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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two early American ministers construct themselves through painting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

American daguerreotypes at the Great Exhibition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

–Frederick Douglass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Washington and portrait prints

In 1880, William Spohn Baker, who forged a minor career as a collector and cataloguer of Washingtoniana, published what was at the time the definitive guide to the engraved portrait prints of George Washington. It was no small task. Less than a century after the founding father’s death, portraits painted during and even after his lifetime had generated more than four hundred engravings whose makers could be identified; those engravings in turn had generated thousands upon thousands of prints. Some were book illustrations, incorporated into histories and biographies; others were sold as stand-alone images, suitable for framing or pasting into scrapbooks. After combing through seventeen collections, including his own, Baker classified the prints first according to the painter responsible for the original portrait and then according to the engraver. As he explained in the book’s preface, he tried his best to weed out the prints that were “copied from no authentic original” and to distinguish the “rare,” the “very rare,” and the “extremely rare” from the ordinary.

Although Baker occasionally noted the artistic merits of the original paintings, he had little to say about the engravings per se. And he had almost nothing to say about the face they depicted. Baker’s “Washingtons” were valued not as art but as Americana. The images did not exemplify aesthetic ideals so much as document national character. And his book was pitched at the connoisseurs and collectors who were beginning to work patriotic objects into their shopping lists. The Engraved Portraits of Washington was a primer in authenticity for men who could recognize a print of Washington’s face but who needed help determining its market value and identifying its painted progenitor. Certainly, Baker began his book with the obligatory paean to the nation’s “father”: Washington’s portraits held unparalleled “interest and significance.” Even the flimsiest engraving could convey “the nobility of his character, the dignity of his manhood, his truth and patriotism.” But the purpose of his book was not to remind readers of these facts. It was “compiled simply as a Text-book for the Washington collector.” Baker, then, was concerned with the authenticity of the artifact not the authenticity of the figure represented on it. But “authenticity” is a moving target. And the citizens who purchased the portraits that eventually found their way into Baker’s collection were far less sanguine than he about the authenticity of the face they saw looking up from the printed page.

Questions about the authenticity of Washington’s likenesses initially emerged when he attained international renown as commander in chief of the Continental Army and “fictitious portraits” found their way into the marketplace. Capitalizing on Washington’s celebrity status, confidence-men-cum-artists unloaded bogus prints on unsuspecting consumers by sticking the head of some other person (real or imagined) atop a suitably dressed and posed body. The most famous of the fictitious portraits, the so-called Campbell engravings, used various military props along with the tagline “Done from an Original Drawn from the Life by Alexander Campbell of Williamsburg in Virginia” to authenticate themselves. Variations of Campbell’s fake likeness were published in London between 1775 and 1778 and seem to have circulated mostly in Europe, although at least a few made their way back to the United States. One was presented to Washington himself, who wryly observed that the commander in chief appeared to be a “very formidable figure [with] . . . a sufficient portion of terror in the countenance.” The Campbell engravings became so well known that more than one hundred years later W. S. Baker included them in his catalogue of “authentic” portraits. They may have been fakes, but they were famous fakes that had earned a place in history and that merited some attention in the collector’s market.

After the Revolution, fictitious portraits had mostly been supplanted by prints taken from the work of painters like Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, and Pierre Du Simitiere. If it was still possible to find the head of, say, John Dryden masquerading as George Washington, it was far more likely that Americans would encounter an image that bore some resemblance to an actual commissioned portrait. But the growing availability of “authentic” portraits—that is paintings that George Washington actually sat for or the paintings and prints that were copied from them—did not dispel questions about authenticity. On the contrary, the proliferation of likenesses that claimed some connection to life portraits exacerbated concerns about authenticity, about the relation between pictorial representation and physical reality. This unease surfaced most regularly in relation to engraved prints, the most widely disseminated form of likenesses.

Before Washington was elected president, even authentic portrait prints tended to rely on a variety of devices, not only to convey his status and to locate him in history, but also to authenticate the image itself, to demonstrate that the engraved figure really was George Washington. In Joseph Hiller’s 1777 engraving, Washington is announced by his uniform, by the military props to his side, by the smoke and flames rising from Charlestown in the background, and (not least) by the conspicuous label announcing the officer’s identity. Subsequent prints introduced and elaborated the emblematic vocabulary—liberty pole and cap, oak branches, laurel wreaths—that would come to characterize Washington’s early graphic portraits and to symbolize the qualities that Americans wished to associate with the nation. Those same props and ornaments also served to identify the subject as George Washington, especially for viewers who had never seen either the man or a commissioned portrait.

But after Washington’s inauguration as president of the United States in 1789, the military props that had once signified his identity and status began to fall away. Rather than depicting a military officer, saturated with national and historic significance, portraits increasingly depicted only the bust, relying on the painted or engraved face to perform the work of identification and authentication. This shifting emphasis coincided with a new, romantic style of portraiture. It also reflected the economics of the art market: it was far less labor intensive—and therefore less expensive—for a painter or engraver to render a head than a full figure posed against an elaborate background. And the simpler format owed much to the absence of an established set of presidential props. Monarchs, soldiers, sea captains, and even ordinary gentlemen had their defining garments and other material accoutrements. But, as the art historian Wendy Wick Reaves has observed, with no comparable signatures for republican statesmen, engravers and printmakers generally avoided the issue altogether by focusing on the bust.

The tight focus on Washington’s face that dominated his portrayal during his presidency and after also signaled the equation of man and office. We have long recognized the extent to which eighteenth-century Americans conflated Washington with the presidency and even with the federal union. More recently, we have begun to understand how important visual perception was to this fusion. To see Washington was to know him. To see Washington was to remember America’s revolutionary past, to realize its republican future, to participate in the cult of republican sensibility that helped bind the new nation together. Like levees and parades, portrait prints played a critical role in these intellectual and imaginative processes, offering large numbers of Americans the chance, in the painter Benjamin West’s words, to “see the true likeness of that phenomenon among men.”

Presidential portrait prints thus raised the stakes for authenticity at the same time that they narrowed the locus of authenticity to George Washington’s face. But which face was that? Was Washington best represented by the distinctive oval heads painted and engraved by Charles Willson Peale? By Joseph Wright’s aristocratic profile, with its aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and pointed chin? By the boxy forehead and squared off jaw that distinguish Gilbert Stuart’s canonical images? However formulaic they may be in composition, portrait prints reveal a striking variation in their most critical element—George Washington’s face. And this vexing variety was only exacerbated by the growing market for portrait prints, which encouraged artists and engravers of varying tastes and abilities to produce copies of copies of copies. All Washingtons were not created equal.

Certainly that was the conclusion of Johann Caspar Lavater, who ended the 1789 English edition of his Essays on Physiognomy with a discussion of Washington’s character as revealed in portrait prints. Analyzing a print based on Edward Savage’s extremely popular face, Lavater detected “probity, wisdom, and goodness.” So far, so good. But closer examination revealed that if the forehead demonstrated “uncommon luminousness of intellect,” it lacked depth and excluded penetration. Worse, the eyes possessed “neither that benevolence, nor prudence, nor heroic force, which are inseparable from true greatness.” He could only conclude that “if Washington is the Author of the revolution . . . the Designer has failed to catch some of the most prominent features of the Original.” Far more promising, Lavater suggested, was a sketch based on one of Trumbull’s likenesses, which conveyed the qualities that Washington was most celebrated for: “valor . . . moderated by wisdom” and “modesty exempt from pretension.”

In an era when a likeness was not a more or less accurate representation of an individual face but a map of character, getting Washington’s face right was no small matter. Accordingly, artists and engravers competed not only to produce the best likeness but to convince a buying public that they had done so. As early as 1787, for example, Charles Willson Peale advertised a mezzotint portrait of “His Excellency General Washington,” deemed by unspecified authorities as the “best [likeness] that has been executed in a print.” Several years later, advertisements for a medal based on Joseph Wright’s profile described the product as a “strong and expressive likeness,” “worthy of the attention of the citizens of the United States of America.” Potential buyers did not have to take the designer’s word; they need only read the endorsements of four prominent citizens who vouched for the designer’s skill. In 1800, an advertisement for a print based on Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait quoted a magazine review to make the claim that “in point of resemblance, [the image is] said by those who have seen the General, to be uncommonly faithful.” That same year, engraver David Edwin described a small, cheap copy of Stuart’s Athenaeum portrait as the “best Likeness of the Celebrated Washington which has ever been published.”

No one worked harder to stake a claim for authenticity than Rembrandt Peale, the second surviving son of artist, museum entrepreneur, and patriot Charles Willson Peale. Extravagantly ambitious, Rembrandt Peale viewed himself as the scion of the nation’s first family of art and Washington’s likeness as his patrimony. By the early 1820s, he had settled on a portrait of George Washington as the vehicle most likely to stabilize his finances and secure his place in art history. While Peale intended for the original painting to be purchased by Congress for display in the Capitol, he also anticipated selling painted and printed copies to an infinite number of individuals and institutions. The result was the magisterial Patriae Pater (1824), a composite likeness culled from the artist’s assessment of extant life portraits and his own memories of the first president. (The president sat for the adolescent Rembrandt as a favor to his more famous father.) Peale aspired to paint the definitive Washington, unseating Gilbert Stuart’s enormously popular Athenaeum portrait in the process. The magnitude of his ambition is suggested pictorially by the massive, trompe l’oeil stonework “porthole” that encases Washington’s bust and gives it a monumental permanence. Peale’s intentions were also announced by the twenty-page advertising brochure that publicized both the original portrait and the copies that he almost immediately began to paint, print, sell, and exhibit. Cataloguing the strengths and weaknesses of one Washington or another and reminding readers that he was one of the few painters still living to have seen the great man, Peale relentlessly built a case for the superiority of his own rendition.

But prospective buyers (in Congress and elsewhere) didn’t have to take his word for it: the pamphlet concluded with the endorsements of eighteen political luminaries who had seen Washington incarnate. For men like John Marshall, Bushrod Washington (George Washington’s nephew), and Andrew Jackson, Peale’s image served as a point of departure. It invited them to recall Washington in battlefields, state houses, and drawing rooms; it compelled them to reflect upon the character they saw in the man’s features and expression. Almost to a one, they confessed that they knew little about art, although many reported seeking out multiple likenesses of Washington. Instead, each positioned himself as a connoisseur of Washington’s face. They recognized the man portrayed on canvas because his features were permanently lodged not only in their minds but also in their hearts: they recognized the President in the “porthole” because of the image’s “effect upon my heart,” because it inspired a “glow of enthusiasm that made my heart warm.” If these remarks testified to the verisimilitude of Peale’s portrait, they also lent credibility to Peale’s claims about the sheer power of Washington’s face. “Nothing can more powerfully carry back the mind to the glorious period which gave birth to this nation,” he wrote, “nothing can be found more capable of exciting the noblest feelings of emulation and patriotism.”

Peale’s brochure was more than one man’s self-aggrandizing hyperbole. Among artists who had painted Washington from life, the deep preoccupation with authenticity went well beyond a workmanlike desire to meet customary standards for “accurate and pleasing likenesses.” Gilbert Stuart so fetishized the authenticity of his canonical Athenaeum portrait that although he copied it endlessly, he refused to complete it. As he explained, it would be “more valuable as it came from his hand in the presence of the sitter” than it would be if finished, “for by painting upon, it would be more or less altered.” The unfinished canvas, to say nothing of its painted and printed copies, suggested the moment of painterly creation and the proximity of the sitter. Even painter-cum-writer William Dunlap, who described his own copies of Washington’s likeness as “cash,” vividly remembered the first time he glimpsed “the man of whom all . . . wished to see” and the electrifying moment when Washington set eyes on him: “It was a picture.” The moment and the “picture” lingered at the edges of his mind, ready to be called forth by a “true” likeness of Washington; in his three-volume history of American art, Dunlap took pains to comment on the authenticity of every Washington produced by the many painters, engravers, sculptors, and wax modelers whose careers he chronicled. Like Peale, Stuart and Dunlap acknowledged the power that emanated from Washington’s face even as they maneuvered to profit from it.

Well into the nineteenth century, some Americans continued to believe that an authentic portrait of Washington, be it an oil painting, a print, or a bust, had the power to reawaken and even create powerful sentiments about the founding father and by extension, the republic itself. But the proliferation of likenesses, authentic and otherwise, registered more than a desire to forge some connection with the man himself, more than patriotic commitments or national spirit. The Washingtons that graced canvases, book illustrations, print collections (to say nothing of crockery, signage, jewelry, and even handkerchiefs) also registered an expansive market. And in the market, the authenticity or accuracy of any particular Washington took on a different set of valences altogether.

On the one hand, the public’s interest in Washington merged with the culture of refinement, which depended upon the nexus of aesthetics and consumption. Deploying Washington’s likeness to demonstrate a capacity for connoisseurship, some men and women shifted their preoccupation with authenticity from the face to the print proper. Consider the Port Folio’s snippy dismissal of English engraver James Heath’s full-length portrait, the first to be taken from Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait and published immediately after Washington’s death. The original composition had much to recommend it, capturing as it did the “union of body and soul.” But Heath’s print was overpowered by the “wire-work” lines that encased the President’s body in a “suit of net-armour,” trapping him beneath a mass of “wicker work.” At issue was not the accuracy of the likeness, much less its ability to rekindle strong feelings about the dead man or the nation, but the quality of the image as an image. Bad art, the critic suggested, could trump even the noblest founder.

On the other hand, the market could chip away at the very notion of “authentic” representation. That was the case in 1814, when Joseph Delaplaine began to solicit subscriptions for what would become the Repository of the Portraits and Lives of Distinguished Americans. Acknowledging widespread disagreement about the best likeness, Delaplaine graciously promised to include two portrait prints of Washington, one taken from Stuart’s Athenaeum portrait, the other from Houdon’s bust. In this way, the author purred, he could “render universal satisfaction.” One man’s true likeness was another’s awkward facsimile. But so long as both men purchased the Repository, the differences hardly mattered.

By the time William Spohn Baker set about sifting his way through George Washington’s engraved portraits, the capacity of those images to inspire individual virtue and invoke national destiny had become a cliché, albeit a mandatory one. Baker himself invoked the storied resonance of an “authentic” or “accurate” likeness only to sidestep it, to assure readers that he was interested only in providing a “Text-book” for collectors. The didactic, even transformative, power that Americans had once sought in Washington’s face had been eclipsed by partisanship, capitalism, sectionalism, and civil war. Like the republican project it symbolized, Washington’s likeness had become the stuff of history. But the power of those “authentic” Washingtons had also been diminished by their ubiquity, by their commodification, by the very images that Baker collected and compiled.

Further Reading:

William Spohn Baker’s catalogue was published in The Engraved Prints of Washington (Philadelphia, 1880). To trace the proliferation and circulation of Washington’s likeness in a variety of media, see William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts in the United States (New York, 1834); Wendy Wick Reaves, George Washington: An American Icon: The Eighteenth-Century Graphic Portraits (Washington, D.C., 1982) and Noble E. Cunningham Jr., Popular Images of the Presidency from Washington to Lincoln (Columbia, Miss., 1991). On the Patriae Pater, see Rembrandt Peale, Portrait of Washington (Philadelphia, n.d. [c. 1824]). The discussion of Peale’s life and work is Lillian B. Miller’s In Pursuite of Fame: Rembrandt Peale, 1778-1860 (Washington, D.C., 1992).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.3 (April, 2007).

Catherine E. Kelly teaches history at the University of Oklahoma; she is currently a fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jasmine Nichole Cobb’s Picture Freedom begins by examining a daguerreotype in the Dickerson family collection at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the same early photographic portrait of an African American woman illustrating the book’s cover. Cobb reads the sitter’s fine clothing and jewelry, her upright pose and hand-tinted cheeks, as well as the studio furnishings and books visible in the portrait as evidence of black self-making and self-possession before the abolition of U.S. slavery in 1865. While the daguerreotype’s maker remains unknown, Cobb asserts it to be Robert Douglass Jr., a black daguerreotypist active in Philadelphia in the 1840s and 1850s. Attributing the portrait to Douglass allows Cobb to see it as the co-production of two free black subjects who rejected popular, degrading images of African Americans under slavery and “seize[d] control over representation of the free Black body” (3).

The five chapters in Picture Freedom never return to an analysis of daguerreotype portraiture, yet Cobb’s understanding of early photography as an especially potent visual technology for the expression of black agency motivates her analysis of “racial caricatures, lithographs, abolitionist newspaper writings, runaway notices, sentimental literatures, joke books, and scenic wallpaper” (20-21). According to Cobb, these popular visual media, which circulated across the Atlantic world “between the years of gradual emancipation laws emerging in 1780 and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850” (6), together “create a more robust depiction of Black freedom in the transatlantic imaginary” (21). Cobb laments the fact that few studies have focused on visual representations of black freedom before the daguerreotype, while at the same time she acknowledges the recent surge of scholarship on early photography and African American self-making. Indeed, major publications in the last decade have presented photography as exceptionally capable of visualizing black agency before the Civil War, including Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and African American Identity, edited by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (2012), Marcy Dinius’s The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (2012), and Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American, edited by John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier (2015). Cobb returns briefly to early photography in chapter 4 of Picturing Freedom (161), referring to Frederick Douglass’s faith in the medium’s democratic character, but only to underscore the importance of popular print media in managing the depiction of black freedom. This shift in focus becomes one of the book’s important contributions to the study of race and representation.

Reflecting Cobb’s interdisciplinary training in communication studies, Picture Freedom explores the social history and cultural uses of nineteenth-century popular images while framing them in terms of twenty-first-century critical theory. Two key theoretical concepts run through the chapters. Cobb includes the first of these, black visuality, in the book’s title, a term that brings to mind recent work on black bodies and performance by Nicole Fleetwood, Leigh Raiford, Anne Anlin Cheng, and others. The introduction to Picture Freedom offers a broad definition of black visuality, explaining that it refers to “the entire sum of the visual as experienced by people of African descent” (9). Both “psychic and subjective,” it “pertains to the Black figure’s awareness of how she was perceived, and the sense of possession she felt toward her own body that allowed her to master and manipulate outward constructions of her visibility” (9-10). Cobb coined the second key concept, transatlantic parlor, by drawing from critical theories of race, studies of the transatlantic slave trade, and cultural histories of the bourgeois parlor or drawing room as a significant site for the performance of gender, class, and race in the nineteenth-century United States.

The transatlantic parlor proves to be a slippery metaphor in Picture Freedom, one to which Cobb returns repeatedly in order to refine and contextualize. The introduction describes it as “a place for dissimilar groups of people and cultural producers to convene around visions of Blackness separated from slavery” (13). It further presents the transatlantic parlor as a discursive space that imagined the Atlantic world as a “unified home of slaving empires and a place for domesticating presumably uncivilized Africans through enslavement” (17). Subsequent chapters use the parlor as a potent metaphor for “the United States as a home interior” in which white middle-class Americans pictured themselves as citizens and imagined others as unfit for belonging; the book also shows how this theoretical concept inhabited physical spaces and material forms of visual communication. In chapter 3, for instance, we learn that the drawing rooms of white bourgeois homes in antebellum Philadelphia “served as places of retreat where Whites coped with the changes of gradual emancipation” (111). By analyzing “Life in Philadelphia,” a lithographic series created by Edward Williams Clay in 1828, Cobb shows how white people in their parlors ridiculed the speech, clothing, manners, and social aspirations of free blacks, and especially black women, “in order to manage anxieties about sharing northern spaces with free Black people” (113). Well-known to cultural historians but rarely studied in detail, Clay’s series comes back as the subject of chapter 6, where Cobb explores its circulation in the United States, Britain, and France. She thus returns to the idea that bourgeois white subjects sought to bring black people “under control through display, through their re-presentations on the printed page and the location of these prints within the home” (193), and to domesticate them in a specifically transatlantic parlor.

Picture Freedom, however, investigates not only whites’ construction of black visuality in the figurative parlor but also African Americans’ efforts to appropriate popular images of blackness and experiment with self-representation. We see the latter interest in chapter 2, where Cobb turns to free blacks’ establishment of their own parlors in northern American cities. She specifically considers the creation of friendship albums as a significant parlor activity that African American women undertook to perform their free selves. The chapter opens with a single page from a friendship album that belonged to a young African American girl—a member of the Dickerson family, like the sitter in the daguerreotype with which Picture Freedom began. On that page the girl’s schoolteacher drew a fuchsia plant, copied from a flower-painting manual, and paired it with a poem that invites the reader/viewer to seek out the inner beauty of the flower, which droops its head in a demonstration of modesty. In Cobb’s view, we must read images and writing like these in black women’s friendship albums as more than mere “floral motifs and saccharine sentiment” (109). Although modeled on white women’s parlor practices, the pages of the Dickerson album “offered thoughts on free Black women’s bodies, the experience of freedom and new practices of spectatorship…” (69). They thus challenged the exclusion of black womanhood from dominant bourgeois society and its specific notions of beauty.

As a historian of art and visual culture, I appreciated Cobb’s effort to tie her theoretically informed claims about black freedom to specific images. Enacting the imperative in the book’s title, almost every chapter opens with a poignant picture: from the daguerreotype in the introduction, to an amateur painting of a free black woman in chapter 1, the floral album page in chapter 2, and lithographs caricaturing African Americans in urban public life in chapters 4 and 5. For each key visual example, Cobb describes the subject matter and historical contexts in which the image circulated before the abolition of U.S. slavery. Such information ends up dominating many of her interpretations, however, leaving the reader with questions about how the visual characteristics of the pictures themselves contributed to the social, cultural, and political work Cobb attributes to them. In her discussion of Clay’s “Life in Philadelphia” series, for example, Cobb spends considerable time deploying critical theory, cultural histories, and period sources to show how free black Philadelphians represented their freedom through personal dress and the built environment, especially the space of the black church. This context, she argues, motivated Clay’s series and found expression in the subjects and captions of his lithographs. But how did those prints signify visually, and in relation to other images, in the early nineteenth century? How did Clay’s rather naïve style of rendering figures, his method of delineating the physiognomy and comportment of black bodies, his use of complex iconography, and his application of color to each scene work together to undermine notions of black respectability, femininity/masculinity, and citizenship?

Picture Freedom concludes as it began, with a photograph. Instead of a daguerreotype portrait from the museum’s beginnings, it considers a press photograph of Barack Obama delivering a speech in the White House in 2009. This key image in the book’s epilogue also brings readers back to the politicized parlor, in all of its complexity. For within the lavish interior of the White House, occupied by the first black U.S. president and his family, Americans can now reimagine the nation as “a home for racial diversity” (223). Through the global circulation of photographs of a black man presiding over the White House parlor, Cobb observes, the United States presents itself to the world as a bastion of freedom and equality, and effaces its history of slavery and racial prejudice.

Picture Freedom reminds scholars who study race and American visual culture how important it is to keep that long and troubling history in view. The book further challenges its readers to rethink what it meant to picture black freedom and citizenship—well before the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and before the advent of photography.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2.5 (Spring, 2016).

Tanya Sheehan is associate professor and chair of the Department of Art at Colby College, where she teaches American art history. She has published widely on the history of photography and African American visual culture.

The sky was blue, the wind was light, and the air was clear on the bright September noon in 1813 when Captain Oliver Perry sailed to victory against the British on Lake Erie. In a hard-fought battle lasting about two and a half hours, the British disabled Perry’s vessel, the Lawrence, and forced him to flee in a rowboat to another ship, the Niagara. Then, from the deck of the Niagara, Perry directed an assault on the British side that culminated in the capture of the entire royal squadron on the lake. Back in Washington, members of the Senate treated the news of this success as a clear indication that the tide of war was turning decisively in favor of the United States. In the midst of the hoopla, at least one prominent Republican went so far as to describe Perry as a dashing lover, who had wooed the Goddess Victory by his gallant courtship. Yet, although most Republicans in Congress hoped to capitalize on the publicity value of Perry’s feat, others were wary of overstating the significance of the battle when so much about the war remained uncertain. News of Perry’s naval maneuvers soon gave rise to a new round of rhetorical skirmishing, one that revealed the role of romantic imagery in patriotic posturing.

The Senate Naval Affairs Committee met to draft a Congressional resolution of thanks to Perry in late December of 1813. The first version of the proposed resolution contained the claim that Perry’s success represented “a victory as decisive and glorious as any ever recorded on the page of history.” But some observers objected that this assertion was more than a bit overblown. Commanding the lake was one thing. Achieving the conquest of Canada, the ultimate goal of the U.S. border action, was quite another.

Senator Eligius Fromentin, then a brand-new legislator from the brand-new state of Louisiana, ventured to remark that, “It is my wish that in our national acts we shall not appear to vapour, or boast our success too highly.” These reservations met swift rejection from his fellow Republican legislators. Senator Charles Tait, of Georgia, a well-known war hawk, countered immediately that he could not accept Fromentin’s criticism. “I, sir,” he exclaimed, “am very far from cherishing a disposition to light up a glare to dazzle the perception of the American people, or the people of any other nation, by a false description of this glorious victory.” No exaggeration was necessary, Tait explained, because “a narration, in the simplest terms, of its true incidents creates admiration and gratitude.”

It may have come as some surprise to Fromentin, therefore, that when Tait proceeded to offer a simple narrative of Perry’s deeds of the day, he cast his naval triumph as a successful romantic romp. Recounting Perry’s move from the Lawrence to the Niagara, Tait gushed, “even after victory had perched on the standard of the enemy, awarding her favor to superior force, Captain Perry, by the gallantry of his continued perseverance, enticed her back into his arms.” Victory, in the form of the winged goddess Nike, had perched for a time on the British flag mast. But the “gallant” Perry had successfully wooed the lovely lady and won “her” feminine favor. Politicians portrayed Perry’s action as the successful suit of a godly lover, one who lured victory away from his rival and into his own embrace.

How, and why, did the language of love and romance become the language of war? This evocative language of courtly seduction became key to crystallizing the meaning of Perry’s naval actions because it echoed the themes and concerns that had framed the Republican case for war and that resonated strongly with contemporary popular culture. The image of the sailor as romantic American hero stirred the public imagination on a number of important levels. From the first outbreak of the conflict, American belligerents had insisted that British impressment practices were the provocation that had forced the nation into open confrontation. Portraits of gallant husbands and dedicated fathers severed from their families and compelled to miserable toil in the floating dungeons of an enemy nation proved highly effective in American efforts to dramatize the issue of British impressment.

Polemicists such as Alexander McLeod, a Presbyterian minister and war partisan in New York, insisted that Americans should take seriously the linkages between love, loyalty, and nation. In a sermon that Reverend McLeod called “A Scriptural View of the Character, Causes, and Ends of the Present War,” he promised that “the love of country” would be “revived by this second war of independence.” He declared: “it is not merely for ‘Free trade and sailors’ rights,’ that this contest was intended by the Governor of the world: it was to illustrate … the true nature of allegiance.” According to McLeod, the war was being fought to “maintain the idea that man is as free to choose his residence as his employment, his country as his wife, his ruler as his servant.” Choosing a wife and choosing a country were paired pursuits that together formed the basis of freedom.

Numerous popular poems and songs, published in songster books and broadside posters, used the tale of an impressed sailor torn from his true love to vivify the links between love and liberty. One such tune, narrated in the voice of an impressed man forced to row aboard a British ship, recounted:

I was ta’en [taken] by the foe, ’twas the fiat of fate,
To tare [tear] me from her I adore;
When thought brings to my mind my once happier state,

I sigh—I sigh as I tug at the oar.

To heighten the drama, this song presented the sailor not only as a forlorn lover but also as a betrothed man seized and forced into shipboard service on the very morning that should have brought his wedding service. Addressing imaginary lines to “Anna,” his fiancée, he laments:

How fortune deceives! I had pleasure in tow,
The port where she dwelt was in view,
But the wish’d nuptial morn was o’er clouded with woe,
I was hurried, dear Anna, from you.

Our shallop was boarded, and I torn away,

To behold that dear ANNA no more.

The song ends, and the sailor finds relief only when he dies of a broken heart. Titled “The Galley Slave,” this song implied that naval impressment was no different than chattel slavery. And the sharpest pain of enslavement came with the loss of love.

Americans and Britons were warring over which nation could lay the greatest claim to loving liberty. Each side sought as its prize the moral right to imperial expansion—Britain in India, the U.S. in North America. Despite the fight for freedom that had once framed the American independence movement, the United States’ continuing and deepening investment in slavery as well as its territorial designs on Native American lands had compromised newer American pronouncements in favor of liberty. When politicians and popular polemicists used the issue of lost love to emphasize the tyrannical side of the British royal navy, they did much to tip the scales of virtue back towards the United States.

These claims framed high politics as well as popular culture. In the opening days of the war, President James Madison’s chargé d’affaires in Britain, Jonathan Russell, claimed that, “in the United States, this practice of impressment was seen as bearing a strong resemblance to the slave trade.” In fact, he went on, compared to enslavement in America, impressment aboard a British ship was actually “aggravated indeed in some of its features.” How could Russell claim that impressing sailors was even worse in some respects than enslaving men, women, and children?

Impressed U.S. sailors suffered more than enslaved Africans did, Russell asserted, because once Africans had been torn from their homeland they had no chance of ever meeting kith or kin again, whereas American sailors forced into British service might very well be put into the position of having to fight against members of their own families. As Russell explained matters, an enslaved African could enjoy “the consciousness that, if he could no longer associate with those who were dear to him, he was not compelled to do them injury.” By contrast, an American tar ran the risk of being “forced, at times, to hazard his life in despoiling or destroying his kindred and countrymen.” The extent of family devastation served as the key index of suffering. Nothing dramatized the threat that Britain posed to the United States like images of American sailors torn from the embrace of their wives and sweethearts.

Sailors pressed into serving the British lost not only their physical freedom but also the right to choose the nation to which they would swear allegiance. In portraying the plight of such involuntary recruits, tableaus of husbands and wives torn apart by British press gangs proved a highly effective way to dramatize the problem. Severing the bonds of love amounted to slashing the basis of liberty. Americans of 1812 equated chosen love with liberty and loyal love with fidelity. Selecting a spouse correlated with the exercise of democratic self-determination, while remaining faithful to the beloved primed people for patriotic allegiance.

American polemicists not only portrayed U.S. sailors as romantic heroes, but they also cast British navy men as rakes and rapists. In reality, a few isolated atrocities werecommitted by servicemen on all sides of the conflict, yet Americans falsely claimed that British Navy made “rape and rapine” systematic policy. So widespread was such anti-British propaganda that when the British attacked Washington, the American physician James Ewell claimed that panicked American gentlemen rode on horseback through the streets of the city crying, “fly, fly: the ruffians are at hand! … for God’s sake send off your wives and daughters, for the ruffians are at hand!” According to Ewell, he received the personal assurance of the admiral of the British fleet, George Cockburn, that American women had nothing to fear. Cockburn supposedly addressed Ewell’s wife directly saying, “Ay madam, I can easily account for your terror. I see, from the files in your house, that you are fond of reading those papers which delight to make devils of us.” As Cockburn rightly observed, newspapers played a key part in popularizing a sexually charged war culture—along with print media of all kinds, from novels and poems to posters and plays.

Cockburn may have diagnosed the problem, but he could not offer any cure. British claims of their own decency held little appeal against white American readers’ delight in tales of British debauchery versus American gallantry. Ultimately, the culture of patriotic ribaldry held sway with the public at large. American men who pictured themselves as the successful suitors and sturdy defenders of the nation’s women felt few qualms about positioning themselves as virile and virtuous proponents of liberty. Concerted complaints about the aberrant sexual behavior of Britain helped inoculate the United States against charges that Americans were the ones engaged in the worst abuses of liberty, from their reliance on slavery to their defiance of Indian territorial rights.

Presenting Perry as a gallant lover who freely won the affections of Victory implied that his triumph was as righteous as it was momentous. The operation on Lake Erie did represent a remarkable win for the usually overmatched forces of the small U.S. navy. Any American naval victory, regardless of its actual strategic impact, gained added significance simply because success against the storied British navy seemed so unlikely. But, more than that, in the mouths of Republicans like Charles Tait, Perry’s conduct proved that America’s fighting men were enflamed by the kind of virtuous love that fed the fires of true liberty.

Unfortunately, by the time the U.S. Senate committee on naval affairs could gather on December 27 to debate the question of whether Perry’s victory had been completely decisive, or simply very glorious, new disastrous events had occurred. Word was then arriving in the capital that the British had seized the American Fort Niagara on December 18, and that combined British and Indian forces were launching attacks across the Niagara Valley. By December 30, the British would burn Buffalo and, in consequence, the U.S. would lose all control of the crucial western frontier between New York and Canada on the east side of Erie. Senator Fromentin raised his objection to the excesses of the Senate celebrations in reference to this reality.

Faced with Fromentin’s inconvenient facts, Tait successfully countered with compelling visions of Perry’s military heroism and romantic powers of seduction. No matter the factual strength of his case, Fromentin gave way before Tait’s superior oratory. Withdrawing his previous critique of the meaning of “decisive,” he conceded, “I am disposed to accept, as more pertinent than my own, the definition which has been offered by the honorable gentlemen from Georgia.” The full resolution citing Perry’s “decisive and glorious” victory passed both houses of Congress unanimously and was approved and signed into law by President James Madison on January 6, 1814.

In strict military and diplomatic terms, the War of 1812 accomplished almost nothing at all. By the war’s end in 1815, after the British had burned Washington, D.C., to the ground and the national debt had nearly tripled, from $45 million to $127 million, all that the United States had managed was to convince the British to return all territorial boundaries and diplomatic disputes to their prewar status. Yet somehow, the population at large regarded the war as a rousing triumph. Madison easily won reelection in November 1812 and his hand-picked successor and former secretary of war, James Monroe, enjoyed landslide success four years later, in 1816. Hundreds of thousands of men cast Democratic-Republican votes in these contests. The war, in other words, proved to be a popular success. Dazzling perceptions were everything.

Further Reading

On the military history of the War of 1812, see Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana, Ill., 1989). On British-American contests for liberty, see Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) and see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006). On the political meanings of marriage in the United States, see Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

For the primary sources quoted here, see: Letter from the Secretary of the Navy, of the Twenty-seventh Instant, to the Chairman of the Naval Committee, together with Sundry Documents (Washington, D.C., 1813); Commodore Perry, or, The Battle of Erie, Containing a Full and Accurate Report of the Proceedings of Congress in Relation to the Gallant Officer and His Signal Victory on Lake Erie (Philadelphia, 1815); Alexander McLeod, A Scriptural View of the Character, Causes, and Ends of the Present War (New York, 1815); “The Orphan Boy; The Galley Slave, and the Sailor’s Return,” American Antiquarian Society, Broadside Ballads from the Collection of Isaiah Thomas, vol. 1 (c. 1812); “Mr. Russell to the Secretary of State, Dated London, Sept. 17, 1812,” in “State Papers Laid before Congress. 12th Congress—2d Session,” T. H. Palmer, ed., The Historical Register of the United States, Part II for 1814, vol. 4 (1816): 1-226; and James Ewell, The Medical Companion … with … a Concise and Impartial History of the Capture of Washington (Philadelphia, 1816).

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

 In 1818, a good war story could fetch you eight dollars a month–and survive you by two hundred years. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, when Congress first granted pension benefits to Revolutionary War veterans from the enlisted ranks who were “in need of assistance from [their] country,” grizzled and destitute exprivates began flocking to their county courthouses to claim their due. Documentation, being rare, wasn’t required, but stories were: to prove their service the veterans were expected to regale the honorable justices with forty-year-old memories of military actions, to impress them with the names of commanding officers, and to supply them with details on places and dates, all of which were taken down on paper for the claimant’s signature or mark. To this day in the National Archives in Washington, thousands of old soldiers remember the war of their youth.

Two of those old soldiers were ancestors of mine. Both William Wharton and Ralph Collins had arrived in the colonies shortly before the war, both ended up in Kentucky soon after it, and both were chronically, sometimes operatically, unlucky in their pursuit of happiness. Their war stories, however, suggest they found very different ways to handle their disappointments. While one forebear apparently forbore talking about himself even when he had tales of high adventure to share, another revised the story of his very low military escapade with such gusto and such success that a version of it was still being actively told a nearly century later. One, it seemed, felt his unhappiness deserved no stories. The other told stories to earn his happiness.

The unhappiest of my ancestors, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather William Wharton, couldn’t seem to hang onto anything. Not his freedom; he may have arrived in Maryland as a transported convict. Not his land; soon after the Revolution he bartered away the military warrant his painful army service had so painfully earned him. Not his civic responsibilities; he was always on the run from the taxman. Not even his children; in 1805 exasperated officials in Pendleton County took his two youngest daughters away and bound them out. By the time the pension act passed, seventy-one-year-old William Wharton was apparently so desperate he applied twice, submitting a statement to the county court in June 1818 and another, essentially the same, in September. In the financial inventory he filed two years later to confirm his need he added that he was supporting an illegitimate orphaned granddaughter, that he was “very infirm and totally incapable to pursue” his work as a weaver, and that his only asset was a forty-five-dollar horse. Persuaded of his indigence, the government allowed him the standard private’s pension of eight dollars a month.

Although William Wharton’s pension claims lay out a history of losses, they remind us that in spite of the odds against it, he managed to keep hold of one precious possession: his life. This unhappy man had apparently been either phenomenally skillful or phenomenally lucky during his seven years as a private in the Eighth Pennsylvania. If he was indeed with his regiment whenever he was supposed to have been–a reasonable if unverifiable assumption, since the skimpy contemporary records confirm a period of service but not his whereabouts during that period–then he managed to survive not just the nasty battles of Brandywine and Germantown but also the action at Paoli that the Americans, with reason, called a massacre, not a battle. If he was with his regiment, then he also numbered among the rare genuine members of what would, over the years, become the most honored band in the Revolutionary army, as well as the most overcrowded. He was (or at least the Eighth Pennsylvania was) among the eight or ten thousand soldiers who actually served with Washington at Valley Forge during that awful winter of 1777-78 and survived the hunger, cold, and disease that killed thousands more of their comrades before the dawn of spring.

Even though America’s romantic re-engagement with its past hadn’t yet hit high tide, by the end of his life William Wharton had plenty of incentive to tell stories of wartime adventure, sacrifice, and courage. A nation still too fresh and hopeful for a history needed heroes, at least, if it was to succeed in figuring out who and what it was, and heroes of the Revolution were naturals to fill the bill: they had fought in a great cause; they had won a great victory; they had fathered a great nation; and in the early years of the new century, they were beginning to die off.

The greatest of these heroes, of course, was George Washington, dead (and Weems-deified) two decades earlier. Washington’s reputation had become so lustrous that many who could not legitimately claim its reflected glow simply appropriated it, spinning yarns of how they or their fathers had known Washington or served with Washington or–as the story would go about another of my ancestors from a different branch of the family–had left bloody footprints in the snow during doughty service as Washington’s courier at Valley Forge. (In fact “Tough Daniel” Maupin did not enlist until 1781 and never left Virginia, but he was far from the only claimant to those iconic tortured feet.) But by the time the country decided to deliver pensions to indigent soldiers, Revolutionary herohood was actually open to almost anybody who had picked up a musket. Even some of the most ordinary soldiers were publishing narratives of their own experiences in which they presented themselves as authentic, conscious, and worthy actors in a drama whose outcome they helped determine.

But when he filed for a pension, Wharton, whose regiment had fought with Washington, did not bother to say he had seen action with the great man.

“Early in the beginning of the war, and amongst the first Recruits of the 8th Pennsylvania Regiment,” he said in his pension application, he’d enlisted in Westmoreland County under Colonel Aeneas Mackay (who, along with dozens of his ragged men, died early in 1777 during their march over the wintry Alleghenies to join Washington in New Jersey), and had re-enlisted when his first three-year stint was up. By then he had a new company captain, too, because the first, he recalled tersely, had been “killed by Indians.” Wharton declared he had been “mostly engaged in the spy or scouting service on the western waters”; the only specific action he mentioned was “the taking of the Muncey Indian town” on the upper Allegheny River in 1779 after the Eighth’s return to Fort Pitt. Though it afterwards rated barely a footnote in the history books, that brief expedition under Colonel Daniel Brodhead was a rare romp for the Eighth Pennsylvania; the regiment took no casualties and spent most of its time burning the Indians’ villages and hacking up the Indians’ corn. Offered the wide-open opportunity to talk about his military service, former Private Wharton entirely neglected to mention his presence at the epic battles near Philadelphia and at the wintertime camp at Valley Forge.

It might have been old age that dimmed his memory and robbed him of a garrulousness that likely tired his grandchildren. It might have been the diffidence of a habitual loser unaccustomed to telling officialdom something good about himself. It might have been a posttraumatic reluctance to delve too deeply into old memories of terror and pain.

Or even as some old veterans boldly accepted the nation’s invitation to refashion themselves as heroes, Wharton may have remained firmly enmeshed in more traditional ideas about the ordinary individual’s right–and ability–to control and narrate his own fate. He could have believed those long-ago years spent being harried and clobbered by enemy invaders were not particularly important or interesting, not especially different from the rest of a long life spent being harried and clobbered by creditors and courts and tax collectors and daughters pregnant out of wedlock. Unlike those marquee battles his unit had barely survived, after all, the Indian skirmish William remembered for forty years had been a resounding victory for his side.

In fact, Wharton probably remembered every victory he’d ever participated in, whether personal or military; victories were probably easier to count than his children. Unlike his many children, however, for whose creation, at least, he could take credit, history remained entirely outside his control. America’s great founding epic had been to Private Wharton just a dirty job that brought him only servile misery, a very tardy eight dollars a month, and no closer to happiness than he’d ever been, or expected to be. Some stories are suppressed; some are embroidered or altered. But some–including many of the ones that to a historian with hindsight seem irresistible–simply feel more like life than stories to those who inhabit them most closely.

Ralph Collins’s prospects seemed no more promising than William Wharton’s; he did, after all, choose William’s oldest daughter to marry, and he had problems of his own with the tax collector, which in 1790 landed him on the roll of defaulters in King and Queen County, Virginia. By the time he took young Margaret to wife in 1803, Collins was a veteran twice over, though neither time entirely by choice. The young and illiterate immigrant had been drafted into the Revolutionary army in the closing months of the war, but found postwar Virginia so unappreciative of his talents that in 1791 he resorted to an expedient that testifies to the leanness of his options: enlistment as a short-term “levy” in the tiny and disreputable federal army Congress had authorized for duty on the Ohio frontier. The pay was lousy–a private like Collins cleared two dollars a month after deductions for his clothing and supplies–but at least he was supposed to get steady meals, and he got himself whisked beyond the reach of the tax man besides.

He also got himself whisked straight into the battle that is still considered the American army’s worst defeat ever, the Indians’ best day ever against U.S. troops. In a single day marked by a string of misfortunes, iniquities, and idiocies, most of the U.S. military force was lost on the banks of the Wabash in a battle so awful it earned the rare distinction of being named not for its locations but for its loser: St. Clair’s Defeat.

In the fall of 1791 Arthur St. Clair, the new governor of the Northwest Territory, took command of a motley group of local militiamen, six-month levies, and nearly all of the U.S. regular army on an expedition north from Fort Washington near the village of Cincinnati. The stated goal was to build a chain of forts all the way to the Miami Indian towns for the purpose of “awing and curbing” the local tribes who were continuing their bloody resistance to white settlement north of the Ohio. The mission was hexed from the start. The secretary of war had figured that three thousand men should be plenty, but even though enlistments had fallen far short, there was so little flour on hand that the men were on short rations most of the time. The flimsy tents welcomed in the wind and rain, the clothing supplied by an inept quartermaster disintegrated on the men’s bodies, the gunpowder had been soaked in a riverboat accident, and nobody was getting paid. “March” sounds too festive a term by far for how this army moved: hacking its way with bad axes through forest and thicket, hauling the big field guns through swamp and mire, prodding the drooping baggage horses, the column might, on a good day, lumber its way five or six miles forward. Everyone suffered in the constant rain and sleet, but St. Clair himself was so tormented by gout and what he called his “rheumatic asthma” that he couldn’t endure the saddle and had to be ignominiously lugged on a litter.

Few of the men seemed any more promising as fighters than their plump and prostrate general. Colonel Winthrop Sargent, the notoriously haughty adjutant general, was openly contemptuous, dismissing most of the corps as “the offscourings of large towns and cities; enervated by idleness, debaucheries, and every species of vice . . . An extraordinary aversion to service was also conspicuous amongst them.”

Ralph Collins shared that aversion to service. After a journey of 480 miles by foot and riverboat from Winchester, Virginia, Collins and his companions arrived at Fort Washington on August 29, 1791. Almost immediately they hit the road again–or rather, they made the road, chopping their way eighteen miles in three days to the banks of the Great Miami, where they were set to work building a fort. There, Collins lasted about a week. The orderly book of Adjutant Crawford shows that on September 20 Collins and nine others were court-martialed for desertion and sentenced to one hundred lashes each, the maximum permissible corporal punishment.

The expedition continued to toil north, and continued to leak men, as deserters wilier than Collins slipped away night after night. On November 3, two months and one hundred miles out of Fort Washington, the fourteen hundred or so remaining soldiers, servants, followers, and hangers-on stopped for the night at an old Indian campground perched above the banks of the Wabash River. Early the next morning, not long after reveille and before the sun had quite risen, some sharp ears caught a peculiar noise whose meaning soon became appallingly clear: it was the war whoops of one thousand warriors from a number of tribes, led by Little Turtle of the Miamis and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees, who were surrounding the camp.

It was not a battle; it was carnage. The fierce and determined Native warriors knew how to use the woods and ground for cover while constantly moving, never shooting from the same place twice. With ruthless efficiency they concentrated their fire on the officers, most of who were on horseback and easily distinguishable by their gaudier dress. Left leaderless, the green troops had neither the skill nor the grit to stand up to a massive surprise assault and most simply milled about in panic. When a retreat was finally ordered, groups of soldiers managed to escape by fixing their bayonets and rushing through a line of attackers too surprised at the sudden outburst of bravado to stop them. Ahead of the exhausted and shell-shocked survivors–many of them bleeding, hobbling, clamping their hands tight over jagged edges of oozing wounds–lay a hundred-mile slog through the rain back to Fort Washington. There they would find no room to sleep, nothing to eat, and not much to do other than to go to Cincinnati and get drunk. Which they did.

In the three-hour battle as much as half of St. Clair’s force had been killed and at least another quarter wounded, more than half of his officers had become casualties or gone missing, and most of his equipment and provisions had been lost. Among the Americans killed or captured were dozens of women and children, family members who had accompanied their men. Estimates of the Native American dead ranged from 150 down to twenty-one.

Ralph Collins’s unit, the First Regiment of Levies under Lieutenant Colonel William Darke, was in the thick of the action and endured a high proportion of the casualties. Colonel Darke himself, who emerged as something close to a hero in the action, led (and survived) two game but futile bayonet charges. Again and again, as Darke reported on November 9, 1791, in a letter to President Washington, he had tried to rally his stunned troops on the field, but they “would not form in any order in the confution,” and “the whole Army Ran together like a mob at a fair.” Some of the officers had behaved bravely, Darke allowed, as did a few of the men and even one resolute packhorse master; it was the levies who suffered most of the casualties. “And indeed,” Darke told Washington with a brutality only slightly excusable by his grief over his own mortally wounded son, “many of [the levies] are as well out of the world as in it.”

How the particular levy I’m interested in managed to stay in the world through the awful battle we have no clue. Ralph’s service record in the National Archives reports no wounds, nor did he “los[e] his arms in action,” the mishap (or more likely the choice, the faster to run or the lighter to travel) that was charged against the meager pay of so many of his surviving comrades. All his record says is that he was discharged on November 11, a week after the action, leaving wide open the question of whether phenomenal soldier’s luck ran in the family–or whether the convicted deserter had made better use this time of his “aversion to service.”

But unlike his father-in-law William Wharton, Ralph Collins talked about his war, often. In the pension application he submitted under the modified regulations of 1832, when he was seventy-two, he made a point of telling the Grant County court that in addition to serving in the militia during the Revolution–when he had participated in the siege of Yorktown–he’d also taken part in “what is generall[y] known as St. Clairs Campain he was under Captain Dark for nine [i.e., six] months, and with him at the defeat of St. Clair.” He must have known that postwar enlistments did not count toward a pension, but as a short-term draftee during the Revolution he seems to have fallen just short of the required six months’ service. His story won him no pension.

Ralph Collins also shared his war stories with his children, who were themselves happy to spread the tale of their father’s survival in so dramatic and lethal a battle. In 1836, Ralph’s sixth child, twenty-three-year-old John Collins, emigrated with his new wife to what would become Scotland County, Missouri. John ended up making a very respectable life for himself as a self-taught judge and seems not to have kept in close touch with his Kentucky kin; his name was not even mentioned in his father’s 1847 will.

But in a local history of Scotland County published in 1887, the short biography of Judge John Collins, doubtless written with the collaboration of the subject, carefully mentioned not just his son the congressman but also his father the soldier who “took part in the battle in which Gen. St. Clair was defeated.” As inexplicable as Collins’s own unscathed survival is the persistence of a story about a brief century-old battle fought by a man three hundred miles distant and forty years dead, a humiliating butchery of a battle redeemed by no heroics and won by the wrong side, a battle that possessed none of the historic luster of the Yorktown siege in which Ralph had also taken part and that had long since been eclipsed by the monumental conflict in which two of Judge Collins’s own sons had defended the Union, one at the cost of his life.

We do not know exactly what Ralph Collins had told his family about his war, though their enduring pride in his participation certainly suggests an emphasis on something a good deal nobler than one hundred lashes for desertion, something a good deal more complimentary than Colonel Darke’s report. So we can presume that whatever the tale, Ralph Collins had felt freer than William Wharton did to put his own mark on his history.

Knowing nothing about the characters of the two men, we can only guess at what made the difference. Time and sentiment doubtless had something to do with it. There is no record of exactly when Wharton died but it seems to have been right around 1832, that epic year when the coincidence of the death of the last Signer of the Declaration of Independence and the centennial of the birth of the sainted Washington helped inspire Americans into a peak of nostalgia for the heroic era that was so visibly slipping away. So in the final indignity to an undignified life, poor Wharton died just when his stories would have made him most interesting. Collins, on the other hand, survived by seventy-two years the shot heard ’round the world, and died a relic as rare as he was doubtless venerated.

But there seems to have been more to Collins’s mythology than mere survival, and in the lives of the children of Wharton and Collins lies a suggestive clue. William Wharton’s only son died before his father, leaving an impoverished widow, and William’s daughters neither loved more wisely nor chose more fortunately than their mother had: one was “sullied,” one left no trace past childhood, one married the unprepossessing Ralph Collins, and the last married a husband even poorer.

But Ralph’s children were different. John, the self-made judge, was not the only Collins offspring to leave his father in the dust. In 1850, John’s youngest brother, Joseph, a thirty-four-year-old farmer, reported a respectable net worth of two thousand dollars; ten years later he was worth more than three thousand, and by 1870 a handsome $12,575. Another Collins brother, William, valued his property at only three hundred dollars in 1850, but a decade later reported a tenfold increase in wealth. Their sisters Mary and Jane married into solid farming families, and Jane’s husband was elected twice to the state legislature.

Since much of his children’s success seems to have flowered only after his death, it could not have been their rising fortunes that emboldened Ralph into some ex post facto raising of his own. Perhaps the relationship between his stories and their happiness was something a bit subtler and more intricate. William Wharton’s children never did any better than their father had any reason to expect. But Ralph Collins, who from somewhere had found the self-assurance to tell his own story his own way, was in effect laying claim to his right to damn the Colonel Darkes of the world and to create not just a story but also a life of his own choosing. Maybe a man with the spunk to recalibrate the justice of his own deserts could provide the jolt of inspiration his children needed to believe they too could succeed in their pursuit of happiness. Maybe creating a family memory had the power to shape the family fortunes as well.

Further Reading:

The pension records are in the Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Application Files (Record Group 15) and Collins’s service record in the Compiled Service Records of Volunteer Soldiers who Served from 1784 to 1811, U.S. Organizations (Record Group 94), National Archives, Washington, D.C. Adjutant Crawford’s orderly book is in the William D. Wilkins Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. See also Lorett Treese, Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol (University Park, Pa., 1995); Wiley Sword, President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-1795 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1985); Winthrop Sargent, “Winthrop Sargent’s Diary While with General Arthur St. Clair’s Expedition Against the Indians,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 33 (July 1924): 237-73; Ebenezer Denny, Military Journal of Major Ebenezer Denny, an Officer in the Revolutionary and Indian Wars, with an Introductory Memoir (Philadelphia, 1859); Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York, 1978).  

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

Andie Tucher, an assistant professor and the director of the communications Ph.D. program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is the author of Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax-Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill, 1994). She is working on a book for Farrar, Straus, and Giroux about the intersections of history, memory, and story in one family’s four-hundred-year-long American experience.