included a photograph of the ballot box captioned as a “Relic of Pioneer Days,” echoing the language of Bannerman’s and the New-York Historical Society. It recounted the story of an election board member who brought two ballot boxes home after they were retired from service at the San Francisco polls in 1865: “His mother, Mrs. Nathaniel Gr[a]y, being a thrifty housewife, saw possibilities in the glass container protected by its wrought iron case and converted the ballot boxes into pickle jars. For many years the Grey family enjoyed pickled peaches which were domiciled in the former vote mobilizers…” Where once the ballot box had been an active agent in “mobilizing” the will of the people, it was now a domestic or even “domiciled” object, repurposed by a “thrifty housewife” who did not have the right to vote. Although the newspaper article went on to recount the history of the stuffer’s ballot box and the conditions that led to the glass ballot box’s adaptation, the story dwelt largely upon the domestic repurposing of the box: “the opening through which thousands of ballots, and pickled peaches, have passed and repassed is covered by an iron lid equipped with a hasp for a padlock.” While the lock would have been an effective means of containing and protecting votes, the ballot box was decidedly not airtight enough to seal pickled fruits or vegetables, perhaps seen as too domestic a concern to disrupt a good story. The “purity of the ballot box” was now understood to safely preserve foodstuffs. It is likely that these ballot-boxes-turned-pickle-jars were indeed some of the original boxes manufactured by Jollie and shipped to San Francisco, offered by consignment by T.W. Park to fellow members of the Vigilance Committee in the wake of the stuffer’s ballot-box controversy.

Less than ten years after their feature in the San Francisco Chronicle, these same boxes, now in the collection of the Oakland Museum, were selected for inclusion in the Index of American Design, that massive WPA-underwritten project to document objects of American material culture, suggesting an appreciation of its aesthetic forms, rather than its function as a vote collector or pickling jar. Among examples of early American crafts primarily made by hand, the semi-mass-produced box is an unusual inclusion. For its photograph to document the box, strong lights enliven the globe’s somewhat irregular sphere, catching its slight undulations, while casting a shadow from the decorative top (fig. 21). In her watercolor rendering, Rose Campbell-Gerke captures this play of light and shadow but also emphasizes the patina of the box, its peeling surface flecked with rust, a green, copper-like patina rather than sturdy, industrial cast iron (fig. 22), aligning the box with the rustic weathervanes or flaking paint of polychrome wooden toys and painted chests found elsewhere in the Index. The box has been removed from its functional context and instead is presented as an antique, an aesthetic object indicative of strong American design sense.

Transparency in Elections?

 

In addition to the two boxes in storage at the Oakland Museum, another Jollie box now sits in the Children’s Museum section of the New-York Historical Society, bypassed by most children who run to the blinking lights and broadcast sounds of nearby “interactive” screen-based displays about New York baseball and other aspects of New York’s cultural history. Two examples given to the Museum of the City of New York have been in off-site storage since being donated in the 1950s and 1960s, although this autumn (2016) one will go back on view in a reconceived exhibition. Far from being the immediately recognizable icon of democratic elections that it was in the late nineteenth century, the Jollie ballot box has primarily been forgotten. Yet its design evokes much of the inspirational lexicon that people still employ during campaigns and elections: desires for transparency and neutrality, references to a grand democratic, republican past, calls for order, symmetry, durability, and strength. Although the Jollie box is now devoid of ballots, it remains a potent object in current discussions of political transparency, fairness, and the sanctity of the franchise. Just as the hanging chad, the butterfly ballot, and the Diebold voting machine came to exemplify fears and anxieties about voting, democracy, and representation at the turn of the twenty-first century, Jollie’s box is a compelling embodiment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century election concerns. Its shimmering transparency and historical deployment in political cartoons that alternately mocked and elevated different demographics of the voting and non-voting populations continue to resonate with debates about voter ID laws, concerns about voter fraud, and competing claims of political transparency. Amid outcries about the possibilities of election rigging or the hacking of electronic voting machines, Jollie’s transparent ballot box reminds us that the democratic process has always been a contested sphere.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many friends and colleagues who discussed this project with me, read earlier drafts of the work, and shared their responses and insights, especially Susan Burch, Hélène Valance, Emily Gephart, Seth Feman, Jason Hill, and Sarah Anne Carter. I also would like to thank the many archivists, curators, and librarians who shared their collections and facilitated much of the research process, including Lauren Brincat and Tammy Kiter of the New-York Historical Society, Lauren Robinson and Emily Chapin of the Museum of the City of New York, Charles Ritchie and Michele Willens of the National Gallery of Art, Anna Bunting of the Oakland Museum of California, Rossy Mendez and Ken Cobb of the New York City Municipal Archives, Jackie Sarich of the Chipstone Foundation, Nan Wolverton of the American Antiquarian Society, staff of the San Francisco Public Library, and the interlibrary loan department at Middlebury College Libraries.

Further Reading

I have been able to find very little information about inventor Samuel C. Jollie, whose primary occupation seems to have been as a music publisher and musical instrument seller; his name appears on many examples of mid-century sheet music, including a fantastic example from the Levy Collection that depicts his storefront at 385 Broadway in New York. He is listed at this address in Longworth’s directory of 1838 (along with George W. Teubner, engraver, whose name also appears in the Levy sheet), as are Anna M. Whittingham, “fancy goods,” and I. Whittingham, Milliner, of 287 Broadway. By 1848, Samuel C. Jollie was listed in Doggett’s New York City Directory as selling pianos at 201 Broadway, and by 1856, Trow’s Directory listed him with the simple descriptor “music,” at 519 Broadway (the St. Nicholas Hotel) and his home residence in Bergen Point, New Jersey. For more on the Jollie family, see Nancy Groce, Musical Instrument Makers of New York: A Directory of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Urban Craftsmen. In the 1860 census, Jollie was included as a “Professor of Music,” age 44. A mortuary notice, but no obituary, was published in the New York Herald October 31, 1861, listing his date of death as October 29, 1861, aged 51 years.

So far, I have located the following surviving Jollie-style ballot boxes:

Two examples at the Museum of the City of New York: accession numbers 50.81.8 and 63.163

One example at the New-York Historical Society: accession number 1919.10ab

Two examples at the Oakland Museum: H26.201A and H26.201B

One example was auctioned at Christie’s, 15-16 January 2008, lot 1217.

Michael Schudson has recently published on the relatively recent phenomenon of “transparency” in politics vis-à-vis the Freedom of Information Act and the culture of the 1950s and 1960s (The Rise of the Right to Know, 2015); for more on the connections between (literal) visibility and order, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (1993); Michael Gaudio, “Swallowing the Evidence: William Bartram and the Limits of Enlightenment,” Winterthur Portfolio 36:1 (Spring 2001). On representation, politics, and “object-oriented democracy,” see Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (2005).

For more on histories of voting technologies, see Roy G. Saltman, The History and Politics of Voting Technology: Chads and Other Scandals (2008); Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? (2012); Barbara Haeberlin, “The Industrialization of Democracy,” Computing for science, engineering, and production mathematical tools for the second industrial revolution (Berlin: Proceedings of the 19th International Meeting of Collectors and Researchers of Historical Computing Instruments, 2013); Lisa Gitelman, “Voting Machines and the Voters They Represent,” Common-place 9:1 (October 2008); Jill Lepore, “Rock, Paper, Scissors: How We Used to Vote,” The New Yorker (October 13, 2008); David Zukerman, The Voting Machine (New York: Political Research Bureau of the Republican County Committee, 1925). The Smithsonian National Museum of American History also has a well-illustrated virtual exhibition called “Vote: The Machinery of Democracy”; see also Douglas W. Jones’s online “A Brief Illustrated History of Voting.”

On the ballots that went into early ballot boxes, see Patricia Crain, “Potent Papers: Secret Lives of the Nineteenth-Century Ballot,” Common-place 9:1 (October 2008); Melanie Goodrich, “19^th Century Ballot Reform in California: A Study of the Huntington Library’s Political Ephemera Collection,” Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project working paper. The American Antiquarian Society and the Boston Athenaeum have digitized their collections of nineteenth-century ballots.

For more on political corruption, fraud, and scandals in San Francisco and New York, see Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (1994); Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (2014); Kenneth D. Ackerman, Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (2005). Sarah Hill also has compiled an impressive bibliography of sources about election fraud pre-2008 as working paper No. 50.

On the important role of political cartoons and illustrated newspapers and magazines, see Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (2006); Fiona Deans Halloran, Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons (2013).

 

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

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Ellery Foutch is an assistant professor in the American Studies Program at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she teaches classes on American art and material culture. She received her PhD in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Her work explores nineteenth-century fascinations with perfection and its preservation, including artist-naturalist Titian Peale’s butterfly projects, painter Martin Johnson Heade’s hummingbird series, the collection of glass botanical models at Harvard, and the work of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow. A forthcoming article on late-nineteenth-century patents for portable magic lantern projectors and illuminated, wearable technologies will be published in Modernism/modernity.

Almost every child in the United States learns who John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson were. They are five men out of a very select group of forty-three (at present count). And certainly many people are also familiar with the names of prominent figures such as John Marshall, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay—men who were not president, but whose names have been passed down through history textbooks, public statues, and names on streets and schools. Less well known to the general public but appearing frequently in histories of early America are men like Artemas Ward, Timothy Pickering, and Asahel Sterns. These men were all members of the 14th Congress from the northeastern section of Massachusetts. They have their own pages on Wikipedia, and they appear in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, maintained by the Office of History and Preservation of the House of Representatives and the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Senate. Most importantly for the purposes of this essay, they appear in the definitive reference book relied upon by scholars studying past congressional elections—Michael Dubin’s United States Congressional Elections, 1788-1997: The Official Results—which offers vote totals for all elections to Congress up to 1997. But there is one man, and one election, that have been lost to history. This article tells the story of how Daniel White got elected to Congress in 1814, and how everybody forgot about it.

Most people who lived and died in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States left little to no trace in the historical record outside of family trees and brief mentions in contemporary newspaper obituaries. But there is also a broad middle ground in history—those who left behind some sort of recorded history that is somewhere in-between, traces that are not easily found through the Web, and instead require digging in archives that haven’t yet been digitized. One of those people is Daniel Appleton White (or Daniel A. White, as contemporary newspapers referred to him), born in the late spring of 1776, just a few weeks before the formal Declaration of Independence, and who died in March of 1861, less than two weeks before the firing on Fort Sumter began the Civil War. There is some information on White that can be found relatively easily, from two memorials written on him—one by request of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1863 and the other at the request of the Essex Institute in 1864 (there is also a collection of some of his papers in the Harvard University Archives). Yet, he is not sufficiently prominent to have earned his own page on Wikipedia, there are scarce traces of him in books published after 1900 (his one mention in The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict is a letter referenced in a bibliographical note), and he has no listing in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. This would not be remarkable, except for the fact that in November of 1814, Daniel A. White was elected to the U.S. Congress from the Essex North District in Massachusetts.

Here is a mystery, which breaks down into several questions.

So here is a mystery, which breaks down into several questions. The first is, if Daniel A. White was elected to Congress in 1814, why is he not listed in the two definitive reference works on members of the U.S. Congress? The second is, if Daniel A. White didn’t serve in Congress, then who did? The third is, if White didn’t serve, then why not? The final question is, why are we only now discovering this fact, some 200 years after the original election?

What happened in November of 1814? Dubin’s collection of data on U.S. congressional elections shows Jeremiah Nelson as the winner of the 1814 election in the Essex-North District. Nelson is listed as receiving 1,810 votes to 205 for Thomas Kitteridge. The Biographical Directory would seem to support this notion with their listing for Nelson: “elected as a Federalist to the Fourteenth and to the three succeeding Congresses and reelected as an Adams-Clay Federalist to the Eighteenth Congress (March 4, 1815-March 3, 1825).” But, if you were to confirm this with the information in the Abstract of Votes for Members of Congress held on microfilm at the Massachusetts Archives, you will indeed find results for the November 1814 election showing returns of 1,810 versus 205 (with 5 scattering votes). The only problem is that Jeremiah Nelson didn’t receive those 1,810 votes. Daniel A. White did.

Contemporary newspaper accounts make it clear that White was the Federalists’ chosen candidate in the district in 1814. He was listed as a candidate for Congress from the Essex North District in the October 21, 1814, edition of the Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette, and references to him as a candidate continued to appear in that paper on a weekly basis throughout the fall. Other newspapers in the region refer to his candidacy as well: the Columbian Centinel of Boston, on October 26, October 29, and November 5; and The Merrimack Intelligencer of Haverhill, Mass., on November 5. Both his overwhelming victory on November 7 and his fervent Federalist views were apparent in a paragraph published in the Herald and Country Gazette the next day to accompany the Newburyport vote total in White’s favor of 407-0: “Thus we see the zeal of the war-hawks, in this town, has so far abated, that they have not even given their candidate a single vote. What will Messrs. Madison & Co. say of their office-holders for this remissness?” The abstract of votes indicates that Republican candidate Thomas Kitteridge did, in fact, fail to receive a single vote from Newburyport, and that he met the same fate in Boxford, Hamilton, Topsfield, and South Reading. As can be seen from the election results compiled in the New Nation Votes database, in only two towns in the district did Kitteridge receive so much as a quarter of the vote: Methuen, where he was outpolled by White 101-55, and Amesbury, where Kitteridge received 30 votes to White’s 80.

 

Thus, it is clear that the absence of White from Dubin’s book is an error. It was Daniel White who received those 1,810 votes. But what about theBiographical Directory—the official government record of members of Congress? White’s absence from that volume is easier to explain: Daniel A. White never served in Congress. The next mention of White in the Newburyport Herald, one of only two newspapers being published in the district at the time, is late in the following spring: “His Excellency has nominated to the Council, the Hon. DANIEL A. WHITE, Esq. of this town, (representative elect to the next Congress,) as Judge of Probate for the county of Essex, vice the venerable HOLTEN, resigned; and NATHANIEL LORD, 3^rd, Esq. Register, of Probate, vice DANIEL NOVE Esq. deceased. The Hon. Mr. WHITE, we learn, has accepted the appointment” (June 6, 1815). Though Article I, Section 6, of the Constitution forbids any representative from being “appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States,” there is no specific mention of state offices, though it would certainly have been impractical and extremely difficult to fulfill both positions. While there is no precise mention in the newspapers of his resignation from his congressional seat, he clearly must have done so before June 27, 1815, when the Newburyport Herald printed the following: “NOTICE. The Federal Republicans of Newburyport, are requested to meet at the Town Hall this evening, PRECISELY at 7 oclock to make arrangements for the selection of a suitable person to represent this District in the Congress of the U. States.”

So, the answer to the first question is clear: while White may have won election to Congress, he resigned that seat in late spring or early summer of 1815, long before the Fourteenth Congress convened on December 4.

This bring us to the next question: who did serve as the Essex North Representative to the Fourteenth Congress? The answer, of course, is Jeremiah Nelson, the man listed in Dubin’s book as having received White’s votes and whom the Biographical Directory lists as the winner of the original election. Nelson, born in either 1768 or 1769, was a prominent Newburyport resident from 1793 until his death in 1838. He had already been a U.S. representative once, serving in the Ninth Congress from 1805 to 1807, defeating the same Thomas Kitteridge who would be White’s opponent in 1806 (in fact, from 1800 to 1817, Kitteridge would be the Republicans’ sacrificial lamb in every election, finishing second in every congressional election except 1812, when the Republicans offered no candidate). After his initial term in Congress, Nelson returned to Newburyport and was a town official in 1815 when he was announced as a candidate in the Newburyport newspaper on July 11: “At a meeting of Delegates from the following towns in Essex North District, viz. Dracut, Boxford, Bradford, Ipswich, Haverhill, Topsfield, Newburyport, Salisbury, Rowley, Andover and Newbury, holden at Hill’s Tavern in Newbury, July 10^th, 1815, it was unanimously voted to support the Hon. JEREMIAH NELSON at the Election to be made on Monday the 17^th inst. as Representative of the said District in Congress, to fill the vacancy occasioned by the resignation of the Hon. DANIEL A. WHITE, appointed Judge of Probate.”

The election was moving at an accelerated pace. There were less than six weeks between the announcement of White’s appointment to the probate court and the election of his successor. (In comparison, in 2013 in my own congressional district, Ed Markey was elected to the U.S. Senate on June 25, in a special election to replace John Kerry, and Katharine Clark was not elected to replace him until December 10).

There was almost no news about the election itself. Of the four newspapers in Essex County, one was a Republican paper (the Essex Register) that reported no news of the election at all. The other three were Federalist papers, yet each printed very little in the way of results. The only actual results were from the Newburyport Herald: “At the Election of Representative to Congress, in this town on Monday last, Hon. Jeremiah Nelson had 184 votes. There were we learn, but two scattering votes given” (July 21, 1815). The returns from the other two newspapers gave vague results, but little in the way of actual details. In fact, the Salem Gazette seemed fairly mystified by the entire proceeding: “Last Monday, we had understood, was to be the day for the election of a Member of Congress, instead of Hon. Mr. White, appointed Judge of Probate, and that the Hon. JEREMIAH NELSON was the federal (we presume there no other in this sterling district) candidate. If the election really took place, we believe it was the most silent and quiet one that has been known since our rulers first began to chain us to the fiery car of Bonaparte; for we have heard nothing of its result, and the election is not even mentioned in the Newburyport paper, which came out the day after” (July 21, 1815).

 

Whatever the other towns may have provided in votes, it was clear that Jeremiah Nelson was now the Congressman-elect from the Essex North District. Since the session had not yet begun, it was Nelson who took his seat in December, and the election of White seemed to have been lost to history at this point. Adding to the disappearance of White’s election was the almost total absence of news on the election to replace him. It is likely that there was little suspense, and thus little interest, in the special election. The Essex North District was so one-sided that the last Federalist to receive less than 60 percent of the vote was when Nelson had run the first time, in 1804. No Republican had ever been elected from the Essex North District, or its predecessor, the Fourth Middle District. What’s more, the election itself had not drawn much in the way of votes, if the results from Newburyport are any indication. While the 1812 and 1814 elections, which were mostly one-sided affairs, had received far fewer vote totals than the more competitive 1808 and 1810 elections, there was still a large drop in the vote total for Newburyport in the 1815 special election. From a high in 1808 of 880 votes, the total had dropped down to 408 in 1814. Yet, this was still more than double the number of votes in the special election, which only drew 184 total votes. In the 1814 congressional race there had only been 2,020 total votes in the district, while the given same towns had 5,299 votes in the governor’s race in the same year. Aside from the matter of low voter interest, there was a much bigger story that was captivating the public’s attention at the time. Nearly every issue of the area papers published, both before and after the election, were full of news about the scandal at Dartmoor Prison in England. Thousands of sailors captured during the War of 1812 were being held prisoner under appalling conditions at the prison on the bleak moors of Devonshire. In April 1815, rumors of an escape attempt led to British guards firing into a crowd of prisoners; the subsequent riot left seven American prisoners dead and thirty-one wounded. This incident was all anyone seemed to care about, and was much bigger news than an election in a lopsided district that could only have one result: the election of Jeremiah Nelson.

A year and a half later, in October 1816, as he was nearing 50, Nelson would decline to run again. As a result, for the first time in the district since 1794, the 1816 election required a second trial (Massachusetts law at the time, as with all of the New England states, required a majority for a winner to be declared in a congressional race). Even in 1794, the race had been between two Federalists. For the first time in living memory, there seemed to be some doubt that the district would send a Federalist to Congress. Yet this was not due to a more robust challenge from Thomas Kitteridge, who again came up short. The problem this time was a lack of unity among the Federalists. The district’s lone Republican newspaper, the Essex Register, took what comfort it could in reporting that the Federalists “have got into a warm quarrel about [Nelson’s] successor, and have two candidates in nomination, viz. Samuel L. Knapp, and Wm. B. Bannister, Esq’rs. Lawyers of Newburyport” (November 2, 1816). With the additional presence of Ebenezer Moseley, another Federalist, in the race, the Merrimack Intelligencer put it succinctly: “Owing to the want of unity in the federal party there will be no choice” (November 9, 1816). A second trial, held in January, had similar results, although Nelson received a scattering of votes. Apparently Nelson’s name had been put back into nomination, according to the January 21, 1817, edition of the Newburyport Herald and Commercial Gazette, which claimed that “we are well assured that Mr. Nelson will serve if elected…” (January 24, 1817). After the second trial, the Federalists did indeed unite behind Nelson, and in the third trial, held in May, he again trounced Kitteridge and returned to Washington.

Nelson would stay in his seat for three more terms, never getting less than 70 percent of the vote. In 1824, he would step down again, and his replacement, John Varnum, would face the closest election in the district’s history, receiving a small plurality of twenty-seven votes in the first election and only getting seven votes more than a majority in the second trial. The election of 1830 featured four candidates, and became the most drawn-out congressional election in U.S. history, not being resolved until over two years after the original election. After the tenth trial, poor Joseph Kitteridge (the son of the persistent Thomas) came closer to Congress than his father ever did, winning 49.01% of the vote, only 35 votes short of being elected. In the thirteenth trial, held on November 12, 1832, Jeremiah Nelson was once again summoned from retirement, and was elected to yet another term in Congress, serving half a term before returning to Newburyport and retiring for good in 1833 (having married late in life, Nelson left four fairly young children at his death in 1838).

Clearly, Jeremiah Nelson is well established in the history books, even if he is hardly a household name. So why, precisely, did Daniel Appleton White decline to serve in Congress?

The quick and easy answer is in those original newspaper articles: that he was appointed judge of probate in Essex County. White was an important enough figure at the time of his death in 1861 that James Walker, the recently retired president of Harvard University, published a memorial to him in 1863. And the pages of that memorial may hold the real reason behind White’s decision: “From 1810 to 1815, Mr. White was a member of the Massachusetts Senate. In that day, for so young a man, this was a high political distinction; but it seems to have had few attractions in his view, except the prospect of serving the public. Indeed, in the beginning, there was one circumstance which made the appointment positively irksome: it drew him away from his family, when they stood most in need of his presence and care; and this apparently to but little purpose, as the government of the State had just passed into the hands of the Democratic party, leaving him in a helpless minority on all the great questions at issue.”

The more likely explanation for White’s decision, however, is simultaneously more prosaic and more personal: he wanted to spend more time with his family. White was a widower, who had been married for less than four years before his wife died in 1811, leaving him with two young daughters. White was understandably not pleased at the prospect of being away from his family as often as a career in Boston would require, a mere forty-three miles away from his home in Haverhill. From Haverhill to the District of Columbia is ten times that distance. At a time when it could take most of a day to travel from Haverhill to the Massachusetts State House, the trip to Washington could easily take more than a week.

Walker expanded on how White’s disposition left him ill-suited to a career in politics: “But we must remember that public life, in itself considered, had no charms for him; and also that the cares and responsibilities of a lawyer in large practice were positively distasteful. A few days after having been admitted to the Bar, he had written to a young friend, ‘last week I took the attorney’s oaths, and was admitted into a profession, the chicanery and drudgers of which I abhor, and fear I always shall.’ Accordingly, we cannot wonder at his accepting a situation which was, beyond question, the most congenial to his nature and habits the law could afford.”

This view of White’s temperament does raise the question of why White would have allowed his name to be put forward as a congressional candidate in the first place. Given the overwhelming Federalist control of the district, he had to know he would be elected. Whether it was due to financial considerations, or the call of public service, White did run for Congress, and perhaps may have been relieved when he was appointed to a position that allowed him to stay in Essex County, much closer to his two daughters. It was the right decision for White, which George Briggs made clear in the memorial he presented at the Essex Institute: “This was the turning point in his life. It was singular, certainly, that a man at the age of thirty-nine, who had already attained marked professional and political distinction, and stood so high in the public favor and confidence, should retire both from the Bar, and from public life, when so wide a sphere of service and influence was open to him.”

The slower rhythms of the probate court were clearly congenial to White, who served on the court for nearly forty years. When he retired in 1853, he had served on the court longer than any person in its history.

This is the point where White seems to have passed out of well-recorded history. He would receive a page in the History of Newburyport Mass., published in 1909, which mentions his election to Congress. His absence from the Biographical Directory is not surprising; the directory doesn’t mention those who were elected to Congress but didn’t serve. His absence from Dubin’s work on congressional elections is clearly an error, as his vote total is attributed to Jeremiah Nelson, who did serve, and whose special election seems to have been mostly lost to history.

All of that raises the final question: why was this election forgotten, and why is all of this finally now coming to light? The absence of the second election is notable primarily because it is also absent from the abstract of votes, kept in the original books at the Massachusetts Archives, but widely available on microfilm. It is, as far as is known, the only congressional election absent from these records. The only known data on the special election held in July of 1815 is from the scant reports in the local newspapers, only one of which contained any actual results. Regardless of why it was overlooked in 1815, it is not in the abstract, and since that has been the primary (and official) source for data on Massachusetts congressional elections, it is no surprise that it came to be lost to history. The existence of the election, however, has now come to light thanks to Philip Lampi and A New Nation Votes, an ongoing collaborative project between the American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University, with funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The primary claim to fame for ANNV has been the massive collection of election records all in one place and their subsequent ongoing digitization. Before this project, a historian seeking access to all of this data would have had to visit the archives of some two dozen states as well as scour the history of hundreds of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century newspapers. But Philip Lampi has done the scouring of those hundreds (and thousands) of newspapers himself, over the course of over forty years, collecting a massive amount of information that is uncovering mysteries like the election of Daniel A. White in November 1814.

While gathering data for Massachusetts elections in 1815, Lampi came upon a mention in theNewburyport Herald of a special election in which Jeremiah Nelson received 184 votes. With no special election for Congress on record in the state of Massachusetts in 1815, Mr. Lampi thought this odd, and called me. Looking together at the record in Dubin, checking our microfilm copy of the abstract of votes, and looking at the directory, it soon became apparent what had happened. It was clear that Daniel A. White had won the original election, that he had resigned his seat, and that Jeremiah Nelson had been elected to replace him.

The records for Jeremiah Nelson’s election in 1815 amount to the votes from one town, and the fact of his election. Its absence from the abstract of votes held at the Massachusetts Archives is, as far is known, a singular omission. It is no longer, however, absent from history.

Further Reading

There were two memorials of Daniel A. White published shortly after his death, and these offer the most detail about his career. The first is Rev. James Walker’s Memoir of Hon. Daniel Appleton White. Prepared Agreeably to a Resolution of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, 1863), available via Google Books. The second is George W. Briggs, Memoir of Daniel Appleton White.Prepared by Request of the Essex Institute, and Read at the Meeting of January 11, 1864 (Salem, 1864), available via openlibrary.org. White also receives brief mention in John J. Currier’s History of Newburyport, Mass., 1764-1909, Volume II (Newburyport, Mass., 1909).

All of the newspapers referenced can be found at the American Antiquarian Society and are available through the America’s Historical Newspapers project scanned by Readex.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

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Erik Beck is the project coordinator for A New Nation Votes, a collaborative project between the American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University, with funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. After two years of data entry, Erik has spent the last four years overseeing the digitization of the Lampi collection, an example of which is highlighted in this article.

With bewitching results

Like many other professors, I have often offered seminars on subjects related to my current research interests. Teaching a topic to either undergraduate or graduate students forces me to review the secondary literature thoroughly and to clarify interpretive themes and identify promising historical questions. Thus, some years ago, when I first began to consider writing a book on the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, I started occasionally teaching advanced (four-hundred-level) seminars—courses required of all our history majors—on the subject of “Witchcraft in Early Modern England and America.”

After the 2002 publication of In the Devil’s Snare, my book on the events of 1692, I at first thought with regret that I could no longer offer witchcraft seminars because I now knew the answers to the questions that had puzzled me for so long. But then I realized that my research had revealed many yet-unexamined aspects of the Salem crisis and that, if I could point students specifically in the direction of those subjects, I could still offer a course that I found intellectually stimulating. A two-hundred-level seminar—aimed primarily at introducing prospective history majors to primary-source research by requiring them to write ten- to fifteen-page term papers along with other shorter essays—seemed to me the ideal vehicle for pursuing this goal.

And so, in the fall of 2003 I offered such a lower-level seminar on Salem witchcraft. Sixteen students enrolled, representing every class from freshmen to seniors and including a mature woman in Cornell’s employee degree program. After having the students read several general works on witchcraft in Europe and America, I focused the course exclusively on Essex County in 1692 and assigned both Bernard Rosenthal’s Salem Story and my own book. Throughout the semester the students and I referred frequently to the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, a Website run by Ben Ray of the University of Virginia, which includes images of the surviving original documents and keyword-searchable transcriptions from Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s three-volume edition of The Salem Witchcraft Papers (1977), along with literary and visual representations of the crisis and other source material. I used the Website both to teach the students how to read seventeenth-century handwriting and to show them the importance of comparing the sometimes flawed published transcriptions with original documents.

The course turned out remarkably well, as the students developed their own topics under my guidance. With the support of Ben Ray, I held out the prospect of “publication” on his Website for the best papers, and that proved to be a strong incentive for several of the students. In the end, four papers stood out as making truly original contributions to scholarship on Salem witchcraft. Two students wrote biographies of executed women who had attracted scant attention from earlier scholars: Jacqueline Kelly researched Mary Parker of Andover in an innovative way, and Mark Rice uncovered the background to the accusation of Margaret Scott of Rowley. The other two students examined hitherto overlooked groups of accused people: Darya Mattes analyzed the very youngest accused children, and Jedediah Drolet studied accused women from Gloucester. At the time they enrolled in the class, Darya was a junior (a dual major in history and anthropology), and the other three were freshmen, two of whom have since chosen to major in history.

Fortuitously the completion of the course coincided with a gift to the department by Cornell parents Nick and Judy Bunzl, who sought to encourage professors to work with undergraduates to present their research at professional meetings. I asked the four students if they were interested in continuing to pursue their projects, and all readily agreed. Knowing that the Thirteenth Berkshire Conference on Women’s History was scheduled for June 2005 at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and that the “Big Berks,” as it is familiarly known, had a long tradition of openness to young scholars, I proposed to the program committee a first-ever undergraduate panel. After some discussion, they accepted the proposal.

Over the intervening year and a half, the students continued to refine their papers, occasionally consulting me in the process. Two made summer trips to do additional research, financed by the Bunzel’s generous gift—one to Salem, one to Gloucester. In the months before the conference, we held two rehearsals at which I listened to and critiqued the revised papers as they were read aloud. The big day came on Sunday, June 5, 2005, at 8:30 in the morning. Given the timing, the audience was small (ten or twelve people), but it was nevertheless knowledgeable and enthusiastic. The students performed beautifully, presenting their papers well and answering questions with great assurance. Elizabeth Reis of the University of Oregon, the commentator, warmly complimented their work. They also attended additional conference sessions, again thanks to the Bunzel’s gift, and they greatly impressed other conferees, several of whom sought me out to tell me of encounters with them. In short, I was thrilled by the results.

In the sciences, more and more emphasis is being placed on integrating undergraduates into research groups early in their college careers. My experience with this group of Cornell students has convinced me that historians should follow the scientists’ example within our disciplinary context. In all likelihood, because of the success of this experiment, the next Big Berks will include a specific call for undergraduate panel proposals; regional historical gatherings might also be amenable to them. Accordingly, I encourage other professors to contemplate the possibility of engaging undergraduates in similar projects. This has been among my most rewarding experiences as a teacher of undergraduates.

The four students’ papers together add new dimensions to historians’ knowledge of the 1692 crisis. Scholarship on the crisis has traditionally focused on Salem Village (now Danvers), where the witch hunt originated. Residents of the village have been investigated in detail, most notably by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, in Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), but few historians other than Carol Karlsen (in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England [New York, 1987]) have paid much attention to any accused witches from elsewhere in Essex County. Almost all of Darya Mattes’s accused children and Jackie Kelly’s subject, Mary Ayer Parker, lived in Andover, a town that produced more accused witches than Salem Village. Even so, the witch hunt in Andover has been the subject of only one scholarly article and an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Therefore, my students are among just a handful of researchers who have seriously examined the behavior of people from that town in 1692. Likewise, Jedediah Drolet’s study of the accused witches of Gloucester broke new ground by exposing the close familial ties between women with differing surnames who bore no immediately obvious relationship to each other. Finally, Mark Rice carefully reconstructed the life of Margaret Scott of Rowley. Because the testimony and other documents in her case became separated from the bulk of the surviving legal records, they were not printed in Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Witchcraft Papers, and thus few scholars have paid any attention to her.

Brief versions of the papers follow, with links to full texts of the revised papers (essentially as presented at the Berkshire Conference) on the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive Website.

 

Darya Mattes developed her topic independently, with little input or guidance from me. Her focus on the accusations of very young children and their confessions highlighted the importance of family ties in the Salem crisis and exposed some fundamental Puritan assumptions about the nature of childhood.

Darya Mattes, “Accused Children in the Salem Witchcraft Crisis”

The witchcraft crisis in Essex County, Massachusetts, in 1692 has long been known for its unusual list of accused witches; however, one atypical group of accused has been largely overlooked in the literature on Salem. Over the course of the crisis, at least eight children under the age of twelve were accused of witchcraft, and most were indicted. Certain commonalities exist in all of the children’s cases: the evidence offered against the children dealt with spectral sightings rather than personal harm, all of the children confessed to being witches, and each of the eight children had an accused witch for a mother. A study of these unusual cases, in conjunction with an examination of the ways in which Puritan individuals were situated within the family and the religious sphere, can thus offer insights into the infamous events of 1692.

A brief description of each case serves to highlight their recurring themes and possible implications. Two of the best-documented cases of accused children were those of Sarah Carrier and Thomas Carrier Jr. of Andover, aged seven and ten respectively. The Carrier children’s case offers a clear example of witchcraft accusations as linked to family ties: their mother and two older brothers were accused and convicted witches as well. Sarah and Thomas Carrier reinforced this connection in their confessions, directly implicating their mother in their own “witchcraft.” The case of Margaret Toothaker, a third child witch who was ten in 1692, exemplifies this emphasis on family connections in a different way. Not only were both of Margaret’s parents accused witches, but Margaret’s name never appears in the court records; she was referred to repeatedly as the daughter of her father or her mother, or even as a cousin, but never as an individual. Abigail Johnson was eleven years old when she was accused and, like the others, had family members—in her case, her mother and older sister—who were accused as well. Additionally, she was accused by prominent “afflicted girls,” a situation that is representative of many of the children’s cases. Three more accused children, Abigail Faulkner Jr, Dorothy Faulkner, and Johanna Tyler, were eight, ten, and eleven when accused, and all had accused-witch mothers. Whereas these seven children all came from Andover—Margaret Toothaker had moved to Billerica from Andover before the trials, while the others still lived there—the last accused child, Dorothy Good, was from Salem Village. Dorothy was only four or five at the time of the trials, and she was accused several months before the other children. However, she too was accused by “afflicted girls,” confessed to witchcraft, and implicated her mother, who was also an accused witch.

Significantly, the notion of a child as a witch did not contradict Puritan belief. Because the focus in Salem was on spectral torment, a witch in 1692 was primarily defined as one who had made a covenant with the devil and who worked with him to afflict other individuals. Because the devil worked through people in this way, even a very young, inexperienced person could, for a Puritan, conceivably be a witch. Puritan adults also viewed the children as religiously precocious. Puritan communities were deeply and pervasively religious, and adults often read religious meaning into their children’s actions, perhaps even beyond children’s actual comprehension. Compounded with the little theological knowledge that Puritans expected in a believable witch, this fact meant that the notion of children as witches was not at all incongruous in Puritan belief.

In fact, the religious climate in Salem in 1692 may have made children more likely than adults to believe that they were actually witches. With its rhetoric of original sin and eternal damnation, Puritan doctrine may have worked with childhood fears to convince children of their own inherent immorality and unworthiness. They would have been likely, therefore, to confess to crimes that were already credible according to Puritan beliefs about both witchcraft and childhood.

The institution of the family was integral in Puritan society as well, occupying a central role in personal identity and spiritual well-being. Individuals, particularly women and children, were consistently referred to through their linkages to others, as “wife of,” “daughter of,” or “son of.” Interestingly, the children accused of witchcraft were most often referred to as the daughters of their mothers. Because mothers, in Puritan society, were charged with setting a spiritual example for their families, having an accused witch for a mother almost necessarily implied that a child would have been tainted as well. Indeed, because Puritan religion was learned within the family, the “inheritance” of witchcraft from mother to child was an inversion of Puritan doctrine, in which adherents followed the devil instead of God but in which the primary means of initiation was the same.

Witchcraft accusations of young children at Salem thus serve to highlight the strength and focus of Puritan belief, particularly exemplifying Puritan notions of witchcraft, religion, and family relations. These ideas, in turn, can help illuminate not only the cases of children but the crisis as a whole.

 

Jedediah Drolet followed up my suggestion that students look at clusters of accusations in towns that had attracted little scholarly attention. His meticulous examination of the genealogical links among the little-known accused witches of Gloucester—based in part on summer research conducted in Gloucester’s manuscript town records after the seminar had ended—demonstrated that even women from substantial families could be the objects of suspicion.

Jedediah Drolet, “The Geography and Genealogy of Gloucester Witchcraft”

Other towns in Essex County besides Salem experienced witchcraft allegations in 1692. One of these towns was Gloucester, which produced more witchcraft accusations than any other town except Andover, Salem Village, and Salem Town. This paper puts forth a new explanation for this phenomenon: conflicts among the town’s elites during a period of high social stress throughout the colony.

The Gloucester residents accused of witchcraft in 1692 fall neatly into a few discrete groups. This paper will focus on two groups, which were closely connected. Phoebe Day, Mary Rowe, and Rachel Vinson were accused sometime in the fall of 1692. There is no record of their accusation or examination extant, but their names were on a petition to the governor and council signed by a group of prisoners held at Ipswich jail. A warrant for the arrest of another group of women, Esther Elwell, Abigail Rowe, and Rebecca Dike, was issued on November 3, 1692, for afflicting Mrs. Mary Fitch. This paper will focus on these women, their accusers, and the possible connections between them and the first group of three.

When Mary Fitch became ill in the fall of 1692, Lieutenant James Stevens sent for the “afflicted girls” of Salem Village to find out who had bewitched her. The girls named Rebecca Dike, Esther Elwell, and Abigail Rowe as the witches, and Stevens subsequently filed a complaint with the magistrates. A warrant for the three was issued November 5. James Stevens, the complainant, was an important figure in town, a deacon of the church, and a lieutenant in the militia. He married Susannah Eveleth, daughter of Sylvester Eveleth, in 1656. At his death in 1697 his estate totaled £239 19s.

Esther Dutch was born around 1639 and married Samuel Elwell in 1658. At the death of Samuel’s father, Robert Elwell, the value of his estate totaled £290 10s. Rebecca Dolliver married Richard Dike in 1667. They lived at Little River. Over the years Richard’s landholdings there steadily grew through grants from the town and purchases from neighbors such as Joseph Eveleth, the son of Sylvester Eveleth and brother of James Stevens’s wife Susannah.

Abigail Rowe was born in 1677 to Hugh and Mary Prince Rowe. The fact that she was only fifteen years old in 1692 shows the peculiarity of her case. While it was certainly not unheard of for children to be accused of witchcraft, they were generally accused along with other family members. Seeing a teenaged girl accused along with two adult women is quite unusual, but she was not the only woman in her family accused of witchcraft. Her mother was one of the three women listed in the petition from Ipswich jail, and her grandmother was Margaret Prince, accused early on and also listed in the Ipswich petition. The apparent link between the Ipswich prison group and the November accusations becomes stronger because of the connections between the Rowe family and the Day and Vinson families.

Hugh Rowe and his older brother John received equal portions of their father John’s estate of £205 16s. 10d. Five years later, Hugh and John entered into an agreement witnessed by Robert Elwell, who owned land near theirs. In 1685, Hugh Rowe received three parcels of land from his “father-in-law” William Vinson, likely the father of his first wife, Rachel Langton. Hugh and Rachel Rowe’s daughters married sons of Anthony Day. Another of Anthony Day’s sons, Timothy, married Phoebe Wilds, one of the women mentioned in the Ipswich petition.

Thus Hugh and Mary Rowe lived near Robert Elwell and had a close relationship to William Vinson and the Day family. Mary was also the daughter of Margaret Prince. All of the Gloucester women whose accusations are known only from the Ipswich petition were connected to the Rowe family. This provides clear evidence that there was a connection between their accusations and the accusation against Esther Elwell, Rebecca Dike, and Abigail Rowe. The likely cause of the accusations was animosity between different members of the town elite, which spiraled out of control in the context of the witchcraft panic and other tensions facing Massachusetts at the time.

These accusations all involved people of high social and economic status. The Gloucester accusations involved no singling out of poor, marginal women. All of the recorded estates of these families were valued at more than two hundred pounds. They all had comparatively large holdings of land and held many town offices. The cases seem to have been based on fear and suspicion among the upper class against a backdrop of paranoia throughout the county.

 

To my knowledge, Jacqueline Kelly is the only person who has ever seriously investigated Mary Ayer Parker’s statement in her own defense that she had been arrested erroneously, mistaken for another woman of the same name. And, remarkably, Jackie found that Goody Parker’s defense was most likely true. To me, her findings offered an important insight into the disarray of the legal process during the last set of trials, in September 1692.

Jacqueline Kelly, “The Untold Story of Mary Ayer Parker: Gossip and Confusion in 1692”

Mary Ayer Parker was tried and convicted of witchcraft in September 1692 by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in Salem, Massachusetts. In less than one month, she was arrested, examined, found guilty, and executed. Historians have paid little attention to her case, one in which it is nevertheless possible to discern where confusion and conspiracy could have arisen, leading to her untimely death.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Mary’s examination was her forceful claim to her examiner: “I know nothing of it [witchcraft] . . . There is another woman of the same name in Andover.” Her denial was quickly dismissed, but she did not lie. In fact, there were not one but three other Mary Parkers in Andover. One was Mary Ayer’s sister-in-law, Mary Stevens Parker, wife of Mary Ayer’s husband Nathan’s brother Joseph. The second was Joseph and Mary’s daughter Mary. The third was the wife of Mary and Joseph’s son, Stephen. To complicate things further, there was a fourth Mary Parker living nearby in Salem Town.

By asserting she was not the Mary Parker the court sought, Mary insinuated that another woman was a more probable culprit. And, true enough, the reputations of two of these Mary Parkers could indeed have sullied the namesake. Mary Ayer Parker’s sister-in-law had a documented history of mental instability. Essex County Court records from the period showed that both Joseph’s wife and his son Thomas were perceived to be mentally unstable or ill. At the time, insanity was sometimes associated with other deviant behavior, including witchcraft. Rebecca Fox Jacobs, long regarded a lunatic in Essex County, confessed to witchcraft in 1692. Her mother Rebecca Fox petitioned both the Court and Massachusetts’s Governor Phips for her release on the grounds of her mental illness.

The reputation of “Mary Parker” was further tarnished by the lengthy criminal history of Mary Parker from Salem Town. Throughout the 1670s, Mary appeared in Essex County Court a number of times for fornication offenses, child support charges, and extended indenture for having a child out of wedlock. She was a scandalous figure and undoubtedly contributed greatly to negative associations with the name Mary Parker.

A disreputable name could have been enough to kill the wrong woman in 1692. In a society where the literate were the minority, the spoken word was the most damaging. Gossip, passed from household to household and from town to town through the ears and mouths of women, was the most prevalent source of information. The damaged reputation of one woman could be confused with another as tales of “Goody so-and-so” filtered through the community. For example, Susannah Sheldon, one of the so-called afflicted girls that led many of the witchcraft accusations in1692, mistakenly attributed gossip about Sarah Bishop to Bridget Bishop when she accused her. The confusion associated with their cases proved how the bad reputations garnered by Mary Parker the fornicator from Salem and the mentally ill Mary Stevens Parker of Andover could have significantly affected the vulnerability of Mary Ayer Parker.

William Barker Jr., who testified against Mary Ayer Parker, may have been confused as well. In his own confession, William accused a “goode Parker,” but he did not specify which Goody Parker he meant. There was a good possibility that William Barker Jr. heard gossip about one Goody Parker or another, and the magistrates of the court took it upon themselves to issue a warrant for the arrest of Mary Ayer Parker without making sure they had the right woman in custody.

The other suspicious side of the proceedings involved the women who testified against Mary Ayer. Hannah Bigsbee and Sarah Phelps were both members of the prominent Chandler family of Andover. Captain Thomas Chandler, who signed the indictment, was father and grandfather to the women respectively. There was virtually no evidence of any previous strife between the Parker and Chandler families. Nathan, Mary Ayer’s husband, and his brother Joseph settled in Andover at the same time as the Chandlers. Nathan, Joseph, and Thomas served public offices together and maintained property adjoining each other’s. Joseph Parker’s will referred to Thomas as his “dear friend.” However, the relationship between the families, at least Nathan’s branch, must have soured sometime after the 1680s, when both Parker brothers had died. The powerful and influential Chandler family gave credibility to the case against Mary Ayer Parker, and they indeed knew which Mary Parker she was. While clear evidence of a rift is not extant, the bad blood is evident.

Mary Ayer Parker was convicted on little evidence, and even that seems tainted and misconstrued. The Salem trials did her no justice, and her treatment was indicative of the chaos and ineffectualness that had overtaken the Salem trials by the fall of 1692. Salem historians, who have studied her little and written misinformed accounts of her case, have only extended this confusion. However, the possibility of her wrongful execution provides an excellent case study of how the Salem trials had grown so unruly and misguided by the end of 1692. Although historians cannot exonerate Mary Ayer Parker, perhaps they can acknowledge the possibility that amidst the fracas of 1692, a truly innocent woman died as the result of sharing the unfortunate name “Mary Parker.”

 

Mark Rice chose to examine the case of Margaret Scott, a stereotypical witch accused and tried late in the crisis. Mark showed that precisely because she was a classic witch, accused of maleficium (bewitching her neighbors’ livestock and children) as well as of spectral attacks on the afflicted, her fate was essentially sealed by the fact she was tried after the Court of Oyer and Terminer had come under sharp attack from critics of the court’s seeming reliance on spectral evidence.

Mark Rice, “Specters, Maleficium, and Margaret Scott”

Until recently, the story of Margaret Scott, executed September 22, 1692, as part of the Salem witch trials, was a mystery. With the discovery of depositions related to her trial, it is now possible to use the names, places, and events mentioned in the court records to finally discover Margaret Scott’s story. The information yielded by these documents shows that Margaret Scott was a victim of bad luck and even worse timing. These two aspects, more than any supernatural forces, led to the demise of Margaret Scott.

Margaret Scott fits the stereotype of the classic witch identified and feared for years by her neighbors in Rowley, Massachusetts (a small town to the north of Salem). Margaret had difficulty raising children, something widely believed to be common for witches. Her husband died in 1671, leaving only a small estate that had to support Margaret for years. Margaret, who was thus forced to beg, exposed herself to witchcraft suspicions because of what the historian Robin Briggs has termed the “refusal guilt syndrome.” This phenomenon occurred when a beggar’s requests were refused, causing feelings of guilt and aggression on the refuser’s part. The refuser projected this aggression on the beggar and grew suspicious of her.

It also appears that when Margaret Scott was formally accused, it occurred at the hands of Rowley’s most distinguished citizens. Formal charges were filed only after the daughter of Captain Daniel Wicom became afflicted. The Wicoms also worked with another prominent Rowley family, the Nelsons, to act against Margaret Scott. The Wicoms and Nelsons helped produce witnesses, and one of the Nelsons sat on the grand jury that indicted her.

Frances Wicom testified that Margaret Scott’s specter tormented her on many occasions. Several factors may have led Frances to testify to such a terrible experience, including her home environment and its relationship with Indian conflicts. She undoubtedly would have heard first-hand accounts of bloody conflicts with Indians from her father, a captain in the militia. New evidence shows that a direct correlation can be found between anxiety over Indian wars being fought in Maine and witchcraft accusations.

Another girl tormented by Margaret Scott’s specter was Mary Daniel. Records show that Mary Daniel probably was a servant in the household of the minister of Rowley, Edward Payson. If Mary Daniel, who received baptism in 1691, worked for Mr. Payson, her religious surroundings could well have had an effect on her actions. Recent converts to Puritanism felt inadequate and unworthy and at times displaced their worries through possession and other violent experiences.

The third girl to be tormented spectrally was Sarah Coleman. Sarah was born in Rowley but lived most of her life in the neighboring town of Newbury. Her testimony shows the widespread belief surrounding Margaret Scott’s reputation.

Both the Nelsons and Wicoms also provided maleficium evidence—a witch’s harming of one’s property, health, or family—against Margaret Scott. Both testimonies show evidence of the refusal guilt syndrome.

However, what sealed Margaret Scott’s fate was the timing of her trial and its relation to the witchcraft crisis. Evidence from the girls in Rowley coincided chronologically with important events in the Salem trials. Frances Wicom initially experienced spectral torment in 1692, “quickly after the first Court at Salem.” Frances also testified that Scott’s afflictions of her stopped on the day of Scott’s examination, August 5. Mary Daniel deposed on August 4 that Margaret Scott afflicted her on the day of Scott’s arrest. The third afflicted girl, Sarah Coleman, testified that the specter of Margaret Scott started to afflict her on August 15, which fell ten days after the trial of George Burroughs and Scott’s own examination. Additionally, the fifteenth was only four days before the executions of Burroughs and other accused witches who were not “usual suspects” and thus brought considerable attention to the Salem proceedings.

By the time that Margaret Scott appeared in front of the court, critics of the proceedings had become more vocal, expressing concern over the wide use of spectral evidence in the Salem trials. The court probably took the opportunity to prosecute Margaret Scott to help its own reputation. Margaret Scott’s case involved not only spectral evidence but also a fair amount of testimony about maleficium. Scott exhibited many characteristics that were believed common among witches in New England. The spectral testimony given by the afflicted girls further bolstered the accusers’ case. To the judges at Salem, Margaret Scott was a perfect candidate to highlight the court’s effectiveness. By executing Scott, the magistrates at Salem could silence critics of the trials by executing a “real witch” suspected of being associated with the devil for many years.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

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Mary Beth Norton, for 2005-6 the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge, has taught at Cornell University since 1971; her most recent book, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, was published by Alfred Knopf in 2002, with a Vintage paperback edition in 2003.

Reports of witches’ meetings in Salem Village in 1692

It is well known that the Salem witchcraft episode is different from any other witchcraft outbreak in New England. It lasted longer, jailed more suspects, condemned and executed more people, ranged over more territory—twenty-five different communities. And once it was over, it was quickly repudiated by the government as a colossal mistake, a great delusion. As historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum pointed out in the 1970s, the excesses of the Salem episode were caused by “something deeper than the kind of chronic, petty squabbles between near neighbors which seem to have been at the root of earlier and far less severe witchcraft episodes in New England.”

But what, exactly, was that “something deeper”? And how can we make sense of it today, as far removed as we are from the early modern residents of Salem? For the most part, scholars have paid more attention to the social, political, and psychological aspects of the witchcraft accusations and less to the world of witchcraft beliefs and fears expressed in the testimonies themselves. A small set of Salem court records (two dozen out of approximately a thousand Salem witch trials court documents) describe, sometimes in vivid terms, the witchcraft meetings in Salem Village and the threat they were perceived to pose. Although historians have not given these particular testimonies any special attention, they accepted the validity of the accusations to the authorities, and through the spring, summer, and fall of 1692, they played a significant role in propelling the legal process forward and ultimately in its spiraling out of control.

The dramatic descriptions of witches’ meetings and the danger they represented were immediately confirmed by the local ministers, and they proved convincing to the Salem magistrates as well. Most of these testimonies were used as eye-witness evidence at the grand jury hearings to obtain indictments against dozens of witchcraft suspects. At the end of the trials, critics and advocates alike would draw attention to the critical role these testimonies played in bolstering the trials.

The court records of the Salem trials contain over a dozen accounts of witches’ gatherings held in Salem Village. These meetings were, however, entirely spectral in nature and visible only to witchcraft suspects who confessed to witnessing them in court. From the beginning, the reports of witches’ meetings alarmed the authorities because they described not only bewitchments among neighbors but also Satan’s larger plan to undermine the village minister and his church. Witches were not only said to be targeting village church members, which was obvious to all, but also to be establishing their own church by holding satanic masses next to the village parsonage in a brazen attempt to supplant the Christian faith.

These claims—which posited an antithetical community, a satanic Salem in the midst of Puritan Salem—were unique and unprecedented. Nothing of this sort had ever been claimed by witchcraft suspects or accusers in New England. To be sure, New England Puritans long believed that their errand into pagan North America was a direct assault on Satan’s empire, and they knew that Satan was responsible for some of the unexplainable misfortunes that people suffered. Satan’s usual methods were to capture a few degenerate souls and use them to create mayhem among their neighbors or to incite the Indians to attack English settlements, as was happening in 1689. In 1692, however, it was revealed that Satan was also striking a blow directly at the spiritual core of New England Puritanism—the church itself. And it soon became apparent that Satan was recruiting agents from all over Essex County. As time went on, accounts of witches’ meetings revealed that destroying the Salem Village church was just the beginning. Satan’s ultimate goal was to destroy all the churches in the Bay Colony.

Salem Village was a separate parish of Salem Town, and it had long been racked by controversy over its ministers, causing the Salem authorities to intervene and appoint new preachers to the village church. In 1689-90 discord broke out over the newly ordained Reverend Samuel Parris, who was both an arrogant and conservative clergyman. Upon arriving in Salem Village he and his small group of followers instituted the restrictive and widely discarded old covenant rules for church membership, which required public confession of conversion and restricted baptism, in contrast to the more liberal half-way covenant. For years, the mother church in Salem Town, which the villagers had previously attended, had loosened the rules for membership. The reaction by most of the villagers was severe. Parris’s opponents stopped his salary, blocked the growth of the church, and curtailed baptisms of village children—actions that severely inflamed the conflict. Parris fought back for months in his sermons, warning about the wickedness of his opponents and the “wiles” of the devil. In January and February 1692, he declared that the devil was trying to “pull down” his new congregation, a charge that came very close to an accusation of witchcraft against unnamed “wicked and reprobate men (assistants of Satan).”

 

In mid-March, three weeks after the first accusations by two children in Parris’s house, the Reverend Deodat Lawson, a former minister of Salem Village, preached at the village at the request of Samuel Parris and the Salem magistrates. Lawson declared that discord over Parris’s ministry was one of the sources of the problem and proclaimed that God had loosed Satan upon the village because of “the Fires of Contention” within the village over its new minister.

The confessors took hold of this theme and wove it into their confessions with impressive effect. The authorities were entirely taken in by the vivid descriptions of witches’ meetings, something that critics would later emphasize. Under the specter of witches’ meetings said to be aimed at destroying the village ministry, an unprecedented and momentous claim, the New England tradition of legal caution towards witchcraft accusations completely evaporated.

The first to confess was Tituba, an Indian slave of Samuel Parris and one of the first three suspects. Parris allegedly beat Tituba prior to her appearance before the Salem magistrates and told her what to say. Whether or not this is true, Tituba cooperated and confessed volubly, and she was never brought to trial. She immediately testified against the two other village women accused with her, Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn, and then told of “seeing” them gathered in spectral form in the minister’s house with several other witches, some of whom came from Boston.

The judges wanted to know more and interrogated Tituba a second time in jail, arranging for three different recorders to take her testimony. She told the judges that the leader of the witches “tell me they must meet together” in Samuel Parris’s house. The court record of her second examination continues, in question and answer form,

Q. w’n did he Say you must meet together.

A. he tell me wednesday next att my m’rs house, & then they all meet together thatt night I saw them all stand in the Corner, all four of them, & the man stand behind mee & take hold of mee to make mee stand still in the hall.

Tituba added that the witches threatened to kill her and made her afflict the two girls in Parris’s house who initiated the accusations. She testified that she counted a total of nine witches’ signature marks in the devil’s book.

Tituba’s confirmation of the guilt of Good and Osburn and her testimony about the witches meeting in Parris’s house to attack his daughter and niece was a bombshell. It meant that Satan’s attack was led by outsiders who had recruited local villagers in a conspiracy against the village minister. For good measure, Tituba told the judges of her experience of flying to and from Boston on a pole with the other witches over the tree tops. Tituba’s tale, with its recurrent references to clandestine gatherings, captivated the magistrates’ imaginations, and, as the Reverend John Hale of nearby Beverly noted afterwards, set the stage for other confessions to follow. Subsequent confessors would admit that they attended witchcraft meetings in Salem Village, describe them as graphically as they could, and name several suspects whom they had “seen” at the meetings—usually people who had already been accused. These testimonies were recorded and later used as evidence to obtain indictments.

 

On March 21, three weeks after Tituba’s confession, the Reverend Deodat Lawson attended Martha Cory’s examination on charges of witchcraft. He reported that during her examination in the village meeting house, Cory’s young accusers responded to her charge that they were “distracted,” or mentally unbalanced. They boldly confronted Cory by asking “why she did not go to the company of Witches which were before the Meeting house mustering? Did she not hear the Drum beat?” This report of a witches’ meeting in the village was the first independent confirmation of Tituba’s initial report of witches gathering in Parris’s house, and it came from the court’s star witnesses.

A week later, eleven-year-old Abigail Williams, Parris’s niece, and seventeen-year-old Mercy Lewis, a servant in Thomas Putnam’s house, told the Reverend Lawson that they had just witnessed a performance of the devil’s mass in the village. The satanic mass that Williams and Lewis claimed to have seen was a counter ritual performed the same day as a public fast that was held in Salem Town to benefit the afflicted village girls. According to Lewis “they [the witches] did eat Red Bread like Man’s Flesh, and would have her eat some: but she would not; but turned away her head, and Spit at them, and said ‘I will not Eat, I will not Drink, it is Blood,’ etc.”

On Sunday, April 3, a Sacrament day at the village church, one of the afflicted girls told Lawson that she had seen the specter of Sarah Cloyce shortly after Cloyce had stormed out of the meeting house without taking communion. “O Goodw. C[loyce],” said Lawson’s informant, “‘I did not think to see you here!’ (and being at their Red bread and drink) said to her, ‘Is this a time to receive the Sacrament, you ran-away on the Lords-Day, and scorned to receive it in the Meeting-House, and Is this the time to receive it? I wonder at you!'” The implication was that Cloyce, a recently admitted church member and a sister of the accused witch Rebecca Nurse, had walked out of the church in anger and refused to take communion. Instead, she took the devil’s sacrament of human blood and human flesh at a satanic mass elsewhere in the village. The next day Sarah Cloyce was accused and joined her sister in jail.

Lawson was sympathetic to his successor, Parris, and believed in the girls’ spectral sightings. Already by the end of March, Lawson estimated that the witches “have a Company about 23 or 24 and they did Muster in Armes, as it seemed to the Afflicted Persons.” Lawson was the only person to record the young village accusers’ observations about witches’ meetings in the village. All later reports were made by defendants who confessed to witchcraft to save themselves and supplied more detailed accounts of witches’ meetings to bolster their confessions.

On April 20, fifteen-year-old accused witch Abigail Hobbs of Topsfield confessed that “the Devil in the Shape of a Man came to her and would have her afflict Ann Putnam, Mercy Lewis, and Abigail Williams, and brought their images with him in wood like them, and gave thorns and bid her prick them into those images, which she did accordingly … ” The wooden images, called “poppets,” represented the witches’ victims. Witches allegedly afflicted people by stabbing and twisting these images to “Torture, Afflict, Pine, and Consume” their victims, in the standard formula of the indictments. Like others before her, Hobbs worked a witch’s meeting into her story. As she explained, she “was at the great Meeting in Mr Parris’s Pasture when they administered the Sacram’tt, and did Eat of the Red Bread and drink of the Red wine att the same Time.”

Two days later, Abigail’s step-mother Deliverance Hobbs, who was also accused of witchcraft, made the sensational revelation that the high priest of the satanic masses was none other than the Reverend George Burroughs, an unorthodox Puritan minister and yet another former minister of the Salem Village, who now ministered to a congregation in the frontier settlement of Wells, Maine. According to Hobbs’s eye-witness account, “Mr Burroughs was the Preacher, and prest them to bewitch all in the Village, telling them they should do it gradually and not all att once, assureing them they should prevail.” And, predictably, Hobbs added that Burroughs orchestrated his conspiracy at a witches’ meeting. “He administered the sacrament unto them att the same time Red Bread, and Red Wine Like Blood … The meeting was in the Pasture by Mr Parris’s house … ” Hobbs also boldly declared herself to be a “Covenant Witch” and proceeded to name nine suspects at the devil’s sacrament, all of whom had been previously accused, to strengthen her story.

On June first, at the first sitting of the special court of Oyer and Terminer, the grand jury began to hear the cases of the dozens of suspects who were crowding the jails. Attorney General Thomas Newton sought additional testimony from Abigail Hobbs and twenty-year-old Mary Warren and interviewed them in jail. Hobbs and Warren cooperated fully and named fourteen more suspects whom they claimed to have seen at a witches’ Sabbath in Parris’s field. Hobbs named five, including Burroughs, and Warren named nine more and identified them as the people who had tortured her in an attempt to make her attend another devil’s sacrament in mid-May. Warren also identified Rebecca Nurse and Elizabeth Proctor, both jailed suspects from Salem Village, as the deacons (in spectral form) who assisted Burroughs at the meeting. These two witches “would have had her [Warren] eat some of their sweet bread & wine & she asking them what wine that was one of them said it was blood & better then our wine but this depon’t refused to eat and drink with them … ” Newton apparently wanted to obtain Hobbs’s and Warren’s sworn testimony about Sarah Good and John Proctor for their upcoming grand jury hearings, which he had planned for June and July, and he needed their “eye-witness” evidence in order to satisfy the two-witness rule required in capital cases. Testimonies about witches’ meetings had already played an important role in the escalating number of accusations and confessions before the trials took place in June, and they were clearly going to play an equally instrumental role in moving the trials forward from June through September.

In mid-July, elderly Ann Foster of Andover told the magistrates that she had flown on a stick in the air “above the tops of the trees” in the company of several other witches to meetings in Salem Village. The court records contain three of Foster’s accounts and all were selected for use at the September grand jury hearings. Foster attested that she saw Martha Carrier, a witchcraft suspect from Andover, sticking pins into poppets to bewitch two children in Andover, making one of them ill and killing the other. “[S]he futher saith that she hard some of the witches say that their was three hundred and five in the whole Country, & that they would ruin that place the Vilige … ” Salem magistrate John Higginson added the comment that Foster “further conffesed that the discourse amongst the witches at the meeting at Salem Village was that they would afflict there to set up the Divills Kingdome … “

By late summer, the notion that the devil was establishing a congregation of witches at Salem Village next to Parris’s house was well known. In neighboring Andover, accused suspects, urged on by their families and the authorities, confessed in large numbers and offered even more elaborate descriptions of witches’ meetings. Twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Johnson Jr. of Andover told the court that “there were: about six score at the witch meeting at the Villadge that she saw … she s’d they had bread & wine at the witch Sacrament att the Villadfe & they filled the wine out into Cups to drink she s’d there was a minister att theat meeting & he was a short man & she though is name was Borroughs: she s’d they agreed that time to afflict folk: & to pull done the kingdom of Christ & to set up the devils kingdom …”

On August 29, forty-six-year-old William Barker Sr. of Andover offered the most detailed description to date: Satan initially recruited followers from the village because of discord over its minister; Satan’s congregation in Salem Village had grown to hundreds of followers; and Satan’s attack on the village was a prelude to his attack on all the churches in the Bay Colony.

… He said they mett there [next to Samuel Parris’s house] to destroy that place by reason of the peoples being divided & theire differing with their ministers Satans design was to set up his own worship, abolish all the churches in the land, to fall next upon Salem and soe goe through the countrey, … He sayth there was a Sacrament at that meeting, there was also bread & wyne … he has been informed by some of the grandees that there is about 307 witches in the country, … He sayth the witches are much disturbed with the afflicted persones because they are descovered by them, They curse the judges Because their Society is brought under, …

By October, the trials had clearly gotten out of control. No one was safe from accusation, the accusations were escalating, and the public was turning against the trials. The Boston ministers finally persuaded Governor Phips to put an end to the court of Oyer and Terminer. Phips also banned the reliance upon spectral evidence, and thereafter, no more spectral witches were seen in Salem Village. In January the newly created Superior Court of Judicature began to clear the backlog of cases and acquit the dozens of suspects languishing in jail.

Following the trials, critics and supporters took up their pens to dissect the trials and, in the process, drew attention once more to sensational testimonies about witches’ meetings. In a privately circulated “letter,” Thomas Brattle, a Boston mathematician and astronomer, wrote that tales of witches’ meetings were evidence of psychological delusion and judicial coercion and should never have been admitted in court.

That the witches’ meeting, the Devill’s Baptism, and mock sacraments, which they oft speak of, are nothing else but the effect of their fancye, depraved and deluded by the Devill, and not a Reality to be regarded or minded by any wise man …

More than that, many of these confessions had been forced by the “most violent, distracting, and dragooning methods.” Boston merchant Robert Calef’s trenchant criticism of the Salem trials, published in More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700), reinforced Brattle’s point about the court’s intimidating methods, especially outside the courtroom, which were calculated to generate confessions and more details about the meetings.

… concerning those that did Confess, that besides that powerful Argument, of Life … There are numerous Instances, too many to be here inserted, of the tedious Examinations before private persons, many hours together; they all that time urging them to Confess (and taking turns to perswade them) till the accused were wearied out by being forced to stand so long, or for want of Sleep, etc. and so brought to give an Assent to what they said; they then asking them, Were you at such a Witch-meeting, or have you signed the Devil’s Book, etc. upon their replying, yes, the whole was drawn into form as their Confession.

The Reverend John Hale, who witnessed some of the proceedings, wrote an account in which he tried to make sense of it all. He concluded that the testimonies about witches’ meetings played a crucial role in driving the witch trials forward.

[T]hat which chiefly carried on this matter to such an height, was the increasing of confessors till they amounted to near about Fifty … And many of the confessors confirmed their confessions with very strong circumstances … their relating the times when they covenanted with Satan, and the reasons that moved them thereunto; their Witch meetings, and that they had their mock Sacraments of Baptism and the Supper, … and some shewed the Scars of the wounds which they said were made to fetch blood with …

Cotton Mather, by contrast, took the confessions to be valid evidence that justified the court’s actions. In Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), which defended the trials, Mather claimed that “at prodigious Witch-Meetings the Wretches have proceeded so far as to Concert and Consult the Methods of Rooting out the Christian Religion from this Country.” Mather quoted at length from several accounts of satanic masses to prove his case and thus to justify the actions of the court.

Five years after the trials, government finally chose to face up its responsibility, siding with its critics rather than Mather. In a carefully worded proclamation for a day of fasting in January 1697, written by repentant witch-trials magistrate Samuel Sewall, the government asked God to forgive “whatever mistakes, have been fallen into … referring to the late Tragedie raised amongst us by Satan and his Instruments, through the awfull Judgment of God; He would humble us therefore and pardon all the Errors of his Servants and People that desire to Love his Name; and be attoned to His Land.” The witch trials, in other words, were a tragedy created by Satan not for the purpose of actually raising up witches but to cause widespread fear that this was the case. During this “late Tragedie,” the testimonies about witches’ meetings played a central role. Arising within the context of intense religious discord in Salem Village, these testimonies about a witchcraft conspiracy, involving satanic masses, the drinking of human blood and eating human flesh, the stabbing of doll-like effigies, and the destruction of Puritan religion, gave ultimate meaning to otherwise ordinary accusations among neighbors. Thus the accusations were driven forward until they caused “an inextinguishable flame,” in the words of Governor Phips, unlike anything seen in New England before.

Further Reading:

For the best and most recent accounts, see Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York, 2002) and Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 (Cambridge, 1993). The complicated legal process involved in the Salem episode is thoroughly explained, for the first time, in the introductory essays to Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (Cambridge, 2009) edited by Bernard Rosenthal. This volume also provides fresh scholarly transcriptions (with notes), and it is the most complete edition of the nearly one thousand court records discovered to date, including many previously unpublished manuscripts. And it presents a complete chronological arrangement of the court records.

 

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

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Benjamin C. Ray is professor of religious studies at University of Virginia and director of the NEH supported Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive. Ray has recently published articles on the Salem witch trials in the New England Quarterly and the William and Mary Quarterly.

Weaving the Wicked Web of Antebellum Religion and Politics

“Douglas is a cuning dog & the devil is on his side,” wrote Abraham Smith to Abraham Lincoln in the summer of 1858. One month earlier, the Republican Party of Illinois had decided to run Lincoln for the Senate against Stephen A. Douglas, the incumbent Democrat. Smith, an Illinois farmer, encouraged Lincoln to take “the high ground” during the campaign. He called upon Lincoln to remind all who would hear that “the bible teaches the same that is taught by the declaration of Independence—by the Constitution of the U.S. and by the fathers of the republic.” What others might view as separate strands of “religion” and “politics,” or “church” and “state,” Smith wove together tightly. For him, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers constituted one holy garment. The Lincoln-Douglas struggle, moreover, was much more than just another political event that pitted two men against one another for a legislative position. The race signaled forces higher and lower, lighter and darker. “As I view the contest (tho we say it is between Douglass & Lincoln—) it is no less than a contest for the advancement of the kingdom of Heaven or the kingdom of Satan.”

Publicly, Lincoln neither elevated nor lowered the electoral stakes to those realms. Before and after receiving Smith’s letter, however, he did reference Satan during the campaign. For Lincoln’s campaign acceptance speech in June 1858, he borrowed from the Bible the line that came to serve as the speech’s unofficial title: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” This was both a statement about the state of the Union and a warning of what could befall the United States if it failed to resolve the imbroglio over admitting new states as either free or slave. Lincoln and most of his audience knew “the house divided” reference well. Recorded in three of the Bible’s gospel narratives, it began with Pharisees accusing Jesus of being in league with the “prince of devils.” Jesus replied, “How can Satan cast out Satan? … if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand.” On one hand, Lincoln used this biblical tale as a template for contemporary political divisions. On another veiled hand, the congressional aspirant lodged devils and concerns over devils within the rhetorical architecture of his allusion.

Privately and publicly, implicitly and explicitly, aurally and textually, the kingdom of Satan seemed more than present. It appeared to be spinning the nation into chaos.

During the ensuing Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas pilloried Lincoln for his “House Divided” speech. Lincoln avoided mentioning or invoking Satan throughout the summer and fall. That was until the final debate. In Alton, Illinois, Lincoln quoted the “House Divided” speech and acknowledged that the words and spirit of it “have been extremely offensive to Judge Douglas.” The Democrat, Lincoln exclaimed, “has warred upon them as Satan wars upon the Bible.” According to the local newspaper, after Lincoln likened Douglas to the devil, the crowd erupted in “laughter.”

In this political contest of 1858, Satan was woven into the fabric of political discussions in ways stark and subtle. Abraham Smith maintained that the electoral process manifested the war between the “kingdom of Heaven” and the “kingdom of Satan.” Lincoln’s most noteworthy speech was premised upon demonic discussions. When mapped onto the United States, the “house divided” line hinted at the presence of darkness in American political culture. When Lincoln later associated Douglas with Satan, it sounded like a joke to some. Privately and publicly, implicitly and explicitly, aurally and textually, the kingdom of Satan seemed more than present. It appeared to be spinning the nation into chaos.

 

Looking first at the devil broadly in antebellum society and then specifically at mentions of Satan in the governmental place Lincoln hoped to get in 1858—Congress—this essay suggests that Satan simultaneously tightened and troubled religion, politics, and the meshing of them in the antebellum age. At one level, Americans put Satan to work as a means to denounce their political opponents. In an era marked by political party chaos and reorganization, raising the devil was a means of political differentiation. It also transformed the stakes of debate. By tying otherworldly dimensions to this-worldly concerns through references to Satan and Satan’s kingdom, Americans acknowledged that perhaps otherworldly forces were unmaking their this-worldly projects and programs.

Conjuring the devil rhetorically and visually signaled much more. Satan troubled senses of political and spiritual progress. The devil’s past havoc both on the earth and beyond it suggested that the present and future United States was in deep and dark trouble. As Satan moved from the margins of American politics to its center by the time of national fracture in 1860-61, the nation’s elected officials seemed to indicate that neither they, nor their God, were in control. “Manifest destiny,” that widespread belief that heavenly providence shined upon the United States, had given way to the malevolent disruptions of the kingdom of Satan in America.

“Devils Dressed in Angels’ Robes”

Satan and his minions could be seen, heard, and discussed widely in the decades before the Civil War. From the writings and artwork of reformers to the political prints and speeches of the era, the forces of radical evil were on the move. By the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the ensuing Civil War, when Abraham Smith perceived a contest between the “kingdom of Heaven or the kingdom of Satan,” it appeared to many Americans that Satan had set his cloven feet on the soil of the United States. Many Americans were not passive observers in Satan’s rise. They conjured the dark prince into American domains through their writings, artwork, and speeches.

 

At times, antebellum artistic culture seemed obsessed with darkness. The gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the art of Thomas Cole embraced the dark sides of humanity and nature. Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville populated their novels and short stories with demonic characters and forces, while the revealed scriptures for the new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Book of Mormon and the Book of Commandments, included prominent roles for Satan and several antichrist characters both in the ancient past and for the American present.

Although antebellum reformers and reform organizations criticized some of these dramatic renderings of evil, they too conjured hell’s angels for their own purposes. The number of reform organizations and their membership rolls swelled during the first half of the nineteenth century. So too did their invocations of the devil and the demonic. Temperance advocates, for instance, damned “demon liquor” and “demon rum.” When businessman and reformer Lewis Tappan encouraged revivalist Charles Finney to carry the gospel to the notorious Five Points of New York City, he explained that Finney would be “rescuing from Satan one of his haunts.”

Abolitionists and women and men formerly held in bondage energetically invoked demons, devils, Satan, and hell. When Frederick Douglass denounced the “religion of the South” in his autobiography, he wrote that it was “a mere covering for the most horrid crimes.” This so-called religion was in fact “a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.” He concluded that in slavery “we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.” William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as an “agreement with hell” and then performed on a copy of it what happened to bodies in hell. He burned it.

“My singularity is that when I say that Freedom is of God, and Slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say,” Garrison wrote on another occasion. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and popular theatrical adaptions of it, the forces of evil seemed hell bent on the destruction of African Americans’ lives, families, and faiths.

Satan and other renderings of the demonic played important roles in the visual culture of antebellum political discussions as well. One popular print from the early 1830s, “The Downfall of Mother Bank,” showcased President Andrew Jackson destroying the National Bank. In the middle of the melee, as Whig politicians cower amid tumbling pillars, one figure with darkened skin, horns, and a tail races away from Jackson. “It is time for me to resign my presidency,” this character exclaims so that viewers could recognize who this devil had been in his human disguise. It was none other than Nicholas Biddle, the president of the downfallen bank. Only through Jackson’s political heroism was Biddle exposed and exorcised.

Twenty years later, as antislavery forces were in the process of painting the peculiar institution as built upon hell, proslavery forces (or at least anti-antislavery contingents) struck back. In response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one artist pictured a “dream” wherein either Stowe was in hell, or hell had invaded the United States. This busy satirical print features a host of devils, beasts, serpents, and Medusa-type characters. At the center, a black man stands holding a flag emblazoned with the words “Women of England To the Rescue.” To his right and below, Stowe holds an illustrated copy of her novel. Devils harass her. They poke and prod her. One fixes a chain to her feet. They appear to be dragging her into an “under ground railway,” perhaps linking the secretive American route of liberation with the assumption that hell was a space under the ground.

 

Beyond the overt denunciation of Stowe and her novel, this “dream” disclosed several important elements in antebellum religion and politics. It tied biblical imagery to the past, present, and future through an overflowing abundance of violent evil. Devils carry pikes and battle flags. Others beat drums of war. A cannon fires at Stowe. From above, a many-headed dragon spews fire in its descent. The apocalypse of Revelations has been unleashed. Evil seemed to be coming from all temporal and geographical directions: under the ground, the sky above, the biblical past, and the prophesied future.

This “dream” signaled a change in American political culture. While references to demons and Satan had been a part of politics in the United States from its beginning, devils did more than move from margin to center. They overwhelmed the stage. In “The Downfall of Mother Bank,” the horned Nicholas Biddle was but one small character. By the 1850s, devils were unavoidable. The kingdom of Satan was present and abundant. It overflowed. It overran the confines of hell and poured itself upon Americans and into the United States. The kingdom of Satan wreaked aggressive violence; and, in the case of this anti-Stowe print, it appeared to perform valuable service. Demons chained the proslavery nemesis. Visual artists, moreover, were not the only ones dreaming of Satan in their midst. Elected officials were, as well, and they conjured the kingdom of Satan in the capital of their own kingdom: the halls of Congress.

The King of Hell in the Halls of Congress

As antebellum Americans incarnated the devil visually and rhetorically to address the central topics of their day, the nation’s leading politicians ushered Satan into their domain. They did so, in fact, with increased frequency. In the seventy years from the founding of the United States government under the Constitution to the severing of the union with the Civil War, Satan moved from a peripheral performer in governmental discussions to a star on the center stage. Demonic invocations showcased how the Senate and the House of Representatives served not only as hubs of national legislation and political discussion, but also as locales of religious debate and discussion. In the buildup to the Civil War, these political representatives voiced what Abraham Smith feared in his 1858 letter to Abraham Lincoln: the kingdom of Satan had arrived and was on the march.

The number of references to “Satan” in the congressional records suggests that vital changes had occurred in the realms of and connections between religion and politics. Before 1826, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives rarely uttered the word “Satan.” They did so only three times in the thirty-five years from 1790 to 1825. Then, from 1826 to 1849, the number of discrete mentions rose to thirty-nine. That number was equaled in the next ten years. From 1850 to 1860, “Satan” was once again spoken thirty-nine times. Put another way, while congressmen used the word “Satan” once every decade in the early republic, they invoked him once every three to six months in the years before the Civil War. The king of hell seemed to find an audience in the antebellum congresses.

Congressional references to Satan had two main sources: the Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). When legislators used biblical texts related to Satan, they emphasized temptation and disruption. The serpent in the Garden, assumed to be Satan, helped cause the fall of humankind. The devil wreaked havoc on Job and his family. Satan appeared to Jesus and tempted him three times. Milton’s Paradise Lost was common reading for educated Americans. In it, Satan and his angelic co-conspirators failed to overthrow God and were then banished to hell. From there, Satan escaped and bedeviled God’s highest creation: Eve and Adam. Most often, Americans found political and religious meaning within Paradise Lost. It was a tale that linked this world with ones beyond it through narratives of treason that resulted in chaos, misery, and exile.

 

The disruptive character of Satan matched the political party chaos of the antebellum age. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, the Republican Party, which had destroyed its Federalist rivals and dominated national politics, died. In its place, Andrew Jackson’s coalition of Democrats arose and in opposition to them a new alliance emerged called the Whig Party. Then in the 1850s, it fell to pieces. Rival parties developed, most notably the American Party (oftentimes called the Know Nothings) and then the new Republican Party to which Abraham Lincoln shifted his allegiances from the Whigs. The presidential elections of both 1824 and 1860 signaled the party confusion, as four main candidates vied with each one, rather than the typical two. Amid this political disarray, Satan seemed an apropos symbol.

Although congressmen referenced Satan more often in the 1830s and the 1850s, important differences marked the decades. In the 1830s, invocations of Satan primarily circulated around issues of executive and federal power. Satan was mentioned in terms of executive vetoes, the place of the U.S. Bank, tariffs, and nullification of federal laws by individual states. During the 1837 economic depression, for instance, Henry Wise of Virginia referenced a description “of Satan” from John Milton’s Paradise Regained to denounce “the wicked intent of wedding the money in Government with the political power of the Executive.” If “the people” did not “start back affrighted and appalled” by how Jackson and his presidential successor, Martin Van Buren, had devastated the nation financially through their economic machinations, then, once more quoting Milton, “God hath justly given the nation up / To thy delusions, justly, since they fell / Idolatrous!”

In the 1850s, however, one topic overshadowed the others, and it was an issue for which Congress had direct responsibility: slavery in the territories. Following the annexation of Texas (1845), the Mexican-American War (1846-1847), and the California Gold Rush (1848), Congress had to address western lands at a speed more rapid and a geographical range more expansive than ever before. As hundreds of thousands of people moved within the nation and from the world to the United States, congressmen had to determine how the territories would be organized, what they would be politically during their time as territories, and whether their proposed constitutions for statehood would be acceptable. In many ways, the political shape and fate of the western lands resided in the halls of Congress.

For some legislators, the only analogue they could find for the political complexity was in the various moments of chaos wrought by Satan. In 1848, as congressmen debated the organization of Oregon as a territory, Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia fretted that if slavery were barred from the beginning, “All considerations of the general interest would be sacrificed and merged in the spirit of hate.” This, he prophesied, would lead to a “civil war … not with arms, but under the forms of law.” To comprehend this future, Hunter knew of nothing “parallel” from the past. “[W]e must leave the realms of history for those of fiction,” he explained to his fellow congressmen. “We must turn to the gloomiest conception of Milton, who makes his Satan address ‘old night and chaos,’ and promise to extend their reign at the expense of light and life.”

Six years later, when congressmen debated placing territorial decisions related to free or slave status with statehood within the hands of local residents with the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act, Thomas Davis, an Irish-American Democrat from Rhode Island, saw in it the wicked design of slave holders. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would nullify the earlier Missouri Compromise that had forbidden slavery from these geographical regions, was to Davis simply a way for slavery to outflank freedom. It was akin to “Satan, entering Paradise, / ‘At one slight bound high overleaped all bound.’ … So slavery, at one bound, overleaps all rights, and subverts the whole foundation on which the moral universe stands. All is chaotic, ‘without form and void.'”

 

Davis was far from the only congressman to voice the sense that “[a]ll is chaotic.” The rise of references to Satan helped heat the tensions of the era as Democrats, Whigs, and Republicans used Satan to describe and denounce their opponents. In 1850, Democrat John R. J. Daniel of North Carolina referred to the hopes of “free-soilism” to keep slavery from the West as “personified and likened to Satan tempting our Saviour on the Mount.” Two years later, Charles Sumner, a Whig who vehemently opposed slavery and became a leading Republican, condemned the new Fugitive Slave Clause of 1850 by asserting that the Founding Fathers opposed slavery and its Satanic resonances. “Our fathers did not say, with the apostate angel: ‘Evil, be thou my good!’ In another spirit they cried out to slavery, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!'”

Beyond religiously dramatizing political differences and legislative possibilities, references to Satan also allowed congressmen to move in a number of temporal and geographical directions to make their points. The disruptiveness of Satan gave congressmen a usable analogy to make sense of the disrupted state of American politics. In their efforts to comprehend and categorize contemporary problems in this way, however, legislators seemed to acknowledge that the nation and its governance were spinning out of control. As congressmen relied on Satan to cross time and space, to connect this world to others, and to configure what was happening in the United States vis-à-vis the actions of nonhuman forces in the past and present, they put on display their own political fragility. When it came to Satan, nothing appeared to be stable: time, geography, the republic of the United States, or the kingdoms of heaven or hell. Invoking Satan did not engender order; it energized disorder.

For some congressmen, contemporary events seemed to burst the bounds of human history and categorization. In 1858, after proslavery forces in Kansas had engineered a proslavery constitution and submitted it to Congress, Henry Bennett of New York maintained, “The offer contained in this act has no precedent or parallel. The only thing resembling it occurred more than eighteen hundred years ago.” At that time, “Satan tempted our Savior, and offered Him all the lands they beheld from the top of ‘an exceedingly high mountain,’ if He would fall down and worship him.” In the contemporary United States, Satan “made very much such an offer as this act makes to the people of Kansas, if they will fall down and worship slavery.”

Perhaps better than any other legislator, Jeremiah Clemens laid bare how efforts to harness Satan created their own kinds of chaos. A Democrat from Alabama who had fought in the Mexican-American War, Clemens took the floor in 1853 to discuss a resolution that called for Americans to participate in an international convention to discuss the fate of Cuba. Some southern whites had advocated annexation of the island. They viewed it, like the western lands, as another place within the nation’s manifest destiny, and these southerners wanted to make certain that American slavery would be part of the agenda. In his response, Clemens put to work such an abundance of analogies that it seemed an anarchy of explanation.

Clemens wanted nothing to do with another land grab, and in his adversarial speech, he roamed rapidly and wildly across space and time. “It is not in the book of Revelations that we are taught to covet the goods of our neighbors,” Clemens exclaimed, invoking and then rebuffing biblical prophecy as a means to determine what the United States should do in the future. Instead, Clemens looked backward to the Mosaic Decalogue and its “thou shalt not covet” refrain. To desire Cuba, Clemens insisted, would invariably lead to “a lawless spirit of war and conquest.” It would be “barbarism.” Searching for an historical analogy, Clemens maintained that if the American people sent troops there, they would be “[l]ike the Prophet of the East, who carried the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other.” Muslims and the Koran, however, simply manifested in the past the powers Satan wielded in the past, present, and potential future. Invading Cuba in the fashion of Muslims, Clemens concluded, “is a species of progress which Satan himself might fall in love.”

 

Clemens moved across time and space dramatically. He invoked Revelations and the Ten Commandments, Muslim history and contemporary American politics. Even more, Clemens suggested that Americans could outdo Satan, perhaps even tempt the devil. This manifest destiny was malevolent destruction. It was chaos and anarchy. This “progress” was the type “Satan himself might fall in love.” Amid the abundance of imaginative crossings of space and time, Clemens maintained not only that supernatural evil could affect human communities, but also that contemporary nations could influence the supernatural figure of Satan.

While most legislators used Satan to discuss elements within the United States, at least one projected his consideration of human history onto the supernatural domains. John Pettit, a Democrat from Indiana, expressed horror that if the United States listened to antislavery forces and liberated the enslaved, the nation would devolve rapidly: “As soon as you equalize different races of men in one country so soon do you commence the work of annihilation and destruction.” Pettit blamed the fall of ancient Rome on racial equality and maintained that such changes in the United States could wreak a “chaos on earth that was worse than the contention in Heaven.” That “contention in Heaven” was when Satan led an army against God. Of the earlier supernatural squabble, Pettit guessed that racial difference drove that discord as well. “I would be hardly willing to doubt even upon the best authority which exists, that Satan himself was of a different race from the other inhabitants of Heaven with whom he warred.” Whether on earth, heaven, or hell, Pettit concluded, “Races cannot, and will not, live together.”

Satan seemed omnipresent, pulling congressmen from the past to the present, from heaven to hell. In one speech, Satan even moved from a poignant metaphor to a prime mover, and that speech was one of the most important in American history: Charles Sumner’s “The Crime Against Kansas.” During two days in May 1856, Senator Sumner explained to his colleagues that while most legislative business over “[t]ariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important,” they and decisions made about them did not determine the overall well-being and functioning of “the State.” Recent events in Kansas, however, were of a different order. The violence and political malevolence there had the potential to destroy the nation. The power behind the disorder was slavery, and the power behind it was Satan. “One Idea has been ever present,” Sumner raged, “as the Satanic tempter—the motive power—the causing cause.”

When Sumner linked the “Satanic tempter” to “the causing cause,” the congressman gestured toward something much deeper than demonization of a political opponent. He lodged the legislative and territorial problems with nonhuman forces. Sumner placed into the hands of Satan the movement and momentum of the nation. While politicians may be the ones debating and making legislation and while border ruffians and antislavery activists in Kansas may be the ones shooting one another, the “motive power” came from an other-than-human figure: the Satanic tempter.

Sumner’s speech drew attention then and later because of the events that followed. During the speech, Sumner had lashed out at Stephen A. Douglas and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Taking umbrage at the insults, Butler’s nephew Preston Brooks, a member of the House of Representatives, proceeded to beat Sumner with a cane. Sumner was so injured that it took four years until he returned to the Senate. Brooks became a hero to many in the South, while the “caning of Charles Sumner” energized northern Republicans to establish themselves as the only “civilized” political party that could stop the violence of the Democrats.

The caning kept Sumner from the Senate, but it did nothing to contain Satan. Democratic congressmen hit back rhetorically. They predicted war and saw both the kingdoms of God and Satan working together to bring it. John Savage of Tennessee feared in 1856 that war was imminent. “Can it be, that, in the early morning of our national existence, the wrath of an offended Heaven is to be visited upon us?” Or were the threats from another supernatural force? “[M]ay we not believe that the prince of darkness, attacking our early weakness, as he did our first parents in the Garden of Eden, let loose this odious brood of the internal world, to destroy a Government whose progress to greatness will banish discord and tyranny from the world?” This “odious brood” had leaders, and Savage named them: William Henry Seward and Charles Sumner.

 

Neither Savage, nor savage violence, had the last word when it came to Sumner or slavery. After a four-year absence after his beating, Sumner returned to Congress in the summer of 1860. Even as the nation crumbled, he held fast to his earlier position. “I oppose the essential Barbarism of Slavery,” he told his colleagues in June 1860, “whether high or low, as Satan is still Satan.” By the time of the Civil War, to hear “Satan” uttered in rapid succession in Congress was nothing new. The nation’s political halls had become a throne room for the king of chaos.

 

Two years earlier in 1858, the kingdom of Satan had prevailed over the kingdom of Heaven, or at least that was how Abraham Smith would have interpreted Stephen A. Douglas’s senatorial victory over Abraham Lincoln. Now in 1860, Lincoln defeated not only Douglas, but also two others who vied for the nation’s top office. In early March 1861, Lincoln became president and in his inaugural address argued that the “better angels of our nature” could save the nation. A few weeks later, but before the Civil War unleashed a different set of angels within the nation, composer Jupiter Z. Hesser wrote to Lincoln with conditional exultation. “Victory is ours, if we show satan the allmighty sword of Justice.” In political defeat and now victory, Lincoln was no stranger to statements about Satan. For his four years as president, the sword most certainly came. One hundred and fifty years after he was cut down, the nation still waits for almighty justice to banish from its midst the kingdom of Satan.

Further reading

W. Scott Poole, Satan in America: The Devil We Know (Berkeley, Calif., 2009); Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York, 1995); Edward J. Blum, “‘The First Secessionist Was Satan’: Secession and the Politics of Evil in Civil War America,” Civil War History (September 2014): 234-269; Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, Conn., 1993); Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt (Chicago, 2012).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3 (Spring, 2015).

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Edward J. Blum is professor of history at San Diego State University. He is the author of several books on race and religion throughout American history. Most recently, he co-authored with Paul Harvey The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012).

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.”

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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.